Marilyn Monroe: The Biography (98 page)

She had been under the supervision of a man who can at best be termed obsessive, and this she realized to the extent that she knew their relationship had to end. This he realized, too, admitting to colleagues that he had reached a classic state of countertransference; his work with her could no longer be justified.

“Dr. Greenson took her death very personally,” said John Miner,

for he was involved with this lady to a strong degree. He was deeply shaken, even devastated by it. Even though a psychiatrist is supposed to maintain a defense mechanism, he could not restrain himself. In his own way, he loved this girl in the sense that she was a wonderful person to him. He had become very emotionally attached to her.

And more than attached, for Greenson deeply resented her increasing independence—thus his systematic attempt to separate her from good friends. His patient’s death indicates the awful possibilities when an analyst does not keep to his boundaries and yet continues, knowing full well that his own emotions are intimately intertwined with his patient. In the end, he no longer regarded either his own responsibilities or her needs. When he said he had “tried to help but ended up hurting her,” Greenson spoke perhaps the truest self-assessment of his life.

Out of patience, fearing the loss of his best beloved, enraged at himself and at what he considered her ill-advised dismissal of Eunice and of himself (which was imminent if not actual), Ralph Greenson ordered Marilyn Monroe sedated—as he had for so long, with Engelberg’s assistance—so that the rupture of their relationship might not occur: “Call me on Sunday morning.”

But it was finally just as the other Ralph, the loving Ralph Roberts, had said: “If you can’t control Marilyn one way, there are always drugs.” John Huston may have known more than he let on when, told of her death, he said angrily, “Marilyn wasn’t killed by Hollywood. It was the goddam doctors who killed her. If she was a pill addict, they made her so.”

As for Eunice Murray, she had experienced the fullness of her life with Marilyn, in the replica of her own house, with a surrogate daughter and working with a surrogate ministerial husband. But the situation had failed her, and so in a way as she administered the sleeping drug she was putting this entire part of her life to rest, however ignorantly and unaware of the final effect. She was the stooge of Ralph Greenson—an unpretty term but in this case an accurate one for an emotionally crippled and dependent woman, and so she must have felt when she cried out at the age of eighty-five, twenty-five years later, “Oh, why—at my age—do I have to keep covering up for this thing?”

The monumental self-absorption and ego-neuroses of her two major caregivers enabled them to observe Marilyn at the happiest time of her
life, at a stage of growth so full of promise—yet they strove to keep her dependent on them and on them only.

At the last, the custodians could not sustain what they perceived as her rejection of their tyranny. “We’ve lost her,” Greenson said ironically to Murray, announcing her death. On his utterance of this statement they both agreed: in a way they already had lost her, when she made her decision to dismiss them.

Ralph Greenson may have helped patients to whom he did not become obsessively attached. But in a serious way he was a personal and professional failure: an egocentric, slick entertainer; a storyteller jealous of the limelight; a possessive and tyrannical man who could pass for a brilliant therapist only in Hollywood, where even social performance is applauded and admired. He treated Marilyn Monroe not as a growing, maturing woman, one who was becoming healthier and stronger. On the contrary, he wished to keep her frail, collared to dependence on him forever. Weary of interrupting his personal life to deal with the struggles of his primary patient—an involvement he had himself worked hard to create—he was at the end resentful that Marilyn was withdrawing from his orbit, was moving out of his control, toward Joe and therefore away from him. Having spun for himself the mantle of guardian and protector, father and caregiver, he found it was an intricate web. He had worked tirelessly to limit Marilyn’s outside contacts, to make his devotion her only love and his care her only support. In any relationship, this is a dangerous program; in a therapeutic situation, it is catastrophic.

Her imminent departure was intolerable to him, the ultimate rejection by his ultimate patient. He considered her, therefore, as one who failed to be his, and in the end he treated her just as such a man would: capriciously, placing her in a perilous situation. In some dark corner of his mind, he may have known or feared or even wished that his temerity would lead to tragedy.

