Marilyn Monroe

by Donald Spoto

  The conclusion of the report was unambiguous: the attending diagnostician hesitated to make any “definite prognosis as to the future, as often in these cases, very peculiar and unforeseen complications can develop at a later date. . . . Other diseases of the nervous system [were observed], manifested by occasional fits secondary to CNS [central nervous system] trauma.”

  Disqualified for overseas service, Greenson served as chief of the neuropsychiatric service at the Army Air Force Convalescent Hospital in Fort Logan, Colorado, beginning in November 1944. Promoted to the rank of captain, he then headed the Operational Fatigue Section at the same hospital. Here, he gained the experience he later shared with his friend, the writer Leo Rosten (no relation to Norman), who used the material as the basis for a novel called Captain Newman, M.D. In 1945, Greenson petitioned for release from service in order to enter private psychiatric practice in Los Angeles, where (thus he claimed in a letter dated December 5, 1945, to military authorities in Washington), there was a community of civilian and veteran psychiatric cases desiring private psychiatric treatment. This request was denied.

  Following his discharge in 1946, Greenson (with financial help from a brother-in-law) set up his psychiatric practice in Los Angeles and, in 1947, purchased a home at 902 Franklin Street in Santa Monica, just at the cusp of West Los Angeles. The house had recently been completed after a long construction period by the owners, John and Eunice Murray, who found they could not afford the mortgage; Greenson paid $16,500 for the Mexican-colonial house. Not long after, the Murrays separated (they were divorced in 1950) and Eunice moved to a rented cottage not far from the ocean. The loss of what she called her dream house pitched Eunice Murray into a sense of bereavement so acute that over the years she regularly visited it.

  In postwar America, psychoanalysis and psychiatric sessions were very much the vogue—not merely for adults in genuine mental or emotional crisis, but also for those who felt drastic action was needed to resolve life’s ordinary demands, and often for those who were merely bored or lonely or self-absorbed and could afford to pay a sympathetic listener. (Children who were simply rambunctious, annoying or precocious were often subjected to long-term therapy, sometimes with disastrous results.) In many large cities across the country, and especially in wealthier communities, daily sessions with one’s analyst were a commonplace for those who could afford them.1

  Among the board-certified psychoanalysts with medical degrees in Los Angeles County in 1950 was Ralph Greenson, a founding member of the Freudian group known as the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society, which had strong personal ties with Anna Freud in London, and with her colleagues in Europe and New York; among his good friends was Marianne Kris, who recommended him to Marilyn Monroe.

  All during the 1950s, Greenson’s Los Angeles practice thrived: to his office in Beverly Hills came many celebrities as well as the merely rich of the county’s west side, and he cultivated a reputation as a popular lecturer to professionals and layfolk. Greenson was, as his wife Hildi wrote in an introduction to his collected lectures, “a charismatic speaker who loved teaching, enjoyed his audience and rarely missed an opportunity to engage a group in dialogue.” His manner at such events was perfectly attuned to the entertainment capital of the world: Hildi recalled that

  Romi [short for Romeo] always mounted the platform or approached the lectern with quick, bouncy steps and obvious pleasure. . . . When I once marveled that he never seemed nervous, his characteristic reply was, “Why should I be nervous? Just think, these lucky people get to hear me.”. . . His gestures were dynamic and his voice would rise to a passionate pitch or break into a helpless chuckle over his own joke. He gave full vent to his own emotions . . . [and] his audience was never bored.

  He was, in other words, as much a showman as anything else, in a way (as some colleagues believed) eager for the applause and notoriety once accorded only to Juliet. This at least partly accounts for his increasingly direct involvement in the business of Hollywood. Represented by his brother-in-law, the noted lawyer Milton Rudin (who was married to the younger Greenschpoon sister, Elizabeth), Greenson received a healthy twelve and a half percent of the gross receipts of the film version of Captain Newman, M.D.—whose title character, as Greenson wrote to Leo Rosten in September 1961, was himself, just as ninety percent of the patients were based on his own during the war. Greenson was also closely connected to a number of film studios, where he met several executives and producers who became patients; similarly, for his articles and interviews in magazines, he sometimes engaged Leo Rosten as “producer.”

