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

also dependent; it was his favourite combination in someone he considered a friend. So these lugs from Chicago or New Jersey or, heaven knows, Palm Springs, they wouldn’t have jobs or proper roles, they would run errands, answer phones, pick up cars, make drinks, find girls, and act the wise guy whenever possible. But mainly they talked a steady, constant stream of pure nonsense to one another, very proudly plumbing the depths of their own ignorance beside a swimming pool of stulti fying blue. ‘Ah dunno, Tony. If you eat morels you get sick.’
    ‘No, shitstick. You get fat. It’s a well-known fact that mushrooms make you fat.’
‘Ask Legs over there.’
‘Ask him what?’
‘Ask him about being fat. He ain’t seen his cock in twenty years, the bitch got so fat.’
‘Hey, Legs. You been at the mushrooms again?’
‘Bite it, Marino. Your mother ain’t seen her pussy neither but everybody else has.’
‘Oh, Legs. My friend. That is cold.’
‘He ain’t been eating no mushrooms,’ said a little pastyfaced one with a mule laugh. ‘Legs been stuffing his face with fried chicken since Ernie Lombardi first came out for the Brooklyn Robins.’
‘I’m goin’ eat me this little pig,’ said a guy with gold in his teeth, a guy putting on his shirt. He’d just been inside with Frank at the massage tables. He walked towards me beside the pool and I yapped at him. ‘Fry me up some of them morels, Tony. Fry them nice in butter. I got me a little dog no bigger than a drumstick. He finger food.’
Grrrrrrrrrrrrazzle.
‘Woah, baby. I’m just jazzin’.’
‘There’s your finger food,’ said Legs, chortling into his chest and presenting his middle finger.
When I went inside the villa I saw Frank was now in the living room, suitcases open on the floor, sorting things out with his valet, Mr George Jacobs. He always took too much stuff everywhere he went. A few days in New York could be fifteen pieces of luggage. There was a fair amount of broken glass from the night before. Some news about Kennedy had riled him, and he had lifted a piece of Lalique crystal and thrown it at the fireplace. ‘Don’t sweat it, Pops,’ he had said in his bathrobe while chuckling to Mr Jacobs. ‘The world’s our ashtray, right?’ Mr Jacobs had seen many disruptions not only from Frank but from everybody around him. First time Frank’s mother met George she looked him up and down, saw he was wearing a white jacket, saw he was black and ready to serve her, and she turned to Frank and said, ‘Who do you think you are, Ashley Wilkes? Well, I ain’t no Scarlett O’Hara.’
Nimes Road. What a place. I had managed to escape the house that morning and had enjoyed ten minutes alone in Nimes Road before Mr Jacobs came to find me. Frank lived in a Tuscan villa at the top of the lane, next door to a French chateau. On the other side of Nimes Road there was a miniWhite House with Greek colonnades, and further down, in the direction I wandered, was the perfect example of an English country cottage, covered in ivy and roses. The real difference between humans is that some care about authenticity and some don’t care at all. The people in Bel Air don’t care. To them, Frank’s villa was nicer than any genuine villa ten miles from Lucca. If one were to speak of the Californian vernacular, I wouldn’t, personally, be speaking about adobe fincas in a beanfield: I would be talking about that wee English cottage with its perfect symmetry and its apple trees. There was something beautifully real, something essential and human at the core of its inauthenticity. Dogs have always lived comfortably with that kind of reality. There it is. There it was, Frank’s Tuscan villa on Nimes Road, an importation of rosemary bushes and terracotta, the fountains chucking jets of water into the air of this beautiful desert.
Frank’s best friends had long since forgotten there were limits to their superiority over the world. They had Italy’s might