‘Mamallen dog,’ said the smallest. Christopher, the boy, cradled me and swung his arms from side to side. ‘Oh, my darling, oh, my darling, oh, my darling, Clementine,’ he sang in a yokel voice and with a cow’s-lick the size of New Hampshire.
‘Let’s paint him blue!’ said Sydney.
‘You is Huckleberry Hound!’
‘Icklebelly Yow,’ said Victoria.
‘Let’s paint him blue!’
There was a certain amount of bouncing me up the stairs on two legs, Christopher chanting lines from a recent episode of their favourite cartoon. ‘Scrubby brushes! Scrubby brushes! You wanna buy one of our new scrubby brushes?’
‘Make him like a space dog,’ said Sydney.
‘Beige dog,’ said the smallest.
‘With a space helmet.’
‘How ’bout that?’ asked Christopher, placing a plastic drinking cup on my head.
All the while, Mr Lawford had been talking to a security guy. He turned round and his big smile reappeared. ‘Would you look at these kids,’ he said. ‘Aren’t they just wonderful?’ I was lying in a basket of small hands and my head was wet. Looking up, I stared at Peter and remembered how close he had been to Lassie in that lovely story.
‘Mr Lawford,’ I said. ‘Is the possibility of Being contingent on an acceptance of Mortality? I mean, is all experience an aspect of Time?’
‘Come on, Christopher. Jolly along. Don’t have the little dog barking. Let him go now. It’s bedtime.’
‘But Daddy, it’s fun.’
‘I said enough, Christopher.’ Mr Lawford pulled me free and the elder children booed. The baby chewed her cuff. Lawford frowned like a clown, as if his decision hurt him more than it hurt them, and they ran up the stairs and chuckled over the banister.
A lot of depressing shoes at the party. I mean mules. Every where I stepped it was D’antonio gold mesh sandals, or little English mules by Rayne. The men, if they were in the movie business, wore white shoes. The Harvard boys wore black oxfords with the laces at equal length. I walked past a great deal of flannel and seersucker, summer tones, until I came to the President’s shoes, which were oxfords, of course. Very shiny.
I’d like to be able to say Marilyn and Kennedy had a big world-historical discussion, but they didn’t, though they looked for a moment like they might. They got involved in a few rapid minutes of performance, an air of great significance hanging over them. They could never have been just any man and woman meeting in the corner of a party, it couldn’t be imagined, especially not by them: their conversation was a meeting of private fantasies that would breed private fantasies, and my memory of their talk is of something dramatic lying just under the surface. Kennedy was drinking whisky and soda. He sat in a beautiful Charles Eames chair. There was a cushion at his back, and he tapped the plywood side of the chair for emphasis as he spoke to her. She was sitting on the chair’s matching footstool, and I snuggled against her legs. Her hand was shaking ever so slightly as she stroked my coat. ‘I think it safe to say he has the instincts of a riverboat gambler,’ he said with a wide grin. They had been talking about the Vice-President, Mr Johnson.
‘He’s tough, huh?’
‘He’s Texan.’
‘But does he have the liberal imagination?’
‘Of course he does.’ Kennedy paused. ‘Well, that’s an interesting question, Marilyn. I hadn’t realised you cared so much for that kind of thing. Trilling and so on.’
‘I did a little reading.’
‘And Trilling? You know him?’
‘Well, I don’t know him. I just know he said something – he wrote it. About Fitzgerald, your namesake. He wrote a line about the “habitual music of Scott Fitzgerald’s seriousness”. That’s the thing I most wish someone had written about me.’
‘Is that right?’
‘I guess so.’
‘Those literary guys. One of them called me an “existential hero”.’
I licked her arm. ‘That’ll be the day,’ I said.
‘Is that a compliment, Mr President?’
‘I couldn’t swear to it. I think it’s more of a compliment to the person who wrote it. You’re so sweet, Marilyn. You know something? I don’t think you should worry so much.’
‘I was born worrying.’
‘Not about pipe-smokers, surely. You’re bringing joy and wholesomeness to people’s lives. That’s the truth.’
‘The whole truth and nothing but the truth?’
