Harpo Speaks! (23 page)

Aside from my brief exchange with Alice Miller, I had nothing, absolutely nothing, to contribute to the Round Table. Yet I was accepted immediately as somebody who belonged there. They didn’t really expect me to talk. It wasn’t only that I played a goofy mute onstage, and sometimes offstage, too. It was mainly because I brought to the table another kind of talent-the one talent it lacked-the ability to sit and listen.

The Algonquin was a refuge for the brightest authors, editors, critics, columnists, artists, financiers, composers, directors, producers and actors of the times. The dining-room corner was a hotbed of raconteurs and conversationalists. But until I came along, there wasn’t a full-time listener in the crowd. I couldn’t have been more welcome if I had had the power to repeal Prohibition.

Bernard Baruch and Herbert Bayard Swope got me cornered one Sunday and wouldn’t let me go. For eight straight hours, they took turns talking to me while I gave the cues like an orchestra leader -for Baruch to shut up and Swope to talk, and Swope to shut up and Baruch to talk.

Miss Flatto, I said to myself, should see me now.

I took an apartment in town, on East 57th Street, but only slept there. I spent the rest of the time on the West Side-at the theatre, at the Algonquin, and at Aleck Woollcott’s joint. Aleck shared a cooperative town house over on West 47th Street with Harold Ross and his wife, Jane Grant, and an old college friend named Hawley Truax. When Aleck wasn’t holding court at the Algonquin he held court at home, slopping around all day-no matter who was there-in his pajama bottoms and an untied kimono. At night, however, he liked to put on the dog. Everything had to be just right, the cocktails and the dinner, and everybody had to be dressed up and on time.

The first time he asked me to his place for an evening, he said he’d be delighted if I could bring my brothers along too-provided, he added, that they behaved like gentlemen. That was all I needed to hear.

As Ross told me later, Woollcott was annoyed as hell when everybody had showed up at the appointed hour except the Marx Brothers. Punctuality was an obsession with him. Then he got even more annoyed when an unearthly, screeching racket started up outside the house, drowning out the story he was telling. He flew into a rage and threw open the front door.

The racket was being made by Groucho, Chico, Zeppo and me, riding on a street carousel and yelling like four wild urchins.

When Aleck saw who it was he laughed and clapped his hands like a kid at his first look at a circus. Then he got sore again-not because we’d lugged a merry-go-round up to his doorstep but because we were late, which was unforgivable.

Woollcott considered that Woollcott was the hub the world revolved around. If he wasn’t the center of attraction he was miserable, and when he was miserable, somebody caught hell. He was a diabolical master of the insult. He could slay a victim with one stab of a phrase or a word. Some of his victims became undying enemies. Others, like me, became undying friends.

I first caught the brunt of Woollcott’s wrath in a lecture on punctuality, the day of the carousel. He didn’t stay sore very long, however. I wouldn’t let him. I didn’t understand half the names he called me, like “arrested adolescent.” When he finished his tirade, I gave him the innocent-eye bit and said, “Arrested adolescent. How did you know about that? I never told you I was thrown in the jig when I was the partner of Seymour Mintz.”

That got him. The red went out of his face. His eyes lit up and his mouth hung open at the prospect of hearing a juicy new story. This I had already learned about Aleck. He couldn’t resist hearing a story.

He was a marvelous audience once you had him. He could have given lessons to Frenchie in laugh starting. For all his sniffy airs, I never knew a guy so easy to break up-as long as he wasn’t the butt of the joke, as long as the story wasn’t on him.

Aleck could never hear enough about my early days. He loved to hear me tell about Miss Flatto, the herring peddler, and the window in P.S. 86. He loved to hear my recital of the jobs I had had, from lappa displaying and tin-can swinging to ragpicking and rent kicking. When he felt blue, instead of asking the piano player to play “Melancholy Baby,” he would ask me to tell about the Friendly Inn, Madam Schang, my debut at Coney Island, the Mississippi train wreck, Pete Penovitch, or the Musical Cow Milker who mailed the dead rabbit to the theatre manager in Laredo, Texas.

He felt it was his responsibility to keep me out of mischief. He was like a stern old bachelor uncle, although he was actually only six years my senior. At the same time, he was more generous and more patient than anybody I had ever known.

