Suspecting that he was under surveillance by the FBI, Fenichel elected to be private in his political statements. His thick FBI file reveals that he was correct in his decision. Little of Fenichel’s published writing reflects his dedication to the communist cause, but he did continue circulating his Rundbriefe in America in an attempt to keep Marxist political psychoanalysis alive. Though he recommended that the recipients burn the Rundbriefe after reading them, many crumpled and faded copies have been salvaged for the archives of psychoanalytic history.
Shortly after he arrived in Los Angeles, Fenichel joined Simmer’s study group of European exiles who shared Marxist sympathies. The study group included Max Horkeimer, T. W. Adorno, and occasionally Leo Lowenthal—all key figures in exile of the Frankfurt school. The group of intellectual sociologists known as the Frankfurt school devoted themselves to psychoanalysis as part of their larger neo-Marxist “critical theory.”
Meetings of the study group took place at the homes of various members. They were open to analysts and nonanalysts alike. The lecture by a participant was usually followed by heated discussions, which often went on well past midnight and ended in spirited arguments held out on the sidewalk. A wide range of topics was presented—education, the cinema, jazz, radio, literature. The nonanalysts in the group often included Thomas Mann, Christopher Isherwood, Bertolt Brecht, Peter Lorre, Bruno Frank,* Fritz Lang, Hanns Eisler, Otto Katz, Leon Feuchtwanger, and Leo Rosten. Rosten, who was to become a prominent humorist and the author of Captain Newman, M.D., had journeyed to Hollywood in the late thirties in the hope of becoming a screenwriter.
Another person who attended Simmel’s study group and frequently carried the heated discussions out to the curb was a young doctor who had recently arrived in Los Angeles—Ralph Greenson. Greenson became Fenichel’s close friend and disciple, and in a brief biography of Fenichel written by Greenson for the Encyclopedia of Psychoanalysis, Greenson states,
I met Otto Fenichel early in 1938, shortly after he had settled in Los Angeles, and I knew him until his untimely death in 1946. In that short span of less than eight years, I had the opportunity of knowing him as a therapist, teacher, supervisor and for a brief period, as friend. He was by far the most important influence in my psychoanalytic life, and I consider myself most fortunate to have had so extraordinary an opportunity. It is true that my many-sided emotional involvement with him has limited my objectivity, but it has also afforded me many first-hand insights into the man and his work….
Greenson became his analysand and went through four years of didactic analysis under Fenichel. According to Hildi Greenson, “Otto Fenichel became Romi’s inspiration, trusted mentor, colleague, and friend.”
Ralph Greenson’s background was quite different from his mentor’s. Born on September 20, 1911, in Brooklyn, he was the fraternal twin to Juliet and was named Romeo by his parents Joel O. Greenschpoon and Katharine Greenschpoon (née Goldberg.) It was Papa Greenschpoon who chose to name the twins Romeo and Juliet. “My father liked Shakespeare and was a romantic,” Greenson later explained. “My mother was too weak from delivering twins to argue.” Both parents were Russian Jewish emigrants, having escaped the czarist pogroms of 1903, and when Romeo was born they lived in a tenement on Miller Avenue in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn.
The majority of the Russian Jews who fled to America during the mass migrations between 1880 and 1920 settled in Brownsville and on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Though the Jewish communities in New York had a multitude of nationalities, they were closely unified by their cultural background, their Yiddish language, and the need to protect themselves from widespread bigotry. Many of the Russian Jews who had survived the slaughters of the czarist pogroms took spiritual refuge in Orthodox Judaism. Others found faith and hope in Zionist-Marxism, which they followed with a burning zeal. On the sabbath in Brownsville, residents went either to the Sholem Alechem Temple on Pitkin Avenue or to the Labor Lyceum on Sackman Street. The Greenschpoons attended the Labor Lyceum, where Lenin was revered.
According to family lore, Papa Greenschpoon had seen his father murdered by a Cossack in their shtetl outside of Minsk. Young Joel Greenschpoon was a promising chemistry student, and the family raised the money to send him to America, where he opened a pharmacy in Brownsville at 373 Bradford Street. Joel first met his wife, Katharine Greenberg, when she answered his ad for a pharmacist. Kate was a feisty and intelligent woman who had also been educated as a chemist in Russia. Joel and Kate found that they made good chemistry, and they married in 1910. Recognizing her husband’s gifts at diagnosing the customers’ aches and pains, Kate urged Joel to study medicine while she took over the pharmacy. In 1914, three years after Romeo and Juliet were born, Papa Greenschpoon earned his medical degree.
