The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe

by Andrew O'Hagan

  We made our way to 135 Central Park West. From the analyst’s apartment, the world below seemed uncomplicatedly yellow, a busy jungle where plants spluttered carbon dioxide and billions of creatures had their say. The people were outnumbered and I guess they came to apartments like this one, high above the insects and the traffic, to find a place where they might be heard. Dr Marianne Kris was already standing by her desk. She was wearing those small-heeled satin shoes once popular with senior ballet mistresses, and, as we came in, she was in the act of dropping something into the wastepaper basket. Her eyes had that benign, intelligent note of suffering one associates with old Europe, the gleam of enquiry one connects to the well-ordered streets of Vienna. She kept her grey hair in a bun and enjoyed gathering up the loose strands and storing them behind her ears. She stood to attention with her hands clasped: Schubert’s Piano Sonata for Four Hands was coming from a record player that sat on top of a bookcase.

  We walked over the rug and stood for a moment at the window. Man was something to be proud of, no? Each of the buildings was significant in itself, but together they were a projection of power and social brilliance that shone in the day and made illuminated pathways at night. Tall buildings cannot be built by ants or squirrels or dogs: they mark the high point of human aspiration, the pinnacle of man’s ability to master the world’s materials. Once they are up they are up and only man can take them down. Marilyn liked to order herself at the window before sitting down; she merely nodded at Dr Kris and turned again to the window, the vast, changing world.

  The doctor had her routines and playing music between sessions was one of them. After a minute or so of the patient’s being in the room she would walk, rather delicately, rather interestingly, to the bookcase and shut the phonograph off. Dr Kris was the kind of small-boned person who did everything just so. Were she not as efficient, as alive in her small and particular ways, it might have appeared the world was about to crush her hoard of sensitivity, but in fact she was good at living amid the world’s bigness and very good at choosing her roles and finding her place. In the minds of her patients, the music was part of that. Marilyn found it aggressive. Coming into the room she often felt she might be swallowed up by the music’s rather too potent indication of someone else’s well-being. Dr Kris must have been aware of this possibility, but she played the music anyway. In fact, she was quite competitive when it came to the battle of selves that took place in the comfort of her rooms. I jumped up and sat on a cushioned windowseat; it was beautifully done, the windowseat I mean, upholstered in a bold grey-and-whitestriped wool dhurri, with a vase of white tulips standing on the ledge. ‘Take a chair if you prefer it, Marilyn,’ said Dr Kris.

  ‘I can’t think of anything. It’s useless. I’ve been trying to learn some lines for Lee. I can’t think.’

  ‘Sit down.’

  Marilyn took off her sunglasses, removed her wig and sat down in a wonderful armchair, the sort of chair one used to find at Charleston, an expanse of cream-coloured cotton, rubbed and worn, covered in tiny, almost invisible grey roses. ‘Do you find, Marilyn, that you must rehearse for these sessions?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Not rehearse. But I have to be able to think, right? It’s often that way before the housekeeper arrives, for some people: they have to tidy up. Well, I guess I feel like that coming here. I’ve got to get my head straight.’ ‘Am I your audience?’

  ‘No, you’re my shrink. I don’t have to wear make-up for you to recognise me.’

  In decorative terms, the room spoke of a relationship between fadedness and vibrancy: the rugs were extremely good rugs, displaying colours that might have been common only to two villages in the north of Afghanistan a hundred or more years ago, but the fadedness of the material brought a nice philosophical edge to the room. All the parts worked together in this way, to dignify, to calm, to amuse, to deepen the tone, making a conversation of the most quiet kind. The glass bookcases, the rosewood side-tables, had come from Germany between the wars, and to Marianne Kris’s mind they gave a dimension of wisdom and learning to the weathered prettiness of the room. Virginia Woolf would have been at home in such a place: the painted wooden birds and the tin toys, the ships-in-a-bottle, the damaged mirrors. They all spoke of the journey a person might make to become themselves. In many ways it was not a suitable room in which to conduct psychoanalysis, seeming so redolent of one woman’s achievements. Even the lampshades were tokens of Marianne’s awakening. The flowers underlined her goodnatured sentiment and the paperweights fed her appetite for pleasure and hard work. Her eye could wander among these things, lighting on what was solid, what had survived. In the corner stood an eighteenth-century desk with a small blue painting by Paul Klee hanging above it.

