The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe (26 page)

‘They wouldn’t,’ I said. I was shocked. I was no longer able to see anything clearly.
‘Soon. They will do it.’
^*
It was a very hot day and the lot was silent. ‘People have rights,’ I said. ‘The workers have rights.’
‘They also have duties-eh,’ said Sasha, licking one of her paws and tapping the ground. ‘They have a duty to turn up and twinkle.’
‘So you think they will fire her?’
‘I heard them. They will do it. She is threatening to go to New York-eh, next week-eh, to sing at Kennedy’s birthday party.’
‘Aye. That’s right. I heard Mrs Murray talking about it on the telephone.’
‘At Madison Square Garden,
oui
?’
‘Right.’
‘If she does it-eh, they will fire her.’
‘They’ll fire her? They’ll
poind her gear
?’
‘Is a funny way of putting it, no?
‘Robert Burns,’ I said. ‘You know his poem “The Twa Dogs”?’
‘I never had that.’
‘Caesar and Luath. The two dogs. The poet records their discussion about the behaviour of evil landlords.’
^*
We rounded a corner at the end of the road and saw the open doors of the refectory. We stopped and Sasha turned to me with a French look of sadness. She licked my ear. ‘She is lost,’ said Sasha.
‘No,’ I said. ‘She is just beginning. It is her thirty-sixth birthday soon. We went to Mexico and found items for her new house: she is smart and political. In Mexico she was like a new person.’
‘They are always being new,’ said Sasha. ‘And yet they are always being the same.’
A cat came out of the refectory, his whiskers damp with milk. Two carpenters walked between us with a length of coloured glass and for a dazzling moment we all seemed like figures in a stained-glass panel. I thought of Duncan Grant’s favourite panel, William Morris’s
Sir Tristan is Recognised by Isolde the Fair’s Dog
. It was exactly two years since those easy days in the garden at Charleston, and it was a different sun that shone down on the bleached pavements of 20th Century Fox.
The milky-faced cat was no Tristan, but I was reconciled to his fame. Sasha was not. ‘You know that’s Orangey over there-eh?’ she whispered. ‘He won a Patsy for
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
.’
‘He got a statue?’
‘
Oui
,’ said Sasha. ‘His second one.’
‘How lovely,’ I said. ‘He must be very talented.’
‘I think he over-acts,’ said Sasha. ‘He can only play one part – himself.’
‘Ah, well.’
‘You try to be too nice, Maf.
Mon Dieu
. Once you start believing in cats, it’s time to give up!’
‘No, Sasha,’ I said. ‘We never give up.’ I stomped my paw. ‘We move on. New adventures. New people. More snacks.’
‘Snacks, yes!’ said Sasha. She looked up and sneered at Orangey. ‘Monsieur,’ she said. ‘I see you are content to be a bourgeois pig. Look at this milk. They give you extra at the commissary, no?’
Orangey just smiled. I wondered whether cats weren’t really the most intelligent of creatures. Sufficient unto themselves, they turned solitude into a great and sustaining thing, while dogs and men, in order to be happy, needed each other. The famous cat seemed a paragon of poise and self-awareness, licking his ginger moustache, taking several gentle steps across the road while quoting William Butler Yeats. ‘Minnaloushe creeps through the grass,’ he said,

* I suddenly understood why Jean Renoir called this place 16th Century

Fox.
* It was the favourite poem of my breeder, Mrs Duff. In her political heyday, she would often copy out the lines and send them to government officials. She imagined it might take the innocence of dogs to put them straight.

alone, important and wise,
and lifts to the changing moon
his changing eyes.

A while later we were retrieved from the kitchens by a second assistant director who was swearing. He intended to be a great
auteur
one day and didn’t care for chasing a couple of mutts around the lot for an hour. Back on set, Marilyn was available for work. The big news now was not Marilyn’s lateness or Marilyn’s absence but the horrific unprofessionalism being displayed by the dog Tippy, who was supposed to recognise Marilyn’s character when she returns from a desert island. I might be alone in thinking
Something’s Got to Give
was quite a nice script; admittedly, it was not
The Brothers Karamazov
, but it was perfectly minxy and funny and not without style. Marilyn hated it, though, and I guess she felt a failure coming back to that after
Anna Christie
and the Trillings and her young publishing friend Charlie, the intelligent beings of New York.

