None of the audience knew the story Stanislavsky used to tell about the dog that came to his rehearsals. The dog would sleep through the sessions but would always wake up and appear at the door just as it was time to go. The Great Russian Ham said this was because the dog always responded to the moment the actors returned to speaking in normal voices. For all their truth-seeking, the players would always be something other than themselves while acting, and the dog could hear the change.* This seemed so germane to my interests that I sat on the metal chair for a long time thinking about it and the group buzzed around the studio doing congratulations and kisses.
The well-wishers were packed into Strasberg’s office, the famous ones and the political types, Shelley Winters, Kim Stanley – ‘wonderful, honey, what a knockout’ – and a dozen others, including a studious young plant from the FBI. Marilyn sat on a chaise longue drinking champagne: in the aftermath of her triumph she was beautifully draped and relaxed, drink in hand, cigarette trailing smoke to the stained ceiling. Sitting at her feet I was happily aware of how much we resembled Georges Clairin’s painting of Sarah Bernhardt in the Musée de la Ville de Paris. Ms Bernhardt is pictured semi-recumbent on a velvet sofa, her lupine borzoi lying on the floor beside her, both lady and dog serene as they stare out, knowing they must be the focal point of the people’s amazement.
Marilyn’s fame made people giddy. After the class a little party developed across the street, the actors getting loud in a neighbourhood bar. Mr Strasberg came sidling into the place, putting his hands up like a man who was happy to say he didn’t know anything about bars. His wife Paula was there and she fiddled with her purse. ‘A small beer, bubee?’ she said, fluttering a sheaf of dollars at the bartender.
‘That’s right,’ he said, smiling. ‘Like Prince Hal in the Boar’s Head Tavern. It is no felony to drink small beer.’
‘Everything is in Shakespeare, right?’ said a bright young kid, bulky-headed, not good-looking, full of spittle and admiration for the theatre. He studied Shakespeare and Ibsen all day long and half the night in a cold-water apartment on MacDougal Street.
‘Ah, the Bard,’ said Strasberg. He liked to be playful in a playful situation, but the teacher was vain of his learning as much as his passion. It was his habit to pass off his mistakes as if they made him more interesting and more reliable, an English affectation he had picked up years before. ‘I think I may just have confused the Henry plays,’ he said. ‘Such is the way of supposed expertise, young man.’ The boy nodded and sipped from his beer. He was preparing another salvo. The guru detected as much and he winked and moved towards the main table where Marilyn was sitting. Strasberg had the leader’s instinct for self-preservation: he wasn’t likely to squander his bon mots just like that, on one student. Before he entered into his inspirational mode Strasberg’s vanity demanded a very good house.
The group round the table were discussing how NBC had recently banned an eight-minute sketch from The Art Carney Show because it spoofed the President-Elect. ‘Nothing at all should be allowed to stand outside comedy,’ said Paula. ‘It is absurd.’
‘I dunno,’ said the actor Paul, who had played Anna Christie’s father. ‘Nothing is sacred if you start taking off the President and his wife. Some things are just worth being solemn about.’
‘Wow,’ said Marilyn. ‘Somebody tickle him.’
‘That’s just plain wrong,’ said Ms Winters. ‘Just plain wrong, goddamnit. Look here, Paul. There’s absolutely nothing that ain’t funny if you think about it. Nothing should be banned for being funny.’
‘Certainly comedy is the, um – the most difficult of the dramatic forms to get right,’ said Marilyn. She looked towards Mr Strasberg.
‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘We were just talking about Shakespeare over there. Myself and this young man.’ He nodded to the fellow as if to confirm that he had made a good decision for both of them. ‘And Shakespeare knew that comedy if anything was a raising of the tragic to meet the dimensions of the truly human.’
‘Holy Kazooey, Lee,’ Marilyn said. ‘I’m gonna ask you to say that to Billy Wilder next time he makes me dance my ass off and trip over my ukulele.’ The group laughed and clinked glasses and swayed into new bits of conversation, then Marilyn brought them together again by lifting me onto the table.
‘Ah-ha,’ said Strasberg. ‘The very dog. It is Crab himself.’
‘Who?’
