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

by Andrew O'Hagan

  Is it or is it not the case that a female rhinoceros was elected

  to public office in Brazil?’

  ‘That is right, Senor. Two years ago. I believe the candidate’s name was Cacareco.’

  ‘An able public servant.’

  ‘Indeed. A rhinoceros. An able public servant if you

  happen to live in Brazil. Elected by the popular vote.’ ‘The popular vote! That phrase will be added to your bill,

  Señor.’

  ‘And I put it to you, el Capitán. The people of Malawi

  returned a parakeet as district officer. The people of Poland

  once voted a pig head of police. He is said to have exhibited

  a sense of justice most natural and fitting for the people.’ ‘Please don’t give me “The People”.’

  ‘It is certainly what I will give you, el Capitán. I give

  you the people. And I give you choice! And I give you

  democracy! Sir, I give you beauty! And I give you – with all

  the heavens in attendance, with history at our beck and call

  and the rebel spirit of Cuauhtémoc guiding our lightning – I

  give you the dog of Marilyn Monroe for president!’ The table erupted more than ever before and everyone stood

  up with glasses aloft and voices raised, the hubbub of good

  cheer infecting everything and Marilyn in love with the great

  joke and the spirit of Mexican reason. People gathered round

  and stroked my ears and kissed Marilyn’s hand and Cantinflas was mobbed by his friends. The waiters lined the back wall of the dining room and applauded. There was dancing and Marilyn and Cantinflas were like teenagers – Norma Jeane and Mario Moreno – dancing a snaky-hipped rumba and laughing their heads off. Later, Mr Fernández made a phone call and had them open the Ministry of Education, so that Marilyn and the rest of us could see the murals of Diego Rivera. (The painter was stupid about Trotsky, but what the hell. You can’t expect all visionary people to be visionary in the same way.) Cantinflas and Marilyn and the young screenwriter grabbed bottles of champagne and led a procession across the square, then up the street to the ministry. The place was dark but someone found candles, and soon light flickered over their faces, over Marilyn’s happy eyes, as they made their way down the corridors in search of Rivera’s offering of a dream they

  could share, The Day of the Dead.

  Marilyn and the screenwriter found a corner where they

  could take off some of their clothes. She was kissing him

  and he lay on top of her and soon she moaned in his mouth.

  He was fast. (Nice to see old people enjoying themselves.)

  Privacy’s not really my bag so I lay at their feet and wanted

  to snuggle into their snuggle, and once they stopped moving

  I took my chance and spooned into their legs. ‘Bueno,’ said

  the young man. ‘A little heartbeat at my feet.’ The next day

  the fellow sent the flowers to our hotel room and Marilyn

  replaced the card with another one before sending the

  bouquet on to Cantinflas.

  Mrs Murray had spent those first days at the hotel making telephone calls. I don’t know what was up. I would say she was more emotional than usual and you know how it is with religious people, they turn most vehemently to God when they seem least ready to accept his example. Marilyn understood. She didn’t do the God thing but she did do the Mrs Murray thing. In any case, on the third day she rose again, the housekeeper, tripping down the stairs to breakfast with a list of retailers for Marilyn and a small bone for me. She got it from my good friend the bellhop. ‘He isn’t doing well with that bone, Marilyn,’ she whispered after a while.

  ‘No, Mrs Murray. I think he’s probably had enough of bones already, in this place. We saw the Rivera murals by candlelight. Aren’t they something? I sure wish we could take one home with us.’

  ‘Beyond our budget,’ said Mrs Murray.

  Remember the bones in Central Park, the buried bones of old Manhattan that came to mind the day I went with Marilyn to see Dr Kris? A similar vision appeared to me as we drove through those beautiful, snow-capped mountains on the way to Toluca, a vision of canine forebears who had died and were buried in the hills. It wasn’t a gloomy thought, either: the local enchantments had cancelled the gloom for me, if not the dread, and for the first time I looked at the wonder of the world happening and considered myself party to some of its darker secrets. The car chugged towards the market town, Mrs Murray whispering facts about pots and looms, and Marilyn stroked my coat as she looked into the same mountains and felt like one of the clouds rolling past in the blue sky. Mexico was a place where people and animals still lived together on the streets.

