Marley and Me: Life and Love With the World's Worst Dog

  On the way home, I sang “We Are the Champions” at the top of my lungs. Marley, sensing my joy and pride, stuck his tongue in my ear. For once, I didn’t even mind.

  There was still one piece of unfinished business between Marley and me. I needed to break him of his worst habit of all: jumping on people. It didn’t matter if it was a friend or a stranger, a child or an adult, the meter reader or the UPS driver. Marley greeted them the same way—by charging at them full speed, sliding across the floor, leaping up, and planting his two front paws on the person’s chest or shoulders as he licked their face. What had been cute when he was a cuddly puppy had turned obnoxious, even terrifying for some recipients of his uninvited advances. He had knocked over children, startled guests, dirtied our friends’ dress shirts and blouses, and nearly taken down my frail mother. No one appreciated it. I had tried without success to break him of jumping up, using standard dog-obedience techniques. The message was not getting through. Then a veteran dog owner I respected said, “You want to break him of that, give him a swift knee in the chest next time he jumps up on you.”

  “I don’t want to hurt him,” I said.

  “You won’t hurt him. A few good jabs with your knee, and I guarantee you he’ll be done jumping.”

  It was tough-love time. Marley had to reform or relocate. The next night when I arrived home from work, I stepped in the front door and yelled, “I’m home!” As usual, Marley came barreling across the wood floors to greet me. He slid the last ten feet as though on ice, then lifted off to smash his paws into my chest and slurp at my face. Just as his paws made contact with me, I gave one swift pump of my knee, connecting in the soft spot just below his rib cage. He gasped slightly and slid down to the floor, looking up at me with a wounded expression, trying to figure out what had gotten into me. He had been jumping on me his whole life; what was with the sudden sneak attack?

  The next night I repeated the punishment. He leapt, I kneed, he dropped to the floor, coughing. I felt a little cruel, but if I were going to save him from the classifieds, I knew I had to drive home the point. “Sorry, guy,” I said, leaning down so he could lick me with all four paws on the ground. “It’s for your own good.”

  The third night when I walked in, he came charging around the corner, going into his typical high-speed skid as he approached. This time, however, he altered the routine. Instead of leaping, he kept his paws on the ground and crashed headfirst into my knees, nearly knocking me over. I’d take that as a victory. “You did it, Marley! You did it! Good boy! You didn’t jump up.” And I got on my knees so he could slobber me without risking a sucker punch. I was impressed. Marley had bent to the power of persuasion.

  The problem was not exactly solved, however. He may have been cured of jumping on me, but he was not cured of jumping on anyone else. The dog was smart enough to figure out that only I posed a threat, and he could still jump on the rest of the human race with impunity. I needed to widen my offensive, and to do that I recruited a good friend of mine from work, a reporter named Jim Tolpin. Jim was a mild-mannered, bookish sort, balding, bespectacled, and of slight build. If there was anyone Marley thought he could jump up on without consequence, it was Jim. At the office one day I laid out the plan. He was to come to the house after work, ring the doorbell, and then walk in. When Marley jumped up to kiss him, he was to give him all he had. “Don’t be shy about it,” I coached. “Subtlety is lost on Marley.”

  That night Jim rang the bell and walked in the door. Sure enough, Marley took the bait and raced at him, ears flying back. When Marley left the ground to leap up on him, Jim took my advice to heart. Apparently worried he would be too timid, he dealt a withering blow with his knee to Marley’s solar plexus, knocking the wind out of him. The thud was audible across the room. Marley let out a loud moan, went bug-eyed, and sprawled on the floor.

  “Jesus, Jim,” I said. “Have you been studying kung fu?”

  “You told me to make him feel it,” he answered.

  He had. Marley got to his feet, caught his breath, and greeted Jim the way a dog should—on all four paws. If he could have talked, I swear he would have cried uncle. Marley never again jumped up on anyone, at least not in my presence, and no one ever kneed him in the chest or anywhere else again.

