Marilyn's Last Sessions

by Michel Schneider

  Bless you, Doctor. What you say is gospel to me. What wasted years. Incidentally, if men weren’t such idiots, and if there was an Oscar for best faker, I would have got it every year . . .

  How can I describe to you, a man, what an orgasm feels like to a woman? I’ll try. Think of a light fixture with a rheostat control. As you slowly turn it on, the bulb begins to get bright, then brighter and brighter and finally in a blinding flash is fully lit. As you turn it off it gradually becomes dimmer and at last goes out.

  . . . I’ll need you to keep me together for a year or more. I’ll pay you to be your only patient.

  Oh, I made you another present. I have thrown all my . . . pills in the toilet. Goodnight, Doctor.

  Five years later Greenson published The Technique and Practice of Psychoanalysis. In the chapter entitled ‘What Psychoanalysis Requires of the Psychoanalyst’, he writes, ‘It is often necessary to probe into the intimate details of the patient’s sexual life or toilet habits, and many patients feel this to be very embarrassing . . . I point out the patient’s sexual or hostile feelings to me straightforwardly; if he seems unduly upset by my intervention, however, I will try to indicate by my tone or in words that I am aware and have compassion for his predicament. I do not baby the patient, but I try to ascertain how much pain he can bear and still work productively.’

  Hollywood, Sunset Boulevard

  August 1962

  The costume designer Billy Travilla had worked with Marilyn for years and dressed her for some of her best roles. They’d had a brief affair and she’d inscribed a copy of her nude calendar for him, ‘Billy Dear, Please Dress Me Forever. I love you, Marilyn’. One evening, he was surprised to see her at La Scala restaurant on Sunset Boulevard, at a table with Pat Newcomb and Peter Lawford. He said hi but she turned away without replying. She was drunk, her eyes blank.

  ‘Hey,’ he said again. ‘Marilyn, are you OK?’

  ‘Who are you?’ she said.

  He knew, as he walked away, that she hadn’t said it because she was embarrassed by the company she was keeping, but because, her voice thick, her hair in her eyes, she was asking herself the same question. He decided to write her a note but, as it turned out, he could have spared himself the effort. She died the following night.

  At the start of August, Marilyn’s last game with her psychoanalyst was playing itself out. The other candidates for the role of saviour had abdicated their posts. Strasberg was tired of her demands, Miller had remarried and was about to become a father, and DiMaggio desperately wanted them to get back together but was too eaten up by jealousy to be able to give her what she wanted. That left only Greenson, or Romi, as she sometimes now called him. On 3 August, she went to his house for an hour-and-a-half-long session on the couch. The date made her cry. She remembered the Doctor’s Hospital on East End Avenue in New York, on 3 August five years earlier, where she had lost a child to a late abortion after an extra-uterine pregnancy. She thought about New York constantly. The torrid heat and humidity of that Friday echoed and intensified her anguish. She wanted to tear something – a veil, a skin, the chain of events that divided her from herself.

  She had been telling Whitey Snyder and W. J. Weatherby for some time now that she wanted to leave Romi. What choice did she have? She’d never find herself otherwise. She’d be stuck without a husband, without friends, dependent on a man she could no longer think of as her saviour. On the afternoon of 3 August, Engelberg gave her an injection, and a prescription for Nembutal that doubled the dose Lee Siegel had prescribed her in the morning. She sent Eunice Murray out to the nearest drugstore on San Vicente Boulevard to get it. In the evening, despite a second session with Greenson at her home, and another injection just before he left, her distress grew more and more acute by the hour. She rang her old friend Norman Rosten and talked for half an hour, throwing a line out across time and space, as though she wanted to steep herself in a familiar voice, to lessen or mask the emptiness she felt. As soon as he heard the hard, strained note in her voice from the drugs, Rosten remembered what she’d said to him once at a party in Brooklyn Heights. She had been wearing a dress like the one at JFK’s birthday gala, the material clinging to her like liquid, and sat on a windowsill, drinking and looking morosely down at the street below. He recognised her expression, although the cause of it was as unfathomable as ever, the sense she was unreachable, lost in some intimate daydream, prey to hard, black thoughts. After a long time, he went over and said, ‘Hey, psst, come back!’

