It is hard to know by what standards the author of this book can claim it to be a novel. Certainly it does not have the shape, tone or atmosphere of a crafted piece of fiction. What it most resembles is one of those immensely long Vanity Fair articles that start off with screaming headlines and lurid crossheads, but after a short distance one has to pursue into the ad-less wastes of the magazine’s back pages. One keeps reading in the hope of finding shocking revelations, scurrilous imputations or at least good low-grade gossip, all the while suspecting that one is wasting one’s time, which would probably be better spent watching Some Like It Hot on DVD.
This is not to say that Marilyn’s Last Sessions is a bad book, but it is such a strange hybrid that one hardly knows what to make of it. To be fair, Michel Schneider, a Frenchman, or a man who writes in French, is cheerfully uncertain both of his aims and of what he has achieved. In a brief prologue that he opens with a nicely acid exchange between Marilyn Monroe and her friend Truman Capote, Schneider admits that, “Like Marilyn’s hair, this novel is a phoney of the bona-fide kind” — and like Capote’s Holly Golightly, whom her creator describes in Breakfast at Tiffany’s as a “genuine phoney.” After all, the portrait of Holly, so Schneider informs us, was based partly on MM, as we shall refer to her from here on.
The book, Schneider writes, is “inspired by actual events,” and all dates, locations and conversations are “the protagonists’ own.” However, “this is a work of fiction. The forger in me hasn’t hesitated to impute to one person what another has said, seen or experienced, to ascribe to them a diary that hasn’t been found, articles or notes that have been invented, and dreams and thoughts for which there is no source.” One could not ask for greater candor, yet the confession is hardly helpful to us in reading the book. Nor is the writing. Lamentably, Schneider presents himself as a hard-boiled commentator who shows what an insider he is by referring to Hollywood as “Tinseltown” and delivering himself of deathless observations such as “some actors are like stars whose visibility belies the fact they’ve stopped shining.”
By Michel Schneider, translated by Will Hobson
The “last sessions” of the title are those that MM had in the final two years of her life with the psychiatrist Ralph Greenson. In the 1950s Greenson, who had worked with Freud in pre-war Vienna, was at the top of his profession, highly regarded both by his psychoanalytical colleagues and by the many screen celebrities among whom he moved — as well as MM, his patients included Tony Curtis and Frank Sinatra, the latter one of MM’s last lovers. Greenson seems to have been entirely screen-struck, and had many connections with Hollywood. His work with traumatized soldiers returning from World War II had led the novelist Leo Rosten to cast him, in light disguise, as the hero of his novel Captain Newman, M.D., which was later turned into a successful movie starring Gregory Peck. Privately, says Schneider, Greenson “wanted to be known to posterity as ‘the man who listened to images.’”
The good doctor was well aware of the elements of fantasy and storytelling that the process of psychoanalysis harbors, and throughout his life he seemed to consider himself as much a scriptwriter as a doctor, in the same way that Freud thought of himself — rightly, alas — as a kind of novelist when he was writing up his case-histories. Greenson himself was as much of a self-invention as MM. He was born Romeo Greenschpoon, the son of well-to-do Jewish Russian immigrants. He had a twin sister, who was named Juliet — according to Schneider, the siblings “were taught to say, in unison, ‘We’re Romeo and Juliet, and we’re twins.’” No wonder the poor schmuck became a psychiatrist.
Greenson and MM were drawn to each other as moths to flame — oh dear, the Schneider style is catching — and their patient-doctor relations rapidly turned into a folie a deux. MM was a deeply damaged personality and depended on Greenson for the maintenance of some form of sanity in the last, tormented months of her life. As for Greenson, Schneider has him say in the aftermath of MM’s death: “She had become my child, my pain, my sister, my madness.” Phew. In old age Greenson came up with a calmer and altogether more acute summation of their mutual predicament: “I was crazy about acting and used psychoanalysis to satisfy my need to please, while she was an intellectual who shielded herself from the pain of thinking by talking in a little girl’s voice and putting on a show of being dumb.”
We know MM to have been a singular person — “phenomenon” would be a better word — but in Schneider’s portrayal of her she is deeply strange, part changeling, part demon, part lost soul. Christened Norma Jeane Mortenson, she took her mother’s maiden name, Baker; then Ben Lyon, an executive at 20th Century Fox, came up with the name Marilyn Monroe, which delighted her. As her career went on, however, MM became her very own inescapable Mr Hyde; as she said, “I drag Marilyn Monroe around with me like an albatross.” One of the most poignant and eerie anecdotes in the book is told by Capote. After being with her while she sat for hours (adjust for Capotian exaggeration) in front of a looking-glass, “He had asked her what she was doing and she’d replied, ‘I’m watching her.’”
In the end, Marilyn’s Last Sessions tells the story of a double tragedy. MM was self-destructive, but also she was one of those people who damage anyone who comes too close. Jean-Paul Sartre said of her, “It’s not just light that comes off her, it’s heat. She burns through the screen,” and it was a heat that could sear the stoutest of hearts. Greenson described what he and MM shared as a loveless love, and one suspects that is all that MM could offer to anyone, even to herself. MM died, and Norma Jeane along with her; Greenson survived them both by 17 years. As he said: “She was a poor creature whom I tried to help and ended up hurting.”
Marilyn’s Last Sessions, for all its fallings-short, is fascinating, in an awful sort of way. Schneider’s talents were just not commensurate with his material — think what Nabokov would have done with such a story! Other writers have had a go — notably Joyce Carol Oates and Andrew O’Hagan — yet MM still awaits a master novelist with the soul of a poet to do her true justice.
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