Despite evidence to the contrary, Greenson insisted that Marilyn was much better. This may have been his way of dealing with the guilt of knowing that his absence had led to her dismissal. It may also have been a way of reassuring himself that she would eventually improve, freeing him from being on call seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day, indefinitely. He saw himself as the prisoner of a method of treatment that, however necessary for Marilyn, had proven nearly impossible for him. Marilyn, sensing his need to see improvement, may sometimes have pretended to be getting better. She was an actress, after all. She knew how to play a happy girl, even with her doctor. The important thing was not to be left.
There was a very real threat that might happen again soon. Greenson planned to go away as early as next month. When he interrupted his vacation, he had canceled a stop in New York to see his publisher. Now, he intended to go east sometime in August, September or October. Work on The Technique and Practice of Psychoanalysis proceeded slowly, as so much of his time and emotion was devoted to Marilyn. Greenson wanted to coordinate his travel plans with Anna Freud. His mentor was about to come to the United States, and he hoped to be invited to join her at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka.
As August began, the central drama of Marilyn’s life was being played out with her analyst. Her other saviors had abdicated in one way or another. Though he wanted to direct her in Macbeth at the new Actors Studio Theater, Lee Strasberg, Marilyn believed, had ceased to pay enough attention to her. Miller, of course, had a new wife and was soon to be a father. Joe DiMaggio was away on business. So Greenson was all Marilyn had left. On Saturday, August 4, he had a call from her at approximately 4:30 in the afternoon. Dr. and Mrs. Greenson were going out that night. Still, Marilyn sounded depressed, so he agreed to visit her at home.
There was something he did not know. One day previously, on August 3, when Engelberg came to sedate her, she lied that Greenson had approved her being given some Nembutal. Assuming he was acting on instructions from Greenson, Engelberg neglected to tell his colleague about the prescription he gave Marilyn for twenty-five capsules. Marilyn had it filled immediately. On Saturday, when Greenson arrived, she had enough drugs in the house to take her own life.
The rooms at Fifth Helena remained bare; the pieces Marilyn ordered in Mexico had never been delivered. A Cosmopolitan photographer who’d recently worked with her had preferred not to shoot in her home because, with so little furniture, the place had a depressing air. Marilyn had spent much of Saturday in bed. Lately, she had been reading the book Captain Newman, M.D., a thinly fictionalized account of Ralph Greenson’s World War II experiences. The rickety wooden night table overflowed with plastic pill bottles, though the Nembutals were nowhere in sight. Shopping bags and dirty clothes littered the floor.
Greenson conferred with Marilyn in her room, while Eunice Murray and Pat Newcomb waited in the living room. Marilyn struck him as despondent and disoriented. Once, perhaps twice, the doctor, absorbed in thought, wandered out into the hall. Greenson was quite tense himself, for reasons having nothing to do with Marilyn. He was trying to give up smoking.
It was certainly a bad sign that Marilyn had failed to take Isadore Miller’s call on Saturday morning. She was invited to dinner at Peter Lawford’s that evening, but she was in no shape to go. The previous day she’d asked her publicist, who had bronchitis, to stay in the spare room. But the fact that her guest slept soundly until noon seemed to enrage Marilyn, who had lain awake all night. As was frequently the case, Marilyn’s anger was irrational. Still, in the interest of peace, Greenson asked Newcomb to leave. He arranged for the housekeeper to stay instead.
After Greenson had been there for about two and a half hours, Marilyn did seem calmer. Inevitably, the moment approached when he would have to go home and change for his dinner party. He left at seven, telling Marilyn to call when she got up in the morning. Greenson, mindful of her fears of abandonment, reassured her that he’d be available again in a few hours.
Marilyn couldn’t wait that long. She appeared to focus all of her anxiety about his impending trip east on the prospect of his being out of reach this evening. She seized the first opportunity to connect with him again. Hardly had Greenson arrived home when the phone rang. It was approximately 7:40 and he was shaving. Marilyn excitedly announced that Joe DiMaggio’s son had just called. Joe, Jr., serving in the Marine Corps, was stationed in San Diego. She assumed Greenson would want to know he’d broken off his engagement.
