Marilyn Monroe: The Biography (84 page)

The student said nothing, but the event disturbed him for years and led to his total loss of respect for his mentor. No professional expertise is required to recognize the classic signs of projection, for it was obviously Ralph Greenson himself who had to exert control and whose narcissistic personality demanded that he have his way with her. It is also remarkable that Greenson would ignore every accepted protocol of professional ethics by discussing his patient with a third party, regardless of the close relationship.

Henry Weinstein recalled a similar breach of ethics by Greenson, when the psychiatrist said to him one day, “Henry, don’t you pay any attention to these fantasies of hers. She has a lot of them—one that is a typical fantasy of girls, for example, is that they want to go to bed with their fathers. That was her fantasy.” Whether this was indeed Marilyn’s expressed dream or fear is impossible to know: by this time, Greenson himself was so deeply overwhelmed by his projection and countertransference that he may well have seen
himself
as the father figure to whom she was sexually attracted. In any case, his conversation about Marilyn with Weinstein was unconscionable. Marilyn’s growing distrust of Greenson was indeed not paranoid. “I think,” Weinstein said years later with compassion for them both, “that Ralph was dependent on her.”

It is astonishing that Greenson conducted himself with a patient in this manner, and that not a single one of his colleagues stood up to correct him. The reason may have been not only his enormous influence in the professional community, but also because he circulated among them the spurious and unsubstantiated report that Marilyn Monroe was
“schizophrenic,” and that he himself was being supervised in caring for her by a man well known in Los Angeles for treating schizophrenics: Milton Wexler, who was not a medical doctor but the holder of an academic degree in psychology.

“At that time,” continued Greenson’s colleague,

everyone was experimenting with ways to treat schizophrenics, and Wexler had his own method. Greenson used Wexler as his supervisor, and thus gave his unorthodox treatment of Monroe an apparent legitimacy. One of the techniques was to invite the patient into the home—not only to provide what may have been lacking earlier, but to have a constant connection so the patient would never have undue anxiety on weekends, or [suffer] any separation trauma.

Marilyn was, then, being further locked into her childhood instead of being freed from it. And Greenson, once upstaged by his sister Juliet, brought Marilyn into his home to domesticate her, to demythicize her, to control her and reduce her celebrity—all of it in the name of treating her emotional maladies and her insecurity. At home in his private clinic, with his professional supervisor providing a convenient endorsement of his tactics, Greenson became the prototype of the analyst who believed himself free of the conventional boundaries. With his own psyche so overwhelmingly intertwined with Marilyn’s, he was no longer able to see the harm of his own actions. Greenson’s attempt to keep Marilyn and Joe separate, then, reveals that he sensed a threat to his primacy—just as he had with her dear friend Ralph Roberts, who was “one Ralph too many.”

Marilyn was the fairest game of all for such manipulation: impressed by learned and paternal men who seemed to offer protection; thrice divorced and uncertain of her own worth, acceptability, talent and capacity for love; about to have her own home for the first time—she mutely accepted what Greenson made of himself for her: the all-providing savior figure every healthy and unneurotic therapist dreads to become. Everything that happened between Monroe and Greenson from that spring to her death suggests a perilous obsession. “She was a poor creature I tried to help,” he said later, “and I ended up hurting her.” These were perhaps the truest words he could have chosen to summarize their association.

As he had at Payne Whitney, however, Joe managed to extricate Marilyn from the situation. They returned to Doheny Drive, whence the movers, on March 8 and 9, transferred her few pieces of furniture to 12305 Fifth Helena Drive; deliveries from Mexico and New York were awaited in the coming weeks. Joe stayed the weekend with Marilyn, left at the house a pair of pajamas and a toothbrush, and proceeded on Tuesday the fourteenth for business with Monette.

Ralph Roberts, who had returned to Los Angeles, was as usual a great help to Marilyn as she settled in. Because she had not yet chosen custom-made draperies for her bedroom, her first request of him was to tack up the blackout drapery she had at Doheny Drive, a single heavy piece of black serge that extended several feet wider than the window. “When she went to bed, she could not bear a flicker of light from outside and always slept in a closed, warm, unlocked room.” Better than anyone, Ralph Roberts was in a position to know these habits: he treated Marilyn with a massage several times weekly, and by the time he departed, she had already retired for the night.