  One morning, not long after Marley abandoned his jumping habit, I woke up and my wife was back. My Jenny, the woman I loved who had disappeared into that unyielding blue fog, had returned to me. As suddenly as the postpartum depression had swept over her, it swept away again. It was as if she had been exorcised of her demons. They were gone. Blessedly gone. She was strong, she was upbeat, she was not only coping as a young mother of two, but thriving. Marley was back in her good graces, safely on solid ground. With a baby in each arm, she leaned to kiss him. She threw him sticks and made him gravy from hamburger drippings. She danced him around the room when a good song came on the stereo. Sometimes at night when he was calm, I would find her lying on the floor with him, her head resting on his neck. Jenny was back. Thank God, she was back.

  CHAPTER 16

  The Audition

  S ome things in life are just too bizarre to be anything but true, so when Jenny called me at the office to tell me Marley was getting a film audition, I knew she couldn’t be making it up. Still, I was in disbelief. “A what?” I asked.

  “A film audition.”

  “Like for a movie?”

  “Yes, like for a movie, dumbo,” she said. “A feature-length movie.”

  “Marley? A feature-length movie?”

  We went on like this for some time as I tried to reconcile the image of our lug-head chewer of ironing boards with the image of a proud successor to Rin Tin Tin leaping across the silver screen, pulling helpless children from burning buildings.

  “Our Marley?” I asked one more time, just to be sure.

  It was true. A week earlier, Jenny’s supervisor at the Palm Beach Post called and said she had a friend who needed to ask a favor of us. The friend was a local photographer named Colleen McGarr who had been hired by a New York City film-production company called the Shooting Gallery to help with a movie they planned to make in Lake Worth, the town just south of us. Colleen’s job was to find a “quintessential South Florida household” and photograph it top to bottom—the bookshelves, the refrigerator magnets, the closets, you name it—to help the directors bring realism to the film.

  “The whole set crew is gay,” Jenny’s boss told her. “They’re trying to figure out how married couples with kids live around here.”

  “Sort of like an anthropological case study,” Jenny said.

  “Exactly.”

  “Sure,” Jenny agreed, “as long as I don’t have to clean first.”

  Colleen came over and started photographing, not just our possessions but us, too. The way we dressed, the way we wore our hair, the way we slouched on the couch. She photographed toothbrushes on the sink. She photographed the babies in their cribs. She photographed the quintessentially heterosexual couple’s eunuch dog, too. Or atleast what she could catch of him on film. As she observed, “He’s a bit of a blur.”

  Marley could not have been more thrilled to participate. Ever since babies had invaded, Marley took his affection where he could find it. Colleen could have jabbed him with a cattle prod; as long as he was getting some attention, he was okay with it. Colleen, being a lover of large animals and not intimidated by saliva showers, gave him plenty, dropping to her knees to wrestle with him.

  As Colleen clicked away, I couldn’t help thinking of the possibilities. Not only were we supplying raw anthropological data to the filmmakers, we were essentially being given our own personal casting call. I had heard that most of the secondary actors and all of the extras for this film would be hired locally. What if the director spotted a natural star amid the kitchen magnets and poster art? Stranger things had happened.

  I could just picture the director, who in my fantasy looked a lot like Steven Spielberg, bent over a large table scattered with
hundreds of photographs. He flips impatiently through them, muttering, “Garbage! Garbage! This just won’t do.” Then he freezes over a single snapshot. In it a rugged yet sensitive, quintessentially heterosexual male goes about his family-man business. The director stubs his finger heavily into the photo and shouts to his assistants, “Get me this man! I must have him for my film!” When they finally track me down, I at first humbly demur before finally agreeing to take the starring role. After all, the show must go on.

  Colleen thanked us for opening our home to her and left. She gave us no reason to believe she or anyone else associated with the movie would be calling back. Our duty was now fulfilled. But a few days later when Jenny called me at work to say, “I just got off the phone with Colleen McGarr, and you are NOT going to believe it,” I had no doubt whatsoever that I had just been discovered. My heart leapt. “Go on,” I said.

