Brooklyn, Brownsville, Miller Avenue
September 1911
Ralph Greenson wasn’t yet fifty when he began analysing Marilyn Monroe. He was born Romeo Greenschpoon in 1911, in the Brownsville neighbourhood of Brooklyn, the twin brother of a sister called Juliet, who became a brilliant concert pianist. Their parents were Russian-Jewish immigrants who had become relatively prosperous, thanks to the drive of the twins’ intelligent, ambitious mother. Katherine Greenschpoon had pulled off the unlikely feat of acquiring a job and a husband all at once when she was hired as the dispensary assistant at Joel Greenschpoon’s pharmacy. Impressed by his ability to diagnose his customers’ ailments, she had convinced her husband to go to medical school. Romeo’s father had therefore qualified as a doctor comparatively late, when his first two children were three years old.
An accomplished pianist, Katherine encouraged all four of her children to play music. She had cultural aspirations of her own and eventually swapped the pills and prescriptions for the art world and became an artists’ manager. Surrounded by New York’s divas and impresarios, Romeo’s head was filled with the romance of the stage, but often he’d escape to the misty, black and white silhouettes up on the screen at Brooklyn’s grand movie house, and lose himself in the romantic travails of the actresses, with their translucent complexions.
‘Wherefore art youse, Romeo?’
The taunts of the kids in his neighbourhood echoed those he heard every day in the classroom, where he and his sister were taught to say, in unison, ‘We’re Romeo and Juliet, and we’re twins.’ When he was twelve, he decided to change his first name, but it took him until 1937, during his internship at the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Los Angeles, to change his last name. He once said they were like scars on his face. Yet his friends continued to call him Romeo or, more often, Romi, and he kept an extra R on his brass plate, after his new first name, Ralph. Marilyn called him ‘Doctor’, but when he wasn’t there, she toyed with his nickname, pronouncing it plaintively, almost like a question.
At the end of his studies at medical school in Berne in Switzerland, where he enrolled in 1931, he met Hildegarde Troesch, whom he married shortly before returning to America. She was won over by his intelligence and adaptability – among other achievements, he learned German in two months so he could read Freud in the original. With his medical degree in his pocket, Ralph travelled to Vienna at the start of 1933, where he was analysed by Wilhelm Stekel, one of Freud’s earliest adherents and a founding member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, the man Freud would later refer to as a ‘pig’ and ‘treacherous liar’. Greenson also worked directly with Freud, and it was through talking to him about tragedy and pathological characters in theatre that he understood Shakespeare’s depiction of Romeo and Juliet as accursed lovers who could only be together in death. Throughout his life, his feelings for Freud would remain less those of a devout disciple than a loyal comrade in arms. Privately, he called him ‘the man who listened to women’.
At the age of twenty-six, Greenson set up in Los Angeles as a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst – American psychoanalytic practice didn’t distinguish between the two. He immediately set his sights on becoming a key figure in the local psychoanalytic community. Its leader, Ernst Simmel, was suspicious of the overtures of a student of the renegade Stekel, but Greenson was bright – or opportunistic – enough to erase the taint of his origins by undergoing another analysis. He spent four years on the couch with Otto Fenichel, an unimpeachable Freudian grandee who had emigrated from Berlin to Los Angeles in 1938.
After the war, Greenson felt the need for another analysis. For his third therapist, he chose neither a doctor nor a man, but Frances Deri, who sported a crew-cut and a long cigarette holder à la Marlene Dietrich, which she kept permanently clamped between her teeth. Before emigrating to Los Angeles in 1936, she had been a midwife in Germany and then trained as an analyst in the team of Freudian Marxists created by Ernst Simmel at the Schloss Tegel clinic near Berlin. She had been analysed twice, by Hanns Sachs and Karl Abraham, pillars of Freud’s inner circle and members of the ‘Wednesday Committee’. Both had disagreed violently with Freud in 1925, when they had collaborated on the first film to attempt to depict psychoanalysis, Secrets of a Soul by G. W. Pabst. Like her mentors, Deri had an all-consuming passion for cinema. Known as Madame Deri by her colleagues in the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society and Institute (LAPSI), she specialised in analysing actors and remained a guiding light for Greenson when he set about establishing his own client base. Crucially, though, she provided him with a fresh imaginative link to Freud, one that would problematically revive the conflict between words and images that had been a feature of his analysis. Privately, he wanted to be known to posterity as ‘the man who listened to images’.
