Marilyn's Last Sessions

by Michel Schneider

  Mankiewicz was coldly dismissive of the project. She didn’t know whether it was because he simply didn’t like Wilder (among other things, because Wilder never missed the chance to mock psychoanalysis in his films), or was actually afraid of him. Wilder’s masterpiece Sunset Boulevard, a bitter portrait of a washed-up actress that served as a brilliant exposé of Hollywood mores, had come out at the same time as Mankiewicz’s depiction of an actress’s decline, All About Eve. Admittedly, Mankiewicz had won the Oscar for best film that year, but he still bore Wilder an inexplicable grudge, and perhaps feared that this time his rival’s comedy might be better than his.

  Either way, Mankiewicz was very tough on Marilyn: ‘No, no. You’re too Hollywood. Put on some more clothes,’ he said, as if she was worthless, ‘stop shaking your ass so much and we’ll see.’ It felt like a brutal reminder of her early days in Hollywood, of everything she most hated, as if she was still making pornographic films.

  The next day, she asked her old lover Milton Greene to take her picture. In his darkened studio on Lexington Avenue, as the Dom Pérignon flowed, he photographed her in a ballerina’s dress. A dancer without a dance in the glare of the flashbulbs, sitting in a broken-down armchair against a large black curtain, she was sad and innocent and carnal as she hugged herself in a snow-white dress several sizes too big, her lipstick and nail polish a matching shade of blood red.

  New York, Actors Studio, West 44th Street

  January 1955

  Los Angeles would always be the movie capital, where even psychoanalysts were gripped by studio fever and infected by the prevailing mania for images. So when she moved east, Marilyn set up an independent production company with Milton Greene and resolved to make New York the place where she’d search for the meaning of people and things, the city of psychoanalysis. Lee Strasberg urged her to ‘free her unconscious’ in analysis, and she asked Greene for the name of a therapist. He recommended Margaret Herz Hohenberg, a psychoanalyst of Hungarian extraction, a large, austere woman who wore her white hair bound in tight braids. She had studied medicine in Vienna, Budapest and Prague, then moved to New York just before the war. She was already treating Greene and analysed them both until Marilyn severed her ties with her analyst and her business partner in February 1957.

  Apart from Strasberg’s prompting – he thought every actor should face the truth of his or her unconscious on the analyst’s couch – Marilyn hoped Hohenberg would help with a range of problems: childhood traumas, lack of self-esteem, inability to sustain relationships, friendships or love affairs, and fear of abandonment. She saw her five times a week, twice in the morning and three times in the afternoon, and was unfailingly punctual for every session. She had a sort of exorcism ritual, which she’d perform when she left the practice on East 93rd Street. Emerging from the building, she’d immediately stop, raise her hand to her mouth and cough until it hurt. Then she’d look up and calmly survey the street, as if all the emotions that had been brought up in the session had been expelled or safely buried. Marilyn instantly became a passionate admirer of psychoanalysis. When she was asked at a press conference what she hoped to get from it, she replied, ‘I won’t talk about it, except to say that I believe in the Freudian interpretation. I hope at some future time to make a glowing report on the wonders that psychiatrists can do for you.’

  Establishing what would become a precedent, Hohenberg became considerably more than a therapist before the year was out: she settled a legal wrangle between Marilyn and her hairdresser, stopped her seeing certain people, and advised her on movie roles. When she wasn’t seeing her analyst, Marilyn would attend morning courses at Strasberg’s workshop in the Malin Studios, or have private lessons in the evenings at his apartment on 86th Street. Strasberg, who had invented an acting technique he modestly called the Method, wanted, as he put it, to bring to light everything she’d marginalised, everything she’d repressed about her past and to tap all her explosive energy. Marilyn was fascinated by his theories of human nature. Strasberg and Hohenberg decided to work together to convert what they saw as Marilyn’s dark core of depression into an ability to sustain viable personal and professional relationships. ‘I had teachers and people I could look up to,’ Marilyn would later say about this partnership, ‘but nobody I could look over at. I always felt I was a nobody, and the only way for me to be a somebody was to be – well, somebody else. Which is probably why I wanted to act.’

