The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe (6 page)

* Born Hans Detlef Sierck, the director is known for a certain goodness of bad taste. At the time of their release, his films were hated by the critics for seeming too unreal; later, they were loved for being so ironic. Despite my difficulty with some of his colours, I always felt he was a master of artistic charm.

Mr Jacobs tied up the last of the suitcases and gave me some lunch in the kitchen before we all met at the limousine next to the fountain. I had to go into a little carrying case but I didn’t mind; somehow, Frank’s exhaustion had filtered through to me, and I just lay watching the palms disappear through a scrap of window as Frank’s voice grew silent. Winter sunshine was falling into the car, and I remember feeling the engines of puphood were beginning to push me in a whole new direction. Thomas Mann understood how strange it is for a dog to watch everything and say nothing and to live a life of wan good nature, worn out with resting. The German pointer Bashan used to lie beside Mann, the blood-heat of his body pleasing the master and making him feel less lonely. ‘A pervasive feeling of sympathy and good cheer invariably comes over me when I’m in his company and looking at things from the dog’s angle,’ Mann wrote in the middle of his life. As we drove onto the freeway I re called the story of Theodor Adorno, who pondered the liquid ation of the individual from a house in the glades of paradise, a house in Malibu that looked into the blue water of the Pacific Ocean. He may have been a creature of the war years, but his moment came with the 1960s, a decade that really began for all of us with the fading brightness of Marilyn.

5

T

he skies were friendly, or so they said. The sky was a place of rest for the tired businessman with his flagging handshake and his Friday face, and who would deny him a bourbon on the rocks and a pretty girl in her TWA cap to smooth his cares away? If you believed the adverts, and we all did, the period in and around Christmas 1960 was a regular party above the clouds, a world apart from the hassles below.

Frank had his own jet, but it was grounded that month. The early days of jet travel were made for Frank. He was an absolute natural for the roped-off areas and beaming girls of the early airlines. ‘Welcome back, sir,’ said the girl. ‘It’s been a long time.’ Her white shirt stood outside her collar, and she leaned on the bulkhead ready for something new. The arched eyebrows, the amused eyes, the crimson lips: everything about her said ‘yes’ to an indecent proposal. ‘What a cute dog,’ she said.

‘You like him, huh?’

‘Why, Barbra. Look at Mr Sinatra’s dog. Isn’t he just adorable?’
‘Uh-huh,’ said Barbra. ‘And the puppy’s not bad either.’
‘You girls,’ said Frank, smiling. ‘Trouble. A whole heap of trouble. We having a clam-bake in here tonight, pussycat?’
‘Afraid not, Mr Sinatra,’ said the girl. ‘Barbra has church in the morning.’ They chuckled. She drew her tongue over her teeth, real sassy. ‘She done been bad before now. She got prayers.’
‘You girls are trouble. Well, tell her to bring me some communion wafers over here.’
‘Coming right up. Barbra, could you bring Mr Sinatra a double Jack with ice on the side?’
Frank was always making sure his rights were protected. He winked at the chief hostess and she leaned over the seat. He hit her with a fifty-dollar bill right there in her palm. ‘Make sure there ain’t gonna be no Harveys near this spot,’ he said. No virtue, no fellow-feeling, no country or pleading voice, could stand in the way of Frank’s pursuit of his own way of life.
^*
He did what he wanted, good or bad. And yet, he appeared in our time to exude the kind of goodness that made people healthy.
I was supposed to stay in my box on the plane, but I was with the Chairman, so he lifted me out and I had a seat to myself. I was an old-fashioned traveller, though – that’s to say, I was scared. By that point, the airlines didn’t worry about people being scared any more, they worried about people being bored. Frank made my fear worse by immediately unfolding a copy of the
New York Times
and falling silent over a story about two planes colliding the day before over Staten Island. I turned towards the window but I could hear every word as it passed through his tough little mind. Frank read the story four times. That was the kind of person he was, and by the last time, we were deep in the bright clouds above Nevada. Frank read the paper and signalled for another drink, then another one, the story in the paper enveloping the cabin in dread but not Frank, who found the experience beautifully comforting. (Bad things happened to other people.) The wreckage from one of the planes had fallen on Park Slope in Brooklyn, setting fire to several brownstones, killing a sanitation worker shovelling snow and a man selling Christmas trees. A boy on the United 826 coming from Chicago had survived for a while in New York Methodist Hospital. He remembered in the seconds before the collision looking down at the snow falling on the city. ‘It looked like a picture out of a fairy book,’ the boy said.

