Almost all Hollywood greenery is fenced in . Most of the good-nature of its male inhabitants sours early and becomes brittle before it learns how to live with the kisses of two women in the course of one night. Marilyn was lucky in one big respect. She was born on the outskirts of Hollywood, not in it or of it. Otherwise her mental demise would have come much sooner, and not one would ever have become interested enough to notice, as parts of one phenomenon, the flowering and dying of her magnificent composition of bone and flesh.
In other cities, people come to live in, enter into and become part of a political zone. In Hollywood a person's first communal realization is what he has entered the magnetic circle of some well-known fraud usually designated as my psychiatrist. Cast doubts on a Hollywoodian lawyer, and your neighbor will not object. Toss rocks at his congressman, and more likely than not he will ask to be allowed to hurl a rock or tow on his own personal account. Whether his dentist survives his drilling, or his physician his last operation is not a matter of concern to him. But be careful of what you write, say or hint about his psychiatrist. That could become a matter of life and death!
The average Hollywood psychiatrist is, more than less likely. a free-wheeling. untarnished fraud, But he is established in the cinema capital in numbers. and the influence he exerts-indirectly. of course-on the chief business of the community is comparable to that of a colony of worms working their way from the bottom to the top of a barrel of ripe apples.
Don't misunderstand me. I have nothing against the profession of psychiatry which I myself serve as well as a profession can be served by a man with a born distaste for routine in science, especially since I am fully convinced that it is a healing art that can be practiced honestly and efficiently only by men of the highest professional talent.
While it's true that only one out of a thousand lawyers and physicians practice their professions creatively, the enhancement of their professions as well as their clients and patients, with not too much harm done to the nine hundred and ninety-nine patients in the toils of routine psychiatry do not come off so easily. In psychiatry the mind is the field of battle the foot-soldiers are also the generals. and the casualties are so heavy I should be forgiven my skeptical attitude towards it.
Marilyn finally yielded to the influence of psychiatrist, in spite of her long struggle against them. She did not seek them out, and they-observing professional ethics-did not come knocking on her door, It may be said she graduated into their influences her roles became more and more important.Every Hollywood psychiatrist has at least one patient-often treated without fee-who is the beneficiary of invitations to parties held in the homes of successful actors and actresses, where are to be met the moths newly evaluated from their cocoons-the schools in acting, the casting couches of young, fiery producers-and desperately trying to singe their bright wings in the flames of the moment.
With the aid of the intermediary already described, the psychiatrist is introduced to his prey. From that moment on, the game proceeds in somewhat the following fashion.
Promising Cinema Player and Doctor begin as sober and aloofly neutral as they can possibly be. As it looks to those around them at the moment of introduction, it does not seem possible that the couple can ever pass beyond being on nodding terms to each other: she so elegantly cool and charming, he as starchily aloof as should be expected of a great doctor fresh from the halls of Cambridge or Heidelberg, who has permitted himself to step out of his fruitful privacy only for what it might eventually mean towards the advancement of science and art.
During these Hollywood parties charm and grace are always buttressed by those famous concomitants of art, champagne and conversation. After a while it becomes glaringly noticeable that the great doctor is downing more of the bubbly than seems humanly possible, and that his glamorous prospect is giving utterance to more than she planned to-or can be good for her.
A week later the minor star in the Hollywood heavens receives from the psychiatrist's secretary-with the privies of clerical service so high, he is not too proud to act as his own secretary, under a fitting pseudonym, of course-a note reminding her of an appointment-one of a series they made on the night of their memorable meeting-to take place within the next forty-eight hours for the clearance of certain grave psychological differences which still prevail between her personal intentions and her artistic possibilities.
I was at her side when a messenger deposited this missive into Marilyn's hand. She glanced at it and turned it over to me.
"Did you make such an appointment with him?" I asked.
"I didn't," she answered, "and I don't know what to do about it. I understand he's a very influential man around here."
"But you talked to him?"
"How can I be sure? There ware always so many phonies at these parties."
"One way of dealing with this thing is to drop the note into your waste-basket and forget about it and its sender." I advised.
She flung it into her fireplace without even the formality of tearing it up.
"But the man mentions an hour he has set aside for me at my request, apparently. He's sure to bill me for it, and you must have some idea of what their billing is like," it occurred to her a minute later.
"Stop worrying about trifles." I said to her. "If he bills you, do with the bill what you did with the note,"
"You're wonderful, darling," she said, kissing me impulsively. Then her face darkened again.
"Do you realize that that bum could bring me to court for it?" she asked.
"So you go to court, smile at the judge, tell him exactly what happened, and you can depend on the judge to give him the bum's rush."
"He could wait for me outside the court and try to coerce me," she continued to complain.
"For that the remedy is one of the oldest in the world," I said to her. "You just spit in his left eye and go home."
"Are you forgetting I'm a lady?" Marilyn asked.
"I'm remembering that precisely, my dear," I answered. "Since the days of Queen Sheba ladies offended ageist by presumptuous males have frozen their offenders dead by spitting in their left eyes. You've only to be careful to make sure that the eye you spit in is the left one, and that the eye is a good one, not a substitute for an eye, something made of glass. If the eye to the left is unworthy of receiving the spittle of an indignant lady, the right eye may be treated as if it were, as it really is-the right eye."
