Harpo Speaks! (22 page)

Surely there should be dancing in the streets when a great clown comes to town, and this man is a great clown. He is officially billed as a member of the Marx family, but truly he belongs to that greater family which includes Joe Jackson and Bert Melrose and the Fratillini brothers. Harpo Marx, so styled. oddly enough, because he plays the harp, says never a word from first to last, but when by merely leaning against one’s brother one can seem richly and irresistibly amusing, why should one speak?

Groucho paused.

“Is that all?” I said. “Didn’t the son-of-a-bitch say anything about you or Chico or Zeppo? What did he think-I was doing a single? Is he blind or something?”

Oh, there was more, Groucho said, plenty about all the rest of them. He just thought I’d like to hear the part about me. “Like me to read it again, old clown?” he said.

I hung up on him and went back to sleep.

At ten o’clock the phone rang again. A voice I had never heard before said, “Have I the pleasure of addressing Mr. Harpo Marx?” From the way he spoke, I couldn’t tell if he was a con artist or a ham actor Groucho had hired to pull a gag on me. I was very suspicious. “I’m Harpo Marx,” I said. “Who’s this?”

“The name is Woollcott,” he said. “Alexander Woollcott.” The name didn’t ring any bells. I didn’t connect it with what Groucho had read over the phone. I’d been too sleepy at the time.

“Sorry,” I said. “Don’t think I know you.” I was still suspicious.

“I do a little chore now and then for the New York Sun,” the guy said. “I did a little chore last night, as a matter of fact. I reviewed your new show. And now I would like very much to meet you.”

I didn’t know what to say. Woollcott went on. “Forgive me for being so presumptuous and calling you out of the blue,” he said. “I got your number from Charlie MacArthur, who seemed to think you wouldn’t mind.”

Oh, well, so he was a friend of Ben Hecht’s friend Charlie. He was all right, then. I told him so, and he laughed and said, “Now that we’ve exchanged references, can we meet? Will you receive me if I barge into your dressing room after the show tonight?”

“Sure, why not?” I said, and he seemed very pleased.

Before he hung up, he said, “By the bye, Mr. Marx, how did you like my little piece in this morning’s Sun?” I said I thought it was the lousiest review I had ever read, and he laughed so hard I had to hold the receiver a foot away.

When he hung up, I reflected that a guy who laughed like that couldn’t be all bad. I’d give him a little time after the show. It wouldn’t hurt. Then I’d go over to Lindy’s and relax, where nobody ever used words like “behooves” and “splendacious” and “presumptuous.”

Alexander Woollcott “barged” into my dressing room-literally. I had no idea what a “big New York critic” ought to look like, but I didn’t expect this. He looked like something that had gotten loose from Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

I couldn’t help thinking of Mons Herbert’s old vaudeville act in which he blew up the rubber turkey. If Mons had blown up a plucked owl, put thick glasses and a mustache on it, and dressed it in an opera cape and a wide black hat, this is what it would have looked like.

“The name is Woollcott,” he said, and his voice didn’t change my first impression. It was a voice that could have been reproduced by letting the air out of a balloon, a downbeat inflection with a whiny edge to it. Coming from him it sounded hoity-toity and supercilious, and I didn’t like it a bit.

We shook hands. Woollcott sighed and settled his bulk onto a rickety dressing-room chair with surprising ease. He rested his hands on the head of his cane, blinked, twitched his mustache, then broke into a grin that wasn’t supercilious at all. If anything, he was being shy. He had come to see me not as a critic, but as a starry-eyed fan.

“Well, Marx,” he said. “So you didn’t approve of my piece in the morning’s paper.”

Nope, I sure didn’t, I told him. At least I didn’t approve of the part I could understand. He laughed and said, “Might I ask what you disapproved of specifically?”

I had read the whole review by now. “You got us all mixed up, Mr. Woollcott,” I said. “Groucho’s not the oldest-Chico is. Zeppo’s not the stage manager-he’s the juvenile.”

“And what about Harpo? Did I get him right?”

“Tell you the truth,” I said, “I couldn’t tell from the things you wrote whether you were giving me the raspberry or trying to give me a build-up, because I didn’t know what half the words meant. If you’re looking to give me a build-up, forget it. I don’t work as a single. I work with my brothers or not at all.”

He stopped smiling, and took off his hat. “My dear Marx,” he said, “I was neither flattering your performance nor making light of it. I meant every word I wrote. You are the funniest man I have ever seen upon the stage.”

