Harpo Speaks! (27 page)

When the show moved to Boston, I set up shop, with easel, model, smock and beret, in my suite in the Parker House. Early in the run, my old friend Eddie Cantor came to town, playing in Kid Boots. I arranged the scene, then called Eddie and asked him to drop by my place for tea. Eddie, who was as proper as any Bostonian, said he’d be delighted to have tea with me.

I carefully refrained from telling him about my new career as an artist. What he saw when he came to the hotel was totally unexpected. I had left all the doors open. When I heard his soft, falsetto “Hoppo?” I yelled at him to come on in-I was busy.

He walked through one open door, then another door, and I yelled at him to keep coming. He came through the last door and stopped cold. The first thing he saw was my model, a gorgeous young blonde, nude upon a chaise longue with a rose between her teeth. Then he saw me behind the easel, squinting at the model and painting with great concentration.

Eddie, flustered by the presence of the naked girl, rushed over to the easel to make some kind of polite, face-saving comment about my painting. What he saw me doing on the canvas was filling in the colors on a big drawing of Mutt and Jeff.

He made a queer little croak, then turned and paddled out of the suite without saying a word.

I thought maybe I’d gone a bit too far with the gag, so after the show that night I took my harp to Eddie’s hotel and played a serenade by the door of his room. Unfortunately, before Eddie could come out and tell me how thrilled he was, a house dick came along and kicked me out of the hotel.

My dalliance with the fine arts didn’t go to my head, I’m happy to say. When I got back to New York I found I hadn’t lost the old touch. The first day in town, Chico and I took a stroll through Times Square and, having nothing better to do, decided to sell money to a policeman.

We stopped a friendly looking cop in front of Lindy’s and asked if he’d like to buy some used cash, cheap. He gave us a tolerant smile, winked, and walked on. We stopped him again. Chico flashed a dollar bill and said our special introductory offer was one buck for ninety cents. He gave the cop the dollar. The cop thought for a minute, rubbed the bill, then gave Chico ninety cents. Next we offered him a two-dollar bill for one-seventy. He bought the two-dollar bill.

It was obvious he was humoring us along until he could decide whether we were a couple of nuts or a team of con artists. It was also obvious that he liked the bargains he was getting. But by the time we offered him a five-spot for four-fifty, he was convinced that something fishy was going on. He said he was going to haul us both in, unless we told him what our racket was.

Chico shrugged and gave him a cheerful grin. “No racket, officer,” he said. “We just like to sell money, that’s all.”

The cop muttered that he was right in the first place-a couple of nuts. He got away from us as fast as he could.

Not long after this, I felt in the mood for another good deed. The beneficiary this time was Tiffany’s, the famous jewelry store on Fifth Avenue. Tiffany’s, I told myself, was too stuffy for its own good, and something had to be done about it.

I bought a bag full of fake emeralds, rubies and diamonds, at Woolworth’s, then went to Tiffany’s. I asked to look at some diamonds. The clerk pulled out a tray of stones, and while I looked at them I turned over the bag from Woolworth’s, behind my back. Jewels went spilling and bouncing all over the joint. Bells rang. Buzzers buzzed. Store detectives appeared out of the woodwork, hustled out all the other customers and locked the doors. Meanwhile the whole sales staff, including the manager, in cutaway coat and striped trousers, were down on their hands and knees retrieving my sparkling gems.

When they were all collected and put in my hat, the manager saw they were phony, every one of them. The attitude of Tiffany’s changed abruptly. The store dicks hustled me out the door, with the recommendation that I never return to the premises. On the way out, for a final touch, I tipped the doorman a giant ruby.

Tiffany’s, I found out, had a long memory. Five years later I went back there to make a legitimate purchase, some silver for a wedding present. The minute I stepped into the store, two detectives recognized me and grabbed me. I convinced them I was carrying no fake jewels. Nevertheless, they stood close by while I bought the gift, and followed me to the door with visible signs of relief.

On the way out, I tipped the doorman a giant ruby.

One Saturday night the Thanatopsis convened without playing poker. A well-known female impersonator named Bert Savoy had drowned off Coney Island after being struck by lightning, and the next day a New York columnist had written an obituary for him in the form of a love letter. (Also on the following day, so the legend goes, all the pansies at Coney Island were wearing lightning rods.) Anyhow, the letter to the departed Savoy was one of the most revolting and mawkish things we had ever read. So we spent the evening sitting around the poker table composing telegrams to the columnist. I remember three of them:

“WHERE WERE YOU WITH THE WATER WINGS? WORRIED.”