But if it’s prima donna you want, see under: Tippy. The willing Marilyn, despite a temperature of 101, was platinum and smiling by the pool, trying take after take, but the outrageous Tippy just wouldn’t perform. ‘I told you-eh,’ said Sasha. ‘She is not right for the part. This dog has no feeling for the character.
Phoof.
Mr Cukor was smitten by her bright coat – always the
décor
. He thinks of the
décor
before he thinks about her talent.’

‘She is pretty bad. They’re on the twenty-third take.’ ‘Ego,’ said Sasha. ‘I’m afraid it is just the ego. Toto would never have behaved like this.’

‘Sasha, Toto was the character in
The Wizard of Oz
. The dog’s real name was Terry.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
I pawed the ground. ‘I think it does matter,’ I said.
Sasha wasn’t listening to me. ‘Look at this one,’ she said. ‘This Tippy, how she snaps at the trainer. Tsk. Tsk. What a waste of fur.’
Playing Ellen, my owner just put down her little United Airlines bag and knelt before the dog. The motivation was pretty simple: the dog hadn’t seen Ellen in five years and she recognised her, even though her children in the pool did not. But Tippy kept missing her cue and she refused to invest in the scene. ‘I wonder what Lee Strasberg would say about
her
,’ I said to an obviously glowing and vindicated Sasha.
‘Come on. Come on. Speak boy! Speak!’ said the trainer, with Cukor shaking his head.
Marilyn laughed. She seemed pleased to know someone else was fluffing their lines. Cukor’s patience was frayed to nothing. It was obvious he felt humiliated by Marilyn’s absences, and now he felt cursed by Tippy, the dog resting its head vacantly on his star’s shoulder and lolling its useless tongue, while the hours rolled past. ‘Some animals-eh, they simply don’t have the guts,’ said Sasha. ‘They don’t know how to
give enough
, you know-eh?’
‘Aye,’ I said. ‘It’s a shame.’
‘No, it is shameful,’ said Sasha. ‘The dog has no bravery. No heart.’
Cukor finally got a take he could use and Tippy wandered over to our water bowls without an ounce of embarrassment.
‘How was it?
‘Wonderful,’ I said. ‘You really carried the mood of the scene. Beautiful piece of work, that.’
‘Inspired,’ said Sasha. ‘The whole thing depended on a certain restraint, no? And you had that.’
‘Thanks guys,’ said Tippy. ‘It took a few goes, but what the hell? It’s worth holding out for it, right? It’s worth holding out for The One. I based the whole thing on
The Two Gentleman of Verona
. You know Launce’s dog, Crab, the one not shedding tears or saying a word? Yeah, man. It was heavily based on Crab and I think I nailed it. I really worked through the emotions. It started with thoughts of rain. I remember rain on the roof of the kennels the night my grandmother died. I knew rain was the key. It was all in the silence. I just had to get back to that and I remembered Launce’s lines.’
‘Bravo,’ I said. ‘It worked wonders.’
‘In the scene-eh,’ said Sasha. ‘The motivation was beautiful. You might win a Patsy.’
‘Oh, don’t, guys,’ said Tippy. ‘I just can’t, you know, I can’t allow myself to think about that.’
Next time we looked over, Marilyn was on one of the sun loungers having each of her sinuses checked by the studio doctor. Paula Strasberg was at her side in a black cape, whispering into her ear. Whitey Snyder was hovering with a lip brush. Pat Newcomb was there with a frown and a sheaf of telegrams from New York. And towering over us all was the simulacrum of Cukor’s house, the house with the white shutters. Marilyn caught my eye. She opened her mouth to say something but nothing came, and I felt she might be looking for a distraction that could replace the many distractions in her immediate circle. There were always phone calls to Dr Greenson, and this day he turned up on the set and we stood outside with him waiting for the car. He was arguing the studio’s case. ‘Maybe it’s just me,’ he said. ‘I’m just being me.’ Marilyn looked him in the eye.
‘I was once me,’ she said.
‘We’re working on that.’
‘Good news,’ she said.

