‘I’m devoted to you,’ Greenson said, in a loud voice, almost a shout, as Marilyn sat down for her second session of the day at his practice – he’d insisted they meet there rather than at her house. ‘I’ll do anything I can to alleviate your suffering, you know that, but you simply have to finish this film. I gave them my word. The studio has agreed to renegotiate your contract into a million-dollar deal: half a million for this picture, plus a bonus if it’s completed to the new schedule, and another half-million or more for a new musical. It’s incredible. Fox is agreeing to revert to the Nunnally Johnson script you liked and, for good measure, to replace George Cukor with a director vetted by you. We’ve won.’
‘I can’t do it. And you can’t help me either. Acting is not a problem I need to solve. It’s the only solution I’ve got to my other problems. Being an actress isn’t the cause of my panic, it’s the only remedy I’ve got, and, I tell you, all the analysis in the world won’t help now. I’m all the way down a dead end, like that house you made me buy.’
‘All your life your basic problem has been rejection,’ Greenson protested. ‘But now the studio’s not confirming your fantasy any more. And I want to free you of your fear of abandonment, or at least allow you to control it.’
‘Every actor struggles with shyness more than anyone can imagine, you know. There is a censor inside us that says, “To what degree do we let go?” Like a child playing. I guess people think we just go out there and, you know, that’s all we do. Just do it. But it’s a real struggle. I’m one of the world’s most self-conscious people. I really have to struggle. An actor is not a machine, no matter how much they want to say you are. Creativity has got to start with humanity, and when you’re a human being, you feel, you suffer. You’re gay, you’re sick, you’re nervous or whatever it is. Like any creative human being, I would like a bit more control so that it would be a little easier for me when the director says “Give me one tear, right now”, to make a tear pop out. Once there were two tears because I thought, How dare he? You need anxiety, but now it’s too much, it’s like I’m under a black shroud. I can’t break out of it.’
Her voice faded away. After a while, she broke the silence: ‘It reminds me of a couple of films I made ten years ago. I’ve never had so many problems with parts. Michael Chekhov said when he coached me, ‘Just thinking about the character, analysing it mentally, won’t allow you to play it, to transform yourself into another person. Your rational mind will make you passive and distant. But if you develop your imaginary body, if you empty yourself and allow yourself to be possessed by the other person, your desires and feelings will allow you to act them out.’ But that’s just what I was afraid of: becoming another person.
‘The anxiety’s always been there, you know,’ she said more fervently. ‘I suffered agonies on Clash by Night, when I was starting out. I almost died of fear at the thought of dealing with Barbara Stanwyck and Fritz Lang – him most of all. He’d barred Natasha Lytess from the set and I couldn’t act without having her close by. On the next one, Don’t Bother to Knock, I threw up before every scene, like now. I had to play another baby-sitter, but she wasn’t like me. She was a straight portrait of my mother, my crazy, impossible mother. I covered up my mother’s existence back then. I’d tell people she was dead so I wouldn’t have to tell them she was insane. That picture gave me the money to put her in a clinic. My movies have helped me survive, some of them have at least, and I guess playing a woman who couldn’t look after a little girl helped me look after my mother in a way. It made me sick, having to relive all that stuff, though. They call it stage fright, but it wasn’t for me, it was stage terror. The director was called Baker, like my mother. But don’t tell Dr Freud that,’ she said, with a stifled laugh. ‘He’d despise me even more than Fritz Lang did. I was twenty-five and it was my first big part. After I’d read the script, I ran to Natasha’s in the middle of the night literally shaking with fear. We worked together for two days and nights, optimistic one minute, the next in a total panic. I still remember what my character Nell said to Richard Widmark: “I’ll be whatever you want me to be. I’ll be yours. Haven’t you ever felt that if you let somebody leave, you’ll be lost, you won’t know where to go because you haven’t got anyone to put in their place?”’
Marilyn fell silent.
‘Who do you belong to now?’ asked Greenson.
