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

by Andrew O'Hagan

  ‘This is different,’ she said. ‘It’s not my story.’

  ‘Yes and no.’

  ‘You know, I yearn for a decent part.’

  ‘We shall take our time, Marilyn. I have spoken to Anna Freud in London and she is convinced this movie is going to be a travesty. She wishes they would all drop dead, to tell you the truth.’

  ‘Is that what they mean by the death-drive?’

  ‘No, Marilyn. It’s the life-drive. One must be able to protect one’s own father, no?’

  Greenson also banned me from the consulting rooms, both the one at his home and the one at his office in Roxbury Drive, saying he did not share Freud’s belief that dogs were an aid to therapy. ‘They have ears,’ he said, with less paranoia than Marilyn assumed at the time. ‘And they have eyes. I always feel the eyes. This little dog can wait downstairs with my daughter.’ And so that particular cycle was complete, from daughter to daughter to daughter to daughter, the heavenly father upstairs with his patient and me and Joan in the kitchen with two bowls of pretzels and a TV that had to have the sound turned down low.

  The godsend in all of this was Mrs Murray. She had actually owned the Greensons’ house some time in the 1940s and had stayed in touch as their friend and helper. To Mrs Murray, interior decoration was a kind of religion, and given she was a Swedenborgian, the matter of hand-painted tiles and garden furniture took on the dimensions of a helio-spiritual quest. With Mrs Murray I always felt I had come towards the closing of a circle in my own journey: she was Scottish, somewhere, an arch decorator, a servant of psychoanalysis, a lover of animals, and a woman with a tremendous passion for the life and lore of Mexico. She was democratic or servile, depending on her mood. When Marilyn decided she needed a house like the Greensons, it was Mrs Murray who found it, just a few blocks away at 12305 Fifth Helena Drive. She agreed to become the housekeeper. Mrs Murray took me in her arms and told me in her whispering voice that everything always turns out perfectly in the end.

  There’s nothing so empty as an empty swimming pool. Mrs Murray came into the garden of the new house with her grizzled hair and her winged spectacles, her tiny eyes casting about for poetic improvements. I think she was a little like the Cheshire Cat in Alice, who didn’t feel mad, or a dog, but who was capable of imaginative feats of her own. ‘We have to make what little life we have, Maf Honey.’

  ‘Nice you,’ I said.

  She was always in her garden slippers. She whispered little religious confections while opening the door to the sun room or preparing the areas for the builders. She had a very clear idea of what we needed: a house like Dr Greenson’s, a refuge from prying eyes. It was also a place where Marilyn could begin to know herself, gathering the strands of her life together and getting ready for happiness. That was the kind of thing a woman sometimes had to do in life, and it’s never easy with husbands who walk off, but we do it, she said to herself, we do it and we thrive, is that not the way of it? Is that not right, Mafia Honey? Mrs Murray explained to me on our walkabouts that marriage is eternal and one’s husband or wife is still one’s husband or wife after divorce and even in the afterlife. ‘If a person is unmarried, like you darling, then it is said that you will meet your wife for the first time in heaven.’

  ‘Oh, goody,’ I said.

  This was all said in the smallest voice. Not since Vanessa Bell had I spent time with someone so perfectly devoted to her invented world. In Mrs Murray’s opinion, her world was real and had God at the centre. ‘All evils originate in mankind and should be shunned,’ she said to me one day as she fitted a square of oatmeal-coloured carpet in the closet of the master bedroom. ‘Good actions are of God.’ And who could fail to love such a believer in the possibility of eternal lives? She made me a bed in the guest house on an old fur coat of Marilyn’s that had been given to her by Arthur Miller. She opened a window and clipped back the bougainvillea vines that had become tangled among the bars. ‘That’s it,’ she said, taking out a hankie from her sleeve, a hankie bearing a brown cross inside a grey circle. ‘A person’s fate after death is according to the character they acquired in life.’ She coughed into the hankie. ‘Those who loved the Lord or who loved being useful to others are very much in heaven.’ The previous owners had fitted two tiles into the threshold of the house, saying ‘Cursum Perficio’.* That first week, the tiles felt nothing but my paws and Mrs Murray’s carpet slippers.

