by Donald Spoto
So far, psychiatry had not been much help at all—not only because she was so unclear about her past and future but because she believed she had to give right answers, to please therapists who seemed to know so much, or at least who asked so many intimate questions. When practiced without respect for the client’s spiritual autonomy, psychotherapy can be counterproductive, especially for those who live double and triple lives as performers, as role-players. In their cases, as Freud himself admitted, life itself can be the superb therapist. Here she was, at thirty-four, the age when very many people reach a crossroad: she had the courage and the inner means to make choices, she had the native intelligence to recognize possibilities beyond the past. The tears that day were not just for the false self—they were a farewell, a kind of death to everything she wanted to abandon.
In fact, therapy was endorsing her dependencies, not freeing her from them. John Huston’s next film was to be about Sigmund Freud, a project in which Marilyn expressed keen interest, and in which Huston was willing to cast her. A few days later, however, she reported to Huston, “I can’t do it because Anna Freud doesn’t want a picture made. My analyst told me this.”
There were more serious dependencies. As Ralph Roberts, Rupert Allan and Susan Strasberg ruefully recalled, Drs. Greenson and Engelberg made no efforts to wean Marilyn from barbiturates that autumn: “in fact they provided them,” as Ralph said.
When we came to Los Angeles for the final work on The Misfits, there was an understanding that Marilyn would call me, and I went over to May Reis to collect the Nembutal pills the doctors gave her to dole out to Marilyn. These I delivered from May to Marilyn. But soon I said this was silly, and I simply collected them from the doctor directly and brought them to Marilyn. So far as I could see, there was no thought about how harmful all this might be.
That autumn, while completing the studio work on her last picture, Marilyn consulted Greenson seven days a week at his home. His son and daughter knew their father had famous clients; they knew, too, that he canceled patients at his office to rush home to see one or two of the most celebrated, and that Marilyn was prime among them.
It is astonishing to realize how quickly a mutual dependence was established, and how rapidly Ralph Greenson betrayed every ethic and responsibility to his family, his profession and to Marilyn Monroe, for reasons that would take more than a year to become clear.
The first indication of trouble was Greenson’s request that his daughter Joan deliver drugs from a pharmacy to the Miller bungalow at Beverly Hills Hotel, where he would be treating her: Arthur Miller himself would probably answer the door, Greenson told his daughter. The delivery was made, and the doctor’s daughter, then twenty, met Miller and, through the open bedroom door, saw Marilyn in bed, being treated by her father and accepting the medication she had delivered.
Greenson’s action constituted a terrible breach of patient confidentiality, a disclosure of patient identity to the physician’s own family, and Greenson’s subtle but clear first attempt to join that family to the client. In addition, there can be no defense or justification for this overt involvement of the psychiatrist’s daughter: pharmacies have delivery services, hotels have messengers. Such a cavalier lack of basic professional discretion was only the first instance of Greenson’s egregious mishandling of his most famous patient.
From this point to the end of his life he developed a keen interest in “countertransference,” the reversal of dependency from patient to therapist; eventually he used this term to describe his own feelings for Marilyn. In a sense, as this increasingly proprietary and grotesque control of patient by therapist continued, Ralph Greenson substituted the ultimate celebrity, Marilyn Monroe, for his celebrated sister Juliet, whom he loved, admired, protected, applauded and bitterly resented. As for his contention that Marilyn would be less known at his home than at his office, that was patently absurd: automobiles crawled past his house each day, waiting for a glimpse of the black limousine Marilyn engaged to transport her around town. More dogs were walked on Franklin Street, more strollers passed by, more tourists pointed and chattered: the Greenson home was becoming a star’s stopping place. But the doctor went further, asking his daughter to meet Marilyn when he was delayed, suggesting that Joan take a walk with the star and befriend her.
“I was her therapist,” Greenson said of Marilyn, “the good father who would not disappoint her and who would bring her insights, and if not insights, just kindness. I had become the most important person in her life, [but] I also felt guilty that I put a burden on my own family. But there was something very lovable about this girl and we all cared about her and she could be delightful.”
