Marilyn's Last Sessions (6 page)

‘Where to begin? It’s all such a long time ago, all this,’ Wexler said. ‘It goes back to the year after Marilyn died, but you’d have to start with the Greenson I
knew just after the war. I can’t resist telling you about that.
Captain Newman, M.D.
was the story of a heroic army medical officer in the Second World War. A joke, really . . . not
Romi, or Gregory Peck, he was no worse than usual. No, the film. I remember it coming out in 1963. It was a big hit, unlike John Huston’s
Freud
, which was put out at the same time with
that ridiculous subtitle,
The Secret Passion
. You know, the picture Marilyn was meant to be in until Ralph Greenson did everything he could to stop her.’

‘No – what happened?’ the journalist asked.

‘Don’t you know about that? I’ll tell you another day . . . Oh, well, what the heck? I haven’t got time to stand on ceremony with the dead any more. Get this: while he
was doing his utmost to make it impossible for a film to be made about Freud, Greenson was busy casting himself as the saviour psychiatrist. He had no problem with being portrayed as a courageous
analyst himself, but he did with his patient playing one of Freud’s hysterics. I’m not saying Newman the shock psychiatrist wasn’t an accurate portrait of Romi’s time in the
army when he treated soldiers who’d fought in the Pacific, mind you. Ever dynamic, ever the handsome lead, that was Romi. Wherever he went, something larger than life would happen, like in
the movies. Ralph was a dramatic guy, but light with it, very humorous. The movie portrayed a valiant psychiatrist struggling to repair the shattered psyches of three battle-weary soldiers. His
sidekick, the orderly Jake Leibowitz, played by one of Greenson’s patients, Tony Curtis, provided some light relief, but basically it was about the tragic dilemma faced by a conscientious
doctor in wartime: why should he help traumatised soldiers back on their feet if it was just so they could go off and fight? Is curing someone effectively sending him out to get killed or live a
miserable life? Sometimes in our humbler endeavours we ask ourselves the same thing.

‘Greenson wrote the
Captain Newman
script but his friend, the writer Leo Rosten, advised him he’d better not put his name on the credits in case his former patients tried to
sue. He agreed, not that he was exactly thrilled about keeping a low profile. He’d met Rosten when they were both at the beginning of their careers, and the two of them immediately hit it
off: Romi took the writer to meetings of the psychoanalytic study group and Leo reciprocated by taking him to Hollywood dinner parties. A remarkable storyteller, Romi would launch into vivid
descriptions of his sessions. Rosten once said, “As an analyst he had to keep quiet all day, and that frustrated him. Soon he was telling his stories all over Hollywood.” I think he
always regretted not having been an actor. He didn’t give his lectures, he acted them out. He put on a real show.

‘Romi loved power or, rather, he loved playing with the idea of it. “If I wanted, I could dominate all this, everyone would be in my debt” – that sort of thing. He craved
the limelight . . . But I’ll stop there. You’re going to think I didn’t like my colleague. And, anyway, all this is tiring. Will you leave now?’

Moments later, Milton Wexler caught up with the journalist on the doorstep.

‘The kicker, you know, is that, without telling him, Romi’s patient was living her life as if she were in a movie just when Romi was making his into one. Everyone’s got one in
them, I guess.’

The filming of
Let’s Make Love
was chaotic from start to finish. On 26 January, Marilyn broke off a take of ‘My Heart Belongs To Daddy’. She arrived on
set at seven in the morning and had her make-up done, then left the studio and disappeared for three days.

‘You’re going to see what it means to shoot with the worst actress in the world,’ she told Montand, when they finally had to do their first scene together. ‘I want to
vanish. Into the picture or out of it, I don’t care, just vanish.’

‘So you’re scared,’ Montand replied. ‘Think of me a little bit. I’m lost.’

His compassion struck a chord.

In March, Marilyn caught a chill. She shut herself away in her bungalow. One evening Montand pushed open the door, sat next to her on the bed, took her hand. She drew him down
and kissed him with a sort of despairing gaiety. She quickly realised that the Frenchman was just another extra in the love story she had been telling herself since childhood. ‘It’s
always the same,’ she told her analyst. ‘The man goes to sleep with Marilyn Monroe and wakes up with me. But I want Montand to love me. Play it again, Yves. Cue the record.’
Greenson immediately advised her to break off her relationship with Montand.

