Marilyn's Last Sessions (9 page)

‘I can guess,’ she cut in, downing her vodka in one. ‘Do you know what it’s like to be me? The same, except without the words to express it.’

After Marilyn’s death, Capote would say, slightly falsely, ‘There was something exceptional about Marilyn Monroe. Sometimes she could be ethereal and sometimes
like a waitress in a coffee shop. She’d been a call girl, off and on, to make ends meet, but in her mind money was always associated with love rather than sex. She gave her body to whomever
she thought she loved and money to whomever she really did love. She loved being in love; she loved thinking she loved someone. One day I introduced her to Bill Paley, a tycoon who fancied her like
crazy. I tried telling Marilyn he loved her. “Don’t shit me,” she said. “You love someone after you sleep with them – and even then that’s kind of rare –
never before. At least, that’s how it’s been with me and men. Sex and love always go together for me, just like these.” And she pointed at her tits. “I wish I could turn sex
into love and forget about bodies. I wish I could
make
love, as they say. I love that expression.”

‘“I don’t,” I said. “What two people make isn’t love. You never make love. You never have it. You’re just in it or you’re not. That’s
all.”

‘She stared at me with a bitter smile. I didn’t make a big thing of it. Everyone’s entitled to their illusions. But later I had my character in
Breakfast at
Tiffany’s
, Holly Golightly, say, “I mean, you can’t bang the guy and cash his cheques and at least not
try
to believe you love him.”’

In 1955, Truman and Marilyn met up again. She was living in a suite on the sixth floor of the Gladstone Hotel, and in February had taken her first lesson at the Actors Studio.
Meeting Lee Strasberg had changed her life. The drama teacher said he wanted ‘to open up her unconscious’. ‘Rather than my legs,’ Marilyn told Truman. ‘That’s
what’s known as a godsend.’

One day Truman took her to see Constance Collier in her dark studio on West 57th Street. The old English actress, whose sight was failing and who was losing sensation in her limbs, gave her
diction lessons and voice coaching. ‘Oh, yes,’ Miss Collier said afterwards, ‘there is something there. She’s a beautiful child. I don’t mean that in the obvious way
– the perhaps too obvious way. I don’t think she’s an actress at all, not in any traditional sense. What she has – this presence, this luminosity, this flickering
intelligence – could never surface on the stage. It’s so fragile and subtle, it can only be found by the camera. It’s like a hummingbird in flight: only a camera can freeze the
poetry of it.’

After that Marilyn went back to Los Angeles and Truman didn’t see her again until Constance Collier’s funeral. She was staying on the twenty-seventh floor of the Waldorf-Astoria. She
liked looking down on Park Avenue from her suite at night, the way one looks at the face of someone asleep. Her favourite thing about the hotel, though, was the revolving doors at the entrance,
always spinning. She was fascinated by them, by the name. Truman once said to her, ‘They’re like life. You think you’re moving forward, but in fact you’re going backwards.
You never know if you’re going in or coming out.’

‘I guess,’ she said. ‘It makes me think of love more, though. We’re all alone in our plate-glass compartments, chasing round and round after someone but never catching
them. We think we’re right next to the other person but really we’re far away, deep inside ourselves. No one knows who’s leading and who’s following. Like children, we
wonder where it all started. Who fell in love first, who fell out of love first.’

Marilyn arrived late at the funerary chapel, all apologies and nervous indecision about her make-up and her dress.

He understood her profound anxiety. If she was never less than an hour late wherever she went, it wasn’t vanity: it was because she was too uncertain and anxious to set off on time. It was
anxiety, the tension of constantly having to please, that was responsible for her recurrent sore throats that were so severe she couldn’t speak, her chewed fingernails, damp palms and fits of
giggling like a geisha; the terrible raw nerves that aroused passionate sympathy in whoever witnessed them and, if anything, only made her more radiant in their eyes. Marilyn was always late, like
everyone who has appeared at the wrong moment in their parents’ lives, all the unexpected souls.