Painful as it was, Marilyn knew that autumn of 1960 where she had to begin to make changes. During the last week of October, she told a few friends she had asked Arthur Miller to leave their bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel; they would presently make a joint announcement of their decision to divorce. Not long before they married, Arthur had said that “the sad fact of her life is that she has calculated wrong every time she’s made a decision.” The implication was unmistakable: in marrying him, she was doing right. But now, in the early days of an unseasonably damp and chilly California autumn, she had revised the calculation.
On November 5, the day after The Misfits was complete, Marilyn heard the news: Clark Gable had suffered a serious heart attack. He had been a calm, unselfconscious friend during the production, her childhood fantasy father sprung wonderfully to life. “I kept him waiting—kept him waiting for hours and hours on that picture,” Marilyn said guiltily to Sidney Skolsky. “Was I punishing my father? Getting even for all the years he’s kept me waiting?” Her words had the ring of a psychoanalyst’s judgment or suggestion.
By November 11, she was back in New York, alone in her apartment on East Fifty-seventh Street; Arthur was living pseudonymously at the Chelsea Hotel on West Twenty-third. On that date, their representatives announced an imminent divorce to the press. Five days later, apparently recovering in the hospital, Gable had a second massive attack and died. He was fifty-nine, and his fifth wife was pregnant with his first child. Marilyn was inconsolable when she read gossip column reports: the party line broadcast that it was her antics during The Misfits that had killed him. No one bothered to report the terrible exertions to which Huston had subjected Gable; no one mentioned the actor’s habit of smoking three packs of cigarettes daily for thirty years.
There were other changes in Marilyn’s life, too. May Reis, who had served her and Arthur for years, resigned: the job was, as her sister-in-law Vanessa recalled, simply too demanding for her. Rupert Allan, perhaps the oldest and dearest friend of his one-time client Grace Kelly, had been invited to assist her now that she was Princess of Monaco, and Rupert was spending many months each year abroad. His place as Marilyn’s personal press representative was taken by Pat Newcomb.
Margot Patricia Newcomb, the daughter of a judge and a social worker, was born in Washington, D.C. After graduating from Mills College in Northern California, she went to work as a publicist for the Arthur P. Jacobs company. By 1960, she had gained the confidence of her colleagues and clients and was widely respected for her discretion, intelligence and wit. Newcomb also had a keen interest in politics—especially those issues relevant to the problems of the poor and disenfranchised; these concerns, she soon found, were shared by her new client and friend Marilyn.
By December, Marilyn had resumed daily sessions with Marianne Kris and classes at the Actors Studio, to which she donated a thousand dollars. As always, she shared her good fortunes, and this had been, after all, a banner year: another payment of almost $50,000 for Some Like It Hot had just arrived, and twice that, the partial fee for her salary of $300,000 for The Misfits (the salary included acting and an uncredited co-producer’s fee). This landed her in the ninety-percent tax bracket, and in fact at year’s end she was surprised to find herself with very little savings. Her New York attorney, Aaron Frosch, took no fee for preparing her divorc
e papers.
At Christmas 1960, spent quietly with the Strasbergs listening to music and sipping champagne, she was a picture of weariness, as Ralph and Susan recalled. Nor were the children of her former husbands forgotten. “I take a lot of pride in them,” she said of Joe DiMaggio, Jr., and of Robert and Jane Ellen Miller, who received Christmas gifts and cards with loving notes from Marilyn. “They’re from broken homes, too,” she told a writer visiting from England, “and I think I can understand them. I’ve always said to them that I didn’t want to be their mother or stepmother as such—after all their mothers are still alive. I just wanted to be their friend. Only time could prove that to them, and they had to give me time. Their lives are very precious to me.” And hers to them, for they never changed their warm feelings toward Marilyn. Joe’s sister and Arthur’s father also remained on the friendliest terms with their ex-in-law.
The holidays temporarily lifted Marilyn’s spirits—just as the entire country seemed alive with optimism at the end of 1960. A new freshness and vitality prevailed, a sense of youth and humor, of energy and strength of purpose. Marilyn and America were taking their cue, basing their mood, on the brightness, wit and enthusiasm that radiated from President-elect John F. Kennedy.
