Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters by Marilyn Monroe Read Free Book Online Page A

consulted Dr. Margaret Hohenberg at 155 East 93rd Street in New York. Margaret Hohenberg was born in 1898 in Slovakia and had studied in Vienna, Budapest, and Prague before having to flee Austria in 1938 after the Anschluss. She first went to London for a year, then settled in New York in 1939.
    Milton Greene, one of Dr. Hohenberg’s patients, recommended her to Marilyn, and, curiously, the doctor accepted her as an analysand in spite of the obvious risk involved in treating two patients who not only knew each other but also had very close professional links. In fact, shortly after Milton Greene was fired from Marilyn Monroe Productions, the actress stopped seeing the analyst and never returned to her consulting rooms. Nevertheless, a bill for $840, drawn up by Dr. Hohenberg on August 1, 1962, indicates that Marilyn had gotten back in touch with her former analyst for telephone consultations.

     
    Dear Dr. Hohenberg,
    I’ve been wondering myself why I don’t write to you. I think it has to do with the fact that I’ve been feeling I was taken away from you (with your consent) or that you sent me away from you—
    On the whole, things are going along rather well so far
    M.C.A., our agents, and Stein, our lawyer are dealing have dealt with Natasha but—we’ll see—
    I have a strange feeling about Paula. I mean—she works differently than Lee but she is a wonderful and warm person—which also bewilders me
    Anyway I keep feeling I won’t be able to do the part when I have to it’s like a horrible nightmare.
    Also I guess I didn’t write you before this because I was waiting to see if I would get shot first.
    Arthur writes me every day—at least it gives me a little air to breathe—I can’t get used to the fact that he loves me and I keep waiting for him to stop loving me—though I hope he never will—but I keep telling myself—who knows?
     
    Notes:
    In January 1953, Marilyn left the William Morris Agency, whose vice president, Johnny Hyde, had died in 1950. She signed a contract with the powerful talent agency MCA, Inc. (Music Corporation of America). George Chasin attended to Marilyn’s interests at MCA until her death. In her book Marilyn and Me , Susan Strasberg quotes a story dating back to 1962 as told by Marilyn’s masseur, Ralph Roberts: “She asked me if I had heard any rumors about Bobby Kennedy and herself. None of it is true, she told me. Besides, he is too skinny. Bobby is trying to dismantle MCA and has asked me to help him.” Indeed, MCA had to wind down its agency work and concentrate on production after an action brought against the corporation by Attorney General Robert Kennedy in July 1962.
     
     
    Irving Stein, along with Frank Delaney, was one of the lawyers who worked for Marilyn Monroe Productions.
     
     
    In 1948, Natasha Lytess was appointed by Columbia, as was their usual practice, to help Marilyn prepare for her part in the Phil Karlson film Ladies of the Chorus . The two women worked together on about twenty films until Marilyn chose Paula Strasberg to assist her during the shooting of Bus Stop in February 1956. Natasha Lytess found it difficult to accept this break.

 
     

LETTER TO DR. GREENSON
     

    1961
     
    From January 1960 onward, following the advice of Marianne Kris (her analyst in New York at that time), Marilyn started analysis with Dr. Ralph Greenson in Los Angeles. She wrote him a long letter on March 2 and 3, 1961, about three weeks after her disastrous confinement at Payne Whitney, when she had had to confront one of her worst fears: the specter of hereditary family madness, the fear of ending up in a psychiatric hospital like her mother and grandmother before her.
    At the time, Marilyn had been transferred from Payne Whitney after Joe DiMaggio’s intercession and was convalescing at Columbia University’s Presbyterian Medical Center. She was reading Freud, especially his letters. Bed-bound, she wrote describing the details of her confinement and all the