The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe (16 page)

I was glad to be back on Sutton Place. ‘You is bad and bad enough!’ said Vincent the doorman as he walked me around the streets one nearly spring-like day. ‘My, how you’ve grown. You is one fat li’l puppy.’ Vince seemed to know all the old ladies in the area, not just remembering their names – Miss Olsen, Mrs Taymor – but remembering their dogs’ names as well, all those Luckys, Butches, and Maximilian Schoenberg the Thirds. ‘And how’s your Claudius today,’ he would stop and ask. ‘Ripe as a week-old nectarine, I’d say. Lively as a sack of polecats, I’d say.’

‘Why do you talk like that?’ I said. ‘Why do you talk like some wide-eyed fictional black man, some daddy of the cotton fields?’

‘Ah, Maf Honey. You is
sunny
today.’

‘Oh, stop it. Can you hear me? Have you ever listened to your voice, Vince?’
‘Sunny side up and no mistake!’
Vince once said something that Grace Higgens used to say upstairs at Charleston and Mrs Duff on the farm in Scotland used to say it, too. He said, ‘Don’t ask me. I’m just the dogsbody.’ That kind of talk made me growl with confusion. In those years your politics was the story of how you defined the individual against the power of the state. The whole thing became slightly hysterical, as things did with people, at a book party I attended with Marilyn later that day. The common obsession back then was totalitarianism, and for some reason – I don’t know, my private education, the life and opinions of your average dog – I always located the struggle between the individual and the state in the kitchens and on the backstairs, in the lobbies, houses, and apartments where we lived. Also on the streets where we walked. But the workers didn’t always agree. They didn’t talk as if they agreed. As Trotsky once said of some haphazard victims, they had a tendency to increase the term of their own captivity.
Yet Vincent had a full understanding of everyday comedy. He worshipped the writings and cartoons of James Thurber, a gentleman from the
New Yorker
who managed to understand dogs (and people) a lot better than most dogs (and most people). Thurber had gone so far into Vincent’s mind that the doorman had Thurber-like thoughts, seeing people as alarming creatures and dogs as questing beasts. After we came back from our walk we still had to wait an hour for Marilyn to come down to the lobby. Marilyn was late for everything: it was her creed, her prerogative, her style, and her revenge.
^*
Vince was a connoisseur of other people’s lateness. He gave me a dish of water and then sat in his big chair to look at a library book, a story called ‘Extinct Animals of Bermuda’.
There was some kind of demonstration on the Upper East Side, so the car had to go fifteen blocks downtown, cut across, and climb back up in the direction of the Plaza Hotel. It should have been a simple journey, but no journeys are ever simple. Anyway it was a lovely evening, the sort of fresh April evening when men of thirty suddenly realise they should go and buy their girlfriend a ring. At one point we got stuck in traffic trying to join Fifth Avenue and Marilyn suddenly asked the driver to stop. She fished in her pocketbook for a quarter, stepped out of the car – my owner in chiffon dress and mink – and asked the first man she saw to do her a favour. The man took his hat off when she stepped up to him. The driver lowered the window. The man was in a state of what they call disbelief. ‘Holy smoke,’ he was saying. ‘Are you who I think you are?’
‘I think so,’ said Marilyn. ‘Are you?’
‘Holy smoke,’ he said again. And then he said, ‘I’m William Ebert. I don’t know why I’m telling you that.’
‘Would you be a pal?’ she said. ‘Would you do something for me? I need to get back into this car.’ She held out the quarter and he took it right away. ‘Could you call the Plaza Hotel? The Oak Room. And just say Marilyn is going to be late but is on the way. We’re trying to hurry. The message is for Carson McCullers. Could you do that for me?’
‘Sure,’ said the guy. ‘Holy smoke. Give me that name again.’ He laid down his briefcase, took a pen from his top pocket and wrote it down, then he handed the pen and the piece of paper to Marilyn.
‘Could you write “To Jenny”?’
‘Is she your sweetheart?’
‘I want her to be,’ he said. ‘Her name’s Jennifer.’ Marilyn pulled the front of her coat around her after she’d written her name, as she handed back the pen and paper. People began to stop and point.
‘She’s a lucky girl,’ said Marilyn, stepping back to the car and blowing him one of her kisses. The car horns were beeping. The man shouted back at her as she stepped in beside me.
‘The Oak Room, right?’
‘Thank you, William,’ she said.
‘I’ll do it. I’ll do it right now,’ he said.
By the New York Public Library I saw two butterflies going round the head of a stone lion. They landed on the bridge of his nose before dancing above the steps and stopping on a small tree by the roadside. The female was brown and the male was blue, shy of his orange chevrons. I put my face up to the open window and listened to them. The evening was moving into amorous dusk, but I could see the butterflies clearly and they spoke in the manner of Nabokov. ‘Translucent friend, I am sea-sick with longing. I admire your wings the colour of sapphire and your tiny breath, the ballet of your movements in the pensive air.’
‘Come,’ said the other. ‘Let’s tom-peep along the hedges.’
‘We will find an arbour in flame-flower.’
‘Tomorrow. Yes.’
‘There will be poplars, apples . . .’
‘A suburban Sunday.’
‘Yes.’
‘There are small houses. Moist gardens.’
‘Let us go there.’
They lifted off and the blue one caught my eye as they passed right over my head. ‘Take care of her,
mon brave
,’ he said.
‘I will,’ I said. ‘I’ll try.’
And with that the butterflies looped over the taxi cabs to disappear against the silver bulk of the buildings. So far so good, the Lupine Blues lost in the sky above Manhattan.
The last bit of the journey was boring. Marilyn looked briefly at her Russian novel, put it down on the seat between us and took out her mirror, fixing her lipstick and smoothing a dot of cream into the skin around her
preoccupeyes
, as I used to call her blue, worried eyes. So I used my time in the traffic to think of my Top Ten Dogs of All Time. The list changes from week to week according to which trait is uppermost in my mind – was loyalty the virtue of the week, or was it clever ness, bravery, athletic ability, or my old favourite, pure goodness?

