A Second Opinion
Fresh research now establishes that Dr. Ralph Greenson was not alone in his belief that Marilyn Monroe was probably suffering from borderline paranoid schizophrenia. Rather than work in a vacuum, Dr. Greenson obtained a second opinion by consulting psychologist Dr. Milton Wexler.
Born in San Francisco in 1908, Dr. Wexler trained as a lawyer before switching to psychology. After taking a doctorate at Columbia University, studying under Theodor Reik, a disciple of Freud, he became one of the country’s first nonphysicians to set up in practice as a psychoanalyst. Also a member of the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society, Dr. Wexler would go on to become a pioneer in the study and treatment of Huntington’s disease, forming the Hereditary Disease Foundation. Wexler also felt strongly that Marilyn Monroe suffered at least from borderline paranoid schizophrenia after sitting in on three sessions with her in Dr. Greenson’s home. “Yes, I treated her,” he said in 1999. “I won’t discuss that treatment but will say that I agreed with Dr. Greenson that she presented borderline symptoms of the disease that had run in her family. I found her to be very proactive in wanting to treat those borderline symptoms, as well. One misconception about her treatment is that it was Dr. Greenson’s idea that she move in with his family. She never moved in with the Greensons. Instead, it was my suggestion that she spend as much time there as possible in order to create the environment that she lacked as a child. That was my theory at the time and Dr. Greenson agreed. Also, I felt it would alleviate her separation anxiety if she knew she had a place to return to.”
All of these many years later, to ignore the findings of these two doctors or act as if those findings did not exist makes no sense. It’s certainly not what Marilyn Monroe did over the years. In the year and a half after Greenson’s and Wexler’s diagnosis, Marilyn did everything she could to perform beyond her illness. She always had. She’d always soldiered on, even knowing that something wasn’t quite right with her.
Dr. Greenson’s different opinions of what Marilyn was dealing with in her life have been, it would seem, purposely overlooked in Marilyn Monroe history for many years. Some biographers have written that his findings were egregiously misguided and couldn’t possibly have been true. As one put it, “[Greenson] even spread lies about his patient to the professional community, including the unsubstantiated report that she was borderline paranoid schizophrenic.” It would seem, though, that if a psychiatrist treats a patient—in Monroe’s case, just about every day of the week—and comes to a conclusion about that person’s state of mind, it is not an “unsubstantiated report.” It’s a diagnosis.
Unfortunately, Dr. Greenson would become so zealous in his treatment of Marilyn, and thus so overbearing in her life, that he would lose credibility, especially with the passing of the years. Historically, he seems like a quack because he invited Marilyn into his home, had her sleep over, integrated her into his family. It was felt that he had lost all perspective where Marilyn was concerned. However, in the 1950s and 1960s, all sorts of vanguard treatments for mental illness were being tested. In fact, in Greenson’s opinion, welcoming Marilyn into his home was the only alternative to putting her in a mental hospital. In his notes about the case, he is specific that he was trying to figure out any way he could to keep her from being “committed once again, for I know she will not survive it a second time.” Douglas Kirsner confirms, “Greenson decided to offer his family as a substitute for the family Monroe never had because she would have killed herself sooner if he had committed her to a mental hospital.”
Marilyn’s Drugs of Choice
By late August of 1961, Marilyn Monroe was back in Los Angeles permanently and living in her apartment on Doheny and Cynthia in West Hollywood. There was also word that she would be making a new film for Fox called Something’s Got to Give. She wasn’t thrilled with the script, felt it needed a lot of work, and wasn’t even sure it could ever result in a decent movie. Still, she was contractually obligated to do one more film for Fox, and this would have to be it.
In September, Marilyn joined Frank Sinatra in entertaining guests on his yacht for a four-day cruise to Catalina Island. “They were definitely a couple,” said one of the partygoers. “She was acting as if she was the hostess, not a guest. She seemed in good spirits, but definitely not quite right. I had heard that there’d been some trouble getting her there. Everyone knew she was not well, that she was under the care of doctors.”
