Harpo Speaks! (30 page)

When the Katzenjammer Kids’ vendetta reached the boiling point, the rest of us prevailed upon them to settle the whole business with a croquet match, each to put up five hundred dollars, the stakes to go to the winner of the best two out of three games.

The great grudge match began at Sands Point, Woollcott’s red and blue versus Swope’s yellow and black. Aleck’s partner was Neysa McMein. Swope’s was Charley Schwartz. Aleck won the first game. When Swope won the next one, Woollcott insisted the rubber game should be played on a neutral court. The tournament moved to the Bonners’ estate for the play-off.

The crucial game got under way in deathly silence. Then, halfway along, when it was his turn to shoot, Swope asked Woollcott to refresh his memory on who was dead on who. He’d forgotten. (Once you’ve hit, say, the yellow ball, you’re dead on yellow and can’t hit him again until you’ve gone through a wicket.) What annoyed Swope more than anything else was Woollcott’s fantastic memory. Woollcott could recall every shot made in a game, and he knew at any given point who was dead on who. It was his single greatest advantage in croquet.

Aleck sniffed. He chose to ignore Swope’s request.

Swope repeated the request. Aleck turned his back on him and said to Neysa, “Would you kindly inform that gangling, red-faced Yahoo that it is against the rules to review the play. If he wants to know whom he’s dead on he should remember to remember.”

“There’s no such rule, Woollcott, and you know it,” said Swope.

Aleck couldn’t resist a rip-roaring face-to-face argument. He turned to Swope and said, “More important than rules, by far, are the ethics of fair play.”

“Who writes `the ethics of fair play’-Alexander H. Woollcott?”

“They are not written, dear Herbert. They are established by precedent.”

Swope snorted. “So what’s the precedent for not telling me who I’m dead on in this game?” he said.

“I’ll give you a precedent, dear boy,” said Aleck. “In a bridge game you wouldn’t ask your partner in the middle of a hand how many trumps had been played, would you?”

“God damn it, Woollcott!” Swope thundered. “That’s indoors!”

Indoors or out, Aleck was adamant. Swope played a ruthless, smashing game, but he wasted two shots on dead balls and Aleck won the match. The Katzenjammer Kids went on feuding, worse than ever.

The only partners who never lost were Abercrombie and Fitch, who must have sold us fifty thousand bucks’ worth of imported croquet equipment during the middle and late twenties. We used nothing except hand-turned English mallets and balls. The wickets, which were scarcely wider than the width of a ball, were made of English steel.

We guarded our mallets and pampered them as if they were rare, sensitive pets. I turned the spare bedroom in my apartment into a “cold room” (no steam heat, constant low temperature) for my mallets, so they wouldn’t split or warp during the winter.

My cold room, it turned out, had unexpected benefits. One night after a show I picked up two good-looking gals in a cafe near the theatre. I couldn’t make any time with either one of them in the cafe, so I asked them to come on over to my place for cake and coffee and a couple of laughs. It was a mistake. I was dead tired. The broads wanted to do nothing but talk all night. They wouldn’t take any hints, so I tried a more direct method of getting them out of my hair.

“By the way,” I said, “I don’t want to scare you, but if I should start acting peculiar, don’t pay any attention. I get these fits, see, late at night sometimes. But I’m not violent every time, only once in a while.”

This had no effect except to start them off on a giggling binge. So then I asked if they’d care to see my collection in the cold room. Oooh! They’d love to! I guess they figured I was going to show them dirty pictures.

I made them put their coats on, then took them in the spare room and closed the door. I opened the closet where I kept my mallets and said, “Look! There they are!” The girls seemed very puzzled.

I picked up a mallet and fondled the shaft and the head, making soft, loving sounds. “Isn’t it beautiful?” I said. “Would you like to feel one?” They shook their heads, speechless for the first time since I had picked them up. They were beginning to get scared. I moved in for the kill.

I lit a cigarette, bugged my eyes, then exhaled a bubble instead of smoke. That did it. The two broads scrambled out of the cold room and ran all the way out of the joint, screaming, “He’s having a fit! He’s having a fit!”

While they waited for the elevator to come, one of them happened to turn, and saw me standing in the open doorway, making a Gookie. They started screaming again. When the elevator man arrived he was ready for trouble. Then he saw it was only me. We exchanged winks, and I went peacefully to bed.

