Marilyn's Last Sessions Read Free

previously in New York. She had already seen two psychoanalysts, Margaret Hohenberg and Marianne
Kris, and in the autumn of 1956, while filming The Princess and the Showgirl with Laurence Olivier in London, she had even had several sessions with Anna Freud, the daughter of Freud
himself.
    Now, at the start of 1960, she was in acute distress again, in front of the cameras of 20th Century Fox, who had treated her as badly as they were paying her. She still owed them a film under
the terms of an old contract, but Let’s Make Love was beset with problems. Marilyn couldn’t get to grips with her character, Amanda Dell, a dancer and singer oblivious to wealth
and fame, who unwittingly falls in love with a millionaire. While the crew waited for her to wake up, after she’d knocked herself out with barbiturates, and eventually appear on set hours
late, her stand-in, Evelyn Moriarty, would walk through scenes, testing and confirming lighting cues and camera angles and rehearsing with other actors. On the first day of filming, Montand had
confided to Marilyn that he was as terrified of failure as she was, and this shared anxiety immediately established a bond between them. To make matters worse, the movie was mired in rewrites and
producers’ second thoughts. Hamstrung by the director’s elegant, casually distrait approach, an air of disaster enveloped the studio. Although she wasn’t by any means
solely responsible for the delays, the producers told Marilyn she had to straighten up or she’d jeopardise the film’s chances of being completed on time.
    Without a regular analyst in Los Angeles, she turned for advice to Dr Kris, who had been treating her for three years in New York. Kris gave her the name of Ralph R. Greenson, one of
Hollywood’s most prominent therapists, but only after asking Greenson if he’d be prepared to take on a difficult case. A woman in utter disarray, Kris explained, whose abuse of drugs
and medication showed markedly self-destructive tendencies. Her immediate problem was severe anxiety stress, but her fragile personality was a source of more fundamental concern. Dr Greenson agreed
to become Marilyn Monroe’s fourth psychoanalyst.
    For reasons of discretion and the actress’s poor health, their first session took place not, as the psychoanalyst would have wished, in his office, but at the Beverly Hills Hotel, in
Marilyn’s apple green, wall-to-wall carpeted bungalow. It was brief. After a few questions regarding her medical condition, as opposed to her psychological history, Greenson suggested he see
her from then on at his practice, not far from the hotel. For the rest of filming, virtually the next six months, Marilyn would leave the set every afternoon to go to her analyst in Beverly Hills,
on North Roxbury Drive, halfway between Fox Studios on Pico Boulevard and her hotel on Sunset.
    The architecture of the Beverly Hills Hotel gives a fair indication of its clientele. Pretty pink façade; sprawling, schizoid, neo-something design; rooms in the garish hues of
Technicolor films. Fox installed Marilyn and her husband, Arthur Miller, in Bungalow Twenty-one, and Yves Montand and his wife, Simone Signoret, in Twenty – Mediterranean-revival-style
affairs reminiscent of pre-war movies. ‘Revival’: Marilyn used to laugh at that word. As if anything could revive. As if one could re-create what had never existed. Not that that
stopped her regularly flying-in an old woman from San Diego who, thirty years previously, had dyed the hair of many stars of the silent era, notably Mae West’s soft white wavy locks, and the
platinum curls of the diva of Hollywood’s heady years, Jean Harlow. Marilyn used to send a limousine for Pearl Porterfield and lay on champagne and caviar. The colourist used the old
technique for peroxiding hair – Marilyn would accept no substitute – but what she liked best was hearing stories about Jean Harlow, her burning life and icy death. The stories may