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

by Andrew O'Hagan

  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.’

  * There was always a story in Marilyn’s bid for seriousness. Arthur sought to capture it a number of times, but probably he got the male attitude towards it most accurately in his play After the Fall. His version of himself, Quentin, says of Maggie: ‘I should have agreed she was a joke, a beautiful piece trying to take herself seriously.’

  One night she really got into her stride and by the end of doing her make-up she was promising me a perfect night on the town. She put on a black cocktail dress and a white ermine coat and lifted me off the chair with a great whirl of laughter. ‘Say,’ she said, stroking me with her kid gloves. ‘You are one little dressed-up Maf, aren’t you, honey?’ ‘Well, actually. I’m dead beat . . .’

  ‘You’re coming with me tonight.’

  ‘But . . .’

  It wasn’t her fault she couldn’t hear me and only saw me

  * Love is strange. Emily said her dog seemed to understand her like a human being. And she punished him the way people punish those who know them too well. In Wuthering Heights, the dogs have a worse time of it than the humans.

  as she figured. That’s just how it is. She called the car service company and checked when the car was coming. I could hear the man speaking through the receiver in the muffled chipmunk-speak that works so well in the movies. ‘Miss Monroe, the car has been waiting for an hour.’

  ‘That’s his job, buster,’ she said.

  She put on a Dean Martin record and swayed to the music while drinking a glass of champagne. I bounced down the cushions onto the carpet and walked over to the window and licked her toes. They tasted fizzy. She was oblivious for a minute or two as she looked at a book called Baby and Child Care by Dr Benjamin Spock. The hesitation became operatic. Marilyn could turn waiting into a kind of surreal, existential caesura, as if her spirit had stopped for a spell. Then, she chucked the book onto the dining table and her face broke into the most beautifully lascivious smile. ‘Come on, Snowball,’ she said, scooping me up. Her eyes sparkled. ‘Our heart belongs to the Copacabana.’

  6

  T

  here was a neon halo over Times Square. The puddles were lighted pink and the bulbs made a cartoon beauty of Midtown, pulling shadows and poor men out of the alleys. The snow was falling and bright commerce took advantage of the dark, the changes in colour feeling like events, the battle of noises seeming like news. In the middle of all those twinkles, you might wonder if people even had a chance of spending their lives wisely.

  She wanted out at the corner of 44th and Broadway. The pharmacy was open all hours and we skipped into its methylated environs, the car going on a block to wait for us. We were way off course, but that was always part of the excitement. In the pharmacy, Marilyn caused looks you wouldn’t believe: she thought it would help to wear sunglasses but they only picked her out and made a show of her. I walked past the toothpaste and the mouthwash, sniffing out the perfumes. But after a minute I took my chance and ran out the door again. There was lots going on, especially at the theatres. The St James: Becket starring Laurence Olivier and Anthony Quinn. The Hudson: Toys in the Attic, a new play by Lillian Hellman, with Maureen Stapleton, Robert Loggia, and the long-serving Irene Worth. The Majestic: Camelot with Richard Burton and Julie Andrews, ‘the hit musical of the season’, an explosion down there of bright lamps and what I imagined were deep Arthurian greens. It must have been after 11 p.m. because the theatres were closed and the people who passed were sealed in their overcoats and a little high on cocktails.

  ‘Maf!’

  As she called my name, I saw a rat emerge from a spout on the building next to Twain’s Diner. The rat had a jittery, downturned little mouth, smirky with self-esteem, and it spoke in a broad Brooklyn accent that instantly drowned Marilyn out. ‘Mind your goddamn business,’ he said as I stared at him and yapped my loudest. ‘Summa us got woik to do.’ The horns hooted and my blonde companion shrieked at top volume as I bounded across the road to catch the wee bugger. The rat was a ringer for J. Edgar Hoover. He ran straight up Broadway and shouted over his oily shoulder while he shot away as fast as his pink feet could carry him. ‘Hey, fella. Pick on somebody your own size.’

