The Genius and the Goddess

by Jeffrey Meyers

  John Huston "was absolutely certain that Marilyn was doomed." He agreed with Miller that "she was incapable of rescuing herself or of being rescued by anyone else." In 1960 he correctly predicted, "she'll be dead or in an institution within three years." Huston also provided an incisive analysis of her character, her poor judgment and her talent as an actress: "People say Hollywood broke her heart but that is rubbish – she was observant and tough-minded and appealing but she adored all the wrong people and she was recklessly willful. . . . You couldn't get at her. She was tremendously pretentious (she'd done a lot of shit-arsed studying in New York) but she acted as if she never understood why she was funny and that was precisely what made her so funny. . . . In certain ways she was very shrewd. . . . If she was a victim, it was only of her own friends."12

  The end of The Misfits was also the end of Marilyn's marriage. She had left Dougherty and DiMaggio, but Miller left her. In their divorce proceedings of January 1961, echoing Miller on Mary Slattery and John Proctor on Elizabeth in The Crucible, Marilyn called him "cold and unresponsive." In late July 1961, soon after her gall bladder operation, Marilyn went to Roxbury for the last time to bring back some of Miller's possessions and pick up some things she'd left in the Connecticut home. She'd been recently reunited with her half-sister, Berniece, who reported that Miller was still extremely solicitous: "Arthur asks Marilyn question after question about her health; he's happy that she's well enough to be up and about, and says he wants her to feel truly well. 'How are you sleeping? Better? Are you taking pills?'"

  After his divorce from Marilyn in 1954, DiMaggio continued to see her, remained a close friend and helped her through her psychological crises. Their marriage had lasted less than a year, yet he remained emotionally involved with her to the end. Miller was married to her for five years, a longer connection than she'd had with anyone else, and had been in love with her since 1951. More deeply committed and more deeply hurt by the way she'd treated him, he broke completely with her to protect himself. Explaining their divorce, he said he'd endured as much as he could take and declared, "if I hadn't done this, I would be dead."13 Miller had acted honorably toward Marilyn, and had held her life, career and finances together. After her visit to Roxbury, he never saw her again.

  Sixteen

  Something's Got to Give

  (1961–1962)

  I

  George Cukor, who directed Marilyn's last, unfinished movie, said, "I think she was quite mad" and then added, "she adored and trusted the wrong people." Her closest and most trusted friends did the most damage. Sidney Skolsky and Milton Greene provided unlimited supplies of drugs. Elia Kazan got her pregnant, persuaded her to enter the Actors Studio and pushed her into analysis. Lee Strasberg made her self-conscious and destroyed her natural spontaneity as an actress. Without Miller's presence in her life, Marilyn depended more than ever on drugs and doctors to keep her afloat. She had been seeing her Hollywood analyst, Dr. Ralph Greenson, since June 1960, and consulted him constantly during the making of The Misfits and the break with Miller. But her years of psychoanalysis did little to relieve her anxieties, and his therapeutic methods actually hastened her tragic end.

  Greenson, born Romeo Greenschpoon in Brooklyn in 1911 and known as Romi, was the son of a doctor. (His twin sister, a concert pianist, had the matching name of Juliet.) After graduating from Columbia University, he earned his medical degree at the University of Berne in Switzerland, where he met his future wife, Hildi Troesch. He was analyzed – a sort of laying on of hands – by Freud's disciples Wilhelm Stekel and Otto Fenichel, and by Freud's personal physician, Max Schur; and he became a friend of Freud's daughter, the analyst Anna Freud. During the war, as a captain in the Army Air Force, Greenson ran a military hospital in Denver, Colorado. After the war, he practiced psychiatry in Los Angeles, became a professor at UCLA medical school, and attracted celebrity patients like Frank Sinatra, Peter Lorre and Janet Leigh. Greenson, with a dark complexion, graying hair, assertive nose and continental mustache, was dynamic, charismatic and sexually attractive, a great lecturer and an amusing raconteur. Anna Freud's biographer described him as "a hard-living man of passionate enthusiasm and even flamboyance, a man for whom psychoanalysis was . . . a way of life."