  Mrs Murray, for all her myopia and hush, was a big wheel in the self-consciousness industry. The Greensons had been dependent on her for a long time, her surprise meals, her gardening efforts, and her library cards – the way she could grasp practical problems, read up on them, dominate them, and then, at small expense and with muffled drums, solve them. She had become well-known in the Brentwood intellectual and artistic world as a purse-lipped solver of people’s botherations, and I’m talking about people with a lot of botherations. (She could make calls you wouldn’t believe, including to the Mexican Embassy, where, pulling strings, she got me a pass from quarantine, allowing me to come on the Mexico trip.) Mrs Murray would arrive with her things in a net bag and her small, consoling smile: she had secrets that glistened like mica in her solid nature, and she hovered at the edge of her employer’s conscience, waiting for mistakes she could busy herself in rectifying without comment. The abandoning husband, John Murray, had been a Swedenborgian minister who became a carpenter in imitation of Christ. It seems he had little of Mrs Murray’s domestic zeal so he disappeared into Mexico to organise workers’ unions. He was never seen again, though I suspect, by now, he must be living somewhere in the suburbs of heaven with his wife, Mrs Murray.

  * ‘My journey is complete.’

  She entered my owner’s life and took charge of everything: house, car, medical appointments, dress fittings, laundry, fruit salads, and – most of all – what she called ‘the demands of home decoration’. Caring about such business was part of my pedigree, but I found it hard to influence Mrs Murray. Her convictions were ingrained at the levels, shall we say, of personal grief and natural obsession, and I could only accompany her and yap quietly as she went about the making of our house in Fifth Helena Drive. As I said, her great model was the house she had sold to the Greensons, the one she had hoped to live in for ever with her husband John. The style of that house was Mexican and Mrs Murray would do it again, better this time, as if to show her skills had only improved with disappointment.

  The trip to Mexico was arranged by Mrs Murray down to the very finest detail. It would be the perfect melding of politics and shopping. Marilyn, of course, wanted to find the materials for the new house, but she also wanted to see some people from New York who were now living in la Patria, working in the film industry or living the dream. It was the end of February 1962 and there was a true note of magic in the air as we arrived at the Continental Hilton. Marilyn was wearing one of her yellowish Pucci dresses and I remember a lovely breeze passing through the foyer, as if we had arrived at last in a world of perpetual spring.

  Mrs Murray arranged for the bags to be taken to the rooms while Marilyn took me to a bar on the roof of the building. Three glasses of Dom Pérignon later, we stood and looked over Mexico with that sense of fulfilment that comes with arrival. I suddenly remembered, or picked up from my owner’s memory, the sleazy little doctor in The Asphalt Jungle. He says Mexico City is a great place: the air is pure, it has great nightclubs and restaurants, a racetrack, and beautiful girls. ‘I’m sorry to drag you so far away from your toys, Honey,’ said my fated companion.

  ‘Are you kidding?’ I barked. ‘This is heaven. My first owners, the Scottish ones, they told me Mexico is the home of freedom and peyote. I believe they had read Mr Huxley on the subject. I believe they had a healthy attitude towards the business of hallucination. My breeders saw life for what it was.’

  ‘But isn’t it swell?’ she said, not hearing me. Then quietly: ‘It’s sure nice to be making a home.’

  ‘A little part of here,’ I said.

  Sh
e broke some nachos in a white bowl. ‘There you go, Snowball. We got everything we need.’

  The look on her face was Mexico and the drumming of my heart was Mexico and so was the scent on the breeze. ‘A book he read to me on that farm in Scotland,’ I said. ‘It was full of paintings and one of them showed the Aztec city rising from the water of the lake. Underneath, the words of Bernal Díaz from 1519. He was speaking of the moment they arrived in the city, “the day we saw what it was always in our minds to see, and our soldiers asked whether it was not all a dream”.’

