It must have been catching because he stopped the car somewhere near the top of Beverly Glen, and went outside, muttering, cursing, to find a spot at the edge of the scrub where he could take a leak. I stared out at the silver stars. A cat came along and stopped by the road. It licked around its mouth when it saw me and spoke the beginning of a languid, narcissistic sonnet, made in the Italian style as a compliment to Frank. The window was down and I could feel the breeze coming up the canyon.
* The combination of cowboy shows and liquor wasn’t good for Nick. In that sense he resembled the great film director John Ford, who, every time he had a drop of the Irish, especially when in close proximity to gallop ing hooves and discharging firearms, would turn into a right-wing lunatic.
* Belka and Strelka were now back on earth, doing other stuff for the human race. I mean, they were having pupniks, which were proving to be top-of-the-range diplomatic presents. Khrushchev gave one to Kennedy’s daughter, Caroline.
Life is excessive but not enough,
The trees are my witness, passing cur. Around Tulip Lane I stopped for love, And breathed the heaven of a single her. She was perfect, knowing, wishful, dark, The living shadow of impervious night. Her love was mine for one remark, And yet I stole away in fright.
In the middle of the morning two days later, the men in Frank’s entourage were having a stupidity contest. I’m not saying they were all mutton-heads, but they took the menace of B-movie gangsters and mixed it with the gutsy malice you might find in a sorority circle, surrounding Frank in a bubble of free-floating aggression and mild bitchiness, a state of affairs which appeared to make him feel good about himself. Frank liked people to be frightened of him but also dependent; it was his favourite combination in someone he considered a friend. So these lugs from Chicago or New Jersey or, heaven knows, Palm Springs, they wouldn’t have jobs or proper roles, they would run errands, answer phones, pick up cars, make drinks, find girls, and act the wise guy whenever possible. But mainly they talked a steady, constant stream of pure nonsense to one another, very proudly plumbing the depths of their own ignorance beside a swimming pool of stulti fying blue. ‘Ah dunno, Tony. If you eat morels you get sick.’
‘No, shitstick. You get fat. It’s a well-known fact that mushrooms make you fat.’
‘Ask Legs over there.’
‘Ask him what?’
‘Ask him about being fat. He ain’t seen his cock in twenty years, the bitch got so fat.’
‘Hey, Legs. You been at the mushrooms again?’
‘Bite it, Marino. Your mother ain’t seen her pussy neither but everybody else has.’
‘Oh, Legs. My friend. That is cold.’
‘He ain’t been eating no mushrooms,’ said a little pastyfaced one with a mule laugh. ‘Legs been stuffing his face with fried chicken since Ernie Lombardi first came out for the Brooklyn Robins.’
‘I’m goin’ eat me this little pig,’ said a guy with gold in his teeth, a guy putting on his shirt. He’d just been inside with Frank at the massage tables. He walked towards me beside the pool and I yapped at him. ‘Fry me up some of them morels, Tony. Fry them nice in butter. I got me a little dog no bigger than a drumstick. He finger food.’
Grrrrrrrrrrrrazzle.
‘Woah, baby. I’m just jazzin’.’
‘There’s your finger food,’ said Legs, chortling into his chest and presenting his middle finger.
When I went inside the villa I saw Frank was now in the living room, suitcases open on the floor, sorting things out with his valet, Mr George Jacobs. He always took too much stuff everywhere he went. A few days in New York could be fifteen pieces of luggage. There was a fair amount of broken glass from the night before. Some news about Kennedy had riled him, and he had lifted a piece of Lalique crystal and thrown it at the fireplace. ‘Don’t sweat it, Pops,’ he had said in his bathrobe while chuckling to Mr Jacobs. ‘The world’s our ashtray, right?’ Mr Jacobs had seen many disruptions not only from Frank but from everybody around him. First time Frank’s mother met George she looked him up and down, saw he was wearing a white jacket, saw he was black and ready to serve her, and she turned to Frank and said, ‘Who do you think you are, Ashley Wilkes? Well, I ain’t no Scarlett O’Hara.’
Nimes Road. What a place. I had managed to escape the house that morning and had enjoyed ten minutes alone in Nimes Road before Mr Jacobs came to find me. Frank lived in a Tuscan villa at the top of the lane, next door to a French chateau. On the other side of Nimes Road there was a miniWhite House with Greek colonnades, and further down, in the direction I wandered, was the perfect example of an English country cottage, covered in ivy and roses. The real difference between humans is that some care about authenticity and some don’t care at all. The people in Bel Air don’t care. To them, Frank’s villa was nicer than any genuine villa ten miles from Lucca. If one were to speak of the Californian vernacular, I wouldn’t, personally, be speaking about adobe fincas in a beanfield: I would be talking about that wee English cottage with its perfect symmetry and its apple trees. There was something beautifully real, something essential and human at the core of its inauthenticity. Dogs have always lived comfortably with that kind of reality. There it is. There it was, Frank’s Tuscan villa on Nimes Road, an importation of rosemary bushes and terracotta, the fountains chucking jets of water into the air of this beautiful desert.
