Marilyn's Last Sessions Read online

  ‘There was one question Dr Greenson didn’t give me a clear answer to the day I saw him: why did he call it suicide at first if he was convinced it wasn’t one? There’s a simple answer to that, but it’s taken me years to work out: he called it suicide on the telephone in the dead woman’s house, because he knew the whole place was bugged—’

  ‘Okay, so Greenson probably wasn’t a murderer,’ Backwright interrupts, ‘but couldn’t he have played a part in covering up a murder by making it look like suicide for reasons we don’t know?’

  Miner says nothing.

  ‘Who killed Marilyn if she didn’t herself?’ persists the journalist.

  ‘That’s not the question I ask. Not who but what killed Marilyn. The movies, mental illness, psychoanalysis, money, politics?’ Miner stands up. As he leaves, he puts two faded, battered manila envelopes on Backwright’s desk.

  ‘I can’t give you proof of anything. I heard what she said. The voice she said it in has . . . how can I put it? . . . has been lost. Every trace a person leaves erases another trace or, if they’re lying, covers one up. There is something I can leave you, though. Something that doesn’t prove anything either. Some images.’

  Backwright waits until he is alone in front of his computer to open the envelopes. He has to write an article that night about the circumstances in which the tapes have come into his possession: they are going to run the contents in tomorrow’s edition. The first envelope contains a single photograph of a body on a table in a morgue. A vision of white on white: a naked, bruised blonde, her face unrecognisable. The second contains six pictures taken a few days before the first photograph, at the Cal-Neva Lodge, a luxurious motel on the border between California and Nevada. They show Marilyn on all-fours having sex with a man who laughs into the camera as he lifts up the shock of hair covering the left side of her face.

  REWIND

  Hunched with age, Miner walks down the stairs of the Los Angeles Times building and, confused about the way out, finds himself lost in a basement smelling of musty ink. Forty-three years have passed since Marilyn’s death, and twenty-three since the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office reopened the archives, combed through the evidence all over again, and then confirmed the verdict of the original investigation. Miner can’t bear to leave the actress’s memory to a cult, to the fans from all over the world who gather every day at her crypt in Westwood Village Memorial Park. He’s never believed that Marilyn took her own life, but neither has he come out and said the contrary. Years have passed, and he doesn’t want to die without putting something right, without showing the world the image that the tapes reveal of a woman full of life, of humour, of desire – anything but depressive or suicidal. Miner knows from experience that people who are full of drive and hope one minute can kill themselves in an efficient, resolute manner the next; that one can want to stop living without wanting to die; and that a longing for death is sometimes just a desire to put an end to the pain of living rather than life itself. But he refuses to believe these contradictions applied to Marilyn. Something in the tapes tells him she couldn’t have killed herself.

  But there is something he cares about even more. The endless profusion of theories has convinced him that no one will ever know for sure who killed her or why. What he knows can be cleared up, what has made him go public with the recordings, is Greenson’s role on the night of the murder. Miner remains haunted by the psychiatrist’s silence, by his expression of utter dismay as he stared out of the picture window of his Santa Monica villa at the swimming-pool bathed in the fluorescent purple evening light. He had felt compelled to ask, ‘Forgive me, but what was she to you? Just a patient? What were you to her?’

  ‘She had become my child, my pain, my sister, my madness,’ Greenson had replied in a murmur, as if he were quoting something.

  REWIND

  Miner hasn’t come to see Forger Backwright to provide him with a key to the conspiracy, an answer to the question that torments FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: ‘Who killed Marilyn Monroe?’ He has come to lay another question to rest: what happened in those thirty months when Greenson and Marilyn were swept up by the insane passion of an analysis that overstepped all its boundaries?

  Los Angeles, West Sunset Boulevard

  January 1960

  At the end of his life, Dr Greenson still vividly remembered the first time he was summoned to Marilyn Monroe’s bedside.

