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

by Andrew O'Hagan

  And so to Glendale, to the other side of Griffith Park from where I’d started my Los Angeles life, to watch the light fading over the San Fernando Valley. Rudy parked at the gates and I walked up Memorial Drive with Marilyn, noting how the names of all the roads and lanes made the cemetery sound like the regions of the moon. The Vale of Peace, The Court of Reflections, Morning Light, The Garden of Victory. By the time we reached the part of the hill she was looking for, I had worked out that this was the place people’s remains came when they died. The fallen eucalyptus leaves crackled as we walked over them. I sniffed the ground and had a pee. Marilyn took a slip of paper out of her purse: in pencil, in her own hand, it simply said, ‘Murmuring Trees, Lot 6739’.

  The breeze at Forest Lawn journeyed visibly over the graves, taking light and shadow with it as it made its way up the hill. And the graves appeared to respond to us, a woman and her dog out for a stroll in the early part of a summer evening. What a fund of consciousness there was in that silent park. My owner sat down on the grass at the top of Murmuring Trees and lit a joint given to her by one of the make-up assistants back at the studio. She crossed her ankles and blew out smoke.

  We saw God’s Acre. The Old North Church. The Court of Valour. I suppose the names were meant to seem restful, and yet, from where we sat, the place teemed with anxiety about God’s absence. (He is never at home.) The lanes were meant for everlasting hope, and since I’ve got such respect for the made-up, the invented, the seriously confected, why not celebrate God as totem of the great fabular instinct? Why not indeed. Sitting on the grass at Forest Lawn, I finally believed in people’s belief in God: he may not be supreme, or even particularly animated, but he must have at least as much reality as Snoopy or Fatty Arbuckle.

  There wasn’t a spot of rain at Forest Lawn, which made me wonder why the lawn stayed so lawn-like, given the temperature and the wind that came from the mountains. We were both on the same level, down on the lawn and happy to be with each other. Marilyn had her funny cigarette and she began speaking again the way Emma Bovary spoke to her dog, Djali, as if it were an act of faith to believe in a dog’s silence. She was talking about the little girl who was a friend of hers at school, a year older than her and the most talkative girl in the class. Alice was a person of the future: her blue almond eyes and her black hair were made for love, the tinder in her quiet voice always ready to catch fire and burn up the great world. She was an ordinary Los Angeles girl whose mother worked as a cutter for Consolidated Film. ‘I guess she was always laughing,’ said Marilyn. ‘One of those girls you think’s gonna make life easier for everybody, just by laughing all the time.’ My fated companion blew out the smoke and pinched her tongue. ‘Dr Kris once told me about a letter she got from Anna Freud,’ she said. ‘I distinctly remember a phrase Kris quoted from it: “One never really loses a father if he was good enough.” ’

  Marilyn stared into the valley. Animals who avoid death are also avoiding Darwin. I knew that perfectly well. What was that thing Mr Connolly said in his cups? Yes. ‘Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turning before we have learned to walk.’ Very good. (And four legs are better than two if wrong turnings are what you’re about.) I have to admit there was plenty of Darwin for me to pick up along the way, but I didn’t like the way it sniffed of everything dying. What is evolution, after all, but the tale of our ultimate extinction? I chose to live my adventures and examine them only where it might prove entertaining to myself and others. Later I understood that the whole game is a struggle for survival. Look at those graves going down the slope at Forest Lawn, each one standing for a different attempt at endurance, a signature stab at permanence that ends here with a small iron lozenge glinting in the sun. You know what Charles Darwin was reading as he sailed on the Beagle? He was reading Paradise Lost, the great scientist finding on the cusp of his discoveries that our lives are spent not quite living in the garden but trying to remember it. I had one of my little visions, looking into the haze of the San Fernando Valley. At first I saw all the buildings and freeways stripped away to reveal the bare beanfields, then I saw the buildings stack up again and fall in some future quake.

