(LOS ANGELES, 1:30 P.M., THURSDAY, 9/20/62)
Greenson met me at his office. I sent a note and requested an interview. I explained why. He responded at once.
I sat in the waiting room. Jack and Jackie beamed up from Vogue. They laid out their summer vacation. Jackie called Biarritz yummy. They had suntans. The grapefruit/amphetamine diet kept them thin. They wore resort clothes c’est bon.
The receptionist buzzed me back. I knew the way. Greenson stood behind his desk. He said “Lieutenant” and gestured to a Saarinen chair. I sat down. He set the clock. The fifty-minute hour clicks in.
“Yes, I did purchase Marilyn’s letters. I was tempted to read them, but I resisted the urge. The provenance rather intrigued me—Marilyn to young Lowell to Officer Leffler. But the officer impressed me as an unstable man with an agenda, so I thought it best to burn the letters and be done with it.”
I believed him. “Unstable” nails Leffler. Desperate nails him best. He was a big name-dropper. He rivaled Monroe there. He dropped Paul de River’s name the most.
I said, “I’ve spent considerable time on this now, and I’ve concluded that Marilyn met Paul de River, and that he sought to mold her in the manner of the many psychopaths in his charge.”
Greenson tugged at his cuff links. “They met in the early ’50s, I believe. Marilyn’s orphanage chum, ‘Gwen’—a criminal, frankly—introduced her to de River. Over the years—intermittently, at first, and far more pointedly as she unknowingly entered the last stage of her life—Marilyn came to believe that she could take her native acting skills and develop an entirely differentiated persona—in the manner of Gwen, who was very much stronger than she was, and whom Marilyn flat-out idolized. Marilyn divulged very little information as to her new ‘criminal metamorphosis,’ but she spent great portions of our sessions analyzing Gwen’s character, and marveling at how Gwen—who had suffered the same neglect and privations as she had—had emerged as someone resolute, clear-minded, and able to live in the real world with far greater grace than she ever had. And Gwen went after what she wanted with deadly resolve—which Marilyn admired more than anything else.”
The Gwen-Marilyn riff took me back. Dope fiend Marilyn sideswiped me. ’48 to ’62. Fourteen years. Marilyn’s pill habit. She crossed “Norma Jean Baker” off a barb vial in ’48. She crossed “Marilyn Monroe” off a barb vial in ’62. All Of It constellated in ’48. The dumped-pill aspect torqued me. Fourteen years elapsed. Marilyn does now what she did then.
I said, “Doctor, where did Marilyn get the pills that killed her?”
“I don’t know. She took the pills I prescribed her, or she dumped them, as she did with the pills her internist prescribed. She told me that she received pills from her friend Jeanne Carmen, and she followed the same pattern there.”
I kicked it around. My brain gears click, clicked.