Marilyn's Last Sessions

by Michel Schneider

  The second time she flew out to the California–Nevada border was the last weekend before her death. People saw her walking around like a ghost, in a kind of daze. She said unspeakable things to D’Amato. The occasion this time wasn’t a celebration with friends, but a meeting with a cabal of sinister characters who didn’t want her to have anything more to do with the Kennedys and were determined to make sure she kept her mouth shut. One evening, as fog shrouded the banks of Lake Tahoe, Marilyn was seen standing barefoot by the swimming pool, rocking back and forth, staring up at the hills. A few hours later she was found in a drug- and alcohol-induced coma. She was driven to Reno airport slumped in the back seat, like an unstrung marionette, and put on a plane. It was The Misfits all over again. She pleaded desperately for the twin-engine plane to land at Santa Monica, but the airport was closed for the night and they had to land at Los Angeles. She screamed that she wanted to go home. When her doctors and Eunice Murray picked her up, she was trembling with fear. She realised what the trip had been all about. ‘Things happened that weekend that nobody’s ever talked about,’ Skinny D’Amato commented laconically afterwards.

  A few days later, Sinatra is alleged to have brought photographer Billy Woodfield a roll of film to develop. In the darkroom, Woodfield supposedly exposed photographs of a drugged, unconscious Marilyn being sexually abused while Sinatra and Sam Giancana watched. Dean Martin was the only person to understand that the drugs and alcohol and her little-lost-girl routine were symptoms of a far worse problem. He told a journalist years afterwards that she had never been able to come to terms with the horror she had blundered into, the dark, seamy world of Sam Giancana, Johnny Rosselli and ‘those spoilt Kennedy bastards’, which lay beyond the land of dreams she shared with the audiences who paid to see her on screen. She had always desperately wanted to return to some sort of fairy-tale land, but in this one, there was no way of getting back. She knew things that no one would believe. Dean had realised she wasn’t long for this world. ‘If she hadn’t kept her mouth shut, she wouldn’t have needed drugs to get where she was going.’ Marilyn had peered through the veil of her corrupted innocence, and the truth she’d seen had terrified her. But Dean didn’t talk. And he wasn’t the only one who knew the whole story about Monroe, the Kennedys and Sam Giancana, the grey thread of truth that ran through the glittering lies and fantasies of the city of angels.

  One evening years later, when he was very drunk, Dean Martin said, ‘Marilyn was only thirty-six when she died, but it was better that way. She didn’t have to end up like June Allyson, who’s just a voice on the radio these days. She does ads for Kimberly-Clark diapers for old men. She’s still alive, if you can call it that.’

  Santa Monica, Franklin Street

  Late July 1962

  ‘I’ve got to tell you something,’ Marilyn said, as she arrived for her session. ‘I read this line in Joseph Conrad that says more about me than any amount of analysis could. “It was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice.” It’s sad, isn’t it? But not all that sad. Beauty’s never sad, but it is painful. I don’t know why, but I’ve always associated beauty with cruelty.’

  Following a train of thought that seemed to require no overt explanation, she moved on to the women in her life.

  ‘Sometimes my relationships with women have been sexual, Doctor, sure, like with Natasha. But always dark and cruel, in a way. Always cold and distant.’

  She fell silent, preferring to watch her memories rather than put them into words. The mould for the women she became close to was set by the first woman to play an important part in her professional life, Natasha Lytess, the drama teacher who took charge of her career in 1950. Like her, they were all intelligent, cultivated and manipulative. Marilyn would ask them what to do and who to be, but they’d never tell her. They preferred to be the invisible hands working the puppet’s strings. She remembered a terrible scene in late 1950 at André de Dienes’s house in the Hills. She and André were lying side by side on his living-room rug, listening transfixed to a version of La Bohème’s ‘Mi chiamano Mimi’ when the phone rang. ‘A furious woman’s asking for you,’ André said. ‘I think it’s Natasha. I said I didn’t know where you were. She’s calling me a liar, screaming she knows you’re here with me.’ Marilyn began to cry. When André hung up, he told her off for being so stupid. Why had she let Natasha know where she was spending the afternoon? Marilyn rushed off to Natasha’s in a state of high anxiety.

