One Hollywood Shrink. A Bit of ECT. Two Dead Celebrities

     Psychiatrist Ralph Greenson came to fame as a shrink to the stars during the popular trend of the 1950s of getting Freudian psychoanalysis, but he branched out into psychotropic drugs, electroshock therapy, and questionable session practices.

     In 1953 Vivien Leigh suffered from exhaustion and a mental “breakdown” while filming Elephant Walk on location in what is now Sri Lanka. Paramount Pictures was forced to dismiss her, but they did bring in two prominent Hollywood psychiatrists to advise on her treatment. One, Martin Grotjann, recommended complete rest. The other, Ralph Greenson, recommended electroshock therapy for a “quick fix.” Greenson won.

     She ended up in an institution, packed in ice, fed raw eggs, and given ECT. That was not the end of her ECT, though. Once later, in Warsaw, she had to perform with the ECT burn marks still on her forehead. When her headaches from ECT became too severe, she was put on psychotropic drugs. When she died in 1967, it was discovered she may have been misdiagnosed for years because of her mental symptoms may have come from from her chronic TB.

     Marilyn Monroe, Greeson’s other famous female client, had barely escaped getting electroshock therapy in 1961. Her ex-husband Joe DiMaggio managed to pull her out of a locked, padded cell at the Payne Whitney psych ward, infamous for its ECT use. She had already been a client of Greeson’s before that, and she continued to see him when she returned to California afterward and up until her suicide the next year.

     She had as many as five private sessions a week with Greeson and it was Greeson who was called to her house and broke open her bedroom door to find her dead. She had apparently overdosed from the sedatives chloral hydrate and pentobarbital, presumably both prescribed by Greenson.

     It doesn’t take Agatha Christie to figure out that psychiatrist Greeson is a prime suspect in these two celebrity deaths. Did he pull a trigger? No.

     Did he push for Vivien Leigh’s electroshock? Yes. Did he write Marilyn Monroe’s prescriptions? Yes.

     He was, after all, a psychiatrist.