Next month, it will be 100 years since the birth of Marilyn Monroe, an occasion marked by a major exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, a season of films at the BFI and the publication of a number of books, including my own, I Wanna Be Loved By You – Marilyn Monroe, A Life in 100 Takes.
One of these 100 “takes” – snapshots of the superstar’s life – is an aspect of her biography that is often overlooked: her support for those who, like her, suffered from problems with their mental health.
Now, this hidden legacy has finally been honoured with the new launch of the Marilyn Monroe Mental Health for the Arts Program at Mount Sinai hospital in New York.
“Marilyn Monroe remains one of the most widely recognised and misunderstood figures in modern history,” says Lori Hall, who has given $100,000 to help set up the initiative, which aims to provide support for those in the performing arts who experience difficulties with their mental wellbeing.
It was an issue close to Marilyn’s heart. Fame was fickle, Monroe said in her last interview, which she gave to Life magazine. “It’s like caviar,” she observed. Although a little bit of it was delicious, if you had it “every damn day”, it was too much. “It’s nothing I’m counting on,” she said, reflecting on her status as a global star and the prospect of a future lived away from the public eye. “And I would say, gee, it was a painful time when I was famous.”
Marilyn’s interest in the issue of mental health was deeply personal. Her maternal grandfather, Otis, suffered from general paresis, a condition brought about by syphilis of the brain, and died in an institution at the age of 43 in 1909. Her maternal grandmother, Della, suffered from “manic-depressive psychosis”, a serious condition that resulted in an attempt to smother the baby Marilyn, then known as Norma Jeane, in her cot.
After this, Della was committed and died in a state hospital in California in 1927. Otis and Della’s daughter, Gladys – Marilyn’s mother – also showed signs of mental illness; she was diagnosed as having schizophrenia and just 12 days after she gave birth in June 1926 she placed her illegitimate daughter in foster care.
For years, Marilyn believed she had inherited the mental illness, thinking her bloodline was cursed. “For a long time I was scared I’d find out that I was like my mother and end up in the crazy house,” she said. “I wonder when I break down if I’m not tough enough – like her.”
At the age of eight, when Norma Jeane was living with one of her foster families, she was sexually abused by a man who boarded in the same house. “When he put his arms around me I kicked and fought as hard as I could, but I couldn’t make any sound,” she wrote in her memoirs. “He was stronger than I was and wouldn’t let me go. He kept whispering to me to be a good girl.”
Experts who studied Monroe’s case concluded that there was a clear connection between the young girl’s experience of sexual abuse and her future emotional difficulties. “The result is a child in a woman’s body,” observed Pamala Klein and Zsuzsanna Adler in a 1986 article, “portraying a certain innocence by needing to play the seductress in the long and painful process of trying to come to terms with her abuse, and with her perception of men”.
Dr Greenson wrote: “Marilyn was a bottomless well: one could not fill her, with all the deep, deep holes her lack of family had left her with.
One of the other consequences of the trauma she experienced in early life was Marilyn’s increasing dependence on drugs. Although it seems she first turned to painkillers and sleeping pills as a way to cope with endometriosis, a chronic condition in which cells similar to those lining the womb grow outside the uterus, the lure of the drugs also eased her psychological distress. In the fallout from her three marriages (to teenage sweetheart Jim Dougherty, baseball star Joe DiMaggio and playwright Arthur Miller) and numerous affairs, Marilyn turned to prescription medication to ease her pain.
In an unpublished letter, Marilyn’s last psychoanalyst, the Los Angeles-based therapist Dr Ralph Greenson, wrote that the star’s dependence on sleeping pills “was her way of escaping the miseries of life”. In the same letter, which Dr Greenson wrote after Marilyn’s death, he concluded that “Marilyn was a bottomless well: one could not fill her, with all the deep, deep holes her lack of family had left her with.”
Marilyn was always searching for a way to understand the source of her problems. She first underwent psychoanalysis in 1951, and was encouraged to take it seriously by her New York acting coach and promoter of “the Method” technique, Lee Strasberg.
In the summer of 1956, when Marilyn was in England filming The Prince and the Showgirl, she underwent a week of therapy with Anna Freud, Sigmund Freud’s daughter, at her house in Hampstead, north London, now the Freud Museum.
She told Anna Freud that she had first read Freud’s classic work The Interpretation of Dreams when she was 21. After the sessions, Anna Freud diagnosed Marilyn with “emotional instability, exaggerated impulsiveness … tendency to depression in case of rejection, [and] paranoid with schizophrenic elements”. Another of her doctors believed the star suffered from bipolar disorder.
From 1960, Marilyn began to see Dr Greenson, often for daily sessions. But when she didn’t respond to traditional analysis – 50 minutes on the couch and therapy, which involved strict boundaries – the doctor tried a more unconventional approach. After sessions at his house, he encouraged Marilyn to socialise with his wife and two adult children. “Marilyn was always looking for a family,” said her publicist, Pat Newcomb.
By December 1961, according to Dr Greenson, Marilyn exhibited all the signs of a “borderline paranoid addict”. He was so worried about her state of mind – she talked about retiring from the movie business and even suicide – that, for a time, he placed nurses in her apartment to watch over her day and night. Marilyn had become dependent on drugs that, in her words, gave her a “womby-tomby” feeling. In the last two months of her life, she was prescribed 830 units of medication, enough to kill someone several times over
On 4 August 1962, Marilyn died from an overdose of Nembutal and chloral hydrate. The coroner ruled it a probable suicide, but many others believe it to be an accidental death; some even claim she had been murdered. She was 36 years old. “I could not defeat all the destructive forces that had been stirred up in her by the terrible experiences of her past life, and even of her present life,” Dr Greenson wrote to Anna Freud.
Since Monroe’s death over 60 years ago, we’ve learned a lot about both mental distress and how we talk about it. While she was working within the confines of the studio system – a system that tried to control every aspect of a star’s life – she was speaking out about “uncomfortable” issues such as mental health and the trauma of childhood sexual abuse.
In 1959, Monroe had asked her lawyer to investigate organisations “that provided psychiatric assistance to children” as she was thinking of setting up her own foundation. Although the bequest – which was likely to have gone to the Anna Freud Foundation in New York – was never fulfilled during her lifetime, Marilyn did leave a quarter of her estate to her New York psychoanalyst, Dr Marianne Kris, who in turn left that share to the Anna Freud Centre for the Psychoanalytic Study and Treatment of Children in London.
In spite of those who have written her off as a “dumb blonde” or a trivial Hollywood actress, I believe we should see Monroe as an incredibly modern – and quietly subversive – figure. And so, as we remember Marilyn for her acting talents and luminous beauty, it’s also time to acknowledge this important legacy too. As Lori Hall, patron of the Marilyn Monroe Mental Health for the Arts Program, says, “I can think of no better way to celebrate her 100th birthday than by fulfilling this wish.”
‘I Wanna Be Loved By You – Marilyn Monroe, A Life in 100 Takes’ is available from Simon & Schuster