  ‘I’m trying to become an artist,’ she said, at one of her first sessions with Hohenberg, ‘and to be true, but sometimes a window opens and I see how empty I am. I sometimes feel I’m on the verge of craziness, I’m just trying to get the truest part of myself out, and it’s very hard. There are times when I think, All I have to be is true. But sometimes it doesn’t come so easily. I always have this secret feeling that I’m really a fake or something, a phoney. My one desire is to do my best, the best that I can from the moment the camera starts until it stops. That moment I want to be perfect, as perfect as I can make it . . . Lee says I have to start with myself, and I say “With me?” Well, I’m not so important! Who does he think I am? Marilyn Monroe or something?’

  New York, West 93rd Street

  February 1955

  Following a pattern that would repeat itself with subsequent analysts, Marilyn wasn’t content simply to pay for her sessions, but instead set about involving money in her analytic treatment in a variety of increasingly intimate ways. She asked her analyst for advice on her business affairs. Then, in February 1956, she drew up a will bequeathing twenty thousand dollars, a tenth of her estimated estate, to Dr Margaret Herz Hohenberg. Among the other legatees, Lee and Paula Strasberg were to receive twenty-five thousand, the Actors Studio ten thousand, and she left enough money to cover hospitalisation costs for Gladys Baker for the rest of her life (but not more than a total of twenty-five thousand dollars). The lawyer who drew up the will jokingly asked Marilyn if she had an idea for her epitaph. ‘Marilyn Monroe, Blonde,’ she said, tracing lines in the air with a gloved finger.

  This symbiotic relationship between talking, love and money evolved. In July 1956, Lee Strasberg negotiated Marilyn’s drama coach Paula Strasberg’s contract with the producers of The Prince and the Showgirl. Then in October, Margaret Hohenberg went to London at great personal expense to Marilyn to provide support during filming, as she had first done on Bus Stop.

  Margaret Hohenberg urged Marilyn to keep a diary, but she never did, although she bought notebooks with beautiful marbled covers. There was something about the bound notebooks, an imperative to write systematically, that was too much for her. She did copy out lists of words from dictionaries, though, either difficult words, like abasia, abate, abject, abstruse, acronym, adjure, adulate, adulterate or simple but obscure words, such as cold, parent or I. Some notes scrawled on scraps of paper were also found among the personal papers and possessions that were left after the police searched the house where she died. It was a meagre haul. Most of her things had disappeared before the police even arrived, which, to some people, gave substance to the thesis that she had been murdered.

  The oldest notes date from 1955, when she was studying at the Actors Studio.

  My problem of desperation in my work and life – I must begin to face it continually, making my work routine more continuous and of more importance than my desperation.

  Doing a scene is like opening a bottle. If it doesn’t open one way, try another – perhaps even give it up for another bottle? Lee wouldn’t like that . . .

  How or why I can act – and I’m not sure I can – is the thing for me to understand. The torture, let alone the day to day happenings – the pain one cannot explain to another.

  How can I sleep? How does this girl fall asleep? What does she think about?

  What is it there I’m afraid of? Hiding in case of punishment? Libido? Ask Dr H.

  How can I speak naturally on stage? Don’t let the actress worry, let the character worry.

  Learn to believe in contr
adictory impulses.

  Hollywood, Century City, Pico Boulevard

  June 1960

  Marilyn celebrated her thirty-fourth birthday with Rupert Allan, her PR agent and friend, at his apartment on Seabright Place. She spent the whole evening talking to Tennessee Williams and his formidable mother Edwina. Anxious at the passing of another year, she had resumed seeing her saviour. ‘It’s starting again. It never stops,’ she told Greenson. ‘It feels like I’m always going backwards.’

  Sometimes it seemed to her as if she was singing her life in playback, struggling to fit lyrics to a pre-recorded tune. ‘What am I afraid of?’ she had written on a piece of paper, while she was waiting to be called on Fox’s set for one of the last scenes of Let’s Make Love. ‘Do I think I can’t act? I know I can act but I am afraid. I am afraid and I should not be and I must not be.’