  Greenson would become famous for his textbook, The Technique and Practice of Psychoanalysis (1967), and his Hollywood clients, notorious for his unorthodox practice and dubious methods. Beginning in June 1960, when she was in Los Angeles, he saw Marilyn every day, sometimes in sessions that lasted as long as five hours, and in her home rather than in his office. He taped her sessions and (setting himself up as the ideal of normal life) invited her into his own home. He encouraged her to become part of his family by eating meals with them and by sleeping overnight in their guest room. Marilyn even modeled her new Spanish-style house on his residence. Greenson's use of "adoption therapy" appealed to Marilyn's deep-rooted need for a surrogate family, and continued her previous attachment to warm and welcoming Jewish clans: the Strasbergs, Greenes, Millers and Rostens.

  In his lecture on "Drugs in the Psychotherapeutic Situation" (1964), Greenson contradicted a fundamental principle of psychoanalysis and medical ethics: the doctor's duty to maintain a professional distance between himself and the patient. Instead, he argued, psychiatrists "must be willing to become emotionally involved with their patients if they hope to establish a reliable therapeutic relationship." He explained his method – or narcissistic intrusion – in a letter to a colleague, which advocated rather than discouraged transference: the transfer of feelings about a parent to an analyst:"All of our patients come to us with varying degrees of mistrust and anxieties; they have to overcome their mistrust and we must help them (a) by interpreting the neurotic distortions from his past which he repeats with us in the transference reaction; (b) we try to become and remain reliable human beings whom he can trust . . . by being whole persons who also have emotions and frailties."1

  Marilyn spent her short life trying to find her real self. But this real self may have vanished or been better left in obscurity. Her analysts believed that Marilyn could overcome her problems by confronting her memories, facing her resentments and understanding her past. Yet repression, in her case, would have been more helpful than revelation. During her years with Greenson, as with Hohenberg and Kris, while her mental health continued to decline, she discussed the fear and insecurity that came from the insanity in her family, abandonment by her parents, sexual abuse, forced early marriage, prostitution, promiscuity, abortions, and exploitation by almost everyone who knew her.

  Marilyn craved a strong man in her life (though no husband was strong enough), and put her complete trust in Greenson. But, like Strasberg, he took advantage of his professional position to dominate every aspect of her life. After ferreting out her most intimate secrets, Greenson used them to prey on her weakness and exploit her childlike dependence, to enhance his reputation and increase his income. In Greenson she finally found someone whose ego was even bigger than her own. The doctor, in this case, was more disturbed and dangerous than the patient.

  Greenson, sure that his treatment should be paramount, sought complete control over Marilyn's life. He forced her to break with her masseur, driver and confidant, Ralph Roberts, and banish him to New York. "He had tried to get rid of almost everyone in her life," Roberts ruefully said, "and she didn't have that many people to begin with." Greenson then filled the void with his own cadre. His brother-in-law Mickey Rudin became Marilyn's lawyer; his friend Harvey Weinstein became the producer of her next film – with Greenson as paid adviser; his colleague Hyman Engelberg became her internist. "You're both narcissists," Greenson told her, "and I think you'll get along fine together."

  Greenson also introduced a spy into Marilyn's household. Eunice Murray – under the guise of housekeeper, companion and nurse – told Greenson almost everything Marilyn said and did. Murray, who never finished high school and had no medical qualifications, made a terrible impression on Marilyn's loyal ent
ourage. Her make-up man Whitey Snyder called Murray "a very strange lady. . . . She was always whispering – whispering and listening. She was this constant presence, reporting everything back to Greenson, and Marilyn quickly realized this." Her publicist Pat Newcomb agreed: "I did not trust Eunice Murray, who seemed to be always snooping around. . . . I just didn't like her. She was sort of a spook, always hovering, always on the fringes of things." Her hairdresser George Masters confirmed, "She was . . . a very weird woman, like a witch. Terrifying, I remember thinking. She was terrifically jealous of Marilyn, separating her from her friends – just a divisive person."2

