Like Marilyn and Inger Stevens, the actress Janice Rule had taken Lee Strasberg’s classes at the Actors Studio and was one of Greenson’s patients. In the weeks after Marilyn’s death, she thought he seemed shattered. He told her he felt ‘crucified’ by the press. During one session, he said something she found very moving: ‘There is no way in my lifetime I will ever be able to answer any of this. I only worry how it will affect you as a patient.’
Suffering from heart problems that caused him to be frequently hospitalised, Greenson found his last years hard. Rule saw him near the end. Greenson had always urged her to vent her emotions during analysis. She often used foul language in their sessions, so much so that one day he’d said to her, ‘I just have to tell you that it’s hard for me to put that face together with what comes out of your mouth!’ They met up again when he was old and ill and had just had his third pacemaker fitted. He suffered aphasia and it infuriated him when he couldn’t express himself. He said to her, ‘You taught me that “fuck” is a very good word. When I could finally speak, that is the first word I said.’
Greenson fought off physical and intellectual collapse for four years. One patient, shocked by how much weight he’d lost, his shortness of breath, said, ‘You don’t look like an analyst.’
He lifted his shirt and showed her the scar from his pacemaker surgery. ‘We’re just as mortal as everyone else.’
Fate toys with Marilyn’s life story. Like a demented editor taking revenge on a director, it randomly joins the sequences, linking contradictory takes and juxtaposing scenes with divergent meanings. On the editing table it rewinds the thirty months Romi and Marilyn spent self-destructively entangled in each other’s madness. The dénouement reverses everything that has come before. Marilyn exists only through her voice and words. The only trace of the last hours of her life is the tapes she made for her analyst and the phone-taps ordered by the Kennedys, or their enemies, and carried out, depending on whose version you believe, by Fred Otash for the CIA or Bernard Spindel for the FBI. The private detectives steal her words, as her image has been stolen for the previous thirty-six years. The reel we’re left with, after Fate has edited it, shows Greenson as a man whom words haven’t been able to justify. His tapes have been erased by time, and he has disappeared beneath the surface of the images that remain of him.
Maresfield Gardens
1962–82
In one respect, Greenson reacted to his depression fairly quickly, drawing closer to the Freudian establishment and resuming his work on analytic theory. He saw fewer patients and immersed himself in teaching and writing, focusing primarily on the subject that had fascinated him for the previous three years, ‘the working alliance’ between patient and analyst. He studied failed analyses, the indications and contraindications for psychoanalytic treatment in severe cases, patients who were unsuited to analysis or who exhibited abrupt changes in pathologies, and mounted a stirring defence of the therapeutic alliance as a means of resolving stalemates in transference.
At the urging of his editor, soon after Marilyn’s death he set about finishing The Technique and Practice of Psychoanalysis. It was to be his only book. In the preface, he pays tribute to his father and mentions the name he was born with. ‘The transmission of knowledge can be an attempt to overcome a depressive state,’ he says, in a line he wrote before meeting Marilyn. Books are often the children of grief. He might not have wept publicly for Marilyn, despite often referring to his sorrow and to his sense that he was in mourning for her, but his book is a five hundred-page lament couched in the form of advice to débutant and seasoned analysts. A lament is always directed primarily at oneself, just as criticism of the failings and weaknesses of others is always a sign of an inner struggle. In his work, therefore, Greenson treats with extreme punctiliousness subjects such as ‘The Weekend Is A Desertion’, ‘The Real Relationship Between Patient And Analyst’ and ‘What Psychoanalysis Requires of the Psychoanalyst’. His handbook lists in painstaking detail everything an analyst should not do with a patient – a summation, in other words, of everything he had done with Marilyn during her thirty months of analysis.
For a while, Greenson used episodes from her analysis to illustrate his lectures at UCLA, and made a point of emphasising the appropriateness of all his clinical decisions. Two years after his patient’s death, he gave a lecture at UCLA entitled ‘Drugs in the Psychotherapeutic Situation’, in which he said, ‘Psychiatrists and physicians must be willing to become emotionally involved with their patients if they hope to establish a reliable therapeutic relationship.’ Defending himself in the Medical Tribune on 24 October 1973, he said he had done ‘what he thought best, particularly after other methods of treatment apparently hadn’t touched her one iota’. He defended his policy of making her a member of his household, negotiating with the studios on her behalf and, in general, taking such an active role in the decisions she made about her life. He said he had had a precise aim. He had thought his method was the only possible one for that specific woman, but he had failed: she had died. He never used the word ‘suicide’.
Greenson more or less stopped seeing patients in the mid-1970s, and gave up teaching. But he continued writing articles, which were collected and published in 1993 under the title, Loving, Hating and Living Well. He never got over his infatuation with Hollywood, and would often suggest ideas for movies to Leo Rosten, which Rosten always found absurd and unfilmable. He counted the friends he’d lost and the colleagues who’d died. Once, on his way back from a funeral, he told his wife, ‘We have to learn to live better. I mean, take more intense pleasure in those close to us, remain curious and active, and work, keep on working.’
