The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe (20 page)

‘Did you know the people Natalie’s mother got him from, the breeders I mean?’ asked Marilyn.
‘I’m not sure. English wackos is all Natalie said to me.’ Marilyn looked down at me in her arms and half-closed her eyes.
‘I take him every place,’ she said. ‘He’s my mascot.’
‘You’re going to see Natalie,’ said Gloria. ‘Frank’s putting together a little thing on Friday.’
I was assuredly part of the life of the boulevard. Frank’s thing was a private dinner at Musso & Frank’s. Natalie was there that night and I got the feeling Sinatra was just showing off his favourite girls to a hoodlum chum of his, Frank DeSimone, who wore glasses and called himself ‘Frank’s Attorney’. It was just the five of us. They say Frank’s Attorney killed Hooky Rothman in broad daylight, in back of Mickey Cohen’s haberdashery shop on Sunset. He was sharp on the dressing front: silk tie, English suit. At Musso & Frank’s, Sinatra was giving out about the late Whittaker Chambers, telling everybody what a shmuck he had been, what a phoney. At the same time he ordered the girls’ food for them, insisting they try this or that dish from the menu. ‘Listen, honey. You gotta have this zucchini, okay. You’re having it. I’m talking fried.’ He looked up at the waiter. ‘Tell Bob the oil has to be fresh.’
‘Could I just have rice pudding?’ said Marilyn.
‘What, you crazy? Huh?’ He looked at the other Frank and shrugged. ‘These dames. Did you hear that? Can you believe that, Frank? They don’t know how to eat food, these girls. They don’t know how to live. They want to eat dessert before they’ve had fish. They won’t eat pasta. What a goof. Hey, Clyde! Do me a favour. Bring this lady the Shrimp Louie and a salad deluxe. After that the spaghetti with meat sauce.’
‘Wow, Frankie. I can’t eat so much food,’ said Marilyn. Natalie laughed nervously and proceeded to knock over a bourbon highball. ‘What a klutz,’ said Frank. ‘Can you believe that? Can you get these girls? What a klutz.’
‘I’ll have the baked apple,’ said the Attorney. Everything he said was spoken with a menacing softness. Sinatra looked at him. It was odd to see Frank saying nothing.
‘You won’t have the grenadine of beef?’
‘I’ll have the baked apple.’
I wished for a second that one of the girls had the gumption to answer back to Sinatra. He was a bully. Yet there were no moans or dismal sobs at the restaurant that night, just a kind of fearfulness on the part of Marilyn and Natalie. Sinatra picked a thread off his tie and smiled like a smile can fix things. ‘Chambers,’ he said. ‘What a fink. Can you believe him? He testified in ’48. He’s the kinda guy who made people crazy in this country, I swear to God. He ratted out his best friends.’
‘This is a great country, Frank,’ said the Attorney.
‘No argument.’
‘A great country. Some people, maybe they would like the communists to run the show, huh? Maybe some people would like these guys who hate the baby Jesus to come and take over our schools, huh? You know something Frank, I love being an American. It makes me cry. I don’t want to be told how to live by some goddamn Russian communist.’
Marilyn stroked me on the seat beside her. I felt the urge to pass on some information. ‘Whittaker Chambers translated
Bambi
,’ I said. She stroked me again.
‘Did you know Whittaker Chambers translated
Bambi
?’ she said. (Wow, I thought. Now, we’re getting somewhere.) She tossed her blonde hair. ‘Yeah, he was a very interesting writer.’
‘Who cares about any goddamn writer?’ said Sinatra. ‘A snitch and a writer! What a cube. Maybe they should have given him the Congressional Medal. Did you hear that? He did
Bambi
!’
‘A swell story, that,’ said the Attorney. ‘My children cry at that story. I love that story. Usually I don’t like animals. I hate animals.’ He nodded downwards. ‘Tell you the truth, I usually hate dogs. I’m giving you a free pass because you’re a very good-looking girl. I loathe dog-lovers. Most of them are cowards who haven’t got the guts to bite people themselves.’