* It was evidence of something special in Frank that he appeared so good to so many, because, in actual fact, he was as Locke described man after the absence of God, with ‘no law but his own will, no end but himself. He would be a god to himself, and the satisfaction of his own will the sole measure and end of all his actions.’

There was a night at the Waldorf Astoria. I remember Frank shouting at a half-dozen bellhops under a massive chandelier. He wanted a shoeshine. He wanted two dozen white roses. He needed a drink. He needed a town car and a goddamn private line. Frank’s needs always came out like urgent threats, but the boys seemed glad to have them and happy to oblige, their handsome young faces readily opening up to Frank’s abuse and the heavy tips that were sure to follow. My legs were stiff and I felt sore after all these hours in cramped surroundings, a feeling which I tried to show by the usual means, whining a little aria and hopping on the sidewalk. I think Frank got the message the next day because he sent the car away and we walked from the Waldorf to 444 East 57th Street. Frank never walked anywhere. It was a lovely, snow-filled day, and my paws were enjoying the skiddy ice on the streets. Frank was busy cursing as he pulled down his hat and exhaled wildly, the king of Sicily pulling at the leash, saying, ‘Heel, goddamnit, heel,’ and me feeling pleased with this nice levelling moment, the Chairman being dragged up Park Avenue. ‘Take it easy, baby! Slow the
fuck
down.’

As we approached Sutton Place, Frank took a deep breath of the East River and felt nostalgic. Humans feel such compassion for themselves, it’s one of their charms, and Frank, who loved to think he was above all that, was travelling that day into a sepia picture of his old mother and how the rough persistence of her love once mingled with the river noises. He looked up at the Queensboro Bridge. The other side is paprika shops and sausage houses, he thought, and over here it’s one perfume counter after another. With Frank no feeling ever survived long enough to challenge his basic sense that life was a load of baloney. He caught himself thinking of the paprika shops as we walked down the street and he sniffed into the breeze and put his hand in his pocket. ‘What a shmuck,’ he said.

Vince was the doorman of the building at 444. A pigeon was pecking a low brass grille beside the door as we walked up. ‘Hey buddy,’ said the pigeon. ‘Listen up. This guy’s the nuts. Are you gonna be hanging around here? This guy’s the business.’ Vince came out of the lobby smiling like a benighted failure. Vince had qualities few of us have: I admired the guy. The great comedy about most people is they think this life is the only one they’re going to live: they stock it up with panic, pain, worth, and glory; they fly a metal bird from Los Angeles to New York, but they haven’t yet grasped the basic facts. God is not in his place of work and is not answering his phone – get it? You don’t get saved, brothers and sisters, you get
reassigned
. The only person I ever met who acted like they knew this was Vince, who must have lived some other life as a pig in shit. None of us really remembers where we’ve been. We don’t know. He laughed easily at events and slapped his big fat thigh, eating donuts and laughing like every day was a holiday, which it is – it’s a holiday from being somebody else. Vince was the first man I met who didn’t think he owned himself.