He described his attitude to death in a short article. ‘I am an analyst by profession, but also a Jew, and that is why I cannot renounce some promise of an afterlife.’ The following year, although he was finding it harder to lecture, he spoke about ‘the Sexual Revolution’ in a talk at San Diego University called ‘Beyond Sexual Satisfaction?’.
On 18 August 1978, he wrote a final, unpublished, article entitled ‘Special Problems in Psychotherapy With the Rich and Famous’. Without mentioning Marilyn by name, he wrote of a famous, beautiful, thirty-four-year-old actress who came to see him because of her lack of self-esteem.
Rich and famous people think that if a course of therapy lasts too long they are the victims of a confidence trick. They want the therapist to be their friend. They even want their wife and children to become members of the therapist’s family. These patients are seductive. They need their therapist twenty-four hours a day, they’re insatiable. They can also drop you at any moment and treat you as they have been treated by their parents or servants. You are in their employ and can be fired at any moment.
He gave his last talk to the Southern California Institute of Psychoanalysis on 6 October 1978 on the subject of: ‘People lacking family’.
When the death of his famous patient threw him into disarray, the Freudian establishment were quick to rally round. Anna Freud immediately sent her condolences.
I am terribly sorry about Marilyn Monroe. I know exactly how you feel because I had exactly the same thing happen with a patient of mine who took cyanide two days before I came back from America a few years ago. One goes over and over in one’s head to find out where one could have done better and it leaves one with a terrible sense of being defeated. But, you know, I think in these cases we are really defeated by something which is stronger than we are and for which analysis, with all its powers, is too weak a weapon.
Greenson answered by return of post.
Santa Monica, 20 August
My dear Anna,
It was so kind of you to write such an understanding letter. It was a terrible blow in many ways. She was my patient and I took care of her. She was so pathetic and had had such a terrible life. I had hopes for her and we thought we were making progress. Now she is dead and I realise that all my knowledge, desire and determination weren’t enough. I was more to her th
an an attentive therapist, but I don’t know what – perhaps a brother in arms in some obscure battle. Maybe I should have seen I was also an enemy to her, as she was to me. The ‘working alliance’ has its limits. It was not my fault, but I was still the last man who let this strange, unhappy woman down. God knows I tried, but I could not overcome all the destructive forces that her past experiences and present way of life exposed her to. Sometimes I think this world wanted her to die, or at least many of the people in it, particularly those who put on a show of distress when she died. It makes me furious, but mainly I feel sadness and disappointment. It is a blow to my pride but also to the profession of which I am considered a leading representative. I will need time to get over it and I know that when the feeling goes it will leave a scar. Good friends have written me very kind letters and that has helped. It hurts to remember, but it is only by going over it that one day I will be able to forget . . .
A few months later, Greenson took up his pen again: ‘I have to reassure my friends and enemies. I am still functioning!’
Anna replied, ‘Marianne Kris spoke to me about Marilyn Monroe and her experiences with her a great deal over the summer. I don’t think anyone could have kept her in this life.’
Three years later, Greenson wrote another letter, which he didn’t send:
Santa Monica, September
My dearest Anna Freud,
I’ve finished my book. It is the only way I have of escaping death. I had a strange thought . . . Anyway, judge for yourself. Writing, it seems to me, is essentially a matter of surrendering to the child within us. The same need drives me to make my marks on a page as drives a neglected child to scream. But what is it?
Your devoted,
Ralph Greenson
He continued to correspond with Anna Freud until his death, and she played the role of supervising analyst in the aftermath of Marilyn. He seemed to combat his feelings of guilt by appealing to destiny, that of his patient and that of any course of analysis. An unfinished letter was found in his papers:
Santa Monica
Dear Anna, my respected friend,
You’re right. One’s fate is written. Names, letters, phrases are engraved on our forgetful memories rather than on tombstones. I am struck by the recurring patterns in my patient’s life. Do you know what I learnt recently? Marilyn’s adoptive mother, without whom she would never have become the star we knew, was an alcoholic and a drug-user as well. Grace McKee died in September 1953 of an alcohol and barbiturate overdose. She was buried in Westwood Memorial Park, where we laid Marilyn to rest. But Marilyn did not attend her funeral.
In 1965, Greenson and Anna Freud’s relationship assumed a more formal dimension when he became an official fundraiser in LA for the Hampstead Clinic, which was short of consulting-room space. The principal American donor, Lita Annenberg Hazen, was so generous that when Freud’s house at 14 Maresfield Gardens came on the market, the Hampstead Clinic was able to buy it. The house was finished in February 1968 after work by the architect Ernst Freud, Anna Freud’s favourite older brother, whom Greenson was treating with sedative injections for his dreadful migraines. When his last analyst Max Schur died in 1969, Greenson again turned to Anna Freud. She replied, ‘I agree that mourning is a terrible task, surely the most difficult of all. And it is only made bearable by the moments, which you also describe so well, when one feels fleetingly that the lost person has entered into one and that there is a gain somewhere which denies death.’ In the same letter, she referred to his request to call her by her first name:
I am willing to call you Romi, and you can call me Anna, under one condition: that you promise not to rage against fate, God (?), and the world when my time comes to disappear. My father used to call that ‘not to kick’. One kicks against fate, but as you describe it, one only hurts oneself, and through hurting oneself, those who are nearest to one. I would not like to think that someday I shall give you such a cause.
