Marilyn's Last Sessions

by Michel Schneider

  I informed Anna of our conversation, as Freud had asked. When he was again in agony, I gave him a hypodermic of two centigrams of morphine. He soon felt relief and fell into a peaceful sleep. The expression of pain and suffering was gone. I repeated this dose after about twelve hours. Freud was obviously so close to the end of his reserves that he lapsed into a coma and did not wake up again. He died at 3 a.m. on 23 September 1939.

  Greenson remained in analysis with Max Schur for seven years, although not on a regular basis.

  Santa Monica, Franklin Street

  8 August 1962

  When they heard Marilyn Monroe was dead, most people’s first assumption was that she had been murdered. The questions about the part her last analyst had played began immediately: insinuations that he had abetted a crime or even perpetrated it. As the years passed, Greenson was portrayed in ever-darker shades. He mutated into a sort of Dr Mabuse, manipulating his patient to the point of madness and death, while Eunice became the reincarnation of Mrs Danvers, the housekeeper who terrorises the second Mrs de Winter in Rebecca. It is true that the accusations of murder (whether out of jealousy, or on the orders of the Kennedys or the Mafia, or as part of a Communist conspiracy) receded over time and were never supported by anything but the most dubious testimony. But the scenario of Greenson killing his patient through medical negligence was plausible – and tenacious.

  John Miner was desperate to understand what had happened. One of Greenson’s versions of events, which implied that Marilyn had been murdered, exonerated him of any guilt for not having been able to prevent his patient’s death. But the other version, suicide, could equally well have hidden genuine guilt on his part if he had been privy to a murder. What had killed her? A lethal combination of Nembutal and chloral hydrate, or of analysis and lovers’ passion? The essential question for Miner was whether Greenson had set the scene for a suicide, then covered up the traces of an unnatural death. This wouldn’t necessarily prove his complicity in murder, unless complicity begins when one covers up a crime, as Freud wrote in one of his last articles, often quoted by Greenson in the UCLA lectures Miner attended. But why would Greenson have done that? Did Marilyn’s death reflect a political imperative or a subversive movement, or was it simply the logical conclusion of psychoanalysis’s failure to save the movie star?

  Miner rang Greenson – there were questions he needed to ask. He wanted to hear the whole story.

  ‘What story?’ Greenson replied. ‘You know there’s never just one story. There’s only ever different stories combined into a narrative. I’m not going to tell you the story of the last years or hours of Marilyn’s life, or even the story of my experiences. Nor will I expect you to believe everything I tell you is true, just that it’s necessary. You’ll hear her voice on the tapes – and mine, if I can add anything, but really they speak for themselves. Anyway, come over. I’ll look forward to reliving it all with you, the most beautiful and terrible years of my life. Come at five, after the funeral.’

  Miner didn’t waste any time when he got to Greenson’s house. He barely waited to sit down before asking, ‘Why did you say “Marilyn Monroe has committed suicide” at first?’

  ‘I didn’t when I called the police. I said “Marilyn Monroe has died from an overdose”, which didn’t mean someone else couldn’t have given her the drugs. It was only then that I said she’d taken her life . . . or her death, maybe. Still, why would I say that? They wouldn’t have understood that it’s possible to want to die because you’re disgusted by death rather than life – the bitter death that makes you drink to forget, that hides in the panic attacks that make you nauseous. We’ll never know the truth about what happened because suicide and murder are only mutually exclusive hypotheses when you’re dealing with conscious acts and motives. In the unconscious, suicide is virtually always a form of murder, and murder can sometimes be a form of suicide. Marilyn told me once, “I am not afraid of dying. That happened a long time ago.” I said, “Everyone is afraid of death because it’s the unknown.” And, of course, a belief in paradise and immortality is a form of consolation for this fear that we all experience to differing degrees. And, of course, I accept that if one is desperate and in agony, one can avail oneself of this consolation. But I absolutely reject the proposition that one can live any sort of good life by relying on a notion of immortality. We’re all afraid of death, but the only decent way to confront it is to live well. Someone who has lived well, who has had a good, rich life, can face death. He fears it, of course, but he goes to meet it and he dies honourably. Yes, it’s true, I do think the only immortality we can hope for is to live on in the memories of others.’

