The Murder of Marilyn Monroe (18 page)

“The above incident occurred during the fourth month of her analysis with me . . . She was impulsive and there was a history of some acting out in her adolescent spitefulness and defiance. Her motivation for treatment had been strong, since she had depressive moods, was sexually frigid, and was unable to work effectively in her job . . . She did return the following day . . . She still felt angry about my supposed cruel rejection of her, but by the middle of the hour I was able to work on this material to try to find past events in her life when she felt similarly rejected . . .

“About one year later, a similar constellation of events occurred, and again she fell into a rage. She refused to work on this but vented her fury on me by silence, nail biting, and leaving the hour early . . . That evening her husband had to leave her alone to attend a meeting, and she reacted to this unforeseen event as if it were another
maternal rejection
. . . The pre-oedipal hatred for the mother, which had been stirred up, plus being deserted by her husband unleashed primitive anger, spite, oral sensual desires, and a powerful need to be punished, which she could not contain.”

Besides the need to conceal sexual indiscretions that could destroy his highly successful psychoanalytic career, Dr. Ralph Greenson had an alternative motive for silencing his star patient. The fact is, Greenson was at his wits end treating Marilyn Monroe. A little more than two weeks after her death, he would complain to his friend and colleague Dr. Marianne Kris that he was becoming a victim of countertransference, which, he explained “is an inappropriate reaction of the therapist to his patient.”

According to Greenson, analysts’ “difficulty with empathy disrupts their timing and dosage of interpretation so that their interventions feel tactless and inaccurate . . . Anger, sexual feelings, boredom, sleepiness, restlessness and uncontrollable laughter” on the part of the analyst “are all indications of the possibility of countertransference.”

Greenson pointed out that all people experience transferences. However, during an analytic session, a transference is a patient’s “experiencing of feelings, drives, attitudes, fantasies, and defenses toward a person in the present” such as the analyst “which do not befit that person but are a repetition of reactions originating in regard to significant persons of early childhood, unconsciously displaced onto figures in the present.”

Ralph Greenson wrote about the maddening frustrations he experienced while treating Marilyn: “If I behaved in a way which hurt her she reacted as though it was the end of the world and could not rest until peace had been re-established, but peace could be reconciliation and death. As a consequence I became aware that any negative transference required instant handling, with the result that she would call me at all hours of day and night, whenever any negative transference cropped up. I saw her seven days a week because she was terribly lonely, the more so as she began to get rid of a lot of people around her who only took advantage of her.”

Curiously, Greenson helped his patient decide who was taking advantage of her and told Marilyn she should try to make friends outside the people she worked with at the studio. After he saw little improvement in Marilyn’s psychological state, Greenson actually questioned the methods he’d been employing with her, “I have some misgivings about how correct was I in my form of treatment and how much was I being led by countertransference feelings,” which are, “inappropriate reaction[s] of the therapist to his patient.”

It was, perhaps, Greenson’s ego as well as monetary considerations that prevented him from acting ethically by withdrawing from the case. Indeed, after Marilyn’s death, he continued to take on new patients and “treat” them despite being aware of his own countertransference feelings.

There is strong evidence that Dr. Greenson grew increasingly tired of playing “surrogate father” to Marilyn Monroe. “There was a real washing out of the usual doctor boundaries,” remarked Dr. Robert Litman of the Suicide Prevention Team. “I would never suggest that there was anything wrong in the relationship. He virtually adopted a person. There’s a danger when someone gets that involved.”

The idea of adding Marilyn to his household was too much for Greenson to handle, especially in light of how she contacted him at all hours, several days a week. Still, as Professor Douglas Kirsner ominously noted, “Greenson told his colleagues that he decided to offer his family as a substitute for the family Monroe never had because she would have killed herself sooner if he had committed her to a mental hospital.”

On August 15, 1962, Greenson penned a letter to Marilyn’s poet friend Norman Rosten. “I should have played it safe and put her in a sanitarium,” he admitted, “but that would only have been safe for me and deadly for her.”