  Kris and her famous husband had escaped something I couldn’t understand. And here she was in broad daylight, her hands covered in graphite smears and pencil dust, sitting at the centre of an environment she had made. She lifted and laid down her objects with a patience that seemed to give every thing its due – a glass of water, a silver letter-opener, a spider plant with a tangerine beside it on a plate. Everything in the room, and in the dangerous world beyond the room, inclined towards Dr Kris’s sensibility, her steady conception of reality, which made even her own psychological confusions appear as a kind of blessing to her patients. She knew who she was, she knew where she came from, she knew what she liked, and she lived pretty much as she had hoped. She would not have experienced these certainties as certainties, but to the people who visited her consulting room, Dr Kris had a definite talent for tethering herself to the world of herself. Other people, most of her patients, were much better at being more people, but none was so good at being herself as she was. That was how it seemed. This room was the domain, shall we say, of her subjectivity. The sort of place where one might easily feel absent among all this evidence of someone else’s presence. Yes, the room was comfortable, but by years, and by degrees, it could become the kind of room that made you question the comforts in your own life.

  Dr Kris lifted a pencil from an old stone jug and slowly sharpened it, using a sharpener from a foreign museum. The delicacy of the action, though typical, annoyed Marilyn: it seemed to indicate an over-sufficiency of personal contentment. In fact, Dr Kris was still grieving for her husband who had passed away a few years before, but Marilyn was fixated on how the analyst seemed to cope. It had never occurred to her that they were both in the persuading game. The doctor held the pencil between her fingers like someone who had spent a lifetime with pencils, and who could master them, direct them, keep them sharp, make them do what she wanted. ‘I guess it’s not really possible to be Anna Christie,’ said Marilyn, ‘without him coming up and when he comes up then I have to talk about him as well, which is hard, you know? Lee says I should use all that and, of course, I try my best but half the time when I’m acting I just want to scream.’

  ‘I must ask you, Marilyn. Do you experience your father as a source of prohibition, perhaps?’

  ‘Uh, I didn’t know him. In the play her father is standing over her. He wants to tell her who she can marry and who’s a bad guy.’

  ‘So, in the play Anna Christie the father is a source of prohibition. Maybe even of jealousy.’

  ‘I guess so. It’s by Eugene O’Neill.’

  ‘Yes. I know the play. I saw it once with my husband in London.’

  Marilyn took a deep breath. ‘Her father can’t tell her what to do.’

  ‘And your own father . . .’

  ‘He’s dead, see? He can’t stop me from doing anything. He couldn’t stop me from marrying Arthur.’

  ‘No, but it’s interesting you mention one playwright in order to understand another, no?’

  ‘I’m not trying to understand Eugene O’Neill. And I’m not trying to understand Arthur Miller. I’m trying to understand Anna – or I’m trying to understand why playing Anna is so terrible for me.’

  ‘Okay, Marilyn. This is good. Just because your father is not alive, it
doesn’t mean he is no longer a source of prohibition. He may be that. And equally he may be a source of something else, something unlikely, say, perpetual approval?’ ‘I always thought he would like me.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘My father. If he had known me. I think he’d have liked me.’

  ‘You do? Tell me about that.’

  ‘Well. I thought he would like me more than other people. Not for sex. Not for sex reasons. That he’d know I was smart and everything, I guess.’

  ‘You idealise your father, no? You idealise him as someone who idealises you.’

  ‘That’s right. Isn’t that what fathers are for?’

  ‘If you say so. But I’m interested in what the play is saying to you at this time.’

  ‘It’s a great play.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it allows me to be a serious actress.’

  ‘This is your definition of a great play? Is Hamlet a great play for this reason, Marilyn?’

  ‘Yes. Well, partly I guess. I would love to play Ophelia.’

  ‘But let us return to the father. In the play your character is struggling to transfer the inhibited sexual feelings for the father onto the legitimate sexual feelings for a husband, okay?’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘This is normal, Marilyn. This is what we do. Our husbands replace our fathers.’

  ‘Not if we don’t want them to.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘Not if we can’t bear it, huh? In that movie last year, you know, the Cukor picture. We sang a song called “My Heart Belongs to Daddy”.’

  ‘Why do you say “we” – “we sang a song”. Wasn’t it you who sang the song?’