The script of
Something’s Got to Give
, meantime, limped along its dreary way. On March 11, writer Walter Bernstein was brought in to see what he could do with the seemingly endless, unamusing scenes and turgid dialogue. By this time, as he recalled, the story and script costs alone had topped $300,000—six times what the production had budgeted. But Fox had lost twenty-two million dollars the previous year and (thus Bernstein) “executives were not easily awed by figures.” Eager to please both the studio and star, Bernstein set to his task and went to Marilyn’s home for script conferences. “She was very charming and accommodating,” he recalled.

She showed me proudly around her new house, and she was really lovely to be with. Things she had to say about the script were right on target. “Marilyn Monroe wouldn’t do this,” she said, and “Marilyn Monroe wouldn’t make this kind of move, they’d come to her,” and so forth. Some of this was typical movie star ego, but she was very shrewd about what would play and what wouldn’t. Perhaps most of all, I remember her saying, “Remember, you’ve got Marilyn Monroe. You’ve got to use her.”

She was, Bernstein added, particularly pleased with the Swedish-accented English she had perfected with a voice coach, to be used for one of the picture’s few genuinely droll sequences.

Weinstein, too, recalled that at their first meeting Marilyn said, “Henry, I think you ought to use this scene instead of that one . . . and this plot development, because let’s face it, if this part of the story is a struggle for a man between me and another woman, there’s no contest!” It was at such time, Weinstein recalled, that “she was very sure of herself, and her points were so well taken that we went ahead with virtually an entire rewrite.”

Charming and alert she may have been, but on March 15 Marilyn was attacked by a virus, suffering chills and a high fever. Besides her duties as publicist, Pat Newcomb became a friend in need, shuttling back and forth with tea and sympathy as well as business papers and ignoring Eunice’s clear resentment of anyone trespassing on what she regarded as her turf. The housekeeper had plenty to occupy her, as she informed Greenson, who immediately ordered Marilyn to double Eunice’s salary to two hundred dollars weekly—“based on the fact that Marilyn’s business secretary [Cherie Redmond] was receiving $250,” as Eunice said. Likewise, Eunice engaged her son-in-law Norman Jeffries, his brother Keith and two friends for the work to be done in and around the house—without telling Marilyn of the personal relationship. Moreover, according to Cherie’s daily account logs for March and April, Eunice asked for Marilyn’s signature on blank checks for Norman and Keith—a privilege she was rightly denied.

In her remarkably self-serving memoir, Eunice Murray expressed her disdain for Cherie Redmond, a shrewd lady with a keen eye and an honest pen who came highly recommended by Milton Rudin. For her part, Cherie resented Eunice’s authoritarian attitude: “It’s not particularly inspiring,” as she wrote to Hedda Rosten, “and in some ways terribly time-consuming, to work through Mrs. Murray—and from Tinkers to Evers to Chance never facilitates things.” Her analogy to a baseball double-play was apt for a system that did not help at home or work. But with her quiet persistence, Eunice was not only reporting but now arranging, too.

In light of her background and life experience (not to say her presence as Greenson’s alter ego), Murray’s proprietary attitude is easy to understand. Chosen for its resemblance to the home she lost and which
was (as she said) the “bond” among herself, Greenson and Marilyn, the house at Fifth Helena became a kind of totem for her. Having lost her own family and her husband, the doctor was Eunice’s surrogate husband: a paternalistic ministerial figure whose vocation it was to help others, and with whom she had associated herself for fifteen years, continuing her adulation of her sister and brother-in-law.

With complete charge over Marilyn granted by Greenson, Eunice had the opportunity to correct her past by recreating it: for her, Marilyn’s house was hers—thus her virtual appropriation of its design, care and refurbishing. Just as she was making 12305 Fifth Helena her home, so was Marilyn her daughter, and Greenson her husband returned. In Marilyn Monroe’s life, Eunice Murray seemed for a time to regain everything to which she had ever aspired and then lost: the situation enabled her to be at last the unrealized, successful sister and the nurse-caretaker Carolyn had become. One of the major problems in all this was that Eunice was living more and more ineluctably in a dangerous fantasy life. Perhaps without their full realization, then, Ralph Greenson and Eunice Murray were fulfilling one another’s needs: the doctor was creating, as his wife said, a fantasy foster home, a haven for all those he could save; and the nursemaid was taking Marilyn as her life’s mission.

