The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe (21 page)

The party laughed. ‘Can you believe that? Martin Luther King’s father being such a bigot?’ And then he looked at Marilyn again in a private way. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘We all have fathers, don’t we?’
People were sitting around the pool. Others were squeezing between the security men to walk on the beach and I followed. I sat down beside the young Mexicans who had been serving. Mexico was meant for me. The workers laughed and jibbed one another, reminding me of the young Texans who drove me to see the UFOs that time, the evening we listened to rock and roll. The waiters smoked pot and passed the thing back and forward on the sand. They stroked me and said, ‘here, boy’. The air was mild and the sky was full of yellow streaks. The waiters hadn’t expected the night to be so informal, but with their shiny skin and their white shirts, their bow ties, they seemed like they belonged. They talked about how sexy the film stars were, how amazing the food was and how cool the firearms of the security detail. But one of the waiters didn’t want to have me on his lap, a young man from Watts named Jabril. He smoked the cannabis and it mingled with his own sweet scent, but he told the others he had no time for dogs.
I was happy listening to the fellows. The night sky grew inky and I drank as much as I could of the soft air. People are so busy with thoughts of paradise they fail to see they have been in paradise all the while. It had been for me a night of listening – a life of listening, and not being heard
– and beside the Lawford house I remembered Plutarch, his beautiful essay ‘On Listening to Lectures’. A female Jack Russell came racing across our sight-line and headed straight for the surf. I bolted out of the waiter’s arms and chased her up to the roiling edge where the foam fizzed on the sand. I was always very slow to fall in love and quick to form my tactics of delay, but the Jack Russell made my heart swerve in the air like a tennis ball. Who was she?
I nodded back at the house and my young friends, the Mexicans. She glanced at me sideways, a rather perfect manipulation of her long lashes. ‘Virtue has only one handle,’ she said. ‘The ears of the young.’
‘They’re nice,’ I said. ‘My kind of people.’
‘You like Mexico?’
‘Oh, yes,’ I said. ‘It’s the ultimate destination. It’s always been in my head. I think we’re going there soon. A short adventure. That’s the plan. I’ve heard my owner talking about it.’
‘You’re so lucky. I’ve never been.’
‘Something happened to Trotsky there. I mean . . . he . . .’
‘Yeah,’ she said, a born realist. ‘He died. Was he a friend of yours?’
‘No, not a friend. He was before my time. My first owners loved him. You know how it is?’
‘Yeah. They never leave you. First loves.’
We walked round each other, tenderly sniffing. Then we sat at the water’s edge and I nudged her cheek and licked her ear. ‘You be careful now, honey,’ she said. ‘I’m spoken for.’
‘Where do you live?’
She walked a few steps and nodded up to the brightly lit houses beyond the cliffs. ‘Pacific Palisades,’ she said.
‘Really?’
‘You like writers, don’t ya?’ she said. ‘I’m picking that up. I’m in the same boat. My grandparents knew all those writers.’
‘Up there?’
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Brecht. Mann. The Belgian one, Maeterlinck. He was a good listener.’
‘I got him! I love him!’
‘Yeah. He came to Hollywood to work in pictures. I think Samuel Goldwyn was just proud to have a Nobel Prizewinner on the payroll. Anyhow, Goldwyn puts him in a room. He’s been in there for months. Maeterlinck decided to adapt his book
The Life of the Bee
. So he comes out of there waving a sheaf of paper and it is taken to the big man. An hour later, Goldwyn comes bursting out of his office shouting, “My God. The hero is a bee!” ’
We both laughed. The night was funny and so is love. ‘Well, so long,’ she said. ‘Enjoy your life, Maf. You’re going to Mexico, huh? Where something happened.’ She licked my chin and didn’t waste any more time, running like blazes down the beach. At the other end, the dog’s owner was clapping her thighs and mouthing words I couldn’t hear. I think she was saying, ‘Home, sweetheart. Home now.’
Marilyn carried her glass out of the party. I saw her coming towards me across the sand. She sang a few words and she sat looking out, liking the water and the distance, too. The song was happy. Nat King Cole, I think. Her lips were soft and her hair rolled back in those small blonde waves. The song was something she knew from her mother, who said it was once sung to her by the only man she ever loved. We weren’t far from the pier. The ferris wheel was going round and its lights burned a hole in the dark.