‘Holy Jess!’ went Frank. ‘Dog-lovers!’
Marilyn was getting drunk and so was Natalie. They were both nervous of Sinatra and Sinatra was nervous of his attorney and it just wasn’t fun to be with them at Musso & Frank’s. Natalie began talking about Elia Kazan and the film they had just made, some squealing epic in which Natalie was able to put absolutely everything in about her mother. The girls went from Kazan to Strasberg to Marilyn’s time in New York, Natalie doing that actor’s thing of gently undermining her friend’s sense of achievement. ‘Oh,
Anna Christie
’s so overblown, don’t you think?’
‘Why, no,’ said Marilyn. ‘I think it’s beautiful.’
‘O’Neill’s too hysterical. I mean, what do I know? But for me it’s too much. It brings out the worst in most people, I swear to God.’ She smiled. ‘It asks for . . . how would you say? Brassy emotions.’
Marilyn’s hand trembled as she moved to drop me under the table. I heard Sinatra asking Natalie what was new with her mother, and Natalie saying Mud was on the war path and her father had recently banned all the dogs from the house. ‘He’s drunk every day,’ she said. ‘And Muddah now thinks the Russians are in league with the UFOs.’
‘She’s a smart woman,’ said the Attorney.
Despite their differences, I think Natalie had what her mother had in such splendidly extravagant proportions: not only the Slavic paranoia but a very determined sense of affliction. Maybe the greater part of it came from Nick Gurdin, the gun-slinging alcoholic of Sherman Oaks, but there was a sense that the bounty of America made that family delirious. It doesn’t always do to compare one temporary owner with another, but a dog can’t help dwelling on his material, so to speak, especially a journeying dog, and I have to say the Gurdins were a sort of purgatory to me, a place where one felt in exile both from the possibility of happiness and the certainty of judgement. I had quite a nice time there, during my in-between life, but I can’t bear to think how many dogs Mrs Gurdin must have sent out into the United States in a state of nervous exhaustion.
Sinatra had removed one of his shoes under the table, and he was nervously stubbing his toe into the clay tiles, the dust coming off on his sock. Natalie was getting into a real drunken flow about Muddah, the way she treated the help down in Sherman Oaks, the fact that Nick was so delusional he thought he was a lost son of the Romanovs. There was a frenzied element to her laughter. She looked from one person to the other with a craving in her eyes for reassurance, laughing again, at one point beginning to imitate the voice of the mother in the Kazan film. ‘Now, Wilma Dean,’ she said. ‘I wanna talk to you. Boys don’t respect a girl they can go all the way with. You and Bud haven’t gone all the way, have you?’
‘Jesus, honey. You are cranked,’ said Sinatra. When she moved on from
Splendor in the Grass
and began talking about Bobby Kennedy, Sinatra eased off his other shoe. At the same time, the Attorney gently put his hand on Marilyn and began stroking her thigh. I put my head down and sniffed one of the empty shoes, which smelled of nothing. I had a sudden vision of
The Last Supper
, that nice painting by Titian, where the apostles appear much more generous when it comes to allowing scraps to fall off the table.

I am happy enough with the sea – was happy that time at New York harbour, when we went to Staten Island – so long as I can be among the little dogs on the deck, protected from the secret undulations by several tons of cast-iron vessel. But the actual water – no. I had a fear of deep water,
^*
which was difficult in California because Marilyn loved the beach at Santa Monica and for her it brought to mind a happy experience of infancy. She was a strong swimmer and she found the place uncomplicated. As far as it goes, I’ve never really been much of a holidaymaker. Like all dogs, I take for granted a certain amount of sanctioned laziness, but beaches, tanning, ice-cream? To me the beach is an unfixed term on a roasting spit, a stifling penance, the water out there a border of pronounced anxiety. It’s not always easy for a dog to know where self ends and owner starts, but my thing about water made me realise that Marilyn’s fears were different from my own.