“I’M FOREVER BLOWING BUBBLES. WORRIED.”

“LETTER RECEIVED. NO CHECK. WORRIED.”

George Kaufman, one of the collaborators on the telegrams, was shocked when he saw that we really meant to send them. For all his flair for the theatre and his biting, irreverent wit, George was a very conservative guy and something of a timid soul in public. I never knew a man so easy to embarrass.

In fact, embarrassing George Kaufman became a rewarding hobby for me. When he was embarrassed, he would blush and stammer and twist himself into knots. When he was acutely discomfited, he would try to wind his right arm twice around his head and reach back to his right ear.

Kaufman especially hated arguing over who should pay the fare when he took a cab with somebody else. Such scenes were unbearable to him. Paying cab fares became an obsession with George. He used to keep a supply of neatly folded bills in his breast pocket-fives, tens and singles-so he could make a quick draw and pay the driver before anybody started making a scene.

Ordinarily I let George pay, without protest, but one day I resolved to cure him of his obsession. I cut a small hole in my pants pocket and stuffed the pocket with bills. George and I shared a taxi from Woollcott’s house to the Algonquin. When we got to the hotel I jumped out of the cab, opened my fly, reached in, pulled out a five-spot and handed it to the driver. There was quite a crowd around the hotel entrance, and I had a good audience. George was too mortified to speak. He slunk out of the cab, redfaced and twisted in knots, praying that nobody would recognize him.

One time I was traveling with Beatrice and George to their country home in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. We decided to have lunch on the train. The diner was crowded, and an old lady asked if we minded her taking the fourth chair at our table. That was okay with us. It was only mildly embarrassing to George. He was apprehensive, I could tell, that I might somehow get involved with the old lady and make a scene. But I said nothing to her. I didn’t even look at her.

She finished eating first. The waiter brought her check on a saucer. Still not looking up from my plate, I reached for the saucer, salted and peppered the lady’s check, and ate it. Kaufman twisted in such agony that I was afraid he was going to screw himself through the bottom of the car.

That weekend, at the Kaufmans’, we got into a hot session of croquet. During a game one of the servants came to the court to announce that two ladies from the Society of Friends were in the house, keeping their appointment with Mrs. Kaufman. Beatrice excused herself-she’d forgotten the date, something to do with local charities-and said she’d only be gone a few minutes.

Half an hour passed. George was getting edgy. It would be his shot as soon as the game resumed, and he was in a good position to win. He couldn’t wait any longer. He went inside to rescue Beatrice from the Quakers. Twenty minutes passed. No Beatrice. No George either. Now I was getting edgy. I looked in the window. There sat both the Kaufmans, cozily sipping tea with the ladies from the Society of Friends. I went to the kitchen and dumped a bottle of ketchup down the front of my shirt and pants. I went to the doorway of the living room, where I stood, dripping ketchup.

“Excuse me, Ma’am,” I said, addressing Beatrice. “I’ve killed the one cat and he’ll be ready for dinner, but I still haven’t caught the other one. Will one be enough?”

The visitors departed in haste, and our game resumed. Beatrice couldn’t stop laughing over the Quakers’ retreat, but George was practically reduced to ashes. He couldn’t get his ball through another wicket, and never did make it to the stake.

The pursuit of happiness by me and my pals was seldom interrupted. We lived in a world of our own. Only once in a great while did anything occur to remind us that the bigger world beyond our own was not eternally full of fun and games.

Poverty I had never forgotten, and never could. But meanness and stupidity I had been spared for a long time-until I had an unhappy reminder in the early summer of 1927. I made a fishing date with Paul Bonner, a book-collector friend of Woollcott’s, and Pie Traynor, the third baseman of the Pittsburgh Pirates. I said I’d take care of the accommodations. I wired a hotel out in Montauk, Long Island, for reservations.

The hotel wired back: “RESERVATIONS CONFIRMED. TRUST YOU ARE GENTILE.”

I was sore as hell, but I didn’t bother to wire back. Why should I stir up a fuss and embarrass Bonner and Traynor and ruin the weekend? Better to turn the whole thing into a joke.

