Hell in Queens, The Last Hours of Lou Reed

Would you follow Lou Reed if he hadn't been in VU? As a lyricist Lou reached a new level post-1988. I think he's a better songwriter in this post-1988 period than he was in the sixties. Musically his 70's stuff somehow falters because he stopped playing lead guitar, and he suffered creatively by drinking too much. But once he gave up the booze and took up the guitar again everything was back on track for one of the greatest songwriters on the century. I say give 'How Do You Think It Feels?' a go in the Animal Serenade album and you'll know exactly what the VU would've sounded like had they stayed together through to the 2000's. —Post by Wick Pick » 28 Jan 2018

LOU REED: You know, when you say, “us and them mentality,” it was no joke, and it was every last centimeter with those people. DAVID FRICKE: You generally felt like you were outcasts. LOU REED: No that we were such outcasts. I'm just a songwriter but they were very stupid. I’ve always hated businesspeople. DAVID FRICKE: White Light/White Heat was considerated aggressive sound. LOU REED: It’s aggressive, yes. But it’s not aggressive-bad. —Interview to Lou Reed by David Fricke (December 8, 2009), New York Public Library

Rock icon Lou Reed was treated extensively with the drug Interferon before his death, a top American pathologist has revealed. However, contrary to music industry gossip, the rock star was not HIV-positive, according to Dr Michael Hunter. Instead, he was taking the drug to try to combat the liver disease Hepatitis C, which he contracted from dirty needles while injecting heroin early in his career. Dr Hunter is set to present his findings in a new episode of television documentary series Autopsy: The Last Hours of Lou Reed, which broadcasts in America, before being shown in the UK later this year, the Sunday Express reported. According to Dr Hunter, Reed had also hid a dark secret from his teenage years, he suffered a nervous breakdown and was admitted to a psychiatric hospital, where he underwent controversial electroshock therapy. Reed was given electroshock therapy aged just 17 because of mental illness - at New York psychiatric hospital described as 'Hell in Queens'. Lou’s sister explained that their “blazing liberal” parents were simply acting on poor advice from a doctor, who’d told them extreme measures might improve his “depressed, weird, anxious, and avoidant” nature. There is also a picture from Reed’s high school yearbook, which ran with the caption “Tall, dark-haired Lou likes basketball, music, and naturally, girls.”

As well as injecting heroin, Reed drank alcohol, chain smoked and was hooked on amphetamines, a potent nerve stimulant. To bring himself down, he took the prescription drug Thorazine. Dr Hunter said: 'The combined effect of this cocktail of uppers and downers would have caused a build-up of toxicity in Lou's liver.' But most significant of all was Reed's Hepatitis C and Dr Hunter said: 'Lou's medical records show that as far back as the early 1960s he was treated for hepatitis. What we know now is that over time, hepatitis C destroys liver tissue, causing scarring and creating the right conditions for cancer.' Source: www.dailymail.co.uk

“All the books about me are bullshit,” Lou Reed once said, when asked about Victor Bockris' biography. In a breezy tone, Reed’s first wife Bettye Kronstad writes of the five-year period, 1968-1973, between the end of the Velvet Underground and Reed’s third solo album Berlin. Kronstad makes an effort in Perfect Day to contextualize what’s happening with their personal life with the goings-on of Reed’s career. But at its most interesting and tragic, this book serves to inject the well-worn myths of Lou Reed the legend with humanity, and offers an insider’s perspective to Reed’s losses of personal control, his fears and anxieties, particularly during the Transformer era. The Velvet Underground have influenced artists of every stripe including filmmakers and one in particular, Todd Haynes, who signed up to direct a documentary about the pivotal group. Much like David Bowie and Iggy Pop themselves, “Velvet Goldmine” is heavily indebted to The Velvet Underground and everything they spawned. Elements of Lou Reed’s upbringing are used in the Iggy Pop character played by Ewan McGregor, Jonathan Rhys Meyers’ Bowie/Marc Bolan composite has a lot of Eno in him and Meyers’ band in the movie is called Venus in Furs, named after a momentous Velvet Underground song. In short, everything that influenced “Velvet Goldmine,” was essentially influenced by everything the VU wrought beforehand.

