Marilyn's Last Sessions Read online

  First published in Great Britain in 2011 by

  Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street,

  Edinburgh EH1 1TE

  This digital edition first published by Canongate in 2011

  Copyright © Michel Schneider, 2006

  English translation copyright © Will Hobson, 2011

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  First published as Marilyn dernières séances in France in 2006

  by Editions Grasset, 61 rue des Saints-Pères, 75006 Paris

  www.canongate.tv

  The publisher acknowledges subsidy from the Scottish Arts Council towards the publication of this volume.

  This book is supported by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as part of the Burgess programme run by the Cultural Department of the French Embassy in London (www.frenchbooknews.com).

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  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on

  request from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 84767 051 9

  eISBN 978 1 84767 914 7

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  To Marilyn

  ‘There’s always two sides to a story.’

  Marilyn Monroe

  Contents

  Los Angeles, Downtown, West 1st Street August 2005

  Los Angeles, West Sunset Boulevard January 1960

  Hollywood, Sunset Boulevard 1960

  Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Roxbury Drive January 1960

  Brooklyn, Brownsville, Miller Avenue September 1911

  Hollywood, Beverly Hills Hotel, West Sunset Boulevard January 1960

  Los Angeles, Downtown 1948

  Santa Monica, Franklin Street February 1960

  Fort Logan, Colorado, Army Air Force Convalescent Hospital 1944

  Beverly Hills, Roxbury Drive November 1979

  Santa Monica, Franklin Street March 1960

  Santa Monica, Franklin Street Spring 1960

  Hollywood, Santa Monica Boulevard 1946

  Los Angeles–New York March 1960

  Vienna, 19 Berggasse 1933

  Beverly Hills Hotel Late April 1960

  New York, Manhattan Late 1954

  New York, Actors Studio, West 44th Street January 1955

  New York, West 93rd Street February 1955

  Hollywood, Century City, Pico Boulevard June 1960

  New York, Gladstone Hotel, East 52nd Street March 1955

  Phoenix, Arizona March 1956

  Reno, Nevada Summer 1960

  Los Angeles, Bel Air August 1960

  Santa Monica, Franklin Street August 1960

  Outskirts of London, Englefield Green July 1956

  London, Maresfield Gardens August 1956

  Colombo, Ceylon February 1953

  Los Angeles, Beverly Hills Late August 1960

  Santa Monica, Franklin Street Early September 1960

  London, Maresfield Gardens Spring 1956

  New York, Central Park West 1957

  Pyramid Lake, near Reno, Nevada 19 September 1960

  New York, Manhattan 1959

  Los Angeles, Sunset Strip Late September 1960

  Los Angeles, Westwood Village November 1960

  Hollywood, Doheny Drive Autumn 1960

  New York, YMCA, West 34th Street Winter 1960

  New York, Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic February 1961

  Los Angeles, Beverly Hills Hotel 1 June 1961

  Santa Monica, Franklin Street Summer 1961

  Los Angeles, Wilshire Boulevard Autumn 1961

  Santa Monica, Franklin Street July 1961

  Santa Monica, Franklin Street Late July 1961

  Santa Monica, Franklin Street October 1961

  Berkeley, California 5 and 27 October 1961

  Santa Monica, Franklin Street Autumn 1961

  Beverly Hills, Roxbury Drive Autumn 1976

  Santa Monica, Franklin Street December 1961–January 1962

  Brentwood, Fifth Helena Drive February 1962

  Santa Monica, Franklin Street March 1962

  Santa Monica, Franklin Street Late March 1962

  Santa Monica, Franklin Street Early April 1962

  Beverly Hills, Rodeo Drive 25 March 1962

  Santa Monica, Franklin Street April 1962

