Harpo Speaks! (25 page)

Cocoanuts ran a full season on Broadway, and played on the road for two years.

We never did stop ad libbing. No two performances were ever quite the same. One matinee, during the second month in New York, I cooked up a little surprise for Groucho. During one of his quieter scenes, while I was offstage, I selected a blond cutie from the chorus, and asked her if she’d like a bigger part in the show. She was willing and eager. I told her all she had to do was run screaming across the stage. She did, and I tore after her in full pursuit, leaping and bounding and honking my horn. It broke up Groucho’s scene, but when the laugh subsided, Groucho was ready to top it. “First time I ever saw a taxi hail a passenger,” he said. So I chased the chorus girl back across the stage the other way, trying to catch Groucho flat-footed. I didn’t. “The nine-twenty’s right on time,” he said. “You can always set your clocks by the Lehigh Valley.”

Luckily for me, my blonde’s boy friend was not in the audience that afternoon. After the show, I found out I had picked the hottest girl in the company. Her boy friend was Jack ‘Legs’ Diamond, and ‘Legs’ wanted his bimbo stashed securely in the chorus, where she wouldn’t “get mixed up in no monkey business with them loony actors.” I made a quick switch of blondes before the evening show.

The chase became a running gag in Cocoanuts-it was fun if only to see what Groucho’s topper would be-and then became part of my permanent repertoire. My stature as an actor was growing, you might say, by leaps and bounds.

I was having a most prosperous year all around, largely at the expense of the other members of the Thanatopsis Club. The big weekly game began at five o’clock on Saturday afternoon, and usually lasted into the gray light of Sunday morning. I was allowed to drop out at eight o’clock, to do the show. I would run to the theatre, get the nuisance over with, then run back to the Algonquin to get on with the important business of the evening-all without bothering to get out of costume.

Kaufman was the only garrulous member of the Thanatopsis -when he was dealing. Otherwise he never spoke a word. Whenever he got the deal, he started telling stories to throw the rest of us off our game, with the usual result that his game wasn’t so steady either.

Over the years, I was the most consistent winner, Heywood Broun the hardest-pressing player, and Aleck Woollcott the worst. Swope was probably the best player there, but he only played at the Algonquin for fun. He did his serious gambling elsewhere.

Woollcott the poker player and Woollcott the cribbage player were not the same person. They weren’t even related. At cribbage, Aleck was absolutely unbeatable. Harold Ross spent a good part of his life and tore out a good part of his hair (fortunately he had acres of it to spare) trying to beat his old war buddy at cribbage. Once after a game in which he was smartly lurched by Woollcott, Ross slammed down his cards and howled to the heavens, “This goddam Woollcott knows something about this goddam game that the guy who invented it didn’t know!”

Yet at the poker table Woollcott was hamstrung, like Minnie, by a superstition. Where Minnie’s weakness was filling inside straights in draw poker, Woollcott had a thing about the king of clubs showing in stud. Whenever the king of clubs was his first or second face-up card he would raise. If anybody else got it, he would fold. It was a ritual with him. As a consequence, he was sometimes eminently beatable at poker.

Shaggy big Heywood Broun hulked over his cards in a constant sweat. If he came out winners on a Sunday morning, he was in even more of a sweat. The rest of us accepted personal checks when we settled up after a game, but Broun had to have cash. He’d rather settle in cash for a percentage of what was due him, as little as fifty cents on a dollar, than take a check for the full amount-even from somebody as solvent as Herbert Bayard Swope, his boss on the New York World.

One Saturday night Chico sat in with the Thanatopsis. He played his usual reckless game and dropped twelve hundred dollars. Broun was the winner. When Chico offered Broun a check for twelve hundred, Broun said he’d take one thousand in cash, instead. Chico said he didn’t have a thousand on him. Broun offered to settle for seven-fifty. Chico didn’t have seven-fifty.

“How much have you got on you?” Broun asked, and Chico emptied his pockets and counted his money. Eighteen dollars. Broun pondered whether he should take the eighteen bucks, cash in hand, or take a chance on Chico’s check for twelve hundred. For once he decided to take a chance, even though Chico’s reputation had preceded him to the Algonquin.

Broun was at the bank when it opened Monday morning to deposit Chico’s check. It was no good. He came roaring after Chico like a wounded bear. Chico grinned and told him not to worry. A mere small oversight. “Put the check through again tomorrow,” he said-then added, “but not before noon.”