Greenson’s son Danny agreed that, following Marilyn’s hospitalization at the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic in early 1961, his father “felt that therapy as he knew it wasn’t working. He couldn’t hospitalize her, because everyone came to stare and gawp at her, which was awful, and medication wasn’t helping in her case.”

Milt Ebbins, meanwhile, recalled the good doctor making “a statement that Marilyn was doomed and eventually she would’ve done it anyway.”

Greenson was convinced that, during the last month of Marilyn’s life, she couldn’t go one day without a crisis, and his brother-in-law Mickey Rudin agreed. Rudin, who was the attorney for Frank Sinatra as well as Marilyn Monroe, told Donald Spoto that Greenson’s relationship with Marilyn “helped kill him . . . ‘Don’t get yourself all emotionally involved’ . . . should have been a rule for a psychoanalyst . . . He involved her
totally
beyond what he should have with the family . . . He totally involved her where he was worried about her all the time.”

Rudin pointed to the great difficulty Greenson had experienced months earlier, before departing on May 10, 1962, for a much-needed five-week vacation: “When he went to Europe, I was delighted. He needed a week. Some time. Just needed it. There wasn’t a crisis just with the picture [
Something’s Got to Give
]. There was a crisis every day.”

Apparently, this had been the case as early as June 29, 1961, when Marilyn was recovering from the removal of her gall bladder. “At that time she was recovering from gall bladder surgery,” Greenson recalled. “She was taking very little medication, but she was terribly, terribly lonely . . . I saw her at that time seven days a week, mainly because she was lonely and had no one to see her, nothing to do if I didn’t see her.”

Mickey Rudin told J. Randy Taraborrelli, author of
Sinatra: Behind the Legend
, “She could have a crisis over what she was having for lunch, she was that emotional and high-strung. She could have had an imagined crisis.”

When Donald Spoto took a look at Marilyn’s phone records, he saw that she’d consistently call her lawyer Mickey Rudin anywhere up to eight times a day. “I wasn’t impatient with her,” Rudin told Spoto. “It was time-consuming as hell. It was a pain in the ass.”

It was also Rudin, described by Frank Sinatra’s former valet George Jacobs as a “combination bag man, hit man, and Hollywood hustler,” who explained why Greenson had been so insistent on taking that five-week European vacation during the spring of ’62: “His wife was Swiss. This was an annual pilgrimage to her family. He’d probably beat his head if he didn’t. How much exhaustion can a man who had a coronary condition take? . . . The problem faced with Marilyn having to do the picture [
Something’s Got to Give
] is that . . . she didn’t have any money.”

Marilyn’s long-time friend Gloria Romanoff reflected to Margolis, “She never had any real money. The house she died in was the first home she ever owned. It was a very simple house but it was everything to her. Marilyn was just very genuine. She had so little money and now it pains me that these people who are in charge of her estate are making fortunes, money she could have used.”
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From March 1962 until her death, Marilyn was living on 12305 Fifth Helena but would occasionally drop by her old apartment on 882 North Doheny Drive. Hildi remembered one time after an analytic session at the Greensons’, her husband later learned she had taken in a taxi cab driver, who had driven her home. Greenson said he took action against this self-destructive behavior by allowing Marilyn to become one with the family.

She would often join in, politely offering to clean the dishes after supper with the Greensons. Hildi reflected, “My husband said, when he wanted to bring her into the house, ‘This is just not a case that one can analyze. She has to work through a great deal more before she can be analyzed.’ She needed to become a whole person again.” Greenson once told his patient-friend actress Celeste Holm, “Celeste, this woman has no concept of family life. She was with Marianne Kris for years, but not one thing has touched her. So I’m trying to give her a model. I’m trying to give her some concept of the way it ought to be.”
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Soon, Marilyn became a member of Greenson’s family and at one point, wearing dark glasses, a wig and scarf, joined his son Danny to help him find an apartment. She was even showing up to Greenson’s lectures in this disguise as well. Joan wrote, “Father liked to give lectures, and he was an excellent public speaker. He would wait for the last few stragglers and latecomers to settle into their seats. At this moment I looked around, and I saw one of the stragglers was Marilyn in disguise. She looked incredible. She had on a brown, dowdy wig, with a scarf over it, tied under her chin. She had on her sporty mink coat, under which she had this terrible, brown Pucci dress—the color was drab and dead. On her feet, without socks, thank God, were loafers.