  ‘I’m going to have trouble sleeping tonight,’ she said. ‘It happens now and then . . . It’s a quick way down from here. Who’d know the difference if I went?’

  Rosten, without knowing why, remembered a line of Rilke: ‘Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’ hierarchies?’ After a silence, he answered, ‘I would, and all the people in the room who care. They’d hear the crash.’

  She laughed. Then, giggling like children, they had made a pact. If either was about to jump or turn on the gas, he or she would call the other to be talked out of it. They joked about it in the way you can only when you’re serious, and Rosten had had a presentiment that the phone would ring one day. He’d pick it up and hear her say, ‘It’s me. I’m on the window ledge.’

  Santa Monica, Franklin Street

  3 August 1962

  That evening, after seeing off Marilyn, who was on her way to La Scala, Ralph Greenson shut himself into his office, without having had anything to eat, and released the pause button on his tape recorder. ‘I have to talk about Grace again, I can’t see any way round it,’ Marilyn’s voice murmured, above the tape hiss.

  Grace McKee – that’s what she was called when she and my mother met, which must have been two or three years before I was born. They were both working in the movies, so they shared a small two-bed apartment on Hyperion Avenue in what’s now called Silver Lake, a run-down part of town not far from the studios. Grace had got my mother . . . it is awful the way my throat tightens up when I try to say ‘mother’ . . . my mother to dye her hair red. She was an archivist and my mother was a film-cutter. They were what used to be called ‘good-time girls’. All they cared about was going out and drinking. They had moved to different places by the time I was born, but they still cruised the bars together, and maybe they slept together, what do I know? I didn’t live with my mother, she put me with the Bollenders when I was still very little. I’ve told you about that already, haven’t I?: the poor orphan girl looking out the window at the glowing RKO Studios sign, imagining her mother inside, ruining her eyes peering at the stars’ faces . . . On Sundays, hand in hand like teenage girls, they’d take me to Hollywood’s picture palaces: huge, lavish Pantages Theater on the corner of Vine Street and Hollywood Boulevard, Grauman’s Egyptian Theater, also on Hollywood Boulevard . . . That’s where they had the première of Asphalt Jungle, my first real film. I couldn’t go. I was sick. Oh, God, I was so sick! . . . The Chinese Theater a bit further west. When they didn’t know what to do with me during the week, they’d send me with my ticket money to sit in those dark auditoria and stare up at the light and the faces they pored over all day at their editing tables. I loved being a little girl in the front row all alone in front of the big screen.

  When I was nine years old – my mother had brought me to live with her about a year earlier – they got in a terrible fight. My mother attacked Grace with a knife. The police were called and Grace had my mother put in a psychiatric hospital. Grace became my legal guardian. I didn’t live with her straight away, I was put in two more foster homes, but she came and got me in the end. She took me to the studios and the movies the whole time. She always said I’d be a star when I grew up.

  One day, she drove me to an orphanage. I was getting on for ten. She had got married and she didn’t have room for me in her place in Van Nuys. She paid for my board, and on Saturdays, she’d take me to lunch, then a movie. Sometimes she’d play dress-ups with me, and we’d go to a beauty parlour on Odessa Avenue. That�
�s how I know so much about make-up. Grace thought Jean Harlow was the best. She used to tell me my middle name was because of her, but I knew it was spelled Jeane not Jean. But even so, Harlow was my idol as well. Grace dressed me all in white like her and powdered my face and gave me red lipstick. I was nearly a platinum blonde then, but I was only ten. It would have been odd, a little girl looking like a femme fatale. So I waited until I was twenty before changing my hair colour and my name. A week after my eleventh birthday, Grace took me out of the orphanage. But a few months later, when she realised her husband Doc – I’m sorry, that’s what they called him – had abused me, she sent me to another ‘mother’, Ana Lower. She had a heart problem and neglected me, but I was very fond of her. For five years, I went back and forth between the two of them, totally confused, always having to do a double-take at school before I said who my mother was and where I lived. At Christmas – I think I was thirteen – Grace gave me my first portable gramophone, a Victrola. The wind-up spring was so stiff that the pitch would be off by the end of the record, but I loved listening to my favourite singers in the dark.

