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

by Andrew O'Hagan

  ‘I like that,’ said Marilyn.

  ‘People. I mean women. I mean children too. We might often rely on men and then resent them quite deeply for our reliance on them.’

  ‘Is that Anna’s problem?’

  ‘Perhaps. But is it your problem?’

  I looked at Marilyn as she leaned into the desk a little and breathed in that thoughtful way. Say it, I said. I will not be happy until you say it. Go on. As your only puppy I demand that you use your voice. Marilyn smiled. ‘And maybe it’s your problem too, Dr Kris.’

  Good girl.

  And what did the analyst do, the daughter of the great paediatrician Oskar Rie, the childhood friend of Anna Freud and patient of Freud himself, what did she do in response to my owner’s point? She arranged the pencils in her pot and walked to the window, where she adjusted the wooden blinds and replaced an Indian cushion. Dr Kris turned with a serene expression and when she spoke it was obvious she was quoting from the book sitting open on her desk some yards away. ‘My starting point is a more specific clinical experience,’ she said. Marilyn squeezed me without much movement: that’s what people do with their animals, they hug them, they squeeze them, but in actual fact they are really at that moment hugging themselves. ‘It refers to a small group of individuals,’ continued Dr Kris, ‘whose biographical self-image is particularly firmly knit and embraces all periods of their lives from childhood on. Their personal history is not only, as one might expect, an essential part of their self-representation, but has become a treasured possession to which the patient is attached with a peculiar devotion.’ Marilyn stood up and placed me on the armchair. She lifted the black wig and the sunglasses. Dr Kris went aggressively on. ‘This attachment reflects the fact that the autobiographical self-image has become heir to important early fantasies, which it preserves.’

  ‘John Huston’s making a film of Freud’s life,’ said my owner while putting on her coat. ‘He wants me for Cecily. She’s based on Anna O. Do you think that’s a good idea?’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ said Dr Kris, without hesitation. ‘I think it is a most terrible idea altogether.’

  ‘Gee,’ said Marilyn. ‘I guess that’s decisive.’*

  By this point, Dr Kris had returned to her desk and was staring down at the book. She looked up. ‘We are stopping early?’ she said.

  ‘I guess,’ said Marilyn. ‘I have work to do.’

  ‘Okay, Marilyn.’ After a second she continued to read out loud from the book in front of her. ‘The patient’s conduct of life’, she said, ‘could best be viewed as a re-enactment of part of the repressed fantasies, which had found their abode in their autobiographical constructions.’

  ‘Abode is good,’ said Marilyn.

  Out in the lobby, waiting for the elevator, a sudden cold breeze came up from the park to refresh us. The snow would return tomorrow. I wanted to be back in New York in the years before the buildings, before the cars and the modern painters and the expensive shrinks, back in the days of Dutch coins and single ships in the harbour. Marilyn mouthed a few of her lines and dabbed her eyes and giggled. She put me inside the top of her coat and we waited for the elevator to come, the music already beginning to play behind us in the doctor’s room.

  * After several attempts to persuade my owner, the part was finally accepted by Susannah York. Jean-Paul Sartre, who wrote the original screenplay, was very keen on Marilyn. He didn’t get his way and neither did Marilyn. So much for Les Chemins de la liberté.

  8

  I

  f adventure is the rogue’s element, then movement is his oxygen. I had scampered and hirpled and rolled and begged, I had barked that day, I had run myself raw after tramps and cabs and helium balloons that carried the word ‘Esso’. In the afternoon I was finding new verbs to inhabit, just as the actors in 44th Street were rubbing their hair and wishing they were Marlon Brando. There’s a lot to be said for actors: they show humans what they are, though few of them can truly cope with the task. I have an image of Mrs Higgens in the kitchen at Charleston, arranging bluebells in a yellow vase. I see them whenever I consider an actor’s genius: the bluebells were real enough and damp with dew, yet they seemed, in that house, to be waiting for their transformation into art, which took weeks. By the time the paint was dry the actual blooms had withered to nothing. To create something permanent the young actors would have to use up everything they had.