  ‘We looked at each other like creatures from different species, who are so alien to one another, who so obviously have no business being together, their first instinct is just to turn and walk away. Her so beautiful, me nothing to write home about. The diaphanous blonde and Freud’s doctor of darkness – what a couple! But now I can see all that was just on the surface. I was crazy about acting and used psychoanalysis to satisfy my need to please, while she was an intellectual who shielded herself from the pain of thinking by talking in a little girl’s voice and putting on a show of being dumb.’

  Marilyn turned to the man who would prove to be her last psychoanalyst when she was supposed to be starting filming on Let’s Make Love, a George Cukor picture in which she co-starred with Yves Montand – with whom she later had an affair. Her anxieties about her performance marked another unhappy chapter in the trials she faced as a Hollywood actress, and by this stage in her career, it had become second nature to her to take to the analyst’s couch whenever she was suffering a crisis on a film. In an attempt to overcome the turmoil of inhibitions and self-doubt that paralysed her every move on set, she had first gone into analysis five years previously in New York. She had already seen two psychoanalysts, Margaret Hohenberg and Marianne Kris, and in the autumn of 1956, while filming The Princess and the Showgirl with Laurence Olivier in London, she had even had several sessions with Anna Freud, the daughter of Freud himself.

  Now, at the start of 1960, she was in acute distress again, in front of the cameras of 20th Century Fox, who had treated her as badly as they were paying her. She still owed them a film under the terms of an old contract, but Let’s Make Love was beset with problems. Marilyn couldn’t get to grips with her character, Amanda Dell, a dancer and singer oblivious to wealth and fame, who unwittingly falls in love with a millionaire. While the crew waited for her to wake up, after she’d knocked herself out with barbiturates, and eventually appear on set hours late, her stand-in, Evelyn Moriarty, would walk through scenes, testing and confirming lighting cues and camera angles and rehearsing with other actors. On the first day of filming, Montand had confided to Marilyn that he was as terrified of failure as she was, and this shared anxiety immediately established a bond between them. To make matters worse, the movie was mired in rewrites and producers’ second thoughts. Hamstrung by the director’s elegant, casually distrait approach, an air of disaster enveloped the studio. Although she wasn’t by any means solely responsible for the delays, the producers told Marilyn she had to straighten up or she’d jeopardise the film’s chances of being completed on time.

  Without a regular analyst in Los Angeles, she turned for advice to Dr Kris, who had been treating her for three years in New York. Kris gave her the name of Ralph R. Greenson, one of Hollywood’s most prominent therapists, but only after asking Greenson if he’d be prepared to take on a difficult case. A woman in utter disarray, Kris explained, whose abuse of drugs and medication showed markedly self-destructive tendencies. Her immediate problem was severe anxiety stress, but her fragile personality was a source of more fundamental concern. Dr Greenson agreed to become Marilyn Monroe’s fourth psychoanalyst.

  For reasons of discretion and the actress’s poor health, their first session took place not, as the psychoanalyst would have wished, in his office, but at the Beverly Hills Hotel, in Marilyn’s apple green, wall-to-wall carpeted bungalow. It was brief. After a few questions regarding her medical condition, as opposed to her psychological history, Greenson suggested he see her from then on at his practice, not far from the hotel. For the rest o
f filming, virtually the next six months, Marilyn would leave the set every afternoon to go to her analyst in Beverly Hills, on North Roxbury Drive, halfway between Fox Studios on Pico Boulevard and her hotel on Sunset.

  The architecture of the Beverly Hills Hotel gives a fair indication of its clientele. Pretty pink façade; sprawling, schizoid, neo-something design; rooms in the garish hues of Technicolor films. Fox installed Marilyn and her husband, Arthur Miller, in Bungalow Twenty-one, and Yves Montand and his wife, Simone Signoret, in Twenty – Mediterranean-revival-style affairs reminiscent of pre-war movies. ‘Revival’: Marilyn used to laugh at that word. As if anything could revive. As if one could re-create what had never existed. Not that that stopped her regularly flying-in an old woman from San Diego who, thirty years previously, had dyed the hair of many stars of the silent era, notably Mae West’s soft white wavy locks, and the platinum curls of the diva of Hollywood’s heady years, Jean Harlow. Marilyn used to send a limousine for Pearl Porterfield and lay on champagne and caviar. The colourist used the old technique for peroxiding hair – Marilyn would accept no substitute – but what she liked best was hearing stories about Jean Harlow, her burning life and icy death. The stories may have been as fanciful a creation as the platinum of her hair, but this was the movie business, and Marilyn was watching herself up there on a screen full of memories.