Late that summer I began to accept that I might never see New York again. Life in California was slower somehow and sweetly empty. Some afternoons, on the freeway, on the beach, your stomach could momentarily lurch with a steep sense that life was elsewhere. I came to understand it as a very California feeling – it came with the smog and the sunkissed faces. We spent a lot of time down at Peter Lawford’s beach house in Santa Monica, a lovely house, an outpost that once belonged to Louis B. Mayer. Normal individuals would get excited by the fact you could step straight onto the beach from Lawford’s deck. Sometimes, Marilyn would kick off her sandals and run onto the sand and immediately be confronted by a mental image of herself sixteen years before, blossoming into stardom in a bikini for some army photographer keen to make it in magazines. Peter was one of those English men who grow more perfectly English the further they are from England. (Marilyn had enjoyed many an earful about him from Frank. ‘How does cheap, weak, sneak, and creep sound?’) In himself, Lawford always felt like a comedy turn, an ersatz European, not quite natural when surrounded by all this natural American power. He had enough talent to turn it to his advantage, marrying the Prez’s sister and everything, but he worried he was never as cool or as substantial as his friends, a very teenage thing to feel. Lawford’s curse was the same as his blessing: he always wanted to be more like the people around him. When standing with Frank he wanted to be more like Frank, when drinking with the surfboys he wanted to be more like the surfboys. Marilyn and I contained multitudes, admittedly, but for Peter we were the easiest creatures in California.

* It’s possible this squeamishness is borrowed from a number of the people I met, especially Natalie Wood, but also, I understand, from an early personal trauma, the drowning of my Aunt Cressy in Loch Morlich, an event that occurred in the first weeks of my puphood. That was one family story: the habit of blanking it out for being morbid was another.

Now we come to the President. Don’t hold your breath for stunning revelations. I’m afraid I only met him one time, a warm night down there at the beach house, and my chief memory is that he was worried about his back and a local shortage of procaine. As far as Lawford was concerned, Jack was very straightforward in the brother-in-law department, a regular, bluff guy, happy to be with Peter and his friends so long as they were lots of fun and nice to his sister. The party was no more racy than usual. I guess people were giddier because of the President, drinking more, dancing more later on, exhibiting that strange confidence people exhibit when they realise they might be at the dead centre of the action. Everybody’s eyes were larger and probably darker than usual, engorged with power’s immediate proximity, and every girl in the room came armed with a question. ‘Mr President, what can we do to support President Ngo Dinh Diem in his fight against the Viet Cong,’ said Angie Dickinson with a toss of her hair, a small furrow appearing on her brow as she ‘did’ serious.

‘
Jack
,’ he said. ‘Call me Jack.’

Marilyn’s make-up man Whitey Snyder had driven us down to the beach from Doheny. It was one of those gentle evenings when the palm trees suddenly make sense, the warm breeze whispering among the leaves on Santa Monica Boulevard. ‘I think my father has been trying to call me, Whitey,’ she said. ‘There was a call from a hospital in Palm Springs.’

‘What did they say?’

‘They said his name was Mr Gifford. They said he wanted to get in touch with his daughter.’
The trees had lights on them and the shadow of the trees passed through the inside of the car. ‘Do you think it’s someone making a fool of me, Whitey?’
‘You didn’t ask to be put through?’
‘Not yet. I couldn’t. I took the number.’ I put my head on her arm and she breathed with that quick, manufactured courage of hers, ready for anything, ready for the whole world. ‘You know, I always forget I’m a daughter,’ she said.
‘You shouldn’t, honey,’ said Whitey. ‘It’s just too big a thing to forget.’
‘I lied to my New York analyst,’ she said casually. ‘I told her my father was dead.’
‘It’s just too big a thing to forget,’ he said.
