The Final Years of Marilyn Monroe: The Shocking True Story by Keith Badman Page B

thought that she was losing him in the marriage stakes severely hurt her. She soon became bitterly jealous of the dancer and began harbouring deep grudges towards her, especially since Prowse was a good decade younger than her and, in Marilyn’s own words, ‘had better legs’.
    Openly dismissive of the heart-wrenching revelations about the former men in her life, Monroe made it clear to the few friends around her that the most significant thing for her at the start of 1962, even more important than her new film, was to move forward with her life, and that buying a home of her own was the key to this. After renting over 35 different homes, flats and hotel rooms (of fluctuating levels of luxury) over the previous 16 years, Marilyn announced she was ‘tired of living in apartments’. However, the decision to finally purchase was not entirely her own. It had actually derived from a suggestion made back in May 1961 by celebratedCalifornian psychiatrist Dr Ralph Greenson, the latest in a line of psychoanalysts who had managed to practise their dubious methods of counselling on the star.
    Born in 1911 in Brooklyn, New York as Romeo Samuel Greenschpoon, Ralph Greenson studied at Columbia University and at Berne University in Switzerland before obtaining a qualified medical degree in 1935, the same year that he married Hildegard Toesch. The couple settled in Los Angeles soon after. The name change occurred concurrently. In 1938, he studied Freudian psychology in Vienna and became close to its creator, Sigmund Freud. During the Second World War, Greenson served in the US military and, following his discharge, returned to Los Angeles where he began to practise the flourishing vocation of psychoanalysis. He would go on to become Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California, and was soon to be known as Hollywood’s ‘therapist to the stars’ (Vivien Leigh, star of Gone with the Wind , was one such).
    He and Marilyn had first met in January 1960, in bungalow 21 at the Beverly Hills Hotel, during the filming of Let’s Make Love , when she was desperately in need of counselling following a heated argument with her acting coach, Paula Strasberg. Counselling sessions between the two of them did not however commence until the following May, shortly before Marilyn began shooting her penultimate movie, the drama-laden The Misfits , and it was during that film that he was forced into making his first major decision about the star.
    In soaring temperatures of 95 to 110 degrees in the shade, the actress had played out her most demanding role. However, it became too much for her and she had difficulty with her performance. Director John Huston lost his patience and snapped, describing her as both ‘useless’ and ‘hopeless’. To ease her mental anguish she turned to her Nembutal tablets. As Huston recalled, ‘She took so many sleeping pills to rest that, in the morning, she had to take stimulants to wake her up and this ravaged the girl.’
    Time spent on the set with one of the movie’s co-stars, Montgomery Clift, no doubt triggered her actions. They shared a lot in common, for instance, a love of New York and a hatred of Los Angeles. He often alluded to it as ‘Vomit, California.’ He was also a habitual user of narcotics. During a break in filming one day, he demonstrated to the actress how, by pricking the top of a Nembutal capsule and pouring its contents directly into a glass of water or champagne, the drug could be made to take effect much faster. Marilyn would remember this ‘trick’ and use it to devastating effect.
    Production on the movie had been temporarily suspended when, on Monday 29 August 1960, Marilyn was flown out to Los Angeles and,under the name of Mrs Miller, was placed in Westside Hospital, a small private Hollywood-based hospice, where doctors discovered she was a barbiturate addict and had been habitually taking approximately 20 sleeping pills a day, enough to kill a non-user. Amid