I didn’t know how to return a compliment like that, so I said, “What about my harp solo? How did you like that?”

“I still think you’re the funniest man I have ever seen upon the stage,” said Woollcott. “Consider yourself fortunate, Marx,” he added, “that I am not a music critic.”

So he was one of those characters. He made you a compliment, then jabbed the needle in. I had known guys like that, who couldn’t help needling any more than a wasp could help stinging. It was a type of guy I loved to have around. They were the world’s greatest patsies for practical jokes. I began to like this Woollcott.

He said he was sorry if he’d offended me, but he had an unfortunate social disease. He always spoke whatever came to his mind. “My friends will tell you,” he said, “that Woollcott is a nasty old snipe. Don’t believe them. Woollcott’s friends are a pack of limps who move their lips when they read.

“Nevertheless,” he continued, hoisting himself up off the chair, “I should like them to meet you, tonight. I should like to show them a true artist. You might bring some light into their grubby little lives. I take it you’re free for what’s left of the evening?”

I had to get out of this fast. If his “friends” talked the way he did I would have absolutely nothing to say to them. I didn’t know the language. “Sorry,” I said. “I’ve got a date I’m already late for.”

Woollcott did not intend that I should refuse his invitation. He squinted down his nose at me and said, huffily, “A young lady, I presume?” I shook my head.

“Some business matter of great urgency?” he asked, with heavy sarcasm.

I nodded my head yes. “Poker game,” I said.

His grin returned. “Bravo!” he said. “Precisely what my friends and I have in mind! Are you a good poker player, Marx?”

I told him I played a pretty fair country game.

He clapped his hands. “So be it!” he said. “The minute you’re out of grease paint, come buckety-buckety over to the Hotel Algonquin. Shall we say eleven-thirty?”

I was trapped. “Okay, eleven-thirty,” I said. “But first, would you mind showing me your teeth?” He bared his teeth. “Too bad,” I said. “No gold. Well, I’ll keep looking.”

“No gold?” said Woollcott, waiting for the gag.

I told him I was still looking for another guy as nice to play poker with as Mons Herbert, who used to tip his hand by the number of gold teeth he flashed. This delighted Woollcott. “And what did this walking bonanza do upon the stage?” he asked.

“He played the `Anvil Chorus’ by blowing on knives and forks,” I said, “and for a finish he blew up a turkey until music came out of its ass.”

Woollcott laughed so hard he had to sit down again. He wiped tears from his eyes and said, “Dear God, why can’t I have friends like that!” I refrained from telling Woollcott why I had been reminded of Mons’s act in the first place, when he had entered the dressing room.

He put on his black impresario’s hat, adjusted his cape, and stuck out his hand. “A rare pleasure, sir,” he said. Instead of giving him my hand I gave him my leg, the old switch gag I had used since On the Mezzanine. He pushed my knee away in disgust. “See here, Marx,” he said, with the full hoity-toity treatment. “Kindly confine your baboonery to the stage. Off it, you are a most unfunny fellow.”

I liked him more and more.

The Algonquin was an oddball kind of a joint. I couldn’t figure it out. It obviously wasn’t a theatrical hotel, because nobody was sitting around the lobby playing two-handed pinochle or reading Billboard. It didn’t have the smell of a commercial travelers’ hotel, and it didn’t have the phony trimmings of a tourist trap. Being none of these things, it had to be a blind, a front. But what the Algonquin was a front for, I couldn’t figure out either.

When I inquired for Mr. Woollcott’s room, the guy at the desk gave me a funny look. I thought: Oh-oh, now he’s going to ask me for the password. But he must have decided I was all right. He gave me the number of a second-floor suite.

When I got to the suite I felt a lot better. It was just eight guys playing cards in a room filled with smoke and littered with ash trays, coffee cups, cast-off jackets and ties, and stacks of poker chips.

Woollcott, now in shirt-sleeves like all the rest of them, put down his cards, jumped up, and took my arm. “Harpo,” he said, “meet the Thanatopsis Inside Straight and Literary Club. Harpo, Thanatopsis. Thanatopsis, Harpo.”

Thanatopsis? What was this? A mob of Greek revolutionaries?

The guys at the table seemed friendly enough. They smiled and said polite things. I said, “Finish your hand, for God’s sake,” and then they seemed even friendlier.