He grinned. ‘So help me God.’
‘Don’t change the subject, Mr President. We were talking about civil rights.’
Just as stars are always the best star-fuckers, the needy are often the very best at feeding the needy. The President and his new friend were locked onto each other that night, addressing each other’s doubts, his sexual and hers intellectual, until everyone decided they must be a couple. Sitting by the patio windows at Lawford’s house, they seemed to present such a heavenly coalition of natural accomplishments that no one could resist picturing them in each other’s arms. This kind of thing gains force by desire and repetition, and those, like me, who like myths more than facts, will enjoy the notion of Marilyn and the President together. Yet they were only in each other’s company a few times, on each occasion talking about themselves and politics in a public room, enjoying a fondness that history would consecrate into something larger than life. He tapped his opinions out on the side of the chair, answering her points, impressed at the way she listened, even as he wished to ask her about success. That was the President’s interest in her, that’s what really intrigued him. It had fascinated his father and it fascinated him: he wanted to understand the nature of fame. She had lived with it longer than he had and she had suffered by it too. He would never have kissed her in a room full of people; he was married to a dignified woman and was too political for spontaneity, but the closest he came was when he finally asked her, point blank, her pretty eyes open to his Boston carefulness, to tell him the thing that is concealed by fame.
‘Gee,’ she said. ‘What a question. You think the answer is private pain, don’t you?’
‘Yes. I suppose I do.’
‘Well, that’s not the answer, Mr President. Fame doesn’t conceal private pain, it only emphasises it. And I guess I might have had troubles even if I’d never left Van Nuys.’
‘What, then?’ he said. ‘I’m interested.’
‘Self-knowledge,’ she said. ‘Simple as that. The thing concealed by fame is self-knowledge.’
‘We must speak again.’ There was a thread hanging off the bottom of Kennedy’s suit trousers and I wanted to play with it, pull it with my teeth and see how far it went before it snapped.
‘Now, I answered your question. We had a deal. You should answer mine.’
‘You want to know if I sprang Dr King from Reidsville state prison?’
‘Well, yes. Lester Markel of the New York Times told me you and the Attorney General did a swell thing. He said you called up Mrs King when he was in that place, that prison. He said Mrs King was expecting a baby. You called to reassure her and word got round the community, the churches. Next thing folks are really paying attention. You did that, Mr President? You called that lady?’*
‘You give me too much credit,’ he said. ‘We were walking on eggshells. But I have to tell you it was Harris Wofford, my campaign aide. We were taking big risks in the South – we had plenty of votes to lose and plenty of votes to gain. Even Dr King’s father was supporting Nixon at that stage.’
‘And Dr King had been arrested? For sitting down in a snack bar in Atlanta?’
‘That’s right. They had him in prison.’
‘And you sprang him?’
‘No. Well. Put it this way. We couldn’t be seen to be backing King in a Southern fight about segregation. That wouldn’t have helped anybody.’
‘But you wanted to, right?’
‘Of course we wanted to. But we had to take it slowly. We were lighting fires in the morning and p
utting them out in the afternoon.’ By this point in the conversation, I noticed the President had shifted forward in his chair and was now addressing a group of listeners, which signalled the end of his flirtation with my owner. ‘We had people in jail,’ he said. ‘We had Klansmen in the fields. Dr King was in a maximumsecurity prison and Wofford had the idea that we should call Coretta. Just a few words. We had a few minutes at O’Hare so I just took the goddamn telephone and made a call.’
Marilyn drank more champagne and lay the glass down next to me. I licked the rim. Her eyes were wide open and she was drunk. I believe she had taken pills and was loose in herself. ‘What did you say?’ The President smiled like a veteran of many campaigns to win the approval of strangers.
‘I said I understood it must be hard for her, expecting a baby and her husband in prison. I said we were thinking about her and Dr King.’
‘Thatta boy,’ said Marilyn. I think she was talking to me but I can’t be sure.
