By this stage in her analysis, Greenson was starting to think Marilyn’s problems lay not so much in her sexuality as in a confusion in her self-image. He had coined a collective term, ‘screen character patients’, for people who, for defensive reasons, represent their desires as a screen. They may project ‘screen hunger’, for instance, or ‘screen affect’, but, in general, they manifest a ‘screen identity’. For them, the twin acts of showing oneself and being seen by others constitute a uniquely exciting or terrifying experience, most often both. ‘In ordinary language,’ he wrote, ‘the word “screen” may mean to conceal, to filter, or to camouflage.’ In Marilyn’s case, he thought, the word ‘screen’ also referred quite literally to a cinema screen, but it had plenty of other associations. He believed that, in the psychoanalytic sense, it specifically denoted a process whereby an individual uses a viable self-image – not necessarily wholly invented or false – to mask the pain of existence, some unbearable truth about him- or herself. He thought of the image that had shown on every TV channel five years before: the still from The Seven Year Itch, fifty feet high, covering most of Loew’s State Theater in New York. Her body and windblown dress had floated over Broadway like a huge white flower for a fortnight in the run-up to the première.
Greenson still knew Marilyn primarily through her film roles, in which she incarnated desirability in its most unattainable form, but he found himself wondering whether icons of desire such as her actually felt desire themselves. Years later, he would read something Vladimir Nabokov had written about the movie star: ‘It is possible this great comedy actress saw sex purely as comedy.’
After several months, the psychoanalyst was inclined to think of Marilyn’s various personae – the diligent Actors Studio pupil, Marianne Kris’s diligent patient, the diligent reader of the writers of her age – as ‘screen images’. She construed herself as an apprentice New York intellectual in order to blank out the fear of being stupid that had haunted the little girl from Nebraska Avenue, who’d dreamed of shining like a fantastical constellation in Hollywood’s firmament.
At their second session that day, Marilyn looked across at her analyst and said, ‘I think that when you’re famous every weakness is exaggerated. This industry should behave like a mother whose child has just run out in front of a car. But instead of clasping the child to them, they start punishing the child. All this industry does is take. All those shots you have to do a hundred times over, all those takes . . . but who’s giving, who’s receiving, who’s loving? If you’ve noticed, in Hollywood, where millions and billions of dollars have been made, there aren’t really any kind of monuments or museums . . . Gee, nobody left anything behind. They took it, they grabbed it and they ran, the ones who made the billions of dollars, never the workers. I’m not in this big American rush, you know, you got to go and you got to go fast but for no good reason, and I’m never going to be.’
‘Fine,’ said Greenson. ‘I think that’s a good place to stop for today.’
‘Oh, you’re the same as all the rest. Cut! Next take! One last one, Marilyn!’
In April 1952 Marilyn had to have an appendectomy at the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. When Dr Marcus Rabwin lifted the sheet covering her in order to start the operation, he found a little handwritten note taped to her stomach:
Dear Doctor,
Cut as little as possible I know it seems vain but that doesn’t really enter into it – the fact that I’m a woman is important and means much to me . . . - for Gods sakes Dear Doctor No ovaries removed – please again do whatever you can to prevent large scars. Thanking you with all my heart.
Marilyn Monroe
Outskirts of London, Englefield Green
July 1956
Her current drama teacher, Michael Chekhov, taught Marilyn a number of things about her acting and the way men looked at her on screen. One day, in the middle of a scene she was doing from The Cherry Orchard, Michael suddenly stopped, put his hands over her eyes for a moment, then looked at her with a gentle grin.
‘May I ask you a personal question?’ he asked.
‘Anything,’ she said.
‘Will you tell me truthfully?’ Michael asked. ‘Were you thinking of sex while we played that scene?’
‘No,’ she said, ‘there’s no sex in this scene. I wasn’t thinking of it at all.’
‘You had no half-thoughts of embraces and kisses in your mind?’ Michael persisted.
‘None,’ she said. ‘I was completely concentrated on the scene.’
‘I believe you,’ said Michael. ‘You always speak the truth.’