‘Whoever wants to have a piece of me. Men, producers, the public. So many people have taken a part of me and changed it, you know: Grace McKee my hair, Fred Karger my teeth, Johnny Hyde my nose and my cheeks, Ben Lyon my name . . . I loved it. You can’t imagine how much I loved it. The greatest experience in my life was in the winter of 1954. It was during my Korean tour—’
‘I’ve seen footage of it,’ Greenson cut in. ‘NBC showed it a few months ago. Can you say who you belong to?’
Marilyn was silent, remembering ‘Marilyn’ singing for seventeen thousand whistling, shouting soldiers without a trace of her usual terror. She’d started by visiting the wounded, then gone to the 45th Division and put on ten shows in sub-zero temperatures. It had snowed, but she wore only a figure-hugging, sleeveless, sparkling purple silk dress with no underwear. The GIs hadn’t seen a woman for months. They went crazy, virtually devouring her limb from limb. To prevent a riot, she’d toned down a Gershwin song from ‘do it again’ to ‘kiss me again’. She’d sung ‘Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend’ for those poor saps who were getting shot up for a pittance, then tried to make up for it with a cute dance. She knew they’d like that. Once she’d had to be whisked off stage in a helicopter. Two soldiers had held her by the legs as she’d hung out of the door, blowing kisses to the mass of men below, all yelling her name.
‘Who do you belong to now?’ the analyst asked again.
‘Fear.’
‘Fear of what? Being alone?’
‘Alone? Some days I’m suffocated by a crew of forty people shouting the same thing at me over and over: “Take”, “Cut”, “First take, thirteenth take, twenty-fifth take”… I don’t know, really. That word, “take” – I find it kind of terrifying and re -assuring at the same time. It’s strange. It makes me feel there’s somebody inside me they’re taking, that at least I’m something. They take me, then they stop filming, but at least I was there in the viewfinder for a minute. At least I existed. Who do I belong to? My audience, the whole world, not because I’m talented or even beautiful, but because I’ve never belonged to anyone or anything. If that’s the way it is, how can you not say yourself, “I belong to anyone who wants a piece of me”?’
‘And do you belong anywhere?’
‘I felt lost on the filming of Don’t Bother to Knock. I had three addresses in as many months, two in West Hollywood, then a suite in the Bel Air Hotel in Stone Canyon, but nothing that made me feel I was at home. I was trying to become a good actress and a good person. But I didn’t have you then . . . Sometimes I felt strong, but I had to go down very deep to find that feeling and it was hard bringing it up to the surface. Nothing’s ever been easy. Nothing ever is easy, but it was less easy then than it is now. I couldn’t talk about my past. It was too painful. I just wanted to forget.’
‘To be able to forget something, you have to revisit it.’
‘Relive it, you mean.’
‘What did you want to relive at Kennedy’s gala?’
‘No, that wasn’t it. I was honoured when they asked me to appear at the president’s birthday celebrations in Madison Square Garden. There was a hush over the whole place when I came on to sing “Happy Birthday”, like if I had been wearing a slip I would have thought it was showing, or something. I thought, Oh, my gosh, what if no sound comes out? A hush like that from the people warms me. It’s sort of like an embrace. Then you think, By God, I’ll sing this song if it’s the last thing I ever do. And for all the people. Because I remember when I turned to the microphone I looked all the way up and back, and I thought, That’s where I’d be, way up there under one of those rafte
rs, close to the ceiling, after I paid my two dollars to come into the place.’
‘Now you have to forget and start over. Go back to the film.’
‘People have said I’m finished, that this is the end for me. You know, it might be a kind of relief to be finished. It’s sort of like, I don’t know, what kind of a yard dash you’re running, but then you’re at the finish line and you sort of see you’ve made it! But you never do. Cut! Let’s go again! You always have to start all over again. Fucking Cukor. He can go fuck himself!’