‘Crab – the only dog to have a real part in the whole of Shakespeare. A comical turn, no less, in The Two Gentlemen of Verona. He has been called the biggest scene-stealer in English literature. See how he yaps at me. And he turns to you and to you.’
‘Don’t be cruel, Lee.’
‘Not cruel. He’s a joyful dog. Come, Crab: tell us whether friendship or love is the better thing.’
‘Don’t be cruel to Marilyn’s dog, bubee,’ said Paula at the edge of the table. ‘He’s fretting.’
‘No, I’m not. I’m not fretting, you fl o y. You upside-down bat.’
‘See his soft muzzle. He frowns,’ said Strasberg, getting into his Shakespeare voice. ‘ “I think Crab my dog be the sourest-natured dog that lives: my mother weeping, my father wailing, my sister crying, our maid howling, our cat wringing her hands, and all our house in a great perplexity, yet did not this cruel-hearted cur shed one tear.” ’ He clasped my chin. ‘ “He is a stone, a very pebble-stone, and has no more pity in him than a dog: a Jew would have wept to have seen our parting.” ’
‘Gevalt!’ cried Mrs Strasberg.
The young Shakespeare scholar from MacDougal Street stood up with his glass, suddenly beaming with actorliness. ‘ “I am the dog,” ’ he quoted. ‘ “No, the dog is himself, and I am the dog – oh, the dog is me, and I am myself; ay, so, so.” ’ Strasberg waved his hand over the table and laid a finger on my collar.
‘Now the dog all this while sheds not a tear,’ he said, ‘nor speaks a word; but see how I lay the dust with my tears.’
‘You’re very devout,’ said Marilyn to the young Shakespearean. She scrutinised him, thinking aloud. ’Why don’t you smile at stupid, happy old me?’ The boy turned bright grey. The pendant light was hot, a spotlight, and my paws felt soft on the sticky table. Suddenly I felt my eyes must be darting here and there to find shelter from the thunder at the edge of the heath. A hovel. I could feel the cold blast on my eyeballs and the damp in my bones. ‘Poor Maf’s a-cold,’ I said to them, my audience, my friends the actors in their moment of glee. I reached inwards. All the way in. I recalled some humiliation I once suffered at the hands of Evelyn Waugh and a croquet ball. I must have been the merest puppy and was pootling on the lawn at Bushey Lodge, where Mr Connolly lived. Yes: I suppose I was gambolling. Evelyn was making a point, a facetious point, naturally, about the ugliness of George Eliot, and when I tried to correct him along Latin principles he knocked a croquet ball across the lawn at vicious speed and it struck me in the centre of my infant forehead. The episode came back as a sense memory. I used it to deepen my performance on the table at the back of Jack’s Bar. I think the Method got to me: I was shivering with cold and forgot myself for a second.
‘Fetch some water for the little mutt,’ said Strasberg. ‘He’ll be going crazy with all this noise.’
‘Uh,’ said Mrs Strasberg. ‘The noise of bars would leave you insensible. Morbid places.’
‘We were talking about comedy,’ said Shelley. An entertaining New York publisher I once met said that Shelley Winters was the kind of woman who brings out the homosexual in all of us. She certainly lived in defiance of her own vulnerability. I only met her a couple of times, but I could see she was always keen to give people the details about themselves – give them their character, as Mummy Duff, mother of my Scottish breeder, used to say – and one suspected most of her bullying was either unconscious or else came under that dreadful heading True Friendship. ‘What about you, Paul? You haven’t cracked a smile since 1932.’
‘That’s right – comedy,’ said Paul,
ignoring her, but certainly fated to brood about her remarks later. ‘You gotta work out the politics of the joke. I mean, Freud, right? At the beginning of comedy the idea was to have a whole bunch of actors leaping around the stage wearing huge padded penises.’
‘Fertility!’ said Strasberg.
‘Is that what it was?’ said Marilyn. She looked like a child again and she bit into her lip.
‘The Greeks played the comedies after three days of tragedy,’ he said.
‘That’s right,’ said Mrs Strasberg. ‘Comedy was the appendage. Right? Light relief after so much horror.’
‘The appendage,’ said her husband. ‘Very good, Paula. Very good, the appendage.’
‘I guess I wouldn’t want to be a joke,’ said Marilyn. ‘It’s so easy to become a joke.’ She spoke in a whisper.