  The catalogue of Greenson’s articles and lectures reveals the extent to which he sought more than professional endorsement: he longed to reach the widest possible lay audience, too, and this encouraged him to popularize and even sometimes to trivialize serious issues. Among the titles of his collected lectures were “Emotional Involvement,” “Why Men Like War,” “Sex Without Passion,” “Sophie Portnoy Finally Answers Back,” “The Devil Made Me Do It, Dr. Freud,” and “People in Search of a Family,” which (as his wife rightly noted) “concerned a need Romi found in his patients which echoed his own partly unconscious desire to make people he cared about a member of his family. It was his foster-home fantasy of a haven where all hurts are mended.” Sterner critics believed that many of the papers he wrote were delivered for the purpose of getting attention (and therefore new clients)—appeals for applause rather than serious creative work.

  Greenson was for years clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA Medical School and a training and supervising analyst at the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. It is not an exaggeration to say that throughout his career—apart from whatever benefits he may have offered his private patients—Greenson was known in Southern California as a beguiling performer who kept audiences nicely entertained.

  Dr. Benson Schaeffer, who was working with autistic children at the Neuropsychiatric Institute during Greenson’s tenure at UCLA, expressed the common impression of Greenson after attending a seminar and hearing a public lecture: “He wanted to amuse and to be thought clever. Frankly, I saw no overwhelming depth in the man. He seemed more shrewd and canny than profound.”

  “Only later,” said another local colleague, “was it clear to many of us just how shallow he was”—a judgment readily confirmed by reference to his papers and articles. These are too often popular to the point of frivolity; a cursory reading of the material is sufficient to reveal how much “pop psychology” this physician generated. Indeed, he might not have won so many ardent disciples or such fervent respect anywhere but in Hollywood, where to challenge is too often to court disfavor, and to coddle is to secure virtually undying devotion. Anna Freud’s biographer, who liked and respected Greenson, nevertheless described him accurately as “a hard-living man of passionate enthusiasm and even flamboyance, a man for whom psychoanalysis was—as Anna Freud thought it should be, and as it was for her entire friendship circle—a way of life.”

  This way of life did not preclude presentations of issues that were frequently sprinkled with appalling generalities unworthy of a serious therapist and more suited to talk shows:

  From “People in Search of a Family,” 1978:

  • “People who search for families try to undo the effects of a bad family life. It is an acting out to replace the unhappy past with a happy future. Family life is good for your health.”

  From “Misunderstandings of Psychoanalysis,” 1955:

  • “Children are complicated and people are complicated. But I don’t feel it is hopeless at all.”

  From “Special Problems in Psychotherapy with the Rich and Famous,” 1978:

  • “The movie actor or actress is not a star until he is instantly recognizable not only by his peers but by the world at large . . . I have found the impatience of the budding star and the fading film stars to be the most difficult with whom I have tried to work.”

  But perhaps most surprising of all was Greenson’s contradict
ion of a fundamental tenet of psychiatry, not to say all medical ethics and practice: “Psychiatrists and physicians,” he said (in a lecture called “Drugs in the Psychotherapeutic Situation” at the UCLA Center for the Health Sciences in 1964), “must be willing to become emotionally involved with their patients if they hope to establish a reliable therapeutic relationship.” This universally condemned position would be crucial, not to say downright harmful, in the case of Marilyn Monroe.

