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

a common feeling and maybe a bogus one, but I believe it meant something to each of us. It seemed I had been sent to look after her. Now that she was back living on her own, Marilyn’s state of mind was, at the same time, fresh and depleted: she wanted to learn to take herself seriously, * to value her experience. And yet she was hitched to the person she had always been: the girl who was sweet and available, who now took pills and drank. She found it hard. Many of the old bids for independence had fallen short. She was tired. When she hugged me, her comforter, her guardian, I felt a weight of disappointment about her, as if the stands she had taken in life, and in love, had only revealed her personal shortcomings and the impossibility of respect. But she was glad that winter to be free of Arthur and his inky old blameless honour.
The apartment had a powerful feeling of departed resentment, as if Marilyn had finally freed herself from a person whose energy had been destructive, the kind of person who had no interest in sustaining what was good in her nature or necessary to her survival. Spouses are sometimes competitive, aren’t they? And the bad ones want not only to destroy the thing they love, but to crush that thing’s ability to offer love, too. Such spouses imagine that no one will ever remember their lies, their aggressions, their capriciousness, and yet, in the end, that is all their former loved ones will remember about them, their terrible behaviour. Poor married people: perhaps they could learn something from dogs about how to settle the business of oneself before setting up shop with another.
All that was gone from the rooms. All the blame had gone and all the typewriters. But in my universe, which, let’s face it, is the universe of the floor, I found myself constantly stepping over evidence that Mr Miller had tried to be Marilyn’s educator. All the books were recent, from the last few years, and none of them spoke of the attachments that had tethered Marilyn’s mind in her twenties, or, further back, in her youth. Outside the bathroom, on another Ferragamo box, stood The Roots of American Communism by Theodore Draper, The Works of Rabelais , De Tocqueville’s Democracy in America , A Piece of My Mind by Edmund Wilson, and an expertly illustrated edition of The Little Engine That Could . Apart from the last one, you never saw Marilyn reading them unless a photographer came to the apartment to take pictures. She was always appearing in Life magazine with a copy of Ulysses or The Poems of Heinrich Heine balanced on her palpitating breast. I wished I could tell her to leave all that to the mutts: anybody can read a book, but Marilyn could make people dream, just as Lena could with her wonderful tagliatelle in meat sauce. After a while I began to feel Lena was treating me as Dr Johnson treated his favourite cat, Hodge. The moggy spoke in alexandrines which the great moralist couldn’t hear, but he fed him oysters all the same and the cat was very happy.
Marilyn took me everywhere. We had a lot of fun going up and down the avenues, Marilyn sometimes in a headscarf and sunglasses, completely unknown, running into the wind with our mouths open, and hungry for experience. I think we shared a feeling for the tribulations of the period, an instinct for killing the distance between the high and the low, something that would come in time to explain the depth of our friendship. If she brought out the actor in me then it might be said that I brought out the philosopher in her. The Marilyn I knew was smelly and fun and an artist to the very end of her fingertips.
I loved to sit on the white piano and watch her get ready for a night out. There was something perfectly shameless in the way she admired her reflection. It was like the central panel of Hans Memling’s remarkable triptych, Earthly Vanity and Divine Salvation , in which Vanity is pictured with her little white lapdog, a model of companionship, standing