‘To you,’ she said.
He walked up and down for a few minutes, then said, ‘It’s very strange. All through our playing of that scene I kept receiving sex vibrations from you. As if you were a woman in the grip of passion. I stopped because I thought you must be too sexually preoccupied to continue.’
She started to cry. He paid no attention to her tears but went on intently: ‘You are a young woman who gives off sex vibrations – no matter what you are doing or thinking. The whole world has already responded to those vibrations. They come off the movie screens when you are on them. You can make a fortune just standing still or moving in front of the cameras and doing almost no acting whatsoever.’
‘I don’t want that,’ she said.
‘Why not?’ he asked gently.
‘Because I want to be an artist,’ she answered, ‘not an erotic freak. I don’t want to be sold to the public as a celluloid aphrodisiac. Look at me and start shaking. It was all right for the first few years. But now it’s different.’
‘All you have to do is be sexy, dear Marilyn.’ This was the bitterly condescending note Laurence Olivier, resplendent in his Grand Duke of Carpathia’s uniform, gave Marilyn Monroe when they started filming The Prince and the Showgirl at Pinewood Studios in the summer of 1956. A disenchanting fairy tale, with only a terrified prince awaiting discovery by the showgirl, the film contains a number of scenes that bear out low expectations, not least the one when, as she is preparing to curtsey on first meeting the monocled grand duke, a strap of her dress snaps, baring her shoulder and almost her entire breast. Marilyn found this scene coming to her mind at a première at the Empire Theatre in London towards the end of the shoot, when she was presented to the Queen, with Joan Crawford, Brigitte Bardot and Anita Ekberg.
Marilyn had chosen Olivier, the great Shakespearean actor, not only to star in, but also to direct this period comedy, the first and only film produced by Marilyn Monroe Productions (Something’s Got to Give, which she co-produced in 1962 with Fox, never saw the light of day). Olivier had returned the compliment by thinking of her as an uneducated, self-obsessed idiot. She immediately resorted to her usual displacements and evasions: arriving late on set, taking drugs, going missing.
‘Olivier hated me, I think,’ she said, when it was finally all over. ‘Even when he smiled, he had a poisonous look in his eyes. I don’t know, I was sick half the time, but he didn’t believe me or else he didn’t give a damn. He always looked at me as if he’d smelt rotten fish, as if I had leprosy or something. He tiptoed up to me at the start as if he was walking into some sleazy dive and told me in his patronising voice just to be sexy. That killed me. I felt terrible around him. I was constantly late and he hated my guts for it.’
Newly wed to Arthur Miller and pregnant with a child she would lose in August, Marilyn arrived in London on a rainy afternoon in mid-July. The subsequent three weeks of shooting brought her to the verge of a nervous collapse. Nothing was working: the film, her marriage, her exhausted body, which was constantly failing her.
One day she found her husband’s notebook lying open on the dining table. She read, ‘I shouldn’t have got married, not to her. She is an unpredictable, forlorn child-woman, abandoned and selfish. My creative life will be threatened if I give in to her relentless emotional blackmail.’
Devastated, Marilyn rang Margaret Hohenberg in New York and talked for hours. Her analyst f
lew over and gave her therapy on set. ‘He thought I was some kind of an angel,’ Marilyn told her, ‘and now he guesses he was wrong to marry me. His first wife had let him down, but I’ve done something worse. Olivier is beginning to think I’m a troublesome bitch, and Arthur says he no longer has a decent answer to that one.’
Overwhelmed by her patient’s depression and anxieties, the tyrannical demands for love she had been making for more than a year, Hohenberg decided she couldn’t leave her New York practice unattended any longer, and sought a solution in situ that would help Marilyn fulfil her professional commitments.