The object of this dangerous tangle of emotions was, however, stronger than most people believed. Determined to accept an invitation to join President Kennedy and other guests for the last weekend of March at Bing Crosby’s home in Palm Springs, Marilyn threw off her illness. At the Crosby home, she radiated grace and wit for the guests and spent her one night in the president’s bed.
⁹
It was at this time that Kennedy invited her to join the Madison Square gala to be held in May;
she not only accepted the offer but said she would sing “Happy Birthday.”

This pleasant weekend may at least partly explain why, the following Monday, Marilyn was (thus Walter Bernstein) “in good humor and full of energy” at a meeting with her producer, director and writer. While she was there, the studio doctor Lee Seigel arrived, took Marilyn into an inner office and administered one of his famous “vitamin shots,” those venerable Hollywood drug concoctions that kept employees energetic or sedated, depending on the company’s need and/or the star’s wishes. “Seigel was the Dr. Feelgood of Fox,” recalled the writer Ernest Lehman, who wrote and produced some of Hollywood’s finest screenplays. “I remember him giving me an intravenous injection once, as he did to hundreds of people at Fox. It was a dangerous mixture of amphetamines and God only knows what else.” The same sort of treatments were also being supplied to Marilyn every few days by Engelberg.

At the meeting, Marilyn learned that the start of
Something’s Got to Give
was now postponed to the end of April, and with that—despite an executive order from the studio that she not risk a relapse of her illness by traveling to New York—Marilyn departed to discuss the film’s problems with the Strasbergs. She was especially anxious, she told them, because an ending to the script still seemed beyond anyone’s imagination, and in such a quandary Paula’s assistance would be more than ever necessary as she groped her way through each day’s scenes. This arrangement Lee negotiated at a fee of five thousand per week, half to be paid by Marilyn herself. Once an ardent Socialist, Lee now knew the value of a dollar.

As usual, Marilyn was as prodigal as she was needy of Paula. That season she wrote a check for a thousand dollars, becoming one of the founding members of something called the Hollywood Museum Associates, a group planning a movie and television archive that never materialized; her check was never returned. The Miller children continued to receive occasional gifts for no other reason than her affection for them; and Marilyn sent to one of her studio hairdressers, Agnes Flanagan, a duplicate of a garden swing Agnes admired one day at Fifth Helena. Such acts of spontaneous generosity were still typical, as Allan Snyder recalled “You had to be very careful shopping with Marilyn. If you went to a store with her and pointed out a
shirt or something you admired, you could be sure it would arrive at your home next day!”

This attitude was perhaps all the more remarkable because Marilyn, one of the handful of unfailingly bankable stars whose films, by this time, had earned Fox more than sixty million dollars, was honoring a commitment she could easily have simply torn up—to make
Something’s Got to Give
for $100,000. By comparison, Cyd Charisse (in a supporting role) was hired for $50,000; Tom Tryon (in an even less important role) was to be paid $55,000; and Dean Martin and George Cukor were receiving $300,000 each for a film budgeted at $3,254,000. “The arithmetic,” as another Fox producer said at the time, “makes Marilyn look like a doll. She could have got a million and a percentage of the gross any day of the week. The studio has got itself a tremendous bargain.” If this is so, it remains unclear why her representatives did not negotiate for a higher salary: as David Brown noted, “an agent should have come in to write a new contract—it would have been that simple.”

But nothing in the executive offices at Pico Boulevard was ever simple, especially in 1962. The budget on the Burton-Taylor extravaganza
Cleopatra
, which shut down in London and was reshooting everything in Rome, sped toward thirty million dollars, and the studio back lot was sold to pay for it; in addition, the commissary and the talent school were shut down, and the lawns on the property went unwatered. In June 1961, Fox had twenty-nine producers, forty-one writers and 2,154 employees on its weekly payroll, working on thirty-one films; there were now fifteen producers, nine writers and 606 staff for only nine films. The fifty-five contract players in 1961 cost Fox a weekly total of $26,995; a year later, there were twelve actors under contract at a total of $7,480. Peter Levathes, his eye on the bottom line, announced proudly to Spyros Skouras that
Something’s Got to Give
would be produced on time and within its budget, requiring only forty-seven working days. This was a well-meant but almost comical proclamation, for when shooting finally began on April 23 the script was still incomplete, Marilyn was ill and Dean Martin had not yet completed a prior commitment.