Marilyn's Last Sessions (40 page)

He carried on reading as Wexler watched, stunned. ‘“For it is really too sad that in life it should be as it is in chess, where one false move may force us to resign the game for
lost, but with the difference that we can start no second game, no rematch. Sigmund Freud, 1915.”’

Wexler wasn’t listening. He marched out of the office and slammed the door.

Sitting there in front of that chaotic mass of papers, after more years than he cared to count, Milton Wexler shook himself out of his reverie and began thinking things he hadn’t been able
to articulate while Marilyn was alive or when he talked to Greenson. He thought about the game of chess and saw the knight’s dashing progress, leaping over squares, advancing on two axes,
vertical and horizontal, always landing on a different-coloured square from the one he’d set off from. He thought about the black queen, Marilyn’s implacable awareness of the horror of
life, and her mother. Marilyn had mirrored her mother’s search for sexual perfection, her knack of catching men, then jettisoning them when they’d served their purpose, her fear of
ageing, the difference between who she was and what she saw in the mirror. Like her mother, Marilyn might have panicked at the prospect of becoming less desirable, the possible fate of any woman
who becomes a mother. Greenson hadn’t seen the parallels between her role in
Something’s Got to Give
and her experiences, the brutal echoes of Gladys Baker’s unhappy,
unforgettable life. The return of the lost mother, one of the few scenes Marilyn had filmed after her analyst had gone to Europe, was a replay of the moment in her childhood when she had seen her
mother, whom she thought was dead, emerge from the mental institution. Perhaps, Wexler thought, becoming a mother had tipped Gladys Baker over into madness, and perhaps not becoming a mother at the
age of thirty-six yet having to play one had done the same to Marilyn Monroe. A mother whom her children did not recognise and who would not reveal herself to them. She was said to have become
pregnant during filming, not known who the father was, and to have had an abortion after being fired. But, then, so many things were said about her.

There’d been no winner in the game of chess between the movie star and her analyst. Who had killed Marilyn? Not Romi, thought Wexler. Too much of a coward. Who, then? Norma Jeane, as some
people said, or her mother, Gladys? Marilyn’s story begins with a pane of glass through which the little Norma Jeane is watching her mother coming to visit the adoptive family she has left
her with. Then a mirror, in which Gladys examines her own beauty, while the little girl who does not know who she’s named after watches her mother looking at herself. And so the story
unfolds, glass pieces moving across a glass chessboard from a fairy tale, like Snow White and her stepmother.

From the start the white queen (a queen only in her dreams at first) struggles with the black queen (whose dark madness is still to come, but all the images she has seen in negative have already
taken their toll). Is that why she wanted to be a platinum blonde, so she is not like Snow White, with her pale skin, cherry-red lips, black eyebrows and hair? She has no choice anyway. She grows
inexorably into a young woman who’s terrified when the glass eye of the camera does not desire her, and panic-stricken when it does. Her only resource is to project herself onto the screen,
the mirror for her dreams. In fairy tales, what kills the daughter’s beauty? The stepmother with the poisoned comb, the apple of sin, which brings knowledge and sexuality when she is older,
work and suffering. Who won, the white queen or the black? Marilyn had written in her notebook: ‘White is passivity, the passivity of the person who is looked at, who’s trapped. Black
is the pupil of the eye, the screen when the movie ends, the heart of the man who leaves you.’

Shaking himself, Wexler thought back to when Romi was dying. He had muttered incomprehensibly the last time he’d seen him – Wexler had only caught the occasional word: ‘Not the
white queen . . . two black knights . . . diagonal . . . bishop . . .’

Rather than being angry at Miner’s insistent questioning, Greenson appeared nauseous, sad, defeated. Without a word, he turned on the first tape.

Miner saw that the psychoanalyst’s face was covered with tears and suggested they stop the tape. Greenson shrugged.

‘You were very close to her, Doctor. How do you feel about her death?’

‘You don’t understand. You can’t understand that she set me free and condemned me in all perpetuity. I lost her just as she almost reached me. Language was stirring in her. At
last, she was talking to me, after almost three years. She was looking life in the face, she wasn’t staring back at the dark road behind her . . .’

‘What will stay with you about her?’

‘Not her image, I tell you, not that vision that made me look away and hurt as only real beauty can. Not her image, no – her voice. That melancholic, ghostly voice singing
“Happy birthday, Mr President. . .” I heard it again yesterday on TV – it was on every channel. You know, we work only with the voice in psychoanalysis. It is no coincidence Freud
came up with this strange system that splits the patient’s body in two. On the one hand, there’s the patient’s image, his mass, the way he occupies space, and on the other,
there’s his voice, which we listen to and which leaves its mark in time all the more effectively because there’s no image. Analysis is a little like silent movies, where scenes followed
the intertitles on a black background. Words bring things into being. It is no coincidence either that I was so sceptical about movies that claimed to portray psychoanalysis, to let people see the
invisible work of words. No coincidence – Fate arranges things so well – that the traces Freud left are either images without words, hours of silent celluloid, or talks recorded for
radio.’ Greenson grew vehement: ‘And it’s no coincidence that Marilyn Monroe recorded the tapes you just listened to in darkness, at night, and didn’t say those things in
our sessions when I could see her. Marilyn knew that reality lies in a voice when it breaks loose from images. One day, she said to me, “You don’t need to use your voice in a special
way. If you think of something sexual, your voice naturally follows suit.” She had two voices in fact, the one in her movies – studied, tamed, a wayward murmur or sigh, like someone
waking up from a dream – and the one she used off-screen, calmer and clearer. In her sessions, she switched between the two, but she had stopped using her actress’s voice towards the
end. Even in her last film, she was using her off-screen voice more.’

