Page 52 of The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe
GEORGE CUKOR WILL be leading Marilyn’s next production, Let’s Make Love .
Her top choice is Yves Montand, a thirty-eight-year-old Frenchman whose career was launched by the beloved Parisian singer Edith Piaf, and whose recent singing tour of the United States caught Marilyn’s attention.
Arthur Miller is also well acquainted with Yves Montand and his wife Simone Signoret, the leftist, educated, well-read co-stars of the French production of Miller’s play, The Crucible .
Signoret’s latest film, Room at the Top, premiered the same week as Some Like It Hot .
Marilyn overrules the studio’s objections—that Montand has never appeared in a Hollywood film and will need to learn English to play this role—and Montand is eventually cast as her leading man.
“I am announcing today my candidacy for the Presidency of the United States … I have developed an image of America as fulfilling a noble and historic role as the defender of freedom in a time of maximum peril—and of the American people as confident, courageous and persevering. It is with this image that I begin this campaign.”
Photographers pose the new candidate next to his beautiful wife, Jackie. Their bright smiles create a portrait of the perfect marriage.
The breaking news takes Marilyn by surprise.
Los Angeles is a long way from Dr. Kris and her New York couch, so an emergency stand-in is called to Marilyn’s bedside at the Beverly Hills Hotel.
Like Kris, Dr. Ralph Greenson is a friend of the Freud family.
Born Romeo Samuel Greenschpoon in Brooklyn, New York, he graduated from Columbia University, earned his medical degree at the University of Bern in Switzerland, and is now a Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine.
Dr. Greenson comes personally recommended. Among his celebrity clientele is Frank Sinatra. The singer’s lawyer, Mickey Rudin, also represents Marilyn, and is married to Greenson’s sister, Elizabeth Greenschpoon.
When Dr. Greenson arrives, already briefed on Marilyn’s liaisons with Kennedy, she is immediately comforted by the presence of this new doctor who’s so very understanding, compassionate, and well-versed in all her problems—almost as if he knows her already.
In slurred, halting words, Marilyn makes a confession. She’s taken some pills. She swallowed a few with a large glass of water, though she’s not sure which ones or how many.
Dr. Greenson examines the labels on the bottles at her bedside, gently shaking each one to gauge its contents. How can one person be allowed so many prescriptions? he wonders.
“Stupid doctors,” he mutters. “Stupid, stupid doctors.” Supplying a patient, no matter how famous, with whatever she thinks she needs only puts her in danger.
For hours, Greenson listens to his new patient’s ramblings. Marilyn describes her husband as a man who is “cold and unfeeling and doesn’t love her.” Of Jack Kennedy, she speaks animatedly. She envisions running away with the senator as the new Mrs. Kennedy.
America’s most famous actress with a man who could be America’s next president? Why not? She married America’s greatest living sportsman, and then America’s greatest living writer.
Greenson’s initial assessment of Marilyn is that she suffers from symptoms of paranoia and schizophrenia.
“As she becomes more anxious,” he writes, “she begins to act like an orphan, a waif, and she masochistically provokes people to mistreat her and to take advantage of her. As fragments of her past history came out, she began to talk more about the traumatic experience of an orphan child.”
Marilyn asks Greenson to return. To her friend Norman Rosten, she describes the doctor as “Jesus—My savior.”
“Jesus—How so?” Rosten asks.
“He listens to me.”
Sensing that Marilyn is prepared to test the boundaries of doctor and patient, Greenson warns that he will not “help her kill herself, or spite her husband.”
Miller, he feels, has “the attitude of a father who had done more than most fathers would do and is rapidly coming to the end of his rope.”
Most astonishing to Greenson is Marilyn’s tolerance for drugs. “Although she resembled an addict,” the doctor observes, “she did not seem to be the usual addict, she seemed to be able to give up the drugs without heavy withdrawal symptoms.”
He enlists internist Dr. Hyman Engelberg in his quest to limit her drug usage. Part of the challenge is Marilyn’s ongoing obsession with sleep. One afternoon, she begs him for an Amytal intravenous drip, despite having slept some fourteen hours the night before.
Amytal sodium is a powerful barbiturate used as a preanesthetic before surgery.
Greenson tells Marilyn that she’s “already received so much medication that it would put five other people to sleep.” Sleeping with less medication is possible, he promises, “if she would recognize she is fighting sleep as well as searching for some oblivion which is not sleep.”