At this time, Marilyn’s primary physician working with Dr. Greenson was Dr. Hyman Engelberg. However, Marilyn had become so adept at the art of “doctor shopping” that the two doctors were unable to keep track of the medications in her system. When she would demand confidentiality from another doctor, she would always get it because of her celebrity. She would then stock up on as much medication as she could from him before that doctor would refuse her any more. Then she would simply “shop” for a different doctor. Greenson and Engelberg did attempt to control Marilyn’s doctor-shopping habit, though perhaps not in the best possible way. “The idea was that she was never to be said no to when she wanted a prescription,” said Hildy Greenson, Dr. Ralph Greenson’s wife, “because the only thing that would happen was she would procure medication elsewhere and not inform her primary physicians about it. So whenever she asked for a drug she would usually get it.” That “idea” apparently did not work. The list of drugs she was taking by the end of 1961 was staggering.
After Greenson’s and Wexler’s diagnosis of Marilyn Monroe as suffering from BPS, she began taking the barbiturate Thorazine. At the time, Thorazine was a new drug, developed in the 1950s to treat the disease. When she would take it, however, she would gain weight, and therefore she didn’t like it. As soon as she was off the medication, she would lose weight quickly. However, she would also lose her grip. Historically, whenever she looked her best—as in her last film, Something’s Got to Give—it was because she was not on Thorazine. Certainly the problems she would later have on the set of that movie suggested that she was off her meds.
Marilyn was also taking the narcotic analgesic Demerol as well as the barbiturates phenobarbital HMC and Amytal, along with large quantities of Nembutal. Of course, she had been taking Nembutal to sleep for many years, and truly it had become an addiction. Dr. Engelberg insists that the most he and Dr. Greenson gave her was twenty-four Nembutal at a time. However, Marilyn went through the drug like candy, so she must have been getting it elsewhere.
Marilyn was also taking Seconal, and no one knew where she got that drug from either. Moreover, she was taking chloral hydrate to sleep, and Dr. Engelberg emphatically states that he never prescribed it to her, nor did Dr. Greenson. In fact, Engelberg would say that he was amazed at the number of drugs found in her system when she died—including the aforementioned chloral hydrate, which he now presumes she bought when she was in Mexico just before her death. There were fifteen bottles of pills on Marilyn’s night table when she died.
Though Engelberg consulted Greenson on all of the sleep medications he prescribed to Marilyn, he didn’t on other drugs. If she got an infection, for instance, and needed an antibiotic, Engelberg would not pass it by Greenson for approval. Also, Marilyn very often received injections of vitamins to boost her resistance to colds and sinus infections—a recurring problem for her. Often she would receive such injections a few times a week. By the end of 1961, though, Marilyn had developed the alarming habit of giving herself injections. Many people witnessed that she had syringes with her and bottles that had been premixed—by whom, no one knows. A source who was very close to the actress recalls that the concoction was of phenobarbital, Nembutal, and Seconal. “Marilyn referred to it as ‘a vitamin shot,’ ” said the source. “I think I know who gave her this combination of drugs, but I’d rather not say because I am not one hundred percent certain. I can tell you that after she would give herself this injection, she would be gone—no longer able to function.”
Indeed, Jeanne Martin recalled that prior to their leaving Frank�
��s home for the cruise that August 1961, Frank asked her to help get Marilyn dressed. She was too disoriented from all of the medication she was taking to do so herself. “I had to pick out each item of clothing and practically dress her,” Jeanne recalled. “I kept asking her, ‘Marilyn, are you all right? Because you don’t look good to me.’ She would just sort of look at me with her eyes half-closed and say, ‘Oh, I am just fine. I couldn’t be better.’ I was worried. I remember thinking, who is giving her all of these drugs? What kind of doctor would keep her in this kind of state? She was really, shall we say, glazed.”
During the weekend, Marilyn drank plenty of champagne every night, as always. The more she drank, the more disoriented and even boisterous she became. “It was such a sad sight,” Jeanne Martin recalled. “I didn’t take my eyes off her for a second because I was afraid she would slip and fall. You can’t know how difficult this was unless you knew Marilyn and what a lovely woman she was, how nice she was to everyone. You wanted her to be all right, but on this day during this party, it struck me that she was not all right. Not at all.”
