The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe (12 page)

* Mr Strasberg remembered Natalie Barney saying that Colette chose her animals for their resemblance to herself. She later gave Kiki the starring role in her novel
Dialogues de bêtes
, a masterpiece of the form, I believe.

‘I have a voice too,’ I said to Kevin. ‘It’s been getting bigger and better for months.’
I must confess I laughed a second later. Sitting on Mr McCarthy’s lap, I caught his memory of something my owner had said to him. ‘Lee taught me how to breathe as an actor,’ she’d said. ‘I mean, there are other things breathing is useful for, or so I’ve heard.’
‘Hold tight, little guy,’ said Kevin.
Lee Strasberg brought his eyes down from the ceiling and placed them directly on me, so I snuggled down, and he got going.

mr strasberg’s introduction

For this is our glory, dear actors, dear friends: To make ourselves equal to living portents. On occasion we falter, at times we forget, But heaven remains in the standard we set. We seek to capture the mysteries of time, Belief and so on,
The common sublime.

Imagination is the god of all,
Do you hear that, Henry, Marilyn, Paul? Show nothing you know of the scene in advance, Just come home alone, as if from a dance, To find newness pealing like golden bells, From a place somewhere inside of yourselves. That is the system, the Method, the scheme: Hard work and so on,
But source your dream.

On the Lower East Side, kicking my heels, I once spent my days in a world like O’Neill’s. The bars, the docks, the immigrant ether, It made us sign up as the spirit’s keeper. Even now I can smell the wig-maker’s glue, Memory and so on,
It makes us true.

Do not debase the silence with applause. Acting is being private in public because The art of experiencing is the art of life, Not representing Garbo, or a man and wife, But total consciousness is the only aim, Feeling and so on,
The human again.

They found it painful not to clap. This was Strasberg at his famous, sentimental best, exultant and prodigious, with large tears sparkling in his ruined eyes. He was a model of how to move people with the sheer scale and power of personal emotion: he didn’t have better arguments than other teachers, purer lines or more original ideas, but he had deeper reserves of feeling, and he could draw them instantly to the surface in ways that struck the group as the very soul of charisma. He sought to persuade not with the subtlety of his case but with the size of his feelings, the technique everywhere of the vivid leader and the effective bully. But however lovingly he spoke of his actors and their potential, there was always a hint of bad temper behind it. Like all gods and many Americans, his invocation to success concealed a horrid rage at the idea of failure. The day they staged scenes from
Anna Christie
he was like an old king presenting his crown jewels. Mr Strasberg had never been so happy to be himself. He sat down.

A large white cupboard stands in the corner of the cabin. On its door is a mirror hanging on a nail. In the centre is a table with two cane-bottomed chairs. A dilapidated, wicker rocker, painted brown, is also by the table. There is a newspaper. The sound of a steamer’s whistle is heard in the distance. Burke looks over the table at his rival Chris and says, ‘We’ll be seeing who’ll win in the end – me or you.’ Then Chris looks to Anna and says, ‘You stay right here, Anna, you hear!’ And in that moment Marilyn suddenly assembled Anna in actual time: she was fiddling with the hem of her skirt and tears filled her eyes and when she opened her mouth a string of saliva appeared for a second. She said nothing. Her consciousness seeming trapped between saying something and not saying it. She was thinking of a time years before on the beach at Santa Monica: there was salt on her lips from swimming and there was sand on the arm of Tommy Zahn. His arm was warm with the sun and he smelled so young and so completely like California. He said, ‘Norma Jeane. Did they put your mother in the sanatorium?’

‘Say, what am I, anyway?’ Anna says.

Mat Burke: ‘’Tis not what you are, ’tis what you’re going to be this day – and that’s wedded to me before night comes. Hurry up now with your dressing.’ A flurry of words and Marilyn was thinking of Jim Dougherty telling her no decent girl works in a factory while her husband is away. They were living on Catalina Island. She heard the sea and again tasted the salt. The salt tasted like copper, like money. It occurred to her that she had always been a prostitute. Burke: ‘. . . she’s taking my orders from this out, not yours.’