  One day, Grace and her husband left California and she married me to the neighbours’ son, James Dougherty. I was sixteen years old and I didn’t want to go back to the orphanage. You asked me a long time ago what marriage meant to me. Here’s one answer: ‘A kind of painful, crazy friendship, with sexual privileges.’ There, I’ve told you the story of my life, if that’s the word for it. That will be all for today, as Dr Greenson used to say at the start. Night night, Doc!

  Greenson pressed the pause button again. He never found out the rest of Grace’s life story because when he resumed listening, after a few laps of the swimming pool, Marilyn had moved on to another subject.

  I told you about the traumas I had filming Don’t Bother to Knock ten years ago. There was something in the script I couldn’t do. It was only talking to you that made me understand. I don’t know if Baker and his screenwriter did it intentionally, but when Nell said ‘I never wore nice dresses of my own at school’, and that she’d been put in a mental institution in Oregon, it reminded me of my last visit to my mother. I have to tell you about that, even if it’s painful. If you were here, you’d say, ‘Especially if it’s painful. If saying something doesn’t come with a price, then there’s no point saying it.’

  She was living in Portland, Oregon, in a seedy hotel downtown. I wish I could forget the scene. I hadn’t set eyes on my mother for six years. She’d left the San Francisco mental hospital a few months before. She wasn’t eating, she wouldn’t look at anyone. It was January, a rainy afternoon. I’d gone to see her with André de Dienes – I’ve already told you about him, my first lover, who I was crazy about when I was twenty. He had fitted out his Buick Roadmaster – he’d taken out the back seat and laid down a mattress, with blankets and lots of pillows, so I could sleep when I wanted on the long drives. I called it the cage. I was his prisoner, and I was happy.

  My mother was sitting in the dark in a small, sad room on the top floor. I had brought her presents: perfume, a scarf, sweets and some photographs of me André had taken. She didn’t react, just sat in her wicker chair, no ‘thank you’, no sign of pleasure. Her mouth set, no smile, lipstick smeared over her lips. She didn’t touch me. At one point, she put her head into her hands and bent down. I threw myself at her feet.

  There was the sound of something like a nervy sob or laugh. Marilyn paused, then resumed in a more earnest tone:

  I remember an earlier visit to San Francisco. Grace had taken me to see her. I must have been thirteen, or thereabouts. She didn’t move then either. She just said at the end, ‘I remember. You had such pretty little feet.’ . . .

  If you were here, you’d ask me why I was silent for a moment then. It’s because there was something I couldn’t say straight away. When my mother looked up – I wish I could forget this – all she said was: ‘I’d like to come and live with you, Norma Jeane.’ Something in me snapped. I jumped up and said, ‘Mom, we’ve got to go now, I’ll see you soon.’ I left my address and phone number on the table with the unopened presents and we headed south. I never got to see her again.

  After another long silence during which Greenson could only hear the hiss and sigh of the tape, as if Marilyn had pushed the tape recorder away from her, she said,

  It got dark after we left Portland and we stopped at somewhere called the Timberline Lodge Hotel, at the foot of Mt Hood, but it was full. We ended up down a narrow, winding road at another place called the Government Lodge. It was full of slot machines – even the johns had them. It was like one of those nightmares when you can’t get where you’re trying to go. It rained, then started to snow. I was very provocative with André that night, sexually I mean. He was sad, incredibly sad. All he said to me was ‘I didn’t even think for a minute of taking pictures of you and your mother. I’ve never told anyone but my mother died when I was eleven. She threw herself down a well. It all seems a long way away now. I don’t even know what country Transylvania is in, these days.’