‘Well, looky here at this nice English lord,’ says he, stroking me in Frank’s arms.
‘I’m Scottish, actually.’
‘And look at how he yaps so nice. I could swear he is singing a song to you and me, Mr Sinatra.’
‘Watch him. He’s a playboy. Is she ready?’
Frank nodded upwards and Vince got his meaning. ‘She ready for you,’ he said. ‘Go right up to 13E. I’ll give this little duke his lunch.’
What a guy. We must have been down there for a good half-hour together. He opened a tin of Dash and mixed it in a bowl. What can I tell you: Liver Treat with a side order of National Biscuits, ready to eat in the mirrored lobby, under the electric candles, Vince at his little desk listening to a football game from Yankee Stadium, the Giants playing the Cleveland Browns. Dash was probably the best of all the tins they had in America. It wasn’t up there with Mrs Higgens’s own small casseroles, but after prison slops, you know, and after Mrs Gurdin’s cakes – she fed her dogs mille-feuille pastries, which she called
Napoleons
– it was just heaven to fall in with Mr Vince of Jackson Heights, Queens.
Plutarch thought creatures could live on goodness alone. That was sweet. A philosopher can’t have everything. I am happy he recognised the speech of animals, but he failed to admit our bad character, when we so obviously love to rend a piece of ox with our teeth and worry a hog with our mouths and feel good about it afterwards. Yet our learning is there to bridle our conscience, is it not? Do we not educate ourselves in order to be moral? So it was with livery breath that I passed my first snooze on those cold floor-tiles, digesting my carrion and worrying it might mean I was not personable.
Frank was whistling in the dark hallway, spinning his hat on his finger, when the lift opened on the thirteenth floor and Vince handed me over. Frank’s great joke was to place me inside the apartment and let me find my way to Marilyn. The door was open. I stepped over a pair of stiletto shoes covered in bright grey rhinestones –
Ferragamo
, it said inside them – and stopped to nibble the strap of a Pucci handbag that leaned against a drinks trolley. She was nowhere to be seen so I sat on a copy of
Paris Match
. ‘Go on, shoo. Keep walking, shitstick,’ stage-whispered Frank from the front door, bending down and urging me on. The carpet was white and fluffy and smelled of carbolic soap, an English smell of rotting flowers. When I got to the living room I could hear her voice, then I saw she was sitting on a Louis XV provincial-style ivory and yellow painted chair, her nice legs folded under her. She wore a lace dress. The chair was right next to a small white piano and she was speaking on the telephone, her head tilted back, her eyes absorbing the light coming from a cut-glass clock that hung above the television. ‘It isn’t a story for Marilyn Monroe,’ she was saying. ‘I guess he’s a good writer but the girl is some kind of tramp, right? Well, Lew. I happen to know she wouldn’t say those lines. She couldn’t. There’s no Sugar in them and there’s no Cherie in them, and gee, Lew, there’s no
me
in them. Don’t you think that’s important? If I’m going to play a tramp I’d sooner do
Rain
for NBC. Lee says I’m ready. Mr Maugham wants me, right?’
She didn’t see me coming in. She listened like an oldfashioned listener, ready to learn, ready to change, alert to the sudden wisdom that makes all the difference. She bit her nails one minute and twisted the phone wire the next. It was a feast to my hungry ears. ‘Well, that is possible too. Yes, I know all that . . . Not where I come from . . . But don’t you ever just want to surprise yourself, Lew? I mean get up and not have to . . . gee, it’s humiliating. I don’t want to do an imitation of myself, okay? . . . Well, it’s nice of you to say it, Lew . . . I’m always running into people’s unconscious. Maybe. I hope so. Which part? This part? I don’t think so. Maybe this time round I could just start myself over again. Hey, is that possible? I know what she is and she’s not that way. I’m on a freedom ride, Lew.’
She laughed and poured some champagne from a bottle next to the telephone. ‘Are you listening to me? . . . I’m a monster, Lew, okay? I accept that. Now listen here . . . But . . . Yes, I was born nervous . . . Listen here. Lew.’
I had never seen anyone so enraptured on the phone before; she seemed to have forgotten about Frank and she only noticed me when she put back the receiver. ‘Wow,’ she said. ‘O Lord. Wow. Hattie! Lena! Frankie!’ She was the only girl I ever knew who could whisper an exclamation. She lifted me into her arms and kissed me as if I was the returning hero, and I did feel special, you know, for a moment, held up high by Marilyn like the dog who finally worked things out and made it home.