  ‘Who are you talking about now? Who are you talking to?’ Miner interrupted, dumbfounded by Greenson’s lecture.

  At the time of Miner’s questioning, Greenson had fifteen years ahead of him in which to remember Marilyn and to confront his own mortality. At a UCLA extension division programme entitled ‘Violent Death’ in October 1971, he gave a lecture called ‘The Dread and Love of Death’. ‘It is my contention,’ he said, ‘that one of the keys to understanding man’s contradictory reactions and behaviour to death stems from that fact that he is fascinated by death. To be fascinated means that one is ensnared and captivated and robbed of one’s good judgement because one is flooded by a variety of contrary feelings and impulses, which cannot be disentangled or integrated because some of these reactions are conscious and others unconscious. Death mobilises dread, loathing and hate, but it may also be appealing, glorious and irresistible.’ He quoted Freud – ‘It is indeed impossible to imagine our own death; and whenever we attempt to do so we can perceive that we are in fact still present as spectators’ – then explained that the reason the most popular films are full of images of death is precisely because it is inconceivable. Concluding his introductory remarks, he noted ‘that man is also able to kill himself, an act which is far more widespread and frequent than we ever dreamed of’. Marilyn had said to Greenson one day, ‘Killing oneself is something that belongs to us. A privilege, not a sin or a crime. A right, even if it doesn’t entitle one to anything.’ Later he had found out about a note she had written to Natasha Lytess before attempting to commit suicide with an overdose of Nembutal in 1950, in which she left her the only thing of value she possessed – a fur stole. She’d also tried to kill herself during the filming of Some Like It Hot in 1959. Two years later he was convinced he personally had rescued her during the filming of The Misfits.

  Quoting e. e. cummings, who died the same year as Marilyn – ‘dying is fine) but Death/?o/baby’ – Greenson contrasted the process of dying with the state of death. He spoke of a patient who had tried to kill himself to avoid dying and suggested that a fear of dying can co-exist with a desire to be dead. He mentioned another patient who had made him promise that, if she was fatally ill, either he or a doctor she was also fond of would sit by her bedside, even if she was totally unconscious, until they were absolutely certain of her being dead. He didn’t cite Marilyn by name, but she might well have been who he was thinking of, because she also considered death essentially as another form of solitude, although possibly a little harder and longer than the one she was used to. She had played chess with death all her life, and in the end she had lost.

  Ralph Greenson always sought to justify the role he had played in Marilyn’s life and death. In Vienna in the summer of 1971, he met Paul Moor, an international journalist and musician. They talked mainly about music, but also about Marilyn a little. ‘Her prime need,’ Greenson assured him, ‘was the warmth and affection our family could give her. She had never experienced it as a child, and her fame made it impossible when she was older.’ Soon afterwards, he said on German television, ‘The most beautiful people can believe they are desired, but never that they are loved.’

  Santa Monica, Franklin Street

  8 August 1962

  Night fell as John Miner continued to question Greenson.

  ‘You just have to tell me th
e facts, Doctor,’ he said. ‘I’ll do the interpreting, if that’s all right.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what I’ve already told the police countless times,’ Greenson said. ‘On Saturday I went to see my patient at one or so in the afternoon, and then returned to conduct my afternoon sessions from five to seven in the evening. At twelve-thirty Eunice Murray called, as I had asked her to do if there was ever a problem. I picked the phone up after a few rings and heard her say “Come, it’s very urgent.” I told her I’d be there in a quarter of an hour. The bedroom was locked but I could see a light under the door. I went back outside to see in through a window, which was also locked, and took a dishcloth and broke the glass. There were no bars, so I put my hand through, unlatched the window and climbed into the room. Marilyn was lying face down, naked, on the blue bed sheets. She still had the phone, “her best friend”, in her right hand. Then I opened the door and let Mrs Murray in.’