  On her previous film, Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot, she had panicked twice when she felt her body, the rampart protecting her vulnerable inner self, was under threat. The first time was when she had refused to come out of her dressing room to do the scene where she sings ‘Running Wild’. Wilder had asked Sandra Warner, who was playing Emily, one of the musicians in the orchestra, to sing the number in playback: ‘Marilyn will come out when she hears your voice instead of hers, take my word for it.’ And sure enough, Marilyn appeared as soon as she heard the singing backstage. She shot Wilder a filthy look as he coldly announced, in his Viennese accent, ‘Let’s do it over’, flourished her ukulele, then launched into the song with furious panache. Then, at the end of filming, she was too pregnant to appear in publicity stills, so they suggested Sandra wear her costumes and pose between Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis; they superimposed her face on the photos afterwards. Marilyn had no choice in the matter but that didn’t stop it hurting, and she begrudged Sandra Warner the theft of her body for a long time.

  On the same film, after a fitting with the two male leads, who were in drag for most of the film, the costume designer Orry-Kelly measured up Marilyn. He was rash enough to say, ‘Tony’s got a nicer ass than you.’

  She turned round in a fury, pulled down her blouse and shouted, ‘Yeah, but he hasn’t got tits like these!’

  But there was another Marilyn. Wilder always remembered the day when an assistant director was sent to get her from her dressing room and found her reading Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man. ‘Go fuck yourself,’ was her pithy response to the interruption.

  After that, whenever anyone talked about her lateness on set, Billy Wilder would say, ‘I’ve never had any problems with Monroe. Marilyn has problems with Monroe. She’s got something inside that bites and gnaws away at her. She’s an out-of-kilter soul, searching for some part of her she’s lost. Like in that scene in Some Like It Hot when, drunk and half-asleep, she had to open the drawers of a chest-of-drawers and say, “Where’s that bourbon?” We put a sticker in each drawer to remind her of the line. But she couldn’t get it. That was eighty takes or something. I took her to one side after about take fifty, and said, “Don’t worry about it.” “Worry about what?” she goes. But it was worth it in the end. She is a truly great actress. Better Marilyn late than any other actress on time. I’ve got an old aunt in Vienna who acts. Her name, I think, is Mildred Lachenfarber. She always comes to the set on time. She says her lines perfectly. She never gives anyone the slightest trouble. At the box office she is worth fourteen cents. Do you get my point?’

  One evening when Wilder went home, he kissed his wife, the tall, beautiful Audrey Young, and announced, ‘Marilyn was sensational. If I had to cheat on you with anyone, it’d be her.’

  ‘Me too,’ Young answered.

  Billy Wilder saw Marilyn Monroe for the last time in the spring of 1960 while she was shooting Let’s Make Love. It was at a party at Romanoff’s in Beverly Hills after a screening of The Seven Year Itch. He offered her the female lead in his next film, Irma la Douce. It was Oscar time and Wilder had been awarded the Oscar for Best Director for Some Like It Hot. I. A. L. Diamond had won Best Screenwriter, Jack Lemmon Best Actor, Orry-Kelly Best Costume Designer. Marilyn, who played the unforgettable Sugar Kane, wasn’t even nominated. When she heard Simone Signoret had been nominated for Best Actress for A Room at the Top, a low-budget British film, she seemed unaffected, almost happy.

  The following day, Wilder asked, ‘How’s it going? You’re not finding it too hard, are you?’

  ‘No. I learned from Freud that sometimes our unconscious wants us to fail. And, anyway, let’s face it, when it comes to women, a lot of people don’t like it so hot.’

  New York, Gladstone Hotel, East 52nd Street

  March 1955

  In Manhattan, Marilyn could dissolve into anonymity. She was nobody. She could hide from herself. She would wear a baggy sweater, an old coat and no make-up, knot a scarf under her chin, slip on dark glasses and go strolling through the crowded streets to the Actors Studio, where she attended group classes, always sitting in the same place in the back row, or to Margaret Hohenberg’s practice. Her time in Manhattan was intellectually exhilarating: she was absorbed by ‘the mysteries of the unconscious’, as she laughingly told her friend, the writer Truman Capote.

