The Genius and the Goddess (37 page)

Miller, who lasted longer than any of Marilyn's lovers or husbands,
called their marriage "a calamity – to me. It was for her, too, I suppose,
but she was more accustomed to it. Her life as a whole was full of
calamity." Explaining why the marriage failed, he said:

I really could not manage that kind of life, finally. I live a very
quiet existence, despite appearances, and that whole show business
thing was more than I could take. And she was on her way.
She wanted to do other things. She could not quite be happy
settling down into a domestic kind of situation – nor should
she have. But I think it was also that her attitudes toward herself
were ripening, so to speak. There was a very destructive thing
going on in her.

In the end, he had to decide whether to save Marilyn or save himself,
and he felt she was beyond help: "There was simply nothing but
destruction that could come, my own destruction, as well as hers. The
point comes when you cannot continue anymore. There is no virtue
in it, there is nothing positive, and your hope is that she can find
some other means of saving herself."
¹¹

Like many couples, Marilyn and Miller seemed happier in their
secret courtship than in their marriage, which brought very little joy
and a great deal of pain. It's easier to note the reasons for failure
than to explain why they married in the first place. They suffered
the intense glare of publicity, the ill-omened death of the French
reporter on their wedding day and their inability to lead a normal
life. Marilyn's disillusionment after reading his private diary in England
was the first nail in their coffin, the first acid of suspicion that
corroded their life. She fell under the spell of the Strasbergs, was
frustrated by appearing in many mediocre movies and hurt by her
bitter break with Milton Greene. Miller hated her drama teachers
and business partner, was frustrated by his inability to write and could
not meet her impossible demands. Sexually frigid and unable to
match her lover's expectations, she was tormented by gynecological
illness and could not have a child. Tortured by psychological problems
and drug addiction, she had (while with Miller) three mental
breakdowns and three suicide attempts. Despite her aspirations to
fidelity, she was unfaithful to all three husbands. She humiliated Miller,
and despised him when he passively accepted her intolerable behavior.
He tried to save her; she nearly destroyed him. He had to escape
from her alluring scalpel, lick his wounds and start a new life.

John Huston "was absolutely certain that Marilyn was doomed."
He agreed with Miller that "she was incapable of rescuing herself or
of being rescued by anyone else." In 1960 he correctly predicted,
"she'll be dead or in an institution within three years." Huston also
provided an incisive analysis of her character, her poor judgment and
her talent as an actress: "People say Hollywood broke her heart but
that is rubbish – she was observant and tough-minded and appealing
but she adored all the wrong people and she was recklessly willful. . . .
You couldn't get at her. She was tremendously pretentious (she'd done
a lot of shit-arsed studying in New York) but she acted as if she never
understood why she was funny and that was precisely what made her
so funny. . . . In certain ways she was very shrewd. . . . If she was a
victim, it was only of her own friends."
¹²

The end of
The Misfits
was also the end of Marilyn's marriage. She
had left Dougherty and DiMaggio, but Miller left her. In their divorce
proceedings of January 1961, echoing Miller on Mary Slattery and
John Proctor on Elizabeth in
The Crucible
, Marilyn called him "cold
and unresponsive." In late July 1961, soon after her gall bladder operation,
Marilyn went to Roxbury for the last time to bring back some
of Miller's possessions and pick up some things she'd left in the
Connecticut home. She'd been recently reunited with her half-sister,
Berniece, who reported that Miller was still extremely solicitous:
"Arthur asks Marilyn question after question about her health; he's
happy that she's well enough to be up and about, and says he wants
her to feel truly well. 'How are you sleeping? Better? Are you taking
pills?'"

After his
divorce from Marilyn in 1954, DiMaggio continued to
see her, remained a close friend and helped her through her psychological
crises. Their marriage had lasted less than a year, yet he remained
emotionally involved with her to the end. Miller was married to her
for five years, a longer connection than she'd had with anyone else,
and had been in love with her since 1951. More deeply committed
and more deeply hurt by the way she'd treated him, he broke
completely with her to protect himself. Explaining their divorce, he
said he'd endured as much as he could take and declared, "if I hadn't
done this, I would be dead."
¹³
Miller had acted honorably toward
Marilyn, and had held her life, career and finances together. After her
visit to Roxbury, he never saw her again.