  It's quite astonishing that an egoist like Greenson, who behaved in this outrageous manner, could achieve such eminence in his profession. Not surprisingly, Greenson himself admitted, "I had become a prisoner of a form of treatment that I thought was correct for her, but almost impossible for me. At times I felt I couldn't go on with this." Miller, who'd also been analyzed, condemned the whole process. He believed that analysis had made Marilyn "conscious of how unhappy she was, [and] she was unhappy nearly all her life. . . . She tried to be real, to face enemies as enemies, and it simply tore her to pieces. . . . Psychiatrists can't help most of the people who go to them. A case could be made for Whitey Snyder's opinion that they did Marilyn harm. Her life began to fall apart. You could see her analysis was a failure because she died."3

  II

  On February 7, 1961 – eight months after she began to see Greenson and only a few weeks after her Mexican divorce from Miller on January 20 – Marilyn, all alone in the world, had the worst moment of her life. In New York for the disappointing premiere of The Misfits, she fell into a deep depression and had another mental breakdown. Terrified that she would lose her reason, like her mother, and lapse into permanent darkness, she tried to kill herself. Dr. Kris committed her to the Payne Whitney Hospital (on East 68 Street, near the East River) without telling her that it was a locked-ward psychiatric clinic. When the full horror of her situation sank in, Marilyn naturally felt betrayed by her doctor.

  Though Marilyn checked in under the name of Faye Miller (a name curiously close to Nathanael West's hysterical Faye Greener), everyone in the hospital knew who she was. Describing the horrific conditions to several friends, she told Susan Strasberg that she was still performing in a new role: "It's crazy, isn't it? I can't even have a nervous breakdown in private; everybody wants to be there, like it's a show. I ought to charge." Jane Russell recalled, "The attendants, the whole damn hospital staff would come and peer into the glass in her door, staring at her like she was some kind of strange bug in a cage." In a traditional sanctuary, where it was absolutely essential to have peace and security, her privacy was invaded and she was put on display. She was put in the ninth-floor security ward, her clothes were taken away, her room was locked on the outside and it was almost impossible to make phone calls. Though frightened by her forced confinement, she took strange comfort from the most extreme cases and told friends, "There were screaming women in their cells. . . . Those people were really nuts. I knew I wasn't that crazy."4

  Three well-known women novelists, also graduates of Payne Whitney, left vivid accounts of their confinement that illuminate Marilyn's experience. In June 1938, after a mental breakdown and physical fight with her husband Edmund Wilson, Mary McCarthy was placed in the psychiatric hospital without being told where she was going. She was led into a small, cell-like room, searched and stripped. Left alone in the dark cubicle, she listened to the clicking sound as the staff opened and closed the wooden shutter of the tiny window to spy on her.

  Jean Stafford, then married to the manic-depressive poet Robert Lowell, voluntarily entered the hospital in November 1946. But she felt frightened and humiliated at being institutionalized (a nurse watched her while she bathed), and thought the clinic was more like a prison than a sanctuary. Stafford, too, was frightened by the screams of the more violent inmates:

  I knew the doors would be locked and that they would take everything away from me . . . that I could not get out once I had signed myself in, that the pain of the analysis was going to be excruciating. That first night, I lay perfectly motionless in my bed, fighting off terror by repeating . . . "I must resign myself." I could hear the really disordered patients on the floor above screaming, beating their heads on the floor.

  Carson McCullers, whom Marilyn had met in New York and saw throughout the 1950s, spent three weeks in Payne Whitney in March 1948. She'd also been deliberately misled, and felt betrayed, vulnerable and ashamed. Her biographer wrote:

  Never before had she felt such utter helplessness and abandonment. Perhaps worst of all, she acknowledged, was the feeling that her mother had used trickery in effecting her confinement. Nothing seemed more devastating to her than that. Encapsulated, it seemed, in a vacuum, unable to try to help herself or to read or write undisturbed, allowed no veil of privacy, she felt stripped bare, defenseless, exposed to the marrow.5

  Marilyn's letters about her experiences in Payne Whitney were introspective, articulate and incisive. In a letter to the Strasbergs, close to her in New York, she said the clinic itself was driving her mad and pleaded for help:

  Dr. Kris put me in the hospital under the care of two idiot doctors. They both should not be my doctors. I'm locked up with these poor nutty people. I'm sure to end up a nut too if I stay in this nightmare. Please help me. This is the last place I should be. I love you both. Marilyn.