Otherwise life was pretty depressing, after winter set in. Central Park wouldn’t be ready to play in again until April, and that seemed like an eternity away. But shortly after the first of the year I made a happy discovery. Across the street from my apartment house was a single-story garage with a large, flat roof. It was a perfect layout for a court!

I talked to one of the two partners who ran the garage and told him I’d like to rent his roof for a croquet court. I’d have some matting put down. I’d keep the snow cleared off and the roof in good condition, and our playing wouldn’t bother anybody in the garage below. The guy didn’t say a word until I finished my spiel. Then he said, “What croquet? What kind of a racket is that? Don’t bother me-get outta here!”

The next day I buttonholed the other partner and gave him the pitch. He said, “Never heard of no such game as `croquet.’ You’re full of crap. Get lost, Mac.”

I wasn’t discouraged. That night I had a salesman bring samples of matting around to my dressing room, so I could test them. I picked out one that was just right-gave the ball good speed and an accurate roll. The salesman estimated the cost of covering the roof would be five hundred bucks. Fine, I said. I’d call him and give him the order as soon as I’d taken care of the details of renting the space.

And so, back to the garage. Both partners were there and they saw me coming. I heard one of them say to the other, “Here comes the nut about the roof.”

We haggled for an hour or so-the partners trying to worm out of me what my racket was, me trying to get out of them how much rent they wanted per month. When I said I already had an estimate on the matting and a crew lined up to lay it down, they got tired of kidding me along.

“Out, out!” said the senior partner. “Off the premises and stay off, crackpot!”

I changed my tactics. I asked them if they’d like four tickets to see a Broadway show that night. So that was the racket, they said-peddling tickets! I assured them there were no strings attached. I only wanted them to know I wasn’t a phony and that I had a regular job. One of the partners said, “For Christ sake let’s take ‘em and get rid of this screwball.” He got on the phone and checked with the theatre. He found out the tickets were for real. He also found out they were for a Marx Brothers show. “No kidding?” he said. “Are you one of them?” I modestly admitted I was. They accepted the tickets.

Next morning I showed up at the garage ready to do business. The senior partner met me at the door. “Well,” I said, “did you see the show?” Yes, they saw it. They took their wives and saw it. And now they knew I was nuts. I was jerkier on the stage than I was in real life, if that was possible. Too dumb to even say anything.

He whistled for his partner. “This crazy son-of-a-bitch,” he said, “has the nerve to come here after we seen him in his stupid show last night!”

Would I remove myself from their place of business for the last time, or would they have to call the cops? For the last time I explained, as patiently as I could, what I was after and the kind of money I was willing to lay out. I even tried to explain the game of croquet.

Now they were really suspicious. “You look to spend five hundred bucks so you can hit a frigging ball around on our roof?” said one of them. And the other said, “There has to be an angle to this -watch it, Fred.”

“Absolutely no angle,” I said. “All I’ve got up my sleeve is this.” I hauled out a certified check for one hundred dollars, payment in advance for one month’s rent. They looked at me with disbelief. Then they examined the check. They took it.

I rushed to break the news to the Katzenjammer Kids. (I hadn’t wanted to tell anybody about my fantastic discovery until the deal was closed.) They were delighted. “Let’s go play!” said Woollcott. “Wait!” said Swope. “Let’s do it right. We’ve got to form a club. The first thing we do is schedule a meeting.” Herbert Bayard Swope was a big man who could only do things in a big way.

We decided that six others should be invited to be charter members: Neysa McMein, the Kaufmans, the Schwartz brothers, and Averell Harriman. Now, I said, I could call the matting people and get the crew to work on the surface. Not so fast, said Swope. The club must first approve of all contracts, bids and expenditures by majority vote. We would take this up in a meeting.

A whole month of meetings was devoted solely to choosing a name for the organization. We could only agree upon a temporary name-“The New York Croquet Club.” “What about the matting?” I kept asking, and Swope kept saying, “First things first, Harpo. First we have to draft the bylaws.”

One day, two months after I had discovered the roof, one of the garage men whistled at me from across the street. “Hey, crackpot!” he called. “A guy here wants to talk to you.”

The third man on the premises was a city fire inspector. He said, “I hear you got it in mind to use the top of this garage for some kind of ath-a-letic contest which requires the use of inflammable matting. Sorry, fellow. Against the Code.”

