Marilyn Monroe

by Donald Spoto

  Michael Korda, then a young writer and friend of Milton, knew that Greene, on the other hand, bitterly resented Arthur’s managerial attitude over Marilyn and MMP’s future; Korda was also aware that Milton’s talents were badly affected when he began taking Dilantin, an anti-epileptic drug for which he had no medical need but which was popularly thought to augment energy by increasing the brain’s electrical impulses. Dilantin was also supposed to counteract Nembutal and other barbiturates and hypnotics, thus balancing the effect of drugged sleep with artificially induced energy the next day: the result was a cycle of catastrophic addictions.

  In another, subtler angle, Arthur’s assumption of control proved that Milton could no longer control the situation as easily as he had before. Amy Greene, who had been close to Marilyn since 1954, also saw the pattern emerging in 1957. For Arthur’s sake, Marilyn felt compelled to break with everything that in Arthur’s mind represented Milton: the business of MMP, a certain social life, a choice of films. “But there was another knot in the problem,” according to Amy. “Although he didn’t mean to, Milton always put Arthur down: ‘You go away and be a good husband’ was his attitude to Arthur. ‘You go and write a play and let us take care of business.’ As for Milton himself, everyone who knew his work acknowledged that he had a streak of genius. But he was also a man of frightening excesses and eventually he destroyed himself, and almost his family, too.”

  As MMP began to unravel, Marilyn took some comfort in a routine, and for much of 1957 and 1958 it was unvarying. Five mornings each week, Marilyn visited her analyst; thence she proceeded to something remarkably similar, her private sessions with Lee Strasberg. By coincidence, both mentors now lived at 135 Central Park West.

  Marilyn had wanted a new psychoanalyst to replace Margaret Hohenberg, who was still counseling Milton. To that end, she telephoned Anna Freud in London, who had a ready reply: in New York was Anna’s closest friend since girlhood—Marianne Kris, a doctor whose father had been the pediatrician for Freud’s children. And so that spring, Marilyn began sessions with Dr. Kris. The relationship, which lasted four years, was crucial and finally harrowing, sometimes helpful but more often troubling rather than illuminating.

  Born in Vienna in 1900, Marianne Rie grew up amid the intellectual excitement of the birth of psychoanalysis. She took a medical degree in Vienna in 1925 and did further study in Berlin, where at Freud’s recommendation she was analyzed by Franz Alexander; later, when she returned to Vienna, Freud himself completed her psychoanalysis and she married Ernst Kris, an art historian who also became an analyst (as who did not in the Freud-Kris social set). Sigmund Freud called Marianne his “adopted daughter,” and together the Freuds and the Krises fled the Nazis and went to London in 1938. Marianne and Ernst subsequently continued to New York, where she developed a private practice and a specialty: the clinical aspects of Freudian child psychoanalysis.

  Ernst Kris had died on February 28, 1957, a few weeks before Marilyn began to meet regularly with Marianne, who was glad for the opportunity to work, and as she acknowledged, the more troubled and famous her patients were, the better for her notes and theories. It was, then, quite a coup to have Marilyn Monroe in her consulting room. For her part, Marilyn was pleased to have Kris, with her close connections to the seminal thinkers of psychotherapy: if anyone could help her, she reasoned, Kris could.

  At this time, Kris was developing a controversial set of principles that, she believed, enabled her to predict a child’s psychological development and potential problems. A dark-haired, handsome woman, she was an intense pragmatist who took the approach that children were the key to understanding the human psyche. She held that, as a colleague wrote, “some of the most important advances in psychoanalysis have come from child psychoanalysis.” While Kris accepted adults as patients, she always emphasized that one had to see the problems of those adults as based entirely on childhood experiences. Helping adults meant in an important way treating them like children. It is worth detailing this background and viewpoint of Marianne Kris because her relationship with Marilyn Monroe was from the start ill advised.

