Marilyn's Last Sessions

by Michel Schneider

  ‘Cut!’ Huston called impatiently.

  When Marilyn flashed him a look, he drawled, ‘I’ve seen ’em before.’

  A few days later, they reshot Roslyn and Perce’s scene, and this time Marilyn gave the director the performance he was looking for. It was the high point of the film, Huston enthused. But when he came to collect her that evening at the Holiday Inn, where she was staying with Paula Strasberg, he found her in a terrible state. Her hair was a tangle, her hands and feet were filthy and she was wearing just a short nightgown, which wasn’t any cleaner than the rest of her. She greeted him euphorically, then went into a kind of trance. ‘You see, Marilyn, that’s what drugs do,’ he said sadly. ‘They make you mistake your terror for ecstasy.’ As he walked out, a doctor was looking for a vein in the back of her hand to give her an injection of Amytal.

  ‘When I had to stop filming,’ Huston said later, ‘I knew something terrible was going to happen to her. I had a sort of premonition. She couldn’t save herself and no one could do it for her. Seeing her sleepwalking into the abyss, I thought, If she carries on at the rate she’s going, she’ll be in an institution in two or three years or dead. But the thing I remember most from that time was her innocence. I like the corruption of Hollywood; I like people who know they’re rotten, who know they’ve gone off, like meat. But that never happened to her. There was something about her that could never spoil. One day, I was talking about her to her masseur, Ralph Roberts, the “masseur to the stars”, who’d been an actor as well, and he told me he’d never known anyone else with skin like Marilyn’s. Her flesh was incredibly soft and deep. A miracle, really. You see that on screen . . . it’s all you see, in fact. As a director, you don’t film a body, you’re blinded by the light that streams from it, even in The Misfits when she was a bit puffy. Or as Sartre said one day, “It’s not just light that comes off her, it’s heat. She burns through the screen.”’

  New York, Manhattan

  1959

  Towards the end of 1959, Marilyn struck up closer friendships with writers she admired in New York. Carson McCullers invited her to stay at her house in Nayack, where they were joined by the novelist Isak Dinesen, and had long talks about poetry and literature. The poet Carl Sandburg, whom she met while making Some Like It Hot, often came over to her apartment in Manhattan for extended tête-à-têtes, and she would read out poetry and do impersonations of actors. She and Truman Capote also met up again.

  ‘I want to tell you about something I’m working on,’ he told her one day. ‘Last year I wrote a novel called Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The girl in it – she’s called Holly Golightly – is me. That’s something I learned from my master Flaubert, my secret friend. But she’s you too. I like to think of my novels as memories of memories – I’d like people to remember my characters the way they remember a dream, with that same mixture of vagueness and precision. Shall I tell you the first line? “I am always drawn back to the places where I have lived, the houses and their neighbourhoods.” The narrator is remembering a girl he used to know: a good-time party girl, who drank a bit too much and was a bit crazy, and used to hang out in a bar on Lexington Avenue. She’s one of those girls who don’t belong anywhere or to anyone, least of all to herself. A displaced person, always searching, moving, running away, someone who never feels at home. If anyone asks her what she does, she says, “I go away.” In the novel, she has a card with her name on it and underneath just “Travelling”. Anyway, now it’s going to be made into a movie. Do you like the sound of it?’

  ‘If it was me,’ said Marilyn, ‘I’d say, “I come back.” My travels have always been of the same kind. No matter where I’ve gone or why I’ve gone there, it ends up that I never see anything. Becoming a movie star is like living on a merry-go-round. When you travel you take the merry-go-round with you. You don’t see natives or new scenery. You see chiefly the same press agent, the same sort of interviewers, and the same picture layouts of yourself. The days, the conversations, the faces – they all go by just so they can come back again. Like in those dreams when you think, I’ve already dreamed this. That must be why I wanted to be an actress, so I could travel without going anywhere, and always end up in the same place. Movies are like merry-go-rounds for grown-ups.’

