‘Dozens,’ I said.
‘Dr Kris!’ said Marilyn. She was laughing as she lay back on the bench.
‘Paula Strasberg,’ I said.
‘Richard Nixon!’
‘Mrs Trilling!’
‘Arthur. What d’ya think, Maf? Arthur.’
Sometimes it made me sad that she couldn’t hear me. Marilyn chuckled, her eyes peeping out from the white stuff. She stroked me. She was none the wiser. Madame Rupa just stared at us from the beaded curtain, her brow furrowing in the company of two more crazies. She was none the wiser either. She instituted sanity by talking more about the song that still played, its sitars melting into the air conditioning. ‘The words are Dari,’ she said. ‘From Afghanistan. I salute the breeze that has passed from your valleys, it says. I will kiss anyone who can mention your name.’ She loved reading the crime pages of the LA Times. That is where she turned when the songs and the stories ran out.
There were so many nice places to pee in LA. I mean, if you have to pee you have to pee, and why not next to the swimming pool at the Château Marmont, right? When Marilyn lived in Doheny my favourite place was the corner of Cynthia and Doheny, where a giant jacaranda hung over the road. Over those weeks back in Los Angeles, the Doheny apartment filled up with belongings: the first thing I recall being brought in was a large bronze bust of Carl Sandburg. She brought some records and as many clothes as would fit in two trunks, which her friend Ralph drove all the way from New York in his old Buick. I noticed the apartment was brighter and so was she: her moody New York books were left behind, as if they had taught her everything they could. No Fitzgerald any more. No Carson. No Camus. Only one of the Dostoevskys. This was the beginning of Marilyn’s last period. She was in her final months, and the only books she tended to keep on the shelves were children’s books, Beatrix Potter, Dodie Smith, Peter Pan, the books she imagined were meant for her alone. ‘It didn’t fail,’ she said about New York to one of her friends. ‘It will always be there, right?’
Gloria Lovell, Sinatra’s assistant, lived in the same apartment block. She knew me from my first weeks in America – it was Gloria who arranged the handover with Mrs Gurdin in Sherman Oaks – and now she was the nicest neighbour in the world, coming in with sausage casseroles and all sorts of love. The trouble with Frank’s people was never Frank’s people, it was always Frank, who at that time was so puffed up and antsy about the Kennedys he was constantly a bag of nerves. ‘Such a great find, your dog,’ said Gloria. ‘Little Maf. The only helpful present Frank ever gave anybody.’
‘Did you know the people Natalie’s mother got him from, the breeders I mean?’ asked Marilyn.
‘I’m not sure. English wackos is all Natalie said to me.’ Marilyn looked down at me in her arms and half-closed her eyes.
‘I take him every place,’ she said. ‘He’s my mascot.’
‘You’re going to see Natalie,’ said Gloria. ‘Frank’s putting together a little thing on Friday.’
I was assuredly part of the life of the boulevard. Frank’s thing was a private dinner at Musso & Frank’s. Natalie was there that night and I got the feeling Sinatra was just showing off his favourite girls to a hoodlum chum of his, Frank DeSimone, who wore glasses and called himself ‘Frank’s Attorney’. It was just the five of us. They say Frank’s Attorney killed Hooky Rothman in broad daylight, in back of Mickey Cohen’s haberdashery shop on Sunset. He was sharp on the dressing front: silk tie, English suit. At Musso & Frank’s, Sinatra was giving out about the late Whittaker Chambers, telling everybody what a shmuck he had been, what a phoney. At the same time he ordered the girls’ food for them, insisting they try this or that dish from the menu. ‘Listen, honey. You gotta have this zucchini, okay. You’re having it. I’m talking fried.’ He looked up at the waiter. ‘Tell Bob the oil has to be fresh.’
‘Could I just have rice pudding?’ said Marilyn.
‘What, you crazy? Huh?’ He looked at the other Frank and shrugged. ‘These dames. Did you hear that? Can you believe that, Frank? They don’t know how to eat food, these girls. They don’t know how to live. They want to eat dessert before they’ve had fish. They won’t eat pasta. What a goof. Hey, Clyde! Do me a favour. Bring this lady the Shrimp Louie and a salad deluxe. After that the spaghetti with meat sauce.’