“Isn’t that great?” asked Marilyn, who believed that Joe, Jr., at twenty-one, was too young to settle down. Her high spirits contrasted with the bleak mood Greenson had observed less than an hour ago. She would have known a tearful call would irritate him after he’d just spent a good deal of time with her. The news about Joe, Jr. offered a pretext to talk happily, as though that were what this desperate call were really about. Marilyn did, however, provide one important clue to what was on her mind, though Greenson failed to notice at the time.
“Did you take away my bottle of Nembutal?” Marilyn asked. The question signaled two things. She was informing him that she had a supply of the dangerous barbiturate, and she was warning that she intended to use it. Greenson, unaware of the prescription, assumed she must be mistaken. As far as he knew, Marilyn couldn’t possibly have any Nembutals in the house.
By the time Marilyn’s phone rang about twenty minutes later, she may already have begun to swallow the yellow capsules. When she was finished, the Nembutal bottle would be empty. And only ten green chloral hydrate capsules would remain in a container that held fifty.
Why did Marilyn take an overdose? A. Alvarez has compared the triggering event in certain suicides to “a trivial border incident which triggers off a major war.” The event may seem insignificant to us, but not to the person in pain. One can never know exactly why someone takes her own life. In Marilyn’s case, the triggering event, the specific incident that pushed her over the edge, seems to have been nothing more than her doctor’s having gone to a dinner party with his wife. Earlier, Marilyn had been frantic at the prospect. By now, it would have become a life-and-death matter, his absence on a par with all the abandonments she had suffered, beginning with her father. Perhaps she thought she would punish Greenson for having left her tonight. Perhaps she thought she could force him to return. Perhaps she thought that, as others had done, he’d rescue her before it was too late.
Marilyn picked up the phone. It was Peter Lawford calling about dinner.
“Hey, Charlie,” he asked, “what’s happened to you?”
The party was already under way. Lawford’s pals chattered in the background. Marilyn, in a dozy voice, said she couldn’t come. He’d heard her like this before. Her thick, halting speech meant she was drunk or drugged, perhaps both. No matter; she’d be perfectly welcome like that. He shouted into the receiver, hoping to revive her.
Then she said something that brought him up short. Lawford had a hard time hearing over the din at the beach house, but he was sure Marilyn said, “Say goodbye to Pat. Say goodbye to Jack. And say goodbye to yourself because you’re a nice guy.” Silence followed. Had she fallen asleep? Had the receiver slipped out of her hand to the white rug? Had she hung up? Had the phone gone dead? Lawford called back repeatedly. Confronted with a busy signal, he couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that Marilyn had just said goodbye.
He wanted to go to her, but his manager, Milt Ebbins, insisted it would be better to contact her lawyer or her doctor. Ebbins was unable to reach Greenson, but he did track down Mickey Rudin at a cocktail party. It was about 9:30 when the lawyer called to check on Marilyn. Eunice Murray, spending the night in the dressing room, answered the second phone. She reported that Marilyn was resting in her room. She insisted everything was fine. As far as she knew, it was. In fact, Marilyn was probably already dead or dying.
Murray awakened at 3 a.m., surrounded by full-length mirrors. Like Natasha Lytess twelve years previously, she sensed something wrong. She flicked on
a light and put on a robe. What she saw in the hall distressed her. A phone cord ran under Marilyn’s locked door. Ordinarily, the phone would have been “put to bed” under a stack of pillows in the guest room.
Moments later a phone rang at the Greenson home. The doctor wouldn’t have been surprised to hear Marilyn’s slurred voice. Instead, he heard the frightened housekeeper. She followed instructions to knock on the door and shout Marilyn’s name. There was no response. She rushed outside. The night air was cool and damp. Marilyn’s lamp was on, but heavy curtains blocked the view. Murray, reaching through an iron grille, pushed them aside. Marilyn, naked, lay sprawled face-down on the bed, one hand resting on the telephone receiver.
Greenson arrived at 3:40. He smashed a pane of glass with a fireplace poker and reached in, undoing the latch. Dr. Engelberg, who came ten minutes later, pronounced Marilyn dead.
Marilyn had finally given in to her mother’s judgment. On the night of August 4, she finished what she believed Gladys had set out to do when she tried to kill her baby daughter.