  That night the Mexican film people threw a party for Marilyn at the Grand Hotel. We made our way there around six o’clock, when a flag was lowered in a huge solemn square, and it seemed part of the ongoing splendour of insurrection that history’s cries for freedom and equality should lead in time to a bourgeois hotel. That is often the way with human struggles, I’ve noticed: they start in barrios and rowdy cafes and they end in the grand rooms of plush hotels, or in fetid palaces, bordered by guards and grey sofas. The contradiction seemed very earthy at the Grand Hotel, very much at home, jungle vegetation and overhead fans working together to stir the air. ‘Of course!’ the manager seemed to say, there is a necessary distinction between the glorious masses and the chosen few. In one smiling sweep we moved from the pavement – the popping cameras, the beautiful faces shouting ‘Maraleen, Maraleen’ – to a staircase of white marble. The big shots of the Mexican film industry were looking over the banister, Marilyn lifting me, cocking her head, my eyes dazzled by the men’s smiles and some bright Tiffany glass.

  We ate like royalty. A man took me off to the kitchen and gave me a truffle omelette in a silver dish and I nearly cried with pleasure. The man had been a policeman but was now recovered. He made a joke to his comrades about me being un guapo and all the men in their white tunics laughed and passed me round. They were all lovely and I finally understood why so many waiters are actors, because good waiters must always be ready for performance. I saw it for myself. The swing doors burst open and out they came with a different posture, a different face, presenting me into the hands of my owner with a nod of officialdom and a sideways glace at the maitre d’.

  ‘Mr Huston is a most wonderful director. I have to tell you he is wonderful. Smaaaaart. Si.’

  ‘You worked with him, right?’

  ‘Si, on The Unforgiven. He is what I am calling my lucky director, okay? To me, he is lucky.’

  Marilyn giggled. ‘You should see him at the crap tables. Luck ain’t even in it.’

  ‘Ah, si, si. John is obstinado, no – at the roulette, no, and the whisky?’

  ‘Obstinado,’ she said.

  ‘I tell you, Maraleen. Without a doubt. He reminds me of John Steinbeck. You know Mr Steinbeck? I directed La Perla

  – yes, it doesn’t matter. Long time ago I directed La Perla. Okay? He is the same kind of macho, si. The same hombre muy obstinado. Drinking. Ho.’

  ‘You can talk to me about Steinbeck,’ I said. ‘I know half of Travels With Charley by heart. Charley the dog and the big man cross the country. Charley knows more about geography than the writer, no? And Charley is the artist lying in wait while the pines go black against the sky.’

  ‘Isn’t there a rumour, he’s about to get the Nobel Prize for Literature?’

  ‘Es verdad,’ said the man, whose name was Emilio Fernández. He had a nice moustache and a very serious wife called Columba. She was an actress but her dark eyes told you she wasn’t so willing to participate in all this excitement. It sometimes happens. She had decided Marilyn might be a threat to a male artist’s integrity.

  ‘You are soon working again with Mr George Cukor,’ said Columba brightly. ‘Is true?’

  Marilyn half closed her eyes. ‘I love George.’

  ‘Is a bedroom comedy, no? Not hard to make political engagement with this kind of material?’

  ‘I’m not so sure,’ Marilyn said. ‘It’s set in a bedroom. What other kind of politics is there?’ She shrugged and Mr Fernández let out an enormous laugh, while his wife pressed her lips together.

  A young friend of theirs who had written the screenplay of a movie about a cockroach was very attentive to Marilyn and she liked his jokes. His name was José and he later sent her a forest of poinsettias. But all evening my excitement grew at the promise of Cantinflas, the modern Quixote who was dining at the other end of the table and making everybody laugh. I felt I had waited a long time to meet Cantinflas. They called him the Charlie Chaplin of Mexico. In fact he was much more than that: a verbal idealist, a picaresque under dog, the spirit of the nation. I kept looking along the table at him and seeing his thin moustache and wishing I knew him as a friend. But in a sense I had always known him, by osmosis, by intuition, this impoverished Everyman, this satirist, for whom politics and art were twinned. In a country of illiterates he took over the language; in a country of migrants he took over the city. He laughed at the law and made life spectacular. The eternal pelado had known my kind all his life, and then, in the midst of my reverie, he stood up at the end of the table and proved it. He spoke English as he had when he was Mr Fogg’s valet in Around the World in Eighty Days.

