Marilyn's Last Sessions (14 page)

Images are a skin, hard and cold. Under hers, Marilyn was coming to pieces again. When she didn’t know who to be any more, she tried to find the answer in a man’s
eyes. It was a trade: with your eyes, hands, penis, tell me I exist, tell me I’ve got a soul, and I’ll let you have my body, in the flesh or in a photograph.

One day in the autumn she again showed up at the house of her on-off lover André de Dienes, dressed in a simple, elegant black suit. André thought she seemed calm, even sad. She
kissed him, and said, ‘André, take pictures of me again! Tonight, and tomorrow too . . . I’ll stay with you.’

Not tempted by the offer, he walked her home, a few blocks away. Her apartment was full of partly packed suitcases and empty movers’ boxes, with two large wardrobe trunks in a corner. She
was using the boxes as tables, one for vodka cocktails, another for a lamp, portable record-player, telephone and a vase of yellow roses. Rough wooden cases with a jumble of books on top of them
lined one wall. André liked the room, its air of a moonlight flit. Holly Golightly’s flat, he thought.

But Marilyn was unhappy – she felt she didn’t belong anywhere any more. As the photographer later remembered, there was ‘the world’s most publicised, most glamorous, most
adulated beauty, in that musty-smelling old lousy apartment; she was alone and had no place to go’. He asked her about the farm she had bought in Connecticut, where she’d lived with
Arthur Miller. ‘Wasn’t that your home?’ he asked.

She answered that she had given it to Arthur.

‘Are you crazy?’ he shouted. ‘Are you crazy? You gave away the only home you ever owned! Having a home is the most important thing in life, and you let yourself be out in
nowhere, due to your stupidity, to your damned kind heart! Oh, Norma Jeane, what are you doing to yourself?’

She looked at him, then poured champagne from a half-empty bottle into two glasses.

The telephone rang, and she let it go for a long time before picking up. As she listened, and answered in a low, monotonous voice, her expression turned sad, and she wiped away tears. De Dienes
went into the bathroom, and when he returned he heard Marilyn’s last few words: ‘Yes, I’m coming! I’ll be there tomorrow.’ Then she hung up the receiver and turned to
him, saying, ‘André, please go home, I have to go back to New York tomorrow.’

Halfway down the street, overcome with regret, he turned round and ran back to her. She was on the phone again, sitting in the same place, crying. He knelt down in front of her. ‘Come
back. Let’s go to my house right now. I’ll take photos like nothing you’ve ever seen. Please, Norma Jeane, don’t go to New York.’

‘No, they’re waiting for me out east.’

When he rang next morning, Marilyn had left.

Marilyn flew to New York, where she met up with W. J. Weatherby, an English journalist she had got to know in Reno while making
The Misfits
. They had arranged to meet in
a bar on Eighth Avenue. It was an icy winter’s day, and Weatherby wasn’t sure she’d come. She was the one who’d wanted to see him, but why should she stick to the plan if
she was in a hole? It wasn’t as though he were a close friend or psychiatrist. He waited for an hour. She didn’t appear. He returned to the YMCA on West 34th Street and had just reached
his room when the phone rang. ‘Apologies, apologies, apologies. I was sleeping. I took some pills. Too many. Will you forgive me?’

The journalist had forgotten he’d told her where he was staying.

‘Can we still meet?’ she asked anxiously. ‘Or are you too tired?’

‘No. Not really.’

During the year they’d known each other, the journalist had come to understand that, for all her love of show, there was only one thing Marilyn really wanted: to hide. She had a unique
ability to disappear even when she was with you, to be whoever people wanted her to be while keeping her real self profoundly hidden.

A quarter of an hour later they met. She had made herself up and was very lively at first. He figured she was putting on a performance to hide her real feelings. He wished she trusted him enough
not to bother, but thought perhaps she was afraid of breaking down.

Somehow Yves Montand and Simone Signoret’s names came up.

‘They certainly seem to have an understanding,’ she said. ‘He can flirt and then go back. When I was interested in my husband, I wasn’t interested in anyone
else.’

The journalist remembered Miller telling him about her affair with Montand, but he still felt she was speaking the truth. Perhaps the marriage was over by then, and she hadn’t felt like
his wife any more.

‘Is it the same with a movie?’

‘The movies are like love, you know. When you’re not looking for it, all kinds of opportunities come your way. If you run after it, you get nothing. That’s the story of my
life. Being an actress has never been as much fun as dreaming of being one, and I’ve never been offered so many star roles as when I was on the verge of giving up. You’ve got a choice:
be a slave of the studios or an untouchable celebrity. I can’t just give up being a screen idol.’

The conversation turned to the Kennedys, whom she vehemently defended against all criticism. The tone grew heated. Weatherby thought it better to return to a calmer subject: books.

‘Have you ever read Scott Fitzgerald’s great novel
Tender Is the Night
?’ he asked.

‘No. I know Fox is working on an adaptation.’

‘There’s something of you in it. A film actress who goes . . .’ Weatherby checked himself, remembering Marilyn’s mother and her own fears.

‘What – crazy?’

‘Yes. Nicole Warren, the female lead, is a vulnerable actress. She marries her analyst but becomes more and more disturbed until she has a breakdown. She only recovers when she leaves her
husband. That’s the proof she’s recovered, he realises, that she’s strong enough to extricate herself from their mutual madness. In the end, he’s the one who cracks
up.’