‘You have that gossamer quality that Garbo had as a comedienne,’ said Strasberg. He loved to flatter Marilyn, because he believed what he said, and because he loved to see her glow so visibly among her colleagues. (It also enlarged him to see how much she needed his approval.) ‘It is always a matter of intelligence and instinct.’
‘And intention!’ I said. ‘George Orwell said that every joke is a tiny revolution.’
‘Don’t forget, when you talk about comedy,’ said Mrs Strasberg, ‘that one has to fight as much for its truths as for any truth on earth. A hundred thousand people were placed in the Gulag for telling jokes. That’s the only point I want to make.’
‘And Khrushchev has released them, right – the comedians I mean?’
‘Yes,’ said Mrs Strasberg. ‘He released them from prison the same month he sent the tanks into Hungary.’
‘It will always be a big image,’ said Ms Winters. ‘The image of those comedy writers out on strike. We campaigned a little for Wallace after the war, didn’t we, Marilyn? We were just kids. And you’d see these comedy guys huffing and puffing. These were great writers.’
‘Yeah,’ said Marilyn. ‘I dated one of them. The guy who worked at UPA.’
‘The cartoonist!’
‘Handsome guy. Too many wives.’
‘This is West Coast talk now,’ said Strasberg to the guy from McDougal Street.
‘Hold on a minute, Lee,’ said Ms Winters. ‘These guys had walked out on Disney back then. They were strikers.’
‘Socialists,’ said Marilyn.
‘It was about style,’ I said. I leapt onto my owner’s lap. ‘It was an argument about style. Your men thought Disney was promoting the idea that animation should mimic cinema reality, an imitation of real life. These guys believed that was the wrong aesthetic: they wanted to let comedy and politics have a romance, you see, on the plane of new design, new charac ter, graphic freedom. United Productions of America was a model for how art and social awareness could improve reality.’
‘Their cartoons had a message,’ said Ms Winters.
‘They certainly did,’ said Marilyn. ‘A message? They were pink all the way through.’
‘Well,’ said Winters. ‘The Committee came down on top of them like a grand piano.’
‘I can’t believe we’re talking about cartoons,’ said Lee Strasberg in his Uncle Vanya mode.
‘Oh, shush, you old goat,’ I said. ‘If it’s not bleeding from the eyes and tripping downstage carrying a giant egg-timer you think it must be frivolous.’ Marilyn placed me back on the table. Strasberg was fidgeting. He didn’t really know anything about comedy and he liked to think that art was really beyond politics. He always thought the words ‘popular culture’ had a whiff of gunpowder about them.
‘UPA lost its brightest workers in a week,’ said Ms Winters. ‘Anybody with any sort of communist affiliation. They stopped producing social conscience stuff altogether. Yet everybody now copies their style.’
‘Wow,’ said Marilyn, her thoughts drifting. ‘He was such a sweet guy.’
A waiter came with another round of drinks and I was reminded of a certain English habit that I deplored – the upper orders arguing in favour of radical politics while their servants set down their tea in front of them. Marilyn turned to Paula as the conversation turned to Clifford Odets. I snuggled into a corner of Marilyn’s coat and fell asleep. I don’t know for how long, but when I woke up I noticed many of the group had left and Marilyn was fizzy. It was the end of a conversation and Shelley Winters was looking lovingly at Marilyn as she tried to be helpful. ‘Some actors are nobody,’ said Shelley, ‘they don’t exist at all. Like Laurence Olivier. He doesn’t actually exist as a person. Even his wife says so. That’s what makes him such a good actor. And I say this as a great compliment to you, honey – the greatest compliment in the world: you are too much of a person to be a great actress. You have an existence.’
‘That’s nice, I guess.’
‘Yes, you are somebody. She’s called Norma Jeane.’ ‘Oh.’
‘She’s a beautiful thing,’ said Ms Winters. ‘But she can only be herself. That’s all I’m . . . that’s the thing I’m trying to say.’
They were both drunk I think. After a moment my fated companion said the most perplexing thing. She said: ‘The best way for me to find myself as a person is to prove to myself that I’m an actress.’
‘But you’re already a person, darling. Too much of a person. You will always be a star and you’ll always work. I’m your friend and what I’m saying is for your own good. What you do is not acting – it’s being. You should be proud you have too much substance to do what they do.’