  ‘Does this Natasha remind you of anyone?’ Greenson asked.

  ‘I don’t know. No, wait, I do: you. Don’t look like that . . . She reminds me of you because her parents were Russian, like yours. She was Jewish, like you; she was an intellectual, like you; she was about fifteen years older than me, like you; she was a failed actor, like you . . . She had just been fired by Columbia when I met her. It’s funny, she taught me a job she couldn’t do herself. A bit like analysts: you try to cure people of something you suffer from.’

  ‘Which other women have you slept with?’

  ‘Gone to bed with, Doctor, gone to bed. And slept with sometimes without doing anything – that’s how it’s usually been. Gee, you know, when I was twenty, my mother and I slept in the same bed at my aunt Ana’s for a few weeks when she came out of hospital in San Francisco . . . But, yes, I went to bed with Natasha. It always seemed like she had sharp edges. I felt hatred more than desire from her, and I suppose she did from me too, when I think about it. People said I was a lesbian. They love labels, don’t they? It makes me laugh. Sex is never wrong if there’s some love involved. But far too often people think it’s like gymnastics, a mechanical exercise. If it was, they could just put machines in drugstores and people could make love without needing anyone else. That’s what I think everyone’s trying to make me into sometimes, a sex machine.’

  ‘I was asking about other women. Have they been actresses? Joan Crawford, for instance?’

  ‘Oh, yes, Crawford . . . Once. Only once. There was a cocktail party at her house, we felt good together. We went to Joan’s bedroom and jumped on each other. Crawford had a gigantic orgasm and shrieked like a maniac. Next time I saw Crawford she wanted another round. I told her straight out I didn’t much enjoy doing it with a woman. After I turned her down, she became spiteful. A year later, I was chosen to present one of the Oscars at the Academy’s annual affair. I waited tremblingly for my turn to walk up to the platform and hand over the Oscar in my keeping. I prayed I wouldn’t trip and fall and that my voice wouldn’t disappear when I had to say my two lines. When my turn came I managed to reach the platform, say my piece, and return to my table without any mishap. Or so I thought until I read Joan Crawford’s remarks in the morning papers. I haven’t saved the clippings, but I have sort of remembered what she said. She said that Marilyn Monroe’s vulgar performance at the Academy affair was a disgrace to all of Hollywood. The vulgarity, she said, consisted of my wearing a dress too tight for me and wriggling my rear when I walked up holding one of the holy Oscars in my hand. Bitch! She didn’t think my rear was vulgar when we were in bed together.’

  ‘Let’s go back to Natasha. You told me one day she instantly fell in love with you. Since you associate her and me, do you think I’ve fallen in love with my patient?’

  ‘You know what she told me just after we met? “I want to love you.” I said, “You don’t need to love me, Natasha. Just get me working.” She kept badgering me with her hopeless passion like something out of Chekhov, all silent suffering and stifled tears. Love isn’t something people are owed. It’s not their due, is it, Doctor?’

  ‘What was happening in your life when you met?’

  ‘I needed someone to model myself on, not a lover. She tried to force her love on me when my aunt Ana died soon after we started working together. But there’s always a silver lining when someone has a crush on you, I suppose, especially if you don’t reciprocate it. We shared an apartment in the Sherry Netherlands Hotel, and all through the summer of 1949, Natasha
introduced me to Proust, Woolf, Dostoyevsky . . . and Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams. Well, not all of it, just bits. Afterwards the Chekhov– Freud line, as I call it, was carried on by Michael Chekhov. I owe him everything. He said he was Chekhov’s nephew. Everyone in Hollywood remembered him playing the old analyst who supervises Ingrid Bergman in Hitchcock’s film . . . When I began lessons with him, I think it was the autumn of 1951, he said something I’ll never forget, “You must try to think of your body as a musical instrument that expresses your ideas and your feelings; you must strive for complete harmony between body and psyche.” What do you think, Romi? Isn’t that what we’re trying to do now? He wrote a book after that called To the Actor: On the Technique of Acting. It’s been my bible, along with Freud. Why don’t you write a book called To the Psychoanalyst: On the Technique of Psychoanalysis?’