Greenson made an effort to compose himself, then continued his monologue. ‘There was a struggle going on in her from the start between her voice and her skin. She thought her skin was the
only thing that could speak, by being seen or touched or bruised. I don’t know . . . I don’t know what happened, and this may shock you, but I think she was really getting better at the
end, I think she was starting to talk … Still, I’m boring you with my stories. I’ll leave you with her, with her voice, without any images to get in the way. Listen to the tapes
as many times as you want. I’m going back to my patients. Take notes if you think it’ll be useful, but don’t take the tapes out of this room.’

Miner settled down in an armchair facing the picture window that was golden in the setting sun. Finally there was no possibility of seeing Marilyn. Now he could hear truths about her without
complicating them by looking at her beauty, as everyone always did. He decided he was going to play that last tape again; he was never going to stop playing it. He pressed REWIND.

Forger Backwright is alone in front of his computer in the
Los Angeles Times
building. Every light on every floor is on. After listening to John Miner’s recording
again, he decides to publish the contents of Marilyn’s last sessions without raising any doubts as to the veracity of the former deputy coroner’s transcriptions. He figures he
doesn’t need to explain the real reason Miner had broken his promise to Greenson – that it wasn’t because he wanted to salvage his reputation but because he was in financial
trouble. He won’t let on that the old man had struck a hard bargain, or that personally he is sceptical of what Marilyn is reported to have said in her last sessions, especially the light,
hopeful note in everything she had confided to her psychoanalyst. He won’t dwell on how uncannily her words echo what Dr Greenson himself had repeatedly said and written. By implying that she
was killed, the tapes not only say – between the words, as it were – that she hasn’t committed suicide, but also that he hasn’t killed her. It isn’t the radiantly
optimistic portrait of Marilyn that gives Backwright pause so much as the representation of Greenson as wholly indifferent to money: the faithful husband, committed analyst and attentive father to
the lost little girl he had helped.

Forger Backwright isn’t convinced about who Marilyn was either. He replays the film he’s managed to download after searching for it for ages on BitTorrent: Marilyn in a black slip
doing dirty things in the flickering light of a raddled piece of celluloid. It’s strange, he thinks. If it is her, if this pornographic sequence really shows Marilyn Monroe when she was still
only Norma Jeane Mortenson, then she looks older in this piece of film, when she hasn’t turned twenty, than she does naked fifteen years later in the last take of
Something’s Got to
Give
. Film’s skin is like a person’s: it grows slack, overwhelmed by time. Death has already touched these old images, but they are markedly less eloquent about sex and its weight
of unhappiness than any words might have been. Staring at them, his mind full of the tapes he has just listened to and the thousands of pages he has read about her final years, Backwright feels
like a film editor trying to construct a story with a beginning and an end out of scraps that make no sense. He knows the truth lies only in the contradictions between these different takes, the
fragments of dialogue, the punchlines that didn’t make it into the final movie, the jump cuts and jerky camera movements.

The morning edition has been put to bed, and the journalist isn’t working any more, although he’s still here in front of his screen, in the middle of the night.
Backwright has decided to keep his questions to himself for now, and to give them the only form that can come close to a semblance of truth. He thinks of the novel he began eight months earlier,
after studying the memories and recordings John Miner had either relayed or invented. He’ll finish it now. Replay the whole murky story. He isn’t sure about the title:
‘MARILYN’S LAST SESSIONS’? He’ll see. He brings the first page of the manuscript up on the screen and starts to read:

Forger Backwright adds ‘REWIND’ as the title.

Like most people who have written about Marilyn Monroe, the author has not had access to private sources of letters and documents concerning the two main protagonists of this
book.

At the Department of Special Collections at the University of California at Los Angeles, the letters between Ralph Greenson and Marilyn Monroe’s previous analysts are not available to the
general public. At the library of the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society, everything related to Monroe’s analysis is inaccessible.

The dialogue attributed to Marilyn Monroe is attested by different sources, including biographies and interviews. The contents of the tapes Dr Greenson is alleged to have had in his possession
are quoted from their transcripts in
Victim, The Secret Tapes of Marilyn Monroe
, by Matthew Smith, and the 5 August 2005 edition of the
Los Angeles Times
.

The clinical and theoretical statements made by Dr Greenson are drawn from his published works and his archives at UCLA. Donald Spoto, Marilyn Monroe’s biographer, was able to consult them
and they are quoted from the American edition of his biography. The same is true of the long letter sent by Monroe to Dr Greenson in February 1961.

Billy Wilder’s recollections come from Cameron Crowe’s collection of interviews.

The dialogue, reported speech and letters are either invented or quoted from the articles and books contained in the following bibliography:

Berthelsen, Detlev,
Alltag bei Familie Freud; Die Erinnerungen der Paula Fichtl
, Hoffman & Campe, 1987

Brown, Peter Harry, and Patte B. Barham,
Marilyn
,
The Last Take
, Signet, 1992

Capote, Truman,
Music for Chameleons
, Random House, 1980

Churchwell, Sarah,
The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe
, Granta Books, 2005

Crowe, Cameron,
Conversations with Billy Wilder
, Faber and Faber, 1995

Dienes, André de,
Marilyn mon amour
, St Martin’s Press, 1985

—,
Marilyn
, Taschen, 2004

Farber, Stephen, and Mark Green,
Hollywood on the Couch
, William Morrow and Company, 1993

Freeman, Lucy,
Why Norma Jeane Killed Marilyn Monroe
, Hastings House, 1993