“Marilyn sat in the seats just behind Mother and myself. When most of the auditorium was emptying, I watched as Marilyn got up and started to walk out. I watched the faces turn around and follow her with their eyes as she slowly made her way up the aisle. I knew no one recognized her, and only a few close friends of the family knew who that person was. But just her movement up the aisle made people stop and take notice and watch her as she exited. I told her that I thought her disguise was great, and we both thought it was pretty funny.”

Hildi recalled, “When we’d have chamber music, my husband would invite her to come and listen. She’d sit in a corner and she’d turn away from the people and the musicians—just listening very intently, all huddled up.” Greenson’s patient actress Janice Rule became jealous when she learned that Marilyn had been invited to his living room recitals. Janice snidely remarked, “You knew I love music. How come you never invited me?” “You were never that ill.” Greenson participated in these recitals albeit as a lousy violinist.

“She would sit in the living room in the big wing-backed chair,” Joan reflected. “As Mozart, Schubert, or Vivaldi would start to be played, Marilyn would get totally lost and absorbed in the music. Slowly, she would start to move with the music, her arms and her torso. Her eyes would remain closed. Her movements were so beautifully sensual, and so seemingly private and personal.” During the spring of 1962, an excited Marilyn invited her poet friend Norman Rosten and his wife Hedda to the Greensons’ on several occasions.

Greenson detailed in his 1964 paper what happened when he announced to his star patient that he would have to depart for his European vacation on May 10, 1962. He wrote, “When I left for a five week summer vacation I felt it was indicated to leave her some medication which she might take when she felt depressed and agitated,
i.e.
rejected and tempted to act out. I prescribed a drug which is a quick acting antidepressant in combination with a sedative, Dexamyl®. I also hoped she would be benefited by having something from me to depend on . . .

“When I returned she told me that she carried a supply of the tablets with her at all times in a silver pill box, which she had bought especially to hold them. She never became severely depressed during my absence and felt that the possession of the pills had been a safeguard, a magical protection for her in my absence.

“A dream in which the silver pill box turned green just like the pills (that is,
everything turned into Greenson
) seemed to explain the unconscious meaning . . .
I felt it was indicated to prescribe drugs for her
. I can condense the situation by saying that, at the time of my vacation, I felt she would be unable to bear the depressive anxieties of being alone. The administering of the pill was an attempt to give her something of me to swallow, to take in, so that she could overcome the sense of terrible emptiness that would depress and infuriate her . . .
Drugs may aid in the interval between visits
.”
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Greenson’s friend and colleague Milton Wexler conceded that not all meaningful treatments of psychoanalysis are successful, especially the unorthodox ones. “Greenson began to write more and more about the importance of the real relationship between the analyst and the patient,” Milton Wexler relayed yet disagreed with this unconventional method and stated, “Once the symptoms were imbedded in that characteristic way of responding to the world, no amount of interpretation, enlightenment or bringing the unconscious into consciousness would do any good.”

In Greenson’s 1964 paper, he made it clear that Marilyn Monroe tried to come onto him during their first four months of analysis. When he rejected her sexual wishes, she saw it as another rejection and became very angry with him. A year later, she tried to come onto him again and he claimed he rejected her again. The psychiatrist wrote that she “fell into a rage.” Peter Lawford said, to his great surprise no less, that Greenson finally succumbed to the seduction of the world’s ultimate sex goddess.

Lawford told Heymann he heard Mafia-Teamster tapes of Marilyn and Greenson making love. Greenson himself admitted in his writings that she was very seductive and that because of her, he had fallen victim to countertransference. Greenson wrote, “One of the most frequent signals of countertransference reaction is . . . reacting sexually . . . to the transference manifestations” of the analysand. In other words, when a therapist has sex with his patient.
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