  Like many in his field at that time, Greenson relied heavily on drug therapy as an adjunct to psychotherapy, routinely prescribing (or asking his patients’ internists to prescribe) barbiturates or popular tranquilizers of the day (Librium, for example) in an effort to ease patients’ crises or to please them. In this regard, Anna Freud’s biographer documented Greenson’s treatment of Ernst Freud, Sigmund’s son, who suffered severe migraine headaches: he prescribed massive doses of tranquilizers, even at that time too facile a response to a condition whose causes are poorly understood.

  Whatever his private crises and difficulties, Ralph Greenson was the soul of serenity in public. At a UCLA symposium called “The Good Life,” he sat debating with three clergymen when a sudden storm brought a thunderclap and a power failure. Electricity was restored after a moment, and Greenson’s colleagues were seen standing. “Please note,” he announced triumphantly, “that I am the only speaker still sitting down.” His wife, touchingly loyal, incongruously wrote that “his self-assurance had scored a point for psychoanalysis.” Or for egotism.

  But of all Greenson’s interests, it was the nature and burden of fame that seems to have most intrigued him and celebrities to whom he was most attracted. This was a recurring theme in his life’s work, and in “Special Problems In Psychotherapy With The Rich and Famous,” he described his experiences with Marilyn Monroe—a period of his professional and personal life that became an obsession. In this paper, Greenson did not mention by name her or anyone else: with so many details, that was hardly necessary.

  Greenson wrote of a famous and beautiful thirty-four-year-old actress lacking self-esteem who was already being treated by an East Coast colleague. For her first appointment with him, she arrived a half-hour late, with the excuse that she was typically tardy for appointments. In response to his inquiry, she then described her early life, giving special emphasis to Grace’s passion for her to be a movie star. Although she had not completed high school, Greenson found her intelligent, with a love of poetry, theater and classical music. Her husband had undertaken to educate her, she said; for this she was grateful, but the life of the housewife bored her. He then said he would meet with her regularly at his office or at his home, which, he said, would not attract public attention.

  This was an astonishingly illogical suggestion. Access to Greenson’s consulting room at his Santa Monica home was through the front door; his family lived there with him, and his young daughter at once noticed the new, famous patient and was subsequently asked to befriend her—hardly a mechanism to deflect attention. In fact, Greenson was pleased and proud to have so celebrated a client, and from late 1960 to the end of her life, one of the terrible miscalculations in his treatment of Marilyn Monroe was the extent to which he brought her into his home and made her a member of his family. Any vigilant psychiatric community or university department would have instantly called him on this and threatened professional censure.

  His tactic was disastrous: instead of leading his patient to independence, he did exactly the opposite and effectively made her entirely contingent on himself. He was not a Svengali, he told Marilyn’s studio colleagues not long before her death, but he was certain he could prevail on her to do anything he wished. His disclaimer notwithstanding, Greenson’s words could indeed have been uttered by poor Trilby’s mesmeric teacher.

  And so, from early 1960, Marilyn Monroe consulted Ralph Greenson five times a week when she was in Los Angeles. “I was going to be her one and only therapist,” he wrote proudly in a letter to Marianne Kris, describing her as “so pathetic, such a perpetual orphan that I felt even sorrier and she tried so hard and failed so often, which also made her pathetic.” These sentiments are remarkable, for they betray Greenson’s complete lack of professional distance and his dangerous emotional involvement: finding a patient “pathetic,” “feeling sorry” for her and judging her to have “failed so often” are phrases more characteristic of a wounded parent or a smug teacher than a sensible counselor committed to the mental health of his patient.

  Even his diction became fractured when Greenson tried to write of Marilyn Monroe, and in time he lost all discretion with her. Nevertheless, in addition to five and eventually seven meetings weekly (“mainly because she was lonely and had no one to see her, nothing to do if I didn’t see her”), he encouraged her to telephone each day—a strategy he undertook, he said in his essay, so that she would understand his values and translate them into the things she needed to survive in the world of film acting.

  As summer began, Marilyn described herself tersely: “I’m thirty-four years old, I’ve been dancing for six months [in Let’s Make Love], I’ve had no rest, I’m exhausted. Where do I go from here?”

