‘It’s only a cocktail, mother.’
‘Yes.’
‘It ain’t the Academy Awards. Don’t we have to do something with that dog, like give it an injection or something?’ I walked over the carpet and disappeared into the hall, at which point I heard Natalie saying, ‘I don’t think dogs like me.’ She popped her head around the door. ‘Hey, buster! Everybody likes me! I’m a very liked person! The studio gets five thousand fan letters a week so stick that in your pipe and smoke it.’ She followed this remark with the kind of cackle that would have pleased a director very much indeed. Upstairs, I’m sure I heard the theme tune to Huckleberry Hound.
Natalie laughed and opened one of the large windows that looked on to the driveway. A cool breeze came round her legs and she pointed up. ‘We really are valley girls, Muddah,’ she said. ‘That’s the San Gabriel Mountains up there, isn’t it?’
‘I wouldn’t know such things,’ said Mrs Gurdin. ‘It’s all just the mountains. Give me a beach house in Malibu or give me Beverly Hills. These are mountains I can do business with.’
‘Nick Ray told me that when it glows over the hills, it is usually the military doing rocket tests.’ Unlike Natalie, who was happily American in all obvious aspects, Mrs Gurdin always experienced a vague flare-up of melancholy at the mention of rockets or bomb shelters, the latter of which Mr Gurdin had long been planning for the bottom of their garden.
‘I hope they are not just throwing good money away on those rockets,’ said Mrs Gurdin.
‘Ha! You sound like me,’ said Natalie. ‘Your politics are going my way. I thought you were all for us raining death and destruction on the Muddah-land.’
‘I don’t hate my country,’ said Mrs Gurdin quietly. ‘I hate what they have done to it.’ I stepped onto the patio. In a second I smelled oranges and grapefruits on the breeze that filtered across the valley, I could hear the low snarl of bobcats coming down the chaparral slopes, and wasn’t there also a whiff of old Spanish airs and sulphur out in the mountains? All this was broken very suddenly by the sound of a car horn and a glint of teeth.
‘Frankie!’
He did have a touch of style, that man. He came out of the car with flowers for Mrs Gurdin, white orchids in a silver pot, and was singing an old song of Bing Crosby’s, in that way of his, both transgressing and apologising at the same time. The song said the San Fernando Valley was just the place for him. Frank’s neat row of teeth rhymed perfectly with the white line of handkerchief cresting the top pocket of his suit. I ran inside to get away from his charm, but not before I saw him kissing Mrs Gurdin’s hand and opening his arms to Natalie, saying, ‘Hey, Nosebleed! You gonna make a guy beg?’ She kissed him and I witnessed one of those subtle shifts that Natalie was so very good at. It was as if someone had gently turned up the setting on an icebox, her eyes sparkling a wee bit harder as she turned a few degrees cooler.
The style of their speech was off-hand, yet full of manners. Mr Sinatra spat the letter t in the New Jersey way while playing the part of the easiest guy on the planet, clicking out words that shimmied over the great topics of the day. It mattered to him that he should seem not to care a great deal. Yet he cared to the point of madness. It was a wonderfully comic kind of curse, the wish to be cool, chiefly because the people who had the curse were generally those whose free-floating anxiety made coolness an impossibility. They were uptight in ways that presented a challenge to molecular physics, but hey, daddy-o, what merry battalions of determination they sent out to overcome the needs of your average Joe.* Everything appeared to melt into a shrug, but it was all appearance: Mr Sinatra was actually the least relaxed person I ever met. ‘What a blast,’ he said, lighting a cigarette for each of them. He was talking about Ocean’s 11.
‘I guess the suits are looking for dollars,’ said Natalie, easing into the put-downs of Hollywood she found so congenial.
‘Made in the shade,’ said Frank. ‘Those shmucks will get their money. Say, how’s that pom-pom-shaker of a husband of yours?
‘Actually,’ said Mrs Gurdin, ‘RJ is trying out for a serious play in New York.’
‘We might have to bend his nose a little,’ said Mr Sinatra. ‘Give him the Actors Studio look, huh?’
‘Yeah!’ said Natalie, laughing. ‘Detroit’s answer to Karl Malden. Come and see the greatest show in town. Drop dead!’ Mrs Gurdin looked at her daughter and said nothing but Natalie felt the full force of admonishment. She had revealed too much in criticising her husband so enthusiastically. ‘RJ is just dandy,’ she said. ‘Handsome as ever and here’s to him.’
