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

Take three. The van pulls up. The door slides open. The daughter exits. The boy exits, holding the leash. As he steps away from the van the leash pulls taut, stretching back inside, but no dog follows. The boy begins to tug, heave, and pull. He leans into it and gives it everything he has. Not a budge. Long, painfully empty seconds pass. The boy grimaces and looks back at the camera.

  “Cut!”

  I peered into the van to find Marley bent over licking himself where no male was ever meant to lick. He looked up at me as if to say, Can’t you see I’m busy?

  Take four: I load Marley into the back of the van with the boy and shut the door. Before Gosse calls “Action!” he breaks for a few minutes to confer with his assistants. Finally, the scene rolls. The van pulls to the curb. The door slides open. The daughter steps out. The boy steps out, but with a bewildered look on his face. He peers directly into the camera and holds up his hand. Dangling from it is half the leash, its end jagged and wet with saliva.

  “Cut! Cut! Cut!”

  The boy explained that as he waited in the van, Marley began gnawing on the leash and wouldn’t stop. The crew and cast were staring at the severed leash in disbelief, a mix of awe and horror on their faces as though they had just witnessed some great and mysterious force of nature. I, on the other hand, was not surprised in the least. Marley had sent more leashes and ropes to their graves than I could count; he even managed to chew his way through a rubber-coated steel cable that was advertised “as used in the airline industry.” Shortly after Conor was born, Jenny came home with a new product, a doggie travel harness that allowed her to buckle Marley into a car seat belt so he couldn’t wander around the moving vehicle. In the first ninety seconds using the new device, he managed to chew through not only the heavy harness itself but the shoulder strap of our brand-new minivan.

  “Okay, everybody, let’s take a break!” Gosse called out. Turning to me, he asked—in an amazingly calm voice—“How quickly can you find a new leash?” He didn’t have to tell me how much each lost minute cost him as his union-scale actors and crew sat idle.

  “There’s a pet store a half mile from here,” I said. “I can be back in fifteen minutes.”

  “And this time get something he can’t chew through,” he said.

  I returned with a heavy chain leash that looked like something a lion trainer might use, and the filming continued, take after failed take. Each scene was worse than the one before. At one point, Danielle the teenage actress let out a desperate shriek midscene and screamed with true horror in her voice, “Oh my God! His thing is out!”

  “Cut!”

  In another scene, Marley was panting so loudly at Danielle’s feet as she spoke on the telephone to her love interest that the sound engineer flipped off his headphones in disgust and complained loudly, “I can’t hear a word she’s saying. All I hear is heavy breathing. It sounds like a porn flick.”

  “Cut!”

  So went day 1 of shooting. Marley was a disaster, unmitigated and without redemption. Part of me was defensive—Well, what did they expect for free? Benji?—and part was mortified. I self-consciously stole glances at the cast and crew and could see it plainly on their faces: Where did this animal come from, and how can we send him back? At the end of the day one of the assistants, clipboard in hand, told us the shooting lineup was still undecided for the next morning. “Don’t bother coming in tomorrow,” he said. “We’ll call if we need Marley.” And to ensure there was no confusion, he repeated: “So unless you hear from us, don’t show up. Got it?” Yeah, I got it, loud and clear. Gosse had sent his underling to do the dirty work. Marley’s fledgling acting career was over. Not that I could blame them. With the possible exception of that scene in The Ten Commandments where Charlton Heston parts the Red Sea, Marley had presented the biggest logistical nightmare in the history of cinema. He had caused who knows how many thousands of dollars in needless delays and wasted film. He had slimed countless costumes, raided the snack table, and nearly toppled a thirty-thousand-dollar camera. They were cutting their losses, writing us out. It was the old “Don’t call us, we’ll call you” routine.

  “Marley,” I said when we got home, “your big chance and you really blew it.”

  The next morning I was still fretting over our dashed dreams of stardom when the phone rang. It was the assistant, telling us to get Marley to the hotel as soon as possible. “You mean you want him back?” I asked.

  “Right away,” he said. “Bob wants him in the next scene.”