Romi’s younger sister, Elizabeth, was born in 1913; and a younger brother, Washington Irving, was born in 1916. It was the mother, Kate, who was the central figure in the household. A woman of indomitable will and energy, she raised her rather eccentric and volatile family in a warm environment of Yiddish culture with a measure of Tolstoy and Rachmaninoff mixed in a Marxist mortar. An accomplished pianist herself, Kate prompted the children’s interest in music. Elizabeth proved to be a gifted pianist and went on to the concert stage, and Romi became a proficient violinist.
Growing up in Brownsville with the name of Romeo was a decided detriment. Brownsville was the home of Louis Lepke Buchalter of Murder, Inc. Former Brownsville resident Al Lewis remembers, “There were plenty of Jewish gangsters—Meyer Lansky, Abe Rellis, Pittsburgh Phil Straus, Banjo Bernstein, the boys in Murder, Inc. They hung out on the streets. We didn’t know—or didn’t want to know—the infamous acts they were involved in, that they were murderers for hire, would ice-pick a guy to death for two hundred dollars. All we knew was they were not so oy-oy-oy!”
The taunting cry of “Wherefor art youse Romeo?” frequently echoed down Miller Avenue and prompted the young Greenschpoon boy to stay inside and dutifully practice his violin. It was to this trauma that Romi later wryly ascribed his early interest in psychoanalysis. Unknown to his parents, when he was in the fifth grade he changed his name to Ralph, after a hero he had read about in Ralph of the Roundhouse. Friends and family, however, always called him Romi. The Greenschpoon children attended P.S. 149, where Romi’s school records show that he was an A student. P.S. 149 was renamed the Danny Kaye School in the 1960s after one of its illustrious graduates. A number of artists in the entertainment world were raised in Brownsville: George Gershwin, Steve Lawrence, Shelley Winters, Joey Adams, Phil Silvers, Henny Youngman, Jerry Lewis, Joe Papp, and the impresario Sol Hurok were among those whose ambitions were formed in the crucible of Brownsville’s streets.
When Hurok’s family moved from Russia to Brownsville in 1905, he became a partner of Kate Greenschpoon’s brother, Alex Goldberg, in directing the Brownsville Labor Lyceum at 219 Sackman Street. Hurok’s start as a manager of musical artists began at the Labor Lyceum, where he and Alex Goldberg and his sister, Kate Greenschpoon, booked speakers and concert artists. Knocking on Efrem Zimbalist’s dressing room door at Carnegie Hall, they persuaded Zimbalist to appear at the Labor Lyceum, and among the speakers that Kate Greenschpoon brought to Brownsville was a young man with a growing voice in the labor movement—Frederick Vanderbilt Field.
In his memoirs Sol Hurok recalled, “Brownsville in those days was a steaming microcosm of culture in the heart of Brooklyn, alive with intellectual striving and artistic hungers. I was becoming more and more active in the labor movement at the Lyceum, and there was never any lack of audience for speakers or concerts. With my partners the Goldbergs, we were busy supplying the artists and organizing the events. Music thrived in Brownsville.”
Marxism also thrived in Brownsville. The waves of immigrants from Eastern Europe seethed with social protest. Socialists, radicals, and communists vied to make the masses cognizant of the deplorable social and economic conditions under which they lived. By 1919 Brownsville, “The Gar
den District of Brooklyn,” became known as “The Red District,” and many party leaders and activists grew up on its teeming streets. There was no such thing as a Republican in Brownsville, and every Saturday evening before election day an extraordinary event took place at the intersection of Pitkin and Saratoga Avenues. It was called “politics night.” Al Lewis recalls, “On each of the four corners at Pitkin Avenue, there’d be speakers up on soap boxes, an American flag beside them as they screamed out their party’s slogans. On one corner there’d be the Liberal Party, on another corner was the American Labor Party, across from them would be the Socialist Party, and then the Communist Party. That was it!”