I think he liked me because I never tried to hide the things that I should have been ashamed of according to conventional rules-my lack of education, my colossal ignorance, my lack of ambition. Basically, the only way I had changed in twenty years was to move down the East Side from 93rd Street to 57th Street. I still lived from day to day, and had fun wherever I could find it. I made no bones about the fact that I’d rather play games than work. Now, at last, I had enough time to play, and enough money. I had begun to pay myself back with interest for everything I’d missed out on when I was a kid.

I wasn’t having a second childhood. It was my first real childhood. The crazy part of it was, I was spending it as a member of the Woollcott gang, hanging out with the brightest and most famous delinquents of the 1920’s.

Perhaps the one thing Woollcott had in common with me was his ability to stay young and enjoy childish pleasures, no matter how old he became. He was a fanatic on games. There was always some kind of game going on wherever Aleck was. Cribbage, poker, parcheesi, bridge, backgammon, craps, casino, anagrams and charades indoors, croquet and badminton outdoors, and word games and guessing games anywhere and everywhere he went.

Whether he was taking Harold Ross on at cribbage at a hundred bucks a game or trying to top George S. Kaufman’s outrageous puns over lunch at the Algonquin, Aleck went all out. He played to win. He was a sore loser. He was even more insufferable when he won, because he couldn’t resist rubbing salt in the wounds. Woollcott never welshed on a gambling debt. He kept meticulous records of his wins and losses, and expected everybody he played with to be just as efficient.

Aleck went all out in everything he did. The better I knew him the more I was amazed by his capacities-for games, food, talk, friendships, feuds, causes, and long hours of concentrated hard work. His curiosity was endless. So was his enthusiasm, whenever he discovered something that moved him, or tickled him. And when Woollcott enthused, everybody else, by God, had to enthuse too. “Everybody else” could mean his inner circle (as when he “discovered” croquet), New York City (as when he “discovered” the Marx Brothers), or the world at large (as when he “discovered” Japan, the Hall-Mills murder case, the plays of Thornton Wilder, Goodbye Mr. Chips, Seeing-Eye dogs, and Walt Disney’s Three Little Pigs). Woollcott was no hidden persuader. For nearly twenty years he was the most conspicuous persuader in America.

Because of his sharp tongue, his lack of modesty, and his peculiar looks, Woollcott was a sitting duck-or a squatting owl-for anybody to mimic or lampoon. There was nobody in public life easier to caricature until Adolf Hitler came along, with the possible exception of George Bernard Shaw.

Woollcott was caricatured aplenty, mostly in words. Ben Hecht described him as “a persnickety fellow with more fizz than brain.” Harold Ross once said he was “a fat duchess with the emotions of a fish.” James Thurber called him “Old Vitriol and Violets.”

Another editor on The New Yorker said Woollcott was “one of the most dreadful writers who ever existed.” I think this guy and everybody else who stuck pins in Aleck took him too seriously, much more seriously than he took himself. Aleck’s first love was the theatre, anything theatrical, whether it was the Broadway stage, the movies, the circus, an animated cartoon, a sunset, or a murder trial. To me, Woollcott was a ham actor-not a deep thinker or a serious writer, but a great, big, wonderful ham. Anybody who knew him and didn’t realize this took himself too seriously.

Once I told Aleck how stupid I felt, tagging along in his shadow, sitting beside him at the Round Table, and never opening my trap. “My dear Harpo,” he said, chuckling, his fat round belly jiggling out of his kimono, “you’re a smarter fellow than I am. I am the best writer in America and I have nothing to say either. But I’m not smart enough to keep my mouth shut.”

Ninety percent of the time he was “on.” The other ten percent of the time, when he was “off,” he was his own severest critic. He used to characterize himself as an overgrown boy-child, and refer to himself by sickening baby names like “Acky” and “Wookie.”

Most people, of course, saw him when he was on. Very few of us had the privilege of being with him when he wasn’t ham acting. I was, I believe, one of the five people who, over the years, knew and loved Alexander Woollcott the best. The other four were Alice Duer Miller, Beatrice Kaufman, Ruth Gordon, and a man named Joe Hennessey, who did the dirty work for Aleck-seeing his steak was cooked rare enough, driving his car, keeping him on schedule, and trying to pacify the people he insulted.