  At that time in America, the raising of the personal could feel like a moment of historical proportions. In many ways that is the story of my life. All of those young acting people, like me, had come from elsewhere, but you heard their voices becoming American, becoming modern, joining themselves in those years to a new view of space and sex and money and art. Mr Strasberg filled the converted church on 44th Street with memories of the Moscow Art Theatre. Everything seemed so personal to Mr Strasberg, his eyes still filled with sadness about his brother Zalmon who died in the influenza epidemic of 1918. At the converted church on 44th Street, you heard the optimistic new voices struggling through the hallway, the sons and daughters of elsewhere. They had found their soil and named their source. They were American. In those corridors, and others like it, I felt the pressure of fresh voices adding themselves to a great tradition. And I have to say I felt myself to be part of the pressure.

  Here was the voice of Ishmael summoning the ferocity of some God; the voice of Walt Whitman singing itself and the open road; Fitzgerald’s voice, warbling sweet truths to the spirit of the age; Gertrude Stein and Bugs Bunny, pulling gags out of the hat; Mr Ed, the talking horse who arrived on television in 1961 and added his prints to the long wagontrail of American rhetoric; Huck Finn and Stuart Little, Elvis Presley and Emily Dickinson, Holden Caulfield and Tweetie Pie, Sal Paradise and Neal Cassady, Daffy Duck and Harold Arlen and John Kennedy and Augie March. American born. Fully voiced. It has never been easy for us Trotskyists to face, but it was America, dear, golden, childish America, that joined the narrative of personal ambition to the myth of a common consciousness, making a hymn, oh yes, to the future, the spirit, and the rolling land. It was all about hope. Billions of creatures closed their eyes at night wondering if the world would still be there in the morning. The Cold War was magical. It brought us into company with the vitality of the everyday in a context of mutually assured destruction. And some of us found our voices there, at the apex of ruin. I know I saw its contours and its warpedness and now join my voice to its knots and grooves. Standing in that corridor, I realised that a new notion had wormed its way into the American grain: it was un-Homeric; it brought a new urgency to our travels. The notion was this: you can’t go home again.

  Mr Strasberg came into the rehearsal space. Here he was, the guru, the magician, the mangy old cartoon cat. He was nervous about his own femininity, perhaps that was why he often spoke in verse, but in secret he had studied Colette and sought to think like a cat whenever possible. The students, gleeful and breathless with promise, sat in rows and examined Strasberg’s whiskery face. What was he thinking in those seconds before he spoke, they wondered? I’ll tell you, shall I? It rolled to me like a polished dime across the resined floorboards. He was thinking of Kiki-la-Doucette, Colette’s cat, who roamed the green-walled rooms of her apartment in the rue de Courcelles, depositing its dainty mess on the parquet floor. The atmosphere in the Paris apartment was bitter as Lee recalled it. Unhappy.* When Lee wanted to achieve a sense of intelligent peace, he would attempt to access a memory of snow as it fell in Paris on the last day of 1908. He remembered a letter of Colette’s where she spoke of the snow falling, ‘like a chenille veil, powdery and vanilla on the tongue’, and he considered this as he looked at the beautiful people sitting down before him in the Actors Studio. I was being looked after by a nice gentleman called Kevin McCarthy. I sat on his lap and watched Mr Strasberg begin to address the class, his eyes lifted ever so slightly in exaltation as his last thought trailed away, the thought of Colette out in the Paris snow with her pets, playing, as she wrote, ‘like
three mad women in the deserted streets’.

  * Mr Strasberg remembered Natalie Barney saying that Colette chose her animals for their resemblance to herself. She later gave Kiki the starring role in her novel Dialogues de bêtes, a masterpiece of the form, I believe.

  ‘I have a voice too,’ I said to Kevin. ‘It’s been getting bigger and better for months.’

