Marilyn's Last Sessions (18 page)

Filming was supposed to start in April, and Cukor expected the worst: ‘So you think you can get Marilyn to the set on time? Let me tell you something, if you placed Marilyn’s bed on
set with her in it, and the set was fully lighted, she still wouldn’t be on time for the first shot!’

As the end of the year approached, Marilyn’s analysis grew increasingly confused. Marilyn, who had entered analysis in character, as ‘Marilyn’, was becoming
less wedded to her image as a way of winning over others. She was beginning to accept that words could keep her warm, covering and enfolding her, like clothing. Whereas Greenson, the highly
articulate product of the world of words, who had chosen to go into psychiatry in order to distance himself from other people’s bodies, was beginning to lay siege to Hollywood’s image
factory. Closely connected to a variety of film studios through his patient list of directors and producers, he became particularly associated with Fox, as a note in the studio’s archives
made clear: ‘Although Dr Greenson did not want us to deem his relationship as Svengali-like, he said in fact he could persuade her to do anything reasonable that he wanted. He would determine
what scenes she would and wouldn’t do, what rushes were favourable and all the other creative decisions that had to be made.’

Ralph Greenson probably started his unpublished article ‘The Screen of Transference: Roles and True Identity’ in 1976. This was when he had come across some
troubling material in the Freud archives concerning the boundaries between analysis and love, a discovery he couldn’t wait to share with Milton Wexler.

‘Now I see why Anna Freud didn’t want anyone to make a film about her father,’ he began. ‘Marilyn wasn’t the issue. The real issue was love, which is what every
movie is about.’

‘No kidding,’ Wexler replied, with a shrug. ‘Has it taken you this long to realise that passion is primarily a matter of representation, of acting?’

‘I love the film business,’ Greenson said. ‘Actors move me; the screen fascinates me. You think I’d like to have been an actor, don’t you? In fact it’s worse
than that: I’d have liked to be a director and do the very thing you must never do in analysis. Write the dialogue, invent the story, run through the scenes.’

‘You’re too narcissistic for that. The director doesn’t appear on screen . . .’

‘I’d like to write an article about it,’ Greenson continued. ‘Something from a historical and theoretical point of view about why Freud, who was so enamoured of images,
didn’t like the movies—’

‘For God’s sake!’ Wexler snapped. ‘All you ever talk about is the movies. What about the passion between lovers? What about love? What movie were you directing Marilyn
in? A romance?’

‘There was never anything sexual between us, you know that. She took possession of me and, it’s true, in a way I did of her too. But the idiots who suspect me of having sexual
relations with her will never get it. Her body didn’t make any impression on me. I admired it, of course, but I almost didn’t see it after a while. I heard a child imprisoned inside it,
not even a young girl, a child who had always been afraid of talking because she didn’t want to be in the wrong. I don’t sleep with children.’

‘Lack of desire or lack of love – what enabled you to resist her? Her therapy, and the self-alienation she was looking for it to provide, might have been less destructive if you had
slept with her. You probably wouldn’t have damaged each other the way you did. And maybe she’d still be alive. I don’t get it. What allowed you to escape virtually unscathed from
your grand passion – because that’s what it was, wasn’t it? Your major motion picture.’

‘Some other time, if you don’t mind. I’ve got things to do,’ Greenson barked, then left the room, slamming the door behind him.

Marilyn cast a circumspect glance around the consulting room before sitting down.

‘This’ll be the third picture we’ve worked on together,’ Greenson announced cheerfully. ‘Now, I don’t want any regrets from you about Cecily. I much prefer
you as a real patient than one of the Master’s in a film. I’m not sure I really understand why you’re finding this movie so hard, though.’

‘It’s not as if it’s anything new. I’ve always had to drag myself on set; the last three pictures I’ve made have been a nightmare. This one, though . . . this
one’s the limit.
Something’s Got to Give
. . . it almost makes me want to laugh. So now we know.’ She lapsed into a deep silence, her eyes lowered, wringing her hands,
until finally she said, ‘I didn’t tell you what I did in the clinic in New York before I threw the chair at the window. They wouldn’t let me out, so I stripped naked and pressed
myself against the glass.’

‘What did you say?’

‘Nothing. I just stood there without saying anything. You know I have trouble with words, Doctor. Words leave us at the mercy of other people; they strip us far more naked than
anyone’s hands. Yesterday evening I went to a party at Cecil Beaton’s and danced naked in front of fifty people, but I wouldn’t have been able to tell any of them the simple thing
I find so hard to say now, even to you: my mother . . . Who’s that? The woman with the red hair, that’s all.’

It was stifling hot when Marilyn left at the end of her hour, and Greenson went to sit by the pool. He unfolded a sheet of yellow paper she had left on the arm of her chair. It was a poem, or
rather a sequence of short poems:

On 4 December 1961, Greenson wrote to Anna Freud about Marilyn without mentioning the brief course of therapy she had given her five years earlier.

Strangely enough Anna didn’t mention her work with the actress either. ‘Marianne keeps me informed of your patient’s progress, as well as her struggles with her. The question
is whether someone can provide her with the impetus to be well that should really come from herself.’ Both seemed to have agreed they should gloss over any role Anna might have played in
Marilyn’s mental state, presumably so that, if anything went wrong, the question of her responsibility wouldn’t come up.

That month Greenson wrote to another correspondent about Marilyn: ‘She went through a severe depressive and paranoid reaction. She talked about retiring from the movie industry, killing
herself, etc. I had to place nurses in her apartment day and night and keep strict control over the medication, since I felt she was potentially suicidal. Marilyn fought with these nurses, so that
after a few weeks it was impossible to keep any of them.’