Gloria Romanoff, also a guest for the weekend, recalled, “She was very unwell that weekend. Sleeping pills were her downfall, I’m afraid. The poor girl simply couldn’t even take a nap without them, she was so addicted. She didn’t even need water or anything to wash them down. She could just take a handful of pills and swallow them, dry. Then, of course, all of the alcohol just made things worse.”
As the afternoon wore on, Frank became frustrated and embarrassed by Marilyn’s behavior. One of his former associates recalled, “To tell you the truth, Frank couldn’t wait to get her off that boat. She was embarrassing him. He told me, ‘I swear to Christ, I am ready to throw her right off this goddamn boat.’ Instead, he called one of his assistants at the end of the trip, when they were ashore, and had her taken back to his place. He told me later that when he got home, she was sound asleep on the couch. He picked her up, he said, and moved her to the bedroom. He undressed her and put her under the covers where she slept soundly through the night. He was worried about her.”
When that same associate asked Frank Sinatra if he was going to stop seeing Marilyn Monroe, he said, “By now I would have cut any other dame loose. But this one—I just can’t do it.” *
What’s most interesting—and telling—about this time is that despite the unhappiness she felt, the photos Marilyn took during this period for publicity purposes, especially those by Douglas Kirkland, are perhaps the best of her career. Kirkland, who shot her in November 1961, described her as “amazingly pleasant and playful, like a sister, and not at all intimidating as I had imagined her to be. She sat beside me, laughed easily and made small talk, putting me at ease. I was young and did not know how to ask her to pose for the sexy images I hoped to get, but she simplified it all by suggesting, ‘I should get into bed with nothing on but white silk.’ We discussed the details and Marilyn said she wanted Frank Sinatra music and chilled Dom Perignon.” She never looked lovelier than she does in Kirkland’s photographs. (It should be stated, though, that based on how Kirkland later described the session, with Marilyn saying, “I think I should be alone with this boy,” and then asking everyone else to leave—and then even inviting him into bed with her—it doesn’t sound like a very platonic situation. However, he insists that nothing happened between them—except for the amazing photos that resulted from the session.)
How Marilyn was able to turn on Marilyn Monroe when she needed to for professional purposes at the same time that she was so terribly troubled remained a true mystery to her friends and associates. It was as if she only found her true bliss in front of the camera as the perfect vision of herself. Everything else—her real life, the one she led in private—paled in comparison. The truth, of course, is that one quick way for her to feel like Marilyn Monroe was to stop taking her Thorazine, as she had during this period. In her mind, as long as she was slim and sexy… she was Marilyn Monroe. In just a few months, when asked by reporter Alan Levy if she was happy, her response would be, “Let’s put it this way. I’m slim. And I can always get very gay. It depends on the occasion or the company.”
The Douglas Kirkland sessions provide an excellent opportunity to contrast experiences with Marilyn. Her publicist Michael Selsman tells the story of what happened when he and his wife, the actress Carol Lynley, were to meet Kirkland at Monroe’s Doheney apartment to go over the proofs of the session. “Carol was nine months pregnant, due any moment,” he says. “I couldn’t and didn’t want to leave her at home by herself, so I took her along to Monroe’s apartment,” he recalls. “I knocked on her door, as Carol stood shivering beside me. MM opened the door and looked at Carol, whom she knew, since they had adjacent dressing rooms at the studio, and said, ‘You come in,’ motioning to me, ‘but she can wait in your car.’ This was unexpected and I was momentarily stunned. Carol and I exchanged glances, and I assured her I’d be out in fifteen minutes.”
