Marilyn's Last Sessions (11 page)

‘Olivier hated me, I think,’ she said, when it was finally all over. ‘Even when he smiled, he had a poisonous look in his eyes. I don’t know, I was sick half the time,
but he didn’t believe me or else he didn’t give a damn. He always looked at me as if he’d smelt rotten fish, as if I had leprosy or something. He tiptoed up to me at the start as
if he was walking into some sleazy dive and told me in his patronising voice just to be
sexy
. That killed me. I felt terrible around him. I was constantly late and he hated my guts for
it.’

Newly wed to Arthur Miller and pregnant with a child she would lose in August, Marilyn arrived in London on a rainy afternoon in mid-July. The subsequent three weeks of
shooting brought her to the verge of a nervous collapse. Nothing was working: the film, her marriage, her exhausted body, which was constantly failing her.

One day she found her husband’s notebook lying open on the dining table. She read, ‘I shouldn’t have got married, not to her. She is an unpredictable, forlorn child-woman,
abandoned and selfish. My creative life will be threatened if I give in to her relentless emotional blackmail.’

Devastated, Marilyn rang Margaret Hohenberg in New York and talked for hours. Her analyst flew over and gave her therapy on set. ‘He thought I was some kind of an angel,’ Marilyn
told her, ‘and now he guesses he was wrong to marry me. His first wife had let him down, but I’ve done something worse. Olivier is beginning to think I’m a troublesome bitch, and
Arthur says he no longer has a decent answer to that one.’

Overwhelmed by her patient’s depression and anxieties, the tyrannical demands for love she had been making for more than a year, Hohenberg decided she couldn’t leave her New York
practice unattended any longer, and sought a solution
in situ
that would help Marilyn fulfil her professional commitments.

Under the virtually white sky of a boiling August day, a black Rolls-Royce stops outside 20 Maresfield Gardens. Silhouetted against the light, a heavily built chauffeur opens
the car door, then pivots to allow a young blonde to slip past and hurry towards the house. Paula Fichtl, the Freud family’s housekeeper for the past twenty-seven years, opens the door and
shows the stranger into the hall. Dressed in a plain blue raincoat with the collar turned up, no make-up, her platinum hair hidden under a floppy felt hat, her face behind a pair of big sunglasses,
Marilyn Monroe has arrived for her first analytic session with Sigmund Freud’s daughter.

The appointment has been arranged with the utmost discretion and speed. Despite her dread of publicity, Anna has overcome whatever initial hesitation she might have felt, and for the following
week, Marilyn doesn’t appear on set. No one knows where she is or what she’s doing. Every day her car stops in Maresfield Gardens and every day she disappears into Anna Freud’s
study. ‘She wasn’t remarkable, I wouldn’t say,’ Paula later recalled. ‘She was a pretty girl, of course, but not especially elegant. Miss Monroe was very natural and
unpretentious and slightly anxious, but you could see she could be attractive when she smiled.’

One day Anna shows her patient around the clinic’s kindergarten. Marilyn immediately becomes animated and, completely at ease, starts joking and playing with the children. Afterwards, very
impressed by the work Anna is doing, she tells her about reading
The Interpretation of Dreams
when she was twenty-one. She was particularly fascinated by its description of dreams about
nudity. Compulsive nudity, the need to undress in public, is something she had talked about at length with her first therapist. Anna makes her diagnosis, which she writes up on a card that can
still be found in the file index at the Anna Freud Centre. A coded summary of ‘the Marilyn case’, it reads: ‘Adult patient. Emotional instability, exaggerated impulsiveness,
constant need for external approval, inability to be alone, tendency to depression in case of rejection, paranoia with schizophrenic elements.’

Employing a technique borrowed from child psychotherapy, Anna Freud gets Marilyn Monroe to play a game. They sit facing one another at a table with a handful of glass marbles in the middle. The
analyst waits to see what she will do with them. After a while, Marilyn starts flicking the marbles towards her, one by one, which, from a psychoanalytic point of view, means a desire for sexual
contact. Anna’s accelerated course of treatment proves, as far as she can tell, a complete success. At the end of the week, Marilyn resumes filming, the picture is completed and, on 20
November, she takes a plane back to New York.