And herein lies the tragedy of Marilyn Monroe’s death. Something brave, new and mature was emerging in her those last months, as every deed, interview, human interaction and performance witnesses. She was finally taking control of her life, as those closest to her testified; she was in some inchoate way banishing the crippling ghosts that had so long surrounded her. Never contemptuous of those who had hurt or
misguided her, she was now kinder still, more concerned than ever for those her life had touched. Only in this spirit can her finest qualities be appreciated—her refusal to malign husbands or lovers for the sake of a good interview; her rejection of self-pity; her devotion to Isadore Miller, to Arthur’s children, to the young DiMaggio. There were remarkable, almost miraculous acts of hope in her own future: her return to Joe, her new projects, her willingness to cast out the unhelpful people, the old and the jaded parts of her life.

This buoyant spirit had been activated before, when she first turned her back on Hollywood in 1955, feeling that her life was stymied. That spirit returned to her now, too, and it must have had something to do with Joe DiMaggio—although not everything, for theirs was hardly a passionate love in its first full bloom, and they were both too wise not to know there were shoals yet to be negotiated. “But there’s a future, and I can’t wait to get to it,” she had recently told one reporter. Enthusiasm and humility, a green hope coupled with the longing to go on, to transcend what had been—rarely has so graceful a spirit been so cruelly silenced.

Silenced indeed. Marilyn Monroe died at the mercy of those who believed their mission was to save her—not for her sake, but for themselves. They wanted to own her. Marilyn Monroe’s death gives new meaning to the phrase California Gothic.

Late Saturday afternoon, Marilyn had begun to write to Joe, whom she so anxiously awaited; it would be pleasant to think that she was writing it after he telephoned. But something interrupted her, and the note was found, folded in her address book. When the house was searched for a suicide letter before her body was removed next morning, the address book was left untouched, or perhaps the note was discreetly left in place by the searcher. Like her life, it was something good, in process:

Dear Joe,

If I can only succeed in making you happy, I will have succeeded in the biggest and most difficult thing there is—that is, to make
one person completely happy
. Your happiness means my happiness, and

*    *    *

1
. As for a small cache of Marilyn’s personal letters and papers, they were duly removed next day by Inez Melson, after whose death in 1986 they passed first to a collector, thence to DS.

2
. For what follows, the author is grateful for corroborative reports filed with John Miner by two internationally renowned pathologists: Dr. Milton Halpern, former chief medical examiner of the City of New York; and Dr. Leopold Breitenecker, medical examiner for the City of Vienna, professor at the University of Vienna and one of the great European forensic pathologists. In 1982, Dr. Boyd G. Stephens, chief medical examiner–coroner of the City and County of San Francisco, provided the City of Los Angeles with an independent review of the autopsy evidence. In 1992, DS further consulted Dr. Arnold Abrams, medical director of Pathology at St. John’s Hospital, Santa Monica.

Chapter Twenty-Four

A
UGUST
6–8, 1962

T
HE BODY DESIRED BY MILLIONS
belonged to no one: on Monday morning, August 6, Marilyn Monroe’s remains still lay unclaimed at the Los Angeles County morgue. And so, to no one’s surprise, Joe DiMaggio stepped in to adjudicate the last details. Late that afternoon, she was brought back to the Westwood Village Mortuary on Glendon Avenue, a few steps from busy Wilshire Boulevard.

Ten years earlier, at the start of her great dash to stardom, Marilyn had asked her friend Allan Snyder to come to a hospital just before she was to be discharged: she wanted to look her best for the public and the cameras. For fifteen years, no one understood her fears and her features better than he, no one was more patient and loyal in devoting his craft to her benefit.

“Promise me something, Whitey,” she had said, using his familiar nickname, while he brushed and lined, highlighting here and toning there.

“Anything, Marilyn.”

“Promise me that if something happens to me—please, nobody must touch my face but you. Promise you’ll do my makeup, so I’ll look my best when I leave.”

“Sure,” he said, teasing. “Bring the body back while it’s still warm and I’ll do it!”