  Hollywood, Sunset Boulevard

  1960

  Los Angeles, the city of angels, had become the dream factory in more ways than one. The meeting of Ralph Greenson and Marilyn Monroe would have been inconceivable anywhere but Hollywood. Two people with such disparate histories could only have found one another in Tinseltown, the city of spotlights, sequins and glitter, among the limitless cast of characters orbiting the studios – all those blindingly bright sets on which actors exposed the half-light of their souls.

  This was where psychoanalysis and the movies acted out their fatal romance. They were like two strangers who turn out to share compulsions rather than, as they had first thought, affinities, and only remain together through a misunderstanding. The analysts threw themselves into interpreting the movies, occasionally successfully, while their film equivalents grappled with the unconscious. Rich, vulnerable, neurotic and insecure, both professions prescribed themselves heavy doses of the ‘talking cure’. Ben Hecht, the scriptwriter of Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound and, ten years later, the ghostwriter of Marilyn’s autobiography, published a novel in 1944 called I Hate Actors, in which he portrayed the Golden Age of Hollywood as an object study in mental pathology, riddled with psychoses, neuroses and perversions of every kind: ‘There’s something everybody in Hollywood has got coming to them at some stage or another, and that’s a headlong plummet into nervous depression. I’ve known film producers who haven’t had a single idea in ten years and then, boom, one fine morning or evening, what do you know, they’ve fallen to pieces like regular overworked geniuses. The number of actors laid low by depression is something truly spectacular.’

  Hollywood had reached its apogee in the 1930s, when Marilyn was born in one of its Nowheresville suburbs, and it was entering its decline by the time she met Ralph in early 1960. Nowadays the major film studios have become echoing deserts haunted by the ghosts of actors whose names mean little to the coachloads of tourists spilling out onto their plywood streets. On Sunset Boulevard, Hispanic prostitutes stand outside Korean convenience stores with cracked windows – one starburst for every break-in attempt – and psychoanalysis is no more than ‘an option’ for anyone wishing to tune the spiritual receiver of his or her being into the vibrations of the New Age. The search for a meaning to one’s life comes some way down people’s list of priorities. So, it’s hard to imagine the relationship between psychoanalysis and the movie business in Hollywood’s heyday. A marriage of intellect and artifice, it was invariably sealed with money, often with glory, and occasionally with blood. For better and for worse, the people of the image and the people of the word tied the knot. Psychoanalysis took it upon itself not only to heal the souls of Hollywood’s denizens but also to build the city of dreams on celluloid.

  Ralph and Marilyn’s relationship replayed that between psychoanalysis and the movie business, each succumbing to the other’s madness. Like all coups de foudre and lasting unions, the two professions’ encounter was based on confusion: the psychoanalysts were straining to hear the invisible, while the filmmakers sought to put on screen what couldn’t be articulated in words, and, slowly but surely, the film industry drove psychoanalysis out of its mind. The entire episode lasted for twenty years or so, and came to an end when Hollywood itself did. But the spectres endured and, like patients in analysis, the movies suffered from involuntary flashbacks for a long time afterwards.

  Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Roxbury Drive

  January 1960

  Norma Jeane and Ralph. A world of difference separated the poor, uneducated LA girl and the prosperous East Coast intellectual – he, a son of the bourgeoisie raised in a bookish environment, she, a daughter of blue-collar parents, who’d grown up surrounded by images – and yet immediately they seemed to feel that deep down they knew one another. Each came to think of the other as a long-lost friend, who would recognise the entreaty where others would see only a smile. But something cast a shadow, something each refused to see in the other. A message from Fate: here is your death making its entrance.

