Marilyn Monroe by Charles Casillo

Author:Charles Casillo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

TWENTY-TWO

NIGHTMARE

On February 7 Dr. Kris herself drove Marilyn to New York Hospital. Although the staff knew who their new patient was, the just-divorced Marilyn Monroe signed herself in as “Miss Faye Miller,” so it wouldn’t be leaked to the press that she was being hospitalized.

Once the forms were signed, however, everything changed. Marilyn immediately knew something was wrong. It was as if the staff, the doctors and the nurses, had been told some inside information about her condition that she wasn’t aware of. They took her by the arms and, in a fast-moving blur, she was escorted down an ominous system of hallways through New York Hospital to a psychiatric wing known as the Payne Whitney Clinic.

Because she was admitted as a patient who had threatened suicide and could possibly harm herself, she was locked in a bare, cell-like room. It was only moments until she realized she was in a psychiatric ward. “Cement blocks and all,” Marilyn later revealed to Dr. Greenson.

What had haunted her all her life had become a reality—the fear of the fate of her mother’s insanity, the terror of a madhouse. There were bars on the windows. Patients were locked in their rooms—but there was a window on every door so she could be gawked at by any passerby like a bug under a magnifying glass. Marilyn would be allowed no privacy—and thus no dignity.

Stripped of any power, stripped of her clothes, it was as if she had signed away her rights as well as her identity. “I felt I was in prison for a crime I hadn’t committed,” Marilyn stated. As a child she had often been placed in situations where she was at the complete mercy of those around her. Panic was gripping her, but—like a child, like an orphan, like a ward of the state—she sensed that her best defense was to try to remain calm, follow orders, and respond rationally.

The first thing she was ordered to do was bathe. She took her bath under supervision. Afterward a psychiatrist whom she did not know arrived to give her a full physical examination, including a breast exam, checking for lumps. Marilyn attempted to explain that she had been given a complete physical less than a month before. Without comment the psychiatrist continued his probing. She felt violated but was afraid to be perceived as violent, so she allowed the examination to proceed.

In her locked room she noticed the markings on the wall, scratchings, cries for help, from patients who had inhabited the room before her. She would not scratch. She would remain calm. Finally a nurse entered; it was she who confirmed to Marilyn that she was on a psychiatric floor for very disturbed and depressed patients.

Meanwhile the screams of other patients echoed through the halls. “They screamed out when life was unbearable for them, I guess,” Marilyn mused. Even amid this chaos, Marilyn’s mind was churning with empathy and compassion, sympathizing with the confined women around her. “I felt an available psychiatrist should have talked to them.

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