Frank’s best friends had long since forgotten there were limits to their superiority over the world. They had Italy’s might without its sense of ruin, so plenty of Augustus but no Epictetus, plenty of Machiavelli but nothing of The Leopard, and they obviously believed man was in the business of getting better all the time. The mutton-heads assumed they were the summit of what the universe had to offer, which was immodest of them indeed, not to say cute, but I admit that sometimes their assumption of my subservience got to me. While they scoffed and burped, I wanted to present them with Swift’s talking horses.
I don’t actually blame the Italians. I blame the French. I blame the Enlightenment. I blame Descartes in particular. He think therefore he Am – well, good for He. Good for Am. And then this devoted father of modern science wishes to argue with Montaigne, my personal friend, and that nice Pythagoras, saying animals cannot be thinking beings because they have the apparatus for speech but don’t use it, therefore no thoughts, no speech, no Am. To think – ah, to think! – the little brown mice housed all those years in the Collège Royal Henri-Le-Grand at La Flèche, who whispered mathematics in Descartes’s dishcloth ears while he slept, and the crows who spoke law as they flew over his head at the University of Poitiers, to think that none of them is recognised in his modish reasoning. Oh, there you have it, the abundant arrogance and certainty of man. I don’t know where I picked it up, Mr Connolly probably, but I have in my memory parts of a letter Descartes wrote to the Marquess of Newcastle in 1646. I’m afraid to say it vexed me to remember it when I looked on the mutton-heads by that nicely invented house in Nimes Road. ‘I am not worried that people say that men have an absolute empire over all the other animals; because I agree that some of them are stronger than us, and believe that there may also be some who have an instinctive cunning capable of deceiving the shrewdest human beings. But I observe that they only imitate or surpass us in those of our actions which are not guided by our thoughts. All the things which dogs, horses, and monkeys are taught to perform are only expressions of their fear, their hope, or their joy; and consequently they can be performed without any thought. Doubtless when the swallows come in spring, they operate like clocks.’
Mmmwwwwince. Thank you for that, Mr Descartes. It wasn’t a dog that wrote the First Meditations but it wasn’t a dog that invented the atom bomb either. ‘Who taught the tortoise to heal a bite with hemlock?’ (The question was present at my birth: spoken by Simplicius Simplicissimus in a novel my owner adored.) ‘Who teaches the snake to eat fennel when it wants to slough its skin?’ The memory of mouse-avoider got me bristling and yappy, as did the man with the gold in hi
s teeth, but I felt better once I’d followed Frank’s valet into a closet off the main bedroom that housed only neckties. ‘Too damn many,’ said Mr Jacobs. ‘I tell you, Rinty. Mr Sinatra has had girlfriends younger than some of these ties.’
The room was a study in pastel baroque, a place of menacing contentment, like those sets in the films of Douglas Sirk.* Most dogs have a big heart when it comes to interior decoration, especially Maltese dogs. During my travels I often thought of my brothers and sisters: would they, like me, be at carpet-level somewhere nice, perhaps inspecting a grand sitting room in Kensington or dappling among the yellow chinoiserie in a European boudoir? My hero Trotsky would have made a great interior decorator: after all, decoration is all about personality and history, the precise business of making, discovering, choosing the conditions of life and placing them just so. The best decorators finding it quite natural to inject a splash of the dialectical into their materialism. Papa Hemingway once said that prose is architecture not interior decoration, but he was only half right: good prose is both, as he must have known in the velvet chambers of his crimson heart. Papa was another one of those geniuses who spent his entire life making a hysterical effort to appear effortfree, sitting down there in his all-day pyjamas with those overflowing tumblers of Dubonnet, shaping his grievances into the mannered simplicities of The Old Man and the Sea. In fact, Papa at his best was like Wallace Stevens, the great, inspired Interior Decorator of American Literature, the tycoon of poetry, whose idea of order at Key West was one where nothing was given and everything was made. ‘For she was the maker of the song she sang . . . repeated in a summer without end.’
I mused on this while Mr Jacobs laid several ties on a stool of dark yellow. This floor of Frank’s house had been done by Alexander Golitzen, an art director who had worked at Universal, an expert in marrying the arts of sedation to the blaze of Technicolor. That’s what Frank wanted more than anything, a house built of certainty, a style that knew itself, a yellow chair in a very blue room, a dark suit and a perfect cream tie. Mr Jacobs looked down at me as I scratched the fibres of the carpet and licked my paws. Cars were being revved outside: the mutton-heads were arriving and leaving with gratuitous despatch. I was licking a bone and remembering the words from Mrs Higgens’s box of cookery cuttings in the kitchen at Charleston, all those yellowed papers talking about meats and bones being succulent and braised.