  I arrived thirty minutes later, not quite believing they had invited us back. Gosse was ebullient. He had watched the raw footage from the day before and couldn’t have been happier. “The dog was hysterical!” he gushed. “Just hilarious. Pure madcap genius!” I could feel myself standing taller, chest puffing out.

  “We always knew he was a natural,” Jenny said.

  Shooting continued around Lake Worth for several more days, and Marley continued to rise to the occasion. We hovered in the wings with the other stage parents and hangers-on, chatting, socializing, and then falling abruptly silent whenever the stagehand yelled, “Ready on set!” When the word “Cut!” rang out, the party continued. Jenny even managed to get Gary Carter and Dave Win-field, the Baseball Hall of Fame all-star who was making a cameo in the movie, to sign baseballs for each of the boys.

  Marley was lapping up stardom. The crew, especially the women, fawned over him. The weather was brutally hot, and one assistant was assigned the exclusive duty of following Marley around with a bowl and a bottle of spring water, pouring him drinks at will. Everyone, it seemed, was feeding him snacks off the buffet table. I left him with the crew for a couple of hours while I checked in at work, and when I returned I found him sprawled out like King Tut, paws in the air, accepting a leisurely belly rub from the strikingly gorgeous makeup artist. “He’s such a lover!” she cooed.

  Stardom was starting to go to my head, too. I began introducing myself as “Marley the Dog’s handler” and dropping lines such as “For his next movie, we’re hoping for a barking part.” During one break in the shooting, I walked into the hotel lobby to use the pay phone. Marley was off his leash and sniffing around the furniture several feet away. A concierge, apparently mistaking my star for a stray, intercepted him and tried to hustle him out a side door. “Go home!” he scolded. “Shoo!”

  “Excuse me?” I said, cupping my hand over the mouthpiece of the phone and leveling the concierge with my most withering stare. “Do you have any idea who you’re talking to?”

  We remained on the set for four straight days, and by the time we were told Marley’s scenes were all completed and his services no longer needed, Jenny and I both felt we were part of the Shooting Gallery family. Granted, the only unpaid members of the family, but members nonetheless. “We love you guys!” Jenny blurted out to all within earshot as we herded Marley into the minivan. “Can’t wait to see the final cut!”

  But wait we did. One of the producers told us to give them eight months and then call and they’d mail us an advance copy. After eight months when I called, however, a front-desk person put me on hold and returned several minutes later to say, “Why don’t you try in another couple months?” I waited and tried, waited and tried, but each time was put off. I started feeling like a stalker, and I could imagine the receptionist, hand cupped over the phone, whispering to Gosse at the editing table, “It’s that crazy dog guy again. What do you want me to tell him this time?”

  Eventually I stopped calling, resigned that we would never see The Last Home Run, convinced that no one ever would, that the project had been abandoned on the editing-room floor on account of the overwhelming challenges of trying to edit that damn dog out of every scene. It would be two full years later before I would finally get my chance to see Marley’s acting skills.

  I was in Blockbuster when on a whim I asked the clerk if he knew anything about a movie called The Last Home Run. Not only did he know about it; he had it in stock. In fact, as luck would have it, not a sing
le copy was checked out.

  Only later would I learn the whole sad story. Unable to attract a national distributor, the Shooting Gallery had no choice but to relegate Marley’s movie debut to that most ignoble of celluloid fates. The Last Home Run had gone straight to video. I didn’t care. I raced home with a copy and yelled to Jenny and the kids to gather round the VCR. All told, Marley was on-screen for less than two minutes, but I had to say they were two of the livelier minutes in the film. We laughed! We cried! We cheered!

  “Waddy, that you!” Conor screamed.

  “We’re famous!” Patrick yelled.

  Marley, never one to get hung up on pretenses, seemed unimpressed. He yawned and crawled beneath the coffee table. By the time the end credits rolled, he was sound asleep. We waited with breath held as the names of all the actors of the two-legged variety had scrolled by. For a minute, I thought our dog was not going to merit a credit. But then there it was, listed in big letters across the screen for all to see: “Marley the Dog…As Himself.”

