‘What was he like?’
‘I’ll get to that. I’ve often wanted to make a picture about a movie-stars’ analyst, in the Hollywood I knew when the Psychoanalytic Society was after me. I don’t know if the public would go for something like that these days, let alone a producer. A picture? Who’s in it? Who’s it for? Who cares? But if I did make it, I’d open with an aerial shot of a sea of umbrellas and a bald head in the middle. That was me, yesterday, as the heavens opened, saying goodbye to the friend I’d lost. Actually we’d lost each other a long time ago. It didn’t happen yesterday.
‘Romeo’s funeral at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery on Santa Monica Boulevard was a farce, like all funerals. I took a bitter delight in replaying all the old scenes in my mind and trying to remember the last time we saw each other . . . No, don’t worry, it’s my age, it’s not tears. I’m legally blind. Clinically, my vision is nil. A blind psychoanalyst is simply taking the Oedipus complex to its logical conclusion, after all. You can’t imagine how little I miss my sight. I don’t watch movies any more, I remember them.
‘Anyway, as I was saying, if I made a film about yesterday’s ceremony, it would go: “NOVEMBER 1979” in bold. General shot of cemetery, then cut to a wide shot of a funeral plaque: “RALPH GREENSON”, and a voiceover of an old man saying, “They called me Romi. I wanted to be laid to rest in the graveyard of the stars. As for her – well, she’s in Westwood Memorial Park. I’ve never gone back to her plaque. I don’t have a handprint in the cement on Hollywood Boulevard or a bronze star on the Walk of Fame. I’m a low-level star, not one of those ones you see for centuries after they’ve burned out.”’
Milton Wexler had said his farewells to Ralph Greenson in the rain and fog the previous day. Concerned about appearances, images and symbols to the last, Greenson had wanted his remains to rest in Hillside Memorial Park mausoleum, surrounded by movie celebrities. When Wexler saw the urn containing Romi’s ashes in its niche in the wall, he felt too intense a mixture of hatred and tenderness to comprehend that he’d lost someone he loved. He decided that the only thing you can do when a friend dies is hate him, resent him for abandoning you and think of all the mean things you couldn’t say when he was alive.
Poor Romi, he thought, as he left the mausoleum where Greenson resided behind a black marble slab, he didn’t understand much about this profession. His colleagues didn’t really understand him either. The homage given by Robert Stoller echoed in Wexler’s mind:
Anyone can sense the power of that love in the many papers and books he published – especially his great The Technique and Practice of Psychoanalysis, and the collected papers in Explorations in Psychoanalysis. And when we read them, from the very first to the very last – with their original, mischievous, gentle, provocative, outrageous, erudite, funny, empathic, warm, forceful, inquisitive, steadfast, modest, abrasive, exhibitionistic, shy, and brave parts – then even a stranger is at least grazed by Greenson’s presence.
For he could only think and write by pouring himself out, searching for the sources of mental life in the living, sentient experience. Only from that bountiful though mysterious well did he then – later, carefully, with roots in the realities of the quickened analytic treatment – turn to theory . . . Then a catastrophe struck. Immediately following a routine pacemaker replacement, Greenson’s heart threw an embolus, instantly shutting down his most joyous aspect, the capacity to communicate with words. For some months, he could not talk, write, or read, and – most awful – he lost a priceless essence: he had stopped dreaming. So he found the therapists, the will, and the vigour and put himself back together: he learned to talk, to write, to read. One morning, on awakening, he remembered he had dreamed. With that, he could return to his delight – clinical work – and to its gift: his thinking and writing on the nature of psychoanalysis. Though speech never returned quite to normal, he again, with a quiet bravery (a counterpoint to his flamboyance when the issues were small), gave presentations, discussed others’ papers, and participated on panels. But he was forced to give way, step by step. His heart could no longer support him. Finally there was nothing left. Work and Love. Greenson’s life suggests a small addendum: when one’s life is well lived, work is love.
‘A labour of love. Maybe,’ Wexler resumed, as the cogs of the journalist’s tape recorder spun. ‘Analysis is that in a way . . . in many ways. But you always wonder: who does the analyst stand for in the transference? And also, in the counter-transference, who does the analyst take himself for? The patient’s father, mother, child? Romi wasn’t a meek and mild humanist. In a way, he was the opposite of Stoller’s portrait of him yesterday. He didn’t practise the talking cure – his was a cure by drama, tragedy. He was a violent soul, a tiger that liked to trap its prey, a wolf that cried too obviously for anyone to believe him. He often said a strange thing: “Nothing is harder than to make people believe something you really feel.” He didn’t believe in anything except his capacity to make others believe. Nothing was sacred for him, not analysis, or psychiatry, or psychology, or ordinary social relationships. He questioned everything, dared everything. His contempt for rules and limits was what made him attractive. He was an actor, always on stage, always rewriting his part. A gambler. That’s what I would have said at his grave if I’d been asked to speak.’
‘What about his analysis of Marilyn Monroe?’
