Harpo Speaks! (26 page)

FAMOUS ACTRESS (bragging about her husband) : Look at him! Isn’t he beautiful? And do you know, I’ve kept him for seven years now!

DOROTHY PARKER: Don’t worry-he’ll come back in style.

HERMAN MANKIEWICZ: You know, it’s hard to hear what a bearded man is saying. He can’t speak above a whisker.

ALICE MILLER (to Woollcott, on settling up a loss at cards) : You sir, are the lowest form of life, a cribbage pimp.

BERNARD BARUCH (to Swope) : You, sir, are a foul-weather friend.

BENCHLEY: Have you heard the one about the little boy on the train?

KAUFMAN (who’s heard it twenty times; for some strange reason it’s Benchley’s favorite joke) : No.

BENCHLEY: A man gets on the train with his little boy, and gives the conductor only one ticket. “How old’s your kid?” the conductor says, and the father says he’s four years old. “He looks at least twelve to me,” says the conductor, and the father says, “Can I help it if he worries?”

ROSS: This looks like a nice day for discoveries. Let’s discover something. Maybe we could get a key and a kite and go discover electricity.

F.P.A.: I think Benjamin Franklin already did an experiment like that. Wasn’t he the guy who flew a kite and discovered the air-cooled car?

ROSS: Well, I could go out and lie in an orchard and let an apple hit me on the head and discover Newton’s Law of Gravity. This could lead to the invention of the elevator and nobody would have to walk upstairs any more.

KAUFMAN: A funny thing-I happened to be lying in an orchard this very morning. Only it was a fig orchard, and a fig hit me on the head, and that made me think of the Law of Gravity, and I said to myself, “This will lead to the invention of Fig Newtons, and maybe I could sell the idea to some big biscuit company and make myself a fortune.”

WOOLLCOTT: Well, it’s buckety-buckety back to work for little Acky. (Exits, singing)

I hope you fry in hell,

I hope you fry in hell,

Heigh-ho the merry-o,

I hope you fry in hell! . . .

One day I complained to Swope, as we left the Algonquin, about the chicken-feed stakes in the Thanatopsis games. We had a summer lay-off from Cocoanuts, and I had a hankering to play some real cards, for real money.

The next day I was en route to Florida with Swope. We were riding in the private railroad car of Harry F. Sinclair, the oil magnate, along with the producer Florenz Ziegfeld and six or seven financiers named Benson. For the whole trip south I sat quietly eating my words. I never touched a card. Those guys’ stakes made me feel I was a kid back on 93rd Street, hustling for pennies. When the train pulled into West Palm Beach, they were still playing. The car was switched onto a siding. They sat there playing all the rest of the day and far into the night. Before I got dizzy from counting, I saw a million dollars change hands.

At Palm Beach, I was the guest of the guy who financed the Ford Motor Company, but I was invited to have my dinners at the Vanderbilt mansion, along with Swope, Sinclair and the others. All I had known about Florida was what I had learned in Cocoanuts, and it certainly wasn’t like this.

For the first time in my life, I felt completely out of place. I simply didn’t belong here-or so I thought until Mr. Emerson, the husband of Alfred Vanderbilt’s widow, came down for dinner. He was made up as Abraham Lincoln, whiskers, wart, stovepipe hat, the whole works-and nobody paid him any special attention. The next night he made his entrance as Ulysses S. Grant. On the third night he was Teddy Roosevelt in Rough Rider uniform, complete to a set of prop teeth. He expected no comments or compliments. It was simply a thing he got a kick out of, dressing up like historical figures he admired.

Who’d ever think I’d find the sixth Marx Brother married to a billionairess and living in the ritziest house in the ritziest resort in America?

I felt better after seeing Mr. Emerson. I felt better yet when I discovered that Colonel E.R. Bradley operated a gambling casino in town. But my pleasure was short-lived. I began losing heavily at chemin de fer.

Joseph P. Kennedy, the Boston financier, came to my rescue. He took me aside and told me it hurt him to watch me throw my money away. The action in Bradley’s casino was too fast for me, he said, and I was obviously losing more than I could afford to. “I’ve got a better kind of action for you,” he said. “I’ll give you the names of two stocks. Buy either one of these and you’ll get your money back.”

As soon as I got to New York I bought the cheaper of the two stocks. I did recoup my losses from chemin de fer, barely. The other stock-which was Coca-Cola-went up a thousand points and split three times. It would have made me rich.