The announcement of Haynes' documentary was made official and perhaps more importantly, the doc is being made with the participation of Polygram Entertainment and Verve Label Group, the record labels that control The Velvet Underground’s music. So, there should be no shortage of music, behind the scenes footage and perhaps rare gems that have barely been seen or discovered. Look, everything I really love in music is kind of a six degrees of VU separation; almost all roads always lead back to Reed and co’s group. According to Deadline, the doc will “trace multiple threads leading to the band’s formation and their impact on music and global culture” and so it’ll be interesting, at least for VU dead heads, to see how much Haynes’ doc starts before the formation of the group and the period that pre-dates Andy Warhol and their first record. Additionally, and very critically, the doc has received the support of the very-selective John Cale and Laurie Anderson, the artist and partner of the Velvet’s late Lou Reed. Source: theplaylist.net

Joe & Marilyn: Legends in Love, Hippocampus

Soon there were Marilyn's visits to Joe DiMaggio’s home on Beach Street in San Francisco, the house he had bought for $14,000 in the early days of his success and where his sister Marie played hostess. Sometimes the couple would go fishing, Marilyn bundled up in leather jacket, jeans, and scarf. They were rarely recognized, and the times when they were spotted DiMaggio angrily told reporters to ‘beat it.’ On his home turf, DiMaggio offered a tranquility rarely experienced by Marilyn. On the matter of his brief marriage to Marilyn, their divorce and moving reunion, Joe DiMaggio’s intact silence is well known and can only be respected. “I didn’t want to give up my career,” Marilyn had said to columnist Earl Wilson, “and that’s what Joe wanted me to do most of all. He wanted me to be the beautiful ex-actress, just like he was the great former ballplayer. We were to ride into some sunset together. But I wasn’t ready for that kind of journey yet. I wasn’t even thirty, for heaven’s sake!” On his deathbed, Joe DiMaggio said in 1999: “I don’t feel bad about dying. At least, I’ll be with Marilyn again.” It was not the first time DiMaggio had said that, according to Morris Engelberg. “We were sitting together in the patio one night, talking about his illness, and he said he wished to be with Marilyn again.” 

Dinner With DiMaggio: Memories of an American Hero promises a rare glimpse into the private life of a frequently misunderstood man, and although occasionally prone to sensationalism, for the most part it delivers. Joe met his first wife, showgirl Dorothy Arnold, on a film set. Their son, Joe DiMaggio Jr., was born in 1941, but the couple were soon embroiled in a bitter divorce. “Dorothy was always trying to get between my little guy and me,” Joe told his friend Dr. Rock Positano. Although he was a lifelong movie fan, Joe’s brushes with Hollywood left him unimpressed. In the late 1940s, he was dining at the Stork Club with some of the biggest names in the movie industry, including Marlene Dietrich and the Bogarts. “I knew better than to pry,” Positano says, claiming that Joe gradually opened up. “He also spoke with [lawyer] Morris Engelberg about Marilyn,” he adds, “but I never knew what he told each of us, and Morris and I never compared notes.”

Joe thought Marilyn was both beautiful and “highly intelligent,” as Positano revealed in a recent interview for People magazine. “He had a tremendous amount of respect for Marilyn because she was a really great actress.” Nonetheless, her star was rising when she married Joe, and babies seem not to have been an immediate priority. His jealousy, and her ambition, were more likely causes of the split. When crowds gathered to watch her standing over a subway grate during filming of The Seven Year Itch, columnist Walter Winchell dragged a reluctant Joe along. The couple separated shortly afterward. “Doc, Marilyn told me that no man ever satisfied her like I did,” Joe said. Although respectful in public, Joe apparently took a dim view of her third husband, Arthur Miller. Sinatra told Joe that Marilyn kept a photo of him hidden in a closet, which “drove Miller crazy and right to the divorce court.” In the final years of her life, Marilyn grew close to Joe again. Talk of reconciliation was rife, but she insisted they were just good friends. Joe had probably been hurt by Marilyn’s relationship with Frank Sinatra, but by 1962, when her alleged involvement with John F. Kennedy occurred, the president had distanced himself from Sinatra. Positano repeats the tale of Joe snubbing Bobby Kennedy at Yankee Stadium in 1965. Marilyn had a long history of depression, and was addicted to sleeping pills. Joe told Positano that she would sometimes neglect her appearance. “Though Joe saw Marilyn’s behaviour become erratic, he was unsophisticated about mental illness,” Positano reflects. During his final trip to New York in 1999, a frail Joe was in a nostalgic mood. “I miss Marilyn more than ever,” he confided. One of his proudest achievements was the opening of the Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital in Florida.

