Today being the anniversary of Marilyn Monroe, I thought it relevant to re post this blog –
The last years of the screen legend are told through the eyes of a pup called Maf.
When Andrew O’Hagan was growing up, there was only one book in his parents’ Kilwinning council house “apart from the Kilmarnock telephone directory”. It was, bizarrely, a paperback of Fred Lawrence Guiles’s 1969 biography, Norma Jean: The Life Of Marilyn Monroe. O’Hagan remembers his carpenter father, who dropped chaotically in and out of family life, bringing it home in his duffle bag after working in Carlisle. His parents never read books, but the 11-year-old boy consumed this one, mesmerised by the luminous beauty of the image of the woman on its cover.
“I had never seen a woman like that. Her dress was golden, split to the waist, her hair was golden, her lips were inviting and rejecting at the same time. I’d never seen anything like it, despite living in Ayrshire, where half the women had lips at least doubly as bright. So Marilyn’s been in my head since childhood,” says O’Hagan, whose new book is called The Life And Opinions Of Maf The Dog, And Of His Friend Marilyn Monroe.
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