What had happened was that Swope, in Doing the Thing Right, had talked to Mayor Walker, and Mayor Walker had talked to the Fire Commissioner, and the Fire Commissioner had looked it up and found it was against the city regulations.

Spring was late that year. But what the hell, it was bound to come. If the first robin showed up, could the first Conk of croquet ball be far behind? And then it would be back to Central Park, and Hurrah for the Red, Blue, Yellow and Black!

On the second Sunday in May I got a call from Woollcott. He was very excited. “Harpo,” he said, “I’ve rented a villa on the French Riviera for the summer.”

“Hey, that’s great,” I said. “You’ll love it there.” I didn’t think it was great at all, because I was beginning to dream of Neshobe Island, the only place in the world where I wanted to go. I had no idea whether Aleck would love it on the French Riviera or not, either, because I’d never been there. As a matter of fact I didn’t know it from the Italian or the Hungarian Riviera or Loew’s Riviera in Brooklyn.

“Something else, me bucko,” said Aleck, with the purr in his voice that meant I was being conned. “I think it would be elegant if you came along with me.”

“Oh, no,” I said. “I can think of forty better places to spend the summer, all of them on Long Island in a hammock. Thanks a lot, but have a nice time, give my love to the folks over there and send me a postcard home.”

On Saturday, May 19, 1928, we sailed for Europe on the S.S. Roma: Aleck, Beatrice Kaufman, Alice Miller and myself.

Unknown

CHAPTER 15

The Bam-Bang-Sock-

and-Pow Part

THE LIVING WAS EASY IN 1928. Life was mostly fun and games and the world was our private, million-dollar playground. All of us had, somehow, the means to do anything we wanted to do. Income tax was a nuisance-like getting yearly license plates for your car-but hardly a burden.

We weren’t mercenary, or dollar-mad. Dough was simply a commodity we liked to have and therefore had, the same as air to breathe, coffee for breakfast, and a fourth for croquet. F.P.A. summarized our attitude when he said, “Money isn’t everything, but the lack of money isn’t anything.”

When Aleck took over the Villa Galanon, on the Mediterranean coast of France near Cap d’Antibes, he lived and played the host in the grand manner. Hang the expense. He was out to make his mark on the international set. He made it, but it wasn’t easy-thanks to me. I didn’t exactly care for the type of dog Aleck put on, on the Riviera. It brought out the worst of the Patsy Brannigan in me.

For a week before the villa was ready, the four of us-Beatrice, Alice, Aleck and myself-stayed in a small hotel, the Antibes. Woollcott favored this hotel because it was very French and very quiet. It was, as he put it, “off the `rout’ of the red-neck, rubberneck tourists.”

I didn’t favor this hotel at all. The only action in the joint was a one-franc slot machine in the lobby, by the foot of the stairs. Every time I passed the one-armed bandit I dropped in a coin, pulled the lever and walked on through the hostile glares of the Frenchmen in the lobby, while behind me the machine turned and clanked to a stop. You’d think I’d set off a firecracker in the reading room of a public library. Woollcott refused to walk downstairs with me, on account of my vulgar exhibitionism.

One evening I came down for dinner, dropped a coin in the slot, pulled the lever and walked on. When I reached the dining-room door, all hell broke loose. The machine hit a jackpot. The lobby burst into a riot. The quiet nontourists stomped and cheered and applauded. They did everything except dance the can-can and sing the “Marseillaise” to celebrate my stroke of luck.

When we checked out of the hotel, two days later, the manager said, “I hope we have the pleasure of your company soon again, monsieur”-not to Woollcott, but to me. Literary figures came and went by the dozen in the Hotel Antibes, but the slot machine hadn’t been hit for three and a half years.

Aleck was very happy to be set up at last in the Villa Galanon, where I would be under his vigilant, owlish eye.

Woollcott was in his element on the Riviera that summer. Soon after we got there, he wrote to Edna Ferber: “I am here leading the life of a rosy, middle-aged dolphin.” There were times, however, when he was oddly-for him-placid. He would stand for long moments of silence gazing from the top of the cliff at the deep, cold-blue sea and the shallow, hot-blue sky. I think he was secretly wishing he was a fresh-water wabbit in Vermont again, instead of a Mediterranean dolphin.