The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe (25 page)

* So says the Elder Zosima. He thinks God is always at home.
that night. I gave him goddamn
Chicago
. Jesus.
Bing Crosby is a fucking Republican!
’

Frank threw down a bourbon glass and put his hand over his heart. ‘I’m going to have a fuckin’ stroke,’ he said. ‘This is what you’ve all done. I’m gonna die right now on this goddamn rug. What – they’re avoiding me? I’m some kind of gangster, all of a sudden?’

Marilyn lifted me up as if to protect me. There was a bottle on the breakfast bar and she poured from it into a fresh glass. ‘Here, Frank,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you take this?’ He reached out blindly and took it like someone in a trance.

‘What am I?’ he asked. ‘Some phoney? Some dweeb in the movie business, huh? Some nightclub shmuck? They think I can win the election for them and then . . . what? They embarrass me? They dump me? They make me lose face, huh? I’m what, an asshole to them? I’m some dago to them? Ol’ Frankie-boy, huh. What am I, the loser?’

‘You’re not any kind of loser, honey,’ said Marilyn. ‘Frank.

They’re politicians.’
‘FUCK THEM!’ he screamed. He gulped from the glass
and put his face up close to our faces. ‘I gave you that little
dog. I gave everybody everything. That’s my problem. I gave
everybody too much.’ I could feel her hands trembling round
my ribs.
‘It was all a gift to yourself,’ I said. ‘That’s the kind of giver
you are. Leave her alone.’
Frank went on raging and spilling his guts, just like a man,
just like a spoiled man. Complaining is an art that some men
practise with self-annihilating zeal. Every word seems to
make them smaller, greyer, sadder, when silence might serve
them like medicine. Frank cut himself off from all he loved and cared about so as to express the full volume and crudity
of his anger.
Grrrrrrrrr.
‘That dog has a throat problem. Take him to the damn
vet!’
I looked up at him. ‘You’re an idiot, Frank.’
‘Tell him to stop looking at me. I’ll crush your head, you
little fuck.’
I jumped out of my owner’s arms and felt sorry for a
moment that I ever left Scotland. Who was I, to guard an
unhappy actress? Who were these people anyway, who could
invent life on the screen but couldn’t begin to live their own
lives? I ran to the back of the living room and deposited
a small puddle of pee onto an orange Hessian rug. I forgot
to say that the Sinatra compound was unforgivably orange.
Dogs can’t quite see that colour, but Frank’s mind was full
of orange and the rage of orange and I picked that up. All
the pleasures of interior decoration go into reverse when
you find yourself, even in your imagination, in a very orange
place: the walls were orange-verging-on-peach and the sofa
was orange-verging-on-brown, while the paintings were as
orange as a muggy evening in Madras and the carpet was
dangerous orange, like the spurting of Mount Etna. I could
feel every one of the tones. I am a dog of indigo moods, of
cornflower hues, so for me the large rooms at Rancho Mirage
were a horror at the top end of the scale. Sinatra once said
that orange is the happiest colour, but his hysterical use of
it made you realise that he lived in something close to a
perpetual nervous breakdown. He liked orange and he liked
red, the colours of alarm.
* Marilyn always had a book in her handbag. She was always on the way to a discovery, to a large recognition that would change everything. And I suppose that kind of hope was the story of our journey. Good human relationships depend on an instinct for tolerating and indeed protecting other people’s illusions: once you start picking them apart, taking down their defences, reducing their plan for survival, making them smaller in their own eyes, the relationship is as dead and gone as the Great Auk.
^*
Marilyn might have spent her life searching for someone with the imagination to love her, and now she was faced with the ruination of all those hopes, Sinatra looking at her with pure hatred, saying, ‘You’re so damn stupid, Norma Jeane. You know that? You and Lawford and the President – you’re all nothing. You hear
me?
Nothing
.’
I went to Marilyn at the patio doors. She was weeping
with a glass held against her chest and I rubbed against her
legs. I could feel her knees trembling as she watched Frank
dragging clothes from one of the guest rooms out to the pool
area, golfing clothes and swimming togs that belonged to
the Lawfords. He was shouting about calls made to Atlanta
during the election and favours done for Joseph Kennedy.
‘See this, Norma Jeane? See this, you two-bit whore,’
he shouted at the patio doors, pointing to the bundle of
clothes. He pulled out a Zippo and in two seconds there
were flames rising by the pool side. Marilyn looked over as if the fire was a perfectly ordinary thing. I started barking and running in circles, while Frank, still shouting about loyalty and Washington, came out of other guest rooms bearing kids’ hats, towels, and sneakers. Eventually the fire rose and threatened one of the sun-loungers, at which point Frank, now levitating with rage, kicked all the burning Lawford belongings into the swimming pool. The flames floated for a while and Frank stomped through the room, slamming doors and cursing the day he ever came to Palm Springs. Marilyn and I just stood at the patio doors, the smoke going up like ghosts. We walked out to the pool and my owner put her feet into the water and drank her champagne, the burnt clothes floating across the blue pool, like land masses on a charred map. We stared at them. It seemed like a billion years had just gone by in Frank Sinatra’s pool, the dark continents floating to the centre and America, a small pair of bikini bottoms with strings scorched and trailing, drifted into place as the compound lights suddenly went out and it was dark.

