Marilyn's Last Sessions (8 page)

The next day, she asked her old lover Milton Greene to take her picture. In his darkened studio on Lexington Avenue, as the Dom Pérignon flowed, he photographed her in a ballerina’s
dress. A dancer without a dance in the glare of the flashbulbs, sitting in a broken-down armchair against a large black curtain, she was sad and innocent and carnal as she hugged herself in a
snow-white dress several sizes too big, her lipstick and nail polish a matching shade of blood red.

Los Angeles would always be the movie capital, where even psychoanalysts were gripped by studio fever and infected by the prevailing mania for images. So when she moved east,
Marilyn set up an independent production company with Milton Greene and resolved to make New York the place where she’d search for the meaning of people and things, the city of
psychoanalysis. Lee Strasberg urged her to ‘free her unconscious’ in analysis, and she asked Greene for the name of a therapist. He recommended Margaret Herz Hohenberg, a psychoanalyst
of Hungarian extraction, a large, austere woman who wore her white hair bound in tight braids. She had studied medicine in Vienna, Budapest and Prague, then moved to New York just before the war.
She was already treating Greene and analysed them both until Marilyn severed her ties with her analyst and her business partner in February 1957.

Apart from Strasberg’s prompting – he thought every actor should face the truth of his or her unconscious on the analyst’s couch – Marilyn hoped Hohenberg would help with
a range of problems: childhood traumas, lack of self-esteem, inability to sustain relationships, friendships or love affairs, and fear of abandonment. She saw her five times a week, twice in the
morning and three times in the afternoon, and was unfailingly punctual for every session. She had a sort of exorcism ritual, which she’d perform when she left the practice on East 93rd
Street. Emerging from the building, she’d immediately stop, raise her hand to her mouth and cough until it hurt. Then she’d look up and calmly survey the street, as if all the emotions
that had been brought up in the session had been expelled or safely buried. Marilyn instantly became a passionate admirer of psychoanalysis. When she was asked at a press conference what she hoped
to get from it, she replied, ‘I won’t talk about it, except to say that I believe in the Freudian interpretation. I hope at some future time to make a glowing report on the wonders that
psychiatrists can do for you.’

Establishing what would become a precedent, Hohenberg became considerably more than a therapist before the year was out: she settled a legal wrangle between Marilyn and her hairdresser, stopped
her seeing certain people, and advised her on movie roles. When she wasn’t seeing her analyst, Marilyn would attend morning courses at Strasberg’s workshop in the Malin Studios, or have
private lessons in the evenings at his apartment on 86th Street. Strasberg, who had invented an acting technique he modestly called the Method, wanted, as he put it, to bring to light everything
she’d marginalised, everything she’d repressed about her past and to tap all her explosive energy. Marilyn was fascinated by his theories of human nature. Strasberg and Hohenberg
decided to work together to convert what they saw as Marilyn’s dark core of depression into an ability to sustain viable personal and professional relationships. ‘I had teachers and
people I could look up to,’ Marilyn would later say about this partnership, ‘but nobody I could look over at. I always felt I was a nobody, and the only way for me to be a somebody was
to be – well, somebody else. Which is probably why I wanted to act.’

‘I’m trying to become an artist,’ she said, at one of her first sessions with Hohenberg, ‘and to be true, but sometimes a window opens and I see how empty I am. I
sometimes feel I’m on the verge of craziness, I’m just trying to get the truest part of myself out, and it’s very hard. There are times when I think, All I have to be is true. But
sometimes it doesn’t come so easily. I always have this secret feeling that I’m really a fake or something, a phoney. My one desire is to do my best, the best that I can from the moment
the camera starts until it stops. That moment I want to be perfect, as perfect as I can make it . . . Lee says I have to start with myself, and I say “With
me
?” Well, I’m
not so important! Who does he think I am? Marilyn Monroe or something?’