  Marilyn was very keen to play Holly Golightly. She worked up two complete scenes by herself and acted them for Truman, who thought them terrifically good. They spent whole nights rehearsing, drinking White Angels and breaking into ‘Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend’, her song in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. But Hollywood had different plans for the novel’s heroine and ended up choosing the brown-haired, utterly unsensual Audrey Hepburn instead. ‘Marilyn would have been absolutely marvellous in the role,’ Capote said afterwards, ‘but Paramount double-crossed me in every conceivable way.’ He was disgusted by the studio’s adaptation, which changed the whole point of his novel. Instead of reminiscing about a girl he’s lost, the film’s narrator convinces Holly to stay in New York ‘because that town and her belonged together for ever’. In the novel, Holly says the opposite, ‘I love New York, even though it isn’t mine, the way something has to be, a tree or a street or a house, something, anyway, that belongs to me because I belong to it’ – the feeling Capote had heard his double, his white angel, express.

  Los Angeles, Sunset Strip

  Late September 1960

  In analysis with Greenson for eight months, Marilyn had been left by Yves Montand. She wanted to love, but didn’t know whom to love. She phoned André de Dienes, and poured out a litany of complaint. Teasingly, he suggested that she come over to his place in the Hills, where he had a ‘cure for all ills’. ‘Leave all your cares behind and come to hear about my cure,’ he told her. She did not come that day, but a few weeks later a mysterious lady got out from a taxicab at the bottom of his driveway. Marilyn was so bundled up in a scarf, dark sunglasses, jeans and a coat that André didn’t recognise her until she walked up to the garage, where he was doing some gardening. She took off her sunglasses when she was ten feet away and he finally recognised her. What on earth had happened to his lovely, laughing-all-the-time Norma Jeane? How could she look so unglamorous, so unhappy? She said she had come to find out what his ‘cure for all ills’ was.

  ‘What’s bothering you?’

  ‘I didn’t sleep all night.’

  ‘Did you drink much coffee yesterday?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you broke?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you worried about many things?’

  ‘Yes, quite a few things! I’m being swindled.’

  ‘Well, that’s cause number one for sleeplessness. You’re angry because you feel used. Are you lonesome? Tell me the truth, Marilyn, the absolute truth.’

  She didn’t answer.

  ‘When did you last make love? When did you have your last orgasm?’

  ‘It’s been weeks and weeks. I don’t care.’

  André offered to fix her a cocktail. She was about to accept when they were interrupted by another visitor. As de Dienes later wrote, ‘A young beautiful model came to see me, sent by the model agent. In great contrast to Marilyn’s disguise that did not show any of her sex appeal, the model wore a skin-tight pink silk dress to emphasise her sexy contour and dainty high-heeled shoes, her long hair flowing down on her shoulders splendidly. The young lady put on her best smile and all her charms as she entered my house, and as she was walking through the long corridor, I could see she was imitating the famous Marilyn Monroe walk! For a few seconds the entire event became like an incredibly ironical confrontation with Fate’s trickery! The model, who was willing to pose nude for fifty dollars, was sexier than Marilyn!’

  Marilyn called a cab, and disappeared into the bathroom until it arrived. As André helped her into the cab she turned to him, and asked what the ‘cure for all ills’ was. Too embarrassed to talk about it in front of the driver, he asked her to wait for a few seconds, dashed into his office and scribbled something on a b
it of paper, then gave it to her as the cab set off. ‘Sex. With me,’ Marilyn read.

  ‘The idiot,’ she said. ‘The real cure is death.’

  Then she crumpled up the bit of paper and threw it out of the window into the evening dust blowing across the steep hill leading down to the Sunset Strip.

  Los Angeles, Westwood Village

  November 1960

  The last evening in Reno had been thick with pathos. Drunk on bourbon, Marilyn had said, ‘I am trying to find myself as a person. Millions of people live their entire lives without finding themselves. The best way for me to find myself as a person is to prove to myself I am an actress.’ On 4 November, in Hollywood, Huston shot a final retake of The Misfits’ happy ending, in which Marilyn and Gable’s characters head off for a life together, and with that the film was finally finished, forty days behind schedule. The following weekend Marilyn and Arthur Miller left for New York on separate flights. She kept the apartment on East 57th Street while he moved into the Adams Hotel on East 86th.

