The Misfit

By Steven Poser

A fascinating account of the unusual relationship between Marilyn Monroe and her last psychiatrist in the fifteen months leading to her suicide.
 
Marilyn Monroe is remembered as both an iconic sex symbol and a heartbreaking figure who suffered through a chaotic childhood and wrestled with addiction and mental illness. This short true account shines new light on the last days of her life.
 
Dr. Ralph Greenson, a clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA Medical School and a star among Hollywood psychoanalysts, treated Monroe for the fifteen months before her August 1962 suicide. He saw her seven days a week and brought her into his home. He never got over losing her.
 
Written by a practicing psychoanalyst, The Misfit recounts this tragic alliance and Marilyn Monroe’s borderline personality, offering compelling insight into the deteriorating mental state of a singular superstar.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Sep 7, 2022
• ISBN: 9780795300875

Book preview

I

Ralph Greenson was Marilyn Monroe's fourth and last analyst. By the time they first met in early 1960, she was world-renowned, an instantly recognizable superstar who epitomized feminine beauty and defined the very essence of screen sexuality. She was a goddess, an icon, the archetypal Hollywood movie star.

Greenson was, in turn, the acknowledged star of Hollywood analysts. Trained in Switzerland and Vienna, he was an internationally recognized exponent of Freudian psychoanalysis. A colleague and friend of Anna Freud's, he had been personally analyzed by two of her famous father's disciples—Wilhelm Stekel in Vienna and Otto Fenichel in Los Angeles. He was clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA Medical School, president and dean of training at the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Institute. He was also very well connected to the movie industry. A film, Captain Newman, M.D., starring Gregory Peck, was made about his wartime work with traumatized soldiers returned to an Army Air Force convalescent hospital in Colorado, for which he collaborated on the script and collected royalties. He numbered among his patients actors Tony Curtis, Frank Sinatra, Vivien Leigh, and Peter Lorre, director Vincente Minnelli, and producer Dore Schary.

Marilyn was referred to him by Marianne Kris, who treated her in New York for several years on the recommendation of Anna Freud, whom Marilyn had seen briefly in London while making The Prince and the Showgirl with Laurence Olivier. Kris wanted her to have an analyst in California, as she was then working on a film called Let's Make Love in Hollywood and needed constant attention. Her marriage to Arthur Miller was falling apart and she had embarked on a disastrous affair with her costar, Yves Montand, who was married to Simone Signoret. Greenson saw her through the completion of the film. She then returned to New York and resumed treatment with Kris.

A few months later she was in Reno, Nevada, to begin filming The Misfits with Clark Gable. She collapsed on the set and was flown to Los Angeles, where Greenson visited her in the hospital, attempting to control her dependence on alcohol, powerful tranquilizers, sleeping pills, and painkillers. Ten days later she returned to filming The Misfits. A week after the film was completed, Clark Gable, whom she idolized as a father figure, succumbed to a fatal heart attack. Marilyn returned to New York. Kris found her suicidal. She had her committed to the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic in Manhattan, where Marilyn was confined to a locked ward. She threw a chair through the glass window of her bathroom door. She took a piece of the broken glass and threatened to cut herself if they didn't let her go. She was restrained and moved to a padded cell on the violent unit. She was released owing to the intervention of Joe DiMaggio, her former husband. She exploded in a rage at Marianne Kris and never spoke to her again. Marilyn spent the next three weeks in the neurological department of Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center. She wrote to Greenson a long letter recounting the horror of her incarceration and the lack of empathy on the part of the doctors attending her. She was reading Freud's correspondence, seeing in his photograph a sad disappointment in his gentle face.[1] She told him how the director Elia Kazan had loved her for one year and had rocked her to sleep one night when she was in great anguish. She returned to Los Angeles in June 1961 and began seeing Greenson five, six, and finally seven days a week.

Greenson wanted to save her. He never treated her analytically. He adopted her into his home and made her a member of his family. He negotiated with the studios on her behalf. She became totally dependent on him. Fifteen months later, in August 1962, she was dead of an overdose of barbiturates, a probable suicide. She was 36 years old.

I don't know that I will ever get over it really or completely, he said.

If Ralph Greenson ever understood exactly what happened between him and the ill-fated movie star, it appears nowhere in his published writing. All of his papers having to do with Marilyn that are in the UCLA Special Collections library are sealed until January 1, 2039. Mentions of Greenson in numerous biographies of Marilyn Monroe—references that suggested something highly unusual in the annals of psychiatry—led me to want to understand for myself the making of this tragic alliance. What follows, based in published accounts, is a reconstruction of perhaps the most important relationship Marilyn Monroe ever had with another man: her last psychiatrist.

II

Marilyn Monroe was born Norma Jeane Mortensen in the charity ward of Los Angeles General Hospital on June 1, 1926. Her mother, Gladys Monroe, was twice married and had already abandoned two children by