‘A word that often cropped up recently in his conversation was “affliction”. He talked about his adaptation of Fitzgerald’s Tender Is The Night. Two people who destroy one another, analyst and patient. The truth is, he didn’t understand what happened between the two of them. Perhaps he had been too much of a doctor, a man of the body, to be able to listen to Marilyn’s suffering without wanting to cure it at any cost. And too much of an actor also to be an analyst through and through. But there was something else, I think. There’s a conflict between words and images in all of us. Maybe, in the end, Marilyn was freed from the necessity of just being an image while images ended up overpowering Romi. He’d have liked to make movies, been an auteur, an artist. But he didn’t ever dare. He gave his opinions from the wings, whispering suggestions about dialogue, composition, shots, adaptations. It got on scriptwriters’ and directors’ nerves, but they had no choice. They had to accept the good doctor’s interventions if they wanted his patient to be the subject, or rather the object, of their images. Images brought Romi to his knees. Then at the end, as you know, words abandoned him too. Fate is cruel: it gave him silence, and it has given me darkness. The word and the dream, the twin shores on which analysis founders, have summoned us at the end of our lives. The images took him, and all I have left is the sound of voices. Write that down. It’s good, isn’t it?’
‘Shall we move on to her now?’ the journalist suggested abruptly. ‘You treated her too for a while, I believe.’
Wexler fell silent, then drew a deep breath. ‘I am the survivor of an ugly story, like all stories that are made up of dreams and money, power and death. Poor Romi! He would have loved to play the lead role as the love interest, or at least a supporting one. He didn’t realise he was going to be merely an extra in Marilyn’s life. With a lot of screen time, sure: the last person to talk to her while she was alive, and the first, as far as anyone knows, to see her dead. Supporting role’s unfair, though: he was already a star on the lecture circuit before he started analysing her, and his couch was a must for any aspiring member of the movie élite. But Marilyn’s death broke him. He survived, but he was never the same again. There was a secret of some kind between them, a kind of pact whereby each said to the other, “I won’t die so long as I’m under your spell.”’
The day after Greenson died, his son entrusted Milton Wexler with the task of sorting through his papers and giving whatever he saw fit to UCLA’s psychiatry department. Wexler spent days, with an assistant, going through them. In a file of carefully collated article drafts and random notes from some of the thousands of sessions Greenson had conducted with patients
, they found this note, which his colleague seemed to have drafted before a police examination.
It was in January 1960 that Marilyn Monroe first came to consult me. She told me I was her fourth analyst, but her first ‘male analyst’. I didn’t know I would be the last (I don’t count Milton Wexler who stepped in for a few weeks in the spring of 1962). She was in such a fragile physical and psychological state that I knew it would be touch and go and
The rest was missing.
Wexler remembered Greenson’s habit of comparing analysis with chess. One day, seeing Wexler obviously bored by his talk of opening gambits, pincer movements and so on, Greenson had burst out, ‘But Freud’s the one who compares analysis to chess. Shall I read you what he says?’
He had rushed out to his office and come back moments later holding a crumpled sheet of paper containing quotations he’d clearly copied from an article. Almost as if he were declaiming verse, he read, ‘“Anyone who tries to learn the noble game of chess from books will soon discover that only the openings and end-games admit of an exhaustive systematic presentation and that the infinite variety of moves which develop after the opening defy any such description. This gap in instruction can only be filled by a diligent study of games fought out by masters. The rules which can be laid down for the practice of psycho-analytical treatment are subject to similar limitations. Sigmund Freud, 1913.”’ Greenson spoke in a state of wild elation, almost on the verge of tears.
He carried on reading as Wexler watched, stunned. ‘“For it is really too sad that in life it should be as it is in chess, where one false move may force us to resign the game for lost, but with the difference that we can start no second game, no rematch. Sigmund Freud, 1915.”’
Wexler wasn’t listening. He marched out of the office and slammed the door.
Sitting there in front of that chaotic mass of papers, after more years than he cared to count, Milton Wexler shook himself out of his reverie and began thinking things he hadn’t been able to articulate while Marilyn was alive or when he talked to Greenson. He thought about the game of chess and saw the knight’s dashing progress, leaping over squares, advancing on two axes, vertical and horizontal, always landing on a different-coloured square from the one he’d set off from. He thought about the black queen, Marilyn’s implacable awareness of the horror of life, and her mother. Marilyn had mirrored her mother’s search for sexual perfection, her knack of catching men, then jettisoning them when they’d served their purpose, her fear of ageing, the difference between who she was and what she saw in the mirror. Like her mother, Marilyn might have panicked at the prospect of becoming less desirable, the possible fate of any woman who becomes a mother. Greenson hadn’t seen the parallels between her role in Something’s Got to Give and her experiences, the brutal echoes of Gladys Baker’s unhappy, unforgettable life. The return of the lost mother, one of the few scenes Marilyn had filmed after her analyst had gone to Europe, was a replay of the moment in her childhood when she had seen her mother, whom she thought was dead, emerge from the mental institution. Perhaps, Wexler thought, becoming a mother had tipped Gladys Baker over into madness, and perhaps not becoming a mother at the age of thirty-six yet having to play one had done the same to Marilyn Monroe. A mother whom her children did not recognise and who would not reveal herself to them. She was said to have become pregnant during filming, not known who the father was, and to have had an abortion after being fired. But, then, so many things were said about her.