  “She says the director wants Marley to try out.”

  “Marley?” I asked, certain I had misheard. She didn’t seem to notice the dismay in my voice.

  “Apparently, he’s looking for a big, dumb, loopy dog to play the role of the family pet, and Marley caught his eye.”

  “Loopy?” I asked.

  “That’s what Colleen says he wants. Big, dumb, and loopy.”

  Well, he had certainly come to the right place. “Did Colleen mention if he said anything about me?” I asked.

  “No,” Jenny said. “Why would he?”

  Colleen picked Marley up the next day. Knowing the importance of a good entrance, he came racing through the living room to greet her at full bore, pausing only long enough to grab the nearest pillow in his teeth because you never knew when a busy film director might need a quick nap, and if he did, Marley wanted to be ready.

  When he hit the wood floor, he flew into a full skid, which did not stop until he hit the coffee table, went airborne, crashed into a chair, landed on his back, rolled, righted himself, and collided head-on with Colleen’s legs. At least he didn’t jump up, I noted.

  “Are you sure you don’t want us to sedate him?” Jenny asked.

  The director would want to see him in his unbridled, unmedicated state, Colleen insisted, and off she went with our desperately happy dog beside her in her red pickup truck.

  Two hours later Colleen and Company were back and the verdict was in: Marley had passed the audition. “Oh, shut up!” Jenny shrieked. “No way!” Our elation was not dampened a bit when Colleen told us Marley was the only one up for the part. Nor when she broke the news that his would be the only nonpaying role in the movie.

  I asked her how the audition went.

  “I got Marley in the car and it was like driving in a Jacuzzi,” she said. “He was slobbering on everything. By the time I got him there, I was drenched.” When they arrived at production headquarters at the GulfStream Hotel, a faded tourist landmark from an earlier era overlooking the Intracoastal Waterway, Marley immediately impressed the crew by jumping out of the truck and tearing around the parking lot in random patterns as if expecting the aerial bombing to commence at any moment. “He was just berserk,” she recounted, “completely mental.”

  “Yeah, he gets a little excited,” I said.

  At one point, she said, Marley grabbed the checkbook out of a crew member’s hand and raced away, running a series of tight figure-eights to nowhere, apparently determined this was one way to guarantee a paycheck.

  “We call him our Labrador evader,” Jenny apologized with the kind of smile only a proud mother can give.

  Marley eventually calmed down enough to convince everyone he could do the part, which was basically to just play himself. The movie was called The Last Home Run, a baseball fantasy in which a seventy-nine-year-old nursing home resident becomes a twelve-year-old for five days to live his dream of playing Little League ball. Marley was cast as the hyperactive family dog of the Little League coach, played by retired major-league catcher Gary Carter.

  “They really want him to be in their movie?” I asked, still incredulous.

  “Everyone loved him,” Colleen said. “He’s perfect.”

  In the days leading up to shooting, we noticed a certain subtle change in Marley’s bearing. A strange calm had come over him. It was as if passing the audition had given him new confidence. He was almost regal. “Maybe he just needed someone to believe in him,” I told Jenny.

  If anyone believed, it was her, Stage Mom Extraordinaire. As the first day of filming approached, she bathed him. She brushed him. She clipped his nails and swabbed out his ears.

  On the morning shooting was to begin, I walked out of the bedroom to find Jenny and Marley tangled together as if locked in mortal combat, bouncing across the room. She was straddling him with her knees tightly hugging his ribs and one hand grasping the end of his choker chain as he bucked and lurched. It was like having a rodeo right in my own living room. “What in God’s name are you doing?” I asked.

  “What’s it look like?” she shot back. “Brushing his teeth!”

  Sure enough, she had a toothbrush in the other hand and was doing her best to scrub his big white ivories as Marley, frothing prodigiously at the mouth, did his best to eat the toothbrush. He looked positively rabid.

