Harpo Speaks! (29 page)

The course on the island was rugged and tricky. The wickets were laid out on a hard, fast surface, on what was once a badminton court. Beyond this there were no bounds or limits. A ball had to be played from wherever it lay. On one side, the court was bordered by a stand of tall maples, thick with underbrush. Beyond the trees a cliff dropped sharply to the narrow beach at the edge of the lake. The only ground rule was that if your ball landed in the water, you had the choice of playing it out or placing it on the beach and losing a turn.

After five days of steady croquet, I began to get the hang of the game-but too late. By Saturday night, when the club’s bets for the week were settled, I owed Aleck nine hundred dollars in croquet money. I had been taken but good-not cheated or swindled, but skunked in an honest, out-in-the-open game.

Aleck made a generous show of mercy. Since I was a rank beginner, he offered me a chance to recoup some of my dough at Russian Bank, a form of two-handed solitaire. I didn’t even need to touch a card, He said he would deal and play both hands, his and mine.

Well, Aleck got on a losing streak, He lost, while the hands he dealt for me kept winning. He refused to quit until his luck changed. It didn’t change. By settling-up time the following Saturday, I was an eleven-hundred-buck winner at Russian Bank. My net profit, after losing at croquet, was two hundred bucks.

Before very long I had played enough and practiced enough to hold my own on the court. By the end of summer, we were all pretty much on a par-Aleck, Neysa, Beatrice, Flcischmann, Dietz, Lederer, Alice and myself.

Croquet became a hopeless addiction. It combined the best elements of golf, billiards and poker. Fresh air and sunshine were added benefits-except that we also played through rains and fogs, aiming by ear, and in wild stones where we argued almost to the point of fist fights over whether knocking a hailstone out of the way counted as a turn.

Nobody ever “choked up” or went off his game under pressure. We were always on our game and we always had supreme confidence. Some of the damnedest shots were made on Neshobe Island. Balls were sent sailing down through the trees to the lake like they had wings. The same balls came sailing back up the cliff, over the brush and through the tree trunks and onto the court, like they had eyes as well.

When I got the feel of the game, I began to fool around with innovations. Drawing on my vast experience in poolrooms, from Lexington Avenue to San Francisco, I was the first to introduce the three-shot, or double carom, to croquet, and I also invented a new way of getting a Rover out of the game.

Unless you’ve played the game as we did, you’ve never known the thrill that erupts inside you when you hit an opponent’s ball from twenty yards out, when you skim through a wicket from a difficult angle, or when you hit two balls so they neatly spread-eagle a wicket.

I knew Alexander Woollcott for eighteen years and eight months. I shared with him many moments of jubilation. I was beside him when he received awards and commendations, and when he got letters of tribute that brought warm tears to his eyes. Nothing, however, ever gave Woollcott a greater joy of pride and fulfillment than a good shot in croquet.

When Aleck sent an opponent’s ball crashing down through the maples of Neshobe Island, he would swing his mallet around his head like David’s slingshot and whoop, “Buckety-buckety! Buckety-buckety! Buck-ket-ty-buck-ket-ty-in-to-the-lake!”

When Aleck pulled off an exceptionally tricky shot-hovering over his mallet like a blimp at its mooring mast, while he aimed with profound concentration, then hitting his ball so it sidled through a wicket from a seemingly impossible angle or thumped an opponent after curving with the terrain in a great, sweeping arc-he was in his own special heaven.

He would dance around the court on his toes, kicking his heels together (unaware that his shorts were falling down), and singing in the exuberant soprano of a cherub in a Sunday-school play:

I’m des a ‘itto wabbit in de sunshine!

I’m des a ‘itto bunny in de wain!

This was a sight to behold, both the crackerjack shot and the ballet of the blimp that followed it. I never saw a man, or a kid, even, happier than Alexander Woollcott upon the croquet court at Neshobe Island after he had pulled off some delicate, deft maneuver, or dealt an opponent a nasty whack.

It’s sad to realize that today, three decades later, when there’s supposed to be more of everything, there are no more wabbits in de sunshine or bunnies in de wain. Famous Persons, anagrams, Murder, and croquet are lost in the TV shuffle, and that’s an awful shame. My God, those games were fun!

I must take credit for the most celebrated croquet shot ever made on Neshobe Island. Well-half credit, since Charlie Lederer was my partner in the game and in this particular gambit.