In the Californian Babylon of the studios, among the sound-stages, lots and banks of spotlights, Greenson avidly pursued the glittering contradictions between image and identity, seeking in the magical word ‘Action’ that launched every shot a salve to the inaction he was confined to by his analyst’s chair. Acting and the performing arts would remain integral parts of his work and life. Fascinated by actors, he constantly returned to performers’ psychology: ‘The movie actor or actress is not a star until he is instantly recognisable not only by his peers but by the world at large . . . I have found the . . . budding star and the fading film stars to be the most difficult with whom I have tried to work,’ he wrote in August 1978, a year before his death. While Marilyn was still his patient, Greenson began a textbook that has been used in psychoanalytic training all over the world for the past fifty years: The Technique and Practice of Psychoanalysis. In it, he compares the analytic session to a scene of a play or film: ‘In a strange way the analyst becomes a silent actor in a play the patient is creating. The analyst does not act in this drama; he tries to remain the shadowy figure the patient needs for his fantasies. Yet the analyst helps in the creation of the character, working out the details by his insight, empathy and intuition. In a sense he becomes a kind of stage director in the situation – a vital part of the play, but not an actor.’
Psychoanalytic conferences across the length and breadth of California gave him the opportunity to fulfil his ambitions as a performer. Word reached Europe that he was the most actorly of orators, the most brilliant of speakers. He never showed any nerves at the lectern, which he approached with quick, bouncy steps: ‘Just think,’ he seemed to be saying, ‘these lucky people get to hear me!’ At glittery Bel Air or Beverly Hills parties, he would launch into veritable one-man shows, describing in detail the cases of a happy few whose identities he’d veil sufficiently thinly for them to be obvious.
Greenson shared a thriving practice with his colleague Milton Wexler at 436 North Roxbury Drive in Beverly Hills, not far from Bedford Drive, otherwise known as Couch Canyon. He lived in Santa Monica, on Franklin Street, near the Brentwood Country Club. From the back of his house, one could see Pacific Palisades and the ocean to the west. At the start of 1960 he was a slender, elegant figure known for his judicious pronouncements. By the time he started analysing Marilyn Monroe, he had become the acknowledged star of the Hollywood branch of the Freudian unconscious, ‘the backbone of psychoanalysis in the western United States’, as one colleague put it. He had long been clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California at Los Angeles, and was president and dean of the training school at the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Institute affiliated to LAPSI. He was very involved in his analyses and showed a passionate interest in his patients. Many of them, such as Peter Lorre, Vivien Leigh, Inger Stevens, Tony Curtis and Frank Sinatra – then Marilyn’s lover – were actors, while others were in the business, like director Vincente Minnelli or producer Dore Schary.
Quietly confident of his saturnine looks, he liked encountering his patients face to face. His large, heavily shadowed brown eyes lent his face a tender, craggy quality, further accentuated by a bushy moustache. Seductive in so far as he didn’t con
sider himself a seducer, Greenson displayed in his analysis the mannerisms that characterised his lectures and private relations, ‘an unpredictable interplay between the wry, the weary, the impatient, the disenchanted’, as Leo Rosten wrote – and the self-absorbed: when Marilyn once mentioned a previous analyst, he couldn’t help saying, ‘Let’s not talk about her! What about me? What do you think about me?’ before bursting out laughing.
Wanting it with a passion yet hardly realising it, Ralph Greenson entered into one of those fatal attractions to which intellectuals succumb with all the more abandon because they think they’re in control. His greatest enemy was boredom, and when Marilyn suddenly appeared in his wearily familiar sky, shining with her incredible white brilliance, she represented an escape from the monotony of his practice he could never have dared hoped for. Surprise, after all, is one of the subtlest of pleasures, just as ruination is the most dandified of misfortunes.
