Free Marilyn's Last Sessions by Michel Schneider

never gives anyone the slightest trouble. At the box office she is worth fourteen cents. Do you get my point?’
    One evening when Wilder went home, he kissed his wife, the tall, beautiful Audrey Young, and announced, ‘Marilyn was sensational. If I had to cheat on you with anyone, it’d be
her.’
    ‘Me too,’ Young answered.
    Billy Wilder saw Marilyn Monroe for the last time in the spring of 1960 while she was shooting Let’s Make Love . It was at a party at Romanoff’s in Beverly Hills after a
screening of The Seven Year Itch . He offered her the female lead in his next film, Irma la Douce. It was Oscar time and Wilder had been awarded the Oscar for Best Director for Some
Like It Hot . I. A. L. Diamond had won Best Screenwriter, Jack Lemmon Best Actor, Orry-Kelly Best Costume Designer. Marilyn, who played the unforgettable Sugar Kane, wasn’t even nominated.
When she heard Simone Signoret had been nominated for Best Actress for A Room at the Top , a low-budget British film, she seemed unaffected, almost happy.
    The following day, Wilder asked, ‘How’s it going? You’re not finding it too hard, are you?’
    ‘No. I learned from Freud that sometimes our unconscious wants us to fail. And, anyway, let’s face it, when it comes to women, a lot of people don’t like it so hot.’

 
New York, Gladstone Hotel, East 52nd Street
March 1955
    In Manhattan, Marilyn could dissolve into anonymity. She was nobody. She could hide from herself. She would wear a baggy sweater, an old coat and no make-up, knot a scarf under
her chin, slip on dark glasses and go strolling through the crowded streets to the Actors Studio, where she attended group classes, always sitting in the same place in the back row, or to Margaret
Hohenberg’s practice. Her time in Manhattan was intellectually exhilarating: she was absorbed by ‘the mysteries of the unconscious’, as she laughingly told her friend, the writer
Truman Capote.
    They had met in 1950 while she was filming Asphalt Jungle with John Huston . Superficially different, the gay writer and the symbol of heterosexual desire were nonetheless
profoundly similar. They shared a sense of something poorly articulated, a secret suffering in the depths of their being. The same abandonment as a child, the same destructive way with drugs and
sex, the same traumas over their art, the same panic about success, the same physical decline and, eventually, the same death from an overdose of prescription drugs. They’d drink cocktails in
bars on Lexington Avenue, one half vodka, one half gin, no vermouth, which they called White Angels. Marilyn would arrive in a cheap black wig, which she’d whisk off with a flourish, and
Capote would call out ‘Bye-bye, blackbird. Hi, Marilyn.’
    He opened his heart the first time they met. ‘Have you any idea what it’s like to be me?’ he asked. ‘An ugly dwarf in love with beauty, a nasty, luckless kid from nowhere
who spends his time ferrying words from people to the page, from one book to another, a homo who only gets on with women—’
    ‘I can guess,’ she cut in, downing her vodka in one. ‘Do you know what it’s like to be me? The same, except without the words to express it.’
    After Marilyn’s death, Capote would say, slightly falsely, ‘There was something exceptional about Marilyn Monroe. Sometimes she could be ethereal and sometimes
like a waitress in a coffee shop. She’d been a call girl, off and on, to make ends meet, but in her mind money was always associated with love rather than sex. She gave her body to whomever
she thought she loved and money to whomever she really did love. She loved being in love; she loved thinking she loved someone. One day I introduced her to Bill Paley, a tycoon who fancied her like
crazy. I tried telling Marilyn he loved her. “Don’t shit me,” she said. “You love someone after you sleep with them – and even then that’s kind of rare –
never before. At least, that’s how it’s