  The rat disappeared through a crack in the wall of a pizza joint and was gone from my story. Damn. I was disappointed in myself: I wanted to show my companion I could be as good as Lailaps, the magical dog destined on every occasion to catch his prey. Marilyn quickly had me by the collar. ‘I am Lailaps,’ I said. ‘It was his job to guard the infant Zeus!’

  ‘You are a bad boy,’ she said. ‘Running off like that. Oh.

  Don’t you know something bad could happen?’

  ‘My master was Kephalos of Athens,’ I said. ‘He used me

  to hunt down the Teumessian Fox, the scourge of Thebes.’ ‘Quiet, Maf! No point crying,’ she said. ‘I was just so

  frightened when I saw you run into the road like that.’ There are good animals and bad ones, that’s for sure.

  Adonis was killed by a wild boar. Bad animal. Actaeon was

  turned into a stag and torn to pieces by his own dogs. Bad

  animals. Tom was hit on the head with a frying pan by Jerry

  and then pushed off a roof. Bad animal. And here I was with

  this nice, smart lady, being made to feel like Virgil’s Aethon,

  the war horse stripped of its insignia who comes weeping and

  drenching its face in mighty tears, all because I had tried to

  show some fierce and righteous opposition to Ugly. ‘I’m one of the good ones,’ I said rather pathetically, laying

  my head against her arm as we stepped back into the waiting

  car.

  We were going to see Sammy. Marilyn wasn’t talking to

  me in the car and I wasn’t particularly bothered. When it

  came to human sulkiness I always kept the same policy:

  forgive them, for they know not what they do. I borrowed

  this idea from accounts of the big man, the Deus absconditus,

  whose son Jesus says it in a film about somebody putting nails

  into his hands and feet. I think it was a Cecil B. DeMille film

  called The King of Kings, a bit lush, if you ask me. Anyway,

  they crucify Him, lots of people wail, then he jumps up

  like Sylvester the Cat or Wile E. Coyote after an accident

  involving heights. Marilyn told the driver to head for the

  Copacabana on East 60th Street and then she turned to the

  window and looked out at the passing shops, as I sat nuzzling

  her hand and the car moved slowly uptown. Eventually, she

  softened and touched my nose.

  ‘Hello there, Snowball,’ she said. I pressed my head into

  her coat and she lifted me up and kissed me. ‘There’s an Irish

  linen dress at Saks,’ she said. ‘They have it in palm green.

  Don’t let me forget to pick it up, okay Slugger?’

  The Copacabana was a nightclub with good food. They

  didn’t welcome dogs, but Marilyn was Marilyn, or, more to

  the point, Frank was Frank, and the driver brought the car

  round to the service entrance. ‘Oh boy,’ she said as the car

  pulled up in the rear car park. ‘Hold tight, Maf. I see some

  shutterbugs.’ In a second we were out of the car and I was

  inside her coat, my head pokin
g out as we headed for the

  door. Three cameras popped and I could feel her body stiffen

  as she smiled and turned for them.

  ‘Will you and Mr Miller be divorcing soon?’ shouted one. ‘Not tonight, boys,’ she said. ‘I mean, no comment.’ In Frank Sinatra’s world, the bigger the shot the closer

  you got, so his table at the Copa wasn’t just a table, it was

  an epicentre, the middle of a golden pond with lesser tables

  rippling away. The tables at the back had patrons who craned

  their necks as they blew their annual bonuses, happy to be

  in the room, enjoying the Christmas atmosphere. Marilyn

  sat down at Frank’s table, took a cigarette and accepted a

  light, half-closed her eyes and said ‘I don’t mind if I do’ when

  a champagne glass was offered. There was a small patter of

  applause from the dark corners of the room, and Frank,

  standing in an impeccable blue suit, scowled slightly and

  bent a busy ear first to Roddy McDowall, who was sitting

  next to Marilyn and me, and then, with a smirk on his face,

  to his friend Frank Todaro, who was sitting on his right. The

  applause was intriguing: it could lead you to believe that

  Marilyn was the discourse of the whole city. Sinatra pointed

  at me as he gave an account of my existence, so far as Sinatra

  understood it, going on to describe his part in the journey

  that led to my being with Marilyn. ‘Hey, sweetheart. How’s

  your dream dog?’ he said.