‘Hey, sister. I have an old-fashioned rule,’ said Mr Sinatra. ‘I refuse to toast anybody until I’ve got a drink in my hand.’
‘Sorry, Frank,’ said Mrs Gurdin. They walked to the bar at the back of the room and Mrs Gurdin rang a bell for Okey, Wanika’s husband, who was in charge of the drinks. Mr Sinatra dropped a jar of silverskin onions on the bar and spoke directly to the barman, as if the ladies couldn’t possibly understand. ‘Okay, buddy. Can you do a Gibson – three times?’
‘Like guava mouthwash?’
‘Come again?’
‘His English. It is bad,’ said Mrs Gurdin.
‘A Gibson martini,’ said Sinatra.
‘Of course. Three times. Vodka or gin?’
‘Gin, buddy boy,’ said Mr Sinatra. ‘Always gin.’ They walked over to the sofa. ‘What am I going to do about this guy? Is he messing with me?’
‘He has a strange sense of humour,’ said Natalie. ‘These Hawaiians.’
‘I love Hawaiians. We can bring him over to Traders if he wants to see how Hawaiians make drinks. I’ll give him guava mouthwash. We have eight decorative tiki gods over there. Somebody carved them. Carved them by hand and we have them in the bar. Is this guy for real?’
‘Forget it, Frank,’ said Natalie, loving the opportunity to feel mature. ‘The guy was just joking.’
‘I’ll give him joke,’ said Frank.
‘He and Wanika just bought a house you build yourself,’ said Mrs Gurdin. ‘They bought it from a catalogue.’
‘Sears Roebuck? asked Frank.
‘No,’ said Mrs Gurdin, ‘they haven’t done them in years. Some other company does them now. They built it over in Inglewood, near Hollywood Park. The house came in the mail. Okey – you bought the house that came in the mail?’
‘Yes, Mrs Gurdin. A house in a box. It is very nice. We make it up with a hammer, that’s all.’
I watched from the door as Mr Sinatra scowled and Mrs Gurdin fussed and Natasha sat on the arm of the sofa blowing smoke into the dead centre of the group’s confusion. Okey the barman was making the martinis one at a time and he bent down to hand one to Mr Sinatra. ‘I make this for you, Mr Frank,’ he said. ‘I learn to make it in the Porpoise Room.’
‘Okey and Wanika worked in the cocktail lounge at Marineland,’ said Mrs Gurdin. ‘Down in Palos Verdes?’
‘I make it good,’ said Okey.
‘Okay,’ said Frank.
‘That’s his name,’ said Mrs Gurdin.
‘No, okay,’ said Frank. ‘The drink is fine.’ He looked up at the expectant barman. ‘It’s okay, Okey. You’re not just a pretty face. Now scram.’ He turned to Natalie and appeared surprised at his own victory. ‘Aren’t you having one of these little mothers?’
* As you know, canines are not so hot with the eyes. Not with colour, anyhow. But our ears and noses make up for it. Unlike humans, we can hear what people are saying to themselves, and we can sniff illusion. The latter capacity makes dogs especially responsive to commercial perfumes.
* Natalie was overstating her case. She had never been Joan Crawford’s daughter.
* The actors were perfect for the parts they played. They would never grow up. Sinatra was eternally Private Maggio, the weedy and needy antagonist in From Here to Eternity. And Natalie would always be the girl who wanted to be cool in Rebel Without a Cause.
4
L
ike Noël Coward
or Holly Golightly, the princess Natalia had what you might call a cocktail-hour mentality. She threw back several of those Gibsons and her breath smelt sweetly of gin and pickled onions, while her mother made dark Russian remarks and the Hawaiian staff stood over by the piano waiting for orders, hands clasped before them and big eyes staring forward. An hour or more passed with laughter, hard looks, industry gossip and little panics, punctuated now and then with bursts of television gunfire from upstairs. All the while Natasha grew more outrageous, more sexy, more Natalie.
Seeking a part for herself in Frank’s current preoccupations, she decided to ask him about the Kennedy campaign. Natalie had an instinctive adoration of the high-ranking. ‘Well, we got him elected,’ Frank said. ‘We did the fundraisers. We got him elected. Let’s see if TP can’t keep his promises.’
‘TP?’ said Mrs Gurdin.
‘The President, Mama.’ Natalie swung round with a little too much energy. ‘They’re the Jack Pack,’ she said.
‘You’re cute,’ said Frank. She giggled in the way that girls always giggled around Sinatra, loading every chime with a sonorous appeal for approval. Frank loved it. Frank beamed. ‘As the man said, he’s the nation’s favourite guy.’