* I never understood why people made such a fuss about her lateness. When Gladys Deacon, the future duchess of Marlborough, was an hour and a half late in coming to an appointment with the playwright Jean Giraudoux, he felt that this was ‘the minimum time to wait for someone of her beauty’.

greyfriars bobby
A Skye terrier from Edinburgh. His owner was a nightwatchman and when something happened to him – okay, he died – Bobby visited his grave at Greyfriars Church for fourteen years. Bobby was a kind of saint, really. And sainthood is the kind of fame you want.

lassie
A brilliant collie. ‘Greenall Bridge is in the country of Yorkshire, and of all places in the world it is here that the dog is really king.’ That was Eric Knight, the author who first found Lassie in his head. She was then found by the people at MGM. Pal was the star who acted her. Pal made the character real and the role made Pal real. That is what happens in great acting. Sometimes Lassie got confused about who she was. No wonder, as she was always played by male dogs.

jo-fi
A world-inflecting chow from Paris. Managed to put Freud’s patients at their ease with Freud, while also manag ing to put Freud at his ease with Freud, a very much harder job.

snoopy
A very wise beagle. A novelist at heart. One of those that puts the create part into creature – a wonderful reader of Tolstoy. Apparently, he didn’t say much for the first two years of his life, which makes him very human.

laika
A brave Russian soul. Laika was a stray on the streets of Moscow, a stray as we all are, and was rocketed into space on
Sputnik 2
in November 1957. She never came back, but she learned what her owners never could. Her deathcapsule orbited the world 2,570 times before it burned up on re-entering the earth’s atmosphere. I believe her memoirs would constitute a masterpiece to rival
David Copperfield
.

flush
London spaniels seldom had the sense to bite Robert Browning. This one did, and kept Virginia Woolf sane during an especially truculent season of the mind.
Flush
shows us at once how to live on several planes of experience, which is a gift to art and a gift to good sense.

lady
An American cocker spaniel, the girl of my dreams. She appears in a wonderful Marxist fantasy from Disney called
Lady and the Tramp
. She was typecast as the love object, but I always saw beyond that, appreciating the rare gifts of this most perfect canine being. If only she had met me things would be different.

balto
A Siberian husky. He took exquisite revenge on the notion that stupidity comes with servitude – and, in so doing, he ridiculed the instinct of people to rank themselves above other people, and other animals – by tramping a long way to save some human beings from diphtheria. His statue stands in Central Park to remind passing strangers that their dogs are probably kinder than they are. Some say that another dog, Togo, did most of the leg-work and that Balto just got all the glory. I choose to believe what I want to believe, which is a dog’s prerogative.

pelléas
A complete riot of a dog – a bulldog – owned by Maurice Maeterlinck – a riot of a Belgian. His master was a hero of the simpler magics, making beauty and truth from a basic belief in the possibility of consciousness. Pelléas was the inspir ation for a great deal of tender, unforgettable prose on the part of the old man, who understood the wisdom of California. Pelléas is the great and ceaseless muse, with a powerful forehead like that of Socrates or Verlaine. ‘His intelligent eyes opened to look upon the world,’ wrote Maeterlinck, ‘to love mankind, then closed again on the cruel secrets of death.’

bisou

A cairn terrier who lived in Montmartre, Bisou watched the birth of modern painting. She was painted by Renoir one sunny day while playing with a model wearing a yellow hat adorned with fresh poppies. The people around Bisou imagined she was a silent witness, if any witness at all: in fact she was the most absorbent creature of her age, and, it is reported, a speaker to rival Oscar Wilde.