  P.S. I'm on the dangerous floor. It's like a cell. They had my bathroom door locked and I couldn't get the key to get into it, so I broke the glass. But outside of that I haven't done anything that is un-cooperative.

  Committed by Dr. Kris in New York, she turned for sympathy to Dr. Greenson in Los Angeles. After her release, she described her incarceration as if she were a character in a novel by Franz Kafka – or the only actual Marilyn Monroe in captivity:

  There was no empathy at Payne Whitney – it had a very bad effect on me. They put me in a cell (I mean cement blocks and all) for very disturbed, depressed patients, except I felt I was in some kind of prison for a crime I hadn't committed. The inhumanity there I found archaic. They asked me why I wasn't happy there (everything was under lock and key, things like electric lights, dresser drawers, bathrooms, closets, bars concealed on the windows – and the doors have windows so the patients can be visible all the time. Also, the violence and markings still remain on the walls from former patients). I answered, "Well, I'd have to be nuts if I like it here!"

  To protest her helplessness and draw attention to her plight, Marilyn resorted to threats and violence, and gave Greenson a different explanation of why she broke the glass in the bathroom door. She behaved in the madhouse as if she were a psychopath in a movie. Her role as psychopath was, in fact, just as real to her as her experience as a patient:

  I got the idea from a movie I once made called Don't Bother to Knock. I picked up a light-weight chair and slammed it against the glass, intentionally – and it was hard to do because I had never broken anything in my life. It took a lot of banging to get even a small piece of glass, so I went over with the glass concealed in my hand and sat quietly on the bed waiting for them to come in. They did, and I said to them, "If you are going to treat me like a nut, I'll act like a nut." I admit the next thing is corny, but I really did it in the movie except it was with a razor blade. I indicated if they didn't let me out I would harm myself – the farthest thing from my mind at the moment, since you know, Dr. Greenson, I'm an actress and would never intentionally mark or mar myself. I'm just that vain.

  In her long, sad and brave letter to Greenson, Marilyn also described how she sought but failed to find some consolation in nature. Unconsciously alluding to her doctor, she contrasted the "promise" and "hope" of the green grass, bushes and trees, as they lay under a shroud of snow and bare branches. Suspended in an unreal state, she lost track of the time, and ended with bitter tears and troubled insomnia:

  Just now when I looked out the hospital win
dow where the snow had covered everything, suddenly everything is kind of a muted green. There are grass and shabby evergreen bushes, though the trees give me a little hope – and the desolate bare branches promise maybe there will be spring and maybe they promise hope. . . .

  As I started to write this letter about four quiet tears had fallen. I don't know quite why.

  Last night I was awake all night again. Sometimes I wonder what the night time is for. It almost doesn't exist for me.6

  Marilyn's letter to Jack Cardiff was the most revealing of all. Exploring her deepest fear about the very core of her identity – whether she was really mad – she mentioned the history of insanity in her family, and repeated that her harsh confinement might actually drive her crazy: "I was afraid – I still am. . . . There's my mother – paranoid schizophrenia . . . and her family – all destroyed by the same thing – insanity. Was I a nut, after all? There I was, in a cell like I was mad. . . . I was hysterical – who wouldn't be? And they were going to put me in a straitjacket. I knew that if I stayed there for long, I really would be mad." Dr. Kris later confessed, "I did a terrible, terrible thing. Oh God, I didn't mean to, but I did." But Marilyn was the one who suffered for her doctor's mistake.

  After four days in Payne Whitney, Marilyn was finally rescued by Joe DiMaggio, who'd come back into her life after her divorce from Miller. Storming the citadel with his intimidating physical presence and barely restraining his fury, he threatened the hospital authorities by shouting, "I want my wife. . . . And if you do not release her to me, I will take this place apart – piece of wood, by piece . . . of . . . wood."7 This was a long speech for the laconic athlete, who meant what he said. The administrators, afraid of provoking a violent confrontation that would attract a storm of unfavorable publicity, agreed to his demands – though Marilyn was not, of course, his wife. She was transferred to the Neurological Institute of Columbia University Presbyterian Hospital, on West 168th Street in Morningside Heights, and recovered there from February 11 to March 5.