  On the one hand, Marilyn was trying harder than ever to face her “real self,” to put aside the glamorous appurtenances that made for superstar Marilyn Monroe, to face her fears and her memories (as Lee Strasberg insisted was essential for acting) and to become someone good and respectable, which she always doubted herself to be. She wanted a clean slate: marriage to a working playwright, motherhood, then perhaps a return to her art.

  But there was an obvious peril here. A devout Freudian, Kris (like Strasberg in his private sessions with Marilyn) constantly led her back to childhood. As Marilyn told her friend and publicist Rupert Allan, there was a consistent motif in this therapy: What was her relationship to her mother and father in childhood? What memories were there to be confronted? What resentments had to be faced? If one could understand the past, Kris stressed, one could be free of its tyranny. But Marilyn had never known her father’s identity and scarcely knew her mother, and her feelings about maternity (and about preparing for it herself) had been shaped by surrogates, from Ida Bolender to Grace McKee to Ethel Dougherty and even to Natasha Lytess and Paula Strasberg.

  But analyzing the past did not necessarily direct one to the future. Marilyn felt blocked, stymied in her life, in a rut—and no one seemed to acknowledge that her sense of crisis was not necessarily a sign of breakdown, as it was so diagnosed; it could be, on the contrary (indeed, it was), an indication that she longed for her life to move to some new, deeper level as yet unrevealed. The Freudian school took seriously the medical model: crisis meant something was wrong and had to be fixed. This was fine so far as it went, but it simply did not go far enough. And for Marilyn, who always felt it best to put her life right by doing rather than discussing, by action rather than by talk, a weariness often set in. But these were parental authority figures, and so she stayed with the program.

  Isolated and introspective in childhood, she was now asked to focus her attention almost exclusively on that unhappy period. And so she was on a kind of treadmill, repeating over and over with Kris what she had with Hohenberg, and this became self-defeating. Where were the fresh revelations, the new energies generated to move beyond the childhood? Reasoning about it did not resolve it; understanding did not necessarily lead to acceptance, nor to the alteration of the meaning of the past that contains seeds of possibility for both present and future.1

  With Hohenberg, Kris and later with Marilyn’s last analyst, Marilyn felt “as if I were going around in circles,” as she told Rupert. “It was always, how did I feel about this, and why did I think my mother did that—not where was I going, but where had I been? But I knew where I had been. I wanted to know if I could use it wherever I was going!”

  Notwithstanding the insights provided by Freudian principles, their wholesale application to someone like Norma Jeane Mortensen/Marilyn Monroe was futile. Excessive introspection exacerbated her lack of self-confidence. Intuition suffered at the expense of a forced, conscious intellectualism that paralyzed her and pushed her further back into herself. There was, therefore, a confusion of realms and realities here, and for Marilyn to attempt an analysis of the past led to an endless attempt first to evoke painful memories and then to find out what they meant. But the memories were vague and disconnected: no wonder Marilyn continued to tell her friend Susan Strasberg that if she couldn’t answer Kris’s questions, well, she just made up what seemed interesting. This, as Marilyn must have known, was counterproductive. Too much the vogue in the 1950s, this sort of strict Freudianism was also unhelpful because the system of five sessions weekly fed Marilyn’s condition of childlike dependence. It is also curious that Kris, like Hohenberg, seemed unable—over the course of four years—to alleviate Marilyn’s increasing reliance on sleeping pills. As for Arthur, he was, as his own family and friends acknowledged, “too stand-offish” in the matter, “amazingly thoughtless and unappreciative [of Marilyn]. Art is interested in p
eople, but not in any particular person.”

  With a husband who approached her as “a mere child” and was taking steps to control her business, an analyst who treated her as a girl who had buried her past, and surrogate parents (the Strasbergs) who fancied themselves intellectual guides, it was difficult for Marilyn to find the mechanisms to be sprung free for adulthood.

  Each day after her session with Kris, Marilyn took the elevator to Lee Strasberg, who led her in a series of sense-memory exercises that required her to feel and act like a child: one day she had to play a hungry baby, another a lonely waif, a confused schoolgirl, a young bride. This was the key to unlocking her “real tragic power,” he said—and she believed him because she needed to: like Hohenberg and Kris, he made himself indispensable to her. As Kazan observed, Lee also turned her against other influences—teachers, directors, even her husband.