  Beverly Hills, Roxbury Drive May 1962

  Beverly Hills, Roxbury Drive 8 May 1962

  Michigan, Ann Arbor University 1969

  Hollywood Heights, Woodrow Wilson Drive April 1970

  Los Angeles, Pico Boulevard May 1962

  New York, Madison Square Garden May 1962

  Beverly Hills, Roxbury Drive 21 May 1962

  Hollywood, Pico Boulevard, Fox Studios 31 May 1962

  Beverly Hills, Roxbury Drive 31 May 1962

  Rome 1 June 1962

  Hollywood, Pico Boulevard, Fox Studios 1 June 1962

  Hollywood, Bel Air, Joanne Carson’s house August 1976

  Westwood, Fifth Helena Drive 6 June 1962

  Santa Monica, Franklin Street 11 June 1962

  Hollywood, Warner Bros Studios December 1965

  New York, Eighth Avenue Mid-June 1962

  Los Angeles, University of California June 1966

  Los Angeles, Hollywood Sign June 1962

  Los Angeles, Pinyon Canyon Autumn 1970

  Bel Air Late June 1962

  Santa Monica Beach 29 June–1 July 1962

  Santa Monica, Franklin Street 25 July 1962

  Lake Tahoe, Cal-Neva Lodge 28 and 29 July 1962

  Santa Monica, Franklin Street Late July 1962

  Santa Monica, Franklin Street Early August 1962

  Hollywood, Sunset Boulevard August 1962

  Santa Monica, Franklin Street 3 August 1962

  Brentwood, Fifth Helena Drive 4 August 1962

  Brentwood, Fifth Helena Drive Night of 4–5 August 1962

  Los Angeles County Coroner’s office, the morgue 5 August 1962

  Hollywood, Sunset Boulevard, Schwab’s Drugstore 5 August 1962

  Paris, Hôtel Lancaster – New York City 5 August 1962

  Gainesville, Florida, Collins Court Old Age Home 5 August 1962

  Beverly Hills 5 August 1962

  Beverly Hills, Roxbury Drive 7 August 1962

  Vienna, 19 Berggasse 1933

  Beverly Hills, Roxbury Drive 8 August 1962

  Westwood Memorial Park Cemetery, Glendon Avenue August 1984 and August 1962

  Beverly Hills, Milton ‘Mickey’ Rudin’s law firm 6 August 1962

  Santa Monica, Franklin Street August 1962–November 1979

  Maresfield Gardens 1962–82

  New York January 1964

  Santa Monica, Franklin Street 8 August 1962

  Santa Monica, Franklin Street 8 August 1962

  Beverly Hills, Roxbury Drive November 1978

  Los Angeles, Hillside Memorial Park Cemetery November 1979

  Santa Monica, Franklin Street 8 August 1962

  Downtown Los Angeles, West 1st Street April 2006

  New York, April 1955. The writer Truman Capote is at a funeral with Marilyn Monroe.

  MARILYN: ‘Seriously, though. It’s my hair. I need colour. And I didn’t have time to get any. It was all so unexpected, Miss Collier dying and all. See?’

  She lifts her kerchief slightly to display a fringe of darkness where her hair is parted.

  TC: ‘Poor innocent me. And all this time I thought you were a bona-fide blonde.’

  MARILYN: ‘I am. But nobody’s that natural. And, incidentally, fuck you.’

  Like Marilyn’s hair, this novel is a phoney of the bona-fide kind. It is inspired by actual events and, except whe
re changes have been made to respect the privacy of the living, its characters appear under their real names. Locations are accurate, dates verified, and quotations from accounts, notes, letters, articles, conversations, books and films are the protagonists’ own.

  But it is a work of fiction. The forger in me hasn’t hesitated to impute to one person what another has said, seen or experienced, to ascribe to them a diary that hasn’t been found, articles or notes that have been invented, and dreams and thoughts for which there is no source.

  In telling this story, a loveless love story of two characters who became fatally embroiled in each other’s lives, my aim is not to find the truth, or probable truth, about Marilyn Monroe and her last analyst Ralph Greenson, but to observe a couple in the act of being themselves, and register their uncanniness as if it spoke to me of my own.