Hollywood, Warner Bros Studios
December 1965
Fox had sunk two million into Something’s Got to Give. ‘The poor dear has finally gone round the bend,’ Cukor told a columnist. ‘The sad thing is, the little work we do have is no good . . . I think she’s finished.’ But Cukor had an idea how to get out of the stalemate – turn the whole débâcle into a tragicomedy. Marilyn, with her abusive demands and shameless manipulation, would play the deranged actress. It would be a classic Hollywood tale of beleaguered producers, interfering psychoanalysts and a vampire acting coach who controls every move the fragile star makes, ending in high melodrama. In the last reel Marilyn would succumb to the death and madness she was always in awe of, or at least gave the impression of being.
Cukor never got the chance to make this film about Marilyn with her as the star, but two years after she died, he returned to the subject of powerful female leads with portraits of women such as the dancer Isadora Duncan and the silent movie star Tallulah Bankhead. Remembering his travails on Something’s Got to Give, he imagined a movie about an actress losing her grip, in the style of Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard or Mankiewicz’s All About Eve. Like him, both directors had worked with Marilyn, and, in an act of sweet revenge on such hated rivals, he liked the idea of shooting a noir in Technicolor about Marilyn’s final days. It would be his last, most beautiful film, which other studios besides Fox might go for, now Marilyn had become a myth. He even had a choice of titles: Lost In the City of Angels, or A Star Dies, a companion piece to his 1954 movie, A Star Is Born, in which Judy Garland played the troubled actress who was more interested in staying up all night than sweating it out under the lights on set all day. He envisaged it as a movie about the movie that could never be made. It would not only show the other side of the screen, the stupid, cruel inner workings of the studios, but also what lies behind a movie star’s public face, the madness of someone desperately searching for an image of something she could actually embody.
He had no qualms in admitting it would also be his way of getting his revenge on her, because he had resented their altercations intensely. She had constantly changed scenes and lines during filming. Under Greenson’s tireless supervision, the screenwriters had had to insert takes, change the order of scenes, put in new material. Paula Strasberg’s involvement in every take of every scene drove him especially insane. As far as he was concerned, the Actors Studio’s Method was pretentious nonsense and he firmly believed the director should retain all his traditional prerogatives. Whenever he had said ‘Cut!’ after a shot, Marilyn would turn to Paula – never him – to ask if it was all right. They’d go off into a corner and have an unbelievably intense discussion that would sometimes end in a favourable verdict, but more often in Marilyn saying, ‘No, it’s no good! Let’s do another!’ Dean Martin, meanwhile, would be off in some corner taking out his frustration on his golf clubs. Strasberg, Greenson, Henry Weinstein – how many people exactly did they think should be arguing over the final cut with him?
But he’d remained courteous throughout. If Marilyn said ‘Let’s do another’ once too often, he’d just say ‘Of course, darling’, call out ‘Last one, Marilyn’, and do four or five takes without any film in the camera. He and his assistant, Gene Allen, would then watch the rushes in private and come out to find Marilyn waiting anxiously at the door. ‘How was it?’ she’d ask – Cukor once turned to Allen and whispered, ‘Meaning: how was I?’ – and he’d always reassure her with a charming smile, ‘Splendid, Marilyn, splendid.’ After the last day of shooting he said publicly, ‘The studio has given in to her on everything. There’s a certain ruthlessness about all of her actions. She pretended to be nice to me. I’m very sorry to see her this way, fighting ghosts. Even her lawyer, Mickey Rudin, can’t take any more. She’s had enough herself. I think this is the end of her career.’
Two years after her death, he realised that what he’d actually foreseen was the end of Marilyn rather than of her career. So now he wanted to re-create the incredible, involuntary force of her performances; her almost unbearable presence on screen in Something’s Got to Give, despite her being so absent on set, even when she was physically there. It was completely hypnotic, the way she seemed to move across the screen in slow-motion, her eyes, which were what made her so beautiful, virtually expressionless. He’d put himself in the movie as the patient, brilliant director he’d found it so difficult to be in reality. It would be a comedy with tragic overtones. Maybe he should call it The Only Thing That Counts Is What’s On Screen. He kept changing his mind, though, and in the end, when people started accusing Greenson of being in a conspiracy to murder Marilyn, he gave up. ‘It’s all too close to the bone,’ he told Hedda Hopper, the Hollywood gossip columnist. ‘There’re too many powerful vested interests. And too much love swirling around.’