1. The Swedish psychoanalyst Nils Haak wrote extensively on the necessity of high fees, which he (and thousands of colleagues) saw as an integral part of the psychoanalytic process because of the sacrifice involved. The belief that what is cheap is of little value is deeply rooted in human society, Haak argued, adding that large sums prevent the patient from feeling infantile and the analyst from feeling merely kind and undercompensated for all the sufferings he is asked to attend.
2. As Arthur Miller knew, “doctors had gone along with her demands for new and stronger sleeping pills even though they knew perfectly well how dangerous this was . . . there were always new doctors willing to help her into oblivion.”
3. Two days later, James Goode wrote in his production diary: “August 27—No shooting. Marilyn is ill and has flown to Los Angeles for medical treatment. No one has said why.”
Chapter Nineteen
1961
I REALLY AM TRYING TO FIND MYSELF,” she told a friendly reporter, “and the best way for me to do that is to try to prove to myself that I am an actress. And that is what I hope to do. My work is important to me. It’s the only ground I’ve ever had to stand on. To put it bluntly, I seem to have a whole superstructure with no foundation. But now I’m working on the foundation.”
Eager to forget the hardships of The Misfits and to counterpoise the end of her marriage with the beginning of a new project, Marilyn and Lee Strasberg proposed a television dramatization of Rain, the classic Somerset Maugham tale of Sadie Thompson. To her letter informing him of these plans, Maugham replied from his home on the French Riviera; touched and pleased by her desire to be his Sadie, he said she would be “splendid” and, with hearty support for the project, he sent his best wishes and admiration.
During January, negotiations for the broadcast at first proceeded smoothly. Fredric March agreed to co-star as the tortured, repressed and angry Reverend Davidson, and his wife Florence Eldridge was to play Mrs. Davidson. Contracts were almost settled with NBC, which at the time regularly offered television versions of classic dramas. But Strasberg insisted on directing, and this demand became the sticking point, for network executives were unwilling to sign him. Fervent to have Marilyn, they argued against Strasberg and for a veteran film or television director, and Marilyn was offered consultation on their choice.
But at this rejection Strasberg was furious, and with customary loyalty (and perhaps feeling she could acquit herself well under no other director) Marilyn supported her teacher. Lee, otherwise so vocal about actors finding their own ways, did not encourage her to seek another; to the contrary, he thought of Rain as their project and, on their behalf, he later canceled plans for it.
Lee also figured in Marilyn’s new will, a simple, three-page document dated January 14, 1961, that reflected her recent divorce. In it, she left $10,000 each to her half-sister, Berniece Miracle, and to May Reis, and to the Rostens she bequeathed $5,000, specifying that it be used for the education of their daughter, Patricia. Her personal effects and clothing were left to Lee Strasberg, “it being my desire that he distribute these among my friends, colleagues and those to whom I am devoted.” A trust fund in the amount of $100,000 was also established for Gladys and for Mrs. Michael Chekhov, to provide a minimum of $5,000 annually for her mother’s care and $2,500 for the latter’s. Twenty-five percent of the residual Estate was left to Marianne Kris, “to be used for the furtherance of the work of such psychiatric institutions or groups as she shall elect”; and seventy-five percent was left to Lee Strasberg.1
There was another matter to be adjudicated more immediately: Marilyn’s divorce from Arthur. Through their lawyers, they reached a swift settlement. The Roxbury house would be Arthur’s, since it had been purchased with proceeds from the sale of his previous home, and there would be no alimonies on either side; there remained only the exchange of a few personal items. Arthur signed a waiver of his rights to contest a unilateral filing for divorce.
And so on Friday, January 20, 1961, Pat Newcomb accompanied Marilyn and her attorney, Aaron Frosch, on a swift mission to Mexico. At Pat’s suggestion, the day of Kennedy’s inauguration was deliberately chosen “because the press and the whole country would be looking at that, and we could slip away and return unnoticed,” which indeed they did. On Friday evening, the trio arrived in El Paso, Texas, crossed the border into Juárez, and before Judge Miguel Gómez Guerra Marilyn pleaded “incompatibility of character” and requested an immediate divorce. This was granted forthwith, and they were back in New York by Saturday evening. Effective Tuesday, January 24, she was no longer Mrs. Arthur Miller.