* I am no academic, but I feel there is a hole in the great universities. Why is there no Faculty of Extinction? It is a subject of interest to man and beast, or maybe, like most creatures, I merely reveal myself to be a thing of my own time.

15

W

e do not go to bed worthless and wake up wise, but we hope the night may bring some colour to our moral travels. Lying with Marilyn in her bedroom in Fifth Helena Drive, the bougainvillea would often seem to tremble in the darkness outside the window, the moon pulling at our blood as we dreamed. But she mostly slept alone. Into the night she would look at album sleeves or speak lines to herself, her eyes just dots of white in the dark and humid room. If I barked, even once, she plopped me outside the bedroom and closed the door. I would stand there quoting Euripides and scratching on the wood, mewling like a cat. ‘One loyal friend is worth ten thousand relatives.’

The stuff from Mexico still lay around the house in cardboard boxes. One night it was unseasonably cool when Marilyn finally got to sleep, the curtains billowing from the window and the sound of a dog barking in San Vicente Boulevard. ‘Shhh,’ I said. ‘She’ll put me out.’ She had taken sleeping tablets and she dreamed of Pierre Salinger. It was a press conference she had seen on television, Salinger holding the White House rabbit Zsa Zsa by the ears, telling the laughing reporters that the rabbit was sent to young Caroline Kennedy by a Pittsburgh magician. Zsa Zsa came with a horn and a beer opener. ‘Mr Secretary,’ comes the question. ‘Do you know that this rabbit is a lush?’

‘All I know about Zsa Zsa,’ said Salinger, ‘is that she’s supposed to be able to play the first five bars of “The StarSpangled Banner” on a toy trumpet.’

