The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  Elizabeth Taylor, who happened to be standing right next to the reporter, observed the entire scene. Afterward, she turned to the photojournalist and said, “Marilyn shouldn’t drink if she can’t hold her liquor. Now, me,” she added, sounding confident, “I know how to hold my liquor.” With that, Elizabeth flashed her famous violet eyes and threw back a martini. However, when she saw that the reporter had written her comment on his notepad, she grabbed the pad out of his hand, smacked him playfully on the back of the head with it, and said, “Now, that was strictly off the record, buster.”

  A Reunion with Berniece

  At the end of June 1961, Marilyn was diagnosed with gallstones and an inflamed gallbladder. There seemed no end to the physical and emotional crises she was facing at this time. The operation on June 29 was successful. Joe DiMaggio was at her bedside when she awakened, looking down at her with devotion. It was decided that her half sister, Berniece, would come to New York and be present for Marilyn’s recovery. Joe wasn’t particularly happy about it, though. Marilyn would later learn that he was very suspicious of Berniece and her husband. “What if they want money from you?” he asked Marilyn. “I think that’s what’s going on here.” His suspicion was shared by Marilyn’s secretary, May Reis, who was now back on the job with Marilyn. Marilyn couldn’t believe Joe would think such a thing about Berniece. “I’ve known her a lot longer than you,” she told him angrily. “And besides, if she did want my money, she can have it. What am I going to do with it when I’m gone?”

  Despite Joe’s ambivalence about Berniece, Marilyn seemed almost desperate to reconnect with her after her gallbladder operation. Therefore, as soon as Marilyn was released from the hospital, Berniece flew to New York from Florida and checked into the Park Sheraton Hotel, where she was to await a phone call from May. When told the coast was clear of reporters, Berniece was to take a cab to Marilyn’s apartment on East 57th Street. Berniece’s husband had been against the visit. He was always very strange when it came to the subject of Marilyn. He wanted to be around her as much as possible—thus his recent trip to see her behind his wife’s back—but didn’t seem to want Berniece to have time with her. For his part, Joe was also unhappy about the sisterly plans—for his own reasons, having to do with Marilyn’s money, but also because he was afraid that Berniece might go to the press with details about his and Marilyn’s life together. Berniece knew better, of course. Still, it had to bother her that, after all of this time, Marilyn kept reminding her not to talk to the press. It didn’t escape Berniece that Marilyn still concluded every telephone conversation with that very warning.

  When Berniece arrived at Marilyn’s thirteenth-floor apartment, she was greeted by May Reis. May could not have been more chilly. However, it would seem that Berniece took her aloof attitude to be professional rather than rude. When Marilyn appeared, the reunion was noisy and exciting. “I can’t believe you’re finally here,” Marilyn squealed. “Finally! We’re together again!” After embracing, they stood back and took a long look at each other. They’d known each other since they were young women. Now Marilyn was thirty-five and Berniece forty-one. However, both agreed that they’d only gotten better with age, even though Marilyn was clearly weak from the surgery and not at all well. She was wearing a cream-colored summer dress and high-heeled sandals. She’d had her hair styled before leaving the hospital because she knew she’d be photographed on her way out and wanted to look her best. So when she saw her half sister, she looked very put together.

  Marilyn’s life was anything but ordinary, and Berniece must have gleaned as much when she learned that the first order of business every day for Marilyn’s maid, Lena Pepitone, was to hand wash the beige lace bra Marilyn had worn the previous day. When recalling this visit, Pepitone had an interesting observation about Berniece—whom she described as being “blonde, even blonder naturally than Marilyn… slightly shorter and thinner, yet her figure was definitely on the voluptuous side”:

  “In a way, Berniece seemed far shyer than Marilyn, who was now in an outgoing phase. All the hustle and glitter of Manhattan seemed to scare Berniece. She seemed in a daze, caused by New York as well as Marilyn.… Yet the way Marilyn sat at attention holding Berniece’s hand and listening to every detail about where Berniece shopped in Florida, what she cooked, how she ran her home, and raised her sons [Note: Berniece did not have sons, just a daughter] made me think that Marilyn could easily be tempted to trade in all her fame and become a housewife, too.”

