The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe (24 page)

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?’

‘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 the 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