‘Bobby went ape,’ he said. The President had taken pills too and they were working nicely for him. ‘It was only thirteen days to the election. But then he got so angry that he called for King’s release. He couldn’t bear it that some lynch-law judge had committed a civil rights leader to hard labour. That was it. I made a phone call and Bobby made a phone call and it shaped up from there.’ Peter Lawford leaned over Marilyn’s shoulder and made like a leading reporter.
‘It had a rather significant effect, no, on the Negro vote in the South?’
‘Right. Rather significant is right.’ He leaned over smiling and picked up his drink. ‘And you know what King Sr said after that? You know what he said? He said he would now be voting for Kennedy even in the face of me being a Catholic and all.’
The party laughed. ‘Can you believe that? Martin Luther King’s father being such a bigot?’ And then he looked at Marilyn again in a private way. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘We all have fathers, don’t we?’
People were sitting around the pool. Others were squeezing between the security men to walk on the beach and I followed. I sat down beside the young Mexicans who had been serving. Mexico was meant for me. The workers laughed and jibbed one another, reminding me of the young Texans who drove me to see the UFOs that time, the evening we listened to rock and roll. The waiters smoked pot and passed the thing back and forward on the sand. They stroked me and said, ‘here, boy’. The air was mild and the sky was full of yellow streaks. The waiters hadn’t expected the night to be so informal, but with their shiny skin and their white shirts, their bow ties, they seemed like they belonged. They talked about how sexy the film stars were, how amazing the food was and how cool the firearms of the security detail. But one of the waiters didn’t want to have me on his lap, a young man from Watts named Jabril. He smoked the cannabis and it mingled with his own sweet scent, but he told the others he had no time for dogs.
I was happy listening to the fellows. The night sky grew inky and I drank as much as I could of the soft air. People are so busy with thoughts of paradise they fail to see they have been in paradise all the while. It had been for me a night of listening – a life of listening, and not being heard
– and beside the Lawford house I remembered Plutarch, his beautiful essay ‘On Listening to Lectures’. A female Jack Russell came racing across our sight-line and headed straight for the surf. I bolted out of the waiter’s arms and chased her up to the roiling edge where the foam fizzed on the sand. I was always very slow to fall in love and quick to form my tactics of delay, but the Jack Russell made my heart swerve in the air like a tennis ball. Who was she?
I nodded back at the house and my young friends, the Mexicans. She glanced at me sideways, a rather perfect manipulation of her long lashes. ‘Virtue has only one handle,’ she said. ‘The ears of the young.’
‘They’re nice,’ I said. ‘My kind of people.’
‘You like Mexico?’
‘Oh, yes,’ I said. ‘It’s the ultimate destination. It’s always been in my head. I think we’re going there soon. A short adventure. That’s the plan. I’ve heard my owner talking about it.’
‘You’re so lucky. I’ve never been.’
‘Something happened to Trotsky there. I mean . . . he . . .’
‘Yeah,’ she said, a born realist. ‘He died. Was he a friend of yours?’
‘No, not a friend. He was before my time. My first owners loved him. You know how it is?’
‘Yeah. They never leave you. First loves.’
We walked round each other, tenderly sniffing. Then we sat at the water’s edge and I nudged her cheek and licked her ear. ‘You be careful now, honey,’ she said. ‘I’m spoken for.’
‘Where do you live?’
She walked a few steps and nodded up to the brightly lit houses beyond the cliffs. ‘Pacific Palisades,’ she said.
‘Really?’
‘You like writers, don’t ya?’ she said. ‘I’m picking that up. I’m in the same boat. My grandparents knew all those writers.’
‘Up there?’
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Brecht. Mann. The Belgian one, Maeterlinck. He was a good listener.’
‘I got him! I love him!’
‘Yeah. He came to Hollywood to work in pictures. I think Samuel Goldwyn was just proud to have a Nobel Prizewinner on the payroll. Anyhow, Goldwyn puts him in a room. He’s been in there for months. Maeterlinck decided to adapt his book The Life of the Bee. So he comes out of there waving a sheaf of paper and it is taken to the big man. An hour later, Goldwyn comes bursting out of his office shouting, “My God. The hero is a bee!” ’
We both laughed. The night was funny and so is love. ‘Well, so long,’ she said. ‘Enjoy your life, Maf. You’re going to Mexico, huh? Where something happened.’ She licked my chin and didn’t waste any more time, running like blazes down the beach. At the other end, the dog’s owner was clapping her thighs and mouthing words I couldn’t hear. I think she was saying, ‘Home, sweetheart. Home now.’