The Greensons hosted glittering parties for celebrities and analysts at their beautiful, sprawling, Mexican-style house. Attendance was compulsory for members of the Los
Angeles élite, who’d gather to listen to chamber music and nibble canapés off paper plates. Greenson spent money freely to show he didn’t think of it as a means to acquire
power or recognition. One of his patients, the painter Tony Berlant, who was penniless at the time, related that Greenson didn’t charge him. Berlant spoke of a schism in his former
analyst’s personality: there was the arrogant, seductive, brutally candid talker at the Santa Monica parties and then there was the person underneath, who was generous and open in the
therapeutic situation.

Everything was simple and extremely chic at Romi’s. Conversation was the main attraction at his parties. As one guest later said, ‘It was the only analytic salon where you could have
fun. You knew you’d always meet a cross-section of people – Anna Freud, Margaret Mead, Masters and Johnson, plus lots of Hollywood people.’ If you lived in Los Angeles, a visit to
the Greensons’ in Santa Monica was like chancing upon an intellectual and artistic oasis in a desert of money.

A regular at the musical soirées in the picturesque hacienda, Marilyn would run into people from the film business: the scriptwriters Lillian Hellman and Leo Rosten, patients and former
patients of Greenson, such as the producer Dore Schary, and Celeste Holm. Analysts would be there in numbers: Hanna Fenichel, Otto Fenichel’s widow, Lewis Fielding, Milton Wexler. The
host’s mother, Katherine Greenschpoon, would have the place of honour in the middle of the room. Everyone would be surprised to see Marilyn sitting off in a corner, curled up in a blue velvet
chair, gracefully swinging her hand to the music. ‘If you want to get closer to the music, you need to move further away from the musicians,’ she once told Hildi. ‘That’s
the thing about music: there’s nothing to see.’

Marilyn was very much among family at these events. She heard her analyst’s twin sister, Juliet, and his younger sister, Elisabeth, play. Elisabeth, the wife of Milton ‘Mickey’
Rudin – Marilyn and Frank Sinatra’s lawyer – was another concert pianist, who wasn’t averse to sitting in with jazz bands. On Sunday afternoons, she would accompany her
brother’s hesitant violin in chamber pieces. An unrequited aesthete, Romi didn’t work hard at his instrument, not that that prevented him launching self-importantly into erratic solos
from the Brandenburg Concertos.

On these evenings, Romi would see a childlike sadness in his patient’s eyes, the loneliness children can feel when grown-ups are playing music and they feel more excluded than if they were
hearing them talking or even making love. Everyone is so bent on conveying the emptiness inside themselves, their terror, that they become invisible to one another and communicate through sound in
a way they could never touch each other with their words or hands.

The first time Marilyn entered the Greensons’ spacious living room she was struck by their piano, a Bechstein concert grand. She thought of her mother’s white
piano, a Franklin baby grand. According to family legend, it had once belonged to the actor Frederic March, and her mother Gladys Baker had bought it when she and Marilyn had briefly lived together
in Los Angeles in a house on Arbol Street, near Mount Washington, Then, when Marilyn was living with one of her foster mothers, Ida Bollender, her mother had paid a woman called Marion Miller to
give her lessons on it for a year. Gladys could pick out a few light classics and was always secretly proud of her ability to play ‘Für Elise’. But Marilyn’s chaotic life,
shunted from home to home, soon put an end to her playing.
Baby grand
– she always laughed when she said the name. That was her: grand, in a way, and yet so little, really. The old
white piano had been sold when her mother was committed to a mental hospital. Marilyn had never really known how to extract music from it and she regretted her repertoire didn’t extend beyond
the plonky, vaguely comical polka she and Tom Ewell play four-handed in Billy Wilder’s
The Seven Year Itch
. But, at the first chance she got, she bought it back and would return to it
like a lost friend, running her fingers over the keyboard whenever people became deaf and life unlivable.