George Cukor, who directed Marilyn's last, unfinished movie, said,
"I think she was quite mad" and then added, "she adored and
trusted the wrong people." Her closest and most trusted friends did the
most damage. Sidney Skolsky and Milton Greene provided unlimited
supplies of drugs. Elia Kazan got her pregnant, persuaded her to enter
the Actors Studio and pushed her into analysis. Lee Strasberg made
her self-conscious and destroyed her natural spontaneity as an actress.
Without Miller's presence in her life, Marilyn depended more than
ever on drugs and doctors to keep her afloat. She had been seeing
her Hollywood analyst, Dr. Ralph Greenson, since June 1960, and
consulted him constantly during the making of
The Misfits
and the
break with Miller. But her years of
psychoanalysis did little to relieve
her anxieties, and his therapeutic methods actually hastened her tragic
end.

Greenson, born Romeo Greenschpoon in Brooklyn in 1911 and
known as Romi, was the son of a doctor. (His twin sister, a concert
pianist, had the matching name of Juliet.) After graduating from
Columbia University, he earned his medical degree at the University
of Berne in Switzerland, where he met his future wife, Hildi Troesch.
He was analyzed – a sort of laying on of hands – by Freud's disciples
Wilhelm Stekel and Otto Fenichel, and by Freud's personal physician,
Max Schur; and he became a friend of Freud's daughter, the analyst
Anna Freud. During the war, as a captain in the Army Air Force,
Greenson ran a military hospital in Denver, Colorado. After the war,
he practiced psychiatry in Los Angeles, became a professor at UCLA
medical school, and attracted celebrity patients like Frank Sinatra, Peter
Lorre and Janet Leigh. Greenson, with a dark complexion, graying hair,
assertive nose and continental mustache, was dynamic, charismatic and
sexually attractive, a great lecturer and an amusing raconteur. Anna
Freud's biographer described him as "a hard-living man of passionate
enthusiasm and even flamboyance, a man for whom psychoanalysis
was . . . a way of life."

Greenson would become famous for his textbook,
The Technique
and Practice of Psychoanalysis
(1967), and his Hollywood clients, notorious
for his unorthodox practice and dubious methods. Beginning
in June 1960, when she was in Los Angeles, he saw Marilyn every
day, sometimes in sessions that lasted as long as five hours, and in
her home rather than in his office. He taped her sessions and (setting
himself up as the ideal of normal life) invited her into his own
home. He encouraged her to become part of his family by eating
meals with them and by sleeping overnight in their guest room.
Marilyn even modeled her new Spanish-style house on his residence.
Greenson's use of "adoption therapy" appealed to Marilyn's
deep-rooted need for a surrogate family, and continued her previous
attachment to warm and welcoming Jewish clans: the Strasbergs,
Greenes, Millers and Rostens.

In his lecture on "Drugs in the Psychotherapeutic Situation" (1964),
Greenson contradicted a fundamental principle of psychoanalysis and
medical ethics: the doctor's duty to maintain a professional distance
between himself and the patient. Instead, he argued, psychiatrists "must
be willing to become emotionally involved with their patients if they
hope to establish a reliable therapeutic relationship." He explained his
method – or narcissistic intrusion – in a letter to a colleague, which
advocated rather than discouraged transference: the transfer of feelings
about a parent to an analyst:"All of our patients come to us with varying
degrees of mistrust and anxieties; they have to overcome their mistrust
and we must help them (a) by interpreting the neurotic distortions from
his past which he repeats with us in the transference reaction; (b) we
try to become and remain reliable human beings whom he can trust . . .
by being whole persons who also have emotions and frailties."
¹

Marilyn spent her short life trying to find her real self. But this
real self may have vanished or been better left in obscurity. Her
analysts believed that Marilyn could overcome her problems by
confronting her memories, facing her resentments and understanding
her past. Yet repression, in her case, would have been more helpful
than revelation. During her years with Greenson, as with Hohenberg
and Kris, while her mental health continued to decline, she discussed
the fear and insecurity that came from the insanity in her family,
abandonment by her parents, sexual abuse, forced early marriage,
prostitution, promiscuity, abortions, and exploitation by almost
everyone who knew her.