Marilyn carried her glass out of the party. I saw her coming towards me across the sand. She sang a few words and she sat looking out, liking the water and the distance, too. The song was happy. Nat King Cole, I think. Her lips were soft and her hair rolled back in those small blonde waves. The song was something she knew from her mother, who said it was once sung to her by the only man she ever loved. We weren’t far from the pier. The ferris wheel was going round and its lights burned a hole in the dark.
* I don’t know why Marilyn said it was the guy at the Times who told her the story. It was Frank Sinatra who told her.
13
W
e spent her last Christmas in Dr Greenson’s house in Brentwood, roasting chestnuts and playing charades. There was a sense of things concluding in a spirit of possible renewal, which might, on balance, be the saddest sense in the whole world. She wasn’t very much like a person at all by then, but like an element, or like those casual flocks of pigeons in Wallace Stevens who live in an old chaos of the sun. They make ‘ambiguous undulations’, as she did in those final months in Los Angeles, before going ‘downward to darkness, on extended wings’.
Marilyn had put up a small tree in the Doheny apartment and she kept it there for months, watching the red shadow of its lights on the wall when she couldn’t sleep. Over at the Greensons, things were happier and psychoanalysis was a way of life. They seemed comfortable basking in the global scale of its achievements. She often stayed after her sessions to have dinner with the family, peeling potatoes and drinking champagne, the clean, creative life of the house making her feel that things could be managed and things could be saved. I would be sat on the dining-room floor, eating from a skyblue Tupperware bowl they kept specially for dogs. The bowl was some kind of anomaly because Hildi Greenson loved crockery. On the wall next to the breakfast bar hung four antique side-plates – 1900, I’d say – by Creil Montereau called ‘L’Esprit des bêtes’. The bottom one showed two donkeys dressed as learned gentlemen with stand-up collars. One of them sits
with his elbow on a large book, next to a Roman statue, and he is speaking. ‘Sans nous,’ he says, ‘que seraient devenues les merveilles de la science et les chefs-d’oeuvre de l’esprit humain.’*
I have to say, I didn’t love Dr Greenson. He was flamboyant in his judgements, somewhat previous in his convictions, and he adored stardom a little too much. For all his high-mindedness, he exhibited a rather tiresome mental softness. Yet he believed in Marilyn’s ‘potential’ and was convinced that her sensitivity could become an asset to her talent, a theory that caused her to relate to him as a father. Now, I’m a dog and I see things in my own way and I have to tell you Dr Greenson was a little too entangled in his favourite role. The doctor was recommended to Marilyn by Marianne Kris in New York, who was only outdone in her father-worship by her childhood friend Anna Freud. These two women were close to Greenson, who was now treating my fated companion, whose own father was visible nowhere but present everywhere, like the perfect author and the worst kind of illness. Dr Greenson was happy to play father to them all. At the time I’m talking about, he was helping Anna to oppose John Huston’s proposed film of her father’s life, while helping Marianne publish some of her father’s papers and get him his due. I was there on Franklin Street the day Greenson said, as Dr Kris had, that it would be a mistake for Marilyn to accept the part in the Huston picture, the part based on Anna O.
* ‘Without us, what would have become of the wonders of science and the masterpieces of the human spirit?’
‘But why, when I feel I know her?’ Marilyn said. ‘The connection is strong, don’t you think?’
‘Leo Rosten just wrote a book about me,’ he said. ‘You should look at it, Marilyn. The novel is called Captain Newman, MD. It made a fiction of my life. I am quite happy with it – I understand art. I helped him with information. But it’s a very serious undertaking to have your problems and your experience and maybe even your brilliance fictionalised, you see? Psychically speaking: it’s a lot to take on. I know this is slightly different. But do you imagine that playing one of history’s totemic hysterics would enhance your own feelings of well-being at this time?’
The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe Page 20