  ‘Yup. I sang the song.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Well, it took twenty-three takes. I kept crying. Isn’t that something? I didn’t even know my father.’

  ‘But you want to know him.’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘And that is a form of knowledge, Marilyn. A very pressing kind of knowledge. Desire. Yes. Desire may be the most pressing kind of knowledge there is.’

  ‘My father’s dead, doctor.’

  My fated companion was irked by her analyst. More irked than she had ever been before: she sometimes had fantasies during these sessions that she, Marilyn, was the analyst, asking Dr Kris the questions her cleverness protected her from asking of herself. ‘I know your sister Margarethe was an actress,’ Marilyn wanted to say to her. ‘Did you ever imagine your father preferred your sister to you?’

  ‘No, Marilyn. I never considered that.’

  ‘Is that because you wanted to sleep with your father or kill your sister?’ Marilyn believed her shrink’s world was made of tinder; it comforted her to imagine Dr Kris had the same kinds of problem she had. It would only take a little flame and all the comforts of Marianne’s life would be consumed.

  ‘I never considered that, Marilyn. Not at all.’

  There were several old clocks in Dr Kris’s room but none of them made a sound. As the voices bent and doubled and pro voked and choked back – the customary motions of the talking cure – the room’s objects maintained a state of perfect detachment, though, curiously, the patients often felt they were being watched. At one point that day Marilyn turned and clicked her fingers at me and it was obvious she needed comfort. I leapt on her lap and Dr Kris gave me one of her experienced looks, which always had a hint of narcissism. She went into a little aria of remembrance about Dr Freud and her place among the psychoanalytic royalty of Vienna. The lady’s father, Oskar Rie, was a paediatrician and a friend of Freud’s, sending the great man a case of dark wine every Christmas. She was busy telling Marilyn this, not for the first time, when a tiny spider crept across the front of the desk and gave me that charming E. B. White look, a very New York spider with its slick legs and its neighbourhood smarts. It had lazy, pot-smoking eyes, too, the little beatnik spider walking in front of me.

  ‘Ahh, put a smile on it,’ said the spider. ‘This is where she does her counter-transference bit. Listen to her: her father, her father, Freud, Freud. They wrote a book together about children, haven’t you heard? Aaaaah, shurrup already. Her father studied children, geddit? She writes about child psychology. You do the math.’

  ‘But what about the music? The pictures? The goddamn Latin translation of Winnie the Pooh?’

  ‘The one lying next to the desk there, on the floor. Yeah. I was over there this morning. All her clients see that book and feel intimidated.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘I mean, Jesus Christ – Winnie Ille Pu? What’s a person supposed to do with that information?’

  ‘My girl has her troubles, but she always comes out of here with a dozen more.’

  ‘Why does she come, bro?’

  ‘For the conversation. She likes having somebody intelligent to talk to. But she often feels quite annoyed.’

  ‘No wonder. I’m telling ya. You should see the number she does on some of these dudes. The whole room’s a stage set and this woman, she smart, she nice, but she fluffs it up like crazy, man. You just watch the show here baby, it’s all about her. She means well, but, boy, some people just exhaust the spirit, you know what I mean?’

  ‘She’s talking about herself. Is that not against the rules or something?’ The spider just rolled his eight eyes and resumed his dainty walk over a set of Art Deco ink-wells.

  ‘Just watch the show,’ he said.

  ‘My friend Anna Freud, the friend of my childhood, she never married. My friend may have enjoyed her father’s brilliance too much. I think we were all intoxicated by his brilliance. I was one of his patients.’ The fact is, though, that Marilyn liked this lore: it was intellectual gossip and Marilyn loved taking it back to Mr Strasberg. Much of what passed for psychoanalysis at the Actors Studio was more in the vein of gossip about analysts and writers, and it made them feel better, just as it did Marilyn, that the same dramas existed for the brilliant people of Europe as existed for those born in America. ‘My husband would have been greatly interested in your little problem of Anna Christie,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t let her patronise you like that,’ I said, but my owner just patted me with her soft hand. ‘That’s so out of line, you know. Every word of it. I can’t believe you’re paying this woman to force her self-importance on you and her music and her good taste and her goddamn paperweights! Then, to top it all, she tries to get you to think painfully hard about the men in your life by – guess what? – talking ceaselessly and infuriatingly about the wonderful men in her life.’