  Los Angeles, Downtown, West 1st Street

  August 2005

  REWIND

  Rewind the tape. Rerun the story. Replay Marilyn’s last session. The end: that’s always where a story starts. I love movies that open with a voiceover. There’s almost nothing on screen – a pool with a body floating in it, the tops of some palm trees stirring in the wind, a naked woman under a blue sheet, splinters of glass in a half-light – and someone’s talking to himself so as not to feel utterly alone. A man on the run, a private detective, a doctor – a psychoanalyst, why not? – looking back, telling the story of his life. He says what’s killing him so you’ll know what he lived for. ‘Listen to me because I’m you,’ his voice seems to say. It’s always the voice that makes the story, not what it says.

  I’m going to try to tell this story. Our story. My story. It would be an ugly little tale even if you could get rid of the ending. A woman, already half dead, drags along a sad little girl by the hand. She takes her to see the head doctor, the words doctor. He gives her his time, tells her her time is up, then listens to her with a sort of abject love for two and half years. He doesn’t understand a word she says and ends up losing her. Such a sad, grim story. Nothing could lighten its weight of melancholy, not even the smile that seemed to be Marilyn’s way of apologising for being so beautiful.

  The title of this unfinished piece of writing was underlined three times. Handwritten and undated, it was found on his death among the papers of Dr Ralph Greenson, Marilyn Monroe’s last psychoanalyst. His was the voice that Sergeant Jack Clemmons, watch commander at West Los Angeles Police Department, had heard on the night of 4–5 August 1962 when a call had come in from Brentwood at four twenty-five a.m.

  ‘Marilyn Monroe has died of an overdose,’ a man’s voice had said dully. And when the stunned policeman had asked, ‘What?’ the same voice had struggled to repeat, virtually spelling it out syllable by syllable, ‘Marilyn Monroe has died. She has committed suicide.’

  REWIND

  The city seems to John Miner to sweat even more in August than it used to in spring. Pollution casts a pink veil wherever he looks and, even in the glare of the midday sun, the streets have a fuzziness to them, like the sepia haze of an old movie. Los Angeles strikes him as even more unreal than it had done forty years earlier. More metallic. More naked. More null and void. His eyes still smarting from downtown’s murky, oppressive reek, he enters the journalist Forger W. Backwright’s office in the Los Angeles Times building at 202 West 1st Street. Tall and stooped, he looks around constantly, as though he were lost. An old man of eighty-six come to tell an old story.

  As head of the medical-legal section at the District Attorney’s Office, Miner had attended the autopsy on Marilyn Monroe’s body conducted by Dr Thomas Noguchi, the coroner who, six years afterwards, would perform the same procedure for Robert Kennedy, one of the people suspected, by those who believed such things, of organising Monroe’s murder. Miner had observed smears being taken from the actress’s mouth, genitals and anus. The autopsy’s principal discovery was the mysterious presence in her blood of 4.5 milligrams of a barbiturate, Nembutal, for which no sign of injection or oral ingestion could be found. It returned a verdict of ‘probable suicide’, an expression Miner has turned over in his mind ever since. They used that wording in the final report; initial accounts spoke merely of ‘suicide’ or ‘possible suicide’. Of course, you’d say it was probable if you looked at the case from a purely psychological point of view, Miner has always thought, but that doesn’t mean the star hadn’t spent thirty-six years committing this probable suicide, or that a criminal hadn’t been employed to do the actual deed. He thinks of other expressions to describe what had happened: ‘foul play’ or, as Dr Litman of the Suicide Prevention Team had put it, ‘a gamble with death’.

  REWIND

  Given the choice, the long-since-retired Miner would simply play the journalist one of the tapes Marilyn had recorded for her analyst at the end of July or the start of August 1962. Ralph Greenson had labelled them ‘MARILYN: LAST SESSIONS’, and Miner had listened to them and transcribed them forty-three years previously, but never seen or heard of them since. They had vanished during the analyst’s lifetime – or after his death, who could tell? The only trace left of them is the summaries Miner has made in his meticulous lawyer’s handwriting, and so, after greeting the journalist, he shakily holds out a sheaf of crumpled pages from a yellow legal pad. Backwright tells him to sit down, and gives him a glass of iced water.

  ‘What makes you want to speak to the press after all these years?’ the journalist asks.