At some point, the two were joined by Douglas Kirkland. Selsman continues, “Every other actor I worked with would use a red grease pencil to put an X through the negatives they didn’t like, but not Marilyn on that day. She took a scissors and cut out every one she did not like, then cut those into tiny splinters and threw them in the wastebasket. This laborious process took three hours, during which I repeatedly got up to leave, but Marilyn kept ordering me to sit down. It was my first evidentiary of Marilyn Monroe’s capacity for cruelty. Doug told her that the negatives and proofs were his property—that he could be trusted to keep them locked up if that was her wish. That didn’t deter her. Poor Doug. She just mopped up the floor with him. He would say, ‘But I like this one.’ She would say, ‘No! I don’t. I don’t want to be seen like that. That’s dead.’ ”
Douglas Kirkland’s memory of that night is totally different. “Yes, she cut the proofs and negatives into little pieces—and that was disturbing,” he says. “It was shocking, actually, the way she went through them, cutting them up. However, she was extremely clear about what she thought was best for her and the ones she killed, for the most part, were not good. She was thorough and professional. She wanted photos that the Everyman could enjoy. Or, as she put it to me when she saw one shot she really loved, ‘I like this one because [Marilyn] looks like the kind of girl a truck driver would like to be in there [the bed] with. That’s who this girl appeals to—the regular guy.’
“I absolutely agree, though, that she was a darker personality than the one I had shot the day before,” says Kirkland. “The day before, she had been sexy, vibrant, and exciting, but twenty-four hours later, she was drawn, tired, and disturbed. She answered the door with a scarf on her head and dark glasses on. I don’t know what could have happened in such a short period of time to change her personality but it was totally, totally different. However, was I horrified? Did I think she was awful? Oh my gosh, no. Absolutely not. No, no, no. She was Marilyn Monroe, after all.” *
Dr. Greenson in Control
At the end of 1961, Marilyn Monroe purchased a house for about $77,000. She had wanted a house that looked as much like Dr. Greenson’s as possible, and she found one. She had been searching for some time. Once, she and Pat Newcomb found a home that Marilyn liked very much. The two were standing outside near the pool talking it over when the owner, a woman, came out, stared at Marilyn for a long time, and finally said, “I know who you are! Get off my property immediately!” There seemed no justification at all for such an outburst, but it suggested that Marilyn’s reputation was by now a mixed one among her public. There were people who loved her, but also definitely people who had a judgment on her. Choked with tears, Marilyn and Pat quickly left the premises.
With three bedrooms and two baths, Marilyn’s new house was a surprisingly small—by show business standards—hacienda-type, one-story home on Fifth Helena Drive outside of Brentwood, California. The living room was so small, just three pieces of furniture would fit. The bathrooms were extremely small, as was the kitchen.
Basically, it looked like a small, very modest apartment. It did feature a swimming pool and a lush garden area, and the entire property was walled from the street at the end of a cul-de-sac. It seemed very private. Below the front door was a tile with the engraving CURSUM PERFICIO. Over the years, some have translated this Latin motto to mean, “My journey ends here”—suggesting that Marilyn had a death wish of some kind and may have had this tile installed to send a message. However, the literal translation is “I complete the course,” and it has been used in the doorways of European homes for many years as a way of welcoming guests. It was installed when the house was built, some thirty years before Marilyn took ownership. Marilyn said she was looking forward to furnishing the house with Mexican-style furnishings that she hoped to purchase during her trips to that part of the world. Despite the important purchase, though, by the end of the year Marilyn was in terrible shape. Her spirits had plummeted and there seemed no way for her to rebound. She was scheduled to go before cameras in 1962 with a new movie, Something’s Got to Give, but she was far from interested in it.
Whereas she had been more or less fine—at the very least her emotional illness seemed to have been stabilized—when she was with her half sister Berniece in New York, in Los Angeles she was not well at all. Those in her circle who did not know about her diagnosis attributed this change in her demeanor to the constant therapy she was receiving from Dr. Greenson. She was with him almost every day. Then, at night, she would often have dinner with the Greenson family. Sometimes she would stay overnight. Doubtless, the biggest problem Dr. Greenson faced was the damage he did to his image with certain aspects of his advice and behavior. Some of what he did was strange, was suspicious, and did not put him in a very good light. For instance, consider this story:
The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe Page 40