  After just a few days with her, Berniece was concerned about all of the drugs Marilyn was taking. People who were around her all the time had grown accustomed to the constant pill-taking, which usually resulted in unsure footing about an hour or so later. She was never quite coherent. She always seemed a little… off. Marilyn’s friends and daily associates were used to this troubling demeanor, but newcomers were always stunned by it.

  Every night, Marilyn’s doctor would come by the house to check on her. This, too, was odd. Every night? Was that really necessary? During each visit, Marilyn would fix him a stiff drink, which he enjoyed—again, odd. Then he would begin to dispense all sorts of pills to Marilyn in what could only be considered “generous” quantities. Sometimes he would give her an injection of who-knows-what, but she definitely enjoyed its effect on her. Berniece seized the opportunity, while the doctor was present, to ask him about the pills. “Truly, does she need all of these sleeping pills?” Berniece asked him. “This is extreme, don’t you think?” The doctor didn’t have time to answer before Marilyn glanced at her sharply. “Yes, I do need these pills,” she said, her temper quickly rising. “I need my sleep. So, the answer is yes, Berniece. That’s the answer. Yes.” There was an awkward silence. After a moment, the doctor continued with his offering of different pharmaceuticals without missing a beat.

  Berniece also took note of Marilyn’s relationship with Joe DiMaggio. He was clearly still in love with her. However, Marilyn seemed unsure of her feelings for him. Perhaps the best indicator of how she felt was that she was planning a trip to California in less than a month and told Berniece that she was going to stay with Frank Sinatra. She made Berniece promise not to mention the trip to Joe. She intended to go, she said, and just not tell him. How she was going to manage that, considering that he was with her every single day, was a mystery to Berniece. According to Lena Pepitone, Sinatra would call Marilyn often and she would speak to him, not at all concerned that Joe might walk into the room at any moment. When it came to Sinatra, she was determined to do whatever she liked.

  Also, Berniece couldn’t help but notice how paranoid Marilyn had become. For instance, at one point in the visit, an Italian restaurant that had just opened in the neighborhood sent over a complimentary meal to Marilyn. Marilyn told Lena to throw the food away. She didn’t even want it in the household. Berniece assumed that Marilyn didn’t want the food because she was watching her weight, or maybe because she’d been told that she shouldn’t eat spicy foods after her surgery. Either would have been an acceptable reason. However, Marilyn’s reasoning was more troubling. “It could be poisoned,” she told Berniece, very seriously. “I never eat anything that’s been prepared by strangers.”

  Indeed, in about a month, when Marilyn was back in Los Angeles under the care of Dr. Greenson, he would write to a colleague that in her sessions with him she expressed a “feeling of mistreatment, which had paranoid undertones.”

  Other friends of Marilyn felt that her paranoia, especially about food, was out of control. “Once, during a late night at the office, we sent out for Chinese food,” said Diane Stevens from John Springer’s office. “Marilyn and Joe were there. When the food came, Marilyn refused to eat it. She and Joe got into a big fight about it. ‘If it was poisoned, I’d be dead now because I just ate some,’ Joe told her. ‘So, what the hell is going on with you?’ Marilyn looked at him very seriously and said, ‘I’m the one they want to poison, Joe. Not you.’ We all sat there with our mouths open, trying to figure out how to res
pond. ‘But it’s all the same food,’ John finally said. Marilyn was not going to bend, though. ‘Enjoy it. See if I care,’ she said. ‘But I’m not taking a chance.’ It made me think of Gladys, I have to admit. I mean, that’s the first thing that came to my mind—Gladys believing that the doctors in her mental hospital were poisoning her food.” *

  Greenson’s Diagnosis

  Dr. Ralph Greenson is not a popular figure in Marilyn Monroe history. Born Romeo Samuel Greenschpoon in 1910 in Brooklyn, he was one of fraternal twins—his sister was named Juliet. He studied medicine in Switzerland before practicing as a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in Los Angeles. He was the president of the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society and Institute (LAPSI) from 1951 to 1953 and dean of education from 1957 to 1961. He was also clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA Medical School. In his paper “Unfree Associations: Inside Psychoanalytical Institutes,” Douglas Kirsner writes of Greenson:

  “The author of a classic clinical textbook, The Technique and Practice of Psychoanalysis (1967), and over sixty papers and articles, Dr. Greenson was unusual in moving outside the ambit of his analytic colleagues to give many public lectures. His psychoanalytic interests were wide-ranging. He was most concerned that analysts with different theoretical approaches seemed to talk at each other.… Upon graduating as an analyst, Greenson quickly became a major influence in the Los Angeles psychoanalytic scene. He soon became an important figure nationally and later internationally… he wielded a good deal of power and influence within LAPSI. [Greenson] was nationally and internationally well known not only for his numerous psychoanalytic writings but also for his real flair for lecturing and teaching. His institute seminars were especially highly regarded at LAPSI. Hilda Rollman-Branch [a director of LAPSI] felt that although Greenson was ‘a character’ and ‘narcissistic,’ his tactlessness could be forgiven because of ‘his enthusiasm and inspiration. He was without a doubt the best teacher of psychoanalysis any of us have ever had.’ Greenson was a passionate man with strongly held views. Three analysts each reported to me that after a disagreement Greenson did not speak to them for years. He was given to irrational fits of anger. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Anna Freud’s biographer, aptly described Greenson as ‘a hard-living man of passionate enthusiasm and even flamboyance, a man for whom psychoanalysis was… a way of life.’ ”

  Despite his credentials and reputation, Dr. Ralph Greenson has been much maligned in books about Marilyn over the years, and for many reasons, some of which are valid. Most of Marilyn’s friends and associates agree that Dr. Greenson exerted far too much control over her life and career. As these people began to give interviews for biographies of the star, Greenson’s reputation as a psychological Svengali became set in stone. He has practically been blamed for his patient’s mental disturbances, as if there was no chance she might have been genetically predisposed to such problems.

  What has not been clearly stated in the past is that Dr. Ralph Greenson had very specific opinions about Marilyn’s mental problems. At first, he had described her in a letter to Anna Freud as a “borderline paranoid addictive personality.” He wrote in his letter that Marilyn exhibited “classic signs of the paranoid addict,” including a fear of abandonment and also a tendency to rely on others too heavily (Natasha Lytess and Paula Strasberg) to the point where she refuses to allow these people to live their own lives. Also, those suffering from this disease are prone to wanting to commit suicide. It was very difficult to treat such problems in patients, let alone someone as famous as Marilyn. He also said he was working behind the scenes to get her off of some of the drugs she was taking, but that it was an uphill battle. “Short of searching her person every day, it is impossible to know what she is taking and when,” he wrote in a different letter to Freud. “I’m not sure how to monitor someone like her. She’s very crafty.” Indeed, when a person would turn his back, she would pop a pill just that fast.

  Dr. Hyman Engelberg added to Greenson’s diagnosis in an interview in 1996. He stated that he and Greenson had also diagnosed Marilyn as having been manic-depressive. “It is now known as bipolar personality,” he said, “but I think manic depressive is much more descriptive. Yes, she was definitely manic depressive. That’s just one of the many things we were up against.”

  Apparently, there was more. After Dr. Greenson began to treat Marilyn more intensively, he started telling colleagues that she’d begun to exhibit strong and growing signs of borderline paranoid schizophrenia, just like her mother and, possibly, her grandmother before her. Three psychiatrists interviewed for this book, who requested anonymity since all are still treating patients in Los Angeles, say that when they were younger and studying in the city Greenson shared with them (on separate occasions) his concern about borderline paranoid schizophrenia in the case of Marilyn Monroe. “He was very specific,” said one of the doctors. “He was concerned, very much so. He felt it would get worse as she got older unless it was treated in a specific way. He also said that Marilyn knew and that she was looking into ways to treat it herself, and that he was trying to discourage that. He didn’t want her out there medicating herself, but he suspected that this is what was going on behind his back.”