Shortly after we got home, Swope took me to the races at Belmont Park. Swope was not only a shrewd horseplayer but a State Racing Commissioner as well. So when he gave me a horse in the feature race I made a bet of two thousand bucks-four times what I had sunk in the market on Kennedy’s tip. Swope’s horse came in dead last. It was the last time I ever bet on the horses.

I was very happy to rejoin the fun-loving Thanatopsians and play for chicken-feed.

Herbert Bayard Swope was like the times he lived in-expansive, vigorous, colorful, unsnobbish, outspoken, and always ready for a game or a gamble. His estate at Sands Point, Long Island, had the same honest magnificence about it. The first time I was invited to Sands Point, Swope said, “How about coming out to the Island for a weekend, Harpo? Bring some things in case you stay over-but, you know, travel light.”

It was the first time I had ever heard the expression “come for a weekend,” and I wasn’t sure what it meant. I stuck a toothbrush and a pair of pajama pants in the pocket of my raincoat and took off. When I got to Sands Point, the Swopes were serving cocktails to thirty people, dressed in flannels and tea frocks. Half an hour later an uninvited contingent of ten more guests arrived. Pearl Swope sent for her housekeeper and told her there’d be forty instead of thirty for dinner. The housekeeper nodded and smiled, and an hour later forty people sat down to a superb feast. I was the only guy without a dinner jacket. When Swope saw I was uncomfortable, he suggested that everybody remove their jackets, since it was such a hot evening.

Twenty more guests showed up after we ate, and all the men had to remove their jackets as soon as they got there. When the party got in full swing, I got restless. Then I spotted a fat guy whose wallet was sticking halfway out of his hip pocket. I tailed him, snatched the wallet, counted the dough inside, and slipped it back in his pocket. Then I ducked around the wing of the house and met the guy coming the other way and bet him ten bucks I could tell by looking at his face how much money he was carrying on him. The guy said sure, he’d take the bet. When I told him the exact amount-($950 and some change) -he was so amazed he damn near dropped his drink.

I handed him back his ten bucks and told him what the gag was. He was so delighted that he begged me to come to all of his parties for the rest of the season, out in Southampton, and pick his guests’ pockets.

I was a social success.

That was the era of the Long Island Estate. I toured the bigtime circuit, from the Swopes’ to the Talbots’ to the Whitneys’ to the Guggenheims’ to the Otto Kahns’ to the Pulitzers’. One I didn’t get to was Marcus Loew’s, which Woollcott alone of the Algonquin mob had the opportunity of seeing.

Aleck was commissioned to write a magazine piece about Marcus Loew, the movie-theatre tycoon. He agreed to write it because he happened to like Loew. That was a condition of Aleck’s. He never did an article about anybody he didn’t like. An interview was arranged, with more protocol involved than in a meeting of two heads of state. Aleck would visit Loew at home, on Long Island, at ten o’clock sharp in the morning. Loew himself would answer the door, no monkey-doodle with servants. Then he and Woollcott would sit down in a quiet place, and talk for two hours. At the end of two hours, Aleck would get up, walk out, and return to New York City.

At ten o’clock sharp on the appointed morning, Woollcott rang the bell at the main entrance to the Marcus Loew mansion. Loew was right on schedule. He opened the door. He was alone, no butlers or maids in sight. Loew was nervous, but obliging. He said, “Let me hang your hat and cloak in the closet here.”

Loew opened the “closet” door-and was amazed to discover it led to five rooms of his mansion he had never seen before.

Housing was not much of a problem in the 1920’s.

The biggest love affair in New York City was between me-along with two dozen other guys-and Neysa McMein. Like me, Neysa was an unliterary, semi-illiterate gate-crasher at the Algonquin. But unlike me, she was beautiful and bursting with talk and talent. A lot of us agreed she was the sexiest gal in town. Everybody agreed she was the best portrait and cover artist of the times.

Her studio was our third most favorite hangout, after the Algonquin and Woollcott’s apartment. We had some wonderful parties in Neysa’s place, and I was always the last to leave. Neysa had undertaken to teach me about art. She was an entrancing teacher, and I was a dedicated pupil. Perhaps because I was a pantomimist by trade and didn’t have much use for words, I fell in love with the fine arts.