‘Wow, Frankie. I can’t eat so much food,’ said Marilyn. Natalie laughed nervously and proceeded to knock over a bourbon highball. ‘What a klutz,’ said Frank. ‘Can you believe that? Can you get these girls? What a klutz.’
‘I’ll have the baked apple,’ said the Attorney. Everything he said was spoken with a menacing softness. Sinatra looked at him. It was odd to see Frank saying nothing.
‘You won’t have the grenadine of beef?’
‘I’ll have the baked apple.’
I wished for a second that one of the girls had the gumption to answer back to Sinatra. He was a bully. Yet there were no moans or dismal sobs at the restaurant that night, just a kind of fearfulness on the part of Marilyn and Natalie. Sinatra picked a thread off his tie and smiled like a smile can fix things. ‘Chambers,’ he said. ‘What a fink. Can you believe him? He testified in ’48. He’s the kinda guy who made people crazy in this country, I swear to God. He ratted out his best friends.’
‘This is a great country, Frank,’ said the Attorney.
‘No argument.’
‘A great country. Some people, maybe they would like the communists to run the show, huh? Maybe some people would like these guys who hate the baby Jesus to come and take over our schools, huh? You know something Frank, I love being an American. It makes me cry. I don’t want to be told how to live by some goddamn Russian communist.’
Marilyn stroked me on the seat beside her. I felt the urge to pass on some information. ‘Whittaker Chambers translated Bambi,’ I said. She stroked me again.
‘Did you know Whittaker Chambers translated Bambi?’ she said. (Wow, I thought. Now, we’re getting somewhere.) She tossed her blonde hair. ‘Yeah, he was a very interesting writer.’
‘Who cares about any goddamn writer?’ said Sinatra. ‘A snitch and a writer! What a cube. Maybe they should have given him the Congressional Medal. Did you hear that? He did Bambi!’
‘A swell story, that,’ said the Attorney. ‘My children cry at that story. I love that story. Usually I don’t like animals. I hate animals.’ He nodded downwards. ‘Tell you the truth, I usually hate dogs. I’m giving you a free pass because you’re a very good-looking girl. I loathe dog-lovers. Most of them are cowards who haven’t got the guts to bite people themselves.’
‘Holy Jess!’ went Frank. ‘Dog-lovers!’
Marilyn was getting drunk and so was Natalie. They were both nervous of Sinatra and Sinatra was nervous of his attorney and it just wasn’t fun to be with them at Musso & Frank’s. Natalie began talking about Elia Kazan and the film they had just made, some squealing epic in which Natalie was able to put absolutely everything in about her mother. The girls went from Kazan to Strasberg to Marilyn’s time in New York, Natalie doing that actor’s thing of gently undermining her friend’s sense of achievement. ‘Oh, Anna Christie’s so overblown, don’t you think?’
‘Why, no,’ said Marilyn. ‘I think it’s beautiful.’
‘O’Neill’s too hysterical. I mean, what do I know? But for me it’s too much. It brings out the worst in most people, I swear to God.’ She smiled. ‘It asks for . . . how would you say? Brassy emotions.’
Marilyn’s hand trembled as she moved to drop me under the table. I heard Sinatra asking Natalie what was new with her mother, and Natalie saying Mud was on the war path and her father had recently banned all the dogs from the house. ‘He’s drunk every day,’ she said. ‘And Muddah now thinks the Russians are in league with the UFOs.’
‘She’s a smart woman,’ said the Attorney.
Despite their differences, I think Natalie had what her mother had in such splendidly extravagant proportions: not only the Slavic paranoia but a very determined sense of affli
ction. Maybe the greater part of it came from Nick Gurdin, the gun-slinging alcoholic of Sherman Oaks, but there was a sense that the bounty of America made that family delirious. It doesn’t always do to compare one temporary owner with another, but a dog can’t help dwelling on his material, so to speak, especially a journeying dog, and I have to say the Gurdins were a sort of purgatory to me, a place where one felt in exile both from the possibility of happiness and the certainty of judgement. I had quite a nice time there, during my in-between life, but I can’t bear to think how many dogs Mrs Gurdin must have sent out into the United States in a state of nervous exhaustion.
