Free Marilyn's Last Sessions by Michel Schneider Page A

been with me and men. Sex and love always go together for me, just like these.” And she pointed at her tits. “I wish I could turn sex
into love and forget about bodies. I wish I could make love, as they say. I love that expression.”
    ‘“I don’t,” I said. “What two people make isn’t love. You never make love. You never have it. You’re just in it or you’re not. That’s
all.”
    ‘She stared at me with a bitter smile. I didn’t make a big thing of it. Everyone’s entitled to their illusions. But later I had my character in Breakfast at
Tiffany’s , Holly Golightly, say, “I mean, you can’t bang the guy and cash his cheques and at least not try to believe you love him.”’
    In 1955, Truman and Marilyn met up again. She was living in a suite on the sixth floor of the Gladstone Hotel, and in February had taken her first lesson at the Actors Studio.
Meeting Lee Strasberg had changed her life. The drama teacher said he wanted ‘to open up her unconscious’. ‘Rather than my legs,’ Marilyn told Truman. ‘That’s
what’s known as a godsend.’
    One day Truman took her to see Constance Collier in her dark studio on West 57th Street. The old English actress, whose sight was failing and who was losing sensation in her limbs, gave her
diction lessons and voice coaching. ‘Oh, yes,’ Miss Collier said afterwards, ‘there is something there. She’s a beautiful child. I don’t mean that in the obvious way
– the perhaps too obvious way. I don’t think she’s an actress at all, not in any traditional sense. What she has – this presence, this luminosity, this flickering
intelligence – could never surface on the stage. It’s so fragile and subtle, it can only be found by the camera. It’s like a hummingbird in flight: only a camera can freeze the
poetry of it.’
    After that Marilyn went back to Los Angeles and Truman didn’t see her again until Constance Collier’s funeral. She was staying on the twenty-seventh floor of the Waldorf-Astoria. She
liked looking down on Park Avenue from her suite at night, the way one looks at the face of someone asleep. Her favourite thing about the hotel, though, was the revolving doors at the entrance,
always spinning. She was fascinated by them, by the name. Truman once said to her, ‘They’re like life. You think you’re moving forward, but in fact you’re going backwards.
You never know if you’re going in or coming out.’
    ‘I guess,’ she said. ‘It makes me think of love more, though. We’re all alone in our plate-glass compartments, chasing round and round after someone but never catching
them. We think we’re right next to the other person but really we’re far away, deep inside ourselves. No one knows who’s leading and who’s following. Like children, we
wonder where it all started. Who fell in love first, who fell out of love first.’
    Marilyn arrived late at the funerary chapel, all apologies and nervous indecision about her make-up and her dress.
    He understood her profound anxiety. If she was never less than an hour late wherever she went, it wasn’t vanity: it was because she was too uncertain and anxious to set off on time. It was
anxiety, the tension of constantly having to please, that was responsible for her recurrent sore throats that were so severe she couldn’t speak, her chewed fingernails, damp palms and fits of
giggling like a geisha; the terrible raw nerves that aroused passionate sympathy in whoever witnessed them and, if anything, only made her more radiant in their eyes. Marilyn was always late, like
everyone who has appeared at the wrong moment in their parents’ lives, all the unexpected souls.
    They fell out of touch. The White Angels grew further and further apart until eventually they vanished into the white blur of oblivion. She had given him the character of
Holly Golightly – or, rather, he had taken it from her, from her words, her hands, her hopes, the chaos of her soul – and now