The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe (11 page)

‘My girl has her troubles, but she always comes out of here with a dozen more.’
‘Why does she come, bro?’
‘For the conversation. She likes having somebody intelligent to talk to. But she often feels quite annoyed.’
‘No wonder. I’m telling ya. You should see the number she does on some of these dudes. The whole room’s a stage set and this woman, she smart, she nice, but she fluffs it up like crazy, man. You just watch the show here baby, it’s all about her. She means well, but, boy, some people just exhaust the spirit, you know what I mean?’
‘She’s talking about herself. Is that not against the rules or something?’ The spider just rolled his eight eyes and resumed his dainty walk over a set of Art Deco ink-wells.
‘Just watch the show,’ he said.
‘My friend Anna Freud, the friend of my childhood, she never married. My friend may have enjoyed her father’s brilliance too much. I think we were all intoxicated by his brilliance. I was one of his patients.’ The fact is, though, that Marilyn liked this lore: it was intellectual gossip and Marilyn loved taking it back to Mr Strasberg. Much of what passed for psychoanalysis at the Actors Studio was more in the vein of gossip about analysts and writers, and it made them feel better, just as it did Marilyn, that the same dramas existed for the brilliant people of Europe as existed for those born in America. ‘My husband would have been greatly interested in your little problem of Anna Christie,’ she said.
‘Don’t let her patronise you like that,’ I said, but my owner just patted me with her soft hand. ‘That’s so out of line, you know. Every word of it. I can’t believe you’re paying this woman to force her self-importance on you and her music and her good taste and her goddamn paperweights! Then, to top it all, she tries to get you to think painfully hard about the men in your life by – guess what? – talking ceaselessly and infuriatingly about the wonderful men in
her
life.’
‘Say, let’s be quiet, Maf,’ Marilyn said, patting me again. ‘He gets a bit antsy in closed rooms.’
‘My friend Anna loved her dogs. Freud more than understood the value of having a dog in the therapy room. He himself was addicted to his chows.’ Dr Kris rose from her desk and straightened her cardigan. She walked to the tallest of the bookshelves and gingerly picked a volume from the middle shelf. ‘My husband was a curator of sculpture and fine arts when we married,’ she said. ‘In the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.’
‘Cultured men.’
‘Who are you referring to?’
‘Your husband. I guess he was a very cultured man.’
‘Yes of course. I believe he was the first of those to marry, shall we say . . . the interests of psychoanalysis with the instincts of fine art.’
‘Marry?’
‘Yes, I walked into that.’
There were days when Dr Kris’s fastidious nature wasn’t quite as fastidious as it might have been. Patients often found her neuroses entertaining, and, at the same time, soothing: wasn’t it nice to have an analyst whose hands shook more than one’s own? In sessions with Marilyn, Dr Kris was often quietly uncovered in ways Marilyn did well to ignore. She became a lonely woman entombed by her past, eager to talk about what had mattered and what was gone. One imagined that was why she played classical music between sessions, to bring her back to her coping self, to feed the historical ego, returning her again to the chief graces of the confected life. Marilyn sometimes listened to her as if it was a sort of penance. Her skirt was cutting into her waist; she fidgeted. She remembered often feeling the same discomfort as a child.
‘My husband worked for many years to investigate the nature of caricature and facial expression in art and he published on that subject.’ Marilyn looked down at me on her lap and made one of her comic faces, the one that made her beautiful lips into a perfectly round O. ‘Do you see yourself as dealing in facial expressions for a living?’
‘Sure. But I’m keen to broaden my repertoire.’
‘You are angry at my question?’
‘It was crude, Dr Kris. But never mind. Crude is fine. I guess I’m pretty used to crude.’
‘That is interesting. Caricature seeks to discover a likeness in deformity. You feel these faces you are required to make are always sexual faces.’
‘All faces are sexual faces.’
‘Okay. We will work with that.’
‘Dr Kris, why don’t you just show me the thing in the book you’re holding. I know that is what you want to do and I want you to do it, too.’
‘I think you are experiencing anger today, Marilyn.’
‘And I think you are.’ I licked her hand and nosed her until she clapped me. I looked along a shelf and was baffled by the self-assurance suggested by its contents. There was a Buddha smiling at the sad turn history had taken. I always found it hard to take the Buddha seriously: his fat simple face that always seems so delighted at the prospect of eternity.
Dr Kris opened the book she had taken from the shelf, a bound volume of the
Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association
. It appeared heavy and had many scraps of paper stuck between its pages. When the doctor laid the volume flat we could see the words ‘Ernst Kris’ and the year at the head of the page, ‘1956’. As my owner stroked me I began to experience something of what she was feeling at that moment: a certainty, and not an unpleasant certainty, really a freeing one, that the analyst was trying to undermine her. That was all. Marilyn had told Dr Kris her story a long time ago and the doctor had been very good at drawing it out from deeper and still deeper reserves, treating Marilyn as an injured child. And now the process had changed course and Marilyn was required to suffer a series of assaults on her ‘personal myth’. In fact she was quite eager to be undermined: that winter she had got to the end of her old satisfactions, and now wished above all to be free of herself. Over the months I had noticed a change in the colours of her thoughts, as if her mind had changed season. She was taking more drugs and was behaving as if it might be good to outwit the demands and expectations of being herself. She was dropping old friends and looking for a new part: that’s right, she was playing at being a serious actress, the biggest acting role of her life. And this meant she was walking very close to the edge of sanity all the time, manipulating her reality to meet the demands of some terrible, unknowable ideal. I watched it and I saw the tears and the little panics at bedtime. But I also saw the new steeliness: the determination that came over her, as if things must change, or things must end. ‘Caricature is a comfort to oneself and others,’ said Dr Kris. ‘But it may also constitute a denial or a distortion of true selfhood. Perhaps Anna Christie relies on men to tell her who she is. Perhaps she wishes to be something unto herself, not merely a daughter or a wife, no?’
‘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’.