Following a pattern that would repeat itself with subsequent analysts, Marilyn wasn’t content simply to pay for her sessions, but instead set about involving money in her
analytic treatment in a variety of increasingly intimate ways. She asked her analyst for advice on her business affairs. Then, in February 1956, she drew up a will bequeathing twenty thousand
dollars, a tenth of her estimated estate, to Dr Margaret Herz Hohenberg. Among the other legatees, Lee and Paula Strasberg were to receive twenty-five thousand, the Actors Studio ten thousand, and
she left enough money to cover hospitalisation costs for Gladys Baker for the rest of her life (but not more than a total of twenty-five thousand dollars). The lawyer who drew up the will jokingly
asked Marilyn if she had an idea for her epitaph. ‘Marilyn Monroe, Blonde,’ she said, tracing lines in the air with a gloved finger.

This symbiotic relationship between talking, love and money evolved. In July 1956, Lee Strasberg negotiated Marilyn’s drama coach Paula Strasberg’s contract with the producers of
The Prince and the Showgirl
. Then in October, Margaret Hohenberg went to London at great personal expense to Marilyn to provide support during filming, as she had first done on
Bus
Stop.

Margaret Hohenberg urged Marilyn to keep a diary, but she never did, although she bought notebooks with beautiful marbled covers. There was something about the bound
notebooks, an imperative to write systematically, that was too much for her. She did copy out lists of words from dictionaries, though, either difficult words, like
abasia
,
abate
,
abject
,
abstruse
,
acronym
,
adjure
,
adulate
,
adulterate
or simple but obscure words, such as
cold
,
parent
or
I
. Some notes scrawled on
scraps of paper were also found among the personal papers and possessions that were left after the police searched the house where she died. It was a meagre haul. Most of her things had disappeared
before the police even arrived, which, to some people, gave substance to the thesis that she had been murdered.

The oldest notes date from 1955, when she was studying at the Actors Studio.

Marilyn celebrated her thirty-fourth birthday with Rupert Allan, her PR agent and friend, at his apartment on Seabright Place. She spent the whole evening talking to Tennessee
Williams and his formidable mother Edwina. Anxious at the passing of another year, she had resumed seeing her saviour. ‘It’s starting again. It never stops,’ she told Greenson.
‘It feels like I’m always going backwards.’

Sometimes it seemed to her as if she was singing her life in playback, struggling to fit lyrics to a pre-recorded tune. ‘What am I afraid of?’ she had written on a piece of paper,
while she was waiting to be called on Fox’s set for one of the last scenes of
Let’s Make Love
. ‘Do I think I can’t act? I know I can act but I am afraid. I am afraid
and I should not be and I must not be.’

On her previous film, Billy Wilder’s
Some Like It Hot
, she had panicked twice when she felt her body, the rampart protecting her vulnerable inner self, was under threat. The first
time was when she had refused to come out of her dressing room to do the scene where she sings ‘Running Wild’. Wilder had asked Sandra Warner, who was playing Emily, one of the
musicians in the orchestra, to sing the number in playback: ‘Marilyn will come out when she hears your voice instead of hers, take my word for it.’ And sure enough, Marilyn appeared as
soon as she heard the singing backstage. She shot Wilder a filthy look as he coldly announced, in his Viennese accent, ‘Let’s do it over’, flourished her ukulele, then launched
into the song with furious panache. Then, at the end of filming, she was too pregnant to appear in publicity stills, so they suggested Sandra wear her costumes and pose between Jack Lemmon and Tony
Curtis; they superimposed her face on the photos afterwards. Marilyn had no choice in the matter but that didn’t stop it hurting, and she begrudged Sandra Warner the theft of her body for a
long time.

On the same film, after a fitting with the two male leads, who were in drag for most of the film, the costume designer Orry-Kelly measured up Marilyn. He was rash enough to say,
‘Tony’s got a nicer ass than you.’

She turned round in a fury, pulled down her blouse and shouted, ‘Yeah, but he hasn’t got tits like these!’