11

I

n the Oak Room at the Plaza, the waiters tried to conceal their love of my owner and their loathing of me, which for a moment shook my faith in the working man. But after a while they saw the light and fed me a little plate of morsels, placing it next to me on the banquette. The girls were drinking Dom Pérignon. It was merely a private drink, a little relaxer, before they set off together for a book party they’d agreed to attend uptown. ‘Pre-drinks drinks,’ is what Marilyn called them.

‘Mercy, if he ain’t the Colt . 45 of Monroeville, Alabama,’ said Miss McCullers, ‘larkin’ aroun’ Europe with them nice ladies and their rich husbands. Babe Paley and Gloria Vanderbilt and Carol Marcus and y’all. He’s playing y’all like a bullfrog plays the summer pond. You should watch it. You should watch his tongue if you’re fixin’ to see the winter months.’

‘Oh, we know about Truman’s tongue,’ said Marilyn into her glass. ‘He’s wicked.’
‘Worse than that. He’d drown his own mother for ten minutes with a princess. Not even a princess, a lousy duchess. A lady-in-waiting. Gawd knows, the darn cousin of a ladyin-waiting.’
‘Oh, Carson. Aren’t you just a tiny bit jealous? I mean, he’s a joke, right? But he’s a good joke and good jokes are hard to find.’
‘Why would I be jealous, dear? He stole all that writin’ from me and Bill Faulkner.’
^*
‘I hear tell he’s mighty good on a yacht,’ said Marilyn.
‘Quit impersonatin’ me,’ said Miss McCullers. ‘I’d sooner walk the plank as sit on a yacht. Telling ya’. Truman nearabout killed everybody who was ever nice to him and that’s the damn truth.’
‘He stole your work?’
‘Yes, dear. He stole that little fag novel from me and Bill Faulkner and Eudora Welty. The rest he got from Tennessee Williams.’
‘And what about
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
?’
‘He stole that from you, dear.’
‘So they say.’
‘Yes. From you he up and stole it. And from Carol Marcus and Slim Keith. That was the story he stole, and the attitude he done stole the same way. The style, well, honey, the style he stole from me and Christopher Isherwood, right’n front of our eyes.’
‘Heavens.’
‘When you reck’n on Truman, he’s really jest a redneck pansy impressed by the smart folks. He’s a rag-doll, jest waitin’ to be picked up by any spoiled girl who happ’ns to be passin’ by lookin’ for a darn plaything.’
‘Well, nobody’s saying he’s Proust.’
‘Next time he comes your way, you skedaddle now dear, you hear me? He’ll cuss you behind yo’ back like tomorrow’s never comin’.’
‘Carson, Carson. Come, come.’
‘You’ll see if I’m wrong, dear. That little bitch hung his momma out to dry. He hung Katherine Ann Porter and Newton Arvin out to dry. You know what he said about Greta Garbo? He said he happened to go up there to her apartment and she has a Picasso in there, but Truman says she so stupid she hung the Picasso upside down.’
Marilyn shrieked. I jumped onto my feet at the size of her laughter and she covered her mouth. ‘Oh, my,’ she said. ‘He must be the most wicked man who ever did live.’
‘Quit impersonatin’ me. And he ain’t no man. Don’t kid yourself on that score. Yo’ just naive about men.’
Carson had a cane hooked over the back of her chair and her face was white. She was only forty-four years old, ten years older than Marilyn, but from her face and her manner one might have imagined she was much older. Lillian Hellman said that Carson wallowed in her illness – and that was the kind of thing Lillian Hellman would say – but nobody, not even Carson, could deny she was conscious at all times of being ‘efflicted’. She even understood how sometimes she used it to gain control over others, that being a ‘burden’ or a ‘handful’ was often a nice way of making sure you weren’t forgotten. For much of the time in the Oak Room, Carson spoke about the surgery she had had on her wrist, about a second operation due to happen in July and then there was her novel. ‘My. I guess that’s something to get excited about,’ said Marilyn. ‘Do you know what it’s going to be called?’
‘
Clock Without Hands
.’