I could never figure Aleck out completely, nor he me. He was too complicated and I was too simple. Our friendship was a lifelong game of “Who Am I?” It was frustrating, exasperating, and sometimes downright silly, but it was a good, rewarding game. Woollcott was what I had believed, in the innocence of my youth, that Seymour Mintz was going to be. He was a true friend. Moreover, it was physically impossible for him to walk on a bias.

I’ll Say She Is ran for over a year, and it made us the richest we’d ever been. I recognized now the power and importance of the New York critics-particularly the man on the Sun, who was behooved to write something about the Marx Brothers at least once a month.

Chico had all the action he could handle. He was in Pinochle Paradise. Groucho could buy all the books he wanted, instead of going to the public library. I had joined the Algonquin mob and lived in a happy new world. Minnie and Frenchie bought a new house farther out on Long Island. They bought a new four-door Chevy, hired a chauffeur, and began to live it up.

Minnie organized a ladies’ poker club, which met four times a week. Minnie’s furs and jewels kept shuttling back and forth from the local pawnbroker, since she still made a religion of trying to fill a straight in poker. Hang the odds, said Minnie. She had borne five sons all in a row and it was therefore her destiny to hold five cards all in a row. But the odds, not destiny, prevailed. And so, back to the old hockshop.

Frenchie could at last be the Beau Brummel he’d always fancied himself to be. He was now a walking fashion plate that made Mr. Burns, the hat-tipper of 93rd Street, seem in retrospect a walking ad for secondhand fumigated clothing.

Beau Brummel he might have become, but otherwise Frenchie had changed very little. The first day the new chauffeur came to work, Frenchie had himself driven to the grocery store to do the marketing. He came out of the market laden with bundles, got into the shiny new Chevy, and had the chauffeur drive on. He made two more stops, then directed the way back to the Marx residence.

The driver didn’t make a move to get out of the car when they got home, and Frenchie asked if he wouldn’t like some lunch. He said thanks, but it wasn’t his lunchtime. The least he could do, said Frenchie, was help carry in the bundles. That he was willing enough to do. In the kitchen, after dumping the bundles, he just stood around waiting, so Frenchie suggested he might go clean the car, if he didn’t want lunch.

“Look, Mac,” said the driver, “I don’t want no lunch and I’ll clean my car when I damn well feel like it. All I want is my money.”

Frenchie called for Minnie. He didn’t have the heart to fire a servant. Minnie came and immediately got the situation cleared up. The man in the kitchen was not the chauffeur they had hired. When Frenchie had come out of the grocery store, he had gotten into the wrong new Chevy, driven by the wrong guy in a leather cap. He had taken a taxi.

In some ways Frenchie was getting surer of himself. He now had the strength of his convictions, on important issues. Late in the summer of ‘24, he invited a friend to be his guest for a drive up to the mountains and a weekend in a hotel. At a certain point on Route 17, south of Middletown, Frenchie and his friend got into such an argument as to whether they were then traveling uphill or downhill that they nearly came to blows in the car, and Frenchie ordered the chauffeur to turn around and drive straight back to New York.

I had become quite a dude myself, after our show settled down for a run. I was not the fashion plate that Frenchie was, however. I was more the hot-sport type. I favored golf caps or straw skimmers, blazers, and white linen knickerbockers. Alexander Woollcott said that nothing in the world made him sicker than the outfits I wore on the street, with the exceptions of Maxfield Parrish’s painting and the poetry of Edgar A. Guest.

Aleck was constantly trying to change the style of my headgear from Broadway to Continental. He himself favored berets, and the kind of hats that spies and opera impresarios wore in movies. One hot day in July he and I, both wearing berets, were walking east on 42nd Street. Near the corner of Fifth Avenue, I noticed a shop advertising straw hats for sale at two bucks apiece. I ducked into the store. Woollcott kept on walking and talking. In the store I grabbed a hat off the counter and plunked down two dollars. I ran out wearing the new skimmer and caught up with Woollcott, who hadn’t broken stride or stopped talking. It wasn’t until we were waiting for the light at Fifth Avenue that he did a double-take, noted the switch in my headgear, and made a face like he was about to throw up.

There were few dull moments while I’ll Say She Is was running. The boredom that used to come toward the end of a season on the road never crept into the Casino. All that crept in was madness. We kept the joint a bedlam six nights and two afternoons per week, from the marquee to the dressing rooms.