The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe

by Andrew O'Hagan

  Up on the landing, Nick Gurdin was already shouting at his wife. I would soon discover that Nick spent most of his time upstairs, where he kept the bottles, and where the television was never off. I’m afraid Nick was a buffoon of long standing. He was always pasty-faced, the sort of man who sweated gently, like a girl crying. Everything in his life was to do with respect or rather its absence: he inspired none and he got none, he didn’t know why, and the situation drove him backwards into his deepest hollows, where he drank by himself in San Fernando bars and thought of new ways to deploy his growing hatred. If he’d lived in New York and worked in an office, he might have thrived as the typical, over-martini’d, cheating husband, leaving every night on the 7.14 to White Plains, a smudge of lipstick high on his neck and a tide of lies to see him through to the next day. But Nick was with Muddah and Muddah was in Hollywood. And in Hollywood Nicky Boy was forced to take early retirement. Upstairs, I could hear him berating his wife for leaving him without sufficient funds to see him through the day. She mentioned something about work at the studio. Carpentry work. A candle flickered in the alcove as he shouted again. I pulled myself up with my paws in an effort to inspect the gaudy seats of the chairs in the hall.

  ‘Oh, don’t be like that,’ said the Staffordshire. He came and lay beside me under a rococo-ish chair that smelt of cheap varnish. ‘If you take the maximum amount of nationalist sentiment,’ he said, placing his handsome head on his paws, ‘and splice it with equal degrees of artistic banality and emotional panic, you will end up with . . .’

  He turned to look at me. ‘What exactly will you end up with?’

  ‘Home Sweet Home,’ I said.

  * The famous home for stray dogs. On her trips to England, Mrs Gurdin was often to be found there, weeping into her kid gloves.

  3

  T

  hese first homes were temporary: I was waiting for my owner, as people call it, or my fated companion. We picaroons know that waiting and listening and learning by our mistakes will always be the bigger part of our adventures. The great challenges are forever ahead. In the meantime, there was the manic world of Ventura Canyon Avenue and the hourly rounds of crisis. Mrs Gurdin lived her life through her children but also via a huge sense of historical desolation. On this front the poor woman could not be soothed or assuaged. The dogs quickly came to see they had no role in comforting Muddah, so we decided just to skip round the house ignoring her cries for help.

  ‘To thine own self be true,’ said the bard. Yet in all the animal kingdom, only humans consider integrity to be a thing worth worrying about. I grew up in the golden era of existentialism, so you’ll forgive me for finding the whole idea of a self that one must be true to a little ridiculous. We are what we imagine we are: reality itself is the supreme fiction. Despite years of excellent evidence, humans cannot get the hang of this condition; they live like the people in Plato’s cave, never quite believing their shadows are as true as they are.

  It was my great good fortune, first in England and then in the United States, to be among people who were very much of the opposite tendency. These were people who shaped themselves according to the farthest reaches of their desires, finding the most fevered kind of honesty in their invented states. Mrs Gurdin was once called Maria Stepanovna Zudilova: people of her background enjoyed a total immersion in feeling, the sort of thing that would endear the Russian interior fandango to several generations of American actors, Mrs Gurdin’s daughter Natalie and my fated companion among them.

  Mrs Gurdin came from a line of people who owned soap and candle factories in southern Siberia. Running from the Bolsheviks they stuffed money into their pockets, but they forgot Mikhail, Mrs Gurdin’s brother, and when they came out from their hiding place they saw the boy hanging from a tree at the end of a rope. Mrs Gurdin would hate the Bolsheviks for life. The family escaped – she liked to say on a private train – to a house in Harbin, where Maria took ballet lessons and enjoyed the services of a German nanny and a Chinese cook. Mrs Gurdin varied her stories, but they all told of a life made out of adversity. She was forever elaborating, forever covering her tracks. Sometimes she was a gypsy child who was found on the steppe but more often she was a Russian princess escaping the bullet or cheating the hangman. In any event it made California a kind of paradise for her, a place where the bare truth was seldom sufficient and seldom reliable. Mrs Gurdin’s husband, Nick, was once Nikolai Zakharenko from Vladivostok.

  Early one evening our friend the dog-lover came down the stairs wearing what can only be called a ballgown. She had set her hair and applied her make-up and was bedecked with a ton of costume jewellery. She addressed Nick over her shoulder as if talking to someone high up in the cheap seats. ‘Faddah,’ she said.