  The market was big enough to get lost in. My friends bought tiles and ordered leather-covered chairs, they picked up a bowl painted with flowers, bought baskets and blankets, an Aztec tapestry featuring a reclining god. Most of the items were for delivery, but some of them were carted by Mrs Murray and the driver back to the car while Marilyn sat in dark glasses and a scarf drinking a long soda from a scuffed bottle. I felt like Berganza amidst the hubbub of the market, indeed I did, a good, old scavenging pícaro, and I even sneaked some fava beans and licked a dreadful iron spoon covered in gravy. Many of the things they were buying were not to my taste, as they say: all that scalloped furniture! ‘Down boy,’ said Mrs Murray when I tried to assail a leather bench with my paws as a way of signalling its inelegance. At the edge of a stall selling patatas bravas, two perfect Imagist cats – cats out of William Carlos Williams – came padding over the dusty ground and they were street cats, fairly louping with fleas. They snarled. Their mouths were dirty but they spoke well. First one:

  Just smelling fi s h

  makes me so hungry.

  They lie on that stall

  sweating salt

  Then the other:

  My father was dozing

  on a Pepsi crate behind the

  old hotel.

  He woke up

  to laundry vans parked in a row. Late last night I saw him

  making graves for all his

  tiny broken

  threads.

  A group of communist friends had us to lunch. They were people Marilyn had known in Connecticut. It appeared Mrs Murray knew some of them, too. Mr Field was a director of the Institute for Pacific Relations and his wife, Nieves, who was lovely and patted me constantly, had once been a model for Rivera. They all talked about Cuba and the waiters kept appearing with more morsels and bottles of champagne. Marilyn put her glass down to me and let me lick up a few mouthfuls.

  ‘Fizzy,’ I said. ‘Fidel-io.’ appear ing

  The most interesting person on the shopping trip was a man called William Spratling. After a visit to Taxco the next day we ended up with him at his ranch, a place islanded in lush, green banana trees. In the memoir of his father, Jean Renoir tells how the old man, walking with him across a field, would perform a strange dance to avoid stepping on dandelions. Spratling appeared to have the same small habit of carefulness. He had been a professor of architecture at Tulane University and he also knew everything there was to know about the rights of man and the properties of silver. I liked him for the sausages. I liked him as soon as I met him, walking towards us with a cane, kissing Marilyn, his blue eyes glittering from years of charm.

  During breakfast he spoke of his old friend, William Faulkner. He said Mr Faulkner was a man with a vision, a man in touch with every happy and bleak part of himself, a true writer, someone who could imagine the world in such a way that nobody who read him could live exactly as they did before. Years ago, in the early days, Mr Spratling had helped Faulkner write a book about Sherwood Anderson, but he preferred to talk about his friend’s drinking and shouting days in Hollywood. ‘Do you know, Marilyn, Louis B. Mayer had him under contract at Metro? Bill said he couldn’t work on the lot and asked if he could work from home. LB s
aid that was fine. Next thing LB hears, Faulkner hasn’t been seen for weeks and that’s because he was working from home

  – in Mississippi!’

  ‘That’s funny,’ said Marilyn.

  When someone tells a joke, a great number of Americans have a tendency to say ‘that’s funny’, while Europeans have a tendency to laugh. Marilyn had always been firmly of the latter party, yet in that last stretch before filming began on Something’s Got to Give, my owner began to slide away from her natural responses. I saw it first in Mexico, perhaps at the exact moment of the Faulkner story, the beginning of her slide towards abstraction, towards a place where all voices sounded like voices from the past. Nothing was new to her. Like a sleep walker she haunted the daylight hours.