One of Lee Strasberg’s standard suggestions—practically a requirement—was that students enhance their reservoir of primal memories and emotions (what he called “sense memory”) by entering psychoanalysis. He and Paula were undergoing analysis, and both felt, among its other advantages, that it had strengthened their marriage. Turning to Milton Greene for advice on the subject, Marilyn was soon given a referral. Greene himself had been in therapy for several years with Dr. Margaret Herz Hohenberg, who, like Lee Strasberg, had come to the United States from Hungary. A follower of the Viennese school of psychoanalysis founded by Sigmund Freud, Hohenberg, at fifty-seven, was a tall, heavy woman with white hair that was often braided and wrapped around her head. On Milton Greene’s recommendation, Marilyn met with the analyst. By March 1955, she was seeing Margaret Hohenberg five times a week.

Monroe’s presence on the block did not go unnoticed; Hohenerg’s neighbors would frequently stop her on the street and inquire, “How is Miss Monroe doing today?” During their sessions, for which Marilyn invariably arrived late, they dealt with the traumas of Monroe’s chaotic childhood, her lack of self-esteem, her lust for approval, her dread of rejection, her obsessive search for a father figure. To facilitate the analytic process, the actress recorded her thoughts and dreams in a series of binders that, in 2010, were posthumously published as a single volume called Fragments, which seemed an appropriate title considering Hohenberg’s pronouncement, made soon after she met Marilyn, that the actress possessed “a fragmented mind.” Typical of Marilyn’s nightmarish notations in Fragments is one that reads: “For Dr. H—Tell her about that dream of the horrible, repulsive man—who is trying to lean too close to me in the elevator—and my panic and then my thought despising him—does that mean I’m attached to him? He even looks like he has a venereal disease.” After six months of treatment, Hohenberg diagnosed Monroe as suffering from borderline personality disorder, a psychological condition characterized by intense turmoil and instability in relationships and behavior.

Marilyn demonstrated two of the conditions commonly associated with Borderline Personality Disorder: dissociation and depersonalization. Under stress, her mind and body would literally shut down, which helped explain (at least to Hohenberg) why Marilyn was always late for appointments and had difficulty remembering her lines when appearing in films. Strangely enough, Hohenberg also determined that Marilyn had a hearing dysfunction in her right ear. She sent her to Dr. Eugen Grabscheid, an audiologist, who confirmed that she had a mild case of Ménière’s disease, a permanent buildup of fluids in the inner ear, a potentially dangerous, difficult-to-treat ailment that led to hearing loss and bouts of dizziness. —"Joe & Marilyn: Legends in Love" (2014) by C. David Heymann

A 2013 study published in the journal Hippocampus found that daily sexual activity was not only associated with generation of more new neurons, but also with enhanced cognitive function. Research on humans has yielded similar findings. It turned out that both men and women who had engaged in any kind of sex over the past year had higher scores on the word recall test. Furthermore, for men only, being sexually active was linked to better performance on the number sequencing task. The results revealed that women who engaged in more frequent sexual intercourse had better recall of abstract words on the test. A new study out this year (also in the Archives of Sexual Behavior) that involved 6,000 adults age 50 and over explored how sexual frequency was associated with performance on two episodic memory tasks administered two years apart. Participants who had sex more often had better performance on the memory test. It's worth noting that more emotional closeness during sex was linked to better memory performance, too. As always, more research is necessary, especially research that can help to establish cause-and-effect in humans and that explores what actually happens in the brain in response to frequent sex. That said, the overall pattern of findings to date is consistent with the idea that sex may very well be beneficial for our brains and our cognitive performance. Source: www.psychologytoday.com

The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

Marilyn Monroe as The Girl in "The Seven Year Itch" (1955).

A new Marilyn Monroe exhibit and auction will include outfits that belonged to the blonde bombshell including a replica of her iconic Seven Year Itch dress. Beginning August 18, The Paley Center for Media in Beverly Hills will display a collection of Marilyn Monroe's costumes and artifacts until September 30, which precedes an October auction of the items. Pieces displayed throughout "Essentially Marilyn: The Auction/The Exhibit" will be complemented by photographs taken by photographer Milton H. Greene, who was also Monroe's friend. The items on display include 15 costumes worn by Marilyn Monroe including the sequined showgirl leotard style from "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. At the end of October, Profiles in History will host an auction of the items, but a date has not yet been announced." Source: www.apparelnews.net