  Marilyn took out a compact case and brushed her eyebrows. She popped a couple of pills. ‘I feel this is going to be a good summer for us, Maf,’ she said. ‘When we get this lousy picture finished, we’ll go back to New York.’ I wagged my tail and paddled into her lap, licking her hands that weren’t so smooth any more. I think she was stoned as she giggled and got to her feet. We walked down the grass and she stopped to look at some recent plates under the trees. ‘Beloved Husband and Father, Edwin M. Dawson, 1903–1958.’ A few steps along: ‘Irene L. Nunnally, Beloved Wife and Mother, 1904–1960.’ We walked down to the older section, past a multitude of ordinary graves, our shadows reaching ahead of us. Marilyn took out the slip of paper again and looked at the number written down. Eventually we came to the place she wanted:

  alice tuttle

  beloved daughter, 1925–1937

  ‘our baby’

  ‘She was my best friend,’ said Marilyn. She spent a while stroking the lettering on the plaque, the same finger going round each word as if she meant to inscribe something personal into its iron law. She spoke to the grave. ‘It was asthma,’ she said. ‘It just came on. Then it was all over.’ Marilyn said she had meant to bring flowers but she didn’t have any and she touched the plaque and she touched her mouth before fishing in her clutch bag and placing ten dollars in a small glass vase covered in dust. The grass seemed very green, like studio grass, but the breeze was real. A moment arrived when Marilyn didn’t want to be there any more and she scooped me up. ‘Goodbye, Alice,’ she said and we walked down to the road. The further we got from Murmuring Trees the more like Marilyn she became, her walk different, her breathing deeper, as the gates came into view. My owner hugged me and looked into my eyes. I was still thinking of Milton as we came to the edge of Forest Lawn. ‘Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth,’ I said. ‘Unseen, both when we wake, and when we sleep.’

  ‘Good dog,’ she said.

  It was a week later when Mrs Murray decided every garment in the house must be washed. My owner had gone to New York. I can’t explain why I always felt close to the domestics; it wasn’t on the whole a matter of politics, more of smell, the little things of temperament and the kitchen. All the windows were open and the bees were gossiping from flower to flower, a contagion of greyness out on the sunny porch. ‘Big bonanza for the beatniks of Berkeley,’ said one of the bees, landing on a garden hose. ‘Zukofsky and the Business of Zen.’

  ‘ Isness not business,’ said another bee, backing into a flower.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Zukofsky, stupid. The gig is called “Zukofsky and the Isness of Zen”.’

  I wonder if I was the only person to notice how much Mrs Murray was beginning to look like me. It happens very often to people who spend a lot of time with dogs. Mrs SackvilleWest, for instance, was said almost to be the spitting image of Pinker. Lionel Trilling is known to have parted his hair in imitation of his Afghan hound, Elsinore, and they say John Steinbeck was often mistaken for his poodle Charley as they crossed the country in a pick-up truck called Rocinante. In the same way, Mrs Murray had begun to look exactly like me or some similar dog. She happened to be carrying me one day from the sun room to the kitchen when we passed a Mexican mirror: she paused there for a second to contemplate the heavenly angels ranged in her mind against suffering and sin, and when I looked into the glass I could have sworn we were not looking at ourselves at all but at Monet’s Portrait of Eugénie Graff with her small terrier. It was not simply that my friend Eunice looked a lot like Eugénie, Madame Paul, the owner of the pâtisserie in Pourville, but each looked a lot like the respective dogs in their respective arms, an echo that almost put me off my bowl of Friskies.*

  But the day grew cold by the evening. That was the problem with the Spanish hacienda style: by day it seemed correct and bright, but by night time, un
less there were fairy lights and briars and distant guitars, the house appeared closed to the joys of the Hispanic world. My mood was always created by the houses where I lived, that was the price of having been owned by artists and make-believers, their imagination clung to the walls, and so too did their absences. It would be one thing to say that Marilyn was in my thoughts, but that wouldn’t cover it. I could taste her essence everywhere. Wandering through the rooms, I felt the trace of Chanel No. 5 was very strong and it brought her close again. All her things made a strong impression: an inscribed copy of ‘The Wee Small Hours’, a single, beautiful shoe by Ferragamo, the Russian novel by the door, not quite finished. My friend would return to Brentwood in a few days, and I’m sure I would be waiting for her with happy eyes in the hallway or by the pool.

  Mrs Murray had placed clothing over every surface. The television was very loud in the corner. There were shirts on hangers billowing from the windows, dresses over the cold standard lamps; there were tights along the fireplace and mirrors sheeted in satin scarves. Every object seemed to find its vantage point in the living room. ‘All created things are an image of things in heaven,’ said Mrs Murray, twisting the TV aerial and directing it south. She was mumbling things from her Bible and eating a Tootsie Roll at the very same time. She turned to me and I hopped up on an armchair and she gave me the end of the Tootsie Roll and I licked my chops. She sighed and gave me one of her looks. ‘There’s something you ought to know, Maf Honey,’ she said. ‘And that is that animals do not go to heaven.’

