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

by Andrew O'Hagan

  ‘Aye. That’s me,’ I said.

  ‘Ee says, “aye”. Scottish, no?’ She turned and took two pretty steps to the pool, where she dropped a paw into the water and sighed. ‘Scottish.’ She turned. ‘Did you know-eh that nice animal – what’s him? Greyfriars Bobby? Is in Edinburgh, no?’

  ‘Grey Fired Who?’ said Solo.

  ‘Bobby, you eediot. I mean the dog who stayed close to the old man. The Disney film.’

  ‘I didn’t know him personally, I’m afraid,’ I said. But I loved her for asking and was nearly dumb with admiration.

  ‘A great story-eh. It makes Lassie look like an ’uman being. I’m not kidding.’ I leapt up on a canvas-covered pool chair to watch them. It felt as if Sasha was getting her own back for something said earlier.

  ‘Far out man,’ said Solo. ‘I was just telling Sasha here that justice is the name of the game.’

  ‘He was trying to tell me,’ she said. ‘Failing-eh.’

  ‘Doin’ it, dude. Not tryin’.’

  Sasha shook her head in a contemptuous way and looked at me as if I might instantly understand how juvenile they were. ‘They’re Californians,’ she said. ‘What could you ex pect-eh? They don’t know ’ow to appreciate their own culture so they . . . do what? They quote Aristophanes all day.’

  ‘Not true, man. We’re cool with movies.’

  She rolled her eyes. ‘He was bred by two girls who worked at the City Lights Bookstore. You know the one I’m talking about-eh? In San Francisco? The girls came to live in Sherman Oaks and started breeding dachshunds. Listen to the way they talk-eh.’

  ‘I like accents,’ I said. ‘I lived in Sherman Oaks for a while, with Mrs Gurdin. She deals in English dogs. You know her?’

  ‘Oh everybody knows her,’ said Amanda. ‘Drives around in that big-ass van, dogs hanging out the windows? She’s a little hopped-up. She’s Russian, right? And she’s got that paranoid husband who’s always running his car off the road. Jesus. I mean, Jesus. You started in that house and now you’re with Marilyn in Brentwood?’

  ‘There was a lot of New York in between.’

  ‘Ah, New York,’ said Solo. ‘I wish we could go to New York some time. That would be cool. Mr Cukor grew up there.’

  ‘They have nice accents in New York,’ I said. ‘You guys have nice accents.’

  ‘That’s not an accent-eh,’ said Sasha. ‘It’s an echo of stupidity.’

  ‘Oh, pipe down, sister,’ said Amanda. She looked at me with a degree of borrowed ease. ‘She’s just sore because Mr Cukor has gone and cast a dog – not her – in the new movie. She’s in a rage.’

  ‘I am not-eh,’ said Sasha. ‘The part, it ees not right for me. I don’t jump-eh. I don’t do tricks. Never ’ave.’

  ‘We were talking about Wasps,’ continued Amanda. ‘You know that cool comedy? Did you have that?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘A guy in England who used to come to visit was a critic. Cyril Connolly?’ The guys shook their heads. ‘He came to lunch all the time. He gave me a whole lot of the Greek stuff.’

  ‘Yeah, man,’ said Amanda. ‘The play gives us something to chew on. Labes commits a felony. He might be a scoundrel, who knows? But man’s vanity is the great destroyer of nations. That’s what the play proves.’

  ‘No, Mrs Dog-eh,’ said Sasha. ‘Bombs are the things which destroy nations. ’Aven’t you heard this?’

  ‘No they don’t,’ I said. ‘I mean, they could. But the thought of bombs preserves nations. The thought of bombs keeps nations from exercising too much vanity.’

  ‘We’ll see about that,’ said Sasha.

  We could hear laughter through the trees, it came from the house and was getting closer. It was the humans. They would soon arrive to get their drinks. Sasha did a little French thing in her throat, somewhere between a growl and a whimper, full of contempt. ‘The movies is where drama comes good-eh.’

  ‘What do you mean, dude? Comes good?’

  ‘Where the moral life is clarified-eh. I say it is the movies that make people see the meaning of friendship, the truth of love, the price of ambition. Movies, yes. We are in the right world, brothers and sisters.’

  I thought of making a case for the novel, but I was young then. I merely smiled with pleasure at the spectacle of her enthusiasm.

  ‘It is movies, little dog. Or television? I offer you Rin Tin Tin. What about Lassie-eh or the Greyfriars Bobby? My favourite is Toto, whose philosophical silence in The Wizard of Oz made ’uman wishes seem truly absurd, no? In that movie? I swear to God-eh. Toto stole the show with ’er thoughts alone.’