  ‘Say, let’s be quiet, Maf,’ Marilyn said, patting me again. ‘He gets a bit antsy in closed rooms.’

  ‘My friend Anna loved her dogs. Freud more than understood the value of having a dog in the therapy room. He himself was addicted to his chows.’ Dr Kris rose from her desk and straightened her cardigan. She walked to the tallest of the bookshelves and gingerly picked a volume from the middle shelf. ‘My husband was a curator of sculpture and fine arts when we married,’ she said. ‘In the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.’

  ‘Cultured men.’

  ‘Who are you referring to?’

  ‘Your husband. I guess he was a very cultured man.’

  ‘Yes of course. I believe he was the first of those to marry, shall we say . . . the interests of psychoanalysis with the instincts of fine art.’

  ‘Marry?’

  ‘Yes, I walked into that.’

  There were days when Dr Kris’s fastidious nature wasn’t quite as fastidious as it might have been. Patients often found her neuroses entertaining, and, at the same time, soothing: wasn’t it nice to have an analyst whose hands shook more than one’s own? In sessions with Marilyn, Dr Kris was often quietly uncovered in ways Marilyn did well to ignore. She became a lonely woman entombed by her past, eager to talk about what had mattered and what was gone. One imagined that was why she played classical music between sessions, to bring her back to her coping self, to feed the historical ego, re
turning her again to the chief graces of the confected life. Marilyn sometimes listened to her as if it was a sort of penance. Her skirt was cutting into her waist; she fidgeted. She remembered often feeling the same discomfort as a child.

  ‘My husband worked for many years to investigate the nature of caricature and facial expression in art and he published on that subject.’ Marilyn looked down at me on her lap and made one of her comic faces, the one that made her beautiful lips into a perfectly round O. ‘Do you see yourself as dealing in facial expressions for a living?’

  ‘Sure. But I’m keen to broaden my repertoire.’

  ‘You are angry at my question?’

  ‘It was crude, Dr Kris. But never mind. Crude is fine. I guess I’m pretty used to crude.’

  ‘That is interesting. Caricature seeks to discover a likeness in deformity. You feel these faces you are required to make are always sexual faces.’

  ‘All faces are sexual faces.’

  ‘Okay. We will work with that.’

  ‘Dr Kris, why don’t you just show me the thing in the book you’re holding. I know that is what you want to do and I want you to do it, too.’

  ‘I think you are experiencing anger today, Marilyn.’

  ‘And I think you are.’ I licked her hand and nosed her until she clapped me. I looked along a shelf and was baffled by the self-assurance suggested by its contents. There was a Buddha smiling at the sad turn history had taken. I always found it hard to take the Buddha seriously: his fat simple face that always seems so delighted at the prospect of eternity.

  Dr Kris opened the book she had taken from the shelf, a bound volume of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. It appeared heavy and had many scraps of paper stuck between its pages. When the doctor laid the volume flat we could see the words ‘Ernst Kris’ and the year at the head of the page, ‘1956’. As my owner stroked me I began to experience something of what she was feeling at that moment: a certainty, and not an unpleasant certainty, really a freeing one, that the analyst was trying to undermine her. That was all. Marilyn had told Dr Kris her story a long time ago and the doctor had been very good at drawing it out from deeper and still deeper reserves, treating Marilyn as an injured child. And now the process had changed course and Marilyn was required to suffer a series of assaults on her ‘personal myth’. In fact she was quite eager to be undermined: that winter she had got to the end of her old satisfactions, and now wished above all to be free of herself. Over the months I had noticed a change in the colours of her thoughts, as if her mind had changed season. She was taking more drugs and was behaving as if it might be good to outwit the demands and expectations of being herself. She was dropping old friends and looking for a new part: that’s right, she was playing at being a serious actress, the biggest acting role of her life. And this meant she was walking very close to the edge of sanity all the time, manipulating her reality to meet the demands of some terrible, unknowable ideal. I watched it and I saw the tears and the little panics at bedtime. But I also saw the new steeliness: the determination that came over her, as if things must change, or things must end. ‘Caricature is a comfort to oneself and others,’ said Dr Kris. ‘But it may also constitute a denial or a distortion of true selfhood. Perhaps Anna Christie relies on men to tell her who she is. Perhaps she wishes to be something unto herself, not merely a daughter or a wife, no?’