We arrived at the party around 11 p.m., too late for supper but in very good time for scraps. It was a stand-up thing anyhow, which dogs understand, and Marilyn’s arrival caused no fuss. Kim Novak smiled from the corner and said ‘hi’ with a pretty cascade of fingers. Lawford had that preposterous, theatrical, very English way of greeting old friends, where he pretended he had been waiting the whole night just for you. It was a trick he had learned from his father, Sir Sydney Lawford: how to exude passionate interest without a scintilla of real personal involvement. They say Peter’s mother dressed her boy as a girl for the first ten years of his life, which explained a number of things about Peter quite neatly and sympathetically. He spent his life devising scenes of great moment that he could preside over whilst enjoying a secret absence. He beamed and took Marilyn by the hand. Someone gave her a glass of champagne and I stared up at Lawford with admiration. I loved him in
Son of Lassie
, the RAF pilot helped to safety across the snows of Norway by a dog whose eyes blazed with the strange existentialist thinking of Martin Heidegger. The dog was living for the moment, unsure whose side to be on, but Lawford made himself a likeable project and convinced the dog to gain its freedom by throwing off reason and morality. I gather this is not how the film is usually described, but I think Lawford must have agreed with my memory of it because he lifted me out of Marilyn’s arms with a whoosh of recognition. ‘Good Lord,’ he said. ‘You’ve brought the dog. Is this the Frank dog?’
Lawford had, in fact, met me several times before. In conversation, he liked to pretend not to know things, just to have something to ask. It was one of the ways that he showed himself to be upper-class.
‘Yes. He’s Maf.’
‘Maf?’
‘Yeah. Mafia.’
Lawford’s handsome face creased up. ‘Hello, Dreamboy,’ he said. ‘I happen to know three individuals who would absolutely love this little chap.’ Marilyn laughed and moved her head like a person in a dream of themselves, putting out her hand to greet the people, the Democrats, the moneymen, who were quickly swimming around her.
Three children in pyjamas were sitting on the stairs. They were sharing a bowl of popcorn and beginning to look sleepy. ‘I want it. I want it,’ said Christopher, the eldest. The boy scrabbled down onto the carpet and tried to pick me up by the ears.
‘No, me, Daddy. Me,’ said Sydney.
‘I’m not kissing him after you! Daddy. She’s got cooties,’ shouted Christopher.
‘Dog,’ said Victoria, the youngest.
Dogs love children: we love them for the purity of their narcissism. But children don’t always love dogs. They love the look of us and our air of teddyness, the way we can seem so loyal and biddable and cute, but they always mistake us for fictions even as they feel the wet dash of our tongues on their laughing faces. Of course, we are no more loyal than children are innocent, but we try our best, aiming not to disappoint the little people in their conception of us as fourlegged bundles of fluff and simplicity. To them we are funny things, made-up creatures, cartoon mixtures of texture and colour, who simply love being patted. It always struck me in Hollywood that dogs are probably less like that than people are, but who’s going to argue with a child’s wonder-seeking eyes, even if they appear amid a fusillade of poking and pulling and general dollying? ‘This is Dreamboy, Marilyn’s dog,’ said Lawford to the children.
‘
Mamallen
dog,’ said the smallest. Christopher, the boy, cradled me and swung his arms from side to side. ‘Oh, my darling, oh, my darling, oh, my darling, Clementine,’ he sang in a yokel voice and with a cow’s-lick the size of New Hampshire.
‘Let’s paint him blue!’ said Sydney.
‘You is Huckleberry Hound!’
‘
Icklebelly Yow
,’ said Victoria.
‘Let’s paint him blue!’
There was a certain amount of bouncing me up the stairs on two legs, Christopher chanting lines from a recent episode of their favourite cartoon. ‘Scrubby brushes! Scrubby brushes! You wanna buy one of our new scrubby brushes?’
‘Make him like a space dog,’ said Sydney.
‘
Beige dog
,’ said the smallest.
‘With a space helmet.’
‘How ’bout that?’ asked Christopher, placing a plastic drinking cup on my head.