  ‘Cut it out, Muddah. You can exclude me from any goddamn drinks down there.’

  ‘Fahd! You make me sorry about the day I met you. You are not a man.’ Nick came on to the top landing carrying a rifle. His hair was mussed up and he was drunker than a Siberian doctor.

  ‘Don’t start me, Muddah. Not tonight. I’m staying out of your communist meeting.’

  ‘How dare you,’ she replied. ‘You hurt my heart, Faddah. Little Mikhail is still lying in his grave and you accuse me of having communists in my house?’

  ‘Sinatra is a communist.’

  ‘He is a friend of the new young President-Elect. We should be proud to know him.’ Nick’s rifle wasn’t loaded; he liked holding it up while watching cowboy shows on the television. He said something about Kennedy being an Irish peasant.

  ‘Krestianin,’ he shouted. ‘Peasant.’

  ‘Mr Sinatra is a friend to Natasha,’ Mrs Gurdin said in return. ‘You are not a man. You don’t look after your family. You are an object to be pitied.’ Her husband shouted a curse and turned up the volume on the television set as she continued her regal descent. I hopped out of the basket and parried her hemline. ‘Mr Gurdin is a . . . you say, naughty man,’ she said, smiling. ‘But you do not care much for that, Maltese, do you?’ Mrs Gurdin always looked a little desperate even when she was happy. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she added. ‘This is your last night here, Sizzle.’

  They had started calling me Sizzle as a tribute to our old friend Cyril Connolly. It was just a family thing: she didn’t say it to breeders – she still called me ‘the Maltese’. When Natalie said that Mr Sinatra was looking for a dog to give as a present, Mrs Gurdin didn’t hesitate to nominate me. She said I had British class, though, in private, her sense of British class had been dented in Sussex. She swept off in her taffeta gown to visit the kitchen, at which point I clambered up the stairs to have a look at Nicky Boy. He was sitting in an old yellowish armchair in front of the television, surrounded by a great variety of Russian dolls peering out with their dead historical eyes. He was slugging from a quart of vodka. This was Nicky Boy’s time. He stared at the screen like someone imagining they might at any moment leap forward and disappear into the Wild West. Mr Gurdin was watching Bonanza and he pointed the rifle at the screen before resting it on his outstretched legs. ‘Mr Cartwright,’ said the young man on the screen, ‘there’s two things I can handle – horses and women. In that order, of course.’ Mr Gurdin let go of the gun and slapped his thigh, before holding up his bottle and toasting the show. The guest star Ben Cooper was thrown to the ground by a horse and the music went all strange. Nick leaned forward. ‘My legs, Mr Cartwright!’ said Ben Cooper. ‘I can’t move them! I can’t even feel them!’ Then the titles began and Bonanza’s theme tune filled the bedroom.

  ‘This,’ said Mr Gurdin, looking across the room at me through tired eyes, ‘is a very beautiful show. A very very beautiful show, I tell you that for free, Dogville.’ I walked across the carpet and he lifted me onto his knees, the cold barrel of the rifle pressing into my side. Looking at him I felt Nick’s face was a small tragedy. ‘You are a nice person,’ he said in a slurred whisper. ‘A nice little dog and I’ve got one thing to tell you. Watch out for the Reds. They will take you
r food and leave you out in the rain.’

  I nuzzled his hand. Pity can be a fairly civilised way of feeling good about yourself. He wore a pair of dirty white bucks, the shoes of someone who’d seen better days.

  ‘Out in the rain,’ he said. ‘That is how it goes with such people.’ I turned and sat on his lap for a second and we watched an advert for Swanson 3-Course Dinners. ‘Dis gusting,’ he said. ‘Khrushchev food for people who want to live in the outer space.’

  The doorbell rang downstairs and I jumped off his lap and made my way down. Nick got up and slammed the door behind me. But it wasn’t Sinatra, it was Natalie, arriving early to talk to her mother about problems she was having with the new house on North Beverly Drive. ‘How perfectly adorable,’ said Natalie when I appeared at her feet in the hall. ‘Oh, Muddah – is this the one for Frankie? It’s got to be, okay?’