‘He cares for the underdog,’ said Natalie.
‘That’s right, sister,’ said Frank. ‘That’s my bag, too. I believe in the Bill of Rights. That’s why I wanted to hire one of the blacklisted guys to write that war picture. And you know what the Hearst papers did? They murdered me, honey. The bums mugged me. I’m talking about the Hearst papers. John Wayne. General Motors. Cardinal Spellman. It was a high-end lynch mob, honey, and I’ll never forgive them. Maybe Kennedy can make a difference in this country. I’ve been fighting against lynch mobs all my life. But I had to lose the writer.’
‘Wayne’s a fink,’ said Natalie.
‘Jesus,’ said Frank. ‘The guy’s been out of line for thirty years. He’s a nut.’ He made as if to wave the subject out of the way, but he had more to add. ‘I tell you, princess. That fella would throw a thousand better fellas in prison, just to show he’s the big tough marshal in town. He’d burn a thousand books to avoid reading one. That’s a fact, Mrs Gurdin. Well, what can I tell you? John Wayne is a shmuck. He’s a loser. And there’s no part for losers in the new game.’
‘Kennedy!’ said Natalie, like a groupie.
‘That’s right, princess.’
A shadow flickered in the hall and then I heard a thump on the stairs and a door closing. ‘That election was in the bag, made in the shade,’ said Frank. ‘Success guaranteed. It might have been close, but to me it was always a cert. We did a lot of campaigning in Hawaii.’ He tilted his glass to the barman, as if re-settling a score. ‘But there’s a lot to fix in this country. Some Charlies want to hold the world back and I’m talking Democrats, too. You know Sammy got booed by those sons-of-bitches from Mississippi when we were singing “The Star-spangled Banner”? Right there at the Convention when Jack got the nomination.’
‘Well,’ said Natalie, a flush coming into her cheeks. Pleasure, I thought. She had the clever pupil’s delight at finding herself ready with an answer. ‘Dr King’s father was ready to vote Republican. He said he would be voting for Mr Lincoln’s party.’
‘Jack was on to that,’ said Sinatra. ‘When they arrested King and put him up there in Reidsville prison, Jack called his wife. The wife’s pregnant. Jack calls her to say he’s thinking about her. Is that classy, or what?’
Frank was so jumpy he couldn’t really sit down, and he nearly tripped over me several times before we were introduced. Talking about Kennedy seemed to make him worse. ‘Maria,’ he said to Mrs Gurdin, pacing back from the windows, ‘I brought you a little smile-maker. All pretty girls should have presents.’ Mrs Gurdin touched her throat and behaved as if her pleasure had caught her by surprise. She stripped the ribbon and the paper from the package he handed her and found inside a blue Fabergé box. I lay on the floor and put my head between my front paws.
‘Oh, Mr Sinatra,’ she said, tears coming into her eyes, ‘this is absolutely beautiful.’ She spread her hands over me and lifted me up to his face. ‘This little one is your dog,’ she said. You got the feeling his blue eyes were able to watch themselves watching you.
‘Hey, I was outta line, buddy,’ he said, stroking my ear and flicking it. ‘I should’ve said hello when I came in. Hey buddy. You’re going to be a present for Marilyn.’
‘She’s in New York?’ asked Natalie.
‘Yeah. She’s been blue.’
‘Finished with Miller?’
‘Done and done,’ said Frank. ‘She’s at half-mast.’
‘So many presents,’ said Mrs Gurdin. ‘I tell you for nothing, Mr Sinatra, you are a generous man. My husband agrees. Always a generous man. To our Natasha also.’
‘Muddah – enough. You are embarrassing Frank.’
‘You are,’ he said. ‘And I love it.’
The noise upstairs got louder. It was as if furniture was being dragged around. You could hear a door handle being pulled and suddenly Mr Gurdin was shouting over the banister. His wife was still weeping with gratitude and a sense of national loss when Nick started shouting, but the sound of his voice instantly mortified her, killing the sentiment, turn ing off the tears. ‘Crackpots!’ Nick shouted. ‘Goddamn crack pots and communists, I tell you. All Reds. Reds in my own goddamn house.’*
Sinatra smiled and I saw a sting of cruelty moisten his eyes. ‘It’s Nicky Boy!’
‘Oh, pipe down!’ said Natalie, giddily, over her shoulder. She mock-shouted back at him. ‘Pipe down, Fahd.’