‘Who’s they?’
‘Those people.’ She paused. ‘Garbo. Marlon. There’s nothing there. Absolutely nothing. Zilch.’
Marilyn ate her soup and thought of Mr Strasberg, who had talked about comedy but who seldom laughed. All evening he had sat at the table like one of Colette’s ancient cats, his chin cupped in his hand, those small, cold nostrils dilated by his violent purring.
Outside it was dark. We were both huddled into Marilyn’s coat and the neon down the street was fuzzy blue. Marilyn was crying when Charlie appeared. She had seen him a few times since the night at the Copacabana, but always in passing, a wave on the way into a town car or a blown kiss from some window. But tonight he was outside the Actors Studio and he came up to ask if she was all right. ‘Hello, Charlie,’ she said. She was pleased to see him. She had a headache as she walked up the sidewalk and she felt she had lost her bearings, the tears a little unsure.
‘Let me help you, Marilyn. Can I get you a cab?’
‘Would you do that for me, Charlie?’ He skipped off and in a few minutes a yellow cab came to a stop right in front of her Ferragamos. Charlie came up behind the cab with the street light splashing on his face. ‘It was a long class today, huh? Are you sure you’re okay? Don’t need anything?’
She touched his chin. ‘You’re a sweet kid, Charlie.’
‘What about Staten Island?’ he said. ‘We talked about it the night of the premiere, remember? I said I’d show you Staten Island. We can eat hotdogs.’
‘Gee,’ she said. ‘A ferryboat.’
‘What d’ya say?’
‘I’d like that, Charlie.’
‘How about Monday?’
‘Monday?’
‘Yeah. Let’s go to Staten Island on Monday.’
* She also thought of Garbo. She imagined her playing of Anna was a footnote to Garbo and a joining of hands with the vanished actress.
* I love Stanislavsky’s dog, mainly because his behaviour opposes that horribly crude notion of my species set forth by Mr Pavlov. Whenever I think of the scientist’s salivating fools, so machine-like in their reflexes, it makes me ashamed. Russian dogs of the period, like their owners, were not so happily enslaved. And Stanislavsky’s dog had an artist’s intuition.
9
T
hey didn’t like dogs at Kenneth’s, the hairdressing salon on 54th Street. Not that it bothered me a great deal: Kenneth was one of those men with a large petted moustache and a mind like a pecan pie, sticky and dense. Kenne
th always imagined he was about four minutes away from ruling the world, standing in a pair of plaid trousers, his scissors ready to dive osprey-like into the hair of some turbulent matron. Usually he stood in that very pose ready to warple a new piece of gossip into existence, but the day we came in he was very huffy. ‘Even for you Marilon, dahling. For you, even, my dahling Marilon, I cannot have animals in the salon. Even seeing him! Even looking at him, please!’
‘O come on, sugar. No more than five minutes. I need you to comb this out.’
‘Marilon. It breaks my heart. You call me up and I come here and we are not even open yet and already you are saying to me “dogs”.’
‘Five minutes, I promise you.’
The whole point of this was Samson, the salon’s late cairn terrier puppy. Poor Samson. He had an altercation with a laundry van and didn’t come back to life. Kenneth turned his back mumbling the kind of complaints that sound like prayers. Marilyn sat down and I stayed by the front door, Kenneth giving me hateful looks as he went to work and blinked back tears. It was a strange process in the chair over there: she was asking him to de-Marilynise her for a day of what she called ‘normality’. (This last period in New York involved many such efforts.) She could just have washed her hair in the apartment, but that wasn’t her style of de-styling: she wanted the ritual breakdown, the taking apart of last night’s heroine. On the wall there was a photograph of Samson carrying rollers in his teeth; they say he was a working animal at Kenneth’s in full-time employment. I suppose that should have made me feel more of his pain, but human sentiment takes a very heavy toll on one’s natural empathy. The whole process of de-Marilynising took much longer than she said it would – involving cold cream, lashes, the endless tying of a Bloomingdale’s scarf – so I closed my eyes and thought of other working animals. My head was full of Trompette in Germinal, that sad, hard-working French horse, feeling its way forward in a culture where darkness prevailed and only darkness had meaning.
The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe Page 12