Weatherby immediately realised he had it wrong. Nicole and the actress were two different characters. But did it matter? He hadn’t read the novel for a long time, but in his memory the
actress in
Tender Is the Night
had a golden Monroe quality. It was as though Fitzgerald had anticipated Marilyn, or at least aspects of her. If you combined the two characters, he thought,
you’d have a portrait of the woman sitting opposite him. Marilyn had left her husband as well, but it hadn’t cured her. She was still seeing her analyst every day.

‘That’s a nice title,’ she said, to say something. ‘The night
is
tender. Sometimes. At any rate, that’s how you’d like it to be.’

‘The doctor drops from sight into the night of obscurity. The wife, for a time, escapes her mental night.’

She didn’t know if that was a quote from the novel or a prediction. ‘That sounds familiar,’ she said jokingly. ‘There are times when it’s been so hard falling
asleep that I hate having to wake up and go through it all again. But that sounds gloomy, I guess.’

The book seemed to have become a dangerous topic. Weatherby steered the conversation to the movie adaptation. ‘I can see you playing Nicole. You know, I suggested to Laurence Olivier that
he should play the doctor’s part.’

‘Fantastic! He’s an expert on madwomen. But I won’t be in it with him; I wouldn’t be treated by him for anything in the world, not even on screen.’

‘How about Montgomery Clift?’

‘Two crazy people together. Great. Besides, Fox haven’t offered me the part.’

When they said goodbye, the journalist noticed how pale she was. She must be tired, he thought. They promised to meet up again. His last view of her was of her back, walking away. She
didn’t have the greatest legs, he decided.

Marilyn bought Fitzgerald’s novel right away. She was fascinated by the story of the rich, famous psychoanalyst Dick Diver, who marries his former patient, a
schizophrenic who has been abused by her father as a child. She’d read other novels of Fitzgerald’s, but none that seemed to speak to her so directly. In a biography of the novelist,
she found out that Nicole was partly based on Fitzgerald’s wife Zelda, whom she knew a lot about. When she had flown to New York in December 1954 to embark, as it were, on her new career as
an analytic patient, she had bought a one-way ticket in the name of Zelda Zonk.

Now she was struck by a metaphor in the novel, ‘Hollywood, “the city of thin partitions”’. That was what she was fleeing by coming to New York. The imperceptible gulf
between people, the futility of everything. She was tired of everything always being reversible; she wanted time to mean something; she wanted there to be a difference between insanity and what she
could only call desire. The opposite of madness is not simply reason.

In September, John Huston had run into Robert Goldstein, the new head of Fox, at the Scala Theater in Hollywood.

‘Where have you got to with your adaptation of
Tender Is the Night
?’ the director asked.

‘Selznick backed out two months ago,’ the producer answered. ‘Henry Weinstein’s in charge now. He’s keeping Jennifer Jones, David’s wife, and Dr
Greenson’s the technical consultant—’

‘What?’ Huston cut in. ‘Greenson? The guy who wanted to stop me making my picture about Freud is giving technical advice on a movie about a psychoanalyst? And it’s
starring Jennifer, who’s a patient of his colleague Wexler’s? What a bastard that guy is.’

Henry King shot
Tender Is the Night
, his last film, for 20th Century Fox in Switzerland and on the Côte d’Azur in the spring of 1961. Greenson didn’t feature on the
screen credits but he played a big part not only in his friend Weinstein’s choice of screenwriter, but also in shaping the script. He was very keen to lighten Diver’s character and make
his attraction for Nicole less fatal, the game they play less deadly, as if the fact that they lose it would deprive his life of the meaning he had tried to give it. He never spoke to Marilyn about
the book or the film.

Marilyn returned to New York once again. This time, as she got on the plane, she didn’t know whether she was travelling into the past or the future. As Billy Wilder had
said, when her divorce from Arthur Miller had come through in January, ‘Marilyn’s marriage to Joe DiMaggio failed because the woman he married was Marilyn Monroe, and the one to Arthur
Miller because she wasn’t.’ After the panning her last film had received, Marilyn thought her career was at a dead end. She retreated to her darkened bedroom on East 57th, listening to
sentimental songs, dosing herself on sleeping pills, not eating or talking, seeing no one except W. J. Weatherby and her analyst.

After forty-seven sessions in two months, overwhelmed and terrified by Marilyn’s deteriorating condition, Marianne Kris finally decided to have her hospitalised. Under the name of Faye
Miller, she was placed in the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic. She was not asked for her consent, but simply given admission papers to sign. She had taken so many pills she was confused and had no
idea what she was signing. Marilyn was thirty-four, the age of her mother, Gladys, when she was sectioned.

Marilyn immediately writes to Paula and Lee Strasberg, her closest friends in New York.

She was allowed to make only one phone call. She called Joe DiMaggio, in Florida, whom she hadn’t spoken to for six years. He caught a flight to New York that night and insisted she be let
out of the clinic. After just four days she was discharged, and went to convalesce in a hospital on the Hudson River, on the other side of Manhattan, where she stayed from 10 February to 5 March
1961. While she was there she decided to make Greenson her sole analyst and wrote him a letter, which for a long time was thought to be lost until it was found in 20th Century Fox’s archives
in 1992.