So when I entered the Montauk hotel I had my pants rolled above the knees, wore a tam o’shanter, smoked a pipe, walked with a crooked cane, and signed in as “Harpo MacMarx.” The place was deserted. At dinner we were the only diners. Twenty waitresses stood around watching us eat. I began to feel depressed, and I finally told Bonner and Traynor what the “joke” was. They got sore and insisted we should move to a hotel where nobody cared what anybody’s name was.

That made me feel a lot better. While we were checking out the manager came over to us. I said to him, “Lad, could ye dir-r-rect me to the near-r-rest Jewish temple?” and threw him a Gookie and we blew the joint.

I rented myself a bachelor-size summer estate on Long Island Sound, near Great Neck, and retired there with my current dog, a retriever who was disguised as a black poodle. I looked forward to a summer of nothing to do, with nobody to listen to. I bought me a kite and fixed up a special rigging so the string could tickle the bottoms of my feet while the kite flew and I stretched out and snoozed on the grass. This has always been a Marx family weakness, the passion for having our feet tickled. To me it was the ultimate luxury, the absolute end-all of gracious living.

My life of ease didn’t last very long, however, thanks to my dog and my friend Woollcott. Every time I drifted off to sleep, massaged by the kite string, the poodle would fetch a big wet pebble from the shore and drop it in my hand, a command for me to throw it so he could retrieve it.

Then I got a wet pebble from Aleck-a letter inviting me to come spend the rest of the summer on his island up in Vermont. Being from Woollcott this, too, was a command. I reeled in the kite, closed up the house, put the poodle in a kennel, stuck a toothbrush and a pair of pajama pants in my raincoat pocket, and took off for Neshobe Island, Vermont.

Unknown

CHAPTER 13

Buckety-Buckety

into the Lake

NESHOBE ISLAND was in the middle of Lake Bomoseen, in west central Vermont, not many hills away from the southern arm of Lake Champlain. Although Champlain was a hundred times bigger than Bomoseen, Aleck regarded it as a minor body of water, simply a convenience for his friend Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., to land his seaplane on when he flew up from New York for a visit.

Aleck’s island was only seven acres in size, but it held a wonderful variety of terrain and vegetation-miniature meadows, hills and cliffs, quarries and beaches, wild flowers, flowering vines and bushes, maples and evergreens. The water surrounding the island was forever changing. It could be smooth as glass one minute, then suddenly churning with whitecaps, from updrafts and downdrafts of mountain winds.

Neshobe was to Aleck the most beautiful spot on earth. It was the only place where he ever lived happily alone, without an audience. Here he was the audience. Neshobe Island was in fact a kind of theatre to Aleck, with a continuous show. Each dawn raised the curtain on a new scene, each season was a new act, and each year a new drama. The last act was autumn and its climax was October, when the turning maples ringed the lake with red and orange fire, unbroken except for the white stems of the birches and the blue-green spires of the pines.

When Aleck bought the island it was with the idea of making it a personal, solitary retreat. But he found himself loving it so much that he had to have somebody to share it with, so he turned the island into a private club for his innermost circle of friends. Charter members of the club included Alice Duer Miller, Neysa McMein, Beatrice Kaufman, Ruth Gordon, the Raymond Iveses (he was an accountant and insurance man), Raoul Fleischmann (co-founder with Ross of The New Yorker), Howard Dietz (a songwriter), George Backer (a newspaper publisher), and Harold Guinzberg (a book publisher, founder of The Viking Press).

For an outsider, an invitation to Bomoseen was more than a feather in the social cap. It meant you had been nominated for the Alexander Woollcott Roster of Who’s Who. If you were invited a second time, it meant you had been elected. There was only one honor higher than this, and that was being asked to join the island club as a full-fledged member.

I was invited up for a weekend. I was invited again, which put me in a class with Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, S. N. Behrman, Charles Brackett, Lilly Bonner, Irene Castle, Ethel Barrymore, Katharine Cornell, Noel Coward and Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. Then I was awarded the final honor. I became a member. The only other guy who made it in my time was Charles Lederer, the present-day screenwriter and producer, who was then a literary protege of Aleck’s. Damned if I know why I qualified. Maybe Aleck considered me his cribbage protege.