Miss Anna and Miss Monroe parted on good terms, according to Paula Fichtl, so much so that a few months later a cheque for a considerable sum drawn on Marilyn Monroe’s account arrives at
Maresfield Gardens.

Laurence Olivier’s wife, Vivien Leigh, became a patient of Dr Greenson for a spell in 1953, after panic attacks and fits of depersonalisation had forced her to pull out
of location shooting in Ceylon on William Dieterle’s
Elephant Walk
. Leigh was embroiled in an affair with her co-star Peter Finch, her husband in the film, when she suffered a
recurrence of her manic-depressive psychosis. Suddenly the bluish heat of Ceylon’s jungles seemed to saturate her summer dresses, and invade every pore of her skin. She was seized by
persecution mania whenever she saw too many brown Sinhalese faces; their looks filled her with something more acute than terror. On camera, she took to striking vampy poses, flirting with Dieterle
and stumbling uncharacteristically over her lines. Olivier sent her back to Hollywood.

Greenson was urgently sent for and he saw her for six days running – fifty hours in total, which he billed at $1,500 – but was unable to prevent her foundering before his eyes,
although he continued to reassure Paramount that she would be able to return to Ceylon. There was no question of Leigh resuming filming, however, and she ended up going to England to be admitted to
a hospital in Surrey.

Seven years later, when he was in the thick of analysing the star of
Let’s Make Love
, Greenson returned home one summer evening feeling bitterly discouraged. He told his wife how
struck he was by the parallels between Vivien and Marilyn’s situations. Both had come to him after breaking down on a film in which their co-star was their lover. He had given Fox exactly the
same assurances about Marilyn as he had Paramount about Vivien: that she would be working again in a week. He hadn’t cured either of them.

‘Marilyn isn’t mad, though, is she?’ he asked Hildi.

‘No. Nor are you. But the potential’s there.’

‘What – we could go
crazy
about each other?’ he joked.

‘I was thinking you could drive each other out of your minds.’

At one point during the filming of
The Misfits
, Clark Gable found Marilyn sitting in tears in the make-up trailer. They’d just shot the devastating scene in which
Roslyn tries to stop the mustang hunt, which ends with a very brutal shot of her and Gable with the sun at their backs, their bodies bisected by the horizon, as she turns and screams, ‘I hate
you’ at him. As she’d said her line, it wasn’t the animal’s suffering she was feeling any more, it was hers. She was in physical pain; she couldn’t tell herself this
was just a movie any more, a series of images. Despair had reduced her to a body flayed by the lights. Her image on film, something that once would have done her good, felt like a wound now, as if
her skin was being torn off strip by strip. From then on, whenever swarms of photographers would shout at her to turn their way and she’d tilt her head back to keep her face in shadow,
she’d feel like that horse, hobbled and cowed by the men’s shouting.

‘“Honey,”’ Gable said to her, quoting their script, ‘“we all got to go some time, reason or no reason. Dying is as natural as living; man who’s afraid
to die is too afraid to live, far as I’ve ever seen. So there’s nothing to do but forget it, that’s all. Seems to me.”’

Soon the question on everyone’s mind was ‘Is Marilyn working today?’ Her last film had exhausted her and the wreckage of her love life was piling up. Her
affair with Yves Montand was over. Miller, who had written the short story that was the basis for
The Misfits
in Nevada when he was waiting for his first divorce to come through, now found
himself back in the same place as his second marriage was drawing its last breath. Seeing Marilyn in the divorce court in the opening scenes of the movie was agonising for him, like an excruciating
dream he couldn’t wake up from. But despite the tension between them, she still often turned to him for help.

Meanwhile Lee Strasberg was flown out for moral support and showed up in the desert dressed as a cowboy in plaid shirt, chaps, boots and spurs. The sight of him in those clothes, as opposed to
his usual Marxist priest’s uniform, made Marilyn cry with laughter. But he had no more luck than anyone else in weaning her off the twenty Nembutals she took each day, sometimes pricking the
capsules with a pin to speed up the effect. On Saturday, 20 August, the day before
Let’s Make Love
’s world première at the Crest Theater in Reno, to which Montand and
Signoret had been invited, no one could find Marilyn. In the afternoon the Sierras went up in flames. Clouds of black smoke blotted out the sky. Fire-fighting planes flew back and forth, dumping
chemicals in a vain attempt to contain the brush fires. The following day the power lines were cut. Reno was plunged into darkness. The première was cancelled. As darkness fell, with only
the eerie white glow of the generator-powered hotel sign for illumination, Marilyn sat on the terrace of the deserted Mapes Hotel drinking champagne with the crew and watching the conflagrations
far off in the night.