  “Are you using toothpaste?” I asked, which of course begged the bigger question, “And how exactly do you propose getting him to spit it out?”

  “Baking soda,” she answered.

  “Thank God,” I said. “So it’s not rabies?”

  An hour later we left for the GulfStream Hotel, the boys in their car seats and Marley between them, panting away with uncharacteristically fresh breath. Our instructions were to arrive by 9:00A.M., but a block away, traffic came to a standstill. Up ahead the road was barricaded and a police officer was diverting traffic away from the hotel. The filming had been covered at length in the newspapers—the biggest event to hit sleepy Lake Worth since Body Heat was filmed there fifteen years earlier—and a crowd of spectators had turned out to gawk. The police were keeping everyone away. We inched forward in traffic, and when we finally got up to the officer I leaned out the window and said, “We need to get through.”

  “No one gets through,” he said. “Keep moving. Let’s go.”

  “We’re with the cast,” I said.

  He eyed us skeptically, a couple in a minivan with two toddlers and family pet in tow. “I said move it!” he barked.

  “Our dog is in the film,” I said.

  Suddenly he looked at me with new respect. “You have the dog?” he asked. The dog was on his checklist.

  “I have the dog,” I said. “Marley the dog.”

  “Playing himself,” Jenny chimed in.

  He turned around and blew his whistle with great fanfare. “He’s got the dog!” he shouted to a cop a half block down. “Marley the Dog!”

  And that cop in turn yelled to someone else, “He’s got the dog! Marley the Dog’s here!”

  “Let ’em through!” a third officer shouted from the distance.

  “Let ’em through!” the second cop echoed.

  The officer moved the barricade and waved us through. “Right this way,” he said politely. I felt like royalty. As we rolled past him he said once again, as if he couldn’t quite believe it, “He’s got the dog.”

  In the parking lot outside the hotel, the film crew was ready for action. Cables crisscrossed the pavement; camera tripods and microphone booms were set up. Lights hung from scaffolding. Trailers held racks of costumes. Two large tables of food and drinks were set up in the shade for cast and crew. Important-looking people in sunglasses bustled about. Director Bob Gosse greeted us and gave us a quick rundown of the scene to come. It was simple enough. A minivan pulls up to the curb, Marley’s make-believe owner, played by the actress Liza Harris, is at the wheel. Her daughter, played by a cute teenager named Danielle from the local performing-arts school, and son, another local budding actor not older than nine, are in the back with their family dog, played by Marley. The daughter opens the sliding d
oor and hops out; her brother follows with Marley on a leash. They walk off camera. End of scene.

  “Easy enough,” I told the director. “He should be able to handle that, no problem.” I pulled Marley off to the side to wait for his cue to get into the van.

  “Okay, people, listen up,” Gosse told the crew. “The dog’s a little nutty, all right? But unless he completely hijacks the scene, we’re going to keep rolling.” He explained his thinking: Marley was the real thing—a typical family dog—and the goal was to capture him behaving as a typical family dog would behave on a typical family outing. No acting or coaching; pure cinema verité. “Just let him do his thing,” he coached, “and work around him.”

  When everyone was set to go, I loaded Marley into the van and handed his nylon leash to the little boy, who looked terrified of him. “He’s friendly,” I told him. “He’ll just want to lick you. See?” I stuck my wrist into Marley’s mouth to demonstrate.

  Take one: The van pulls to the curb. The instant the daughter slides open the side door, a yellow streak shoots out like a giant fur ball being fired from a cannon and blurs past the cameras trailing a red leash.

  “Cut!”

  I chased Marley down in the parking lot and hauled him back.

  “Okay, folks, we’re going to try that again,” Gosse said. Then to the boy he coached gently, “The dog’s pretty wild. Try to hold on tighter this time.”

  Take two. The van pulls to the curb. The door slides open. The daughter is just beginning to exit when Marley huffs into view and leaps out past her, this time dragging the white-knuckled and white-faced boy behind him.

  “Cut!”