There’d been no winner in the game of chess between the movie star and her analyst. Who had killed Marilyn? Not Romi, thought Wexler. Too much of a coward. Who, then? Norma Jeane, as some people said, or her mother, Gladys? Marilyn’s story begins with a pane of glass through which the little Norma Jeane is watching her mother coming to visit the adoptive family she has left her with. Then a mirror, in which Gladys examines her own beauty, while the little girl who does not know who she’s named after watches her mother looking at herself. And so the story unfolds, glass pieces moving across a glass chessboard from a fairy tale, like Snow White and her stepmother.
From the start the white queen (a queen only in her dreams at first) struggles with the black queen (whose dark madness is still to come, but all the images she has seen in negative have already taken their toll). Is that why she wanted to be a platinum blonde, so she is not like Snow White, with her pale skin, cherry-red lips, black eyebrows and hair? She has no choice anyway. She grows inexorably into a young woman who’s terrified when the glass eye of the camera does not desire her, and panic-stricken when it does. Her only resource is to project herself onto the screen, the mirror for her dreams. In fairy tales, what kills the daughter’s beauty? The stepmother with the poisoned comb, the apple of sin, which brings knowledge and sexuality when she is older, work and suffering. Who won, the white queen or the black? Marilyn had written in her notebook: ‘White is passivity, the passivity of the person who is looked at, who’s trapped. Black is the pupil of the eye, the screen when the movie ends, the heart of the man who leaves you.’
Shaking himself, Wexler thought back to when Romi was dying. He had muttered incomprehensibly the last time he’d seen him – Wexler had only caught the occasional word: ‘Not the white queen . . . two black knights . . . diagonal . . . bishop . . .’
Santa Monica, Franklin Street
8 August 1962
Rather than being angry at Miner’s insistent questioning, Greenson appeared nauseous, sad, defeated. Without a word, he turned on the first tape.
Ever since you let me be in your home and meet your family, I’ve thought about how it would be if I were your daughter instead of your patient. I know you couldn’t do it while I’m your patient, but after you cure me, maybe you could adopt me. Then I’d have the father I’ve always wanted and your wife whom I adore would be my mother, and your children, brothers and sisters. No, Doctor, I won’t push it. But it’s beautiful to think about it. I guess you can tell I’m crying. I’ll stop now for a little bit . . .
Miner saw that the psychoanalyst’s face was covered with tears and suggested they stop the tape. Greenson shrugged.
‘You were very close to her, Doctor. How do you feel about her death?’
‘You don’t understand. You can’t understand that she set me free and condemned me in all perpetuity. I lost her just as she almost reached me. Language was stirring in her. At last, she was talking to me, after almost three years. She was looking life in the face, she wasn’t staring back at the dark road behind her . . .’
‘What will stay with you about her?’
‘Not her image, I tell you, not that vision that made me look away and hurt as only real beauty can. Not her image, no – her voice. That melancholic, ghostly voice singing “Happy birthday, Mr President. . .” I heard it again yesterday on TV – it was on every channel. You know, we work only with the voice in psychoanalysis. It is no coincidence Freud came up with this strange system that splits the patient’s body in two. On the one hand, there’s the patient’s image, his mass, the way he occupies space, and on the other, there’s his voice, which we listen to and which leaves its mark in time all the more effectively because there’s no image. Analysis is a little like silent movies, where scenes followed the intertitles on a black background. Words bring things into being. It is no coincidence either that I was so sceptical about movies that claimed to portray psychoanalysis, to let people see the invisible work of words. No coincidence – Fate arranges things so well – that the traces Freud left are either images without words, hours of silent celluloid, or talks recorded for radio.’ Greenson grew vehement: ‘And it’s no coincidence that Marilyn Monroe recorded the tapes you just listened to in darkness, at night, and didn’t say those things in our sessions when I could see her. Marilyn knew that reality lies in a voice when it breaks loose from images. One day, she said to me, “You don’t need to use your voice in a special way. If you think of something sexual, your voice naturally follows suit.” She had two voices in fact,
the one in her movies – studied, tamed, a wayward murmur or sigh, like someone waking up from a dream – and the one she used off-screen, calmer and clearer. In her sessions, she switched between the two, but she had stopped using her actress’s voice towards the end. Even in her last film, she was using her off-screen voice more.’
Greenson made an effort to compose himself, then continued his monologue. ‘There was a struggle going on in her from the start between her voice and her skin. She thought her skin was the only thing that could speak, by being seen or touched or bruised. I don’t know . . . I don’t know what happened, and this may shock you, but I think she was really getting better at the end, I think she was starting to talk … Still, I’m boring you with my stories. I’ll leave you with her, with her voice, without any images to get in the way. Listen to the tapes as many times as you want. I’m going back to my patients. Take notes if you think it’ll be useful, but don’t take the tapes out of this room.’
Marilyn's Last Sessions Page 31