  ‘You crack me up, Sasha,’ said Solo. ‘She’s comparing herself to the movie greats. You know why: because she wants to be one of them.’ Things went quiet for a moment and I heard footsteps.

  ‘You know Toto was in one of Mr Cukor’s movies?’ Sasha whispered. She was in The Women.’

  ‘I just gathered that,’ I said. ‘Up in the house while they were talking. I saw a photograph.’

  ‘She shone,’ said Sasha.

  * A few weeks later, one afternoon, I watched Marilyn pack the car at Fifth Helena Drive. She had errands in Palm Springs. That day, something made me imagine that she was changing into a version of the girl she once was. Her hair was pale and her skin beautifully clear; it was as if the world had bleached her with attention. We drove up Highway 10 and it might have appeared that she was nobody. We didn’t feel like two creatures making for the desert, but rather like a pair of porpoises aiming for some blue and distant ocean, there to swim and turn and ride the great currents. Marilyn had always been political, but after Mexico it was her habit to see everything in political terms, everything from her face to her future. She was abstracted, as I said, unfocused, but that seemed to make her simpler, a blossoming girl.

  She spoke to me over those hundred miles or so like someone sending her consciousness out over the land, over the trailer parks and the hamburger joints, to reach the little motels, their curtains closed. ‘There’s nothing wrong with sex,’ she said. It would be nice, she thought, just to be a woman, a woman like any other, with talents to inhabit and share. Marilyn was sure she could become natural. One time in New York, she said that the best way for her to find herself was to prove to herself that she was an actress, but driving into the golden dusk that evening she changed her mind. ‘I am trying to prove to myself I am a person,’ she said. ‘Then maybe I’ll be able to convince myself I am an actress.’

  She gave me half a turkey sandwich. It smelled of expectation and that’s the nicest smell of all. We stopped next to a bowling alley. Marilyn was thinking about Dr Greenson, how he reminded her of a kind man who was a teacher at Van Nuys High. He was the same type: the sort of person you could trust with your uncertainties. The teacher once told her she could do anything in the world if only she put her mind to it. She tapped my nose and I barked with love. ‘But I put my mind into tight sweaters instead,’ she said. There was no top on the car and we could sit back feeling cool. The entrance to the Coachella Bowl was shaped like a pyramid; the boys in their leather jackets were passing round cigarettes at the door. I wanted to say I knew those kids, I knew their type, and saw that they would never know how free they were in their youth until their youth was over. I wanted to tell her about the young people in Dallas, the ones who took me to the hillside when she had to go off on the plane and divorce Arthur. I think she would have liked them, those kids jousting with the future. I lay on her lap. I wondered if Raymond had been made grocery clerk again this summer, or was he off with the Marines? Marilyn leaned her head back and the sky was mysterious, just like the sky in Texas as we waited for signs. She fell asleep and I thought it was probably the pills. I liked the sky anyhow, the thought of those chimps, those dogs, going in search of knowledge and making the universe a safer place to be. In one of his letters, Freud wrote that when next to his dog he often found himself humming the Octavio aria from Don Juan, about the bonds of friendship. ‘The simplicity of life free from th
e conflicts of civilisation that are so hard to endure,’ he writes. ‘There is a feeling of undeniably belonging together.’

  The hospital was a white building at the edge of the desert in Palm Springs. We weren’t there for long, it was another stop-off on the way to Frank’s, but looking over the emptiness to the San Jacinto Mountains made Marilyn think of those desert locations on The Misfits. It was a thought that made her cry and she did so quietly, like a child weeping at something they knew they could never change. But I’m sure the thought of Mr Gable also gave her strength for what she was about to do. She lowered the rearview mirror and used a tissue to wipe away her lipstick. She wanted to be immaculate. Lifting an envelope from the dashboard she stepped out of the car, wet her finger and held it up to the non-breeze. ‘We’re in the agua caliente,’ she said cheerfully. I stood up with my paws on the steering wheel. I watched her walking over that dusty car park to the white building, every step an effort that could break your heart when you saw how beautiful she was and how massive the land around her. I believe she simply handed the letter to the receptionist. On the way back to the car she would stop and look into the distance, take a step, then stop again.

  Dear Doctors,

  A man in your care named Mr Gifford has been calling my home in Los Angeles claiming to be my father. Please ask the gentleman to refrain from calling me and if he has any specific concerns they should be addressed to my lawyer, Mr Milton Rudin.

