Marilyn's Last Sessions

by Michel Schneider

  Mankiewicz thought of cinema as an essentially verbal art. His motto was ‘Pictures will talk’. He didn’t like exteriors or films that revolved around actors’ performances. He divided directors into two categories: the ones who manipulated images and the ones who manipulated meaning. He considered himself the latter, someone who turns to images only after conceiving of a film in terms of dialogue, and searches for truth through words rather than under an actor’s skin. Despite his intensely intimate engagement with images in all his films, he had no time for spectacle. ‘There’s nothing to see in a film, any more than there is in a person,’ he was fond of saying.

  Psychoanalysis overtly inspired his directing technique. To prepare his actors, he’d encourage them to confide in him for months prior to filming, to talk about their childhood and relive their memories in order to break down their inhibitions. Just after the war, he saw the same analyst as Ralph Greenson, Otto Fenichel, one of the original Freudians, who died prematurely at the age of forty-eight in 1946. Years later, long after the summer of 1962, he rang Greenson and asked if they could meet. They had run into each other a few times at parties in the interim but they weren’t close, or ever likely to be. He said that after the death of ‘the sad blonde’, as he called her, he needed to talk to the person who had treated her so he could find out ‘everything about Marilyn’. He hadn’t felt up to calling him immediately after her death, but now he felt that enough time had passed. They met in an anonymous diner on Sunset Boulevard.

  ‘The situation was a simple one: Eve Harrington was about to turn into Margot Channing,’ Greenson began, referring to the characters in All About Eve.

  ‘That’s not it,’ replied the director. ‘Marilyn wasn’t the ambitious starlet devouring everything in her path, or the egocentric star who won’t quit the stage. She was always Miss Caswell, the naïve beginner who understands the rules of the game, but refuses to checkmate anyone. When I chose her for the part, she was the loneliest person I had ever met. We filmed the exteriors in San Francisco, and for three weeks, or however long it was, we’d see her go off every day to eat on her own in a diner or somewhere. We always asked her to join us, and she’d always be happy to, but she never understood that we thought of her as one of us. She wasn’t a solitary type, she was just profoundly alone.’

  ‘Actors are always alone,’ Greenson said. ‘I’ve analysed my fair share so I think I have a working knowledge of the subject. They have a mass of parts and characters and ghosts in their heads, but on the outside they’re completely alone. They need a script and a director to give meaning and shape to their inner worlds.’

  ‘Yes, but Marilyn was very different from those actors who want to think aloud with their lines, who want to express themselves when all they need to do is make us hear the words that have been put in their mouth. I’ve never understood that strange process whereby a body and a voice, which is what an actor is, suddenly thinks it’s a mind. For God’s sake, when will the pianos realise they haven’t written the concerto? Why does an actress suddenly think she’s speaking her words, expressing her thoughts? Anyway, Marilyn never fell into that trap. She knew instinctively that wasn’t right, and all her years of religious instruction in Strasberg’s Method couldn’t change that.’

  Mankiewicz was starting to sound bitter, almost malicious. Clearly he needed to speak about the dead woman, even more than Greenson, who maintained a distracted, almost bored, silence.

  ‘I’ll tell you something,’ Mankiewicz went on. ‘When she projected an image of herself, she was trying to lose herself in it, to shrug off her real self like a piece of clothing in the hands of someone chasing her, like one of those heroines in the schlocky thrillers that were all the rage when I was starting out. She was constantly exposing her self, not just her body, to the public – to you, to me – in some terrible, deadly game. When I see her image on screen, it always seems like an over-exposed photograph, the light pouring off her face so you almost can’t see it. Her Medusa face – it was a screen for us to project our desires on, but never to see behind, only we never realised that.’

  ‘By the end, you know, she was more than just the sexual icon for which she was famous,’ Greenson stated. ‘To a certain degree – thanks to me, I think it’s fair to say – she had learned how to start speaking for herself.’