  ‘What a relief,’ I said. ‘We can believe without having to pay the consequences.’

  ‘What you barking for?’ she said. ‘I’m only telling you the truth. No need to take it out on me, little . . . Snowball.’

  She smiled through her old winged glasses. The door was open onto the terrace, and I could hear the cicadas veepveep-veeping their defence of John Stuart Mill against the charge of human arrogance. Next minute the TV kicked in and soon we could see her on the stage in a white stole and a dress made of stars. On the little Magnavox TV, she appeared more than ever a person entirely removed from ordinary life. Every creature is an effusion of something rare, but she was beyond reach at the centre of her ghostly aura, the night crowding around her as she sang ‘Happy Birthday’. My fated companion looked as if nothing real had ever touched her, no small regret, no other person, no Alice Tuttle. She was unearthly. I was sure for a moment I saw the boychick Charlie in the crowd. The camera went on to a row of smiling faces, young people who cared about the future of society, and I’m sure one of them was Charlie. We saw President Kennedy walking to the stage. Opera music began to play. The screen went fuzzy and the music got louder. I thought for a second the extra-terrestrials might be sending a message, but it was just Kennedy speaking on the telecast, the screen fuzzy and the music larger than life. Mrs Murray seemed oblivious to everything in her armchair. She darned one of Marilyn’s favourite socks and mumbled the words to an old hymn.

  The bougainvillea had dropped some of its petals into the swimming pool. I sat on the terrace, enjoying the evening. My owner might be half a continent away, the insects might be lost in arguments, and Mrs Murray might be working quietly in the Mexican armchair, but we were all here together beneath the blue forests of the sky. Constellations of beasts were glinting up there – Ursa Major, the scorpion, Canis Major – just as they had for Ptolemy nearly two thousand years ago. Then Lizzy appeared, the cat belonging to the orthodontist over the wall, and she seemed fully in step with the strains of Wagner coming from indoors. The cat spoke slowly and was reflected in the swimming pool.

  * Madame Paul, in a letter to her sister, observed that Claude Monet had a very sweet tooth – ‘aimait les sucreries’ – but that his painting of her and the dog would not be hung in the shop. ‘We shall ensure it finds a proper place in the laundry room,’ she wrote. ‘I am in love with the achievements of art, and feel sure that Monsieur M. has caught us exactly. My husband is of a different opinion. I believe he is mortified to learn that Foulette and myself are made from the same materials.’

  The sun is spent, and so are we,

  Who hop among the ruins seeking light.

  Enjoy your summer, mes amis,

  The day must end at the burial site.

  I went up to the wall of vines and put my paws up, but the cat didn’t run or fret and she leaned down playfully. She saw I knew something. ‘Your adventures have taught you much,’ she said. ‘Even your adversaries might agree. You are older, Maf.’

  ‘Artists are always young,’ I said. ‘In their work, they are always young and their dreams are always new.’

  ‘Good dog,’ she said.

  With the music playing, it occurred to me that the pool might be the deep blue water of the Rhine, and over its surface maidens might appear to sing an elegy to the memory of their lost gold. Their laughter rang from the violins in the house. And then the ravens spoke of vengeance and Siegfried was killed, as we always knew he would be. I looked up and imagined I saw a fierce red glow in the sky, the flames mounting as Brunnhilde rides her horse into the funeral pyre and all is done and gone. Everything cleared and the swimming pool was nice again, a little pond in California. Wagner once told Cosima that she must share everything with their beloved spaniel, Peps. ‘Tell Pepsel everything that comes into your mind,’ he wrote. ‘I find when I begin to work that I need the dog to come and watch over me.’

  Mrs Murray was snoozing over her work as I walked past her in the living room. The television was now a field of snow and the clock ticked in some other universe, so I walked past the hanging garments and found my favourite place at the back of the house, on Marilyn’s bed. I lay down sleepily and scratched my borrowed collar. It’s true I was often banned from the bedroom, sometimes kept to the guest cottage for being too talkative, but that night I was free to lie on my owner’s bed and sniff the exact and everlasting scent, the cotton freshness that seemed so right as I closed my eyes and breathed the secrets of her pillow.