The check bounced the second time. Broun came charging back to Chico. “Look,” said Chico, “I told you not to put it through until twelve o’clock, didn’t I?”

“What the hell!” Broun roared. “I didn’t get to the bank until five minutes after twelve!”

“I’m sorry,” said Chico. “That was too late.”

Like Woollcott, Broun was a great talker and a great laugher. When he laughed, the whole two hundred fifty pounds of him shook, and the dishes must have rattled on the shelves of the Algonquin kitchen. Unlike Woollcott, Broun didn’t worry about literary style when he talked. He wanted to like everybody he met, which made him one of the best-liked guys in New York City. The only grudges he ever held were political, never personal. When he resigned from the World in 1928 because he disagreed so violently with the paper’s policy on the Sacco-Vanzetti case, his friendship with Swope continued as warm as ever.

One day Broun called me up and asked me if I’d like to come over to his place and meet Mabel Normand, the Hollywood star. I’d never met a real, live movie queen, and I was so delighted at the prospect that I put on a suit and a tie, something I hadn’t done since Zeppo’s wedding.

I met the beauteous Miss Normand in Broun’s bedroom. Broun didn’t rise to introduce us. He continued sitting in his rumpled bed, in rumpled pajamas (everything that touched him instantly -magically-lost its press), swatting at a punching bag that hung from the ceiling. He was conscientiously following his doctor’s orders to get plenty of rest and exercise every day.

That winter, the winter of Cocoanuts, we took to bringing in snacks from home and the delicatessen for our poker sessions and ordering less food at the Algonquin. Apparently, the room-service waiter complained to the management, because one Saturday night there was a large, hand-painted sign tacked to the inside of the door of our suite:

Basket Parties Not Welcome

-Frank Case, Proprietor

The Thanatopsis Inside Straight and Literary Club, we felt, was the victim of unjust, ungrateful and cavalier treatment. We voted to take our business elsewhere. We gathered up our cards and chips and trekked across town in a convoy of taxis to the Colony restaurant, where we were graciously received and given a private room to play in. Case called immediately to apologize. We decided to give him two months of Saturdays to reflect on his dastardly deed before we moved back to his joint.

Leaving the Colony late one freezing night in January, I shared a cab with Woollcott and Broun. The two of them were at each other’s throats, tooth and nail, slur and insult, in some ridiculous literary argument. I couldn’t get a word in sideways. My place was the first stop. When I got out of the cab, Aleck muttered, “Tell the driver where to drop us off, like a good boy, Harpo,” then launched back into his tirade against Broun.

I did not like his condescending attitude, so I said to the driver: “The other two parties want to go to Werba’s Theatre, Brooklyn.” Werba’s was a burlesque house in the far-off, frozen reaches of Flatbush.

Two hours later, I was awakened out of a deep sleep by the telephone. I still couldn’t get a word in sideways. The person at the other end of the wire delivered one sentence-“You Jew son- of-a-bitch!”-then hung up. Woollcott and Broun had argued all the way over the Brooklyn Bridge before they realized what kind of a ride they were being taken for, and coming back the cab had slid on the ice and stalled. By the time they got home they were in the early stages of frostbite.

When guys like Aleck and Heywood held the floor, there was no use my talking. But I had my own, illiterate way of making my presence felt, as I demonstrated that night.

As for Aleck’s standard crack at me whenever I took him for a ride, the epithet he borrowed from Madam Schang, I must point out that it was uttered in anger, all right, but it never had the slightest tinge of malice or defamation to it. Once a reader sent Aleck a letter accusing him of being anti-Semitic. Aleck was deeply hurt by the accusation, yet he didn’t want to stir up a fuss over the matter. “Miss Dorothy Parker,” he wrote back, “has seen fit to name my apartment `Wit’s End.’ In the light of the faith of most of my good friends who share with me its modest delights, I should see fit to rename it `Jew Drop Inn.’ ‘

The Thanatopsis returned to the Algonquin, where Frank Case greeted us with a lovely WELCOME HOME floral wreath, and all was well with the world.

F.P.A. was never in better form. Once, between games, he said he had seen an incredible sight earlier in the day-Harold Ross tobogganing. (Ross wasn’t with the club that night.)

“For God’s sake-Ross tobogganing!” said Kaufman. “Did he look funny?”