  She resumed her daily sessions with Marianne Kris and spent the rest of her time going over the black and white contact sheets of the photographs Henri Cartier-Bresson, Inge Morath and Eve Arnold had taken during the filming of The Misfits. She scratched out, with a red cross, all the photos that included Arthur. Twelve days later, when she heard Clark Gable had died, Marilyn said nothing to Kris about it. It was only a few weeks later when she got back to Los Angeles that she rushed to Greenson’s office in Beverly Hills and said: ‘You can’t believe how shattered I’ve been since Gable died. In the kissing scenes on The Misfits, I kissed him with real affection. I loved his lips, the way his moustache tickled when he turned away from the camera. I didn’t want to go to bed with him, but I wanted him to know how much I liked and appreciated him. When I came back from a day off the set, he patted my ass and told me if I didn’t behave myself he would give me a good spanking. I looked him in the eye and said, “Don’t tempt me.” He burst out laughing so hard he was tearing up. Those bastards at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences,’ she stressed the words ironically, ‘didn’t even give him an Oscar for Gone with the Wind. I saw that first when I was about thirteen. I have never seen a man who was as romantic as he was in that picture. It was different when I got to know him. Then I wanted him to be my father. I wouldn’t care if he spanked me as long as he made up for it by hugging me and telling me I was Daddy’s little girl and he loved me. Of course you’re going to say that’s a classic Oedipal fantasy.’ Greenson said nothing, merely stroked his moustache.

  ‘The weirdest thing,’ Marilyn continued, ‘is that I dreamed about him a few days ago. I was sitting on Clark Gable’s lap with his arms around me. He said, “They want me to do a Gone with the Wind sequel. Maybe I will if you will be my Scarlett.” I woke up crying. They called him “King” on set. What respect and deference he had from the actors and crew, even Huston. Some day I hope I’ll be treated like that. He was Mr Gable to everybody on the set, but he made me call him Clark. One day he told me that we had something very important and secret in common. His mother had died when he was six months old.’

  Shortly afterwards, during a very troubled session, Marilyn gazed off into the distance with dilated pupils and said in the sort of light, almost playful, voice you’d use to tell a fairy tale to a child, ‘When I was a little girl I would pretend I was Alice in Wonderland looking into a mirror, wondering what I could see. Was that really me? Who was that staring back at me? Could it be someone pretending to be me? I would dance around, make faces, just to see if that little girl in the mirror would do the same. I suppose every kid’s imagination takes over. The looking glass can be magical, like acting, in a strange way. Especially when you’re pretending to be someone other than yourself. This did happen when I put on my mom’s clothes, tried to fix my hair as she did and powder my face with her big powder puff, and, oh, yes, her red rouge and lipstick and eye shadow. I’m sure I looked like a clown, not sexy, because people couldn’t stop laughing. I started crying.

  ‘I always had to be dragged out of my seat when I went to the pictures. I wondered, Are the movies a make-believe land, just an illusion? Those huge images up there on the screen in the dark theatre were bliss – they put me in a trance. But the screen was always a mirror. Who is that looking back at me? I’d think. Which is really me? The little girl in the darkness, or the woman up there in the silver light? Am I her reflection?’

  Hollywood, Doheny Drive

  Autumn 1960

  Images are a skin, hard and cold. Under hers, Marilyn was coming to pieces again. When she didn’t know who to be any more, she tried to find the answer in a man’s eyes. It was a trade: with your eyes, hands, penis, tell me I exist, tell me I’ve got a soul, and I’ll let you have my body, in the flesh or in a photograph.

  One day in the autumn she again showed up at the house of her on-off lover André de Dienes, dressed in a simple, elegant black suit. André thought she seemed calm, even sad. She kissed him, and said, ‘André, take pictures of me again! Tonight, and tomorrow too . . . I’ll stay with you.’