“The greatest thing about Monroe is not her chest,” Billy Wilder declared with sincerity. “It is her ear. She is a master of delivery. She can read comedy better than anyone else in the world.” For many, Marilyn Monroe will always be the girl on the sidewalk grating; her skirt blowing up around her waist. For others she is the woman breathily singing her way through Happy Birthday for President John F Kennedy. In reality, however, she was neither. In fact it could be said that Marilyn Monroe wasn’t even a real person; she was a fascinating character created by Norma Jeane Baker, the little girl who dreamed of becoming a movie star. Marilyn was an invention in which she herself didn't believe. By 1933 Gladys Baker decided to move Norma Jeane into a house she was sharing with Mr and Mrs Atkinson, an English couple who worked in the movies. Shortly after moving in together, news came through that Gladys’ grandfather Tilford Hogan had committed suicide, and her son had died tragically at 14. Gladys had always been emotional and these two events were enough to push her over the edge. Shortly afterwards Gladys suffered a nervous breakdown and was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. 

In 1942, when faced with yet another stint in an orphanage, Norma Jeane married Jim Dougherty, a neighbour of the Goddard family, where she was living at the time. For Jim, it was a chance to ‘save’ her; he could be a knight in shining armour and he embraced the challenge wholeheartedly, though Norma Jeane was conflicted. “It was like being retired to a zoo,” she later said. The marriage lasted four years, during which time Jim went to war and Norma Jeane moved in with her in-laws. She was bored and lonely, so took a job at a defence plant, where she was discovered by a photographer taking photos for the war effort. These photographs led to a modelling career and Jim went along with it, giving her all of his savings for her customes and fees, though assured his wife that when he returned from war, she’d have to give it all up and start a family. She responded by heading to Las Vegas and filing for divorce; much to the shock and despair of her husband. Johnny Hyde, a prominent Hollywood agent, put her forward for the small but important role of Angela in The Asphalt Jungle, directed by John Huston. Hyde asked her many times to marry him and she turned him down each and every time. After Johnny Hyde’s death, Marilyn channelled everything into her career, earning roles in films such as Love Nest, Clash By Night and Don’t Bother To Knock. 

Marilyn's star was on the rise, and yet it all threatened to come crashing down with the discovery not only that she had posed nude, but that her mother, whom she had been declaring dead for years, was actually alive and living in an institution. Many theories have been brought forward over the years as to why or how Marilyn died. Though Dr. Ralph Greenson acknowledged that ‘all their sessions had been like acts in a play,’ he seemed unsure of its meaning. ‘The curtain had fallen, and the enigma of Marilyn's self was intact.’ He realised that she ‘revealed herself only to mask herself again.’ Greenson was haunted by the memory of Marilyn and devastated by his failure to rescue her. "It was ‘a marriage of intellect and artifice’that ‘came to an end when Hollywood itself did." Monroe’s decline coincided with the demise of the studio system which she had grown to bloom.  She took her secrets to the grave, and any stories of her death that have come and gone through the years can only be speculative at best. Each question invites further answers, on and on, like an endless hall of mirrors. —"The Shocking Truth Behind Marilyn Monroe's Secret Life" (2015) by Michelle Morgan

Kelli Garner is the latest actress to tackle an impossible role — the screen legend Marilyn Monroe, whose dumb-blonde persona masked a dark personality haunted by mental illness. Sometimes Garner's performance doesn’t work at critical times because it lacks sufficient nuance. Vocally, Garner goes for mannered breathiness punctuated with a bubbly giggle. The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe is based on the biography of the same name by J. Randy Tarraborelli, although the book was written off by some critics as being little more than vapid gossip about the late actress. And that's one of the problems with creating yet another book, movie, or TV show about Monroe. Since Monroe's untimely death at the age of 36 on Aug. 5, 1962, she has taken on a larger-than-life, mythic quality that makes it difficult to know what is fact and what has just been repeated as part of her legend for years. The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe suggests that mental illness ran in Monroe's family. Just as her mother suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, Monroe also deals with bouts of paranoia, delusion, and depression. Hollywood, then, provides the perfect escape from a miserable reality. One screen test revealed what we all know now: the camera loved Marilyn Monroe and she loved the camera, giving herself to it as she never could to any husband or lover. In one scene the mother-daughter duo are on the same page: when Norma Jeane asks Gladys at what age she began to hear the voices, Gladys gives her a knowing look and says, “So you’re hearing them too?” At least Gladys realized she was better off under a doctor’s care. 