London, Maresfield Gardens
August 1956
Under the virtually white sky of a boiling August day, a black Rolls-Royce stops outside 20 Maresfield Gardens. Silhouetted against the light, a heavily built chauffeur opens the car door, then pivots to allow a young blonde to slip past and hurry towards the house. Paula Fichtl, the Freud family’s housekeeper for the past twenty-seven years, opens the door and shows the stranger into the hall. Dressed in a plain blue raincoat with the collar turned up, no make-up, her platinum hair hidden under a floppy felt hat, her face behind a pair of big sunglasses, Marilyn Monroe has arrived for her first analytic session with Sigmund Freud’s daughter.
The appointment has been arranged with the utmost discretion and speed. Despite her dread of publicity, Anna has overcome whatever initial hesitation she might have felt, and for the following week, Marilyn doesn’t appear on set. No one knows where she is or what she’s doing. Every day her car stops in Maresfield Gardens and every day she disappears into Anna Freud’s study. ‘She wasn’t remarkable, I wouldn’t say,’ Paula later recalled. ‘She was a pretty girl, of course, but not especially elegant. Miss Monroe was very natural and unpretentious and slightly anxious, but you could see she could be attractive when she smiled.’
One day Anna shows her patient around the clinic’s kindergarten. Marilyn immediately becomes animated and, completely at ease, starts joking and playing with the children. Afterwards, very impressed by the work Anna is doing, she tells her about reading The Interpretation of Dreams when she was twenty-one. She was particularly fascinated by its description of dreams about nudity. Compulsive nudity, the need to undress in public, is something she had talked about at length with her first therapist. Anna makes her diagnosis, which she writes up on a card that can still be found in the file index at the Anna Freud Centre. A coded summary of ‘the Marilyn case’, it reads: ‘Adult patient. Emotional instability, exaggerated impulsiveness, constant need for external approval, inability to be alone, tendency to depression in case of rejection, paranoia with schizophrenic elements.’
Employing a technique borrowed from child psychotherapy, Anna Freud gets Marilyn Monroe to play a game. They sit facing one another at a table with a handful of glass marbles in the middle. The analyst waits to see what she will do with them. After a while, Marilyn starts flicking the marbles towards her, one by one, which, from a psychoanalytic point of view, means a desire for sexual contact. Anna’s accelerated course of treatment proves, as far as she can tell, a complete success. At the end of the week, Marilyn resumes filming, the picture is completed and, on 20 November, she takes a plane back to New York.
Miss Anna and Miss Monroe parted on good terms, according to Paula Fichtl, so much so that a few months later a cheque for a considerable sum drawn on Marilyn Monroe’s account arrives at Maresfield Gardens.
Colombo, Ceylon
February 1953
Laurence Olivier’s wife, Vivien Leigh, became a patient of Dr Greenson for a spell in 1953, after panic attacks and fits of depersonalisation had forced her to pull out of location shooting in Ceylon on William Dieterle’s Elephant Walk. Leigh was embroiled in an affair with her co-star Peter Finch, her husband in the film, when she suffered a recurrence of her manic-depressive psychosis. Suddenly the bluish heat of Ceylon’s jungles seemed to saturate her summer dresses, and invade every pore of her skin. She was seized by persecution mania whenever she saw too many brown Sinhalese faces; their looks filled her with something more acute than terror. On camera, she took to striking vampy poses, flirting with Dieterle and stumbling uncharacteristically over her lines. Olivier sent her back to Hollywood.
Greenson was urgently sent for and he saw her for six days running – fifty hours in total, which he billed at $1,500 – but was unable to prevent her foundering before his eyes, although he continued to reassure Paramount that she would be able to return to Ceylon. There was no question of Leigh resuming filming, however, and she ended up going to England to be admitted to a hospital in Surrey.
Seven years later, when he was in the thick of analysing the star of Let’s Make Love, Greenson returned home one summer evening feeling bitterly discouraged. He told his wife how struck he was by the parallels between Vivien and Marilyn’s situations. Both had come to him after breaking down on a film in which their co-star was their lover. He had given Fox exactly the same assurances about Marilyn as he had Paramount about Vivien: that she would be working again in a week. He hadn’t cured either of them.
‘Marilyn isn’t mad, though, is she?’ he asked Hildi.
‘No. Nor are you. But the potential’s there.’