  ‘Dah,’ said Mrs Gurdin. ‘I know he loves an entertainer and this one has been in the world before, I’m telling you, Natasha. Even in England, the other dogs sat in the basket. This one was out. He is the friendly one.’

  ‘Oh, how completely sweet.’ Natalie lifted me up and involved me in her beauty for a few seconds. I nuzzled her neck and she smelt of some excellent floral thing, Joy, I would have said, yes, Joy by Patou, jasmine, tuberose, a philosopher’s notion of the perfect flower.* Her eyes were so dark you felt they must hold secrets, including the darkest secret, but only a perverse dog could speak of anything but life when speaking of Natalia, Mrs Wagner, Natasha, Natalie Wood, in her prime, only months before she starred in both Splendor in the Grass and West Side Story. Her lovely face concealed a nest of hostile feelings; I absorbed that as she stroked me and put me down, the daughter preparing for battle with Muddah and all she presumed to understand. Life is a movie anyhow, but no one played it like Natalie, rolling the dialogue in her mind before she spoke.

  She took out a holder, lit a cigarette, and gave Muddah the full up-and-down treatment. ‘We have frogs,’ she said. ‘The new swimming pool is crawling with frogs. They’re all dying. You argued for a salt-water pool, Muddah. Better for the circulation, you said. Now we have a fucking biblical plague down there. Isn’t that just dandy? I tell you we’re the talk of Higgins Canyon. It is not a Beverly Hills smell, Muddah. Dead frogs is not a fucking Beverly Hills smell!’

  ‘Don’t swear, Natasha,’ said Mrs Gurdin. ‘It is very common to swear.’ Natalie looked down and enlarged her eyes for dramatic effect.

  ‘Not in front of the puppies, huh?’

  Natalie spun round and walked into the living room, looking for an ashtray as if underscoring a point. Without pause, she reeled off a list of complaints, about her house and her husband and the new picture she was making, that went from being a litany to being an avalanche. Mrs Gurdin was the sort of mother who allowed her children’s strong feelings to trump her own, at least for as long as she was in their presence. And that’s how she saw it: not as being with her kids, but as being in the presence of her children. Her relationship with Natasha involved a heady mixture of pride and humiliation. ‘That is the most enthralling part of her story,’ the Labrador said before she went to a new owner. ‘Does she want to be honoured by her children’s success, and also martyred by it, allowing it to reveal the chances she never had?’

  Natalie went on. The decorators were phonies. The rosetinted marble didn’t match in colour all the way through the ground floor. Her private bathroom was too heavy and cracks were now appearing on the ceiling downstairs. At least half of the chandeliers were fakes. The pipework was amateur and by the time the hot water reached the faucets it was stone cold and, can you believe it, dirty. Dirty bathwater and frogs in the pool! It was like living in a swamp somewhere in Bolivia. The head of Fox was threatening to ditch her husband RJ’s contract. ‘Isn’t that just the limit? This busboy from St Louis, Missouri, this Greek guy who is into buying ships. Actors aren’t ships! You can’t just scuttle them when they get a bit rusty.’

  ‘RJ’s not rusty,’ said Muddah. ‘He’s thirty.’

  ‘In this town that’s rusty,’ said Natalie. ‘That’s salvage. An actor over thirty is bad news. Some Clyde in a nylon suit from the front office is testing him for the push, I can tell you, I know these guys.’ Muddah wrung her hands and dived into the doom. We should never have left Harbin. My poor mother and father. Before you know it we’ll all be starving. The Bolsheviks hanged poor Mikhail from a tree. At this point she produced a handkerchief from the sleeve of her gown. Things were supposed to be better and now Robert will be on the scrapheap and life is over. Over, I tell you.

  Mrs Gurdin had a tendency to approach all problems with those tears of ecstasy and tender emotions typical of Dostoevsky’s women of faith. No occasion was too small for this awesome trick of unburdening: Mrs Gurdin required almost daily exhortations to the higher authorities that they suspend her portion of misery here on earth, and make sure the milkman comes on time.

  ‘Oh, turn it off, Muddah!’ said Natalie. ‘I’m having the time of my life because for the first time . . . for the first time it is my life.’

  ‘Are you rehearsing?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Are you running your lines?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Mama. I’m not a kid any more.’