When the hand was over, Woollcott introduced me around. Only one name meant anything to me-Frank Adams, “F.P.A.,” the famous columnist of the “Conning Tower.” Groucho and I had been mailing in contributions to the “Conning Tower” for years, and had succeeded in having a few of them printed. I never thought I’d be shaking hands one day with the Keeper of the Tower himself. As for the rest of the cardplayers, I could only remember them as a bunch of guys named “Benson,” which was what one of the names sounded like. I had a lousy memory for names.

I met a plump Mr. Benson with a toothbrush mustache and a surprised look; a huge shaggy one who looked like he was wearing last week’s dirty laundry; a tall one with a booming voice and a handsome ruddy face; a tall, sad-faced one who kept twisting an arm around his head and massaging an ear the hard way; a bald Mr. Benson with glasses, and a Benson with uncombed hair who looked like a cowhand who’d lost his horse.

Weeks later, when I finally got them all straight, I realized that I had been introduced to, respectively, the writers Robert Benchley and Heywood Broun, Herbert Bayard Swope, the editor of the New York World, the playwrights George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly, and Harold Ross, the editor of Judge who was then cooking up an idea for a new magazine to be called The New Yorker.

If I had known that night in May who these characters really were and that I’d been lured into a den of intellectuals, I would have scrammed out of the joint and run all the way to Lindy’s, where my empty seat was still waiting for me. But not knowing any better, I stayed and played poker. My luck was lousy, but it was otherwise a surprisingly pleasant evening.

The most popular sport between hands was baiting Aleck Woollcott. That was how I learned how hard Woollcott had tried to get out of reviewing I’ll Say She Is. F.P.A. had him squirming while he retold the whole story. Seems Woollcott had come to the Algonquin before the opening, cursing about having to cover “some damned acrobats called `The Marx Brothers,’ ” and looking for somebody to take his place and write the review for him. He tried threats, cajolery and bribery, but had no takers. In last-ditch desperation he latched onto Adams. Adams said sorry, but he had a date for the evening. He was taking a lady English professor to the theatre. When Woollcott finally gave up and dragged himself into the Casino, muttering with self-pity, he discovered Adams and his date already sitting in the theatre. He was so furious he swore he’d never speak to F.P.A. again.

“Now look at the old fraud,” said Adams. “He wants the world to think he invented the Marx Brothers, and he brings one of the acrobats in here like he was presenting his favorite son at court.”

“I hope you fry in hell,” said Woollcott.

The game broke up early. The big weekly game would start Saturday afternoon at five o’clock, they told me, and they expected me to be there. It was easy to see why: they wanted more of my dough. I’d dropped a hundred dollars. 1 said good-bye to Woollcott, Adams, Benson, Benson, Benson, Benson, Benson, and Benson, and said I’d see them Saturday.

I had passed the initiation. I was now a member of the Thanatopsis Inside Straight and Literary Club. I’ve often wondered if I ever would have made it if I’d been a winner that night.

Downstairs at the Algonquin was where the conversation flowed, often at a round table in a corner of the dining room. Years later, when everybody was getting nostalgic about the twenties, this became known as the Round Table, and people were written up as being “Members” of the Algonquin Round Table.

The Thanatopsis Club did have official members, but the downstairs gathering never did. It was nothing more than one long shmooze, with people drifting in and out, eating, arguing, gossiping, telling jokes, talking shop and having brainstorms. Along with the other upstairs cardplayers-Woollcott, Adams, Benchley, Broun, Swope, Kaufman, Connelly and Ross-I spent a lot of time at the Round Table. There was no telling who else might turn up-regulars like Deems Taylor, Donald Ogden Stewart, Peggy Wood, Jane Grant and Dorothy Parker, or strays like Helen Hayes, Charlie MacArthur, Edna Ferber, Bernard Baruch, Ring Lardner, Otto H. Kahn and Will Rogers.

Woollcott had lunch at the Algonquin every day. Through him I met four extraordinary women, who were to be very close to me for the rest of the decade: the actress Ruth Gordon, Neysa McMein, the painter and illustrator, Alice Duer Miller, the novelist, and George S. Kaufman’s brilliant wife, Beatrice.

Alice Duer Miller was the most dignified and cultivated lady I had ever met. I thought it would be impossible for me to ever get to know her. Then one day I found out that the greatest single passion in Alice Miller’s life was not writing or literature, but the New York Giants. I told her how I used to watch my one Giant-Sam Mertes-from Coogan’s Bluff. She was enchanted. Alice said she had felt there was something rare about me that she liked, and now she knew what it was. From that moment on we were very special friends. We shared the faith, a bond that could only exist between Giant fans.