Marilyn’s life had been one of rare achievement. On her own, against almost impossible personal and professional odds, she had created something brilliant and magical—”Marilyn Monroe.” Her creation had brought immense pleasure to millions of people, and would continue to do so long after she was gone. The world loved Marilyn. Yet in the end she felt utterly unloved and alone. For thirty-six years, Marilyn, with her immense life force, had fought against an equally strong pull towards death. Tonight, death triumphed, and her struggle was over.
The doctors conferred. Greenson, to his horror, learned about the twenty-five Nembutals. As often happens after a suicide, the “what ifs” and the “if onlys” hovered in the air. If Greenson had known about the barbiturates, almost certainly he would have been alert to Marilyn’s cry for help. Her death might have been prevented. At 4:25 a.m., Greenson, devastated, called the West Los Angeles police station.
Now that Marilyn was gone, Greenson would confide to Anna Freud that he realized all his knowledge, desire, and strength had been insufficient. Marilyn’s death was a blow to his pride, he admitted. And it was a blow to his science. But most of all, it was a blow to him personally, for he had cared about her very much. Anna Freud wrote back that she knew exactly what he was going through. She had once returned from a trip abroad to discover that a patient of hers had committed suicide two days previously. She explained to Dr. Greenson that one goes over and over in one’s thoughts how one might have done better, the process inevitably leaving the survivor with a terrible sense of defeat. “But, you know,” Anna Freud continued, “I think in these cases we are really defeated by something which is stronger than we are and for which analysis, with all its powers, is too weak a weapon.”
Greenson knew it would take him a long time to get over Marilyn’s death. It hurt even to think about it, yet he sensed it was only by remembering that someday he would be able to forget. He longed to spend a few days talking himself out with his own analyst, Max Schur, in New York. (Schur had been Sigmund Freud’s personal physician.) But there was no time for that now. Greenson was interviewed at length by the police, by the district attorney’s office, and by a panel of twelve psychological experts dubbed the “suicide squad.” The latter had been appointed by Dr. Thomas J. Curphey, the chief medical examiner and coroner for Los Angeles County, to determine whether Marilyn had been capable of taking her own life.
When someone commits suicide, friends, family members, and other associates often question whether the person could possibly have done such a thing. So it was quite normal when Marilyn’s housekeeper, makeup man, hair stylist, and others in her entourage suspected that she had died by accident (having lost track of how many pills she’d taken) or even by foul play. The haunting image of her hand on the telephone receiver led several people to believe that Marilyn’s final act had been to try to call them. A natural death is hard enough to deal with; the idea that someone close died intentionally may be almost impossible to bear. Denial frees the survivors from endlessly examining whether there were any indications that a suicide was going to occur. And of course, it frees them from a certain amount of guilt.
In fact, everything pointed to the conclusion that Marilyn had killed herself. There had been prior attempts to take her own life. There was a family history of suicide. She had been feeling especially defeated in recent weeks. Though there had been talk of future projects, one had to wonder whether she was capable any longer of doing a film, let alone a play. Marilyn had been despondent the day she died. Toxicological tests showed that a combination of Nembutal and chloral hydrate had proven fatal. The only thing that could never be known was whether, as on previous occasions, she expected to be saved. The one person who might have disclosed that was Marilyn, and she was dead. Still, in light of all the rumors, the coroner ordered a “psychological autopsy.” On the basis of the report, Dr. Curphey later ruled the death a “probable suicide.”
Meanwhile, there was confusion about who would claim the body. Marilyn’s sixty-two-year-old mother was her closest relative, but she was incompetent. At Rockhaven Sanitarium, Gladys appeared to have no reaction to her daughter’s death. Initially, Marilyn’s half-sister couldn’t be reached in Florida. Joe DiMaggio came from San Francisco as soon as he heard about Marilyn. He hadn’t seen her in two months, though they had often talked on the phone. He was prepared to make the funeral arrangements, but the coroner couldn’t release the body without a family member’s permission. Finally, Berniece, contacted by telegram, gave Joe the go-ahead. She flew to Los Angeles early on Monday morning.
