Harpo Speaks! (31 page)

These placid moments, which became less frequent as the season got under way, were usually interrupted by Guy, the majordomo, chauffeur and chef of Galanon. Guy would march up to Aleck on the double and out of breath, like an aide reporting to Napoleon in the midst of battle. There was a running battle going on, the battle for dinner. Each night’s dinner had to be a victory, a triumph of Guy and the haute cuisine over the peasant forces of common food.

Guy never lost a battle. He never won without a fight, however. He skirmished from dawn to the dinner hour. He attacked the village market, ambushing the butcher, the wine merchant and the greengrocer. He sparred with the dairyman. Back at the villa he exchanged volleys with the pastry cook, the housekeeper, and the gardener. He fought off sneaky, rear-guard attacks by balky stoves and stopped-up plumbing. He rallied sauces and souffles with rousing battle cries, urging them on to blend and to rise.

It was between these skirmishes that Guy threw on his alpaca jacket, wetted down his wild thatch of hair-which kept struggling to stand, like a field of wheat after a cloudburst-and marched off to find his commander-in-chief, M. Woollcott, to report on how the battle was going and ask for any change of orders on the wine. After a mumbled exchange in French (not loud enough for the enemy to overhear), Guy would rush back to the front, rip off his jacket, and leap into the fray. Just when shattering defeat seemed certain, and the villa seemed doomed to fall into a pile of smoldering rubble, the battleground would become suddenly silent.

Guy, in a spotless white jacket, his hair glistening smooth, would appear through the kitchen door. He would incline his head toward Aleck, closing his eyes in a moment of sublime reflection, and announce quietly, “Monsieur est servi.”

Whether it was dinner for ten, fifteen, or just the four of us, it would be magnificent. We got the full treatment every night, from hors d’oeuvre to soup to fish to roast to salad to dessert to cheese, with wines between and cognac following after (except for me; I didn’t dare drink anything stronger than Vichy water). As a chef, Guy rated my highest compliment: he was almost as good as Frenchie.

All due respect to him, I don’t think Guy could ever have won a dinner battle if he hadn’t been motorized. If he’d been a foot soldier he could never have pulled off his lightning raids on the village market. Even a horse-cavalryman couldn’t have made such breath-taking dashes back through the lines for emergency supplies -a bottle of Marsala, when there’d been a change in sauces, or an extra liter of cream, if the menu had been changed from hot soup to cold. Guy made it because he had a car. His vehicle was an ancient jalopy-a touring car, ancient of vintage but stout of heart. It never failed in line of duty.

The jalopy had two speeds, the way Guy drove it-full speed ahead and dead stop, with nothing in between. Yet, he never had an accident. This was not because he was safety-conscious, but because pedestrians and other drivers were. When they heard him coming they got out of the way. They were able to hear him coming because Guy had the notion that the horn was an extra gas pedal. The accelerator by itself wasn’t enough. To maintain full speed ahead, he pushed the gas to the floor and kept squeezing the horn bulb, even down an empty country road. Cattle, goats and donkeys for miles around took to the hills when they heard the whonk-a-whonk-a-whonk of the rampant jalopy.

Guy offered to let me drive his car any time I wanted to. At first I was flattered. Then I realized this was his way of letting me know I was slightly lower in class than the three other Americans at the villa. Ladies and gentlemen did not drive. They were driven. Beatrice and Alice were ladies. Aleck, le patron, was a gentleman. Me, I could drive the car.

Guy never could quite figure me out. The language barrier didn’t help much. The day we moved into the villa and Guy came to my room to help me unpack, I tried to get across the idea that I’d prefer being called “Harpo” instead of “Monsieur Marx.”

He got hung up on “Harpo.” He pronounced it a dozen different ways, none of which sounded vaguely like my name. I did a pantomime of playing the harp. “Ah!” he said. “Monsieur est harpiste?” I nodded my head yes. Then he looked around for the harp. “No,” I said, “no harp here. Harp in America.”

I could not be, according to Guy, a harpiste if I didn’t have a harp. We were back where we started. Finally he seemed to get it. “Harpon? Harpon?” he said. He laughed, then made a motion like he was throwing a spear. “Comme ci? Comme ci?” he said. Now it was my turn to be puzzled. Guy saw from my look that spearthrowing had nothing to do with it. He shrugged, thought for a moment, then got another idea.

“Appeau?” he said, hopefully.