But there was another Marilyn. Wilder always remembered the day when an assistant director was sent to get her from her dressing room and found her reading Thomas Paine’s
The Rights of
Man
. ‘Go fuck yourself,’ was her pithy response to the interruption.

After that, whenever anyone talked about her lateness on set, Billy Wilder would say, ‘I’ve never had any problems with Monroe. Marilyn has problems with Monroe. She’s got
something inside that bites and gnaws away at her. She’s an out-of-kilter soul, searching for some part of her she’s lost. Like in that scene in
Some Like It Hot
when, drunk and
half-asleep, she had to open the drawers of a chest-of-drawers and say, “Where’s that bourbon?” We put a sticker in each drawer to remind her of the line. But she couldn’t
get it. That was eighty takes or something. I took her to one side after about take fifty, and said, “Don’t worry about it.” “Worry about what?” she goes. But it was
worth it in the end. She is a truly great actress. Better Marilyn late than any other actress on time. I’ve got an old aunt in Vienna who acts. Her name, I think, is Mildred Lachenfarber. She
always comes to the set on time. She says her lines perfectly. She never gives anyone the slightest trouble. At the box office she is worth fourteen cents. Do you get my point?’

One evening when Wilder went home, he kissed his wife, the tall, beautiful Audrey Young, and announced, ‘Marilyn was sensational. If I had to cheat on you with anyone, it’d be
her.’

‘Me too,’ Young answered.

Billy Wilder saw Marilyn Monroe for the last time in the spring of 1960 while she was shooting
Let’s Make Love
. It was at a party at Romanoff’s in Beverly Hills after a
screening of
The Seven Year Itch
. He offered her the female lead in his next film,
Irma la Douce.
It was Oscar time and Wilder had been awarded the Oscar for Best Director for
Some
Like It Hot
. I. A. L. Diamond had won Best Screenwriter, Jack Lemmon Best Actor, Orry-Kelly Best Costume Designer. Marilyn, who played the unforgettable Sugar Kane, wasn’t even nominated.
When she heard Simone Signoret had been nominated for Best Actress for
A Room at the Top
, a low-budget British film, she seemed unaffected, almost happy.

The following day, Wilder asked, ‘How’s it going? You’re not finding it too hard, are you?’

‘No. I learned from Freud that sometimes our unconscious wants us to fail. And, anyway, let’s face it, when it comes to women, a lot of people don’t like it so hot.’

In Manhattan, Marilyn could dissolve into anonymity. She was nobody. She could hide from herself. She would wear a baggy sweater, an old coat and no make-up, knot a scarf under
her chin, slip on dark glasses and go strolling through the crowded streets to the Actors Studio, where she attended group classes, always sitting in the same place in the back row, or to Margaret
Hohenberg’s practice. Her time in Manhattan was intellectually exhilarating: she was absorbed by ‘the mysteries of the unconscious’, as she laughingly told her friend, the writer
Truman Capote.

They had met in 1950 while she was filming
Asphalt Jungle
with John Huston
.
Superficially different, the gay writer and the symbol of heterosexual desire were nonetheless
profoundly similar. They shared a sense of something poorly articulated, a secret suffering in the depths of their being. The same abandonment as a child, the same destructive way with drugs and
sex, the same traumas over their art, the same panic about success, the same physical decline and, eventually, the same death from an overdose of prescription drugs. They’d drink cocktails in
bars on Lexington Avenue, one half vodka, one half gin, no vermouth, which they called White Angels. Marilyn would arrive in a cheap black wig, which she’d whisk off with a flourish, and
Capote would call out ‘Bye-bye, blackbird. Hi, Marilyn.’

He opened his heart the first time they met. ‘Have you any idea what it’s like to be me?’ he asked. ‘An ugly dwarf in love with beauty, a nasty, luckless kid from nowhere
who spends his time ferrying words from people to the page, from one book to another, a homo who only gets on with women—’