Hollywood, Beverly Hills Hotel, West Sunset Boulevard
January 1960
For a time, sessions reverted to Marilyn’s bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel, since she was too depressed and weak to make it to her analyst’s office. Greenson began the next session with the usual questions about the first years of her life and her childhood. Marilyn didn’t say anything for a long time, then only a name: Grace.
‘What relation was she to you?’
‘None. She was a friend of my mother . . . my so-called mother, I mean. Grace was my real mother; she wanted to make me a film star. I don’t know what the other one wanted. Me to be dead, maybe. It’s strange, you’re the only person I can say this to, but I always tell journalists my mother is dead. She’s not, but I’m still telling the truth really. When they put me in the orphanage on El Centro Avenue, I screamed, “I’m not an orphan. I have a mother. She’s got red hair and soft hands.” That was true too, even if she never touched me.’
Greenson took this at face value. Marilyn’s mother might still have been alive, but she was right to think of her as dead to her. Rather than interpret, he asked, ‘What did you study before becoming an actress?’
‘I didn’t finish high school. I sat for people, did some modelling, looked at myself in the mirror or in other people’s eyes to see who I was.’
‘Do you need to be seen by other people for that? Men?’
‘Why just men? Marilyn doesn’t exist. I come out of my dressing room Norma Jeane. I’m still her even when the camera’s rolling. Marilyn Monroe only exists on screen.’
‘Is that why you’re so anxious about having to shoot? You’re scared of your image being stolen by the picture? That the woman on screen isn’t you? That your image is not only giving you life but also taking it away? Do you feel the same when people look at you in real life?’
‘Too many questions, Doctor. I don’t know. Men don’t look at me, anyway. They run their eyes over me. It’s different. You don’t, though. The first time we met, it felt as if you were looking at me with all your heart, as if you were about to introduce me to someone inside myself. That made me feel good.’
It took the psychoanalyst a while to notice a strange and unsettling thing. When she wasn’t being looked at, when nobody was paying attention to her, her face would go utterly slack and come apart, as if it had died.
Greenson knew she was intelligent, but was still surprised by her faultless taste in poetry, theatre and classical music. Arthur Miller, her third husband, whom she had married four years earlier, had undertaken to educate her. But while she was grateful for the education, she expressed at the same time a venomous resentment towards him. She claimed he was cold and unresponsive, attracted to other women and dominated by his mother. But by this stage their marriage was faltering. Yves Montand had been a catalyst; the real reasons for their estrangement lay elsewhere.
The first time Greenson met Marilyn, he sensed her body was something she possessed rather than who she was. After her death, Miller confirmed this when, staring off into space, he told Greenson, ‘In the end, something of the order of the divine resulted from her feelings of disembodiment. She was utterly incapable of condemning or judging anyone, even if they’d hurt her. To be with her was to be accepted, to pass from a world where suspicion reigned into a luminous, sanctifying realm. She was part queen, part waif, sometimes on her knees before her own body and sometimes despairing because of it.’
The analyst confided his first impressions to his colleague, Wexler, soon after he started treating Marilyn: ‘As she becomes more anxious, she begins to act like an orphan, and masochistically provokes people to mistreat her and to take advantage of her. As fragments of her past history come out, she begins to talk more and more about the traumatic experiences of an orphan child. She feels at times that she is unimportant and insignificant. At the same time, although sexually dissatisfied, she glories and revels in her personal appearance, feeling that she is an extremely beautiful woman, perhaps the most beautiful woman in the world. She always takes great pains to be attractive and to give a very good appearance when she is out in public, although when she is at home and nobody can see her she might not be able to put herself together very well. The main mechanism she uses to bring some feeling of stability and significance to her life is the attractiveness of her body. I tried to tell her that in my experience truly beautiful women are not beautiful all the time. They look plain, or even ugly, at certain moments and from certain angles. And that’s what beauty is, a temporary quality rather than a state. But she didn’t seem to understand what I was saying.’ Greenson didn’t give his colleague the chance to respond, but that didn’t surprise Wexler. He knew it was questions Ralph Greenson was short of rather than answers.