  It’s not known if Dr. Greenson shared his views of her different problems with Marilyn. In notes regarding her case, he is specific about being careful to give her information “only in small portions.” He wrote that, in his view, telling her “too much, too soon” could only lead to “other more significant problems.”

  What also comes from fresh research for this book is Marilyn’s determination to get the drug Thorazine, which was used to treat paranoid schizophrenia. “Dr. Greenson had prescribed it to her,” said one of the psychiatrists. “I know for a fact that he did because he told me that he had. However, he wasn’t sure he liked her reaction to it. For some reason, he changed his mind about Thorazine. He said, however, that she wanted more than he wanted to give her and that he was afraid she was going about the business of getting it from other doctors. A major frustration for him was that he knew he was not the only one giving her drugs. She was such an expert doctor shopper toward the last couple years of her life, there was no way to be sure what she was taking, what she was mixing.”

  According to what Dr. Greenson would later remember in his papers stored at UCLA, he had insisted that Marilyn “get rid of her unhealthy connection to the past.” Her half sister, Berniece, her business manager, Inez Melson, and many others were convinced that therapy—not her mental state—was ruining Marilyn Monroe. In a letter to Greenson, Melson wrote that she was concerned about Marilyn spending “too much time thinking about her problems.” She added that she didn’t see how it was doing Marilyn any good and, in fact, “I think quite the contrary. It is not my place to tell you how to treat your patient,” she wrote, “but, truly, I am concerned that she is languishing in her misery.”

  Part of Marilyn Monroe’s sickness had to do with her paranoia. However, complicating things was that, in many ways, she had actually good reason to be paranoid. As we’ve seen, she was being followed and she was well aware of it. Consider this story, from Diana Herbert, daughter of the man who wrote Scudda-Hoo! Scudda-Hay! She and Marilyn stayed in touch over the years, and she encountered Marilyn in New York during this period. “I was coming up out of the subway and there she was,” recalled Herbert. “Dressed very casually, she was stunning, in a coral beige ensemble. She looked a little lost, but she perked up when she recognized it was me. We went to a little health food sidewalk cafe in Midtown. She spoke about how much she loved New York and the Actors Studio, but she told me something bizarre. She said, ‘I’m so uncomfortable here in New York because I am being followed.’ I said, ‘Well, Marilyn, that’s because you are a star, you are beautiful, of course people are following you.’ She said, ‘No, that’s not it.’ Her voice became lower, whispering, ‘I’m being followed by the FBI.’ I thought, ‘Well, she’s totally flipping out!’ Marilyn said, ‘I’m being followed because of my connecti
ons with the Communist Party.’ She told me she was very proud of herself because she became adept at losing the FBI agents. She said she started figuring out how to evade them when she became a movie actress and learned how to ‘become invisible.’ ”

  While the FBI’s episodes of surveying Monroe did happen, there were also times when she was not under their watch yet still concerned about a plot to know her every move—and at times, she believed, her every thought. Maureen Stapleton was a contemporary of Marilyn’s at the Actors Studio. In an interview in 1995, Stapleton recalled that while she was dining with Monroe one evening, an odd thing happened. “[Marilyn] thought the waiter was reading her mind. At first, she said he was a secret agent or something, she said, ‘He’s one of the bad guys,’ and then she said, ‘He knows what I’m thinking now, we have to leave.’ Now, you have to keep in mind we were all [New York actors] a little loopy back then—but that was particularly strange.”

  Others in Marilyn Monroe’s life at the time were more categorical. “I think Marilyn was a very sick woman, a classic schizophrenic,” said Johnny Strasberg, son of Lee and Paula. “She was dedicated to love. It’s a thing schizophrenics talk about, love. They’ll do anything for love and, additionally, they are totally infantile; they have no ego, no boundaries, as the rest of us have. The amazing thing about her is that she survived as long as she did. There was enough capacity for life that had she been lucky enough to find a therapist who could treat her problems, she might have… That’s the tragedy. People loved her. But nobody could say no to her. No one would or could take responsibility for her. They had to cut her off or abandon her, which is the thing she expected. With Marilyn, you’re dealing with an abandoned infant who’s not an infant anymore.”