  Sincerely yours, Marilyn Monroe

  An hour later we arrived at Frank’s. ‘You know what, baby. Fuck the Actors Studio. Fuck Marlon Brando. And fuck Peter Lawford. Brother-in-Lawford my ass. He’s a no-good, cheap hustler and a low-down English fag.’

  On account of the Kennedys’ bad treatment of him, Mr Sinatra was so angry he pushed a drinks trolley loaded with crystal glasses through some open patio doors. The glasses came to grief on a fat desert rock, the kind of rock that was everywhere at Rancho Mirage, dotted between a hundred cactuses. (It was one of the only things Frank had in common with Trotsky: they both loved cactuses.) The compound was on the seventeenth fairway of the local golf and country club, which gave the dry air an extra layer of boredom. When Sinatra was angry at someone he would rage at their entire being. ‘Lawford is a faggot,’ he repeated. ‘You know his mother used to dress him up in little girl clothes? And now he’s Jack’s bagman on the West Coast. Big deal! Big deal! I’ll tell ya honey, that boy’s doomed.’

  He was walking up and down the room kicking chairs out of the way. He looked at her. He brought down his fist on the polished lid of a grand piano. ‘The fuckin’ scumbag. The louse!’

  ‘Frank.’

  ‘Don’t Frank me! Don’t fucking Frank me!’

  ‘Peter wouldn’t . . .’

  ‘He would. The jerk. He would. He did. The fucking

  creep. He did it.’

  ‘I’m sure Jack wanted . . .’

  ‘He did it. Don’t Jack me! Don’t fucking Jack me. I swear

  to God. I’ll kill somebody.’

  ‘Frank.’

  ‘Fuck you! Fuck all of you. Fuck Lawford. Fuck Pat. Fuck

  the President. Fuck his cheap brother, his good-for-nothing sneak of a brother. Fuck them. And fuck you. And fuck Bing Crosby! The President wants to come to fucking Palm Springs. He wants to be over there? He was my friend! He actually wants to be at Crosby’s? Shmucks. You know something, I feel sorry for them. I feel sorry for all of you. Two-bit hustlers and fucking sneaks. I’ll tell you. You listening to me? Peter Lawford is doomed. I built a motherfucking helipad out there. You see it? You can walk over there. You want to see it? A helipad. A motherfucking helipad for Jack Kennedy.’

  ‘He knows . . .’

  ‘He knows? He motherfucking knows what? Don’t tell me what he knows. Don’t do it. Don’t fucking do it. The President. I swear to God I’m going to kill somebody. The fink. You know what? I’m sorry for every one of you. I built a motherfucking HELIPAD!’

  Marilyn stood biting her thumbnail. George the valet was staying out of the way, working with a broom in the kitchen in his white jacket. He had seen it many times before, the way the Kennedys could make Frank’s self-assurance crumble. I wanted to go over to George and tell him all the places I’d been since I last saw him in Nimes Road, about New York, the parties, the people, and the trip to Mexico. All the adventures. I wanted to quote from The Brothers Karamazov. ‘It’s possible that there are no masters and no servants, George,’ I wanted to say. ‘But let me be the servant of my servants, and let me be to them what they are to me.* I wanted to say this to George but he had stopped up his ears. You couldn’t blame him because Frank had gone nuclear. I licked his hand and George pulled his mouth up into a frown.

  ‘You know what? You’re all sick people. Just sick people with no class. I did their campaign song. I organised fundraisers. Fundraisers! I ran their convention. Ran it. Booked everybody. Sang! I got every goddamn star in Hollywood to come out

  * So says the Elder Zosima. He thinks God is always at home.

  that night. I gave him goddamn Chicago. Jesus. Bing Crosby is a fucking Republican!’

  Frank threw down a bourbon glass and put his hand over his heart. ‘I’m going to have a fuckin’ stroke,’ he said. ‘This is what you’ve all done. I’m gonna die right now on this goddamn rug. What – they’re avoiding me? I’m some kind of gangster, all of a sudden?’

  Marilyn lifted me up as if to protect me. There was a bottle on the breakfast bar and she poured from it into a fresh glass. ‘Here, Frank,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you take this?’ He reached out blindly and took it like someone in a trance.

  ‘What am I?’ he asked. ‘Some phoney? Some dweeb in the movie business, huh? Some nightclub shmuck? They think I can win the election for them and then . . . what? They embarrass me? They dump me? They make me lose face, huh? I’m what, an asshole to them? I’m some dago to them? Ol’ Frankie-boy, huh. What am I, the loser?’