Anna laughs. ‘Orders is good!’
She walks round the table and while she’s walking she strokes her hair and loses patience. Marilyn’s voice had disappeared into Anna: she feels she is vibrating with Anna and she is sad inside with Anna. She remembers her childhood friend Alice Tuttle and how much more ready for life Alice was than everybody else. She was too young for boys. Then the face of the girl disappears. Marilyn recalls a car Norma Jeane rescued from repossession by posing nude for a calendar. They paid her fifty dollars. Tom Kelley took the picture. She had to do other stuff, but the steering wheel was warmer than Tommy Zahn’s arm. The memories pass in seconds. She catches sight of Anna in the mirror as she passes her: she pauses to nip a hair from her tongue. ‘You can go to hell, both of you!’ says Anna. ‘You’re just like all the rest of them – you two! Gawd, you’d think I was a piece of furniture! I’ll show you! Sit down now! Sit down and let me talk for a minute. You’re all wrong, see? Listen to me!’
She gets angry. She wants to break off a piece of the table.
The Misfits
comes into her mind and the sand at the edge of the desert in Reno and the brutality of that place and falling out of love. It was Arthur: he was married to his typewriter not to me. And that character,
Roslyn
. What was she? If that’s how he sees me then I’m not for him and he’s not for me. Some sex-pot. Some floozy. Playwrights are all shmucks wanting women to drown. They want them to drown and choke and end up dead. ‘I’m going to tell you a funny story so pay attention,’ says Anna. ‘I’ve been meaning to turn it loose on him every time he’d get my goat with his bull about keeping me safe inland.’
She spoke and cried and tore at herself and mocked the air. ‘I want to tell you two guys something. You was going on’s if one of you had got to own me. But nobody owns me, see?’ And she says the line as if, more than anything, she has always wanted to be owned by someone. But not like that. She has long since forgotten about forgetting her lines: she discovers each one with the thought that lives there. She hangs over the table and at one point gently kisses the wood.
^*
One of the foster families had a good table in the hall and the man came to her room one night and it is all here, a part of Anna’s wish to speak. She imagines a creak on the stairs and the salt again. ‘It wasn’t none of my fault,’ shouts Anna. ‘I hated him worse’n hell, and he knew it. But he was big and strong.’ She points to Burke. ‘Like you.’ Some of the audience began to cry: is Anna asking for punishment or release from something terrible? ‘That was why I ran away from the farm,’ she says. ‘That was what made me . . . a nurse girl in St Paul.’
The man Kevin was tense: he squeezed me at the top of each line, his tension rhyming with the tension in the play. ‘If you’d ever been a regular father . . .’ Anna says. Marilyn unfurls herself. The audience could feel this delicate unmooring, this very human movement, and they could observe this person in search of a person to become, following Anna’s meagre shadow out from the page and into some strange, new, living reality. There are only a few chairs and props, but Anna appears to magnify the space and set us down in the broad world beyond ourselves. For creatures who like that sort of thing, it was a little miracle, something I wouldn’t want to take for granted during this account of my adventures. I’ve noticed that people cover themselves in material comforts to conceal their fears, but Marilyn dived into the centre of those fears and made it her work to find out what sort of person she might be. She played the part. Most people never go near the task and never know themselves. Most people imagine that being themselves is a perfect alibi for not being something better.
The barge and the harbour were terribly real. It was hard not to think of the boats against the wind in Fitzgerald’s novel and I smiled to remember the sway of that passage. That was the line of American literature most enjoyed by my rusticated friend Trotsky: he detected right there the zeal of liberty and imagined it to be fraudulent. (One of the things all the literary dogs like about Trotsky, by the way, is the notion that the country’s best literary critic could have been a natural world leader.) Marilyn had gone beyond herself: her Anna Christie came over like a liberated soul, a person saying no to some popular savagery, saying yes to idealism. I looked along the row and saw Mr Strasberg weeping into his hands and the audience holding its breath. She looked at us. ‘Will you believe it,’ Anna said, ‘if I tell you that loving you has made me – clean?’