It was my turn. I was dead on Charlie and couldn’t use him to get in position for my next wicket. I didn’t have a very good shot at Charlie anyway. In fact, the only ball within twenty yards of mine was Aleck’s. Aleck’s ball was only fourteen inches away, but it was smack against the opposite side of a big maple tree. It was an impossible play. There was nothing nearby I could use to carom my ball off of and get it to Aleck’s side of the tree.

Charlie and I puzzled over the situation for half an hour. (There was no time limit for “impossible” shots.) Then we got an idea. While Lederer stayed on the court as a decoy, taking sights and lining up trajectories for me, I got a saw from the tool shed, then went down to the dock and untied one of the automobile tires that were used for boat bumpers. I sawed the tire diametrically in half, and carried one of the halves up to the court.

I laid the half-circle of tire around the maple tree. It was a dandy banked tunnel, leading from my ball to Woollcott’s. I shot. The ball rolled around the tire, out the other end, and smacko- a direct hit.

There was no toe-dancing or kicking of heels. Woollcott smashed his mallet deep into the turf of his beloved island and stomped off toward his quarters, muttering that he conceded the game and would never again play with such a ___-___ing horse’s ass as Harpo Marx.

“Correction!” he snapped, turning back to stick his head around the corner of the clubhouse. “Not ‘horse’s’-faun’s-ass!”

I didn’t know what that meant, but I was certainly flattered to be called it by Alexander Woollcott.

The next morning Aleck was gone from the island when the rest of us got up, and so was Joe Hennessey. This meant that Aleck had taken a cooling-off trip, to recover from the incident of the tire. Most likely he’d gone on a cemetery hunt, in which case he’d be back at the end of the week to recite through cocktails and dinner and half the rest of the night all the “sweet, fantastic names” he’d copied off old tombstones-like “Felicity Calm DeWitt,” “Happy Ivy Wentworth,” “Deuteronomy Newton,” “Lucy Fur Thomas,” “Honesty Policy Dredge,” “Onward Christian Purdy,” or his favorite four sisters, “First Cora Hooker,” “Second Cora Hooker,” “Last Cora Hooker” and “Immaculate C. Hooker.”

Later, I made some of these trips with Aleck. He couldn’t pass a cemetery without having Joe stop the car so he could explore the boneyard-grave by grave, stooping to read out loud the inscription on each and every one. What started out to be a viewing of the autumn colors or a back-road tour of the mountains invariably wound up as an excursion to a graveyard.

In the fall of 1934 he took me along on a pilgrimage to a cemetery in the little town of Plymouth, Vermont. There he led me quickly past all the other gravestones and over to a simple headstone in a family plot. The only decoration on the grave was a tiny American flag, the kind that kids buy in a dime store. On the headstone was carved, simply, “John Calvin Coolidge, 1872-1933″ Aleck inspected the grave in silence, from every aspect. I can think of nobody who ever lived who was more unlike Woollcott than Calvin Coolidge, politically, physically and emotionally. Yet Aleck had a half-secret, perverse fondness for the tight-lipped Yankee President.

Lest I should think he was being a mushy old fool, when he finished his study of the grave he did a little tippytoe jig, then ordered Joe to drive us straight back to Bomoseen for a game of Murder.

A strange man, Woo]lcott was. He seemed to love the idea of death in all its aspects. But while his mind carried on a morbid flirtation with death, his heart was stuck on life. He loved the pure existence part of living, the yapping, scrapping, laughing, eating, romping, exploring-the-world part of it-but never, sad to say, the intimate, sexual part of it.

I didn’t know until after Aleck’s final flirtation with death that he had been ravaged by a near-fatal case of the mumps when he was twenty-two years old. Its cruel aftermath may have been one of the reasons he felt compelled to live three times harder than anybody else ever had the right or the capacity to live.