That was more like it. That was almost how I pronounced it myself, East Side style-“Hoppo.” To illustrate that now he understood, he began to whistle through his teeth. Somehow he must have known that onstage I whistled instead of talking. I nodded and whistled back at him. We nodded and smiled and whistled at each other for a while, and Guy said, “Ah oui! Monsieur l’Appeau.”

I shook my head. He’d lost it again. He went back to Harpon. I said “Oui!” He tried Appeau again. I said “Oui” to that too. Guy raised his eyebrows, shrugged, and held up the palms of his hands. He went back to work and back to calling me “monsieur.”

Just then Aleck came by. Aleck and Guy had a long jabber in French. I didn’t like the tone of their conversation, not at all. First Aleck, then Guy, then both of them, would look at me and laugh. “What’s so damn funny?” I wanted to know, and Aleck explained. The word harpon meant “harpoon” in French, and appeau meant “bird call.”

“I’ve instructed Guy,” he said, trying hard to keep a straight face, “that you have no preference, and like to be called by either name.

So, depending on his mood, I was either Appeau (friendly mood) or Harpon (unfriendly) to Guy for the rest of the summer. Whenever I told him his grenadine of beef or his cucumber soup was delicious, I was a bird call. But when I put a hand over my wine glass, refusing a rare Chateauneuf-du-Pape in favor of seltzer water, I was a plain old harpoon.

There wasn’t room for a croquet layout at Galanon, but one terrace overhanging the sea was big enough for badminton. Because of the fierce wind, the mistral, we had to use special, heavily weighted birds. Once we got the hang of it, our games were as fierce as the wind and hot as the Mediterranean sun. Aleck, who played against his doctor’s orders, was amazing at badminton. He was quick on his feet. He was a placement artist and he had a deadly, slashing backhand. On the court he was indeed a “rosy, middleaged dolphin”-if you could imagine a dolphin in sagging shorts and flapping bathrobe.

Alice Duer Miller was even rosier. Badminton was the one game at which she could always beat Aleck.

Sports on the Riviera were much more strenuous than on Neshobe Island. One day the wind changed, and the sea came booming at the shore in long, smooth breakers and everybody started riding the surf. This looked like something I should try. I was fearless in those days. I’d try anything, once. So I climbed down the cliff to the water and asked somebody to show me how to use a surfboard. Five minutes later I took my first solo ride on the waves, stunting around on one leg like a hot-shot daredevil. An hour later I was being towed behind a high-speed launch, out to an island that was famous for its bouillabaisse made with octopus.

(When Guy heard about this, he went into a sulk and called me nothing but a harpoon for a week. My eating a vulgar fisherman’s stew like bouillabaise de poulpe was a slur on his haute cuisine.)

Somebody told me that the only way to get a true picture of the Riviera was to see it from the air. A bird’s-eye view of the coast, they said, was a thing of unforgettable beauty. So one Sunday I drove over to the Cannes airport, where they advertised plane rides for fifty francs a spin.

The plane was a survivor from World War One, an open-cockpit Salmson biplane held together with splints and patches. Since I was so short, the pilot put a wooden box on the seat for me, so I could see over the rim of my cockpit all right. I saw over it, all right. I stuck out of the cockpit like an Eskimo in a kayak, more out than in, and I spent the whole flight hanging on for dear life to a wire strut. My bird’s-eye view of the Riviera was a close-up of the knuckles of my right fist, beyond which I didn’t have the nerve to look, and the beauty of which was quite forgettable.

That was one thing I tried only once.

The Riviera was pretty strong on indoor sports, too. Besides the usual kind, it offered roulette, baccarat and chemin de fer, in some lovely, enticing casinos.

The first casino I sampled was in Juan-les-Pins. I wandered in there one quiet afternoon. I was the only American in the place but I figured, what the hell, the spots on a deck of cards were a universal language, and I got into a small game of chemin-de-fer.

I was wrong about the language. Right away the dame next to me began to heckle me, in French. She resented the fact that I could only talk by making faces and signs. She was even more annoyed by the fact that I was chewing gum. She started mocking my gum chewing and this made me good and sore.

The next time I made the high bet and got to play a hand against the bank, I was dealt a seven-count. By the rules I should have just stood, but being sore I signaled the banker to deal me a third card. I got a four face-up, which put my count back down to one. The banker won the hand on a two.