  ‘Let’s go on with your relationships with women. Is there any significance in their being brunettes?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe when I’m with them, I can see what I’m not or what I used to be or what I might have been. The reason I dye my hair every two days is not just for my roles, you know, it’s also so I’ll never have to be the woman with reddish-brown hair I used to be again.’

  ‘I sense a fear of homosexuality and, at the same time, a tendency to seek out situations where you will encounter it.’

  ‘What would I know? When I started reading books about psychoanalysis and sexuality, I’d read words like “frigid”, “rejected”, “lesbian”, and think I was every one of them. Some days I don’t feel I’m anything and other days I wish I was dead. Then there’s that other sad part I have to play: the beautiful woman.’

  Just before Natasha Lytess died, she spoke about Marilyn: ‘She was most definitely not a child. A child is naïve and open and trusting. But Marilyn was shrewd. I wish I had one-tenth of her ability for business, of her clever knack of promoting what was right for her and discarding what was not. My life and emotional well-being were in her hands entirely. I was the older one, the teacher, but she knew how deeply I felt, and she took advantage of it as only a young person and a beautiful person can. She said she always needed the other person more than they needed her. In fact it was the opposite.’

  Santa Monica, Franklin Street

  Early August 1962

  One evening around eight o’clock, when Greenson was saying goodbye to his lost soul at the end of her session, she gave him a large envelope, saying, ‘This is for you. Tell me what you think.’ With a graceful gesture, she dropped it on the table by the couch as if she was shrugging off a piece of clothing. The envelope contained two tape recordings of her talking. ‘I can’t loosen up with you, Doctor,’ she said. ‘I need somewhere more private where I can be alone with myself. But I’m talking to you, even though you’re not there – more than ever, in fact. These are the most private, most secret thoughts of Marilyn Monroe.’

  The only record of these tapes is the transcript John Miner claimed to have made a week after she gave them to Greenson, which was published in the Los Angeles Times in August 2005.

  REWIND

  Ralph Greenson replays the tape Marilyn left for him at her last session. ‘I have put my soul in you. Does that frighten you?’ her voice says, in a whisper.

  What can I give you? Not money. I know that from me that means nothing to you. Not my body. I know your professional ethics and faithfulness to your wonderful wife make that impossible. You know what Nunnally Johnson said? ‘For Marilyn, sex is the simplest way to say thank you.’ How I can say thank you to you, since my money isn’t good with you? You have given me everything. Thanks to you, I am different, with myself and other people. Because of you I can now feel what I never felt before. So now I am a whole woman (pun intended – like Shakespeare). So now I have control – control of myself – control of my life. What I am going to give you is my idea that will revolutionise psychoanalysis.

  Isn’t it true that the key to analysis is free association? Marilyn Monroe associates. You, my doctor, by understanding and interpretation of what goes on in my mind, get to my unconscious, which makes it possible for you to treat my neuroses and for me to overcome them. But when you tell me to relax and say whatever I am thinking, I blank out and have nothing to say; that’s what you and Dr Freud call resistance. So we talk about other things and I answer your questions as best I can. You are the only person in the world I have never told a lie to and never will.

  Oh, yes, dreams. I know they are important. But you want me to free-associate about the dream elements. I have the same blanking out. More resistance for you and Dr Freud to complain about. I read his ‘Introductory Lectures’. God, what a genius. He makes it so understandable. And he is so right. Didn’t he say himself that Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky had a better understanding of psychology than all the scientists put together? Damn it’s right, they do. Billy Wilder had me say in Some Like It Hot, ‘I am no Professor Freud!’ You remember, the scene where Tony Curtis was pretending that he had a block about sex and couldn’t feel anything when I kissed him. He said he’d tried everything; he’d spent six months in Vienna with Professor Freud, flat on his back, but nothing doing. I kissed him three times, saying, ‘I may not be Dr Freud, but could I take another crack at it?’ Psychoanalysis is a fine thing, but love, the love you make with your mouth and hands and body, isn’t a bad way of escaping death and the deep freeze either. Billy understood that.