  ‘In Vaudeville, in Godville – we need our props.’ He took up a small, crushed hat and the whole table erupted with applause as he put it on his head. The cheers continued as he took up a bottle and poured himself a drink, then another, holding the bottle and cocking the hat. He twisted his mouth from side to side as if a bee was on his nose and took up a leg of chicken from the plate. Marilyn clapped. We watched him eating the chicken, but there was something in our concentration that made it seem as if we were staring at a Velázquez. He ate greedily like a dog and knew it like a man. ‘If work was precious,’ he said with a mouthful of chicken, ‘the rich would no doubt have hoarded it up for themselves.’

  ‘Viva Cantinflas!’

  The table shook with delight and uproar. He began to smoke a cigar. ‘In the great tradition of enormous welcomes,’ he said, ‘offered since ancient days by the denizens of Mexico with their benisons for the roughly transplanted – I mean, the weary sailor who expects courtesy for his Cortez-y, the noble plunderer who begs safe harbour – it has been our habit to accept them with hungry eyes before enjoying their oppressions. In short, ladies and gentleman, we join with the law-givers of our nation in welcoming America to our table. She comes in armour of harmony. About time, too, and no mistake in the hour of our death, Amen.’

  The man beside me was actually crying with laughter. He thumped the table. There was something quicksilver and brave in the performance: Cantinflas had no notes and the routine was new, but nothing seemed ill-fitting and the words he spoke were fiery and nonsensical and they cheered every one up. ‘Her skin is like porcelain snow as on the peaks of our volcanoes. Our guest is not from the mansion house, my friends. She is from the house in the barrio next to the thieves’ market, as I am – not the King of Siam, but a man

  – and by her talent alone she has made herself the Queen of Love and Intelligence.’

  Everyone looked at Marilyn and she laughed that wonderful laugh of health and good times and better ones to come. ‘Marilyn is here with us and she is a fact of democracy.’

  ‘I love you Cantinflas,’ I said. The people at the table were cheering and they seemed in that moment to be the people who knew best how to live, who knew how to be themselves. And they felt proud, most proud of Cantinflas and his words. Proud of his dissidence. One of the actors came to his side in the part of Hotel Manager. Cantinflas turned to him and shied like a horse.

  ‘I am not ready to pay my check,’ he said. ‘A check is an imposition, an insult to the free man. I demand you countermand your demand if you call yourself a man.’

  ‘Señor,’ said the man playing the hotel manager. ‘It is rumoured you have been speaking freely of freedom. The bill is doubled. I believe you used the word “democracy”?’

  ‘I said “geography”. I said Miss Monroe was the Queen of

>   Knowing Where She Is.’

  ‘Señor. There is no charge for the cognac. No charge for

  the chicken and the cigar. This is your bill for the use of

  expensive words.’

  He looked at the bill and the comic’s face snarled with

  feigned disgust. ‘El Capitán! If my eyes are my eyes, it says

  here that the cost of our evening is four times the national

  debt.’

  ‘That is correct, Señor. You have overspent. It is not cheap

  in this country to praise beauty.’

  ‘Ah, ugliness! Ugliness,’ said our hero. From the side of the

  room came the sound of violins, the kind of sad music heard

  in silent movies. Marilyn’s eyes were wide with excitement

  and I nuzzled into her waist. ‘It is the dog! I tell you, the

  dog!’ Cantinflas said, pointing. I’m sure I must have blushed

  under my whiskers. Marilyn laughed and rubbed my cheek.

  ‘The dog is the navigator. I believe he is the geographer.’ ‘How so, Señor?’

  ‘Marilyn’s dog is the dictator of optimism. I say he has

  slipped into Mexico to run a campaign for president. He has

  attached himself to this wonderful woman for the purpose of

  running our country.’

  The table roared and Marilyn hugged me and I was almost

  dizzy with the attention.

  ‘You are insane. This is a dog!’

  ‘Indeed, a dog. A small white dog. A small dog belonging

  to la chica moderna. He is here as a guest of the Mexican film

  industry.’

  ‘Si. And your point, Señor? At this establishment we

  charge very heavily for nonsense.’

  ‘And what do you charge for wisdom? Tell me, el Capitán.