  A couple of things gave Miner pause. Greenson couldn’t have seen a light under the door because the bedroom carpet was too thick for any to filter through. The door couldn’t have been locked either: Marilyn wouldn’t have stood for it after her incarceration in Payne Whitney. He guessed Greenson had been too dazed to remember the details accurately, or maybe he had simply dispensed with whatever wouldn’t work in a script. The unnerving gleam of light, the locked door, the shadowy terrace, the heroically smashed window, the pool’s blue light catching on the splinters of glass: none of it was necessary as far as her death was concerned, but it made for a good exterior night shot. Which didn’t mean Greenson had something to hide, only that he had something to show. John Miner decided not to pull him up on the inaccuracies in his story.

  Greenson fell silent, letting the scene play itself out in his mind. I broke the window as she said she had when she was hospitalised in New York. Why did she throw that chair? To get out of the room or into herself, to pass through the mirror? Why did I break the garden window? Finally to see the woman who had killed me with her death and whose body I could never really look at? Did I want to join her on the other side? What about our chessboard? Where’s that now she’s dead?

  Haunted by his black and white memories, Greenson visualised the glass chessboard. If I were to tell the story of what really happened, I’d call it Marilyn: Living and Dying, like Schur, or The Marilyn Defence, like Nabokov. It wouldn’t be a true story, the course of a single life followed from birth to death. It would be more like a chaotic set of points of force. A chess problem revealing how the pieces had moved on a board. A web of actions, reactions, manoeuvres, failings, mistakes, betrayals, selfishness and an unattainable forgiveness, all overseen by an improbable god. And the truth of it would lie in the silences between the words.

  Riled by Greenson’s remorseful silence, Miner asked, ‘Why did you meet the toxicologist R. J. Abernethy before he drew up his report on August thirteenth and try to steer him towards the suicide theory?’

  ‘She didn’t want to die. She had too many plans. Only the hopeless make an effective job of killing themselves.’

  ‘What about the journal that’s meant to have disappeared in the clean-up after her body was taken to the morgue?’

  ‘The red diary. Red like me and my crypto-Communist friends. It’ll look more realistic in the script. The colour of spilled blood. It works better in Technicolor.’

  ‘If I asked you “Who killed Marilyn Monroe?”, what would your answer be?’

  ‘I don’t know. Psychoanalysis must have played a part. It didn’t kill her, as the anti-Freudians and anti-Semites say, but it didn’t help her survive either.’

  Greenson had nothing more to add, although Miner waited, but a note probably dating from late summer 1978 was found in his papers after his death:

  I’ll never write ‘The MM Case’. I don’t have the words. It’s like in those movies when the images on screen are too powerful and suddenly I can’t hear a word anyone’s saying.

  My God, the way you can delude yourself! Self-analysis – what a chimera. I was blamed, and I blame myself, for taking Marilyn into our household and making her a virtual member of the family. Did I kill her? Or did psychoanalysis, as people are starting to say? When they say it was the hold my family had over her that killed her, they don’t see that maybe it was my other family that was the problem: Freud and Co.

  I want to understand the kinship ties, the lines of descent in the family I unwittingly made Marilyn a part of; she didn’t have a clue herself of course. Are the sins of the fathers really visited on their children? How many generations does it go on for?

  I’ll try to describe the psychoanalytic family we were both ensnared in, but I’ve got to do it as a chart. I need plans and diagrams to see it all – maybe it’s my scientific training, or maybe I need to explore the territory between us, visualise the space of ideas and actions around us. Some things you can only understand when you have a visual image of them.

  Marilyn didn’t know anything about my psychoanalytic or my private life, but it may still have left its mark on her. All her other analysts were close to Anna Freud. In her imagination, and ours, she was one of us, a member of the family of European Jewish exiles in California. Even the house I got her to buy so she could feel at home for once was next to Hanna Fenichel’s, the widow of my second analyst. But this is the strangest connection: Anna Freud told me that when Joseph Kennedy was the American ambassador in London, he arranged for Marianne Kris to emigrate to the States in 1940. Marianne was Marilyn’s analyst, Marilyn was JFK’s mistress, then Marianne became Jackie’s analyst.

  I feel dizzy. I’m going to have to stop.

  Beverly Hills, Roxbury Drive

  November 1978

  ‘Milton, do you mind reading what I’ve written about our leading lady?’