Mr Jacobs was considerate and he would often switch on the television if he saw I was in a room alone. When we ambled back into the living room I saw Mr Sinatra was getting heavy with some guy who had his back to me. It was Mr Lawford and my friend turned on the TV as a way to avoid embarrassment. The TV was way over in the corner of a giant room and I sat down in front of a bunch of Tom and Jerry cartoons. Now, not all cats are poetic just as not all poems are cat-like, but this kid Tom was wild and he ran around like a thing on fire, dodging the musical soundtrack, lurching – I’d say scrabbling, scatterising – like everybody you ever saw in those years, between brutality and sentiment. But boy those cartoons were a great venue for politics. That day at Mr Sinatra’s was maybe the first time it occurred to me that a lot of those Democrats would get ahead quicker if they watched more cartoons. That’s where you saw the world growing up. Frank was mostly oblivious to the call of reality, however, and was arguing with Lawford about some aspect of the Kennedy plans.
‘The hell with that, Peter,’ he said. ‘Okay? The hell with it. I’m knocking myself out over here. Do you get that?’
‘Of course, Frank.’
‘Do you see that? I’m taking pills to sleep. I’m sick in my fucking stomach over this – this bullshit. Who’s feeding this shit to the newspapers – Mr Sinatra’s “connections”, Mr Sinatra’s “associations”? I’ll feed their fucking children to the piranhas at Oceanworld, d’you hear me? I’ve had bad ink before.’
‘Of course.’
‘Oceanworld, I’m saying.’
‘Frank.’
‘I’m organising a fucking inauguration, Peter. Do you see what I’m doing? I’m getting every motherfucking star on the planet to come and adorn the Kennedys’ motherfucking party. I’m knocking myself out. I’m making myself crazy over here.’
‘I know, Frank . . .’
‘Don’t give me “I know”, okay? I’ll cut your fingers off.’
‘The family appreciates it . . .’
‘Don’t give me “the family”, you smooth-assed English creep. Don’t give me that.’
‘Frank.’
‘I’ll fucking destroy you. Do you hear me? I’ll put my fucking hand through your fucking chest and pull out your fucking liver, you fucking limey shmuck. I’m knocking myself out for these people. I’m putting myself on the line for these boys. Do you hear me? These invitations are to personal friends of mine. Personal friends! You tell Jack or Ted Sorensen or Jesus H. Christ that these gentleman are coming to the capital as my guests. You dig? Otherwise they can forget the show. I’ll do a Farewell Gala for Adlai Stevenson. I’ll do a fucking roast for Richard Nixon. You tell them. You tell Ted Sorensen I’m out. I’m done.’
‘Please Frank. Jack knows . . .’
‘Don’t give me what Jack knows! I’m about to leave for New York to do more work for Jack Knows.’
Tom and Jerry used to be called Jasper and Jinx. The cat had the mouse by the tail and was trying to make him run over the Welcome mat into his mouth.
‘I will sort it out, Frank. Honest.’
‘Today, Peter. I want it fixed today.’
The black housekeeper came in with a broom and a big ol’ Southern voice, a big fat lady with orange stockings and blue slippers. She shouted, ‘Jasper! Jasper!’
‘There are big things to be done, Frank. I’m sorry about any confusion. Dr King’s lobby is on their tail and Jack’s special assistant Woodruff is kicking up. Jack’s just trying to keep everything on the down-low, with the segregation issue pressing in and the right-wing columnists . . .’
You never saw the black lady’s face. Never. The respect for social realism at MGM meant you never saw the face of a domestic servant in a cartoon presentation. Yes, ma’am. And here was the faceless lady coming down the stairs shouting at poor Jasper for breaking up the house. ‘Wait just a minute you goodfor-nothing cheap fur coat. One more breakings and you is out. O-W-T out!’
‘Well, Slim. Just you remember that some of us have been pushing for change just as long as brother-in-law over there has been pushing for office.’
‘Yes, Frank.’
‘And we’ve paid a price for it. The world has changed but we’ve paid a price.’
‘Indeed. I know that.’
‘You get that?’
‘I got it, Frank.’
‘You get it?’
‘Certainly I do.’
And the clever mouse tricks the cat and makes him break up the house all over again. The housekeeper comes down the stairs and she’s still got no face, no history, and that big Southern voice coming at you with her broom and her good sense about the house. ‘When I says out I means out!’ The door is flung open and out goes the cat. The mouse is happy with the world.
* 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 wa
n 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?’
The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe Page 5