  It snowed all that night in the mountains in Oregon. It carried on the next day and the next night. We didn’t leave our room. While I was doing my fingernails and toenails, I held out my hands towards André and showed him how the lines on my palm make a capital M. We compared our palms like kids. He told me that when he was a child in Transylvania, an old bell ringer had predicted that the letters MM would be very important later in his life. ‘You know, Norma Jeane, at the time I was reading a strange old book and the man was worried that one page began “Memento mori”.’ I was fascinated and we spent a long time talking about the Ms on our palms. André laughed and said they didn’t have anything to do with death. ‘The opposite, they mean “Marry Me”!’ he said. André also told me about going walking in the forest when he was a child and carving a double M in a tree. It’s odd, Doctor, don’t you think? That was only a few months before my initials became MM . . . We put our palms together. André took a photo of mine.

  That night he made love to me. It felt like he was searching my body, desperately looking for something. I was in tears. He asked me why and I held him tight as if he was my child. I didn’t know what to say. We had been travelling and taking pictures for a fortnight but this was the first time we made love. People use sex to win love, don’t they, or at least to think they’re loved or that they exist, or that they’ve lost themselves without becoming somebody else’s, or that they’ve died but nobody’s killed them? I often think I’m making love to the camera nowadays. It doesn’t feel as good as with a man, but it doesn’t hurt so much either. It’s just someone’s eyes owning your body.

  Brentwood, Fifth Helena Drive

  4 August 1962

  When Arthur Miller opened the copy of Life magazine he’d bought at a kiosk on East 57th Street and saw the photos of Marilyn emerging naked from the swimming-pool, he couldn’t help thinking her defiant, wilful expression was forced, an attempt to cover up what he called ‘the wound of indignity’. He remembered returning to their Brooklyn apartment three years before and finding her standing in a daze, without a stitch of clothing, like a lost bird that had flown in through an open window. She pushed her hair off her forehead and went to sit on the edge of the bath, her eyes closed, her head bowed. He watched through the open door as she slowly came back to herself and to him, until finally she looked up and gave him a tender smile. She shouldn’t have to do these sorts of things any more, he thought. There are other ways of getting through to people.

  The interview Marilyn gave Life after being fired from Something’s Got to Give appeared the day before she died. In it she comes across as calm, happy, confident. She talks about going to Grauman’s Chinese Theater as a child and putting her feet in the movie star’s footprints on the Walk of Fame outside. Uh-oh, she used to think, my foot’s too big! I guess that’s out. So it was a remarkable moment when she was memorialised there herself. It brought home to her that ‘anything’s possible, almost’.


  To fans, the Hollywood Walk of Fame stretches down Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street like a dazzling trail across a starlit sky, a triumphal procession through the history of movie-making. The star with Marilyn’s name above the bronze camera is set in the reddish-brown concrete just outside the McDonald’s at 6774 Hollywood Boulevard, not far from Grauman’s Chinese Theater where she’d spent whole afternoons as a child, on her own or with Grace McKee, losing and finding herself in the darkness.

  Just opposite, number 7000, is the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, which hosted the first Academy Awards dinner two years after it opened in 1927. Marilyn posed by its swimming pool when she was twenty-five, and often stayed there in the 1950s, in Suite 1200. The contempt her fame excited still came as a surprise back then: ‘It stirs up envy, fame does,’ she told Greenson. ‘People you run into feel that, well, who is she? Who does she think she is, Marilyn Monroe? They feel fame gives them some kind of privilege to walk up to you and say anything to you, you know, of any kind of nature and it won’t hurt your feelings. Like it’s happening to your clothing. You’re always running into people’s unconscious.’ In December 1985, soon after the Roosevelt’s 1920s décor had undergone a dismal 1980s revamp, a woman on the hotel staff called Susan Leonard was cleaning a mirror in the manager’s office when she saw a blonde woman in its reflection, coming towards her. She swung round but there was no one behind her. It took a while for the image to vanish. Later it transpired that the mirror used to hang on the wall in Suite 1200. Among other relics of Hollywood’s golden age evoked by the hotel’s themed rooms, you can now ask to see the ‘haunted mirror’. It hangs in the low corridor by the elevators.