  CHAPTER 17

  In the Land of Bocahontas

  One month after filming ended for The Last Home Run, we said good-bye to West Palm Beach and all the memories it held. There had been two more murders within a block of our home, but in the end it was clutter, not crime, that drove us from our little bungalow on Churchill Road. With two children and all the accoutrements that went with them, we were packed, quite literally, to the rafters. The house had taken on the pallid sheen of a Toys “R” Us factory outlet. Marley was ninety-seven pounds, and he could not turn around without knocking something over. Ours was a two-bedroom house, and we foolishly thought the boys could share the second room. But when they kept waking each other up, doubling our nocturnal adventures, we moved Conor out to a narrow space between the kitchen and the garage. Officially, it was my “home office,” where I played guitar and paid bills. To anyone who saw it, though, there was really no sugarcoating it: We had moved our baby out into the breezeway. It sounded horrible. A breezeway was just a half step up from a garage, which, in turn, was nearly synonymous with a barn. And what kind of parents would raise their boy in a barn? A breezeway had a certain unsecured sound to it: a place open to the wind—and anything else that might blow in. Dirt, allergens, stinging insects, bats, criminals, perverts. A breezeway was where you would expect to find the garbage cans and wet tennis shoes. And in fact it was the place where we kept Marley’s food and water bowls, even after Conor took up residence there, not because it was a space fit only for an animal but simply because that’s where Marley had come to expect them.

  Our breezeway-cum-nursery sounded Dickensian, but it really wasn’t that bad; it was almost charming. Originally, it was built as a covered, open-air pass-through between the house and garage, and the previous owners had closed it in years earlier. Before declaring it a nursery, I replaced the old leaky jalousies with modern, tight-fitting windows. I hung new blinds and applied a fresh coat of paint. Jenny covered the floor with soft rugs, hung cheerful drawings, and dangled whimsical mobiles from the ceiling. Still, how did it look? Our son was sleeping in the breezeway while the dog had full run of the master bedroom.

  Besides, Jenny was now working half-time for the Post’s feature section, and mostly from home, as she attempted to juggle children and career. It only made sense for us to relocate closer to my office. We agreed it was time to move.

  Life is full of little ironies, and one of them was the fact that, after months of searching, we settled on a house in the one South Florida city I took the greatest glee in publicly ridiculing. That place was Boca Raton, which, translated from the Spanish, means literally “Mouth of the Rat.” And what a mouth it was.

  Boca Raton was a wealthy Republican bastion largely populated with recent arrivals from New Jersey and New York. Most of the money in town was new money, and most of those who had it didn’t know how to enjoy it without making fools of themselves. Boca Raton was a land of luxury sedans, red sports cars, pink stucco mansions crammed onto postage-stamp lots, and balkanized walled developments with guards at the gates. The men favored linen pants and Italian loafers sans socks and spent inordinate amounts of time making important-sounding cell-phone calls to one another. The women were tanned to the consistency of the Gucci leather bags they favored, their burnished skin set off by hair dyed alarming shades of silver and platinum.

  The city crawled with plastic surgeons, and they had the biggest homes and most radiant smiles of all. For Boca’s well-preserved women, breast implants were a virtual requirement of residency. The younger women all had magnificent boob jobs; the older women all had magnificent boob jobs and face-lifts. Butt sculpting, nose jobs, tummy tucks, and tattooed mascara rounded out the cosmetic lineup, giving the city’s female population the odd appearance of being foot soldiers in an army of anatomically correct inflatable dolls. As I once sang in a song I wrote for a press skit, “Liposuction and silicone, a girl’s best friends in Boca Raton.”

  In my column I had been poking fun at the Boca lifestyle, starting with the name itself. Residents of Boca Raton never actually called their city Boca Raton. They simply referred to it by the familiar “Boca.” And they did not pronounce it as the dictionary said they should, with a long O, BO-kuh. Rather they gave it a soft, nasal, Jersey-tinged inflection. It was BOHW-kuh! as in, “Oh, the manicured shrubbery is bew-tee-ful here in BOHW-kuh!”