  After an exhausting day’s filming, Marilyn was half an hour late for her first session at her last psychoanalyst’s office. She was wearing a pair of loose slacks, Dr Greenson noticed, and he was struck by how upright she sat in the chair he showed her to, as though waiting for someone in a hotel lobby.

  ‘You’re late,’ he began. An avid chess player, he was fond of opening moves that threw the other player off balance.

  ‘I’m late because I’m late for everybody, for all my meetings,’ Marilyn retorted, deeply hurt. ‘You’re not the only person I keep waiting.’

  Later, remembering these words, Greenson thought one should always treat the first session as if it were the last. Everything that would subsequently prove of importance came out then, even if merely by implication.

  With a mixture of anger and sadness, Marilyn continued, ‘Since the production began, Cukor has been unable to shoot for a total of thirty-nine hours on account of the fact that I am always late. I guess people think that why I’m late is some kind of arrogance and I think it’s the opposite of arrogance . . . A lot of people can be there on time and do nothing, which I have seen them do, and, you know, all sit around and sort of chit-chatting and talking trivia about their social life. Do you want me to do that?’

  The analyst had treated troubled actresses before, but he was alarmed at her condition. She must have taken a lot of sedatives, since she barely reacted when Greenson tried to draw her into conversation, and she painlessly said painful things. She wanted to lie on the couch for the kind of Freudian therapy she’d been used to in New York, but Greenson suggested face-to-face supportive therapy instead.

  ‘Fine, whatever you want,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell you all I can. What can you say when you feel you’re being swallowed up?’

  He asked her about the facts of her day-to-day life. She complained about the part she had to play in a film she detested; about her acting coach Paula Strasberg, the wife of her drama teacher in New York; and about Cukor, who had made his dislike for her obvious and constantly put her down.

  ‘“We all think we’re original,” he told me in that syrupy voice of his. “We think everything about us is unique and different. But it’s incredible how much we echo other people, our families, how our childhood shapes our every curve and contour.” Curves and contours, are you kidding? That old fairy. What does he know about this body I have to live in?’

  After a long silence, Marilyn told him about the cocktail of drugs she took for her chronic insomnia, and about how she secretly went from doctor to doctor for the prescriptions. She showed a staggering knowledge of psycho
pharmacology, and recited the litany of drugs she took, often intravenously: Demerol, Sodium Pentothal, phenobarbital, Amytal. Greenson was furious with her doctors and immediately advised her to use only one physician, Hyman Engelberg, to whom he would entrust every aspect of her physical well-being. He told her to leave everything up to him: he would decide what medication she needed.

  He definitely disconcerted her, this doctor: he listened but resisted her demand to be soothed, cherished, made whole.

  And then her hour was up and they parted company.

  When she got home that evening, Marilyn thought of the calm, gentle figure she had met and the cool, slightly brisk way he had questioned her. The challenge in his eyes when he had looked at her seemed to conceal worrying reserves of tenderness. When she had asked him if she could lie on the couch, as she did with Dr Kris, he had advised against it. ‘Let us be modest about what we want to achieve here. We don’t have to make a deep change since you’ll soon return to New York and your analyst there.’ The word ‘modest’ had wounded her; tears had welled in her eyes. The analyst had been quick to reassure her it wasn’t meant as a criticism but as a goal for himself, a benchmark for what they could achieve in their time together.

  It’s strange all the same, thought Marilyn, strange he didn’t ask me to lie down. I’m always surprised when a man doesn’t want to see me on my back. See my ass when I turn away from him. Glass in hand, looking at her bungalow’s white walls and black drapes, she continued replaying the session in her mind. Dr Greenson doesn’t have ulterior motives, I don’t think. It’s lucky he didn’t ask me to lie down. Perhaps he’s afraid. Of me? Of himself? It’s better this way, I think. I was afraid – not of him, though. It was nothing to do with sex.

  If she was truthful, she didn’t like being asked to sleep with someone. She was afraid of the night: afraid of it starting, afraid of it never ending. She often made love standing up, in the day.