Three weeks after J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, informed Robert Kennedy that the Chicago Mafia boss Sam Giancana was planning to use Frank Sinatra to intercede with
the Kennedys on his behalf, Marilyn was invited to dinner at the Lawfords’ place with Bobby Kennedy. This was going to be her second dinner with the president’s brother and she
didn’t want it to end like the first, with her falling out of her dress, in tears, about to pass out. Over at the Greensons’ a few days before the dinner, she and Danny talked politics,
while she took notes. Danny – a medical student – was campaigning against American support for the South Vietnamese regime, and they went over all the important issues of the day
– the House Un-American Activities Committee, civil rights and so on.

At first she impressed Bobby, but then he saw her studying the list of talking points hidden in her handbag, and gently made fun of her. It wasn’t the first time she’d tried to
prepare like that – if you think it was a mistake that you were born in the first place, you can’t bear being even remotely at fault.

A month later, thinking her intense involvement with the Kennedys was damaging – and hoping to have some time away from her himself – Greenson urged Marilyn to
take a holiday in Mexico before starting
Something’s Got to Give.
She felt an indefinable change in her analyst, and began to see him as an object of passion rather than as a loving
saviour. Imperceptibly the nature of their relationship had changed. Now there was a single self between them, a shared unconscious – love, but not love for each other, only self-love.

Marilyn, like everyone, had her version of true love. Some have more than one version, others an infinite variety. To each their own. ‘I love you’; ‘I don’t love you any
more’ – those words people say when they’re no longer true, or to make them true. But one never says, ‘I love you,’ without it also meaning ‘Love me!’
Sometimes that’s all it means. As the intimacy between Marilyn and Ralph grew fiercer, a sort of feverish romance developed, fuelled not by love but by passion – passion with its
breakdowns and recoveries, its stalemates, its bitter tears and black delights. If love is always reciprocal – each loves to be loved – passion is always asymmetrical.

The Los Angeles Marilyn returned to from New York was no longer the city of her youth. Under the pressure of six million inhabitants, it had mutated into a flat, amorphous
organism, pumping thick clots of traffic round its endless, smog-ridden freeways. Every block glowed with the neon tubes of twenty-four-hour supermarkets. Overshadowed by the Mediterranean-style
villas of silent film stars, which had remained secluded behind high stands of palm and eucalyptus for the last thirty years, Marilyn’s first address on her return was 882 Doheny Drive, near
Greystone Park, north of Beverly Hills – an unprepossessing studio flat with Stengel, her secretary’s name, on the bell. She’d lost track of all the houses, hotel rooms,
apartments she had lived in: from the YMCA to Chateau Marmont, from hookers’ joints like the Biltmore to the Beverly Hills Hotel, from an apartment backing onto the Van Nuys rail track to
palatial Manhattan penthouses. She’d stayed in converted garages and the Carlyle’s presidential suite, but never once had she felt like she had her own home. ‘I seem to have a
whole superstructure with no foundation,’ she told a journalist.

So Marilyn bought a house in Brentwood, a neighbourhood in West Los Angeles with coastal winds and a village charm, even in the midst of LA’s gangrenous, featureless sprawl. She decided to
buy a place after Greenson said, as he walked her to his gate at the end of a session, ‘Take care of yourself. Do you want us to drive you home?’

It sounded weird,
home
. Instead of answering his question, she had said, ‘The other day I was at a reception and they asked me to sign the guest book. I wrote my name after
hesitating a little, as I always do, and then in the column for addresses I put, “Nowhere”.’

After two psychiatric hospitalisations and two major surgeries, she wanted a house of her own or, more specifically, one of her own like the one of
his
own. That was the ultimate appeal
of the place: it was a replica, albeit smaller and less beautiful, of her analyst’s house. A faux-hacienda in a nondescript, peaceful neighbourhood at the end of a cul-de-sac. She would live
there barely six months.

It had a small swimming pool at the back, a few trees and a lawn rolling down to a deep valley. At first she hardly decorated it: a few ceramic tiles, some masks on the walls, a grandfather
clock given her by Carl Sandburg, a few pieces of coloured pottery, an Aztec calendar. She left the rooms sparsely furnished, as if still slightly uncertain, and made a plan to go to Mexico to buy
furniture and art so she could re-create her doctor’s house in detail.

Marilyn felt she could love that house on Fifth Helena Drive, with its hand-hewn beams and cathedral ceilings. On the terrace, she could feel the strength of the trees, like sturdy arms that
hold you without imprisoning you. She liked the roughness of the adobe stucco walls, like the hands of a working mother, the way her feet sank into the bedroom’s thick white carpet. ‘It
will be the child you lost, the husband you divorced,’ Greenson had said. ‘This house will bring you peace.’ She counted all the places she’d lived in: there had been
fifty-seven in thirty-five years. This time, she felt, she’d found the right one. The last one. The one where she’d settle, where she wouldn’t be afraid any longer.

The last film she was contracted to make for Fox, the last house. It was like turning over a new leaf, but that was good. She could even envisage going to her last session at Greenson’s
one day.

‘I heard you bought a house,’ André de Dienes said, when they saw each other soon afterwards.

‘Oh, yes. And my analyst congratulated me on my choice. It’s a big step towards resolving my transferential attachment, apparently. God knows why. I’ve moved from three streets
away from his office in Beverly Hills to somewhere a stone’s throw from his house in Santa Monica. I even felt funny when I found out he lived on Franklin Street. When I was twenty, I lived
on Franklin Avenue in Hollywood for a while. I’d left my foster parents who’d put me up when I had no work and was going hungry. They were kind people, but I got sick of their parties
in the end and needed somewhere to be on my own.’