  ‘Ralph Greenson was a good man,’ says Miner. ‘I knew him well, before his patient died. When I studied medicine before taking up criminal law, I attended his psychiatry lectures and seminars at UCLA. I respected him – I still do. He fascinated me.

  ‘Two days after Marilyn Monroe’s death, he asked me to interview him because he wanted to go back over his initial statements to the police. He was very worried at being portrayed in the papers as “the weird psychiatrist” and “the last man to have seen Marilyn alive and the first to have seen her dead”. He insisted I listen to two tapes she had given him on the last day of her life, Saturday, August fourth 1962. He left them with me to transcribe on condition that I never revealed the contents to anyone, even the district attorney or the coroner. I had too many unanswered questions after the autopsy not to want to examine any new evidence, however difficult I might find his request to respect its confidentiality.’

  ‘Where and when did you meet him?’

  ‘I spent several hours with the psychiatrist on Wednesday, August eighth, after he had attended the actress’s funeral.’

  ‘And you’ve never discussed your conversation with anyone?’

  ‘I remember what he said when the rumours started,’ Miner says, his voice trembling. ‘“I can’t explain or defend myself without speaking about things that I don’t want to reveal. It’s a terrible position to be in, to say I can’t talk about it. I just can’t tell the whole story.” That’s why I didn’t reveal the content of the tapes, out of respect. It was only when biographers began rehashing old accusations of violence, or even murder, that I decided to speak out. But I didn’t disclose everything, as I would have liked to. I decided to get his widow Hildi Greenson’s permission before I went back to my notes and showed them to you.’

  Forger Backwright reminds him that Hildegarde Greenson had assured the Los Angeles Times she’d never heard her husband talk of any tapes and knew nothing of their existence. Miner replies that Greenson was very strict about medical confidentiality.

  ‘I have kept this secret for Greenson’s sake. I’m breaking my promise only now because he has been dead for over twenty-five years and because I pledged his widow not to leave unanswered all those people who have tried to implicate Marilyn Monroe’s last analyst in her death. Some have spoken of criminal negligence. I have decided to make these tapes public to respond to all the accusations that have sullied the reputation of a man I respected.’

  REWIND

  In the muggy, sweltering heat of another Californian August, in front of another
tape recorder, Miner, with a mixture of hesitancy and vehemence in his voice, tells the journalist about his visit to Dr Greenson in August 1962. He had found a grief-stricken, unshaven figure in the ground-floor consulting room of his villa overlooking the Pacific. Greenson had spoken freely, as if he were a trusted confidant. He had asked Miner to sit down and, without preamble, played him a tape lasting forty minutes. Marilyn was talking. It was her voice on the tape. Nothing else. No hint of anyone listening or any conversation. Just her, alone. Her voice seemed to hover on the edge of her words – out of discretion, rather than fragility, as if she were leaving them to fend for themselves, to be heard or not, as the case might be. A voice from beyond the grave that entered into one with the incalculable immediacy of voices heard in dreams.

  It couldn’t be a therapy session, Miner explains, because the psychiatrist didn’t record his patients. He says Marilyn purchased a tape recorder a few weeks earlier to record herself free-associating outside her sessions and share the results with her analyst.

  Miner had taken very detailed verbatim notes that day. He had come away from Greenson’s office convinced it was highly improbable Marilyn had committed suicide. ‘Among other things,’ he says, ‘it was clear that she had plans and expectations for her immediate future.’

  ‘What about Dr Greenson?’ Backwright asks. ‘Did he think she had committed suicide or been murdered?’

  ‘That is something on which I cannot respond. All I can say is that in the report I subsequently had to make to my superior, I maintained that the doctor did not believe his patient had killed herself. As far as I remember, I wrote something like: “As requested by you I have been to see Dr Greenson to discuss the death of his late patient Marilyn Monroe. We discussed this matter for a period of hours, and as a result of what Dr Greenson told me, and from what I heard on tape recordings, I believe I can say definitely that it was not suicide.” Then I sent it in. It was never acknowledged, and the case was closed ten days later, on August seventeenth. My memorandum disappeared.’

  REWIND

  After another glass of iced water, Miner goes on.