‘Could we have the rabbit come over here and run through a couple of numbers for us?’
‘I can ask her,’ said Salinger.
Then it was Khrushchev. In her dream he looked like the producer Joe Schenck. The Soviet wanted more than anything to visit Disneyland. He said he would release the nuclear rockets if they stopped him from meeting Mickey the Mouse and Pluto the dog. Marilyn wanted to speak about Shostakovich and he wanted to speak about the space animals. He boasted about Laika and then about Belka and Strelka, saying the pupniks would honour the Soviet Union for a thousand years. Marilyn then dreamed the face of Mrs Kennedy cradling Pushinka, Strelka’s pup, a present to her daughter from the Russian leader. She held the pup in her arms and it looked up at her. Marilyn stood by herself in a kind of desert, next to a hospital, or was it a fortified house in Coyoacán? In a garden, she saw a man tending his rabbits and cuddling them. The man turned around and smiled for the camera, just as the rabbit opened its mouth. ‘It is as well that the potentialities of art’, the rabbit said, ‘are as inexhaustible as life itself, for those of us who do not simply adhere to the false beauties and vain art of the ruling class may come to believe that art is much richer than life, shedding a variety of light on what it has meant to be together in the world.’
* For
Something’s Got to Give
, Mr Cukor got the set-builders at Fox to make a replica of his house on Cordell Drive. It was the same right down to the Roman statues and the shuttered windows, the tables by the swimming pool and the jacaranda. As I told you some time ago, dogs don’t have a natural capacity to separate fact from fiction – we only learn by attending to people’s neuroses – yet the new version of Cukor’s house really tested my faith in the power of actuality. In the end, even the dogs came to feel the house on Stage 14 was more Cukor’s house than Cukor’s house. It was more of a home and less of a stage set, except that the roof of the make-believe house reached upwards from the fake trees and the fake statues to end not in the starry skies of California but in a crowded grid of hot lights and cables. We tried to ignore that.
‘Oh look. It’s Hopalong Oedipus.’
‘Funny, Dino. That’s very funny.’
Wally Cox had injured his leg so his voice was even punier than usual. Dean Martin liked to rib him about his smart intellectual friends. ‘Hey, Wally,’ he said. ‘You still friends with all them shrinks? Do you think they’d do me a deal? I need a whole truck-load of ’em over here. Will they do me a deal, Charlie?’
‘That’s funny, Dino.’
‘Tell them I’m a golf bum from Steubenville, Ohio. Do they do cheap rates for that?’
‘They’d probably charge you more, Dino,’ said Mr Cukor crossing from the pool and clapping his male lead on the shoulder.
‘That’s sick, George. It’s Nutsville in here.’
‘You think this is Nutsville? You should see the laughs they’re having in the old country.’
‘In Italy?’
‘That’s right, Dino. On the set of
Cleopatra
. They’ve gone thirty million dollars over budget.’ I wondered if that nice Roddy McDowall might be enjoying himself over there. I’m sure he likes a bit of chaos. Mr Martin grinned and turned to Mr Cox.
‘Hey, Wally. Is that where all the shrinks are at? The expensive New York guys? They all in Cinecittà helping Liz with her make-up?’
‘Funny.’
^*
Mr Martin could talk about make-up. His face was a brown olive ripening on the ancient coast of Liguria. ‘Don’t talk to me about budgets, Harvey,’ he said in the direction of Mr Cukor. ‘I got seven children. Ask Wally. Seven kids. I spend more on milk than I do on bourbon, Clyde. That’s no joke. And Hopalong here, he won’t give me one of his fancy shrinks. Isn’t that just the meanest thing you’ve ever heard?’
Marilyn had flown Mrs Strasberg over from the East Coast to help her with her lines. But my owner didn’t come to the sound stage most days, feeling sick, feeling low, and when she did come she was wired, I’d say, feeling anxious one minute and rebellious the next. Since coming back to LA, Marilyn’s panic about who she was had become who she was. I am probably too ignorant of normality to notice when things are getting beyond repair. But Marilyn was off the hook during that last film, no doubt about it. Mr Levathes the studio lizard was always popping his head round the

* Mr Cox was a model of human freedom, at least of human freedom as it was understood by Jean-Paul Sartre. He was free to be and not to be, and, in the end, like Mr Hemingway and others, he proved his existence by ending it.

door of her bungalow and sticking out his tongue. ‘You good for work today, Marilyn dear?’ I wanted to bite him and I wanted to pee in his golf cart. One day I heard him speaking with an associate producer behind the set. He said, ‘She’s out of control but she’s still bankable. Greenson says he can probably pull her though.’ Sometimes I would just wander round the set looking for adventure and pestering the electricians for scraps of their sandwiches. Dean Martin was often to be found in the little road outside the sound stage, swinging his golf club and smoking. Mr Cukor had shot around Marilyn for weeks and now there was nothing to do but sit and wait for her. He brought his dog Sasha to the set in the hope it would calm his nerves. He lost sight of the dog in all the annoyances, but soon Sasha and I were outside the sound stage and running over the road to investigate the snacks situation. We ran past a phoney cowboy saloon bar, then slowed down near the front office, where Sasha nodded up at the windows. ‘They will fire her, little dog. Listen to me, the studio will fire her soon.’