A printed epilogue notes that Gladys ended up outliving her daughter by 22 years. In the series, things got so bad that Monroe almost tried to kill herself by jumping out of a window, which eventually caused her therapist Dr. Kris to admit her to a psychiatric hospital. In the 2001 documentary Marilyn Monroe: The Final Days, Dr. Kris says Monroe got into the psychiatric ward at Payne Whitney in 1961, with a doctor forcing a physical exam on her and Monroe threatening to cut herself with glass if she wasn't released. “The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe” takes a compassionate look at a star whose beauty made her a legend, but whose private life was a torture chamber. Monroe was in many ways unknowable and you'll come to the sad realization that you'll never come to truly know her either, which is what Monroe wanted the most. Marilyn Monroe, as Joshua Logan said, "is pure cinema." Source: www.sfgate.com

It takes more than a breathy voice and a golden dye job to play Marilyn Monroe, the most celebrated and troubled of Hollywood idols. Kelli Garner certainly throws herself into the title role of Lifetime’s two-night miniseries The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe, adapted from the 2009 biography of the same name by J. Randy Taraborrelli. Yet she never seems to be doing anything more than celebrity karaoke, rarely digging deep beneath the long succession of hairstyles and form-fitting clothes. As for John F. Kennedy, that’s included too, but the senator-turned-President remains discretely off-screen, although there’s still an excuse to show Garner in the knockout gossamer dress Monroe famously wore when she sang “Happy Birthday, Mr. President.” Underlying it all, in the adapted screenplay by Stephen Kronish, directed by Laurie Collyer, is that Monroe inherited mental illness from her mother, a religious scold (she calls modeling “a sinful business”) who hears voices. Marilyn, as usual, is portrayed as an object mostly of pity, someone who tells her agent, “Everyone uses everyone,” having been on both sides of the equation. Source: variety.com

Marilyn Monroe: The Misfits, The Last Sessions

A nude scene long believed lost featuring Marilyn Monroe in John Huston’s The Misfits has been re-discovered. The footage, cut from the film by Huston, was previously believed to have been destroyed. The whereabouts of the footage was uncovered by Charles Casillo, the author of Marilyn Monroe: The Private Life of a Public Icon. Casillo discovered that the footage had not been destroyed during an interview with The Misfits producer's (Frank Taylor) son Curtice Taylor, who revealed that he had kept in a locked cabinet since his father's death nearly twenty years ago in 1999. Living up to her sex symbol status, Monroe reportedly went nude while filming without warning, much to the chagrin of director, John Huston. Her impromptu disrobing was not appreciated by Huston, however, who felt it was unnecessary for the scene. Source: deadline.com

While Something's Got to Give (1962) is listed as Marilyn Monroe’s last film, The Misfits was her last completed movie before her death from a drug overdose in 1962. Bored while waiting for Monroe to arrive on the set, Clark Gable volunteered to do a number of hazardous routines which included being dragged by a truck travelling at 30 mph. On the last day of filming, he allegedly said, "Christ, I'm glad this picture's finished. She [Monroe] damn near gave me a heart attack." The next day, he suffered a massive heart coronary which led to his death eleven days later. According to Arthur Miller, Clark Gable had already seen a rough cut of the movie by the last day of filming, and said: "This is the best picture I have made, and it's the only time I've been able to act."

In his study on Marilyn Monroe, Graham McCann describes the character of Roslyn as having “the abstraction, and the intimacy, of a figure in a dream” (1988, p.155). Undoubtedly the film acknowledges the oneiric qualities of Monroe/Roslyn. Indeed, the vision of the movie as a whole seems to gesture towards an understanding of Monroe and her character as the ultimate misfit, an individual unable to completely find her place in either the ideal or the real. As Montgomery Clift’s character remarks: “I can’t figure you floating around here like this”; to which Roslyn replies: “I don’t know where I belong”.  Clark Gable plays an aging cowboy whose life has lost purpose and who is reduced to capturing wild horses — the symbols of the free life he loved — for dog food. Marilyn/Roslyn is the only beautiful thing in the whole ugly desert, in the whole world, in this whole dump of toughness, atom bomb, death. Source: wcreynolds.com

