Marilyn's Last Sessions Read Free Page B

difference separated the poor, uneducated LA girl and the prosperous East Coast intellectual – he, a son of the bourgeoisie raised in a
bookish environment, she, a daughter of blue-collar parents, who’d grown up surrounded by images – and yet immediately they seemed to feel that deep down they knew one another. Each
came to think of the other as a long-lost friend, who would recognise the entreaty where others would see only a smile. But something cast a shadow, something each refused to see in the other. A
message from Fate: here is your death making its entrance.
    After an exhausting day’s filming, Marilyn was half an hour late for her first session at her last psychoanalyst’s office. She was wearing a pair of loose slacks, Dr Greenson
noticed, and he was struck by how upright she sat in the chair he showed her to, as though waiting for someone in a hotel lobby.
    ‘You’re late,’ he began. An avid chess player, he was fond of opening moves that threw the other player off balance.
    ‘I’m late because I’m late for everybody, for all my meetings,’ Marilyn retorted, deeply hurt. ‘You’re not the only person I keep waiting.’
    Later, remembering these words, Greenson thought one should always treat the first session as if it were the last. Everything that would subsequently prove of importance came out then, even if
merely by implication.
    With a mixture of anger and sadness, Marilyn continued, ‘Since the production began, Cukor has been unable to shoot for a total of thirty-nine hours on account of the fact that I am always
late. I guess people think that why I’m late is some kind of arrogance and I think it’s the opposite of arrogance . . . A lot of people can be there on time and do nothing, which I have
seen them do, and, you know, all sit around and sort of chit-chatting and talking trivia about their social life. Do you want me to do that?’
    The analyst had treated troubled actresses before, but he was alarmed at her condition. She must have taken a lot of sedatives, since she barely reacted when Greenson tried to draw her into
conversation, and she painlessly said painful things. She wanted to lie on the couch for the kind of Freudian therapy she’d been used to in New York, but Greenson suggested face-to-face
supportive therapy instead.
    ‘Fine, whatever you want,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell you all I can. What can you say when you feel you’re being swallowed up?’
    He asked her about the facts of her day-to-day life. She complained about the part she had to play in a film she detested; about her acting coach Paula Strasberg, the wife of her drama teacher
in New York; and about Cukor, who had made his dislike for her obvious and constantly put her down.
    ‘“We all think we’re original,” he told me in that syrupy voice of his. “We think everything about us is unique and different. But it’s incredible how much we
echo other people, our families, how our childhood shapes our every curve and contour.” Curves and contours, are you kidding? That old fairy. What does he know about this body I have to live
in?’
    After a long silence, Marilyn told him about the cocktail of drugs she took for her chronic insomnia, and about how she secretly went from doctor to doctor for the prescriptions. She showed a
staggering knowledge of psychopharmacology, and recited the litany of drugs she took, often intravenously: Demerol, Sodium Pentothal, phenobarbital, Amytal. Greenson was furious with her doctors
and immediately advised her to use only one physician, Hyman Engelberg, to whom he would entrust every aspect of her physical well-being. He told her to leave everything up to him: he would decide
what medication she needed.
    He definitely disconcerted her, this doctor: he listened but resisted her demand to be soothed, cherished, made whole.
    And then her hour was up and they parted company.
    When she got home that evening, Marilyn thought of the calm, gentle figure she had