Joel and Kate Greenschpoon stood on the corner with the communists, who were screaming the loudest and echoed the pain and frustrations the Russian Jews had endured at the hands of the “ruling class.” It was in this environment of dialectical materialism endemic to the Marxist creed—so carefully taught every Saturday at the Labor Lyceum—that young Romeo Greenschpoon lost his instinctive belief in a Creator and adopted the Marxist atheistic dogma that he expounded until his death.
Though Ralph Greenson later claimed to have been raised in a hoo hoo house in the more affluent area of Williamsburg, described as a “large Colonial home situated majestically behind a high gate which reflected the family’s growing prosperity,” the fact is that the census records, the school records, and Brooklyn directories clearly establish that the Greenschpoon family lived in a tenement house that still stands at 393 Miller Avenue in Brownsville, and that they lived there from the time Romeo and Juliet were born until the family moved to Los Angeles in 1933.
After graduating from P.S. 149 midschool in 1927, Ralph Greenson later stated, he completed his undergraduate and premedical studies at Columbia University, but that wasn’t exactly true, either. He never attended classes on the Columbia campus but attended Seth Low Junior College in Brooklyn. In the 1920s and well into the 1930s, Columbia maintained a quota for Jewish students, and it was very difficult for Jews to attend Columbia unless they came from an influential family. A solution to the problem of the many Jewish applicants was the establishment of Seth Low in Brooklyn by the Columbia regents. As a result the student body at Seth Low was 95 percent Jewish. That it became a hotbed of Zionist-Marxism was ultimately a problem for the Columbia regents, who disbanded Seth Low in 1937.
Graduating from Seth Low in June of 1929 with an A-B grade average, Romi found it equally difficult to attend the medical school of his choice in the United States because of the prevalent quota system. His father helped him enroll at the Medical School in Berne, Switzerland, where he stayed at a boarding house run by the Troesch family. It was there that he met Hildegard Troesch, who would become his lifelong companion and devoted wife. Hildi’s older brother had been a member of the Communist Youth movement in Berne and later became a leader of the Communist Party in Switzerland.
After completing medical school in 1932, Romi traveled to Vienna and studied psychoanalysis under the imaginative but somewhat erratic Wilhelm Stekel. Stekel, who was one of Freud’s earliest adherents and a founding member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, was also a Freudian-Marxist and had much in common with Romeo Greenschpoon. The grandiloquent Viennese analyst was described by Freud’s biographer, Peter Gay, as “intuitive and indefatigable…Though entertaining company, he alienated many with his boastfulness”—traits that could one day equally describe Dr. Ralph Greenson.
Romi married Hildi Troesch in 1935, and by the time he had completed his studies in Vienna and returned to the United States, Papa Greenschpoon had moved the family to Los Angeles, where he opened an office as a general practitioner on Fairfax Avenue. Romeo’s twin, Juliet, had married a successful pediatrician with an office in Beverly Hills, Dr. Max Belous; and his younger sister, Elizabeth, had become a concert pianist and was dating a young promising Los Angeles attorney by the name of Milton “Mickey” Rudin.
In 1936 Romi and Hildi moved into a small apartment at 633 North Berendo Street, not far from the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Hollywood, where he did his internship along with a fellow intern, Dr. Hyman Engelberg. Mickey Rudin recalls that it was at this time, when Romi Greenson and Hy Engelberg were interns at Cedars, that he first became an acquaintance of Engelberg and his wife, Esther.
It was following the completion of his internship in 1937 that Romeo Greenschpoon and his brother Washington Irving Greenschpoon legally changed their names to Ralph and Walter Greenson, and Dr. Ralph R. Greenson opened his office and set up his couch at 1930 Wilshire Boulevard. He had ingratiated himself with Ernst Simmel and Francis Deri at the Southern California Psychoanalytic Study Group, and it was Simmel who introduced him to Otto Fenichel upon Fenichel’s arrival from Europe in 1938. A close friendship began.
The war interrupted Ralph Greenson’s career just as it was beginning. “I was just getting to earn some money,” Greenson recalled. “I got an office in Beverly Hills and was going to pay back Fenichel, and pay for the furniture in the office, and by this time I was drafted.”