None of the audience knew the story Stanislavsky used to tell about the dog that came to his rehearsals. The dog would sleep through the sessions but would always wake up and appear at the door just as it was time to go. The Great Russian Ham said this was because the dog always responded to the moment the actors returned to speaking in normal voices. For all their truth-seeking, the players would always be something other than themselves while acting, and the dog could hear the change.
^*
This seemed so germane to my interests that I sat on the metal chair for a long time thinking about it and the group buzzed around the studio doing congratulations and kisses.
The well-wishers were packed into Strasberg’s office, the famous ones and the political types, Shelley Winters, Kim Stanley – ‘wonderful, honey, what a knockout’ – and a dozen others, including a studious young plant from the FBI. Marilyn sat on a chaise longue drinking champagne: in the aftermath of her triumph she was beautifully draped and relaxed, drink in hand, cigarette trailing smoke to the stained ceiling. Sitting at her feet I was happily aware of how much we resembled Georges Clairin’s painting of Sarah Bernhardt in the Musée de la Ville de Paris. Ms Bernhardt is pictured semi-recumbent on a velvet sofa, her lupine borzoi lying on the floor beside her, both lady and dog serene as they stare out, knowing they must be the focal point of the people’s amazement.
Marilyn’s fame made people giddy. After the class a little party developed across the street, the actors getting loud in a neighbourhood bar. Mr Strasberg came sidling into the place, putting his hands up like a man who was happy to say he didn’t know anything about bars. His wife Paula was there and she fiddled with her purse. ‘A small beer, bubee?’ she said, fluttering a sheaf of dollars at the bartender.
‘That’s right,’ he said, smiling. ‘Like Prince Hal in the Boar’s Head Tavern. It is no felony to drink small beer.’
‘Everything is in Shakespeare, right?’ said a bright young kid, bulky-headed, not good-looking, full of spittle and admiration for the theatre. He studied Shakespeare and Ibsen all day long and half the night in a cold-water apartment on MacDougal Street.
‘Ah, the Bard,’ said Strasberg. He liked to be playful in a playful situation, but the teacher was vain of his learning as much as his passion. It was his habit to pass off his mistakes as if they made him more interesting and more reliable, an English affectation he had picked up years before. ‘I think I may just have confused the Henry plays,’ he said. ‘Such is the way of supposed expertise, young man.’ The boy nodded and sipped from his beer. He was preparing another salvo. The guru detected as much and he winked and moved towards the main table where Marilyn was sitting. Strasberg had the leader’s instinct for self-preservation: he wasn’t likely to squander his bon mots just like that, on one student. Before he entered into his inspirational mode Strasberg’s vanity demanded a very good house.
The group round the table were discussing how NBC had recently banned an eight-minute sketch from
The Art Carney Show
because it spoofed the President-Elect. ‘Nothing at all should be allowed to stand outside comedy,’ said Paula. ‘It is absurd.’
‘I dunno,’ said the actor Paul, who had played Anna Christie’s father. ‘Nothing is sacred if you start taking off the President and his wife. Some things are just worth being solemn about.’
‘Wow,’ said Marilyn. ‘Somebody tickle him.’
‘That’s just plain wrong,’ said Ms Winters. ‘Just plain wrong, goddamnit. Look here, Paul. There’s absolutely nothing that ain’t funny if you think about it. Nothing should be banned for being funny.’
‘Certainly comedy is the, um – the most difficult of the dramatic forms to get right,’ said Marilyn. She looked towards Mr Strasberg.
‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘We were just talking about Shakespeare over there. Myself and this young man.’ He nodded to the fellow as if to confirm that he had made a good decision for both of them. ‘And Shakespeare knew that comedy if anything was a raising of the tragic to meet the dimensions of the truly human.’
‘Holy Kazooey, Lee,’ Marilyn said. ‘I’m gonna ask you to say that to Billy Wilder next time he makes me dance my ass off and trip over my ukulele.’ The group laughed and clinked glasses and swayed into new bits of conversation, then Marilyn brought them together again by lifting me onto the table.
‘Ah-ha,’ said Strasberg. ‘The very dog. It is Crab himself.’
‘Who?’
‘Crab – the only dog to have a real part in the whole of Shakespeare. A comical turn, no less, in
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