Well met
, Comrades. Marilyn’s helpers came rushing into the room with Frankie laughing. ‘Oh, my!’
‘How darling!’
‘Oh, my Lord.’
‘The baby. Oh, the baby.’
‘Little thing.’
‘Just a pooch I picked up on the West Coast. He’s from England.’
‘Oh, a proper gentleman.’
‘I guess . . . I love him, Frankie.’
‘Good, honey. He’s for you.’
‘I love him.’
‘Natalie Wood’s mother deals in dogs,’ he said. ‘She finds them and she . . . well, she collects them. That’s how I found the ankle-biter.’ Hattie the cook and Lena the housekeeper disappeared out of the room in a flurry of warm and tender mouthings. It seemed like they were happy. ‘Every girl needs a man around the house,’ said Frank.
Her eyes had filled up. ‘Gee.’
‘What’s his name going to be?’ asked Frank. She rubbed my nose with hers and I felt it was stone cold.
‘This little tough guy? Gee.’
‘How about Britt?’ said Frank. Cradling me in her arms she looked very tender, a long lock of blonde hair falling over one eye. She caught her breath and smiled a perfect smile.
‘You mean like English?’
‘Naaa,’ he said. ‘I think you should name him after Sammy’s new wife. She’s Swedish. Britt’s a good enough name for a blonde.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘He’s a tough guy, isn’t he? I’m calling him Mafia – Mafia Honey.’
‘Oh, that’s cute, kiddo.’
She kissed me again and let out a cascade of giggles. ‘You like it?’
‘That’s fresh. You read too many newspapers.’
‘Oh, I don’t read any. If I wanna see myself I can look in the bathroom mirror.’
‘I’ll give you Mafia, wise guy.’ He smiled and wandered out of the room to find his coat.
Sizzle, Maltese,
Mafia Honey
. Is there any chance of sticking to a name around here? Scott Fitzgerald once said that there could never be a good biography of a writer, because a writer is too many people if he is any good. I buy that. I believe it. Writers mattered to Marilyn. She was reading a fat Russian novel that whole period in New York, carrying it everywhere in her bag. She read it very slowly and perhaps she gave it more respect than it deserved. It made her feel accompanied.
So I was Mafia Honey – Maf for short. The days just drifted into one another on the East Side. For the first time since leaving England, I felt I might be on solid ground, in safe company every day with the same maid and the same housekeeper. It seems I was destined always to enjoy the briefest of stays wherever I landed, but in many ways I will always consider the apartment at 444 to have been my home. Marilyn was a strange and unhappy creature, but at the same time she had more natural comedy to her than anybody I would ever know. More comedy and more art. Not for her the stern refusal of life’s absurdities: Marilyn had a sensitivity to jokes and moral drama that would have delighted the chiefs of psychoanalytic Vienna. It didn’t take long for her to become my best friend.
‘Maf. Today I give you meatballs.’ This was Lena Pepitone, who looked after the clothes and sometimes the kitchen. She could mostly be found in the utility room, darning the edge of some Jean Louis sheath dress, re-attaching spangles, biting off threads, but regularly she came out and offered to make big Italian dinners for us. She worked under a Renoir etching,
Sur La Plage, à Berneval
. I always thought Renoir was so overdone: I mean, all those wispy strokes, they gave me a headache with their infinite prettiness. A body needs a little ugliness to keep it going. Like Frank, he always knew the benefit of some grossness; he gave Marilyn a set of gold lighters that said Cal Neva Lodge on them. They sat on the bookshelf beside a tray of toothpicks and a copy of
Madame Bovary
.
There was a strong sense of third-personhood about the apartment on 57th Street, right down to the mementoes of a largely invented past and the many pictures of Marilyn herself that hung on the walls, most of them painted by fans. All too soon, I felt like her protector, a common feeling and maybe a bogus one, but I believe it meant something to each of us. It seemed I had been sent to look after her. Now that she was back living on her own, Marilyn’s state of mind was, at the same time, fresh and depleted: she wanted to learn to take herself seriously,
^*