  Not tempted by the offer, he walked her home, a few blocks away. Her apartment was full of partly packed suitcases and empty movers’ boxes, with two large wardrobe trunks in a corner. She was using the boxes as tables, one for vodka cocktails, another for a lamp, portable record-player, telephone and a vase of yellow roses. Rough wooden cases with a jumble of books on top of them lined one wall. André liked the room, its air of a moonlight flit. Holly Golightly’s flat, he thought.

  But Marilyn was unhappy – she felt she didn’t belong anywhere any more. As the photographer later remembered, there was ‘the world’s most publicised, most glamorous, most adulated beauty, in that musty-smelling old lousy apartment; she was alone and had no place to go’. He asked her about the farm she had bought in Connecticut, where she’d lived with Arthur Miller. ‘Wasn’t that your home?’ he asked.

  She answered that she had given it to Arthur.

  ‘Are you crazy?’ he shouted. ‘Are you crazy? You gave away the only home you ever owned! Having a home is the most important thing in life, and you let yourself be out in nowhere, due to your stupidity, to your damned kind heart! Oh, Norma Jeane, what are you doing to yourself?’

  She looked at him, then poured champagne from a half-empty bottle into two glasses.

  The telephone rang, and she let it go for a long time before picking up. As she listened, and answered in a low, monotonous voice, her expression turned sad, and she wiped away tears. De Dienes went into the bathroom, and when he returned he heard Marilyn’s last few words: ‘Yes, I’m coming! I’ll be there tomorrow.’ Then she hung up the receiver and turned to him, saying, ‘André, please go home, I have to go back to New York tomorrow.’

  Halfway down the street, overcome with regret, he turned round and ran back to her. She was on the phone again, sitting in the same place, crying. He knelt down in front of her. ‘Come back. Let’s go to my house right now. I’ll take photos like nothing you’ve ever seen. Please, Norma Jeane, don’t go to New York.’

  ‘No, they’re waiting for me out east.’

  When he rang next morning, Marilyn had left.

  New York, YMCA, West 34th Street

  Winter 1960

  Marilyn flew to New York, where she met up with W. J. Weatherby, an English journalist she had got to know in Reno while making The Misfits. They had arranged to meet in a bar on Eighth Avenue. It was an icy winter’s day, and Weatherby wasn’t sure she’d come. She was the one who’d wanted to see him, but why should she stick to the plan if she was in a hole? It wasn’t as though he were a close friend or psychiatrist. He waited for an hour. She didn’t appear. He returned to the YMCA on West 34th Street and had just reached his room when the phone rang. ‘Apologies, apologies, apologies. I was sleeping. I took some pills. Too many. Will you forgive me?’

  The journalist had forgotten he’d told her where he was staying.

  ‘Can
we still meet?’ she asked anxiously. ‘Or are you too tired?’

  ‘No. Not really.’

  During the year they’d known each other, the journalist had come to understand that, for all her love of show, there was only one thing Marilyn really wanted: to hide. She had a unique ability to disappear even when she was with you, to be whoever people wanted her to be while keeping her real self profoundly hidden.

  A quarter of an hour later they met. She had made herself up and was very lively at first. He figured she was putting on a performance to hide her real feelings. He wished she trusted him enough not to bother, but thought perhaps she was afraid of breaking down.

  Somehow Yves Montand and Simone Signoret’s names came up.

  ‘They certainly seem to have an understanding,’ she said. ‘He can flirt and then go back. When I was interested in my husband, I wasn’t interested in anyone else.’

  The journalist remembered Miller telling him about her affair with Montand, but he still felt she was speaking the truth. Perhaps the marriage was over by then, and she hadn’t felt like his wife any more.

  ‘Is it the same with a movie?’

  ‘The movies are like love, you know. When you’re not looking for it, all kinds of opportunities come your way. If you run after it, you get nothing. That’s the story of my life. Being an actress has never been as much fun as dreaming of being one, and I’ve never been offered so many star roles as when I was on the verge of giving up. You’ve got a choice: be a slave of the studios or an untouchable celebrity. I can’t just give up being a screen idol.’