  Mr Spratling had put on the first show of Mexican art at the Metropolitan Museum, and it comforted Marilyn, ennobled her, really, to have him show her the best places to buy silverware. He was good fun and his brilliance brought her out of herself. After a large shopping spree in Taxco and the Jardín Borda, the crowd returned to the city and Marilyn was taken on an arranged visit to a local orphanage. Mr Spratling and Mrs Murray took me the short distance to Coyoacán, and the closer I got the more nervous I became, history seeming to bleed from the walls of the buildings and from the sun itself that afternoon. It was as if some old belief, something personal, from the latent quarters of my own past, was coming together as we walked towards a building with towers. Mrs Murray picked me up and she stood in front of the building and wiped a tear from her eye. Mr Spratling spoke and I caught the name ‘Mercader’, the taste of Paris buns coming powerfully with the thud of memory. This was the house in which Leon Trotsky was killed. Mrs Murray let me down onto the road and I sniffed my way forward and stopped beside the gate, becoming sure I could scent a memory of fur coats lingering on the road, Siberian furs with linings stitched in Manhattan.

  I looked at the windows, the dust on the road. Every object has its story and every being has his tale, and Trotsky, well, here was his house and the garden he tended. Inside the house, they would no doubt have his original desk and all the photographs, the inkpot and the dictaphone. But standing there, my head was filled with the power of his example. Wasn’t he the god of small things and massive ideas, a cultivator of man’s better instincts? That, my friends, is the greatest work of the imagination: not action, but the thought of action. (Trotsky and Shakespeare, I thought, what friends they would have been.*) I glimpsed the garden where Trotsky must have grown his small lettuces. He showed us all creatures are servants and every creature is master of the servant in himself. I dropped a tear in the dust at Coyoacán, just as Mrs Murray blew her nose and walked back to the car saying the past is always the past, and nothing can change it. I followed her with emotions hot as the sun. ‘It is men, Mrs Murray – you hear me? It is men not animals who are guilty of bestiality. It was noted before any of us was born by Plutarch’s talking pig.’

  * Thinking about writers always reminded me of Charlie. That time on the ferryboat, when he spoke with Marilyn about politics, I licked his hand and absorbed some lines about Trotsky written by his favourite writer. ‘I was excited by this famous figure, the impression he gave of navigation by the great stars, of the highest considerations, of being fit to speak the most human words and universal terms.’

  ‘Nice and quiet now, Maf,’ she said.

  On the way to meet Marilyn, I was imagining how nice it would be to discover oneself in the form of a pottery dog, the kind much admired and much displayed by Mr Spratling. Those pottery dogs were a big deal in Colima culture, staring into the inevitable with their blank eyes and their ears pert for news of a reprieve. As the heat rose and the car pulled to a stop, I found myself wondering if Mr Freud had kept any of those dogs among the funerary ornaments in his famous study. The heat was radiating above the dusty road but I could see Marilyn up ahead. She was sitting on the steps of an old cantina, playing with a pretty Mexican girl in bare feet, the two of them laughing and clapping their hands. It began to rain and the rain felt like a great relief in all the dryness. The girls stood up and danced on the porch and the rain made them seem so young.

  14

  O

  f all the directors in Hollywood, I have to say George Cukor is the one I liked best. I loved the fact that George was a stylish storyteller but also a glorified interior decorator. Women were not blank canvases to Cukor so much as darling little dolls, waiting to have their dresses put on and their hair set in curlers, ready to have their mouths painted and their spirits tested. He was heartless of course and queer as a week in Tangiers, but George had a fine understanding of female self-consciousness, a never-ending insight not only into how women thought but into how they would like to be thought of. He was the best director of female talent the industry ever produced, a man with personal taste so good it was verging on bad, someone who knew how to furnish and dress a room, never forgetting – while wishing to forget

  – that he came from good, middle-class Hungarians who simply loved the theatre.

