whispering, ‘I’m being followed by the FBI.’ I thought, ‘Well, she’s totally flipping out!’ Marilyn said, ‘I’m being followed because of my connections with the Communist Party.’ She told me she was very proud of herself because she became adept at losing the FBI agents. She said she started figuring out how to evade them when she became a movie actress and learned how to ‘become invisible.’ ”
While the FBI’s episodes of surveying Monroe did happen, there were also times when she was not under their watch yet still concerned about a plot to know her every move—and at times, she believed, her every
Others in Marilyn Monroe’s life at the time were more categorical. “I think Marilyn was a very sick woman, a classic schizophrenic,” said Johnny Strasberg, son of Lee and Paula. “She was dedicated to love. It’s a thing schizophrenics talk about, love. They’ll do anything for love and, additionally, they are totally infantile; they have no ego, no boundaries, as the rest of us have. The amazing thing about her is that she survived as long as she did. There was enough capacity for life that had she been lucky enough to find a therapist who could treat her problems, she might have… That’s the tragedy. People loved her. But nobody could say no to her. No one would or could take responsibility for her. They had to cut her off or abandon her, which is the thing she expected. With Marilyn, you’re dealing with an abandoned infant who’s not an infant anymore.”
Born in San Francisco in 1908, Dr. Wexler trained as a lawyer before switching to psychology. After taking a doctorate at Columbia University, studying under Theodor Reik, a disciple of Freud, he became one of the country’s first nonphysicians to set up in practice as a psychoanalyst. Also a member of the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society, Dr. Wexler would go on to become a pioneer in the study and treatment of Huntington’s disease, forming the Hereditary Disease Foundation. Wexler also felt strongly that Marilyn Monroe suffered at least from borderline paranoid schizophrenia after sitting in on three sessions with her in Dr. Greenson’s home. “Yes, I treated her,” he said in 1999. “I won’t discuss that treatment but will say that I agreed with Dr. Greenson that she presented borderline symptoms of the disease that had run in her family. I found her to be very proactive in wanting to treat those borderline symptoms, as well. One misconception about her treatment is that it was Dr. Greenson’s idea that she move in with his family. She never moved in with the Greensons. Instead, it was my suggestion that she spend as much time there as possible in order to create the environment that she lacked as a child. That was my theory at the time and Dr. Greenson agreed. Also, I felt it would alleviate her separation anxiety if she knew she had a place to return to.”
All of these many years later, to ignore the findings of these two doctors or act as if those findings did not exist makes no sense. It’s certainly not what Marilyn Monroe did over the years. In the year and a half after Greenson’s and Wexler’s diagnosis, Marilyn did everything she could to perform beyond her illness. She always had. She’d always soldiered on, even knowing that something wasn’t quite right with her.
Dr. Greenson’s different opinions of what Marilyn was dealing with in her life have been, it would seem, purposely overlooked in Marilyn Monroe history for many years. Some biographers have written that his findings were egregiously misguided and couldn’t possibly have been true. As one put it, “[Greenson] even spread lies about his patient to the professional community, including the unsubstantiated report that she was borderline paranoid schizophrenic.” It would seem, though, that if a psychiatrist treats a patient—in Monroe’s case, just about every day of the week—and comes to a conclusion about that person’s state of mind, it is not an “unsubstantiated report.” It’s a diagnosis.
Unfortunately, Dr. Greenson would become so zealous in his treatment of Marilyn, and thus so overbearing in her life, that he would lose credibility, especially with the passing of the years. Historically, he seems like a quack because he invited Marilyn into his home, had her sleep over, integrated her into his family. It was felt that he had lost all perspective where Marilyn was concerned. However, in the 1950s and 1960s, all sorts of vanguard treatments for mental illness were being tested. In fact, in Greenson’s opinion, welcoming Marilyn into his home was the only alternative to putting her in a mental hospital. In his notes about the case, he is specific that he was trying to figure out any way he could to keep her from being “committed once again, for I know she will not survive it a second time.” Douglas Kirsner confirms, “Greenson decided to offer his family as a substitute for the family Monroe never had because she would have killed herself sooner if he had committed her to a mental hospital.”
In September, Marilyn joined Frank Sinatra in entertaining guests on his yacht for a four-day cruise to Catalina Island. “They were definitely a couple,” said one of the partygoers. “She was acting as if she was the hostess, not a guest. She seemed in good spirits, but definitely not quite right. I had heard that there’d been some trouble getting her there. Everyone knew she was not well, that she was under the care of doctors.”
At this time, Marilyn’s primary physician working with Dr. Greenson was Dr. Hyman Engelberg. However, Marilyn had become so adept at the art of “doctor shopping” that the two doctors were unable to keep track of the medications in her system. When she would demand confidentiality from another doctor, she would always get it because of her celebrity. She would then stock up on as much medication as she could from him before that doctor would refuse her any more. Then she would simply “shop” for a different doctor. Greenson and Engelberg did attempt to control Marilyn’s doctor-shopping habit, though perhaps not in the best possible way. “The idea was that she was never to be said no to when she wanted a prescription,” said Hildy Greenson, Dr. Ralph Greenson’s wife, “because the only thing that would happen was she would procure medication elsewhere and not inform her primary physicians about it. So whenever she asked for a drug she would usually get it.” That “idea” apparently did not work. The list of drugs she was taking by the end of 1961 was staggering.
After Greenson’s and Wexler’s diagnosis of Marilyn Monroe as suffering from BPS, she began taking the barbiturate Thorazine. At the time, Thorazine was a new drug, developed in the 1950s to treat the disease. When she would take it, however, she would gain weight, and therefore she didn’t like it. As soon as she was off the medication, she would lose weight quickly. However, she would also lose her grip. Historically, whenever she looked her best—as in her last film,
Marilyn was also taking the narcotic analgesic Demerol as well as the barbiturates phenobarbital HMC and Amytal, along with large quantities of Nembutal. Of course, she had been taking Nembutal to sleep for many years, and truly it had become an addiction. Dr. Engelberg insists that the most he and Dr. Greenson gave her was twenty-four Nembutal at a time. However, Marilyn went through the drug like candy, so she must have been getting it elsewhere.