A few weeks later, Allan received a gift box from Tiffany’s. Wrapped in a light blue pouch was a gold money clip with an engraving:

Whitey Dear

While I’m still warm

                Marilyn

Now it was time to call in the promise. On Tuesday, August 7, the telephone rang at Snyder’s Malibu home.

“Whitey?” Joe was calling from his hotel room in Santa Monica. “Whitey, you promised—will you do it, please—for her?”

No explanation was necessary. They both remembered.

“I’ll be there, Joe.”

And so Allan drove to the mortuary. Swiftly, deftly, reverently, he took up his bases and brushes, his liquids and rouges, and worked there in the cool room. He had done this job so many times, had worked on her while she laughed and chatted or simply slept; he had prepared Marilyn for so many public appearances before she exited from dressing rooms, airplanes and clinics. Now, as Allan completed his task, Joe entered.

On Wednesday morning, August 8, Allan returned early, knowing that the makeup would surely need retouching.

Joe was still there. He had spent the night with his beloved, his fingers clasped tightly, his gaze fixed on Marilyn’s features: it was the solitary vigil of an adoring knight, worshipful from twilight to dawn on the eve of a great battle. Now Joe sat motionless, leaning forward as if by sheer force of love and longing he could urge her back to life for their wedding. To strangers, reporters and writers, he never uttered her name again, nor did he ever remarry.

Joe made a hard decision during those three days. There would be no Hollywood stars or directors at the funeral, no producers or studio executives, no newsmen, reporters or photographers: they had only hurt Marilyn, he said. Instead, only thirty relatives and friends were to be admitted, among them Berniece, who had come from Florida out of respect for the half-sister she scarcely knew but had come to admire from afar; Enid Knebelkamp, Grace’s sister; the Snyders; Lee and Paula Strasberg; May Reis; Ralph Roberts; and the Greenson family,
with Eunice Murray. Jim Dougherty, remarried, was at his job with the Los Angeles Police Department, and Arthur Miller, also remarried, likewise declined to attend.

Gladys, still at Rockhaven, never knew of her daughter’s death. She was released from the sanitarium several years later and, after living for a time with Berniece, entered a Florida nursing home where she died of congestive heart failure on March 11, 1984, at eighty-two. When questioned, Gladys seemed not quite certain who Norma Jeane was or who she had become.

The service began in the mortuary chapel at one o’clock, when an organist offered a selection from Tchaikovsky’s
Sixth Symphony
and one of Marilyn’s favorite melodies, “Over the Rainbow,” from
The Wizard of Oz
. A local minister preached, taking his text from the Book of Amos: “How wonderfully she was made by her Creator.” Then, as Joe had requested, Lee Strasberg spoke briefly: “We knew her,” he said, his voice shaking and his eyes glazed with tears, “as a warm human being, impulsive, shy and lonely, sensitive and in fear of rejection, yet ever avid for life and reaching out for fulfillment. The dream of her talent was not a mirage.”

Before the casket was closed, Joe bent over, weeping openly as he kissed Marilyn. “I love you, my darling—I love you,” he said, placing a nosegay of pink roses in her hands. Henceforward for twenty years, flowers would be delivered weekly from Joe to her burial place—just as he had promised Marilyn when she told him of William Powell’s pledge to the dying Jean Harlow. Joe then led the group from the chapel to the crypt, a hundred yards away. They passed the grave markers of Ana Lower, buried here in 1948, and of her niece Grace McKee Goddard, who had followed five years later.

That day they were gathered at the center of the neighborhood where Marilyn had spent almost all her life. It was the same small arena where she had grown and gone out to work in such a brief but brilliant radiance, this local girl who now belonged to the world. There were Hawthorne and the old Bolender house to the south; the Los Angeles Orphans Home eastward in Hollywood, near the place where Gladys and Grace worked at film-cutting benches and took the girl to the movies; and very close, Nebraska Avenue, where she lived with Aunt Ana, and
Emerson Junior High School, where Norma Jeane was “the Mmmmm Girl,” dating the wise-cracking Chuck Moran. Near them, too, were University High; the house where she married Jim; the soundstages of Twentieth Century—Fox; and Fifth Helena Drive.