In the society of the future, Trotsky wrote, all art would dissolve into life. That is how the world would know good philosophy had triumphed. No need for dancers and painters and writers and actors: everyone would become part of a great living mural of talent and harmony. Ever since I bounded from the gate of the farm in Aviemore and jigged down the road in Walter Higgens’s van, I know that I had been looking for the great operatic moment, the supreme fiction, a place where politics and art would show themselves united however average the day. We didn’t know much but we knew one thing, that earth is so constituted that heaven could never better it.

You find things out. Pups ask me what happens in life and I say you find things out. That day back in my youth, when Mrs Bell went down to the wine cellar and struck a match for one of her Gauloises and asked me to swipe out the flame with my paw, I think I was too young to work out that she must have been thinking about her dead sister. (Virginia had trained each of her dogs to perform the same trick for her.) During that day’s lunch at Charleston, Mr Connolly’s mentioning of Virginia had brought Vanessa up short, confronting her, all of a sudden, with echoes and portents. And something of the same atmosphere filled the limousine that took us away from Pico Boulevard the last time I was on the set of
Something’s Got to Give
. Marilyn told her driver to give everybody the slip and head for the freeway. ‘Take us to Forest Lawn, Rudy,’ she said. ‘I feel like walking. You know how you sometimes want to just walk and walk and get everybody’s worries out of your hair?’ The car was a neat refrigerator, a perfect place to be if you’re going to live in California. A book about Mexican gardens sat under the rear window.

And so to Glendale, to the other side of Griffith Park from where I’d started my Los Angeles life, to watch the light fading over the San Fernando Valley. Rudy parked at the gates and I walked up Memorial Drive with Marilyn, noting how the names of all the roads and lanes made the cemetery sound like the regions of the moon. The Vale of Peace, The Court of Reflections, Morning Light, The Garden of Victory. By the time we reached the part of the hill she was looking for, I had worked out that this was the place people’s remains came when they died. The fallen eucalyptus leaves crackled as we walked over them. I sniffed the ground and had a pee. Marilyn took a slip of paper out of her purse: in pencil, in her own hand, it simply said, ‘Murmuring Trees, Lot 6739’.

The breeze at Forest Lawn journeyed visibly over the graves, taking light and shadow with it as it made its way up the hill. And the graves appeared to respond to us, a woman and her dog out for a stroll in the early part of a summer evening. What a fund of consciousness there was in that silent park. My owner sat down on the grass at the top of Murmuring Trees and lit a joint given to her by one of the make-up assistants back at the studio. She crossed her ankles and blew out smoke.

We saw God’s Acre. The Old North Church. The Court of Valour. I suppose the names were meant to seem restful, and yet, from where we sat, the place teemed with anxiety about God’s absence. (He is never at home.) The lanes were meant for everlasting hope, and since I’ve got such respect for the made-up, the invented, the seriously confected, why not celebrate God as totem of the great fabular instinct? Why not indeed. Sitting on the grass at Forest Lawn, I finally believed in people’s belief in God: he may not be supreme, or even particularly animated, but he must have at least as much reality as Snoopy or Fatty Arbuckle.

There wasn’t a spot of rain at Forest Lawn, which made me wonder why the lawn stayed so lawn-like, given the temperature and the wind that came from the mountains. We were both on the same level, down on the lawn and happy to be with each other. Marilyn had her funny cigarette and she began speaking again the way Emma Bovary spoke to her dog, Djali, as if it were an act of faith to believe in a dog’s silence. She was talking about the little girl who was a friend of hers at school, a year older than her and the most talkative girl in the class. Alice was a person of the future: her blue almond eyes and her black hair were made for love, the tinder in her quiet voice always ready to catch fire and burn up the great world. She was an ordinary Los Angeles girl whose mother worked as a cutter for Consolidated Film. ‘I guess she was always laughing,’ said Marilyn. ‘One of those girls you think’s gonna make life easier for everybody, just by laughing all the time.’ My fated companion blew out the smoke and pinched her tongue. ‘Dr Kris once told me about a letter she got from Anna Freud,’ she said. ‘I distinctly remember a phrase Kris quoted from it: “One never really loses a father if he was good enough.” ’