Sinatra had removed one of his shoes under the table, and he was nervously stubbing his toe into the clay tiles, the dust coming off on his sock. Natalie was getting into a real drunken flow about Muddah, the way she treated the help down in Sherman Oaks, the fact that Nick was so delusional he thought he was a lost son of the Romanovs. There was a frenzied element to her laughter. She looked from one person to the other with a craving in her eyes for reassurance, laughing again, at one point beginning to imitate the voice of the mother in the Kazan film. ‘Now, Wilma Dean,’ she said. ‘I wanna talk to you. Boys don’t respect a girl they can go all the way with. You and Bud haven’t gone all the way, have you?’
‘Jesus, honey. You are cranked,’ said Sinatra. When she moved on from Splendor in the Grass and began talking about Bobby Kennedy, Sinatra eased off his other shoe. At the same time, the Attorney gently put his hand on Marilyn and began stroking her thigh. I put my head down and sniffed one of the empty shoes, which smelled of nothing. I had a sudden vision of The Last Supper, that nice painting by Titian, where the apostles appear much more generous when it comes to allowing scraps to fall off the table.
I am happy enough with the sea – was happy that time at New York harbour, when we went to Staten Island – so long as I can be among the little dogs on the deck, protected from the secret undulations by several tons of cast-iron vessel. But the actual water – no. I had a fear of deep water,* which was difficult in California because Marilyn loved the beach at Santa Monica and for her it brought to mind a happy experience of infancy. She was a strong swimmer and she found the place uncomplicated. As far as it goes, I’ve never really been much of a holidaymaker. Like all dogs, I take for granted a certain amount of sanctioned laziness, but beaches, tanning, ice-cream? To me the beach is an unfixed term on a roasting spit, a stifling penance, the water out there a border of pronounced anxiety. It’s not always easy for a dog to know where self ends and owner starts, but my thing about water made me realise that Marilyn’s fears were different from my own.
Late that summer I began to accept that I might never see New York again. Life in California was slower somehow and sweetly empty. Some afternoons, on the freeway, on the beach, your stomach could momentarily lurch with a steep sense that life was elsewhere. I came to understand it as a very California feeling – it came with the smog and the sunkissed faces. We spent a lot of time down at Peter Lawford’s beach house in Santa Monica, a lovely house, an outpost that once belonged to Louis B. Mayer. Normal individuals would get excited by the fact you could step straight onto the beach from Lawford’s deck. Sometimes, Marilyn would kick off her sandals and run onto the sand and immediately be confronted by a mental image of herself sixteen years before, blossoming into stardom in a bikini for some army photographer keen to make it in magazines. Peter was one of those English men who grow more perfectly English the further they are from England. (Marilyn had enjoyed many an earful about him from Frank. ‘How does cheap, weak, sneak, and creep sound?’) In himself, Lawford always felt like a comedy turn, an ersatz European, not quite natural when surrounded by all this natural American power. He had enough talent to turn it to his advantage, marrying the Prez’s sister and everything, but he worried he was never as cool or as substantial as his friends, a very teenage thing to feel. Lawford’s curse was the same as his blessing: he always wanted to be more like the people around him. When standing with Frank he wanted to be more like Frank, when drinking with the surfboys he wanted to be more like the surfboys. Marilyn and I contained multitudes, admittedly, but for Peter we were the easiest creatures in California.
* It’s possible this squeamishness is borrowed from a number of the people I met, especially Natalie Wood, but also, I understand, from an early personal trauma, the drowning of my Aunt Cressy in Loch Morlich, an event that occurred in the first weeks of my puphood. That was one family story: the habit of blanking it out for being morbid was another.
Now we come to the President. Don’t hold your breath for stunning revelations. I’m afraid I only met him one time, a warm night down there at the beach house, and my chief memory is that he was worried about his back and a local shortage of procaine. As far as Lawford was concerned, Jack was very straightforward in the brother-in-law department, a regular, bluff guy, happy to be with Peter and his friends so long as they were lots of fun and nice to his sister. The party was no more racy than usual. I guess people were giddier because of the President, drinking more, dancing more later on, exhibiting that strange confidence people exhibit when they realise they might be at the dead centre of the action. Everybody’s eyes were larger and probably darker than usual, engorged with power’s immediate proximity, and every girl in the room came armed with a question. ‘Mr President, what can we do to support President Ngo Dinh Diem in his fight against the Viet Cong,’ said Angie Dickinson with a toss of her hair, a small furrow appearing on her brow as she ‘did’ serious.
