Marilyn's Last Sessions Read Free Page A

have
been as fanciful a creation as the platinum of her hair, but this was the movie business, and Marilyn was watching herself up there on a screen full of memories.

 
Hollywood, Sunset Boulevard
1960
    Los Angeles, the city of angels, had become the dream factory in more ways than one. The meeting of Ralph Greenson and Marilyn Monroe would have been inconceivable anywhere but
Hollywood. Two people with such disparate histories could only have found one another in Tinseltown, the city of spotlights, sequins and glitter, among the limitless cast of characters orbiting the
studios – all those blindingly bright sets on which actors exposed the half-light of their souls.
    This was where psychoanalysis and the movies acted out their fatal romance. They were like two strangers who turn out to share compulsions rather than, as they had first thought, affinities, and
only remain together through a misunderstanding. The analysts threw themselves into interpreting the movies, occasionally successfully, while their film equivalents grappled with the unconscious.
Rich, vulnerable, neurotic and insecure, both professions prescribed themselves heavy doses of the ‘talking cure’. Ben Hecht, the scriptwriter of Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound and, ten years later, the ghostwriter of Marilyn’s autobiography, published a novel in 1944 called I Hate Actors , in which he portrayed the Golden Age of Hollywood as
an object study in mental pathology, riddled with psychoses, neuroses and perversions of every kind: ‘There’s something everybody in Hollywood has got coming to them at some stage or
another, and that’s a headlong plummet into nervous depression. I’ve known film producers who haven’t had a single idea in ten years and then, boom , one fine morning or
evening, what do you know, they’ve fallen to pieces like regular overworked geniuses. The number of actors laid low by depression is something truly spectacular.’
    Hollywood had reached its apogee in the 1930s, when Marilyn was born in one of its Nowheresville suburbs, and it was entering its decline by the time she met Ralph in early 1960. Nowadays the
major film studios have become echoing deserts haunted by the ghosts of actors whose names mean little to the coachloads of tourists spilling out onto their plywood streets. On Sunset Boulevard,
Hispanic prostitutes stand outside Korean convenience stores with cracked windows – one starburst for every break-in attempt – and psychoanalysis is no more than ‘an option’
for anyone wishing to tune the spiritual receiver of his or her being into the vibrations of the New Age. The search for a meaning to one’s life comes some way down people’s list of
priorities. So, it’s hard to imagine the relationship between psychoanalysis and the movie business in Hollywood’s heyday. A marriage of intellect and artifice, it was invariably sealed
with money, often with glory, and occasionally with blood. For better and for worse, the people of the image and the people of the word tied the knot. Psychoanalysis took it upon itself not only to
heal the souls of Hollywood’s denizens but also to build the city of dreams on celluloid.
    Ralph and Marilyn’s relationship replayed that between psychoanalysis and the movie business, each succumbing to the other’s madness. Like all coups de foudre and lasting
unions, the two professions’ encounter was based on confusion: the psychoanalysts were straining to hear the invisible, while the filmmakers sought to put on screen what couldn’t be
articulated in words, and, slowly but surely, the film industry drove psychoanalysis out of its mind. The entire episode lasted for twenty years or so, and came to an end when Hollywood itself did.
But the spectres endured and, like patients in analysis, the movies suffered from involuntary flashbacks for a long time afterwards.

 
Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Roxbury Drive
January 1960
    Norma Jeane and Ralph. A world of