Ralph Greenson and Anna Freud subsequently exchanged letters about a documentary on the Hampstead Clinic that Greenson thought was necessary for fundraising. Anna and her companion, Dorothy Burlingham-Tiffany, ended up agreeing to appear in the film. They thought it very good, and held out great hopes for it. Greenson, however, was to die before he could show it in California as he had planned. In the last letter she wrote to him, in November 1978, Anna asked, ‘What will happen to psychoanalysis in the future? And where will its backbone be when our generation is gone?’
Greenson died on 24 November 1979. Anna, who had lost Dorothy just five days earlier, wrote to Hildi, ‘You ask who’s coming with me on holiday. The answer is simple: I’m going alone, since I do not believe in replacement partners. I am trying to learn how to be alone outside my work.’ Hildi answered that she felt on the threshold of solitude too. ‘I feel that terrible homesickness for all the marvellous years, including the many times when all four of us were together.’
At a memorial service, Anna gave the eulogy on behalf of the Freudian establishment. ‘We are raising new generations of psychoanalysts all over the world. Nevertheless, we have not yet discovered the secret of how to raise the real followers or people like Romi Greenson, namely, men and women who make use of psychoanalysis to its very limits: for the understanding of themselves; of their fellow beings; for communication with the world at large; in short, for a way of living.’ On behalf of the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society, Albert Solnit lauded ‘Captain Greenson, MD’: ‘He was a clinical scientist and a romantic in the classical sense. He loved life in all of its forms and expressions: musical, poetic, artistic and athletic. He showed constant concern for those who struggle to achieve, those who fail, those who life puts at risk, those who suffer and go without.’
A year later, Marianne Kris died in London at Anna’s house in Freud’s widow Martha’s room. Anna herself was eighty years old ‘with a silly heart’. ‘It’s as if I’m trying to be next, having heart problems straight after Marianne’s death,’ she wrote to Hildi Greenson. She was to die in 1982.
New York
January 1964
In Arthur Miller’s play After the Fall, first directed in 1964 by Elia Kazan in New York, the husband Quentin says to the wife Maggie, who is clearly modelled on Marilyn, ‘A suicide kills two people. That’s what it’s for.’ During his session the day after seeing a performance of the play, Ralph Greenson said to Max Schur, ‘Miller has his highly autobiographical character say, “You don’t want my love, you want my destruction.” It wasn’t hard to think that about Marilyn.’
‘Would you say it was love you felt for her?’ Schur asked.
‘I loved her and I didn’t love her. I didn’t love her as an adult. I loved her as a child, or someone sick, for her fallibilities, her fears. But her fear also frightened me: it was bigger than her, it was somewhere she could hide, and I thought I could accommodate it, contain it, make it go away.’
‘OK,’ Schur said. ‘Shall we stop there?’
Greenson had gone into analysis in New York partly to help him resolve his mourning for Marilyn, and partly to get away from Hollywood, to rediscover a space of words and language – to forget the movies, at least for a while. When he thought about their years together, he said to himself that Los Angeles had ended up catching Marilyn and killing the New York side of her, killing the Marilyn who’d fled Hollywood one day to become someone else, the Marilyn who’d given a press conference upon arriving in New York City on ‘the new Monroe’. By the end of the 1970s, as far as movies were concerned, Manhattan had conquered Hollywood anyway. New York was the only place where Greenson could finally lay claim to the phrase he had repeated to Sergeant Clemmons as the Schaefer ambulance men took her body away: ‘We lost her.’ He often said that to Schur, without specifying who he meant by ‘we’.
During the ensuing sessions, he wondered what had brought him to this psychoanalyst. Schur had been Freud’s doctor during his final years in Vienna and afterwards in London. Was he seeking some sort of rapprochement with
Freud after his unorthodox treatment of Marilyn? No doubt he and Schur also identified with one another in a way. Schur had been a doctor more than an analyst. But Greenson had also been drawn to him for a more unconscious reason. He only realised this after Schur had died, and once Freud: Living and Dying, the book Schur had hardly had time to complete, was published in 1972. Greenson saw his choice of fourth analyst as a repetition.
When the press started to insinuate that he had killed his patient with an injection to the heart, Greenson read the passage where Schur described giving Freud the morphine injection that had released him from the burdens of his suffering and this life:
On the following day, 21 September, while I was sitting at his bedside, Freud took my hand and said to me: ‘My dear Schur, you certainly remember our first talk. You promised me then not to forsake me when my time comes. Now it’s nothing but torture and makes no sense any more.’
I indicated that I had not forgotten my promise. He sighed with relief, held my hand for a moment longer, and said, ‘I thank you,’ and after a moment of hesitation he added: ‘Tell Anna about this.’ All this was said without a trace of emotionality or self-pity, and with full consciousness.
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