On the train back to New York, I dozed among my memories of the island summer: Alice Duer Miller standing stately and alone among the pines when she should have been at work inside, waiting for the sound of the launch from the mainland, waiting for news of how the New York Giants had made out the day before. … Charlie Lederer calling her “Butch,” which pleased her more than if she’d been knighted and addressed as Lady Alice… . The sound of Neysa’s laughter, as carefree as any little girl’s on a holiday from school, or as any song of a meadow lark…. The bewitchery of Beatrice Kaufman, Aleck’s “Lamb Girl,” lighting up a dark room with her presence, igniting a dying conversation with the spark of her wit. . . . The sound of music coming across the water on Saturday nights from the open-air dance on the main land, tinny and gay, like a crazy, woodland honky-tonk (the only times we ever felt tolerant toward the tourists).. . . The reading of plays around the fireplace, the wonderful voices of the Lunts, Ethel Barrymore, Ruth Gordon and her husband Gregory Kelly, the familiar voices of the islanders reading the minor parts, and the audience of one: me. . . . Aleck, during his last two days on Neshobe, sailing around and around the island in a dinghy, going buckety-buckety over the chopping waves for hours on end, savoring the scenery of his personal paradise like it was vintage champagne. . . . The first signs of autumn, when you could almost see the maples turning, leaf by leaf, from green to gold and orange. . . . The sad look of the closed-up clubhouse, the nakedness of the court with the wickets and stakes taken up and put away, and the weird silence, with no whack or Conk of mallet on ball or ball on ball. . . . And the last boat ride to the mainland dock, with Aleck playing cribbage all the way and never once glancing up from the cards or the pegboard for a last look at the lake and the island; he’d said his good-bye from the dinghy the day before and, being a critic, he hated anticlimaxes and never had to stick around for encores or curtain calls.

Unknown

CHAPTER 14

Croquemaniacs of the

World, Unite!

THE CROQUET MANIA was upon us like a plague. Croquet became the most serious thing in the lives of a lot of people who should have been concerned with far more important matters. The most hopeless cases in New York, besides Aleck, Beatrice, Neysa and myself, were Kaufman, Swope, Dietz, Fleischmann, F.P.A. and a group of financiers-among them, Harold Schwartz, Harold Talbot and Averell Harriman.

We got a special permit from the city to play in Central Park. Weekends we usually played at Swope’s joint on Long Island, where the course was even bigger. It was so vast and hilly you sometimes had to yodel to let your partner know where you were.

Once during a hot game at Sands Point (they were all hot games there), Swope’s butler came to the court to announce that Governor Al Smith was calling from Albany. “Tell him to hold the phone,” said Swope. “It’s my shot.” The Governor held the phone and the affairs of the state of New York were halted for twenty minutes, while Swope made three wickets. During another game I remember, Swope gave his partner the worst bawling-out I had heard since P.S. 86, for making a “stupid shot, worthy only of a moron with ten thumbs.” His partner was a two-star general.

Neysa, Aleck, Charlie MacArthur and I once spent a wild and wonderful weekend at Otto H. Kahn’s estate. The minute we arrived there we started to play croquet, without bothering first to pay respects to our host. Kahn’s course was as flat and smooth as a billiard table. It was more like a golf green than a croquet court, which gave me an idea. I started experimenting with a golf-type swing, using the mallet like a mashie. The other three gleefully joined in the experiment, and the croquet balls went zooming all over the place. Garden furniture got knocked over. Greenhouse windows were smashed. Servants ran the gauntlet from main house to guesthouse with arms clutched over their heads. Kahn himself fled to his yacht, which was anchored in the Sound at the foot of the lawn, and hoisted a white flag. He didn’t emerge from the yacht until nightfall, when the world was once again safe from croquemaniacs.

Once, at Harold Talbot’s estate, not even nightfall stopped us from playing. When it got dark, we drove our cars through the shrubbery and around the house, lined them up by the court, and turned the lights on. There were seven dead batteries the next morning, but it was worth it. The night game was good and close, and I won it with a lucky triple carom.

The mob was invited up to Averell Harriman’s preserve in the Adirondack Mountains for Thanksgiving. There we played through a heavy snowstorm, while a crew of eight men stood by with snowplows, shovels and tractors, and scraped off the court between games.

Croquet was the cause of jealousies, feuds and fights. When we weren’t playing we sat around for hours rehashing games, arguing over tactics, analyzing shots and second-guessing each other’s mistakes. The two worst offenders were Swope and Woollcott. They were eternally backbiting and bickering on the court. Off the court they yammered and yelled at each other over minor rules and obscure points of strategy. They were deadly serious, and we were continually fearful there might be bloodshed.

We called them the Katzenjammer Kids.