‘What – we could go crazy about each other?’ he joked.
‘I was thinking you could drive each other out of your minds.’
Los Angeles, Beverly Hills
Late August 1960
At one point during the filming of The Misfits, Clark Gable found Marilyn sitting in tears in the make-up trailer. They’d just shot the devastating scene in which Roslyn tries to stop the mustang hunt, which ends with a very brutal shot of her and Gable with the sun at their backs, their bodies bisected by the horizon, as she turns and screams, ‘I hate you’ at him. As she’d said her line, it wasn’t the animal’s suffering she was feeling any more, it was hers. She was in physical pain; she couldn’t tell herself this was just a movie any more, a series of images. Despair had reduced her to a body flayed by the lights. Her image on film, something that once would have done her good, felt like a wound now, as if her skin was being torn off strip by strip. From then on, whenever swarms of photographers would shout at her to turn their way and she’d tilt her head back to keep her face in shadow, she’d feel like that horse, hobbled and cowed by the men’s shouting.
‘“Honey,”’ Gable said to her, quoting their script, ‘“we all got to go some time, reason or no reason. Dying is as natural as living; man who’s afraid to die is too afraid to live, far as I’ve ever seen. So there’s nothing to do but forget it, that’s all. Seems to me.”’
Soon the question on everyone’s mind was ‘Is Marilyn working today?’ Her last film had exhausted her and the wreckage of her love life was piling up. Her affair with Yves Montand was over. Miller, who had written the short story that was the basis for The Misfits in Nevada when he was waiting for his first divorce to come through, now found himself back in the same place as his second marriage was drawing its last breath. Seeing Marilyn in the divorce court in the opening scenes of the movie was agonising for him, like an excruciating dream he couldn’t wake up from. But despite the tension between them, she still often turned to him for help.
Meanwhile Lee Strasberg was flown out for moral support and showed up in the desert dressed as a cowboy in plaid shirt, chaps, boots and spurs. The sight of him in those clothes, as opposed to his usual Marxist priest’s uniform, made Marilyn cry with laughter. But he had no more luck than anyone else in weaning her off the twenty Nembutals she took each day, sometimes pricking the capsules with a pin to speed up the effect. On Saturday, 20 August, the day before Let’s Make Love’s world première at the Crest Theater in Reno, to which Montand and Signoret had been invited, no one could find Marilyn. In the afternoon the Sierras went up in flames. Clouds of black smoke blotted out the sky. Fire-fighting planes flew back and forth, dumping chemicals in a vain attempt to contain the brush fires. The following day the power lines were cut. R
eno was plunged into darkness. The première was cancelled. As darkness fell, with only the eerie white glow of the generator-powered hotel sign for illumination, Marilyn sat on the terrace of the deserted Mapes Hotel drinking champagne with the crew and watching the conflagrations far off in the night.
Filming resumed three days later without her. Cameraman Russ Metty told the producer, Frank Taylor, ‘That’s it . . . the pills. She can’t be photographed. If this is going to go on day after day, we’re finished here.’ On 26 August, Marilyn had to leave the set, not to return until 6 September. The rumour going around was that she had been saved from death only by having her stomach pumped. In the broiling heat, she was evacuated to Los Angeles. She was carried onto the plane wrapped in a wet sheet. Predicting (or hoping) that she would collapse for good this time so that she could be replaced, Huston returned from the airport a relieved man, and headed straight for his usual table at the casino. The producers decided to close down the film for an unspecified period of time.
Marilyn didn’t collapse immediately, however. Instead she checked into the Beverly Hills Hotel and attended a smart dinner party at the home of the director Charles Vidor’s widow. The following evening, Greenson and her physician Hyman Engelberg jointly decided she should be hospitalised. Since United Artists would cover the costs of a private hospital, Marilyn was admitted to a comfortable room in the Westside Hospital on La Cienega Boulevard, and spent ten days there under the name of Mrs Miller. Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra visited. Greenson was at her bedside, day and – at least in part – night.
Marilyn's Last Sessions Page 8