Filming resumed three days later without her. Cameraman Russ Metty told the producer, Frank Taylor, ‘That’s it . . . the pills. She can’t be photographed. If this is going to
go on day after day, we’re finished here.’ On 26 August, Marilyn had to leave the set, not to return until 6 September. The rumour going around was that she had been saved from death
only by having her stomach pumped. In the broiling heat, she was evacuated to Los Angeles. She was carried onto the plane wrapped in a wet sheet. Predicting (or hoping) that she would collapse for
good this time so that she could be replaced, Huston returned from the airport a relieved man, and headed straight for his usual table at the casino. The producers decided to close down the film
for an unspecified period of time.

Marilyn didn’t collapse immediately, however. Instead she checked into the Beverly Hills Hotel and attended a smart dinner party at the home of the director Charles Vidor’s widow.
The following evening, Greenson and her physician Hyman Engelberg jointly decided she should be hospitalised. Since United Artists would cover the costs of a private hospital, Marilyn was admitted
to a comfortable room in the Westside Hospital on La Cienega Boulevard, and spent ten days there under the name of Mrs Miller. Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra visited. Greenson was at her bedside,
day and – at least in part – night.

During this crisis, the psychoanalyst struck his patients as hopelessly distracted and confused. His colleagues heard him talk about the fatefulness of birth, the irreparability of destiny. Then
he seemed to snap out of it. He organised follow-up treatment for Marilyn and rang Huston to assure him she’d be back at work in a week. ‘If I can’t finish
The Misfits
,
I’m ruined as a director,’ Huston stormed. ‘No one’s going to want to produce or insure anything I do.’ Gossip columnists ran stories saying Marilyn was a very sick
girl, much sicker than had at first been thought and that she was under psychiatric care. Engelberg spoke his piece to the press: ‘Miss Monroe is suffering from acute exhaustion and needs
rest and more rest.’ Frank Taylor talked about cardiac problems and the strain of a location shoot so soon after
Let’s Make Love
. Neither of them, however, saw fit to mention the
huge amounts of narcotics – Librium, Placidyl and chloral hydrate – that Greenson had discovered she was taking.

She couldn’t resist calling Yves Montand from the clinic. The receptionist at the Beverly Hills Hotel put her on hold, then came back on the line to say that Mr Montand couldn’t take
her call. She felt herself falling through empty space. When her analyst saw her after this call, she seemed lost and kept saying, ‘Did you see what he said, the bastard, in his interview
with that bitch Hedda Hopper? He said I was a simple girl without any guile, who had a high-school crush on him. A hopped-up little teenager. He’s sorry he gave in. It was a moment of
weakness because I was like a hurt child. He even said the only reason he screwed me was to make the film’s love scenes more realistic.’

Greenson tried to convince her to resume filming, come what may. ‘You’ve reached a dead end. Love’s dead end. When that happens, the only way you can hurt the other person is
by hurting yourself.’ Shortly afterwards, Huston came to see him in Santa Monica to check on Marilyn’s condition. ‘All we can do is wait and expect everyone else to do the
same,’ Greenson told him. ‘Movie stars forfeit their status as men and women, you know. They become children whose time is spent waiting – between movies, between scenes, between
takes. They have no control over anything, their role is entirely passive, which is why actors often become directors or producers, to escape. But actresses are more used to it. Waiting is a
woman’s fate in many ways. This is something you have to understand about her, but I can assure you she’ll be able to start filming again within a few days.’ Huston was about to
interrupt Greenson’s clinical disquisitions when Marilyn suddenly appeared, as if in confirmation of everything he was saying. She was bright-eyed, vibrant, full of winning charm. She greeted
the director, then turned to her analyst with the chastened smile of a child. ‘I know what the barbiturates did to me, but that’s over now.’ Then she said to Huston,
‘I’m so embarrassed by how I behaved and I want to thank you for making me stop filming this week. I’d like to come back, though, if you’ll have me.’ The director
didn’t say anything. Greenson broke the silence, saying she’d be ready, without the barbiturates this time.