  ‘Right. How many sessions did it take you to discover that for Marilyn? I’ll tell you a story. When we were filming All About Eve, I bumped into her one day in the Pickwick bookshop in Beverly Hills. She was often in there, leafing through the books and buying a few, although she’d hardly ever finish them. She read with the unmethodical voracity of anyone who’s grown up in a house without books, who is ashamed at the vastness of what they’ll never know. Anyway, next day on set, I saw she was reading Rilke. I complimented her on her choice and asked what drew her to him. “The terror,” she said. “Rilke says beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror. I don’t know if I really understand that, but I like the idea.” A few days later, she gave me a book of Rilke’s poetry. She loved giving presents, like someone who’s never been given many. When I remember the strange, frozen look she sometimes had in her eyes, its denial of even the possibility of desire, I think of it as a reflection of terror.’

  What a blowhard, Greenson thought. All his endless digressions! It’s like one of his movies, a digression within a digression.

  ‘As you may have suspected,’ Mankiewicz suddenly said, ‘I didn’t really come here to speak to you about Marilyn. What interests me, as far as you two are concerned, is the power, the money, the recognition – what was the deal with them? Human relations always have their share of manipulation. We manipulate others and, in the end, we manipulate ourselves, like inveterate gamblers who play to lose, who want their own destruction. I’m fascinated by this drive in women. I wish there were more parts for actresses in general. You play with women, Dr Greenson, the way other people play backgammon or poker, and yet you think of yourself as a chess player.’

  The analyst said nothing.

  Mankiewicz got up abruptly and left the diner, as if he were breaking off with a lover who would never understand him. He decided to go for a walk before driving home. That evening, Los Angeles seemed to reveal itself for what it was more clearly than it had ever done before. The streets and avenues were lined with buildings in every conceivable architectural style – Mexican farms, Polynesian huts, Côte d’Azur villas, Egyptian or Japanese temples, Swiss chalets, Elizabethan thatched cottages – like something out of a giant prop house or bric-à-brac store. With its semblances of thoroughfares, its mocked-up houses, LA was a film set gesturing at a city. He could almost hear the director calling out ‘Action’ in a tired voice, as people passed each other, like actors between takes. It wasn’t fake, because it wasn’t even notionally concerned with the truth. All it was was a plausible backdrop for a scene in a movie set in Hollywood. A crime film, most likely. Flashing lights, cars with ‘LAPD’ on their panels, the camera zooming in on a low building halfway up a hillside and stopping on the word ‘MOTEL’, with one letter missing, picked out in scarlet neon against the blue night.

  Mankiewicz thought of a line from Suddenly Last Summer: ‘the moment death takes over the movie’. He had experienced that in August 1962, when death took over the film Marilyn starred in. Reaching the end of Vine Street he started to climb Pinyon Canyon, and dark silhouettes of palm trees began to materialise in the pale light, their sparse high branches gradually fading from mauve to black. They ran like a garland along the low hills, almost grotesquely beautiful. Even nature imitates the neon of a diner here, Mankiewicz thought. This town is just a mask the desert’s invented for itself. I don’t like exteriors. I’m not going to make movies any more.

  Bel Air

  Late June 1962

  While he was working for Vogue, Bert Stern spent two nights at the Bel Air Hotel taking pictures of Marilyn. She was staying in a secluded bungalow, number ninety-six. Discarded liquor bottles, empty
film cartons and pairs of shoes littered the bedroom floor, as his strobe lights flashed and an Everly Brothers record played in the background. On the second night they went on past midnight. Marilyn had been posing naked in bed for hours, drinking Dom Pérignon spiked with one-hundred-proof vodka. At one point she pulled back the sheet to show Stern her breasts and said, ‘What do you reckon? Not bad for thirty-six.’ He shot her leaning over the bed looking for a champagne bottle on the floor. It seemed unreal, a dream come true for someone like him, who, from the age of thirteen, had fantasised about finding a woman like this, who would do anything he desired.

  Finally, she lay still under the sheets utterly passive and vulnerable. He sat down beside her. Her eyes were shut but her breathing was reassuringly regular. He kissed her and, despite hearing a vague ‘No’, slid his hand under the sheet and touched her. She didn’t resist. He told himself she wanted to make love. But at the last moment he stopped. She opened her eyes a little. ‘Where have you been so long?’ she asked dreamily, then fell asleep. Stern was sure she wasn’t talking to him.