“Well,” Adams said, “you know how he looks not tobogganing.”

Robert Benchley, about this time, was paying a lot of attention to a protegee of his, a young actress named Helen Walker. One Saturday he arrived late at the poker game. Somebody asked where he’d been, and Benchley said, “Cuing Helen Walker.”

“Please,” said Adams, without looking up from his cards, “no baby talk at this table.”

When Swope retired from the New York World, we kidded him unmercifully about being unemployed. He continued to live like an emperor. He was chauffeured about in a limousine. He gave fabulous parties at his estate on Long Island, and he maintained a town house on Fifth Avenue. He gambled for astronomical stakes outside the Algonquin. But we made out he was more to be pitied than envied. He had no job, and no visible means of support.

Once he was playing bridge with Broun, Adams and myself. Broun, reviewing the bidding, said, “Who the hell bid six no-trump?”

“I did,” said Swope.

“And who the hell are you?” said Broun.

“I,” he replied grandiosely, “am Herbert Bayard Swope. Age-48. Address-1165 Fifth Avenue, New York City.”

“Occupation-housewife,” said F.P.A.

One night I brought around a copy of Shouts and Murmurs for Aleck to autograph. Aleck signed the book, handling it with loving tenderness, then sighed and said, “Ah, what is so rare as a Woollcott first edition!”

“A Woollcott second edition,” said F.P.A.

Nobody was more delighted by this crack than Harold Ross, who was in an on-again phase of his famous off-again on-again feud with Woollcott. Ross squeezed his eyes, clutched his hair and was seized with a violent trembling. This meant he was laughing. Ross was so easy to break up that he could never tell a story straight through without breaking himself up. His favorite was a true story about a Chinaman in San Francisco who had two whangs. But nobody ever heard the end of it. Every time he tried to tell it, he’d have such a seizure of eye-squeezing, hair-clutching and trembling that he’d be too weak to finish.

Benchley happened to arrive one Saturday night-late again-between deals, when nobody was talking. As a matter of fact, we had just talked ourselves out on a most depressing subject: Prohibition. The New York papers had been yelling for open war on the sale of hooch, and a record number of speakeasies had been padlocked that week.

“Why so quiet?” Benchley asked.

F.P.A. gave him a reproving look, put a finger to his lips, and said, “Moment of silence, for the Unknown Bootlegger.”

A moment of silence was a phenomenon that never occurred downstairs, at the Round Table. I kept my trap shut, but the joint was so thick with talk that I seldom had a chance to hear myself not talking.

A lot of what was said was way over my head. A lot of it was shop-talk, inside jokes from out of the World, The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. Books I had never read, plays I had never seen and people I had never heard of were torn apart with great hilarity. All this was lost on me. But I never ceased to be fascinated. I never stopped listening. Once I fell asleep in the dentist’s chair while I was having a molar drilled, but I never fell asleep at the Algonquin.

Crazy bits and fragments of Round Table talk come back to me still, over the years, like isolated lines from an old show whose title and plot I’ve long forgotten. I can hear the voices clearly, voices of some of the most brilliant people who ever lived, but what I hear them saying is not always brilliant, and never very profound.

KAUFMAN: Want to hear me give a sentence using the word “punctilious”?

WOOLLCOTT: Give a sentence using the word “punctilious.”

KAUFMAN: I know a man who has two daughters, Lizzie and Tillie. Lizzie is all right, but you have no idea how punctilious.

F.P.A.: Guess whose birthday it is today!

BEATRICE KAUFMAN: Yours?

F.P.A.: No, but you’re getting warm-it’s Shakespeare’s.

BROUN (who’d taken up oil painting) : You have no idea how hard it is to sell a painting.

F.P.A.: If it’s so hard, why don’t you try just selling the canvas? I’ll give you a note to some tent-makers I know.

BROUN: No more griping. Today I shall be bold, resolute and gay!

KAUFMAN: I hear they’ve just taken in a new partner and now the firm is Bold, Resolute, Gay and Berkowitz.

CHARLIE CHAPLIN (in a conversation about blood pressure) : Mine is down to 108.

KAUFMAN: Common or preferred?

DOROTHY PARKER: I met a strange fellow up in Canada, the tallest man I ever saw, with a scar on his forehead. I asked him how he got the scar, and he said he must have hit himself. I asked him how he could reach so high. He said he guessed he must have stood on a chair.