Marilyn's Last Sessions Read Online Free PDF Page A

journalists my mother is dead. She’s not, but I’m still telling the truth really. When
they put me in the orphanage on El Centro Avenue, I screamed, “I’m not an orphan. I have a mother. She’s got red hair and soft hands.” That was true too, even if she never
touched me.’
    Greenson took this at face value. Marilyn’s mother might still have been alive, but she was right to think of her as dead to her. Rather than interpret, he asked, ‘What did you study
before becoming an actress?’
    ‘I didn’t finish high school. I sat for people, did some modelling, looked at myself in the mirror or in other people’s eyes to see who I was.’
    ‘Do you need to be seen by other people for that? Men?’
    ‘Why just men? Marilyn doesn’t exist. I come out of my dressing room Norma Jeane. I’m still her even when the camera’s rolling. Marilyn Monroe only exists on
screen.’
    ‘Is that why you’re so anxious about having to shoot? You’re scared of your image being stolen by the picture? That the woman on screen isn’t you? That your image is not
only giving you life but also taking it away? Do you feel the same when people look at you in real life?’
    ‘Too many questions, Doctor. I don’t know. Men don’t look at me, anyway. They run their eyes over me. It’s different. You don’t, though. The first time we met, it
felt as if you were looking at me with all your heart, as if you were about to introduce me to someone inside myself. That made me feel good.’
    It took the psychoanalyst a while to notice a strange and unsettling thing. When she wasn’t being looked at, when nobody was paying attention to her, her face would go utterly slack and
come apart, as if it had died.
    Greenson knew she was intelligent, but was still surprised by her faultless taste in poetry, theatre and classical music. Arthur Miller, her third husband, whom she had
married four years earlier, had undertaken to educate her. But while she was grateful for the education, she expressed at the same time a venomous resentment towards him. She claimed he was cold
and unresponsive, attracted to other women and dominated by his mother. But by this stage their marriage was faltering. Yves Montand had been a catalyst; the real reasons for their estrangement lay
elsewhere.
    The first time Greenson met Marilyn, he sensed her body was something she possessed rather than who she was. After her death, Miller confirmed this when, staring off into space, he told
Greenson, ‘In the end, something of the order of the divine resulted from her feelings of disembodiment. She was utterly incapable of condemning or judging anyone, even if they’d hurt
her. To be with her was to be accepted, to pass from a world where suspicion reigned into a luminous, sanctifying realm. She was part queen, part waif, sometimes on her knees before her own body
and sometimes despairing because of it.’
    The analyst confided his first impressions to his colleague, Wexler, soon after he started treating Marilyn: ‘As she becomes more anxious, she begins to act like an
orphan, and masochistically provokes people to mistreat her and to take advantage of her. As fragments of her past history come out, she begins to talk more and more about the traumatic experiences
of an orphan child. She feels at times that she is unimportant and insignificant. At the same time, although sexually dissatisfied, she glories and revels in her personal appearance, feeling that
she is an extremely beautiful woman, perhaps the most beautiful woman in the world. She always takes great pains to be attractive and to give a very good appearance when she is out in public,
although when she is at home and nobody can see her she might not be able to put herself together very well. The main mechanism she uses to bring some feeling of stability and significance to her
life is the attractiveness of her body. I tried to tell her that in my experience truly beautiful women are not beautiful