  I must confess I laughed a second later. Sitting on Mr McCarthy’s lap, I caught his memory of something my owner had said to him. ‘Lee taught me how to breathe as an actor,’ she’d said. ‘I mean, there are other things breathing is useful for, or so I’ve heard.’

  ‘Hold tight, little guy,’ said Kevin.

  Lee Strasberg brought his eyes down from the ceiling and placed them directly on me, so I snuggled down, and he got going.

  mr strasberg’s introduction

  For this is our glory, dear actors, dear friends: To make ourselves equal to living portents. On occasion we falter, at times we forget, But heaven remains in the standard we set. We seek to capture the mysteries of time, Belief and so on,

  The common sublime.

  Imagination is the god of all,

  Do you hear that, Henry, Marilyn, Paul? Show nothing you know of the scene in advance, Just come home alone, as if from a dance, To find newness pealing like golden bells, From a place somewhere inside of yourselves. That is the system, the Method, the scheme: Hard work and so on,

  But source your dream.

  On the Lower East Side, kicking my heels, I once spent my days in a world like O’Neill’s. The bars, the docks, the immigrant ether, It made us sign up as the spirit’s keeper. Even now I can smell the wig-maker’s glue, Memory and so on,

  It makes us true.

  Do not debase the silence with applause. Acting is being private in public because The art of experiencing is the art of life, Not representing Garbo, or a man and wife, But total consciousness is the only aim, Feeling and so on,

  The human again.

  They found it painful not to clap. This was Strasberg at his famous, sentimental best, exultant and prodigious, with large tears sparkling in his ruined eyes. He was a model of how to move people with the sheer scale and power of personal emotion: he didn’t have better arguments than other teachers, purer lines or more original ideas, but he had deeper reserves of feeling, and he could draw them instantly to the surface in ways that struck the group as the very soul of charisma. He sought to persuade not with the subtlety of his case but with the size of his feelings, the technique everywhere of the vivid leader and the effective bully. But however lovingly he spoke of his actors and their potential, there was always a hint of bad temper behind it. Like all gods and many Americans, his invocation to success concealed a horrid rage at the idea of failure. The day they staged scenes from Anna Christie he was like an old king presenting his crown jewels. Mr Strasberg had never been so happy to be himself. He sat down.

  A large white cupboard stands in the corner of the cabin. On its door is a mirror hanging on a nail. In the centre is a table with two cane-bottomed chairs. A dilapidated, wicker rocker, painted brown, is also by the table. There is a newspaper. The sound of a steamer’s whistle is heard in the distance. Burke looks over the table at his rival Chris and says, ‘We’ll be seeing who’ll win in the end – me or you.’ Then Chris looks to Anna and says, ‘You stay right here, Anna, you hear!’ And in that moment Marilyn suddenly assembled Anna in actual time: she was fiddling with the hem of her skirt and tears filled her eyes and when she opened her mouth a string of saliva appeared for a second. She said nothing. Her consciousness seeming trapped between saying something and not saying it. She was thinking of a time years before on the beach at Santa Monica: there was salt on her lips from swimming and there was sand on the arm of Tommy Zahn. His arm was warm with the sun and he smelled so young and so completely like California. He said, ‘Norma Jeane. Did they put your mother in the sanatorium?’

  ‘Say, what am I, anyway?’ Anna says.

  Mat Burke: ‘’Tis not what you are, ’tis what you’re going to be this day – and that’s wedded to me before night comes. Hurry up now with your dressing.’ A flurry of words and Marilyn was thinking of Jim Dougherty telling her no decent girl works in a factory while her husband is away. They were living on Catalina Island. She heard the sea and again tasted the salt. The salt tasted like copper, like money. It occurred to her that she had always been a prostitute. Burke: ‘. . . she’s taking my orders from this out, not yours.’

  Anna laughs. ‘Orders is good!’