‘It makes me sorry,’ said Mrs Gurdin. I went out to the hall and could see Nick hanging over the banister, his face all grey and furious, and a bottle dangling.
‘We pledge ourselves to fight, with every means at our organised command, any effort of any group or individual, to divert the loyalty of the screen from the free America that gave it birth.’
‘Holy smoke,’ said Sinatra. ‘He’s giving us the “Statement of Principles”.’
‘Stop it, Nikolai!’
‘Don’t sweat it, Mud. He’s drunk.’
‘Straight up,’ said Sinatra. ‘It’s the old ragtime: The Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals.’
‘Oh, heavens. He must stop. It is terrible,’ said Mud.
‘Shout it out, Nicky Boy!’ said Sinatra.
‘We dedicate our work . . .’ shouted Mr Gurdin.
Natalie rolled her eyes and knocked back her Gibson. ‘Work, ha! That’s cute,’ she said. ‘He hasn’t worked since he left Vladivostok.’
‘ . . . in the fullest possible measure . . .’
‘That’s not fair, Natasha,’ said Mrs Gurdin. ‘He has tried to work, like any man.’
‘Dream on, Muddah. He’s a waste of oxygen.’
‘Wise guy, huh?’ said Sinatra.
‘. . . the presentation to the American scene, its standards and its freedoms, its beliefs and its ideals, as we know them and believe in them.’
‘Shout it out, you two-bit hustler,’ yelled Sinatra. ‘I have a good mind to come up there and break your legs.’
There were threats and curses. One of the other dogs ran into the kitchen howling. I don’t think I had ever witnessed such chaos, whether in Scotland, England, on Pan-Am, or in quarantine, and it ended when Mrs Gurdin threatened to pray to one of her icons or Romanovs or whoever she thought might bring this nightmare to an end. There was a moment of silence when Nicky Boy upstairs ended the hostile fire and slammed the door shut before Natalie started one of her theatrical cackles, looking at Muddah’s lips, which were still moving in silence. ‘You think my mother’s interested in stardom,’ she said to Frank. ‘But what she really cares about is tsardom.’
Mrs Gurdin wrapped me in a blanket along with a rubber bone.
‘Take it easy, funny girl,’ Frank said to Natalie. ‘Your mother’s a widow. I wouldn’t give a dime for that lemon popsicle upstairs. N
ot a dime. He’s a total nut.’
‘You actually like my mother?’
‘Why, sure,’ said Frank.
‘She was a ballet dancer once,’ said Natalie, biting her lip and showing some wish she had to be proud of her mother. Mr Sinatra touched her chin and lifted a pickled onion from his glass, tossing it into the air and catching it in his mouth. ‘Now you be careful on that picture. Keep your nose clean. You’re still working on it, right? Remember, Kazan is a rat just like that deadbeat upstairs. A snitch. Any flack, you just get on the horn to me, princess.’
‘I’m nervous, Frank. They think I’m still the little girl in pigtails.’
‘Just do your work, Miss Moscow,’ said Frank, ‘and remember you owe him nothing. Not Kazan or Jack Warner or him upstairs, neither. You earned the right. Those shitheels are lucky to have you.’
Across the lawn and into the car, I could hear Mud’s holy recriminations on the upper floor. I heard a bottle smashing as she shouted in Russian. Mr Sinatra took the blanket off me and placed me down on the furry covers of the back seat. There was a faint whiff of Sicily about Frank, a hint of lemons and jasmine, and I wasn’t sure if it was the flowers he gave, the food he liked, Acqua di Parma or just some longlost scent that lingered about his skin. I detected it when his hand touched my face and when he walked round the car. He blew a kiss at Natalie, who was in her own car and already speeding out of Sherman Oaks with that laugh of hers that seemed to embody the danger of the night and the secret of her own freedom. As I said, Frank and Natalie were the parts they played: I saw this most clearly as their cars swept onto the highway with their headlamps chasing the palm trees into the dark. I wanted to pee. When I looked through the back window I thought of Belka and Strelka, the two Russian dogs sent into space that year, and I wondered what small roles they had taken in the action of the night sky. Yes, they too must have wanted to pee as their capsule travelled through space, and I felt some pride as I looked up and imagined the trouble my comrades had taken for the human race.* The distant sky at night is often a comfort: it lets you believe that we are all alone to the same degree. The car moved with pent-up fury towards Bel Air, and only then did I let the long day pass into the lower regions. I relaxed into my adventure, counted my blessings, and did a long, warm wee-wee in the back of Frank’s car.
The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe Page 4