The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe Read Free Page A

He often knocked off at 2.30 and made his way to the Griffith Observatory, where he liked to fall asleep in the planetarium beneath the whirling cosmos. He was a twenty-six-year-old part-time employee with a good sense of what was visible and not visible to the naked eye. He was especially fascinated by the cool, distant, impervious stars and I’d say he was my first American friend. He worried about proximity, judging everything by how near or how far it was from him. Animals and outer space are excellent hobbies for such a person, for each is useful and comforting to humans with more than a passing interest in loneliness. Much of his conversation was about space animals, the poor beasts regularly sent into the sky as part of the respective space programmes of the United States and the Soviet Union. He enjoyed spending his afternoons thinking about those legions of chimps, monkeys, and macaques floating about the solar system, fulfilling man’s need to discover. The jailer’s natural patriotism led him to stress the American side of things: it was all happening in those years, so we heard a lot about Able and Miss Baker, the two monkeys who were the first creatures to travel into space and return, but there were many others – Sams, Hams, Enoses, Goliaths – shooting into the sky on Little Joe 2 as part of the Mercury programme, dozens of profoundly reluctant beasts gaining altitude, going sub-orbital, lost in space.
Mrs Gurdin, Maria Gurdin – ‘Muddah’, or ‘Mud’, as her girls called her – displayed all the imperial ruthlessness of her White Russian cousins. Just as the Romanovs at Ekaterinburg had sewn their jewels into the linings of their dresses, gems that the assassins’ fusillade soon embedded in their bodies, so Mud sustained an image of herself as a martyr to her riches, a modern Russian icon glittering in pain. When she came to Griffith Park to collect us one November morning, she wore a bright grey turban and extremely rickety peep-toe heels. She was quite different from the woman I’d met in England. In homage to the ravages of American motherhood, she wore too much make-up. No question: she believed motherhood was a kind of martyrdom, the make-up a show of coping. Muddah had what the poet Keats called ‘negative capability’: in England she had seemed to be the perfectly coiffed, white-gloved business lady, but in California she tottered across the lawn doing Joan Crawford at the apogee of her maternal ruination. You could actually scent her lipstick and her general unhappiness at five hundred yards. I would soon come to know very well the depths of anger that lay beneath Mrs Gurdin’s efficiency mode: the day we got our release from Griffith Park she came to fetch us in a rented bus which she drove herself, throwing open the back doors and tossing the dogs inside after the paperwork. Me, Myself and I? What do you think? I sprung into Muddah’s van like Tom Jones vaulting a garden wall.
Bumps. A great many bumps. And what a wonderful lesson in the price of devotion Her Ladyship offered during the ride into the valley and the township of Sherman Oaks. Let me tell you: Mrs Gurdin was a high priestess of devotion, a fan of fandom, an actor’s mother indeed, fully charged up and quite mad with the émigré’s love of American possibility. Yes. There she was at the wheel in her blazing turban, shouting her Russian curses out the window as she battled through the traffic with a bus full of British dogs. On the seat beside me, a dark, lugubrious Staffordshire bull terrier was trying to establish a mathematical formula that could prove Mrs Gurdin was happy in her life, despite the obvious. ‘If you added her minor portion of talent to her major degree of des per ation,’ he said, ‘multiplying it with the exact quantity of her need for revenge and then dividing it by the standard vanity, I think you could show that Muddah is actually quite content.’
We passed the Greek Theater at the edge