Marilyn's Last Sessions Read Online Free PDF Page B

or cry of pain. But its black candour about sex shows the truth about cinema as well: worn and unrestorable, the surviving prints reveal how
images eat away at themselves, how, as the shadows rise to the surface of the celluloid, the canker of oblivion corrodes even the most studied pose and tells the voyeur, Nothing to see
here .
    One day in January 1951 in Hollywood, a black Lincoln convertible containing the director Elia Kazan and the playwright Arthur Miller eased through the Fox lot, searching for the sound-stage on
which As Young As You Feel was being shot. They heard Marilyn’s name being shouted by a hoarse-voiced production assistant before they saw her. The director was cursing the
twenty-four-year-old actress, who kept wandering off set and returning dejected and in tears. She had only a small role, but every scene she was in was taking hours. Eventually she appeared in a
close-fitting black dress. Kazan was speechless. He had come to offer her a part.
    He became her lover, then her friend, then her enemy under McCarthyism, and then her friend again. ‘When I met her,’ he said later, ‘she was a simple, decent-hearted kid whom
Hollywood brought down, legs parted.’ She was thin-skinned and had a hunger to be accepted by people she could respect. Like many other girls who’d had her sort of life, she measured
her self-esteem by the number of men she was able to attract.

 
Santa Monica, Franklin Street
February 1960
    Marilyn continued to arrive late at her psychoanalyst’s.
    ‘Why such hostility towards people who want to help and understand you?’ Greenson asked. ‘We’re allies, you and I, not enemies.’
    ‘That’s how it’s always been. On A Ticket To Tomahawk , in the early days, the assistant director threatened, “You know, you can be replaced.” “You can
too,” I said. The idiot! He didn’t understand that being late guarantees you can’t be replaced and that everyone else is waiting for you, only you and no one else . . . Anyway,
when I’m late, it’s not as if I’m not doing anything, you know. I check my clothes and make-up, I work on my image, I take notes on what I’m going to say, topics of
conversation—’
    ‘You’re not on set or at some fancy party here,’ the analyst interrupted. ‘Do you know what it means to me when you come late? It means “I don’t like you, Dr
Greenson. I don’t want to come and see you.”’
    ‘Oh, no, I do like to come and see you. I do,’ Marilyn exclaimed. ‘I like talking to you, even if I have to look away so as not to feel your eyes on me.’
    ‘Your words say that. Your actions say: “I don’t like you.”’
    Marilyn was silent. She’d thought her being late meant only one thing: ‘You are waiting for me. You love me. You are waiting just for me. Love me, Doctor. You know it’s always
the one who loves who waits.’ But she stopped coming late after that – started coming early, too early. In the end she still couldn’t be on time.
    ‘You see, you don’t know what you want,’ the analyst told her. ‘You don’t know what time it is.’ He thought her coming early now meant: ‘He’s
there. Who knows about time, but he’s there for me. He’s there.’
    The following summer, during a very emotional session, she told her analyst about filming a scene in The Misfits in which she’d rejected her screen husband’s attempts at
reconciliation.
    ‘I kept getting stuck on the little sentence, “You’re not there.” Huston got mad, but Clark Gable stood up for me. “When she’s there, she’s there. All
of her is there! She’s there to work.” Ever since then that’s been my favourite expression when I talk about my experiences with men: mostly they’re never there .’
    The first time she sat in the leather chair in the consulting room at her analyst’s house, she noticed there were no papers on his large wooden desk. He must write his
articles upstairs, she supposed. It was odd not seeing any