Marilyn craved a strong man in her life (though no husband was
strong enough), and put her complete trust in Greenson. But, like
Strasberg, he took advantage of his professional position to dominate
every aspect of her life. After ferreting out her most intimate secrets,
Greenson used them to prey on her weakness and exploit her childlike
dependence, to enhance his reputation and increase his income.
In Greenson she finally found someone whose ego was even bigger
than her own. The doctor, in this case, was more disturbed and
dangerous than the patient.

Greenson, sure that his treatment should be paramount, sought
complete control over Marilyn's life. He forced her to break with her
masseur, driver and confidant, Ralph Roberts, and banish him to New
York. "He had tried to get rid of almost everyone in her life," Roberts
ruefully said, "and she didn't have that many people to begin with."
Greenson then filled the void with his own cadre. His brother-in-law
Mickey Rudin became Marilyn's lawyer; his friend
Harvey
Weinstein became the producer of her next film – with Greenson as
paid adviser; his colleague
Hyman Engelberg became her internist.
"You're both narcissists," Greenson told her, "and I think you'll get
along fine together."

Greenson also introduced a spy into Marilyn's household.
Eunice
Murray – under the guise of housekeeper, companion and nurse –
told Greenson almost everything Marilyn said and did. Murray, who
never finished high school and had no medical qualifications, made
a terrible impression on Marilyn's loyal entourage. Her make-up man
Whitey Snyder called Murray "a very strange lady. . . . She was always
whispering – whispering and listening. She was this constant presence,
reporting everything back to Greenson, and Marilyn quickly
realized this." Her publicist
Pat Newcomb agreed: "I did not trust
Eunice Murray, who seemed to be always snooping around. . . . I just
didn't like her. She was sort of a spook, always hovering, always on
the fringes of things." Her hairdresser George Masters confirmed, "She
was . . . a very weird woman, like a witch. Terrifying, I remember
thinking. She was terrifically jealous of Marilyn, separating her from
her friends – just a divisive person."
²

It's quite astonishing that an egoist like Greenson, who behaved in
this outrageous manner, could achieve such eminence in his profession.
Not surprisingly, Greenson himself admitted, "I had become a
prisoner of a form of treatment that I thought was correct for her,
but almost impossible for me. At times I felt I couldn't go on with
this." Miller, who'd also been analyzed, condemned the whole process.
He believed that analysis had made Marilyn "conscious of how unhappy
she was, [and] she was unhappy nearly all her life. . . . She tried to
be real, to face enemies as enemies, and it simply tore her to pieces. . . .
Psychiatrists can't help most of the people who go to them. A case
could be made for Whitey Snyder's opinion that they did Marilyn
harm. Her life began to fall apart. You could see her analysis was a
failure because she died."
³

On February 7, 1961 – eight months after she began to see Greenson
and only a few weeks after her Mexican divorce from Miller on
January 20 – Marilyn, all alone in the world, had the worst moment
of her life. In New York for the disappointing premiere of
The Misfits
,
she fell into a deep depression and had another mental breakdown.
Terrified that she would lose her reason, like her mother, and lapse
into permanent darkness, she tried to kill herself. Dr. Kris committed
her to the Payne Whitney Hospital (on East 68 Street, near the East
River) without telling her that it was a locked-ward psychiatric clinic.
When the full horror of her situation sank in, Marilyn naturally felt
betrayed by her doctor.

Though Marilyn checked in under the name of Faye Miller (a
name curiously close to Nathanael West's hysterical Faye Greener),
everyone in the hospital knew who she was. Describing the horrific
conditions to several friends, she told Susan Strasberg that she was
still performing in a new role: "It's crazy, isn't it? I can't even have
a nervous breakdown in private; everybody wants to be there, like
it's a show. I ought to charge." Jane Russell recalled, "The attendants,
the whole damn hospital staff would come and peer into the
glass in her door, staring at her like she was some kind of strange
bug in a cage." In a traditional sanctuary, where it was absolutely
essential to have peace and security, her privacy was invaded and
she was put on display. She was put in the ninth-floor security
ward, her clothes were taken away, her room was locked on the
outside and it was almost impossible to make phone calls. Though
frightened by her forced confinement, she took strange comfort
from the most extreme cases and told friends, "There were screaming
women in their cells. . . . Those people were really nuts. I knew I
wasn't
that
crazy."
⁴

Three well-known women novelists, also graduates of Payne
Whitney, left vivid accounts of their confinement that illuminate
Marilyn's experience. In June 1938, after a mental breakdown and
physical fight with her husband Edmund Wilson, Mary McCarthy
was placed in the psychiatric hospital without being told where she
was going. She was led into a small, cell-like room, searched and
stripped. Left alone in the dark cubicle, she listened to the clicking
sound as the staff opened and closed the wooden shutter of the tiny
window to spy on her.