Entering the United States Army in 1942, he was assigned to a psychiatric ward at the Army Air Force Convalescent Hospital at Fort Logan, Colorado, and it was there that Greenson discovered he had a gift for teaching. He began giving seminars to psychiatrists and medical personnel on how to treat the mental casualties of war. Leo Rosten’s popular book, Captain Newman, M.D., which was made into a motion picture starring Gregory Peck in 1964, was largely modeled on Captain Greenson’s wartime experiences. In describing Captain Newman (Greenson), Rosten stated, “The mannerisms he had always displayed, that unpredictable interplay between the wry, the weary, the impatient, the disenchantment—he was spilling over with responsiveness…. His seminars were jammed from the beginning, and they were about as lively, unorthodox, and illuminating as any I ever heard. He loved to teach. He loved to perform.”
In describing his experiences at Fort Logan, Greenson states, “At this time Colonel Murray comes to the post from the Air Force in Washington, and he says, ‘Look, Greenson, I want to tell you something. Do you know why I’m here?’ I said, ‘no.’ He said, ‘I’m looking where to set up a teaching hospital in psychiatry. I’ve just made my decision.’ He said, ‘I’m going to set it up at Fort Logan, and I’m setting it up and you’re going to be my assistant.’ And by God he came. A few months later and there he was. Colonel John M. Murray was Commanding Officer of the Psychiatric Unit, and I was his assistant.”
Was it the same John M. Murray who was married to Eunice? The same labor organizer whom Norman Jefferies described as a strange “well educated man versed in history and the arts and spoke six languages”? The same John M. Murray who “wasn’t home much, or even in Los Angeles unless it was on party business”?
In the many books and biographies on the subject of Marilyn Monroe very few facts are revealed of the relationship between Dr. Greenson and John and Eunice Murray. The unlikely “friendship” between Dr. Greenson and Eunice Murray has never been clarified. In her book, Marilyn: The Last Months, Eunice Murray scarcely mentions her husband, or the circumstances of her association with Dr. Greenson. The coauthor of that book, her niece Rose Shade, states, “She was drawn to psychology, feeling a need to work with people and their problems. Eunice read and studied, and when an opportunity came to care for a psychiatric case in the patient’s home, Eunice was prepared with enough knowledge and understanding to work under the guidance of a psychiatrist as his aide, helping in any kind of therapy that seemed indicated. She worked with many kinds of patients.”
Yet this is among the many bewildering contradictions in the strange life of Eunice Murray. There is no documentation of any eductional qualifications in the psychatric field, nor any evidence of any cases in which she may have been involved. Deepening the mystery, neither Hildi Greenson nor the Greenson children, nor the Murray children, will discuss the relationship between Dr. Greenson and John and Eunice Murray.
The military records of Colonel John
M. Murray indicate he was born in 1897, the same year as Eunice’s husband. Colonel Murray studied psychiatry in Vienna in 1932, the same year that Romi Greenschpoon was a student. They both apparently knew Otto Fenichel, who was a frequent lecturer in Vienna, and who was brought to Fort Logan for seminars.
All that could be attributed to coincidence, but Colonel Murray was a founder of the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute, and a photograph of him at the Institute taken in 1942 bears a striking resemblance to the one extant photograph of Eunice Murray’s husband taken in 1957. Handwriting samples of the two John M. Murrays are strikingly similar.
Norman Jefferies said John M. Murray was frequently on the East Coast or in Mexico on party business. Did one of the John M. Murrays lead a double life as a frequent flier on the Comintern triangle?
24
Nymph Errant
By the time you swear you’re his,
shivering and sighing,
And he vows his passion is
Infinite, undying—
Lady, make a note of this:
One of you is lying.
—Dorothy Parker
Another exile who had sought refuge from the European storm was Andre de Dienes, a young Transylvanian with a Gypsy heart, who had traversed the nomadic trails of European café society before settling down in New York City as a Vogue fashion photographer. Romantic by nature, he was a fervent sensualist and had an epicurean eye for the female form. His wanderlust took him to Hollywood, where he called the Blue Book Modeling Agency and requested a shapely model.
Yes, Miss Snively did have a young girl on the books, who had little experience but might fill the bill. An hour later Norma Jeane Dougherty was knocking at de Diene’s door at the Garden of Allah. She wore a tight pink sweater, her light-brown curly hair was tied with a ribbon to match her outfit, and in her hand she carried a hatbox containing a skimpy swimsuit.
The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe Page 20