to value her experience. And yet she was hitched to the person she had always been: the girl who was sweet and available, who now took pills and drank. She found it hard. Many of the old bids for independence had fallen short. She was tired. When she hugged me, her comforter, her guardian, I felt a weight of disappointment about her, as if the stands she had taken in life, and in love, had only revealed her personal shortcomings and the impossibility of respect. But she was glad that winter to be free of Arthur and his inky old blameless honour.
The apartment had a powerful feeling of departed resentment, as if Marilyn had finally freed herself from a person whose energy had been destructive, the kind of person who had no interest in sustaining what was good in her nature or necessary to her survival. Spouses are sometimes competitive, aren’t they? And the bad ones want not only to destroy the thing they love, but to crush that thing’s ability to offer love, too. Such spouses imagine that no one will ever remember their lies, their aggressions, their capriciousness, and yet, in the end, that is all their former loved ones will remember about them, their terrible behaviour. Poor married people: perhaps they could learn something from dogs about how to settle the business of oneself before setting up shop with another.
All that was gone from the rooms. All the blame had gone and all the typewriters. But in my universe, which, let’s face it, is the universe of the floor, I found myself constantly stepping over evidence that Mr Miller had tried to be Marilyn’s educator. All the books were recent, from the last few years, and none of them spoke of the attachments that had tethered Marilyn’s mind in her twenties, or, further back, in her youth. Outside the bathroom, on another Ferragamo box, stood
The Roots of American Communism
by Theodore Draper,
The Works of Rabelais
, De Tocqueville’s
Democracy in America
,
A Piece of My Mind
by Edmund Wilson, and an expertly illustrated edition of
The Little Engine That Could
. Apart from the last one, you never saw Marilyn reading them unless a photographer came to the apartment to take pictures. She was always appearing in
Life
magazine with a copy of
Ulysses
or
The Poems of Heinrich Heine
balanced on her palpitating breast. I wished I could tell her to leave all that to the mutts: anybody can read a book, but Marilyn could make people dream, just as Lena could with her wonderful tagliatelle in meat sauce. After a while I began to feel Lena was treating me as Dr Johnson treated his favourite cat, Hodge. The moggy spoke in alexandrines which the great moralist couldn’t hear, but he fed him oysters all the same and the cat was very happy.
Marilyn took me everywhere. We had a lot of fun going up and down the avenues, Marilyn sometimes in a headscarf and sunglasses, completely unknown, running into the wind with our mouths open, and hungry for experience. I think we shared a feeling for the tribulations of the period, an instinct for killing the distance between the high and the low, something that would come in time to explain the depth of our friendship. If she brought out the actor in me then it might be said that I brought out the philosopher in her. The Marilyn I knew was smelly and fun and an artist to the very end of her fingertips.
I loved to sit on the white piano and watch her get ready for a night out. There was something perfectly shameless in the way she admired her reflection. It was like the central panel of Hans Memling’s remarkable triptych,
Earthly Vanity and Divine Salvation
, in which Vanity is pictured with her little white lapdog, a model of companionship, standing beside her on a carpet of fresh flowers. I used to watch her
– the Leichner, the eyelashes, the Autumn Smoke, the Cherries à la Mode, the Day Dew, the tissues, the pins, the small brushes and the lipsticks scattered on the tray like gold bullets – and I would wonder how much of our love is inspired by our need for a secret. Wasn’t Emily Brontë’s great dog Keeper the love of her life? Did she not love him above all creatures for his strength and silence, and punish him for knowing her so well?
^*
Some women need a fully accompanying silence to help them speak, and that was how it seemed sometimes to be with my owner, the pupils of her eyes engorged in front of the mirror as she completed her rituals of becoming. Next to me on the piano was a framed photograph of Marilyn with a letter by Cecil Beaton. ‘Somehow we know that this extraordinary performance is pure charade,’ he wrote. I nuzzled up to it. ‘The puzzling truth is that Miss Monroe is a make-believe siren, unsophisticated as a Rhine maiden, innocent as a sleep walker. Like Giraudoux’s Ondine, she is only fifteen years old and she will never die.’