  The Disney movie Pocahontas was in the theaters then, and I launched a running spoof on the Indian-princess theme, which I titled “Bocahontas.” My gold-draped protagonist was an indigenous suburban princess who drove a pink BMW, her rock-hard, surgically enhanced breasts jutting into the steering wheel, allowing her to drive hands-free, talking on her cell phone and teasing her frosted hair in the rearview mirror as she raced to the tanning salon. Bocahontas lived in a pastel designer wigwam, worked out each morning at the tribal gym—but only if she could find parking within ten feet of the front door—and spent her afternoons stalking wild furs, trusty AmEx card in hand, at the ceremonial hunting grounds known as Town Center Mall.

  “Bury my Visa at Mizner Park,” Bocahontas intones solemnly in one of my columns, a reference to the city’s toniest shopping strip. In another, she adjusts her buckskin Wonderbra and campaigns to make cosmetic surgery tax-deductible.

  My characterization was cruel. It was uncharitable. It was only slightly exaggerated. Boca’s real-life Bocahontases were the biggest fans of those columns, trying to figure out which of them had inspired my fictional heroine. (I’ll never tell.) I was frequently invited to speak before social and community groups and invariably someone would stand up and ask, “Why do you hate BOHW-kuh so much?” It wasn’t that I hated Boca, I told them; it was just that I loved high farce. No place on earth delivered it quite like the pretty-in-pink Mouth of the Rat.

  So it only made sense that when Jenny and I finally settled on a house, it was located at ground zero of the Boca experience, midway between the waterfront estates of east Boca Raton and the snooty gated communities of west Boca Raton (which, I relished pointing out to the very zip-code-conscious residents, fell outside the city limits in unincorporated Palm Beach County). Our new neighborhood was in one of the few middle-class sections in the city, and its residents liked to joke with a certain reverse snobbery that they were on the wrong side of both sets of tracks. Sure enough, there were two sets of railroad tracks, one defining the eastern boundary of the neighborhood and one the western. At night you could lie in bed and listen to the freight trains moving through on their way to and from Miami.

  “Are you crazy?” I said to Jenny. “We can’t move to Boca! I’ll be run out of town on a rail. They’ll serve my head up on a bed of organic mesclun greens.”

  “Oh, come on,” she said. “You’re exaggerating again.”

  My paper, the Sun-Sentinel, was the dominant newspaper in Boca Raton, far outpacing the Miami Herald, the Palm Beach Post, or even the local Boca Raton News in circulation. My work was widely read in the city an
d its western developments, and because my photograph appeared above my column, I was frequently recognized. I didn’t think I was exaggerating. “They’ll skin me alive and hang my carcass in front of Tiffany’s,” I said.

  But we had been looking for months, and this was the first house that met all our criteria. It was the right size at the right price and in the right place, strategically located between the two offices where I split my time. The public schools were about as good as public schools got in South Florida, and for all its superficialities, Boca Raton had an excellent park system, including some of the most pristine ocean beaches in the Miami–Palm Beach metropolitan area. With more than a little trepidation, I agreed to go forward with the purchase. I felt like a not-so-secret agent infiltrating the enemy’s encampment. The barbarian was about to slip inside the gate, an unapologetic Boca-basher crashing the Boca garden party. Who could blame them for not wanting me?

  When we first arrived, I slinked around town self-consciously, convinced all eyes were on me. My ears burned, imagining people were whispering as I passed. After I wrote a column welcoming myself to the neighborhood (and eating a fair amount of crow in the process), I received a number of letters saying things like “You trash our city and now you want to live here? What a shameless hypocrite!” I had to admit, they made a point. An ardent city booster I knew from work couldn’t wait to confront me. “So,” he said gleefully, “you decided tacky Boca isn’t such a bad place after all, huh? The parks and the tax rate and the schools and beaches and zoning, all that’s not so bad when it comes time to buy a house, is it?” All I could do was roll over and cry uncle.

  I soon discovered, however, that most of my neighbors here on the wrong side of both sets of tracks were sympathetic to my written assaults on what one of them called “the gauche and vulgar among us.” Pretty soon I felt right at home.