  ‘You won’t be able to say anything about her. You’re the last person who could; you’re still caught up in the whole thing. Don’t think you can step out of the story somehow and uncover the truth of it. It was a whole galaxy of affects and interests and people and relationships. You were both prisoners of psychoanalysis.’

  ‘You don’t need to remind me of all the connections. I’ve mapped out the settings and actors. You don’t know the half of it. Look at this . . .’

  ‘That’s an odd expression. An analyst would say “Listen to this.” Anyway . . .’

  ‘All right, listen, if you’d rather, and don’t interrupt. Marilyn was analysed by Marianne Kris, who had previously been analysed by Anna Freud, who also briefly analysed Marilyn. Anna Freud had been analysed by her father, who had also been Marianne Kris, Otto Fenichel and Wilhelm Stekel’s analyst. The last two were my analysts, so I’m Freud’s grandson twice over. Fenichel was Rudolf Löwenstein’s analyst, who was Arthur Miller’s analyst, Marilyn’s third husband. I was Frank Sinatra’s analyst, her lover. This is the milieu Marilyn was analysed in—’

  ‘It’s not a milieu,’ Wexler interrupted, ‘it’s a structure. Which means that these are not just sociological coincidences. They are incestuous, psychological ties that make up a system – a web, a network, whatever you want to call it – within which Marilyn’s psychological experiences and analyses ran their course. And when your patient died, the system exploded. I’ve thought a lot about that photo that was taken on the Manitou four days after her funeral. JFK’s on the yacht with his brother-in-law Peter Lawford, his sister Patricia Kennedy, who was Marilyn’s great friend, and Pat Newcomb, who did her press and was with her on the last morning of her life. If you look at those rows of white teeth and actors’ smiles under the star-spangled banner, various things become clear. First: you’re not in the photo. Second: you could have taken it, because you’re the link between everyone in the photo. Third: a tragedy was always going to part what Marilyn had joined. Death was always going to disperse that galaxy.’

  This was the last thing Wexler said to Greenson. Over the following months, Greenson stopped seeing or talking to his colleagues, not that he could have explained why
.

  Neither analyst was in a position to be objective about ‘the Marilyn case’. Like all analytic case studies, it was essentially a fictional construct, a spiral of conflicting interpretations, a trail followed in every conceivable direction. Not one of its facts, even now, is set in stone. Perhaps more information will come to light that will shuffle the cards once again and fragment the narrative into a myriad of vignettes, opinions and uncertainties. It is, after all, a legend. A story is only true if someone believes it, and it changes at every telling. A case study is not a novel that says what happened: it is, among other things, an analyst’s fictional self-representation. You can’t fully detach the analyst’s life from the patient’s, and what is said in public bears no relation to how the particular lives intertwined in private. Even when some degree of the private becomes public, you still don’t get any closer to the truth. What is known simply changes to incorporate these new elements and thereby create a new version of the legend. No one will ever know anything about what really happened. Psychoanalysis doesn’t reveal the truth about the people who experience it. It just gives them a version of who and what they are that they can live with, and says how things might have happened.

  Los Angeles, Hillside Memorial Park Cemetery

  November 1979

  Taking a seat opposite the journalist he’d commissioned to co-write his memoirs, Wexler slowly began telling his life story.

  ‘Before I cross the final threshold . . . I’m eighty now, for goodness’ sake . . . I’m going to take a look in the rear-view mirror at all the strange, confused, pathetic things that went on in “the Marilyn years”. You’ve no idea what analysis was like in Hollywood in those days. The directors were on our couches, and we were writing scripts for them. Freud thought you could read his case histories like novels. Romi – Ralph Greenson – wanted his case histories to be like movies he’d directed. I preferred having someone tell me their story and turn it into a script there and then – with a little bit of direction, naturally. But of course I owe Romi a huge debt. He introduced me to the whole show-business crowd. We’d go for brunch on Sundays at the writer and producer Dore Schary’s house, where LA’s starriest would gather. Romi and I hit it off straight away and we decided to share offices. We worked together, we compared cases, we co-authored articles. When Romi went on vacation, I’d fill in for him.’