  Bert Stern’s photos were published under the title ‘Marilyn Monroe: The Complete Last Sitting’. He had brought ribbons, necklaces, veils, scarves and champagne glasses to the shoot, all manner of props to catch and reflect the light, but he was thrilled when Marilyn took far more of the initiative than he’d hoped, and acted as his partner rather than simply as an object for him to photograph. After the first two hours, which he spent suggesting shots from the catalogue of images in his head, she chose the scenarios she wanted and acted them out without words. From then on, they didn’t talk; he, or rather they, took shots of Marilyn. Stern had photographed countless women, but she was exceptional. She entered into the process so completely that all he had to do was capture her on film.

  He took 2,571 pictures, mainly nudes, some of them, the most beautiful, in black and white. All of them contain a secret, something masked that no one will ever uncover. The truth is never naked; it never emerges fully into the light. We see Marilyn draped in brightly coloured scarves with a corner between her teeth; in black woollen shawls and trashy necklaces; in evening dresses and chinchilla fur stoles with her hair up in a chignon; almost unrecognisable in a black wig, her arms dangling like those of a dazed child – and in every shot, she challenges the camera with an oblique, reserved look that seems to come from below or far away. Here I am, it says. It’s me at last. Can you handle it? The most moving shots show her holding a towel over her left breast and rubbing it against her cheek, her head bent, like a child nuzzling its blanket. Her stomach is bare, revealing a big horizontal scar just above her hip. The photos are in black and white, and you can almost hear her singing ‘That Old Black Magic’, her song in Bus Stop, in her head.

  She had copied out a sentence from Freud’s Civilisation and Its Discontents in her diary: ‘We are never so defenceless against suffering as when we love, never so helplessly unhappy as when we lose our loved object or its love.’ In the margin she had added, ‘Loving someone means giving them the power to kill you.’

  ‘Sometimes,’ Stern wrote later, ‘when something is perfect in every last detail, it’s not beautiful any more. It’s overwhelming, terrifying. To get over this fear, we think no one could be this perfect, but Marilyn made you want her because of her imperfections and fragility, the sudden changes in her body and face from moment to moment and in different lighting. Her lips aren’t perfect . . . so? That’s what makes you want to kiss them.’

  Santa Monica Beach

  29 June–1 July 1962

  Barris’s Cosmopolitan photographs show no mottling of Marilyn’s skin; neither do Bert Stern’s for Vogue taken a week earlier. She had told Barris, ‘I don’t care about age. I like the view from up here. I can see the future opening up and it’s mine as much as any woman’s.’ But when she sat in Stern’s red Thunderbird outside Schwab’s Drugstore and went over his photographs from the Bel Air Hotel, she took out a hairpin and scratched out every colour transparency that struck her as ‘too Marilyn’. ‘I was drunk and naked,’ she told Greenson afterwards. ‘But that’s not what I minded. It was the schmaltzy music I could hear when I looked at them.’

  Marilyn had a month to live. Greenson had no real idea what to do. He continued to confide in Anna Freud, who wrote to him on 2 July: ‘Dear colleague and friend, I saw your patient has been remiss, late on set and even absent. I am surprised by what is happening to both of you. From what I understand from Marianne Kris, she must have many good qualities but she is clearly far from being an ideal analytic patient.’

  Marilyn talked to Joan Greenson a lot on the phone over the next few days, always seeming distracted. Joan was twenty-one, but Marilyn treated her as her little sister. She didn’t want her to see naked photographs of her; she never talked about the men she slept with. ‘She always presented herself to me as a virginal creature,’ Joan said. But, in early 1962, Marilyn started mentioning the new man in her life. She didn’t want to use his name, calling him ‘the general’ instead, which Joan supposed was a cover for John Kennedy. But when Life magazine published a profile of Attorney General Robert Kennedy and revealed that his colleagues in the Justice Department addressed him as ‘the general’, the penny dropped.