All the while, Mr Lawford had been talking to a security guy. He turned round and his big smile reappeared. ‘Would you look at these kids,’ he said. ‘Aren’t they just wonderful?’ I was lying in a basket of small hands and my head was wet. Looking up, I stared at Peter and remembered how close he had been to Lassie in that lovely story.
‘Mr Lawford,’ I said. ‘Is the possibility of Being contingent on an acceptance of Mortality? I mean, is all experience an aspect of Time?’
‘Come on, Christopher. Jolly along. Don’t have the little dog barking. Let him go now. It’s bedtime.’
‘But Daddy, it’s fun.’
‘I said enough, Christopher.’ Mr Lawford pulled me free and the elder children booed. The baby chewed her cuff. Lawford frowned like a clown, as if his decision hurt him more than it hurt them, and they ran up the stairs and chuckled over the banister.
A lot of depressing shoes at the party. I mean mules. Every where I stepped it was D’antonio gold mesh sandals, or little English mules by Rayne. The men, if they were in the movie business, wore white shoes. The Harvard boys wore black oxfords with the laces at equal length. I walked past a great deal of flannel and seersucker, summer tones, until I came to the President’s shoes, which were oxfords, of course. Very shiny.
I’d like to be able to say Marilyn and Kennedy had a big world-historical discussion, but they didn’t, though they looked for a moment like they might. They got involved in a few rapid minutes of performance, an air of great significance hanging over them. They could never have been just any man and woman meeting in the corner of a party, it couldn’t be imagined, especially not by them: their conversation was a meeting of private fantasies that would breed private fantasies, and my memory of their talk is of something dramatic lying just under the surface. Kennedy was drinking whisky and soda. He sat in a beautiful Charles Eames chair. There was a cushion at his back, and he tapped the plywood side of the chair for emphasis as he spoke to her. She was sitting on the chair’s matching footstool, and I snuggled against her legs. Her hand was shaking ever so slightly as she stroked my coat. ‘I think it safe to say he has the instincts of a riverboat gambler,’ he said with a wide grin. They had been talking about the Vice-President, Mr Johnson.
‘He’s tough, huh?’
‘He’s Texan.’
‘But does he have the liberal imagination?’
‘Of course he does.’ Kennedy paused. ‘Well, that’s an interesting question, Marilyn. I hadn’t realised you cared so much for that kind of thing. Trilling and so on.’
‘I did a little reading.’
‘And Trilling? You know him?’
‘Well, I don’t know him. I just know he said something – he wrote it. About Fitzgerald, your namesake. He wrote a line about the “habitual music of Scott Fitzgerald’s seriousness”. That’s the thing I most wish someone had written about me.’
‘Is that right?’
‘I guess so.’
‘Those literary guys. One of them called me an “existential hero”.’
I licked her arm. ‘That’ll be the day,’ I said.
‘Is that a compliment, Mr President?’
‘I couldn’t swear to it. I think it’s more of a compliment to the person who wrote it. You’re so sweet, Marilyn. You know something? I don’t think you should worry so much.’
‘I was born worrying.’
‘Not about pipe-smokers, surely. You’re bringing joy and wholesomeness to people’s lives. That’s the truth.’
‘The whole truth and nothing but the truth?’
He grinned. ‘So help me God.’
‘Don’t change the subject, Mr President. We were talking about civil rights.’