They fell out of touch. The White Angels grew further and further apart until eventually they vanished into the white blur of oblivion. She had given him the character of
Holly Golightly – or, rather, he had taken it from her, from her words, her hands, her hopes, the chaos of her soul – and now she wasn’t of any use to him except to make him sad,
like a worn car tyre left lying on the tarmac of a parking lot, or a lost key. He saw her for the last time in Hollywood a few weeks before her death, and said afterwards, ‘She had never
looked better. She had lost a lot of weight for the picture she was going to do with George Cukor, and there was a new maturity about her eyes. She wasn’t so giggly any more. If she had lived
and kept her figure, I think she would still look terrific today. The Kennedys didn’t kill her, the way some people think. She committed suicide. But they paid one of her best friends, her
press attaché Pat Newcomb, to keep quiet about her relationship with them. That friend knew where all the skeletons were, and after Marilyn died, they sent her on a year-long cruise round
the world. For a whole year no one knew where she was.’

Four years later, Truman Capote threw his famous black and white ball in New York’s grandest ballroom at the Plaza Hotel. He spent months drawing up lists, covering page
after page with names, underlining some, crossing out others. People thought he was working on his next novel, but it was his last party, his immolation on the funeral pyre of celebrity. He invited
five hundred people: hardly any writers, lots of Hollywood types, including Sinatra, a few ghosts, such as the old diva Tallulah Bankhead, but neither John Huston, for whom he had written
Beat
the Devil
and who had introduced him to Marilyn, nor Blake Edwards, who had massacred
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
. He wanted people to hide their faces and wear black or white, like
pieces in a chess game. After his death, a note from 1970 was found in his papers. ‘A white bishop. That’s how she saw me. Marilyn and I were destined to find each other but not touch.
It can be that way sometimes, like Holly and the narrator in
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
.’ Truman also noted in his diary, ‘Strange. After my parents’ divorce, I was
brought up in Monroeville, Alabama.’

After fourteen months in New York, Marilyn returned to Los Angeles to film
Bus Stop
. On 12 March 1956, Norma Jeane Mortenson, as she still signed herself, became Marilyn
Monroe. ‘I am an actress and I found my name a handicap,’ she said. ‘I have been using the name I wish to assume, Marilyn Monroe, for many years and I am now known professionally
by that name.’

On set, director Joshua Logan discovered just how much of a Freudian devotee the actress had become. In one scene Don Murray, who was playing a cowboy, was supposed to wake Marilyn with the
words, ‘No wonder you’re so pale and white. That’s the sun out there.’ Instead he said ‘so pale and scaly’.

Logan called, ‘Cut.’

‘Don,’ Marilyn said gleefully, ‘do you realise what you just did? You made a
Freudian
slip . . . It’s a sexual scene and you gave a sexual symbol. You see, you
said “scaly”, which means to say you were thinking of a snake. And a snake is a phallic symbol. You know what a phallic symbol is?’

‘Know what that is?’ Murray retorted. ‘I’ve got one! Do you think I’m a fairy or something?’

‘What do I know? Let me tell you a story. You know Errol Flynn? Well, when I was about ten, I saw
The Prince and the Pauper
three times. And then ten years later I met him in the
flesh in Hollywood. Next thing I knew, my prince had whipped out his dick and was playing the piano with it. Errol Flynn! My childhood hero! I’d just got into modelling, and I went to this
half-ass party, and Errol Flynn, so pleased with himself, he was there and he took out his prick and played the piano with it. Thumped the keys. He played “You Are My Sunshine”. Christ!
Everyone says Milton Berle has the biggest schlong in Hollywood. I wouldn’t know about that. But I’ve seen Errol’s . . . So you’ll have to do better than that!’

During the filming of
Bus Stop
in Sun Valley, Marilyn tried out the psychoanalytic methods of Strasberg, who was a close friend of Logan’s. She replaced the
sumptuous costumes that had been designed for her with a shabby black dress and a trashy blue silk and fishnet basque, reminders, perhaps, of the porn shoots when she was starting out. She wanted
her clothes to be as tattered and patched-together as she felt. She gave her character a stutter like her own, even a tendency to forget her lines that wasn’t in the script.

Her problems with filming didn’t let up after
Let’s Make Love.
Her next picture, based on a short story by Arthur Miller, was
The Misfits
, co-starring
Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift, directed by John Huston and shot on location in Reno, Nevada. Filming began behind schedule, without her. The crew took over the Mapes Hotel and used a nearby
movie-house, the Crest Theater, to watch the daily rushes. Two days later, Jim Haspiel, the most devoted of Marilyn’s admirers, went to New York’s LaGuardia airport to see her off. She
looked terrible, with ‘bags under the eyes and a period stain across the back of her skirt’. He couldn’t bear to see her that way.

