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Nothing Personal
John Wayne Bobbitt: From chopping block to auction block
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[11/06/99]

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Recently, Christie's New York auctioned off those same belongings for an astonishing $13.4 million. Of that sum, $612,600 went to the Literacy Partners, $441,650 to the World Wildlife Fund and the rest -- $12.3 million -- to one Anna Mizrahi Strasberg, widow of Lee Strasberg, a woman whom Marilyn Monroe had never even met. She is said to be thrilled.

The only other beneficiary of Monroe's estate is the Anna Freud Centre in England, an institute dedicated to researching the effects of long-term psychoanalysis and psychotherapy on emotionally disturbed children.

While Marilyn displayed some degree of dependence on her analysts and her acting mentor throughout her lifetime, her biographers suggest that, toward the end of her life, her relationship to both had cooled significantly. Did Marilyn intend for her legacy to end up where it did?

Since her death, international licensing deals have generated more money than Marilyn earned during all her years in Hollywood. Since 1992, licensing and royalties have resulted in more than $1 million a year in revenue to the estate. With companies such as the Franklin Mint now rushing to cash in on the public interest fueled by the auction, that amount is sure to increase in 1999.

A recent visit to the estate's Web site reveals that 122 companies are licensed to sell products bearing Marilyn's image, while 52 companies have permission to use her image in advertisements or promotions. In addition to the ubiquitous posters and T-shirts, there are Marilyn checkbook covers, Venetian blinds, cookie jars, Christmas ornaments, shoulder pads, camera straps, stockings, stocking hangers, billiard cues and cue cases.

The serpentine story that culminated in the Christie's auction began long before Monroe had become merely an image for sale.

In the fall of 1956, Marilyn was in London filming "The Prince and the Showgirl" with Laurence Olivier. With her were her husband, Arthur Miller, and her psychotherapist, Dr. Margaret Hohenberg. As Hohenberg could not remain with Marilyn during the entire four-month shoot, she referred her famous patient to another analyst in London.

Donald Spoto, author of the definitive "Marilyn Monroe: The Biography," writes that Hohenberg "whisked [Monroe] off to meet her old friend Anna Freud" and that the star subsequently had "several therapy sessions" with her. Spoto provides no evidence of this, but his assertion is supported by Peter Swales, a historian who has researched the subject for his own as-yet-unpublished book.

Swales claims that he was told by two sources (Paula Fichtel, the Freud family's maid since the 1920s; and Hohenberg herself), that these sessions took place. In correspondence with Swales, however, Miller "cast all kinds of doubt" upon the likelihood of these meetings.

"To further complicate matters, Fichtel may not be an entirely reliable source. According to Anna Freud's biographer, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Fichtel was "a paranoid, and ancient by the time Peter Swales came on the scene."

"Paula Fichtel told all kinds of things to all kinds of people which then made their way into the literature and were taken as fact," says Young-Bruehl. She also claims that Fichtel "has contributed a huge amount of falsehood to the history of psychoanalysis."

Was Marilyn treated by Anna Freud? The answer remains unclear, though there is evidence to suggest that Freud played an important role in Marilyn's life later on. Whether or not a meeting between the world's most celebrated sex symbol and the daughter of the world's most famous sex theorist actually took place, Anna Freud may have been better qualified to treat Marilyn than the actress's own doctors. According to both Spoto and Swales, Marilyn's analysts were worse than unhelpful.

"Marilyn wasn't killed by Hollywood," John Huston said upon learning of her death. "It was the goddam doctors who killed her. If she was a pill addict, they made her so."

Huston had personally witnessed the hold that Monroe's therapists had on her life. In 1960, she expressed an interest in starring in his film about Sigmund Freud, and Huston was keen on casting her in it. Anna Freud, however, was adamantly opposed to the project. According to Young-Bruehl's book "Anna Freud: A Biography" Freud's (ultimately unsuccessful) attempts to stop the film's production were bolstered by the efforts of an influential friend in Los Angeles, Dr. Ralph Greenson.

A psychotherapist with a thriving practice in Beverly Hills, Greenson counted Marilyn as one of his patients. According to Spoto, only a few days after Marilyn agreed to be in Huston's film, she changed her mind. "I can't do it," Marilyn told the director, "because Anna Freud doesn't want a picture made. My analyst told me this."

Young-Bruehl scoffs at the idea of Freud exerting pressure on Monroe through her colleague.

"Absolutely not. I mean, no analyst of principal -- and she was certainly a very rigorous person -- would instruct another analyst to be the courier of a message," she said. "That would be a violation of the kind of consulting relationship that Anna Freud had established with Greenson."

But, according to Spoto, Greenson's sense of ethics were a different matter. Marilyn had been referred to Greenson by yet another one of her therapists, a woman named Marianne Kris. Kris, in turn, had come to know Marilyn through Freud, and she also shared a Manhattan address with Lee Strasberg. While Kris treated Marilyn in New York, Greenson treated her in California. Marilyn was to have access to a psychoanalyst at all times.

Next page | An obsessive Greenson and his bizarre influence on Marilyn