Just as stars are always the best star-fuckers, the needy are often the very best at feeding the needy. The President and his new friend were locked onto each other that night, addressing each other’s doubts, his sexual and hers intellectual, until everyone decided they must be a couple. Sitting by the patio windows at Lawford’s house, they seemed to present such a heavenly coalition of natural accomplishments that no one could resist picturing them in each other’s arms. This kind of thing gains force by desire and repetition, and those, like me, who like myths more than facts, will enjoy the notion of Marilyn and the President together. Yet they were only in each other’s company a few times, on each occasion talking about themselves and politics in a public room, enjoying a fondness that history would consecrate into something larger than life. He tapped his opinions out on the side of the chair, answering her points, impressed at the way she listened, even as he wished to ask her about success. That was the President’s interest in her, that’s what really intrigued him. It had fascinated his father and it fascinated him: he wanted to understand the nature of fame. She had lived with it longer than he had and she had suffered by it too. He would never have kissed her in a room full of people; he was married to a dignified woman and was too political for spontaneity, but the closest he came was when he finally asked her, point blank, her pretty eyes open to his Boston carefulness, to tell him the thing that is concealed by fame.
‘Gee,’ she said. ‘What a question. You think the answer is private pain, don’t you?’
‘Yes. I suppose I do.’
‘Well, that’s not the answer, Mr President. Fame doesn’t conceal private pain, it only emphasises it. And I guess I might have had troubles even if I’d never left Van Nuys.’
‘What, then?’ he said. ‘I’m interested.’
‘Self-knowledge,’ she said. ‘Simple as that. The thing concealed by fame is self-knowledge.’
‘We must speak again.’ There was a thread hanging off the bottom of Kennedy’s suit trousers and I wanted to play with it, pull it with my teeth and see how far it went before it snapped.
‘Now, I answered your question. We had a deal. You should answer mine.’
‘You want to know if I sprang Dr King from Reidsville state prison?’
‘Well, yes. Lester Markel of the
New York Times
told me you and the Attorney General did a swell thing. He said you called up Mrs King when he was in that place, that prison. He said Mrs King was expecting a baby. You called to reassure her and word got round the community, the churches. Next thing folks are really paying attention. You did that, Mr President? You called that lady?’
^*
‘You give me too much credit,’ he said. ‘We were walking on eggshells. But I have to tell you it was Harris Wofford, my campaign aide. We were taking big risks in the South – we had plenty of votes to lose and plenty of votes to gain. Even Dr King’s father was supporting Nixon at that stage.’
‘And Dr King had been arrested? For sitting down in a snack bar in Atlanta?’
‘That’s right. They had him in prison.’
‘And you sprang him?’
‘No. Well. Put it this way. We couldn’t be seen to be backing King in a Southern fight about segregation. That wouldn’t have helped anybody.’
‘But you wanted to, right?’
‘Of course we wanted to. But we had to take it slowly. We were lighting fires in the morning and putting them out in the afternoon.’ By this point in the conversation, I noticed the President had shifted forward in his chair and was now addressing a group of listeners, which signalled the end of his flirtation with my owner. ‘We had people in jail,’ he said. ‘We had Klansmen in the fields. Dr King was in a maximumsecurity prison and Wofford had the idea that we should call Coretta. Just a few words. We had a few minutes at O’Hare so I just took the goddamn telephone and made a call.’
Marilyn drank more champagne and lay the glass down next to me. I licked the rim. Her eyes were wide open and she was drunk. I believe she had taken pills and was loose in herself. ‘What did you say?’ The President smiled like a veteran of many campaigns to win the approval of strangers.
‘I said I understood it must be hard for her, expecting a baby and her husband in prison. I said we were thinking about her and Dr King.’
‘Thatta boy,’ said Marilyn. I think she was talking to me but I can’t be sure.
‘Bobby went ape,’ he said. The President had taken pills too and they were working nicely for him. ‘It was only thirteen days to the election. But then he got so angry that he called for King’s release. He couldn’t bear it that some lynch-law judge had committed a civil rights leader to hard labour. That was it. I made a phone call and Bobby made a phone call and it shaped up from there.’ Peter Lawford leaned over Marilyn’s shoulder and made like a leading reporter.
‘It had a rather significant effect, no, on the Negro vote in the South?’
‘Right. Rather significant is right.’ He leaned over smiling and picked up his drink. ‘And you know what King Sr said after that? You know what he said? He said he would now be voting for Kennedy even in the face of me being a Catholic and all.’