  They had met in 1950 while she was filming Asphalt Jungle with John Huston. Superficially different, the gay writer and the symbol of heterosexual desire were nonetheless profoundly similar. They shared a sense of something poorly articulated, a secret suffering in the depths of their being. The same abandonment as a child, the same destructive way with drugs and sex, the same traumas over their art, the same panic about success, the same physical decline and, eventually, the same death from an overdose of prescription drugs. They’d drink cocktails in bars on Lexington Avenue, one half vodka, one half gin, no vermouth, which they called White Angels. Marilyn would arrive in a cheap black wig, which she’d whisk off with a flourish, and Capote would call out ‘Bye-bye, blackbird. Hi, Marilyn.’

  He opened his heart the first time they met. ‘Have you any idea what it’s like to be me?’ he asked. ‘An ugly dwarf in love with beauty, a nasty, luckless kid from nowhere who spends his time ferrying words from people to the page, from one book to another, a homo who only gets on with women—’

  ‘I can guess,’ she cut in, downing her vodka in one. ‘Do you know what it’s like to be me? The same, except without the words to express it.’

  After Marilyn’s death, Capote would say, slightly falsely, ‘There was something exceptional about Marilyn Monroe. Sometimes she could be ethereal and sometimes like a waitress in a coffee shop. She’d been a call girl, off and on, to make ends meet, but in her mind money was always associated with love rather than sex. She gave her body to whomever she thought she loved and money to whomever she really did love. She loved being in love; she loved thinking she loved someone. One day I introduced her to Bill Paley, a tycoon who fancied her like crazy. I tried telling Marilyn he loved her. “Don’t shit me,” she said. “You love someone after you sleep with them – and even then that’s kind of rare – never before. At least, that’s how it’s been with me and men. Sex and love always go together for me, just like these.” And she pointed at her tits. “I wish I could turn sex into love and forget about bodies. I wish I could make love, as they say. I love that expression.”

  ‘“I don’t,” I said. “What two people make isn’t love. You never make love. You never have it. You’re just in it or you’re not. That’s all.”

  ‘She stared at me with a bitter smile. I didn’t make a big thing of it. Everyone’s entitled to their illusions. But later I had my character in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Holly Golightly, say, “I mean, you can’t bang the guy and cash his cheques and at least not try to believe you love him.”’

  In 1955, Truman and Marilyn met up again. She was living in a suite on the sixth floor of the Gladstone Hotel, and in February had taken her first lesson at the Actors Studio. Meeting Lee Strasberg had changed her life. The drama teacher said he wanted ‘to open up her unconscious’. �
�Rather than my legs,’ Marilyn told Truman. ‘That’s what’s known as a godsend.’

  One day Truman took her to see Constance Collier in her dark studio on West 57th Street. The old English actress, whose sight was failing and who was losing sensation in her limbs, gave her diction lessons and voice coaching. ‘Oh, yes,’ Miss Collier said afterwards, ‘there is something there. She’s a beautiful child. I don’t mean that in the obvious way – the perhaps too obvious way. I don’t think she’s an actress at all, not in any traditional sense. What she has – this presence, this luminosity, this flickering intelligence – could never surface on the stage. It’s so fragile and subtle, it can only be found by the camera. It’s like a hummingbird in flight: only a camera can freeze the poetry of it.’

  After that Marilyn went back to Los Angeles and Truman didn’t see her again until Constance Collier’s funeral. She was staying on the twenty-seventh floor of the Waldorf-Astoria. She liked looking down on Park Avenue from her suite at night, the way one looks at the face of someone asleep. Her favourite thing about the hotel, though, was the revolving doors at the entrance, always spinning. She was fascinated by them, by the name. Truman once said to her, ‘They’re like life. You think you’re moving forward, but in fact you’re going backwards. You never know if you’re going in or coming out.’