Looking tired and depressed, she was blunt with reporters. “I am upset and I don’t feel like being bothered with publicity right now,” she said on her return—but then she tried to appear cheerful, adding with a rueful smile, “but I would love to have a plate of tacos and enchiladas—we didn’t have time for food in Mexico!” She was, as Pat recalled, trying valiantly despite her evident depression over the formal termination of the marriage. At the same time, Pat knew that “at the core of her, she was really strong, much stronger than all of us—and that was something we tended to forget, because she seemed so vulnerable, and one always felt it necessary to watch out for her.”
As for her comments on Arthur Miller, Marilyn displayed her customary dignity when publicly discussing former husbands or lovers. “It would be indelicate of me to discuss this. I feel it would be trespassing,” she said. “Mr. Miller is a wonderful man and a great writer, but it didn’t work out that we should be husband and wife. But everybody I ever loved, I still love a little.” Typically, there was no bitterness, no rancor toward those from whom she felt estranged, even from those she felt had in some ways abused, demeaned or been faithless to her. Marilyn confided only in friends whose discretion she could trust: she had no desire to justify herself before the press. To show her essential goodwill, she attended the New York premiere of The Misfits at the Capitol Theater on January 31. Montgomery Clift was her escort.
* * *
But beneath the brave, cheerful public exterior, Marilyn’s mood was as dark as the New York winter. The Misfits, like Let’s Make Love, was not well received by most critics, and audiences were puzzled by the story and disappointed with the leading players. By February 1, after the divorce, the failure of two films, the breakdown of negotiations for Rain and no prospects for the work that always somehow sustained her despite its anxiety-provoking aspects, Marilyn was able to find consolation in nothing, and so she told Marianne Kris as well as her friends. Except for her visits to Kris, she stayed at home in her darkened bedroom, playing sentimental records, subsisting on sleeping pills and rapidly losing weight.
Her condition alarmed Marianne Kris, who suggested to Marilyn that
she check into a private ward of New York Hospital for a physical workup and a good rest, with meals served and every comfort provided.
On Sunday, February 5, Kris drove Marilyn to the vast Cornell University–New York Hospital complex, overlooking the East River at Sixty-ninth Street. After freely signing her own admission papers (as “Faye Miller,” to avoid publicity), Marilyn was taken not to a typical hospital room but—as Kris had arranged—to the Payne Whitney Clinic, the psychiatric division of New York Hospital. There, to Marilyn’s horror, she was placed in a locked and padded room, one of the cells for the most disturbed patients.
Such an incarceration might cause a perfectly healthy person violent upset and panic: for Marilyn, it was as if she had at last become the heir of the mental illness she believed had bedeviled her ancestors. It had all happened so quickly, as she later told Norman Rosten, Ralph Roberts and Susan Strasberg, that she was pitched into a state of extreme shock. She broke down weeping and sobbing, shouting to be released and banging on the locked steel door until her fists were raw and bleeding. She was ignored, and the staff reaction was that here indeed was a psychotic case, just as her physician had attested. Her clothes and purse were removed and she was put into hospital garb and threatened with a straitjacket unless she behaved.
A young psychiatric intern, visiting her cell (it can only be called that) on Monday morning, evaluated her as “extremely disturbed,” which in a sense she was, and as “potentially self-destructive,” a judgment he made after Marilyn smashed a small window on her locked bathroom door in an effort to get to the toilet. As she told the doctor, she was upset and humiliated—not to say betrayed, as she later told her friends. But the intern merely asked repeatedly, “Why are you so unhappy?”—as if she were at a luxury resort and not confined against her will in a lunatic asylum. Quite rationally, Marilyn answered, “I’ve been paying the best doctors a fortune to find out why, and you’re asking me?” Such a logical counter is often taken as a challenge, not the sort of contradiction most professionals wish to hear.