. He has been called the biggest scene-stealer in English literature. See how he yaps at me. And he turns to you and to you.’
‘Don’t be cruel, Lee.’
‘Not cruel. He’s a joyful dog. Come, Crab: tell us whether friendship or love is the better thing.’
‘Don’t be cruel to Marilyn’s dog, bubee,’ said Paula at the edge of the table. ‘He’s fretting.’
‘No, I’m not. I’m not fretting, you
fl o y
. You upside-down bat.’
‘See his soft muzzle. He frowns,’ said Strasberg, getting into his Shakespeare voice. ‘ “I think Crab my dog be the sourest-natured dog that lives: my mother weeping, my father wailing, my sister crying, our maid howling, our cat wringing her hands, and all our house in a great perplexity, yet did not this cruel-hearted cur shed one tear.” ’ He clasped my chin. ‘ “He is a stone, a very pebble-stone, and has no more pity in him than a dog: a Jew would have wept to have seen our parting.” ’
‘Gevalt!’ cried Mrs Strasberg.
The young Shakespeare scholar from MacDougal Street stood up with his glass, suddenly beaming with actorliness. ‘ “I am the dog,” ’ he quoted. ‘ “No, the dog is himself, and I am the dog – oh, the dog is me, and I am myself; ay, so, so.” ’ Strasberg waved his hand over the table and laid a finger on my collar.
‘Now the dog all this while sheds not a tear,’ he said, ‘nor speaks a word; but see how I lay the dust with my tears.’
‘You’re very devout,’ said Marilyn to the young Shakespearean. She scrutinised him, thinking aloud. ’Why don’t you smile at stupid, happy old me?’ The boy turned bright grey. The pendant light was hot, a spotlight, and my paws felt soft on the sticky table. Suddenly I felt my eyes must be darting here and there to find shelter from the thunder at the edge of the heath. A hovel. I could feel the cold blast on my eyeballs and the damp in my bones. ‘Poor Maf’s a-cold,’ I said to them, my audience, my friends the actors in their moment of glee. I reached inwards. All the way in. I recalled some humiliation I once suffered at the hands of Evelyn Waugh and a croquet ball. I must have been the merest puppy and was pootling on the lawn at Bushey Lodge, where Mr Connolly lived. Yes: I suppose I was gambolling. Evelyn was making a point, a facetious point, naturally, about the ugliness of George Eliot, and when I tried to correct him along Latin principles he knocked a croquet ball across the lawn at vicious speed and it struck me in the centre of my infant forehead. The episode came back as a sense memory. I used it to deepen my performance on the table at the back of Jack’s Bar. I think the Method got to me: I was shivering with cold and forgot myself for a second.
‘Fetch some water for the little mutt,’ said Strasberg. ‘He’ll be going crazy with all this noise.’
‘Uh,’ said Mrs Strasberg. ‘The noise of bars would leave you insensible. Morbid places.’
‘We were talking about comedy,’ said Shelley. An entertaining New York publisher I once met said that Shelley Winters was the kind of woman who brings out the homosexual in all of us. She certainly lived in defiance of her own vulnerability. I only met her a couple of times, but I could see she was always keen to give people the details about themselves – give them their character, as Mummy Duff, mother of my Scottish breeder, used to say – and one suspected most of her bullying was either unconscious or else came under that dreadful heading True Friendship. ‘What about you, Paul? You haven’t cracked a smile since 1932.’
‘That’s right – comedy,’ said Paul, ignoring her, but certainly fated to brood about her remarks later. ‘You gotta work out the politics of the joke. I mean, Freud, right? At the beginning of comedy the idea was to have a whole bunch of actors leaping around the stage wearing huge padded penises.’
‘Fertility!’ said Strasberg.
‘Is that what it was?’ said Marilyn. She looked like a child again and she bit into her lip.
‘The Greeks played the comedies after three days of tragedy,’ he said.
‘That’s right,’ said Mrs Strasberg. ‘Comedy was the appendage. Right? Light relief after so much horror.’
‘The appendage,’ said her husband. ‘Very good, Paula. Very good, the appendage.’
‘I guess I wouldn’t want to be a joke,’ said Marilyn. ‘It’s so easy to become a joke.’ She spoke in a whisper.
‘You have that gossamer quality that Garbo had as a comedienne,’ said Strasberg. He loved to flatter Marilyn, because he believed what he said, and because he loved to see her glow so visibly among her colleagues. (It also enlarged him to see how much she needed his approval.) ‘It is always a matter of intelligence and instinct.’
‘And intention!’ I said. ‘George Orwell said that every joke is a tiny revolution.’