  On 19 July, Marilyn invited Daniel and Joan over to celebrate Joan’s birthday and thank them for being there for her while their father was away. In high spirits, she told Joan, ‘You know, I could string together my life story out of the titles of songs I’ve sung in films. “Every Baby Needs A Da-Da-Daddy”; “Kiss”; “When Love Goes Wrong”; “Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend”; “Bye Bye Baby”; “After You Get What You Want, You Don’t Want It”; “Heat Wave”; “Lazy”; “River Of No Return”; “I’m Gonna File My Claim”; “That Old Black Magic”; “I’m Through With Love”; “I Wanna Be Loved By You”; “Running Wild”; My Heart Belongs To Daddy”; “Incurably Romantic” . . . I don’t sing in the movies any more, though, or at home. Why is that?’

  Joan wondered whether ‘Happy Birthday’ counted.

  The following day, Marilyn was admitted into the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital for a gynaecological operation. People speculated whether it was an abortion or a miscarriage. She gave her name at Reception as Zelda Zonk.

  Santa Monica, Franklin Street

  25 July 1962

  The day Darryl Zanuck became president of Fox, Greenson saw Marilyn twice, first at his office and then at her house. Engelberg had already given her an injection of sedatives, and Greenson prescribed Nembutal on top of that. He had seen her every day since he’d got back from Europe. She phoned him constantly, sometimes at two or three or four in the morning, as well as regularly calling Bobby Kennedy.

  Since he had started seeing her again, Greenson had felt Marilyn was getting better, even if she talked constantly about separation, absence and loneliness. His diagnosis might partly have been motivated by guilt, because he felt responsible for her being sacked by Fox while he was away. He might also have been trying to reassure himself that it would end at some point, that she would recover and free herself from him and he wouldn’t be at her mercy seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day, a ‘life prisoner’, as he put it, of a method of treatment that he thought necessary for her but was gradually proving impossible for him. He realised that her anguish, her obsessive existential sense of waiting, wasn’t directed at anyone real such as him, or even a nameless stranger. She was waiting for no one to respond to her waiting.

  He sometimes wondered if she was only pretending to be better because she knew how much he wanted her to be better. She was an actress, after all. She could play the happy girl even with her doctor. Anything, just so long as she didn’t lose him. At one session she said, ‘I don’t mind about dying. I know you’ll call me afterwards.’

  Greenson planned to go to New York the following month. His book was going slowly now Marilyn occupied most of his time and emotions. Anguish seemed to be the only way she could ensure another person would
be there. Her distress had a nightmarish quality. However much love, tenderness – greatness, even – it might contain, he knew it also had an inexorably destructive side. What if he did not want to be destroyed?

  Lake Tahoe, Cal-Neva Lodge

  28 and 29 July 1962

  In the last thirty-five days of her life, Marilyn saw Greenson twenty-seven times and Engelberg twenty-four. Both gave her a series of sedative injections and ‘youth shots’, which they refrained from mentioning during the investigation after her death. Richard Meryman, the Life journalist who was the last person to interview her at the start of July, described her going into the kitchen at one point, where Engelberg gave her an injection, then returning in an almost electric state of animation.

  She didn’t go to New York again, but she was often out of town, and spent two weekends at the Cal-Neva Lodge, the casino resort reportedly owned jointly by Frank Sinatra and Sam Giancana, which Paul ‘Skinny’ D’Amato managed. Sinatra organised the first weekend, officially to celebrate her renegotiated contract with Fox – she planned to resume filming Something’s Got to Give in the last week of August – with the added suggestion that they talk about a film project of his, which he thought would suit her. According to Ralph Roberts, she wasn’t keen to go and only changed her mind when she heard Dean Martin was giving a show at the Lodge’s Celebrity Room that weekend. Sinatra flew her up in his private plane, the Christina, a lavish affair with fitted carpets, carved wooden skirting boards, bar, piano and luxurious bathrooms with heated toilet seats, no less. She was given Bungalow Fifty-two, one of a group reserved for distinguished guests. Disguised in a black scarf and sunglasses, she spent most of the time in her room, and slept with the phone connected to the switchboard at her ear.