Free The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe by Andrew O’Hagan Page A

laughing. ‘Oh, my!’
‘How darling!’
‘Oh, my Lord.’
‘The baby. Oh, the baby.’
‘Little thing.’
‘Just a pooch I picked up on the West Coast. He’s from England.’
‘Oh, a proper gentleman.’
‘I guess . . . I love him, Frankie.’
‘Good, honey. He’s for you.’
‘I love him.’
‘Natalie Wood’s mother deals in dogs,’ he said. ‘She finds them and she . . . well, she collects them. That’s how I found the ankle-biter.’ Hattie the cook and Lena the housekeeper disappeared out of the room in a flurry of warm and tender mouthings. It seemed like they were happy. ‘Every girl needs a man around the house,’ said Frank.
Her eyes had filled up. ‘Gee.’
‘What’s his name going to be?’ asked Frank. She rubbed my nose with hers and I felt it was stone cold.
‘This little tough guy? Gee.’
‘How about Britt?’ said Frank. Cradling me in her arms she looked very tender, a long lock of blonde hair falling over one eye. She caught her breath and smiled a perfect smile.
‘You mean like English?’
‘Naaa,’ he said. ‘I think you should name him after Sammy’s new wife. She’s Swedish. Britt’s a good enough name for a blonde.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘He’s a tough guy, isn’t he? I’m calling him Mafia – Mafia Honey.’
‘Oh, that’s cute, kiddo.’
She kissed me again and let out a cascade of giggles. ‘You like it?’
‘That’s fresh. You read too many newspapers.’
‘Oh, I don’t read any. If I wanna see myself I can look in the bathroom mirror.’
‘I’ll give you Mafia, wise guy.’ He smiled and wandered out of the room to find his coat.
Sizzle, Maltese, Mafia Honey . Is there any chance of sticking to a name around here? Scott Fitzgerald once said that there could never be a good biography of a writer, because a writer is too many people if he is any good. I buy that. I believe it. Writers mattered to Marilyn. She was reading a fat Russian novel that whole period in New York, carrying it everywhere in her bag. She read it very slowly and perhaps she gave it more respect than it deserved. It made her feel accompanied.
So I was Mafia Honey – Maf for short. The days just drifted into one another on the East Side. For the first time since leaving England, I felt I might be on solid ground, in safe company every day with the same maid and the same housekeeper. It seems I was destined always to enjoy the briefest of stays wherever I landed, but in many ways I will always consider the apartment at 444 to have been my home. Marilyn was a strange and unhappy creature, but at the same time she had more natural comedy to her than anybody I would ever know. More comedy and more art. Not for her the stern refusal of life’s absurdities: Marilyn had a sensitivity to jokes and moral drama that would have delighted the chiefs of psychoanalytic Vienna. It didn’t take long for her to become my best friend.
‘Maf. Today I give you meatballs.’ This was Lena Pepitone, who looked after the clothes and sometimes the kitchen. She could mostly be found in the utility room, darning the edge of some Jean Louis sheath dress, re-attaching spangles, biting off threads, but regularly she came out and offered to make big Italian dinners for us. She worked under a Renoir etching, Sur La Plage, à Berneval . I always thought Renoir was so overdone: I mean, all those wispy strokes, they gave me a headache with their infinite prettiness. A body needs a little ugliness to keep it going. Like Frank, he always knew the benefit of some grossness; he gave Marilyn a set of gold lighters that said Cal Neva Lodge on them. They sat on the bookshelf beside a tray of toothpicks and a copy of Madame Bovary .
There was a strong sense of third-personhood about the apartment on 57th Street, right down to the mementoes of a largely invented past and the many pictures of Marilyn herself that hung on the walls, most of them painted by fans. All too soon, I felt like her protector,