  She walks round the table and while she’s walking she strokes her hair and loses patience. Marilyn’s voice had disappeared into Anna: she feels she is vibrating with Anna and she is sad inside with Anna. She remembers her childhood friend Alice Tuttle and how much more ready for life Alice was than everybody else. She was too young for boys. Then the face of the girl disappears. Marilyn recalls a car Norma Jeane rescued from repossession by posing nude for a calendar. They paid her fifty dollars. Tom Kelley took the picture. She had to do other stuff, but the steering wheel was warmer than Tommy Zahn’s arm. The memories pass in seconds. She catches sight of Anna in the mirror as she passes her: she pauses to nip a hair from her tongue. ‘You can go to hell, both of you!’ says Anna. ‘You’re just like all the rest of them – you two! Gawd, you’d think I was a piece of furniture! I’ll show you! Sit down now! Sit down and let me talk for a minute. You’re all wrong, see? Listen to me!’

  She gets angry. She wants to break off a piece of the table. The Misfits comes into her mind and the sand at the edge of the desert in Reno and the brutality of that place and falling out of love. It was Arthur: he was married to his typewriter not to me. And that character, Roslyn. What was she? If that’s how he sees me then I’m not for him and he’s not for me. Some sex-pot. Some floozy. Playwrights are all shmucks wanting women to drown. They want them to drown and choke and end up dead. ‘I’m going to tell you a funny story so pay attention,’ says Anna. ‘I’ve been meaning to turn it loose on him every time he’d get my goat with his bull about keeping me safe inland.’

  She spoke and cried and tore at herself and mocked the air. ‘I want to tell you two guys something. You was going on’s if one of you had got to own me. But nobody owns me, see?’ And she says the line as if, more than anything, she has always wanted to be owned by someone. But not like that. She has long since forgotten about forgetting her lines: she discovers each one with the thought that lives there. She hangs over the table and at one point gently kisses the wood.* One of the foster families had a good table in the hall and the man came to her room one night and it is all here, a part of Anna’s wish to speak. She imagines a creak on the stairs and the salt again. ‘It wasn’t none of my fault,’ shouts Anna. ‘I hated him worse’n hell, and he knew it. But he was big and strong.’ She points to Burke. ‘Like you.’ Some of the audience began to cry: is Anna asking for punishment or release from something terrible? ‘That was why I ran away from the farm,’ she says. ‘That was what made me . . . a nurse girl in St Paul.’

  The man Kevin was tense: he squeezed me at the top of each line, his tension rhyming with the tension in the play. ‘If you’d ever been a regular father . . .’ Anna says. Marilyn unfurls herself. The audience could feel this delicate unmooring, this very human movement, and they could observe this person in search of a person to become, following Anna’s meagre shadow out from the page and into some strange, new, living reality. There are only a few chairs and props, but Anna appears to magnify the space and set us down in the broad world beyond ourselves. For creatures who like that sort of thing, it was a little miracle, something I wouldn’t want to take for granted during this account of my adventures. I’ve noticed that people cover themselves in material comforts to conceal their fears, but Marilyn dived into the centre of those fears and made it her work to find out what sort of person she might be. She played the part. Most people never go near the task and never know themselves. Most people imagine that be
ing themselves is a perfect alibi for not being something better.

  The barge and the harbour were terribly real. It was hard not to think of the boats against the wind in Fitzgerald’s novel and I smiled to remember the sway of that passage. That was the line of American literature most enjoyed by my rusticated friend Trotsky: he detected right there the zeal of liberty and imagined it to be fraudulent. (One of the things all the literary dogs like about Trotsky, by the way, is the notion that the country’s best literary critic could have been a natural world leader.) Marilyn had gone beyond herself: her Anna Christie came over like a liberated soul, a person saying no to some popular savagery, saying yes to idealism. I looked along the row and saw Mr Strasberg weeping into his hands and the audience holding its breath. She looked at us. ‘Will you believe it,’ Anna said, ‘if I tell you that loving you has made me – clean?’