  The result was predictable: Marilyn began to worry more about herself. Impossibly high ideals were being set before her (she might soon play Lady Macbeth, Strasberg said). “Lee makes me think,” Marilyn told Norman Rosten, her voice full of awe. “Lee says I have to begin to face my problems in my work and life—the question of how or why I can act, of which I’m not sure.” Her emotions, frustrations and angers were, Lee said, to be the equipment for her craft, and to do this he put her constantly in touch with her past. She was going nowhere very quickly—at least partly because she had not one but two therapists; in reality, she needed not to be enclosed within a prison of self-examination but freed from it.

  This was almost pathetically evident in March, when for a Studio class Marilyn was asked to do a scene that included a song. She stood before the group and began to sing in a wavering voice: “I’ll get by as long as I have you . . .” And then suddenly the room was as still as a lake, for Marilyn began to weep. She kept her pitch, focused on the words and music and let the tears fall. Everyone in class felt this was great acting, but Marilyn was simply terrified. She was not performing; she was anxious about Lee’s judgment.

  As for Arthur and the Strasbergs, Susan recalled the considerable mutual antipathy. “Whether it was competitiveness or that [Arthur] wanted total control over Marilyn, I couldn’t figure out. There seemed to be two kinds of people: those who went for control, like my father and Arthur, and those who went for approval, like [Paula], Marilyn and me.” For the first time, Marilyn’s friends began to observe that she was gaining weight, drinking too much and suffering frequent attacks of various viruses.

  Around April 1, Marilyn saw a first print of The Prince and the Showgirl. For perhaps the only time in her life, she wrote a lengthy, detailed letter, dictating furiously to her new secretary, May Reis, who had once worked for Arthur and who now (because he had no need of her) attended Marilyn. “It is not the same picture you saw last time [in New York that winter],” she wrote to Jack Warner,

  and I am afraid that as it stands it will not be as successful as the version all of us agreed was so fine. Especially in the first third of the picture the pacing has been slowed and one comic point after another has been flattened out by substituting inferior takes with flatter performances lacking the energy and brightness that you saw in New York. Some of the jump cutting kills the points, as in the fainting scene. The coronation is as long as before if not longer, and the story gets lost in it. American audiences are not as moved by stained glass windows as the British are, and we threaten them with boredom. I am amazed that so much of the picture has no music at all when the idea was to make a romantic picture. We have [shot enough] film to make a great movie, if only it will be as in the earlier version. I hope you will make every effort to save our picture.

  This was clearly a sober critique by a seasoned professional, not the raving of an ignorant, mentally confused actress.

  But it was also different from her reaction when she saw the rough cut in London, which was virtually the same screened for her now. Her strategy was, according to all the documents in the files of MMP and Warners, to imply that Milton had secretly recut the film—an action that owed much to Arthur’s encouragement, as the legal proceedings subsequently documented.

  First, she stated that Milton ought to have obviated postproduction problems in working with Olivier and the film editor; second, she insisted that Milton’s credit as the film’s executive producer was neither contracted nor deserved. But as their MCA agent Jay Kanter recalled, and as the relevant MMP-Warner contract of 1956 clearly indicated, Milton’s credit had indeed been formally and firmly contracted before production. And Olivier himself, never one to yield credit he considered rightfully his own, had a change of heart and enthusiastically supported Milton’s claim to be listed as executive producer—a status Milton demanded not out of vanity but for his future as a film producer.

  Because Marilyn was seeking to sever herself emotionally and professionally from Milton and to ally herself only with Arthur, she disingenuously took up the matter of Greene’s credit as her cudgel. As her talent for acting was being refined, her ability to make consistent and sound business judgments was not; nor was she able to admit that her desperate attempt to ingratiate herself to her husband (who was only too willing to take whatever control he could) was at odds with both her knowledge and intuition about the marriage itself.