  You told me to read Molly Bloom’s mental meanderings (I can use words, can’t I?) to get a feeling for free association. It was when I did that that I got my great idea. As I read it something bothered me. Here is Joyce writing what a woman thinks to herself. Can he, does he really know her innermost thoughts? But after I read the whole book, I could better understand that Joyce is an artist who could penetrate the souls of people, male or female. It really doesn’t matter that Joyce doesn’t have breasts or other feminine attributes or never felt a menstrual cramp. Wait a minute. As you must have guessed, I am free-associating and you are going to hear a lot of bad language. Because of my respect for you, I’ve never been able to say the words I’m really thinking when we are in session. But now I am going to say whatever I think, no matter what it is. I can do that because of my idea, which, if you’ll be patient, I’ll tell you about. That’s funny. I ask you to be patient, but I am your patient. Yet to be patient and to be a patient makes a kind of Shakespearean sense, doesn’t it? Back to Joyce. To me Leopold Bloom is a central character. He is the despised Irish Jew, married to an Irish Catholic woman . . . What is a Jew? . . . I couldn’t tell if you’re Jewish by looking at you. Same with women, you can’t pick them from the outside. Is there even a woman inside a woman’s body? . . . OK, my idea! To start with there is the doctor and the patient. I don’t like the word, analysand. It makes it seem like treating a sick mind is different from treating a sick body. However, you and Dr Freud say the mind is part of the body. . . . Anyway, you are in his office and the doctor says, ‘I want you to say whatever you are thinking, no matter what it is.’ And you can’t think of a damn thing. How many times after a session I would go home and cry because I thought it was my fault. While reading Molly’s blathering, the IDEA came to me. Get a tape recorder. Put a tape in. Turn it on. Say whatever you are thinking like I am doing now. It’s really easy. I’m lying on my bed wearing only a brassière. If I want to go to the refrig or the bathroom, push the stop button and begin again when I want to.

  And I just free-associate. No problem. You get the idea, don’t you? Patient can’t do it in Doctor’s office. Patient is at home with tape recorder. Patient free-associates sans difficulty. Patient sends tape to Doctor. After he listens to it, patient comes in for a session. He asks her questions about it, interprets it. Oh, yes, she can put her dreams on the tape too – right when she has them. You know how I would forget what I dreamed or even if I dreamed at all.

  Dr Freud said dreams are the via regia to the unconscious and so I’ll tell you my dreams on tape.
<
br />   OK, Dr Greenson. You are the greatest psychiatrist in the world. You tell me. Has Marilyn Monroe invented an important way to make psychoanalysis work better? After you listen to my tapes and use them to treat me, you could publish a paper in a scientific journal. Wouldn’t that be sensational? I don’t want any credit. I don’t want to be identified in your paper. It’s my present to you. I’ll never tell anybody about it. You will be the first to let your profession know how to lick resistance. Maybe you could patent the idea and license it to your colleagues. Ask Mickey. . . .

  What I told you is true when I first became your patient. I had never had an orgasm. I well remember you said an orgasm happens in the mind, not the genitals.

  It doesn’t bother me, but this damn free association could drive somebody crazy. Oh, oh, crazy makes me think about my mother. I am not going to free-associate about her right now. Let me finish my thoughts about orgasms. You also said that a person in a coma or a paraplegic could not have an orgasm because genital stimulation did not reach the brain and that the contrary was possible, an orgasm could occur in the brain without any stimulation of the genitals. You said there was an obstacle in my mind that prevented me from having an orgasm; that it was something that happened early in my life about which I felt so guilty that I did not deserve to have the greatest pleasure there is; that it had to do with something sexual that was very wrong, but my getting pleasure from it caused my guilt. You said that when I did exactly what you told me to do I would have an orgasm, and that after I did it to myself and felt what it was, I would have orgasms with lovers. What a difference a word makes. You said I would, not I could.