If there are two things I feel strongly about, they are books about Marilyn Monroe, and books purporting to be written by dogs. Faced with a title as arch as The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of his Friend Marilyn Monroe, the staunchest critical objectivity might fail. In fact, Andrew O’Hagan’s title is somewhat misleading: although certainly chock-full of the life and opinions of Maf the dog, his novel provides those of Marilyn Monroe only in sporadic and impressionistic glimpses – what you might call a “dog’s-eye view”.
The book’s opening pages do little to assuage doubts about affectation. It begins, in all places, at Charleston Farmhouse in Sussex, where a puppy waxes lyrical about life with Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, from whom he absorbs aesthetic philosophy, literary history and good taste. He is sent to America to live with Natalie Wood’s vulgar mother, who gives him to Frank Sinatra, who gives him to Marilyn Monroe at the end of 1960 – at which point, the story begins to resemble something like fact, if such a claim can be made for a book in which dogs quote everyone from Plutarch to Proust, cats speak only in verse, butterflies converse “in the manner of Nabokov” (“We will find an arbour in flame-flower”), and rats talk Brooklynese like hoodlums from 1930s Hollywood films: “‘Summa us got woik to do.'”
Sinatra did indeed give Marilyn a Maltese terrier near the end of her life, a dog she rather wickedly named Mafia, or Maf for short (some claim the dog’s full name was Mafia Honey). Such is the value of association with Marilyn that two Polaroids of Maf sold for more than $220,000 in Christie’s 1999 auction of her effects. In the winter of 1960, Marilyn was living in New York: her marriage to Arthur Miller had failed, and she would divorce him on the day of JFK’s inauguration, in January, 1961. Eighteen months later, in August 1962, she was dead of a barbiturate overdose, at the age of 36. In between, depending on whom you read, she had an affair with President Kennedy – and with his brother Bobby; or with Sinatra; or the gangster Sam Giancana; or even, depending on your susceptibility to gossip, with all of the above. She underwent psychoanalysis, and was traumatised by an enforced hospitalisation at New York’s Payne Whitney clinic in early 1961; she left New York and bought a modest hacienda in LA, which she travelled to Mexico to furnish. She attended parties at Peter Lawford’s beach house and began work on her final film, Something’s Got to Give, from which she was fired two months before she died. The novel is punctuated by these events, with two extremely tactful omissions: it resists almost all speculation about her sex life, going so far as to suggest her relationship with President Kennedy remained platonic (a dubious claim); and it ends with her performance at Kennedy’s gala birthday celebration, three months before she died, thus rising above the standard wallowing in sordid, maudlin, or punitive endings to her tale.
But while these episodes provide the novel’s landmarks, they do not constitute its real terrain. Instead, it offers a whimsical, sometimes strained, occasionally charming, series of riffs on its chosen themes: not only Marilyn, fame, loneliness and death; but also literature, including the literary pedigree of stories about dogs; cultural pretension, in the form of literary New York and Freudian psychoanalysis; politics and democracy; and even America itself.
There is no question that O’Hagan can write, and the book is peppered with sharp summations of famous people: not just Marilyn (“Marilyn was late for everything: it was her creed, her prerogative, her style, and her revenge”) but also Sinatra (a man with a “tough little mind” who “lived in something close to a perpetual nervous breakdown”); Lee Strasberg (“Mr Strasberg had never been so happy to be himself”); and Lionel Trilling (“there was something sinister in Trilling’s grand composure”). He gives Diana Trilling a delicious Parthian shot: at the end of a snide Partisan Review party in New York, during which Maf bites Edmund Wilson and Lillian Hellman, Mrs Trilling tells Marilyn: “Your little dog has exquisite critical taste. We must find a place for him on the faculty.”
Other passages are more awkward, including O’Hagan’s decision to shoehorn some of Marilyn’s most famous quotations into the narrative, so that she bizarrely informs her agent, “I’m always running into people’s unconscious”. Likewise, Maf changes the target of Monroe’s famous ad lib in All About Eve from casting-couch producers to literary critics: “Why do critics always look like unhappy rabbits?”
O’Hagan does Marilyn the justice of making her kind, humorous and sharp-witted – which, by all but most the mean-spirited accounts, she was. She also called a spade a spade: when a young writer preaches communism, she replies: “That’s the way Arthur talks in his plays. But I don’t know about real life. He always seemed pretty interested in money to me.” Refreshingly, O’Hagan doesn’t present Marilyn as a cautionary tale or an object of pity. He understands that she spent her life trying to earn respect, and clearly intends this book as a tribute. But if there was one thing Marilyn recognised, it was a dubious compliment. Arthur Miller once offered Marilyn a “valentine” in the shape of a story about her called “The Misfits”. She divorced him soon after. As Monroe herself quipped, “Dogs never bite me. Just humans.”
Sarah Churchwell is the author of The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe (Granta).