  ‘You’re not any kind of loser, honey,’ said Marilyn. ‘Frank.

  They’re politicians.’

  ‘FUCK THEM!’ he screamed. He gulped from the glass

  and put his face up close to our faces. ‘I gave you that little

  dog. I gave everybody everything. That’s my problem. I gave

  everybody too much.’ I could feel her hands trembling round

  my ribs.

  ‘It was all a gift to yourself,’ I said. ‘That’s the kind of giver

  you are. Leave her alone.’

  Frank went on raging and spilling his guts, just like a man,

  just like a spoiled man. Complaining is an art that some men

  practise with self-annihilating zeal. Every word seems to

  make them smaller, greyer, sadder, when silence might serve

  them like medicine. Frank cut himself off from all he loved and cared about so as to express the full volume and crudity

  of his anger.

  Grrrrrrrrr.

  ‘That dog has a throat problem. Take him to the damn

  vet!’

  I looked up at him. ‘You’re an idiot, Frank.’

  ‘Tell him to stop looking at me. I’ll crush your head, you

  little fuck.’

  I jumped out of my owner’s arms and felt sorry for a

  moment that I ever left Scotland. Who was I, to guard an

  unhappy actress? Who were these people anyway, who could

  invent life on the screen but couldn’t begin to live their own

  lives? I ran to the back of the living room and deposited

  a small puddle of pee onto an orange Hessian rug. I forgot

  to say that the Sinatra compound was unforgivably orange.

  Dogs can’t quite see that colour, but Frank’s mind was full

  of orange and the rage of orange and I picked that up. All

  the pleasures of interior decoration go into reverse when

  you find yourself, even in your imagination, in a very orange

&n
bsp; place: the walls were orange-verging-on-peach and the sofa

  was orange-verging-on-brown, while the paintings were as

  orange as a muggy evening in Madras and the carpet was

  dangerous orange, like the spurting of Mount Etna. I could

  feel every one of the tones. I am a dog of indigo moods, of

  cornflower hues, so for me the large rooms at Rancho Mirage

  were a horror at the top end of the scale. Sinatra once said

  that orange is the happiest colour, but his hysterical use of

  it made you realise that he lived in something close to a

  perpetual nervous breakdown. He liked orange and he liked

  red, the colours of alarm.

  * Marilyn always had a book in her handbag. She was always on the way to a discovery, to a large recognition that would change everything. And I suppose that kind of hope was the story of our journey. Good human relationships depend on an instinct for tolerating and indeed protecting other people’s illusions: once you start picking them apart, taking down their defences, reducing their plan for survival, making them smaller in their own eyes, the relationship is as dead and gone as the Great Auk.* Marilyn might have spent her life searching for someone with the imagination to love her, and now she was faced with the ruination of all those hopes, Sinatra looking at her with pure hatred, saying, ‘You’re so damn stupid, Norma Jeane. You know that? You and Lawford and the President – you’re all nothing. You hear

  me? Nothing.’

  I went to Marilyn at the patio doors. She was weeping

  with a glass held against her chest and I rubbed against her

  legs. I could feel her knees trembling as she watched Frank

  dragging clothes from one of the guest rooms out to the pool

  area, golfing clothes and swimming togs that belonged to

  the Lawfords. He was shouting about calls made to Atlanta

  during the election and favours done for Joseph Kennedy.

  ‘See this, Norma Jeane? See this, you two-bit whore,’

  he shouted at the patio doors, pointing to the bundle of

  clothes. He pulled out a Zippo and in two seconds there

  were flames rising by the pool side. Marilyn looked over as if the fire was a perfectly ordinary thing. I started barking and running in circles, while Frank, still shouting about loyalty and Washington, came out of other guest rooms bearing kids’ hats, towels, and sneakers. Eventually the fire rose and threatened one of the sun-loungers, at which point Frank, now levitating with rage, kicked all the burning Lawford belongings into the swimming pool. The flames floated for a while and Frank stomped through the room, slamming doors and cursing the day he ever came to Palm Springs. Marilyn and I just stood at the patio doors, the smoke going up like ghosts. We walked out to the pool and my owner put her feet into the water and drank her champagne, the burnt clothes floating across the blue pool, like land masses on a charred map. We stared at them. It seemed like a billion years had just gone by in Frank Sinatra’s pool, the dark continents floating to the centre and America, a small pair of bikini bottoms with strings scorched and trailing, drifted into place as the compound lights suddenly went out and it was dark.