Michelle Morgan, who has studied Marilyn Monroe’s life for 30 years, was able to track down some of the last living people associated with the screen legend to further investigate how the star helped pioneer an unlikely movement in Hollywood for other actresses yearning to make it without resorting to the casting couch. “She had said that she never fell for it,” Morgan told Fox News. In the mid-1950s, Monroe spoke out about being harassed by an executive whom she did not name. "She was very intelligent about that, to keep his name out of the article. But she certainly did speak about it," Morgan said. “She was never going to let herself be victimized. She spoke about it and as a result, inspired other people. She was one of the few actresses in Hollywood at that time who was speaking out about that.” Morgan added: “I think based on the things she said herself and the outspoken way she approached Hollywood, I personally don’t believe she was ever a victim of the casting couch. I think she was able to walk away." Arthur Miller said: “She was making fun of the situation as she was playing it. That was the difference. People thought they could imitate her by being cute. But she was being cute and making fun of being cute at the same time. There was another dimension, which is very difficult to do.”

Harassment in Hollywood wasn’t the only hot topic on Marilyn Monroe’s mind. Frustrated for constantly being cast in “dumb blonde” roles, Monroe wasn’t shy about letting the film studio know she was willing to risk her growing success just for the chance to play different characters. The scene in which Monroe’s white halter dress blows over her hips as she steps onto a New York subway grate while being ogled by 5000 onlookers made her an icon. And while some may believe the actress was exploiting her sex-appeal, Morgan said she was proud of making a bold statement. “I think she enjoyed the fact that she was an attractive woman who had an effect on other people. Not just on men, but on people around her… I thinks she really used the skirt scene… to get out of these dumb blond roles and… as a way of getting power because she worked so hard to get it… And at the end of the day, it was just a scene for a film. A very successful one.” Source: www.foxnews.com

In the summer of 2002 a book of photographs was published called Becoming Marilyn, featuring pictures taken in 1949 by photographer André de Dienes of a young model who was preparing to make the leap into Hollywood stardom. In reviewing Becoming Marilyn, Newsweek magazine commented that the book’s “images catching Norma Jeane as she mutates to ‘Marilyn.’” This statement reflects the basic premise of the myth of Marilyn Monroe: a real girl (named Norma Jean) metamorphosed into something that was not a person, but a concept: “Marilyn.” And it is an ideal seen as being distinct from the woman’s reality. “Marilyn” was only a fantasy of femininity, an imaginary role the actress performed with immense success, but which eventually destroyed her. Norman Mailer shows this response par excellence in his notorious, ranting catalog of Marilyn’s contradictions. She was, as Mailer describes her: a lover of books who did not read, a proud inviolate artist who could haunch over to publicity; a female spurt of wit and sensitive energy who could hang like a sloth for days in a muddy-mooded coma; a child-girl, yet an actress to loose a riot by dropping her glove at a premiere; a fountain of charm and a dreary bore; an ambulating cyclone of beauty and a dank hunched-up drab at her worst; lover of life and a cowardly hyena of death who drenched herself in chemical stupors... Simone de Beauvoir wrote that 'Woman is all that man desires and all that he does not attain'.” That's Marilyn. —"The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe" (2005) by Sarah Churchwell 

Marilyn's Last Sessions (2013): A novel based on the records of Marilyn Monroe's analysis is grimly fascinating. The "last sessions" of the title are those that Marilyn 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 and highly regarded both by his psychoanalytical colleagues. In Michel Schneider's portrayal of Marilyn, she is deeply strange, part changeling, part demon, part lost soul. Marilyn's Last Sessions tells the story of a double tragedy. Marilyn 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." As the actress said herself, "I drag Marilyn Monroe around with me like an albatross". By late 1961, for Dr Greenson, Marilyn was both patient and ever-present family friend. Marilyn, he found, could not abide the notion of any imperfection in ‘certain ideal figures in her life.’ Greenson came up later with a more acute summation of her predicament: "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."

‘Marilyn could not rest until peace had been reestablished,’ Greenson wrote. But the psychiatrist thought her inability to handle anything she perceived as hurtfulness, along with her abnormal fear of homosexuality—Greenson was to write—‘were ultimately the decisive factors that led to her death.’ Marilyn herself told journalist W. J. Weatherby, ‘People tried to make me into a lesbian. I just laughed. No sex is wrong if there’s love in it.’ Earlier, speaking of her life in 1948, she said the sexual side of relations with men had so far been a disappointment. ‘Then it dawned on me,’ she said, ‘that other people, other women, were different than me. They could feel things I couldn’t. And when I started reading books I ran into the words “frigid,” “rejected,” and “lesbian.” I wondered if I was all three of them. There was also the sinister fact that a well-made woman had always thrilled me to look at.’ Source: www.theguardian.com