  ‘He’s swell,’ said Marilyn being Marilyn. ‘I guess he’s a

  naughty boy, just like you, daddy.’

  For Mr Todaro, that summed up the decade just past. He

  had no idea about the fun that was brewing, still believing

  America had reached its peak in the days of Al Capone.

  But it gave him a regular buzz to be sitting across from such

  a famous girl. Looking at Marilyn over there with a finger

  propped on her pretty cheek, he thought her health was the

  sort that could make everybody else feel better, and that

  was really something when it came to old heart-attacks like

  himself. She looked back with a look she’d been practising

  for years, a look that said, I would like to be nice to you

  but nothing more. I remember he tapped his fingers on his

  champagne glass as if he was playing an instrument, tipping

  it up to his face with expertise. He winked at us. From a

  decorating point of view, I wondered if his gloss wasn’t just a

  little too even. ‘There are two things you’ll never get a guy

  to admit he’s no good at,’ he said. ‘I’m talking about driving

  and I’m talking about making love.’

  ‘I know,’ said my owner. ‘And he’s often too fast at one

  and too slow at the other.’

  The dancing girls weren’t great dancers, but they whipped

  and pony’d their way around the floor in their Latin blouses.

  I’ve always found the maracas to be a strangely obnoxious

  instrument, but these girls shook them like they’ve never

  been shaken in the long annals of merriment. By the time

  Sammy Davis Jr came bojangling his way downstage the

  joint was delirious. I got under the table to drink from a bowl

  of water they put down, and then I went further under the

  table to enjoy the shoes, Mr Todaro’s brogues jumping to

  the music, Marilyn’s stilettos tapping a nervous beat on the floor. The smell of shoe polish and floor resin was strong, and so was the sense of a powerful connection, right here, right now, between coolness in public performance and mystique in political life. Looking at a small hole on the sole of Sinatra’s shoe, I felt at home with the perfect Democrats,

  attached to a new dictatorship of good intentions. I leapt back onto the chair. ‘Play regular and no messages,’

  said Sammy to the black drummer, and wasn’t Sammy looselimbed in his shiny suit? And wasn’t he drilling the whole

  history of human charisma into that song? If being cool

  was a slim-tie version of Hemingway’s thing about grace

  under pressure, then Sammy had it more than Frank: the

  inhabiting of a great and attractive personal calm in the face

  of overwhelming stress. ‘I’m coloured, Jewish, and Puerto

  Rican,’ he said. ‘When I move into an area I wipe the whole

  place out.’ Not only did everybody laugh, everybody felt

  privileged to laugh: they felt their laughter was an aspect

  of liberal confidence and authentic change. ‘Send Me the

  Pillow that You Dream On,’ he sang, and Marilyn brought

  her eyes to mine. She blew me a kiss. ‘Send me the pillow

  that you dream on.’

  ‘We’ve just seen the election of a new Chief Executive,’

  said Sammy. ‘President Kennedy.’ A round of applause. He

  held a cigarette in his hand and he rotated the hand as he

  spoke, watching the smoke wreath through his fingers.* ‘A

  great new President.’ He waited. ‘I also have a great new wife. Her name is May Britt and the next song is dedicated

  to her.’

  ‘Good for him,’ whispered Roddy McDowall into Marilyn’s

  ear. ‘The great new President wouldn’t let him and his wife –

  his white wife – into a reception because it was sure to upset

  the South.’

  ‘Gee,’ said Marilyn. ‘No kidding.’