Los Angeles, Downtown
1948
The first photographer in the life of the woman still known as Norma Jeane Baker, André de Dienes, was a good-looking thirty-three-year-old, who had been brought over from Europe in the early 1940s by the producer David O. Selznick. He had hired Norma Jeane for her first modelling job, a five-week road trip through California, Nevada and New Mexico in 1945. She was nineteen.
At the end of the 1950s, Life magazine commissioned him to do a photo shoot of Marilyn and her drama coach, Natasha Lytess, a failed Hollywood actress of Russian extraction who had emigrated from Berlin. The set-up was straightforward enough, an acting lesson at Lytess’s Beverly Hills house, but things went badly from the start. Lytess and de Dienes argued. De Dienes didn’t like what Marilyn was wearing: a voluminous blouse that covered her completely, and a long, unattractive skirt almost down to her ankles. He hated her formal hairstyle and wanted to show her as glamorous, provocative, desirable. He suggested to Marilyn that she take off her clothes and stand there, facing Natasha, wearing only her short, black slip with her hair messed up. ‘Make real dramatic movements,’ he told her. ‘I want action going on for the pictures.’ Natasha had other thoughts. She started shouting that Marilyn was going to be a dramatic actress, not a ‘sex-bobble’. De Dienes pointed out that Marilyn’s sex appeal was the reason she was becoming famous, then packed up his equipment and stormed out, yelling he didn’t work with hypocrites.
Throughout her life, photography would represent a haven Marilyn could retreat to whenever she was suffering. The greater her anguish at the prospect of shooting, the more acute her terror at having to repeat a scene twenty times in front of a hundred people, the more the ballet of a man dancing round her armed with a camera seemed to shelter her from her fears.
Look bad, dirty, not just sexy. Such, no doubt, were the dismal instructions the unknown cameraman gave Marilyn before he started rolling his camera in some squalid Willowbrook apartment in downtown Los Angeles. The resulting film lasts three minutes forty-one seconds and is in black and white. Originally silent, it has since been soundtracked with an extract from a Monroe song, ‘My Heart Belongs To Daddy’.
Provided it’s not a fake, this short film is the first trace of Marilyn on celluloid. To survive in Hollywood, as a twenty-two-year
-old, she sold what she had to whoever wanted it: her body to producers and its image to the anonymous spectators who watched the pornographic shorts with titles like Apples, Knockers and Cokes that were shot on the fringes of the studios. This one, Porn, is particularly horrific. The actress enters in a black dress, which she takes off to reveal a black négligée and suspenders. She seems large somehow, her stomach, her thighs, even her head, her russet-brown hair hanging limply over the left side of her face. Her leaden movements and vague gestures as she takes a tawdrily wrapped box from a man exude something irredeemably crude and exhausted. If it weren’t for the glimpse of her face in the last shot, when she smokes a cigarette as she looks down at the man she has just had sex with, one might doubt it was Marilyn Monroe. Only the smile is hers.
This sequence of undressing and desolate intercourse seems like some primeval form of pornography, mesmerisingly ugly in its evocation of how cruel sex can be. The fact it is silent makes it seem even more like the visual representation of a moan or cry of pain. But its black candour about sex shows the truth about cinema as well: worn and unrestorable, the surviving prints reveal how images eat away at themselves, how, as the shadows rise to the surface of the celluloid, the canker of oblivion corrodes even the most studied pose and tells the voyeur, Nothing to see here.
One day in January 1951 in Hollywood, a black Lincoln convertible containing the director Elia Kazan and the playwright Arthur Miller eased through the Fox lot, searching for the sound-stage on which As Young As You Feel was being shot. They heard Marilyn’s name being shouted by a hoarse-voiced production assistant before they saw her. The director was cursing the twenty-four-year-old actress, who kept wandering off set and returning dejected and in tears. She had only a small role, but every scene she was in was taking hours. Eventually she appeared in a close-fitting black dress. Kazan was speechless. He had come to offer her a part.
Marilyn's Last Sessions Page 3