One of my proudest moments occurred when I reported to Neysa that I had spent an afternoon with Aleck and the Averell Harrimans at an auction on 57th Street and had purchased my first painting, a small, original Degas. Neysa kissed me, oh boy oh boy!

She kept telling me I should paint too. “You’ll never be lonesome, Harpo,” she said, “as long as you have some paint, a brush, and some canvas.” This idea I laughed at. I told her I could only possibly do two paintings-one called “Waltz Me Around Again, Willie,” and the other, “Love Me and the World Is Mine.”

Neysa had one failing as an art instructor. It was, as far as I knew, her only failing, period. That was her passion for fires. If a siren or bell should sound during one of our late-night seminars, that was the end of the seminar. Neysa was such a fire buff that she once dashed to Penn Station and jumped on a train when she heard there was a four-alarm fire burning in Philadelphia.

We went on tour with Cocoanuts. When we settled down for our run in Chicago, I was surprised to find that Chicago had become a dull place. Ben Hecht was in New York. Pete Penovitch was away, probably visiting friends in Joliet. What to do with myself? Damn it all to hell, Neysa was right. I should paint.

I rented a studio. I spent $350 on oils, brushes, props, smock, beret, and a couple of acres of canvas. I asked the guy in the artists’ supply store where I could get a model, and he gave me a number to call. A model came to my studio, a well-stacked brunette. I asked her how much she charged, and she said, “How do you want me-nude?”

I said, “Of course.” Ten seconds later she was out of her clothes and in the nude.

Remembering how Neysa posed her models, this way and that, to catch certain highlights and shadows, I posed my girl this way and that. After each new pose I went back to the easel. But I didn’t have the courage to bring brush to canvas. I was scared. For the first time since the night I made my debut on the stage on Coney Island, I had stage fright.

Half an hour passed. I meditated. I inspected my brushes. I uncapped tubes of paint and studied them and smelled them and recapped them. I fiddled with the skylight. I put a scarf in the crook of the model’s arm-so. I put a rose in her teeth-so. I went back to the ease] and stared at the canvas. What would Neysa do next? Now I remembered. She would sketch in the model with some crayon. That was my trouble: I had to sketch before I could paint. I picked up a piece of black crayon. I held up my thumb and squinted to get the model in perspective. All I saw was my thumb. It was shaking. I didn’t have the courage to make a mark on the canvas. I began to sweat.

Finally the girl said, “Do you mind if I have a smoke, Mr. Marx?”

On the way to her coat to get a cigarette, she sneaked a glance at my easel and saw that the canvas was a total blank. She said, “Don’t you even know how to draw, Mr. Marx?”

“No,” I said, “I don’t. But I want to start. I want to start with you.”

“Well,” she said, forgetting about having a smoke, “let me show you a few pointers. I’ll sketch you in. You sit over there.”

“How do you want me-nude?” I asked. She said it didn’t matter. I didn’t bother to undress. Cheaper that way.

So it came about that the model, undraped, painted the artist, fully draped. The two of us worked together, taking turns posing and painting, for several weeks. She showed me how to mix colors and how to use brushes and how to adjust the lighting. I didn’t show her much in return, but she didn’t seem unsatisfied.

My model had to leave Chicago before I did. She left me with a challenge “Mr. Marx,” she said, “what you should do next is a self-portrait of yourself. It might be kind of hard but you must do it, for your own personal good.”

Using the bathroom mirror, I painted a self-portrait. When it was finished it looked exactly like my Aunt Hannah.

I never used a live model again. I’ve been painting, off and on, ever since. I’ve done a few pretty nice things-but only because I know that any resemblance I get is not going to be to anything I’m looking at.

Before I left Chicago I sold my first oil. I had kept one of my cockeyed nudes because it was painted on the biggest piece of canvas I owned and I’d had it put in a pretty lavender frame. I decided to use the canvas for a landscape. So I painted trees over the nude-purple trees, to match the frame.

When Cocoanuts was about to leave town, I took my landscape to an art dealer and offered it for sale. The dealer looked at the painting and said, “Why?” I held it up to the light and showed him how the original nude still came through, through all the layers of purple. “Well,” said the dealer, “it is sort of a novelty,” and he gave me five bucks.

When I left the gallery, I made a recount and realized that the canvas and frame alone were worth twenty-seven fifty. But what the hell, I’d sold a painting! From what Neysa had told me, it had taken a lot longer for Rembrandt, Cezanne or Van Gogh to make their first sale.