  ‘You’re running lines, Natasha. This Gypsy role you’ll never get. I read the script. They want someone to play a whore. You’re too innocent. They remember the baby girl in the Christmas picture.’

  ‘Stop it, Mama.’

  ‘And this Kazan picture, too. You’re reciting from it, aren’t you, Natasha? These things you are saying to me. You are playing the Deanie girl with me. All these pictures you want to do are mother-hating pictures. Everybody wants to blame the mother.’

  Natalie suddenly flushed. ‘Don’t lay it on me if you can’t find the right way to be a mother. Don’t blame me if you don’t have the lines, Muddah. I’ve been Maureen O’Hara’s daughter and Bette Davis’s daughter. I’ve been goddamn Claire Trevor’s daughter. Gene Tierney’s. I know all about mothers!* Mothers always looking for forgiveness, mothers always looking for redemption, mothers making out like it wasn’t about them all along. Mothers crying themselves to sleep at night. You’re right, mother! More than anything I know, oh yes, I know how to play at being a daughter.’

  ‘I’m not asking you to play, Natasha.’

  I looked up at Mrs Gurdin with eyes that I hoped betrayed the deepest confusion. She lifted me up and walked into the parlour where Wanika, ever-smiling in a white maid’s apron, was laying out sandwiches and cheese biscuits on pretty little plates. I dropped from her arms into a waiting chair. She sighed. ‘I haven’t seen Mr Sinatra since your birthday party at Romanoff’s.’

  ‘That was just the kindest thing anybody ever did for me,’ said Natalie wistfully. Muddah was stung by this remark but she cancelled the feeling by saying no to a cheese biscuit while Natalie moved to the fireplace mirror, an actress fixing her lipstick.

  ‘Mr Sinatra is a kind man,’ said Mrs Gurdin. ‘He gave a lovely speech that night of the birthday. He supports many worthwhile . . . many worthwhile causes.’ Natalie turned round and drilled her brown eyes into her mother, the eyes that could magic the doubt behind them into a furious and almost blasphemous certainty.

  ‘I am not a cause, mother,’ she said. ‘I am Frank’s friend. That’s what I am. Frank’s friend.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Mrs Gurdin. ‘I was thinking of the work he does for the coloured people.’ Natalie walked over and put her perfect hands over her mother’s, a pose of beseeching and bullying that she had perfected long ago in the first days of her childhood.

  ‘Mud,’ she said. ‘Please don’t mess things up with Frank and me, okay?’ Mrs Gurdin felt that her daughter did not mean this in a romantic way; things weren’t good with the Brylcreem Kid back home, she knew that, yes, she understood that it was as much in Natasha’s nature as it was in her own to be constantly looking out for signs of betrayal in the
people she loved. Her womanly instinct also told her RJ was the sort of man to be driven mad by Natasha’s moods. But Mr Sinatra was good news for her daughter and she knew that too. Mrs Gurdin knew that her daughter needed to ally herself with serious adult concerns and politics. Mr Sinatra liked Natalie, and Natalie wanted to reward him by taking seriously the things that mattered to him. Natalie felt that this was how adults behaved. Mud should know. Natalie turned back to the mirror and frowned. ‘If Faddah is upstairs with The Andy Griffith Show that’s the best place for him,’ she said in the mirror, meeting her mother’s eyes.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mrs Gurdin. ‘He did not do so very well at Romanoff’s.’

  ‘He did worse than that,’ said Natalie. ‘He was loaded before the soup came and he told Peter Lawford he was a pinko fag from England.’

  ‘Yes, that was naughty of Fahd.’

  ‘Naughty! It was disgusting. He was drunk. Peter is the brother-in-law of the President-Elect of the United States of America.’

  ‘That is correct,’ said Mrs Gurdin. ‘Nick gets very tired and times have been difficult . . .’

  ‘Oh, please, Mud. Please.’

  ‘Well. Since the accident.’

  ‘It wasn’t an accident, Muddah. He was drunk and he ran a red light. He drove into the guy and killed him. Right in Beverly Hills.’ Muddah looked at the carpet and thought she saw fluff.

  ‘It’s unusual to find people walking in Beverly Hills,’ she said distractedly.

  ‘Muddah!’

  ‘Don’t worry, Natasha,’ she said. ‘He is in the bedroom and that is where he will stay tonight. He is not . . . as you say, social.’