  On April 11, Marilyn issued a statement through Arthur’s attorney, Robert H. Montgomery, Jr., stating that Marilyn Monroe Productions had been mismanaged by Milton, that he had misinformed her of certain contractual agreements and entered into secret negotiations for new deals without her knowledge or consent. She would, therefore, soon announce a new board of directors. As Arthur had pointed out, she had the controlling 50.4 percent of the company’s stock, against Milton’s 49.6 percent.

  Five days later, in a meeting at Montgomery’s law offices, she calmly announced that MMP’s vice-president Milton Greene, attorney Irving Stein and accountant Joseph Carr were forthwith dismissed from her company and replaced by Robert Montgomery, George Kupchik (Arthur’s brother-in-law) and George Levine, a friend of Arthur who was a city sanitation worker and carpet salesman. As for the matter of Milton’s producer status, even Robert Montgomery admitted to his colleague John Wharton that Marilyn was “absolutely irrational on the subject of Milton’s credit.”

  Greene’s public response was suitably dignified, with a tone of mild hurt and shock:

  It seems that Marilyn doesn’t want to go ahead with the program we planned. I’m getting lawyers to represent me, [but] I don’t want to do anything now to hurt her career. I did devote about a year and a half exclusively to her. I practically gave up photography.

  Marilyn was not at a loss for an equally public reply, although the comments, drafted by Miller and Montgomery, were not at all typical of her, nor were the facts accurately represented.

  He knows perfectly well that we have been at odds for a year and a half and he knows why. As president of the corporation and its only source of income, I was never informed that he had elected himself to the position of executive producer of The Prince and the Showgirl. My company was not formed to provide false credits for its officers and I will not become party to this. My company was not formed merely to parcel out 49.6% of all my earnings to Mr. Greene, but to make better pictures, improve my work and secure my income.

  The stakes were clear. Because of her expectation of a new life and new career with Arthur Miller, Marilyn had been persuaded that her need for Milton Greene no longer existed. The result was that he was suddenly badly treated by the woman to whom he had devoted his considerable talents. It was true that he had shared and perhaps even encouraged some of her most perilous weaknesses. But he had also enabled her to free herself from studio servitude and form a company in which she had succeeded magnificently by selecting and delivering arguably the best roles of her career. They had discussed plans for the future—among them a film with Charles Chaplin, who was indeed interested. Now everything was sabotaged.

  “The truth is,” said Jay Kanter, “that
suddenly Milton was left out in the cold.” And Amy, who was not blind to Milton’s mistakes and weaknesses, recalled that Marilyn admitted to her that “Arthur was taking away the only person I ever trusted, Milton,” but that she felt powerless to withstand him. At the root of it all was the frustration and sadness Marilyn felt over her marriage to Arthur, and much of that feeling she directed against Milton. It was ironic that Marilyn now found herself in the same situation as previously. Just as she had once allowed Milton to appoint his friends as corporate officers of MMP, so now she was allowing Arthur to do the same, but with men far less qualified. Despite her anger and protests, she was exerting no more professional control over her destiny in 1957 than she had in 1954.

  That anger was fierce in April. At a social gathering, the Millers met Arthur Jacobs, and Marilyn (thus Jacobs) “screamed about me and Jay [Kanter], calling us ‘shitty friends of that shitty Mr. Greene, who got me a psychiatrist who tried to work against me and for Mr. Greene!’ ”

  Marilyn Monroe and Milton Greene never met again. Lawyers battled for a year until she finally bought out his stock for $100,000—his entire remuneration for over two years of work. He returned to work as a photographer, but a bitter disillusionment afflicted him, and in ensuing years he became increasingly addicted to alcohol and drugs. But Milton was forever courteous in his public statements about Marilyn:

  She was ultrasensitive, and very dedicated to her work, whether people realize this or not. She came through magnificently in Prince and she was great in Bus Stop. All I did was believe in her. She was a marvelous, loving, wonderful person I don’t think many people understood.