The French dame, who had a hundred francs riding on me against the bank, hit the ceiling when she saw the cards I’d been dealt. She started to jab her finger at me and howl like a siren. The next thing I knew, a platoon of casino officials, all of them with beards, appeared out of nowhere and started a loud argument with the dame.

While they yammered away I went quietly off to a corner of the casino and stood on my head.

When the dame spotted me upside down in the corner she pointed my way and screamed louder than ever. Two officials rushed over to me. They hesitated. They weren’t sure whether to address my feet or bend down and yell at me face-to-face. They compromised and yelled at each other. I didn’t like the sound of their voices. I swore I heard words like police and surete. But I was damned if I’d stop standing on my head until they calmed down.

Thank goodness an Englishman who could speak French came into the casino. He got the story from the guys with the beards, then knelt down on the floor like he was looking under the bed for a lost collar button, and said to me, “Old boy, it seems you’ve broken a rule of the game, and you’re being asked to pay this lady a hundred francs.”

I came down off my head, gave the dame her hundred francs, tipped everybody in sight-including the dame-a stick of Juicy Fruit and blew the joint.

Now that the international incident was settled and war clouds no longer hovered over Juan-les-Pins, I decided to switch casinos and try my luck at Monte Carlo.

When I told Aleck this, he clapped his hands and said, “Marvelous idea! We shall all go to Monte Carlo-and it’s my treat, bunnies. Dinner at the Cafe de Paris is on me. Good King Alexander is full of noblesse oblige and feels like bestowing largesse upon the poor.”

“You’d save a lot of scratch, King, if you bestowed your largesse upon a chair and stayed home,” I said. Aleck was feeling so good that he laughed and refrained from calling me the name I expected.

Guy, who was the head of protocol at Galanon, told us what to order at the Cafe de Paris and what we should wear to the casino -evening dresses for the ladies, simple and not too much jewelry, and black tie and dinner jackets for the gentlemen. When he saw me about to leave in polo shirt, blazer and white ducks, he was horrified. He had a frenzied consultation with Aleck. Aleck shrugged. He turned to me and said, “How can I explain you to Guy? There’s no French word for ‘boob.’”

I went as I was, which was the only way I was ever comfortable anywhere I went.

Dinner was great. Guy had touted us onto the best food on the Riviera. When we got to Monte Carlo, about eleven o’clock, I was feeling well-fed and lucky. I couldn’t wait to get into the action. But I couldn’t get past the outside entrance. A guy as big as Jess Willard and dressed like an ambassador blocked my way.

“I’m sorry, monsieur,” he said, pointing to his throat. “You will not be allowed in the casino without a tie.”

“He’s quite right, you know,” said Aleck. He’d been waiting all night for this. He gloated and swept grandly into the casino, with Beatrice on one arm and Alice on the other.

Fortunately I was wearing black socks. I went outside into the shadows. I took off my socks, tied one of them into a bow beneath my shirt collar, stuffed the other one in a shoe, stuck my shoes inside my belt, and went back to the entrance. The same guard was there. This time he smiled and said, “Forgive the inconvenience, monsieur, but you know-the regulations. Please go in. Your friends will be expecting you.”

It was the first time I ever gambled with a tie on, but I made out very nicely. I was, in fact, too lucky at roulette. In the “Little Casino,” where I played, if you got on a streak and hit like five numbers in a row they’d declare the bank closed. In this part of the joint they saw to it a guy never made over a thousand bucks. So when my winnings reached the five-hundred mark, I took to slipping stacks of chips to other guys to bet for me, on a commission.

That fattened my bankroll but killed my fun. Whenever you hit a number in this casino you had to tip the four croupiers. I’d been making them work for it. Before they got a tip from me the croupiers had to line up and sing “Merci beaucoup, monsieur!” in harmony. By God, at that they sounded better than the Four Nightingales ever did.

Later, when I kibitzed the action in the “Big Casino,” I felt like a piker. The center of attraction at the roulette wheel was a retired carpet-sweeper manufacturer, a doddering old coot of eighty-five who played in a wheelchair, with a male nurse in attendance. He was betting a thousand American bucks on red, on every turn, and he was winning consistently.

At one in the morning the nurse said it was past his patient’s bedtime, and insisted on wheeling him home. Before they left, the old guy handed over a wad and told the dealer to bet a thousand for him on red, once every half hour for the rest of the night.