  ‘Sammy held off on the wedding until after the election.

  She had to hold the breath, ya? He didn’t want to throw any

  schmeer at the Prez.’

  ‘Have you met the lady?’

  ‘You kidding? She’s been in hiding. The last time he

  wanted to marry a blonde the whole country decided to

  lynch him.’

  ‘She’s Swedish, you know.’

  ‘I know.’ He smiled. ‘A natural blonde.’

  ‘Whatever that means,’ she said. ‘And incidentally: fuck

  you.’

  Martinis were arriving. Hi-balls. Girls were passing with

  trays and the smell of sweat began to corrupt the fruity tang

  of expensive perfumes. People fanned themselves and now

  and then our party froze as an invited photographer got his

  moment. Mr Todaro was never in the pictures. It was nice

  to have my own chair beside Marilyn’s. I wasn’t interested

  in the soup, cool bowls of stringy asparagus, which none of

  them touched, apart from Todaro, whose mother told him

  never to waste food. A fly was floating in Marilyn’s soup and

  I bent down to hear him. He was some kind of Aesop guy,

  all messages, all wisdom, but I told him to relax and eat the

  cream because nobody was paying attention tonight. They

  were all drunk and the music was too loud for morality. ‘I know, I know,’ I said. ‘You want to give me some big story about how you have soaked your wings and destroyed all chance of flight. For the sake of a little pleasure you have put

  yourself in danger. Ho hum.’

  ‘Wrong again, buster,’ said the fly, sounding of the Bronx.

  ‘Fact is, I’ve had my thirty days. This is a neat way to go.

  You oughta be careful who you’re supping with – they ain’t

  stable.’

  ‘Who’s stable?’ I said. ‘Not you. Not me.’

  ‘That’s true,’ he said. ‘But we have no side. We take the

  world as it is and find comfort in its illusions. These people

  a
re nihilists, my friend. They say of the world as it is, that it

  ought not to exist, and of the world as it ought to be, that it

  will never exist.’

  ‘Dry your wings, Harvey,’ I said. ‘I’m not doing Nietzsche

  tonight. There’s too much fun to be had.’

  ‘Schopenhauer, actually,’ he said. Then a spoon came

  down on top of him and that was the end of that. Ella Fitzgerald sat at the table during Sammy’s break.

  ‘Hello baby,’ she said to Marilyn and she stroked my ear. ‘You look beautiful,’ said Marilyn.

  ‘That’s right, honey. I open my eyes and I step outside and

  I stop traffic. Look at this cute thing. He’s as cool as they

  come.’

  ‘He’s a customer all right,’ said Marilyn.

  ‘I’m not actually,’ I said. ‘It’s boiling in here. And this

  English actor keeps giving me licks from his champagne

  glass. See. Look at him!’

  ‘Cool as Christmas Day,’ said Ella. ‘Do you like dogs, Mr

  McDowall?’

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘You know the thing about children and dogs. And I was a child working with a dog – can you imagine

  what a trial that was?’

  ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘Lassie.’

  ‘A pretty smart dog,’ said Marilyn.

  ‘You’re telling me,’ he said. ‘That dog made Albert Einstein

  look like Jerry Lewis.’

  One of the waiters brought a note to my friend. She

  looked at it and showed it to Ella. ‘For Marilyn Monroe, a

  credit to the human race, mankind in general + womankind

  in particular. Brendan Behan.’ The women looked up and

  saw a bright-faced, tousled person raising a glass three tables

  over. Marilyn blew him a kiss and pressed the card into her

  purse. ‘A writer?’ said Ella. ‘An Irish writer. Playwright, no?’ ‘Sure,’ said Marilyn. ‘They’re blind but they see

  everything.’

  ‘Writers in general?’

  ‘Playwrights in particular, I guess.’

  The two women laughed. I gathered Mr McDowall was

  a great friend to women. They all adored him because he

  cared in an off-hand way about the things that mattered to