On Wednesday, August 8, a small group of invited mourners entered the tiny Westwood Funeral Chapel. An organist played “Over The Rainbow,” among other selections. Marilyn, in a green Pucci dress and a platinum wig, lay in a velvet-lined, open bronze casket. George Solotaire and Joe DiMaggio, Jr., in his Marine dress uniform, were present. So were the Strasbergs and the Greensons. (Lee Strasberg and Marianne Kris had been left the bulk of the estate, with the stipulation that the psychiatrist use her inheritance to further her work.) Also in attendance were Marilyn’s housekeeper, makeup man, hair stylist, masseur, and driver. There were two of Marilyn’s attorneys, her half-sister, her publicist, her former secretary, and a few others—but no movie stars, no studio executives, and no press. Frank Sinatra and the Lawfords had been excluded. Arthur Miller chose not to attend. A tearful Lee Strasberg, voice quivering, delivered the eulogy. But the most poignant moment occurred as the coffin was about to be closed. Joe DiMaggio leaned over to kiss Marilyn.
“I love you, I love you, I love you,” Joe wept.
Something extraordinary happened after that. Joe’s life with Marilyn had been messy and embarrassing. He frequently lost his temper and did things he was later ashamed of. The dignity he prized had often eluded him. He never seemed to understand why the relationship failed to live up to his ideal. But in his impeccable behavior following Marilyn’s death, Joe finally recaptured some of the “deft serenity” he once knew on the baseball field. He was steadfast in never talking about her in public, yet he made it clear precisely how he felt. His silence, once a sign of awkwardness, became a form of grace.
The story that began when Arthur Miller and Elia Kazan arrived in Los Angeles to pitch The Hook came to an end on January 23, 1964. That evening, Miller’s long-awaited autobiographical play After the Fall had its premiere in New York. Directed by Kazan, the production marked the first time the two men had collaborated in thirteen years. The origin of the play itself also dated back to that earlier time. Miller had been writing about Marilyn in one way or another since 1951, when he fled Los Angeles having known her for only a few days. The moral crisis Marilyn provoked exploded in his thin brown notebooks. As early as 1952, Miller had discovered his own alter ego in Quentin, a tortured, unfaithful husband, torn between the claims of ecstasy and morality.
For more than a decade, Miller’s autobiographical work-in-progress proceeded in fit
s and starts. He worked at a cluttered desk in Brooklyn as children’s voices wafted in from other rooms. He worked in his study on East 57th Street, while Marilyn, at the other end of the apartment, strummed a ukelele and sang “I Wanna Be Loved By You.” He worked in a spartan one-room studio in Roxbury. But in all those years, Miller failed to bring his play to completion. Marilyn’s death changed all that. Miller seemed suddenly to know why he was writing and where the play must go.
On October 25, 1962, two months after Marilyn committed suicide, the Lincoln Center Repertory Theater announced that Miller’s new drama would be its inaugural production. From the first, there was a distinct air of scandal about the project. The news that Miller had agreed to work with Kazan, perhaps the most notorious of the informers, came as a shock to many people. The nightmare of McCarthyism was not yet so far in the past that people were willing to forget what Kazan had done. Too many careers had been wrecked, too many lives destroyed. In his decision to revive the collaboration, Miller seemed to confer a certain amount of his own moral authority on Kazan. It was said in Miller’s own family that were Mary still his wife, she would never have permitted him to reunite with Kazan. A number of Miller’s friends were baffled by his motives. Norman Rosten blamed ambition. In Rosten’s view, Miller, unsuccessful in recent years, was “looking for a replay of his past triumphs” with Kazan. Indeed, there could be no denying that Miller’s once brilliant career had faltered badly since he lost Kazan. In a sense, the production of After the Fall took both men back to 1951 as they set out to match the glory they had achieved together with Death of a Salesman.
It also took them back to the moment when the sexual triangle that had played such a vital role in Miller’s imagination began. When Miller and Kazan first encountered Marilyn, she had recently attempted suicide. In awe of Kazan, Marilyn dreamed that the great director might give her a role. At that point, it would have been inconceivable that the author of Death of a Salesman would even consider writing for her. More than a decade later, Marilyn had succeeded in killing herself, and the former husband and the former lover seized the opportunity to reignite their partnership with a play devoted, in large part, to the star’s sensational life and death. The package seemed to have all the ingredients of the triumph that had long eluded Miller. In speaking of his intimate life with Marilyn, the playwright would tell a story the public very much wanted to hear. And, of course, Miller had Kazan back. This time, no critic would lament the director’s absence as Eric Bentley had done in his review of The Crucible. It was all rather like Kazan’s fantasy of two men, recently enemies, happily going off together at the end of Baby Doll.
Marilyn Monroe Page 52