* I don’t know why Marilyn said it was the guy at the
Times
who told her the story. It was Frank Sinatra who told her.

13

W

e spent her last Christmas in Dr Greenson’s house in Brentwood, roasting chestnuts and playing charades. There was a sense of things concluding in a spirit of possible renewal, which might, on balance, be the saddest sense in the whole world. She wasn’t very much like a person at all by then, but like an element, or like those casual flocks of pigeons in Wallace Stevens who live in an old chaos of the sun. They make ‘ambiguous undulations’, as she did in those final months in Los Angeles, before going ‘downward to darkness, on extended wings’.

Marilyn had put up a small tree in the Doheny apartment and she kept it there for months, watching the red shadow of its lights on the wall when she couldn’t sleep. Over at the Greensons, things were happier and psychoanalysis was a way of life. They seemed comfortable basking in the global scale of its achievements. She often stayed after her sessions to have dinner with the family, peeling potatoes and drinking champagne, the clean, creative life of the house making her feel that things could be managed and things could be saved. I would be sat on the dining-room floor, eating from a skyblue Tupperware bowl they kept specially for dogs. The bowl was some kind of anomaly because Hildi Greenson loved crockery. On the wall next to the breakfast bar hung four antique side-plates – 1900, I’d say – by Creil Montereau called ‘L’Esprit des bêtes’. The bottom one showed two donkeys dressed as learned gentlemen with stand-up collars. One of them sits with his elbow on a large book, next to a Roman statue, and he is speaking. ‘
Sans nous
,’ he says, ‘
que seraient devenues les merveilles de la science et les chefs-d’oeuvre de l’esprit humain
.’
^*

I have to say, I didn’t love Dr Greenson. He was flamboyant in his judgements, somewhat previous in his convictions, and he adored stardom a little too much. For all his high-mindedness, he exhibited a rather tiresome mental softness. Yet he believed in Marilyn’s ‘potential’ and was convinced that her sensitivity could become an asset to her talent, a theory that caused her to relate to him as a father. Now, I’m a dog and I see things in my own way and I have to tell you Dr Greenson was a little too entangled in his favourite role. The doctor was recommended to Marilyn by Marianne Kris in New York, who was only outdone in her father-worship by her childhood friend Anna Freud. These two women were close to Greenson, who was now treating my fated companion, whose own father was visible nowhere but present everywhere, like the perfect author and the worst kind of illness. Dr Greenson was happy to play father to them all. At the time I’m talking about, he was helping Anna to oppose John Huston’s proposed film of her father’s life, while helping Marianne publish some of her father’s papers and get him his due. I was there on Franklin Street the day Greenson said, as Dr Kris had, that it would be a mistake for Marilyn to accept the part in the Huston picture, the part based on Anna O.

* ‘Without us, what would have become of the wonders of science and the masterpieces of the human spirit?’

‘But why, when I feel I know her?’ Marilyn said. ‘The connection is strong, don’t you think?’
‘Leo Rosten just wrote a book about me,’ he said. ‘You should look at it, Marilyn. The novel is called
Captain Newman, MD
. It made a fiction of my life. I am quite happy with it – I understand art. I helped him with information. But it’s a very serious undertaking to have your problems and your experience and maybe even your brilliance fictionalised, you see? Psychically speaking: it’s a lot to take on. I know this is slightly different. But do you imagine that playing one of history’s totemic hysterics would enhance your own feelings of well-being at this time?’
‘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.