On the tarmac at Reno, Marilyn kept everyone waiting while she changed in the lavatory of the aircraft. The sun set, the photographers readied their flashes, and finally the star emerged from
the plane, like a white dream blossoming out of the darkness.

The next day the desert heat reached at least 100 degrees in the shade, and Marilyn began filming. She was like nothing human anyone had ever seen or dreamed. She was like a ghost, so pale that
the people around her were like shadows picked out by the moon. As a journalist described her, ‘Disdaining all lingerie and dressed in tight, white silk emblazoned with countless red
cherries, she became at once the symbol of impartial and eternal availability, who yet remained forever pure – and a potentially terrible goddess whose instinct could also deal death and
whose smile, when she directed it clearly at you, was exquisitely, heartbreakingly sweet.’

When Huston had offered her the part of Roslyn a few months earlier, Marilyn hadn’t been particularly enamoured by the prospect of playing a woman torn between her need for love and her
abhorrence of suffering. It all felt too close to home. ‘She’s my double,’ she told Greenson. ‘The same anxieties, the same sense of abandonment, the same problems living. I
don’t want to play a woman who’s had an awful childhood and a crazed relationship with her mother and whose only refuge is innocence, you know, the wonder she feels when she looks at
children and animals.
Roslyn
: that’s Rose, as in the Rose I played in
Niagara
, the cheap whore who killed her husband, and -lyn, as in Marilyn. Me basically.’

She had only taken the role in the end because she was tired of doing comedies and because Huston had assured her he would write the final version of the script, which her husband had tailored
to fit her like a lethal glove. ‘Even Marilyn’s pain expressed life,’ Miller said later, ‘the struggle against the angel of death.’

‘Why do you want to film in black and white?’ Marilyn asked Huston, after agreeing to play Roslyn.

‘You’re on so many drugs,’ Huston shot back in his tough-guy way. ‘With those bloodshot eyes and veins of yours we couldn’t film in Technicolor even if we wanted to
and could afford it . . . Now, don’t take that badly and go and jam down another handful of pills. I wouldn’t want you to be any deader than you are already. Suicidal neurotics get on
my nerves. I mean, kill yourself if you must, be my guest, but, honey, why do you have to make everybody else’s life hell while you’re at it? . . . Why else do I want to shoot in black
and white? Well, if I’m doing a psychological study, like my Freud picture’s going to be, I’m more interested in showing what’s going on behind people’s eyes than the
colour of them. And nothing’s black and white in life and I only want to film what exists in the movies.’

‘Why do you want me?’ Marilyn wondered.

‘Because you’re more like a hooker than an actress. Like real hookers, the good ones, you don’t pretend to an emotion, you give your whole self, body and soul. But you do know
she’s not you, this woman, don’t you? I can’t stand that whole Actors Studio Method – thank God Strasberg hasn’t managed to ruin you with it yet. That fucking
technique where you have to go deep into yourself to find an emotion from your past and then smear it all over the screen. I’ve got a lot of respect for psychoanalysis and a lot of respect
for the job of an actor, but put the two of them together and you’ve got a recipe for disaster. The great thing about you, Marilyn, even if you don’t realise it, is that you’ve
broken free from Strasberg’s Method. You won’t
act
Roslyn. You’ll give the viewer what he wants to feel and see and love, like a hooker who wants the customer to get his
money’s worth. If you do the exact opposite of what Strasberg has taught you, I’m telling you, everything’ll be fine. Forget all that “go inside yourself” crap. Go
outside – that’s where you are, that’s where the audience is. And as for your anxieties, hang on to them. They’re a precious resource for an actor. Don’t think your
analyst is going to free you from them. No one can and, anyway, they shouldn’t. If you don’t feel anxiety in this business, you might as well give up.’

‘So why are you making a film about Freud?’ Marilyn asked. ‘Is it instead of going into analysis yourself?’

Huston didn’t reply straight away. At fifty-four, he found himself confronted by the same anxieties, conflicts and deep-seated problems that had plagued him throughout his childhood and
adolescence. Fascinated and terrified in equal measure by the unconscious, his investigations into ‘depth psychology’ – they didn’t call it ‘psychoanalysis’ in
Hollywood in those days – dated from his first film.