On the last day of his life, 24 January 1983, when he was talking to a friend, George Cukor mentioned Something’s Got to Give: ‘It was a dirty business,’ he said. ‘That was the worst rejection she ever had to take. When it came down to it, you know, she was just too innocent.’
New York, Eighth Avenue
Mid-June 1962
Within weeks of being fired, Marilyn was doing major interviews and photo-shoots with Life, Vogue and Cosmopolitan, counterattacking with the only thing she had ever known how to exploit: her image. A photo of her naked in the swimming pool appeared on the cover of Life on 22 June. Whether you think of her as a glittering star or a faded rag doll in the last days of her life depends on whose impressions you listen to, the photographers or the journalists. Two decades later, the photographer Bert Stern described her in euphoric terms as strong and free: ‘She had the power. She was the wind, that comet shape that Blake draws blowing around a sacred figure. She was the light, and the goddess, and the moon. The space and the dream, the mystery and the danger. But everything else all together too, including Hollywood, and the girl next door that every guy wants to marry.’ The journalist Richard Meryman, however, who interviewed her for Life, was struck ‘by how pasty her skin was – pasty and lifeless-looking. There was not much health in that skin. It wasn’t white and it wasn’t grey. It was a little bit coarse, lifeless. It looked like skin that had had make-up on it for a long, long time. She looked terrific, but when you really studied that face, it was kind of cardboardy. Her hair was lifeless, had no body to it, like hair that had been primped and heated and blown a thousand times.’ A permanent, as they say. The only part of her that couldn’t die because it was already dead.
Discouraged by the turn of events since he’d come back from Europe, Greenson wrote to a friend, Lucille Ostrow, that he felt his failure as a personal affront. To come to Marilyn’s aid, he said plaintively, he had sacrificed not only his holidays, but also time in New York, when he was supposed to meet Leo Rosten. ‘I’ve given up all my objectives and interests, and she is thrilled to be free of the film that was boring her. She’s extremely well. Now I’m the one who’s depressed, who feels alone and abandoned.’ Greenson devoted every working hour to his ‘favourite schizophrenic’. Everyone who’d worked on the movie was scathing, however. The screenwriter Walter Bernstein told anyone who’d listen that Greenson had wrapped Marilyn up in a cocoon: ‘She has become an investment for him, and not just a financial one. He is not taking care of her; he’s manufacturing her illness. It’s become vital for him and various others that she be regarded as sick, dependent and at a loss. There is something sinister a
bout this psychoanalyst who exerts an insane influence over her.’
On the Monday after she was fired, Marilyn left for New York. She saw nobody there, except W. J. Weatherby, whom she’d met up with now and then over the last two years. They had become close, if that was the word. She always appeared in disguise, wearing a headscarf, baggy blouse, loose trousers and no make-up. The journalist was not particularly susceptible to the narcissistic aspects of her beauty; he thought of himself as more interested in what lay behind the mask. He was particularly struck by a quality he tried to define by focusing on the word ‘screen’. The image she projected of herself was a screen, he thought, an ecstatic refraction of certain inner qualities that masked a profound confusion.
They used to meet in a bar on Eighth Avenue, a joint filled with silent drinkers who liked a generous measure – not the kind of place you’d expect to run into a Hollywood movie star. Once, Weatherby chose a booth at the back in the shadows. After half an hour, he had begun to think she wasn’t coming when he heard a woman’s voice behind him, ‘A dollar for your thoughts.’
‘Not worth it,’ he replied.
Marilyn had a glass in each hand. Her old pallor was overlaid with another layer, which made her more indecipherable.
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