‘Jack,’ he said. ‘Call me Jack.’
Marilyn’s make-up man Whitey Snyder had driven us down to the beach from Doheny. It was one of those gentle evenings when the palm trees suddenly make sense, the warm breeze whispering among the leaves on Santa Monica Boulevard. ‘I think my father has been trying to call me, Whitey,’ she said. ‘There was a call from a hospital in Palm Springs.’
‘What did they say?’
‘They said his name was Mr Gifford. They said he wanted to get in touch with his daughter.’
The trees had lights on them and the shadow of the trees passed through the inside of the car. ‘Do you think it’s someone making a fool of me, Whitey?’
‘You didn’t ask to be put through?’
‘Not yet. I couldn’t. I took the number.’ I put my head on her arm and she breathed with that quick, manufactured courage of hers, ready for anything, ready for the whole world. ‘You know, I always forget I’m a daughter,’ she said.
‘You shouldn’t, honey,’ said Whitey. ‘It’s just too big a thing to forget.’
‘I lied to my New York analyst,’ she said casually. ‘I told her my father was dead.’
‘It’s just too big a thing to forget,’ he said.
We arrived at the party around 11 p.m., too late for supper but in very good time for scraps. It was a stand-up thing anyhow, which dogs understand, and Marilyn’s arrival caused no fuss. Kim Novak smiled from the corner and said ‘hi’ with a pretty cascade of fingers. Lawford had that preposterous, theatrical, very English way of greeting old friends, where he pretended he had been waiting the whole night just for you. It was a trick he had learned from his father, Sir Sydney Lawford: how to exude passionate interest without a scintilla of real personal involvement. They say Peter’s mother dressed her boy as a girl for the first ten years of his life, which explained a number of things about Peter quite neatly and sympathetically. He spent his life devising scenes of great moment that he could preside over whilst enjoying a secret absence. He beamed and took Marilyn by the hand. Someone gave her a glass of champagne and I stared up at Lawford with admiration. I loved him in Son of Lassie, the RAF pilot helped to safety across the snows of Norway by a dog whose eyes blazed with the strange existentialist thinking of Martin Heidegger. The dog was living for the moment, unsure whose side to be on, but Lawford made himself a likeable project and convinced the dog to gain its freedom by throwing off reason and morality. I gather this is not ho
w the film is usually described, but I think Lawford must have agreed with my memory of it because he lifted me out of Marilyn’s arms with a whoosh of recognition. ‘Good Lord,’ he said. ‘You’ve brought the dog. Is this the Frank dog?’
Lawford had, in fact, met me several times before. In conversation, he liked to pretend not to know things, just to have something to ask. It was one of the ways that he showed himself to be upper-class.
‘Yes. He’s Maf.’
‘Maf?’
‘Yeah. Mafia.’
Lawford’s handsome face creased up. ‘Hello, Dreamboy,’ he said. ‘I happen to know three individuals who would absolutely love this little chap.’ Marilyn laughed and moved her head like a person in a dream of themselves, putting out her hand to greet the people, the Democrats, the moneymen, who were quickly swimming around her.
Three children in pyjamas were sitting on the stairs. They were sharing a bowl of popcorn and beginning to look sleepy. ‘I want it. I want it,’ said Christopher, the eldest. The boy scrabbled down onto the carpet and tried to pick me up by the ears.
‘No, me, Daddy. Me,’ said Sydney.
‘I’m not kissing him after you! Daddy. She’s got cooties,’ shouted Christopher.
‘Dog,’ said Victoria, the youngest.
Dogs love children: we love them for the purity of their narcissism. But children don’t always love dogs. They love the look of us and our air of teddyness, the way we can seem so loyal and biddable and cute, but they always mistake us for fictions even as they feel the wet dash of our tongues on their laughing faces. Of course, we are no more loyal than children are innocent, but we try our best, aiming not to disappoint the little people in their conception of us as fourlegged bundles of fluff and simplicity. To them we are funny things, made-up creatures, cartoon mixtures of texture and colour, who simply love being patted. It always struck me in Hollywood that dogs are probably less like that than people are, but who’s going to argue with a child’s wonder-seeking eyes, even if they appear amid a fusillade of poking and pulling and general dollying? ‘This is Dreamboy, Marilyn’s dog,’ said Lawford to the children.
The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe Page 19