  Cukor believed a woman is a project not an animal, a basket of pearls waiting to be strung. She is a girl from nowhere who is ready to be transformed into her greater, imag in ary self, who adorns her surroundings and spells drama. He made films the same way he did his house – the most beautiful house in Beverly Hills, which stood like a lavender-scented villa on the Côte d’Azur – and that meant comfort and discipline and a great depth of lightness. George believed it was the merging of opposites that dignified life, and, out of all his doubts, he had come to be very good at what he did, and quite imperial in Cordell Drive. For people, I’ve noticed, life’s greatest satisfactions are always imperial: they have to involve the crushing of something, especially the crushing of one’s smaller or former self. I loved his style. I loved his methods, the way he touched things and made them instantly gracious. Thus, he sat Vivien Leigh on a Regency fauteuil and began to rehearse her for her part in Gone With the Wind. Thus, he laid Greta Garbo on a satin bedspread under a painting by Vuillard, and holding her hand as if it were a porcelain bird, showed her how to manage her grief in Camille. And thus, again, he summoned Marilyn to an oval room beyond a scented belvedere, to a spot between two Venetian parcel-gilt blackamoors, and stroked her face with the backs of his fingers. They were standing under a painting by Georges Braque of some pears waiting to be eaten. The director told my friend she was a very great artist who would stun the world in Something’s Got to Give. I just sat on the cold parquet floor and stared at a copper fireplace. I padded outside to let Marilyn get on with airing her worries. I tried to imagine what it would be like to live at George Cukor’s house, and decided it would be hard, the kind of hardship endured by the orphan Lazarillo de Tormes, one of the original picaroons, who lived for a short spell with a man who painted tambourines. Lazarillo invented the art of running away.

  The swimming pool was silent. Two rather facetious cats were lying on top of a parked car in the driveway, while a third skipped metrically down the edge of a turquoise awning to leap onto the flagstones. She mewled coquettishly and rubbed her shoulder against her cheek. ‘All of us endorse your plan,’ she said.

  It’s clear you love the common man.

  A better democrat we’ve never met

  At least among the younger set.

  The novelist Henry Fielding, friend of my childhood, friend of my childhood friends, once opened a book with the true observation that a good man is a standing example to all his acquaintance. That’s to say, goodness is the greatest prompt for emulation, though I find this to be truer of dogs than of other animals. Fielding sets out his handsome theory in The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews, and of His Friend Mr Abraham Adams. My mother’s owner, my own breeder, the Scottish fellow, often came from the tractor with whole passages of Fielding stuck in his head. (He was a fan of epic comedy, the art of the novel, the sport of digression.) Anyway, this business of example – of example’s force – works on dogs but
rarely on cats. Cats have a strong heart for the burlesque. They remember not the thing itself but the manner of the thing. In this sense they are very modern. When trying to emulate the dogs at Mr Cukor’s house, the cats were apt to speak viciously as they skirted the plant-pots, speaking in classical forms without really adding anything to the conversation of the dogs. ‘Go down to the pool, and mind your step, please,’ the coquettish one said in a state of mental luxury.

  The boys are discussing a Sicilian cheese. It was stolen by Labes of Aexone,

  A villainous thug in Aristophanes’ day.

  The three dogs belonging to Mr Cukor were lounging around the pool discussing the nature of drama. It was often the way with showbusiness dogs, though in my experience canines have a tendency to chase the matter round and round with more vigour than their owners. Not more than Cukor, though, who chased such lore in his sleep. A low painted table stood by the pool bearing two glasses of tequila, their rims glinting in the orange sun, the stone statues of gods and emperors listening among the magnolias. The most talkative dogs were a pair of dachshunds, Amanda and Solo; the third was Sasha, a standard black poodle, seemingly irked, as if the other two had been ganging up on her. Sasha had come from Paris, a gift from Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon, people who believed, as Sasha did, that movie legend was much more important than the sorts of legend peddled by the hacks of ancient Greece. As you know, I’m a dedicated student of non-human behaviour, and I’d say the two dachshunds, who were born somewhere in the Valley, were getting off on the fact they could be more high-minded than the self-important European, Little Miss Boulevard Raspail. ‘Listen, dude, you gotta listen . . .’

  ‘A look-eh. We ’ave a veesitor.’

  The dogs turned their heads as I came down the steps feeling embarrassed that I had to take each step individually. I couldn’t bound down like some gasping husky to meet them at the bottom. (We all have our handicaps.) The French one came forward. ‘A veesitor, indeed-eh. Are you Marilyn’s dog-eh?’