Jean Stafford, then married to the manic-depressive poet Robert
Lowell, voluntarily entered the hospital in November 1946. But she
felt frightened and humiliated at being institutionalized (a nurse
watched her while she bathed), and thought the clinic was more like
a prison than a sanctuary. Stafford, too, was frightened by the screams
of the more violent inmates:

I knew the doors would be locked and that they would take
everything away from me . . . that I could not get out once I
had signed myself in, that the pain of the analysis was going to
be excruciating. That first night, I lay perfectly motionless in my
bed, fighting off terror by repeating . . . "I must resign myself."
I could hear the really disordered patients on the floor above
screaming, beating their heads on the floor.

Carson McCullers, whom Marilyn had met in New York and saw
throughout the 1950s, spent three weeks in Payne Whitney in March
1948. She'd also been deliberately misled, and felt betrayed, vulnerable
and ashamed. Her biographer wrote:

Never before had she felt such utter helplessness and abandonment.
Perhaps worst of all, she acknowledged, was the feeling
that her mother had used trickery in effecting her confinement.
Nothing seemed more devastating to her than that. Encapsulated,
it seemed, in a vacuum, unable to try to help herself or to read
or write undisturbed, allowed no veil of privacy, she felt stripped
bare, defenseless, exposed to the marrow.
⁵

Marilyn's letters about her experiences in Payne Whitney were
introspective, articulate and incisive. In a letter to the Strasbergs, close
to her in New York, she said the clinic itself was driving her mad
and pleaded for help:

Dr. Kris put me in the hospital under the care of two idiot
doctors. They both should not be my doctors. I'm locked up
with these poor nutty people. I'm sure to end up a nut too if
I stay in this nightmare. Please help me. This is the last place I
should be. I love you both. Marilyn.

P.S. I'm on the dangerous floor. It's like a cell. They had my
bathroom door locked and I couldn't get the key to get into it,
so I broke the glass. But outside of that I haven't done anything
that is un-cooperative.

Committed by Dr. Kris in New York, she turned for sympathy to
Dr. Greenson in Los Angeles. After her release, she described her incarceration
as if she were a character in a novel by Franz Kafka – or
the only actual Marilyn Monroe in captivity:

There was no empathy at Payne Whitney – it had a very bad
effect on me. They put me in a cell (I mean cement blocks and
all) for
very disturbed
, depressed patients, except I felt I was in
some kind of prison for a crime I hadn't committed. The inhumanity
there I found archaic. They asked me why I wasn't happy
there (everything was under lock and key, things like electric
lights, dresser drawers, bathrooms, closets, bars concealed on the
windows – and the doors have windows so the patients can be
visible all the time. Also, the violence and markings still remain
on the walls from former patients). I answered, "Well, I'd have
to be nuts if I like it here!"

To protest her helplessness and draw attention to her plight, Marilyn
resorted to threats and violence, and gave Greenson a different explanation
of why she broke the glass in the bathroom door. She behaved
in the madhouse as if she were a psychopath in a movie. Her
role
as
psychopath was, in fact, just as real to her as her experience as a patient:

I got the idea from a movie I once made called
Don't Bother to
Knock
. I picked up a light-weight chair and slammed it against
the glass, intentionally – and it was hard to do because I had
never broken anything in my life. It took a lot of banging to
get even a small piece of glass, so I went over with the glass
concealed in my hand and sat quietly on the bed waiting for
them to come in. They did, and I said to them, "If you are going
to treat me like a nut, I'll act like a nut." I admit the next thing
is corny, but I really did it in the movie except it was with a
razor blade. I indicated if they didn't let me out I would harm
myself – the farthest thing from my mind at the moment, since
you know, Dr. Greenson, I'm an actress and would never intentionally
mark or mar myself. I'm just that vain.