Perhaps the side of Greenson’s character Marilyn loved most was that of the pathetic, ridiculous musician. Like his voice, there was something that captivated her about his violin playing.
Music seemed even more important to him than words or ideas. It afforded him respite from the incessant need to see or be seen. Once, after playing a Mozart trio, he put a hand on her shoulder and
led her to the bay window looking out to sea. ‘This is one of those skies, like that piece of music, that makes you want to die,’ he said, ‘that fills you with the desperate
pleasure aroused by anything perfect.’ She wondered if he was quoting something and, without understanding it completely, felt it play on her mind.

Marilyn was twenty years old with an emptiness in her heart that she tried to staunch with men and women. She’d go out walking until dawn. She roamed all over Los Angeles
and hung around the studios, her eyes full of hazy images, her blonde hair framed against the white sky like the halos that gild actresses on the over-exposed screens of old movies. A thought kept
running through her mind, like a chant: she was going to become somebody strong, a great, enigmatic figure whom people could avoid as little as they could avoid their destiny.

Out on a drive one afternoon, André de Dienes and Marilyn stopped at the Hollywood Memorial Cemetery on Santa Monica Boulevard, where they wandered through the grand marble halls of the
mausoleum in search of Rudolph Valentino’s grave.

André remarked to Marilyn that she was born the same year, 1926, that Valentino had died – maybe she had been born to replace him and continue his legendary career! And maybe she,
too, would become famous!

‘It’s not worth it if you die so young,’ Marilyn answered.

‘What more can you ask?’ André said. ‘He became immortal!’

She responded that she would prefer a long, happy life. Then she lifted a rose out from one of the urns on both sides of his bronze plaque.

‘You don’t steal flowers from the dead!’ exclaimed André.

‘I’m sure he would be very pleased to know that a lonesome girl took the flower home to keep it next to her bed. What about Jean Harlow? Do you know where she’s
buried?’

‘No. I don’t care either.’

‘I do. I go to Forest Lawn Memorial Park a lot, where she’s laid to rest in a private chapel. She died when she was twenty-six because her mother was a member of a sect and
wouldn’t let doctors treat her.’

When they left the mausoleum, he asked her to forget her appointment at the studio and stay with him so he could read to her from a large quotation book that was always with him in the trunk of
his car. They sat on the lawn and read about life, love, happiness, fame, vanity, women, death and other things, but it was the word ‘fame’ that caught her attention the most . . . Then
she suddenly decided she’d had enough poetry and philosophy and should go to her appointment, even if she was already very late. A pang of jealousy gripped him.

‘Are you going to lay that producer?’ he shouted.

‘Yes! Why not?’ she angrily answered.

He dropped her on the corner of Melrose Avenue and Gower Street.

A few days later, André read her a poem entitled ‘Lines on the Death of Mary’. She said it was written for her, but the lady who wrote it forgot to put the ‘lyn’
after ‘Mary’. He remarked that in the cemetery she’d told him she preferred a long, happy life and now she was saying she wouldn’t live long—

‘OK, that’s enough, pose for me,’ André interrupted himself. ‘Let your face do the talking.’

The reading ended and he began taking pictures of her, one by one, depicting the moods she interpreted for him. An entire spectrum of life, happiness, pensiveness, introspection, serenity,
sadness, torment, distress – he even asked her to show him what ‘death’ looked like in her imagination. She threw a blanket over her head; that was how she interpreted it.

The photo that followed was her own idea. She told André to get ready with his camera because she was going to show him what her own death would look like – some day. She looked
down with a very sordid expression, pointing out to him that the photo’s meaning would be ‘THE END OF EVERYTHING’.

‘André, do not publish these photos now. Wait until I die!’

‘How do you know you’re going to die before me? After all, I am twelve years older than you.’

‘I just know,’ she said, in a sad, low-toned voice.

But the mood passed: soon she was gay and cheerful again, looking forward to her dinner date, and she urged him to hurry, hurry, pack everything into the car and leave.

De Dienes often went to Marilyn’s grave during the twenty-three years he outlived her, and always visited on 1 June, her birthday, and 4 August, the anniversary of her death. Each time
he’d steal some flowers and put them in a glass next to his bed. He’d think about her when he went to the Westwood Village movie theatre, knowing her coffin was behind the screen, only
fifty feet away. She had said to him one day, ‘You want me to become a cloud? Take pictures of it. That way I’ll never completely die.’