  In fact, she already had the answer: to New York for meetings and wardrobe tests for The Misfits, which was at last being rushed into production in July after several delays. This she undertook despite a persistent pain in her right side and frequent bouts of severe indigestion that interrupted her uneasily achieved sleep, to which she could return only by taking more sleeping pills. These were easily obtained through one of several internists, especially her Los Angeles physician, Hyman Engelberg. He had been recommended to Marilyn by Ralph Greenson, who told him, “You’re both narcissists, and I think you’ll get along fine together.” Very quickly, Engelberg fulfilled a specific function for Greenson, who persuaded the internist to “prescribe medication for her . . . so that I had nothing to do with the actual handling of medication. I only talked about it with her and he kept me informed.” Here, someone might have observed, lay dragons.

  On July 18, en route to Nevada, Marilyn arrived in Los Angeles for a session with Greenson, an appointment with Engelberg and a date with Yves Montand, who was working on a second American film and with whom her relationship was still occasionally intimate.

  Two days later, clutching a purseful of medication for pain and insomnia, she arrived in Nevada. There already was her “family,” as she called them—her coach (Paula Strasberg), her masseur (Ralph Roberts), her secretary (May Reis), her personal makeup artist (Allan Snyder), her hairdresser (Agnes Flanagan), an expert at full body makeup (Bunny Gardel), her wardrobe supervisor (Sherlee Strahm) and her driver (Rudy Kautzky, borrowed from the Carey Limousine Company). She would need all this support and more: whereas the making of Let’s Make Love had been described as an ordeal, the making of The Misfits would be an undiluted horror, not even remotely justified by the final product.

  Perhaps no motion picture in history was ever realized without complications: production files are usually chronicles of delays, illnesses, unforeseen difficulties due to weather, sudden changes in the schedules of cast and crew, budget problems, the often uneasy relations between actors and directors, the legendary temperaments of stars and the countless details dependent on a successful interplay of many arts and crafts. The meticulous Alfred Hitchcock foresaw almost every eventuality of the process, enjoyed as much control as any director and suffered no fools gladly: toward the end of his life, he expressed his amazement that any movie was ever made at all, by anyone: “I have lived, he said, “in a constant state of astonishment that we ever completed even one picture. So much can go wrong, and it usually does.”

  The films of Marilyn Monroe were no exception, and from 1953 her co-workers had to deal with her chronic fears that led to habitual lateness. They put up with her tardiness because she brought so much effort to her work, because the result was invariably rewarding and because she was, paradoxically, among the least temperamental actresses: there
is no record of a public display of anger against an actor or director, no outburst of pride or contempt. Demanding of producers and technicians only a measure of the expertise she required of herself, she knew what was at stake with each picture; and because, like all performing artists, she knew how much she needed acclaim, she worked ceaselessly to merit public loyalty. This résumé deserves emphasis for a consideration of her twenty-ninth and final film, which asked everything of her except what she was most equipped to give—her unique, highly imaginative talent and a special gift for subtle and sophisticated comedy.

  As shooting began, the screenplay of The Misfits was far from complete, despite three years of work, several drafts and redrafts and a detailed outline. Two things were soon clear.

  First, the film was based on Miller’s own experience when he came to Nevada to fulfill a residency requirement for his divorce from Mary Grace Slattery. During those months of 1956, he had met a crew of cowboys who captured mustangs—wild horses once trained to be used as children’s ponies but now sold for butchering as dog food. For Miller, these men were as much misfits as the animals they considered useless. “Westerns and the West,” according to Miller, “have always been built on a morally balanced world where evil has a recognizable tag—the black hats—and evil always loses out in the end. This is that same world, but it’s been dragged out of the nineteenth century into today, when the good guy is also part of the problem.” His story and scenario would be, he said, “about our lives’ meaninglessness and maybe how we got to where we are.”