Harpo Speaks! (33 page)

He fell all over himself apologizing to Shaw about the mix-up. “Nonsense, my boy,” said Shaw, playing it straight for Woollcott but with a twinkle on the side for me. “We had a grand reception here. We were met by a naked jackanapes, your immodest Mr. Marx. A bit shocking, but quite grand!”

The luncheon too could only be described as grand. It was a one-man show. Shaw’s performance at lunch was the most remarkable I’d ever seen, onstage or off. Ruth, Alice and Beatrice were entranced. Aleck was in heaven.

I’d never heard a voice as superb as Shaw’s. He played it like an organ. This guy was no ham, but a real actor. He had expressive, graceful hands, magnetic eyes, and the plastic face of a comic. The dining room became his stage. He flung himself in and out of doorways, making exits and entrances. He dashed around like Fairbanks, he danced and shuffled like Chaplin, he swooned like Duse, as he told story after story, acting out all the parts. He recreated scenes and plays, and he brought to life the famous characters he had known over the past fifty years-from Disraeli and Lenin to Darwin and Huxley, from Gilbert and Sullivan to Liszt and Debussy, from Oscar Wilde to Henrik Ibsen.

Only two people at the table dared to interrupt him-his wife and me.

Every time Shaw strayed onto the subject of Ellen Terry (which was fairly often), Mrs. Shaw would tap a finger on the table, slowly, steadily and ominously. If her husband didn’t get the message she started thumping her spoon on the table, and she wouldn’t stop until he changed the subject. I hadn’t been aware of Shaw’s famous “friendship” with Miss Terry, but the thumping of the Mrs.’ spoon told me all I needed to know.

At one point Shaw admitted, a bit shamefacedly, that he hadn’t written a play since The Apple Cart, and that he doubted if he would ever tackle another. This sounded to me like a terrible waste of talent. What this guy needed was a little encouragement. So I said, “How about it? Why don’t you write another play, Shaw?”

There was a deathly silence. Shaw leaned across the table and fixed me with a piercing look from beneath the bristly hedges of his eyebrows.

In a stage whisper that would have filled Madison Square Garden he said: “Got an idea?”

Then he threw back his head and laughed so hard I thought he’d strangle. At that moment a great mystery was solved for me. Since I had first met the guy I had been trying to figure out whether or not he was wearing a tie under his beard. Now I knew. He wasn’t even wearing a collar.

He asked why I was staring at him so oddly. “I just discovered,” I said, “that you couldn’t have sat downstairs at Loew’s Delancey Street Theatre.”

Shaw asked for an explanation. The downstairs seats were strictly high class at the Delancey Street, I told him. A man had to be wearing a tie to sit downstairs. Otherwise he had to sit in the balcony. The assistant manager of the theatre used to stand by the entrance, sorting out customers according to their neckwear. The older guys in the neighborhood all wore beards, and you used to hear the assistant manager, as he lifted the beards of the customers coming in, checking for neckties: “Upstairs . . . Downstairs .. . Upstairs . . . Downstairs….”

Shaw said he would have been flattered to join the upstairs crowd at Loew’s Delancey Street, with the sensible chaps who knew what a beard was for.

This time it was Woollcott who tapped a finger until the subject was changed. It was a hint for me to get the hell out of the act, so Shaw’s one-man show could continue.

The lunch lasted three hours. When the guests departed, driven to Antibes by the gardener, the rest of us sat in silence. We were spellbound by the great man’s presence long after he had gone. Aleck was first to speak. He sighed and said, “Well, what did you think of him?”

The only person prepared to answer was Guy, who was gathering up the wine bottles. As social arbiter of the Villa Galanon, Guy assumed the question was directed to him. He shrugged and said, “Il est presentable,” and went on about his business.

I was the Shaws’ chauffeur for the rest of their stay in Antibes. We spent a lot of time together. I always drove the old bus the way it was used to being driven by Guy, and I’m afraid I gave the Shaws some pretty wild rides in the open jalopy. Bernard Shaw hung on grimly. He turned pale a few times, but he never complained. For a guy of seventy-four he was a wonderful sport.

Mrs. Shaw was just as good a sport. She usually sat by herself in the back seat, holding onto her hat with one hand and clutching a rolled-up umbrella with the other. She never commented about the way I drove-except to make sweeping signals with her umbrella whenever I stopped or turned. She waved and jabbed it around as briskly and efficiently as any Fifth Avenue traffic cop.

One day Shaw and I drove to Cannes, where a friend of his, Rex Ingraham, was directing a movie called The Three Passions. We only wanted to watch the shooting for a while, but Ingraham had other ideas. He shanghaied us and put us to work as extras. In our one and only joint appearance before the camera, George Bernard Shaw and I shot pocket billiards in a poolroom scene.

I’m sure the scene was cut from the picture. No audience could ever mistake us for extras, lost in the crowd. The way we shot pool we could only be taken for what we were-a couple of ringers, a couple of sharpies.

Aleck got sniffy and made like he was sore because I was spending more time with Shaw than he was. Actually, I knew that nothing tickled Aleck more than seeing me hit it off with one of his idols. He loved playing the game of Strange Bedfellows. “Harpo Marx and Bernard Shaw!” he used to say, with that smirking chuckle of his. “Corned beef and roses!”

When it came to parties, Aleck took his people-mixing seriously. Making up a guest list was an involved job. He wasn’t happy until he came up with a balance of personalities that would make an evening perfect.

Unbeknownst to Aleck I took the liberty of adding to the guest list for his farewell dinner for the Shaws. I invited Sir Oswald Mosley and Peggy Hopkins Joyce.

Mosley, who later became the leader of the British Nazi Party, had some peculiar political ideas even then, and he wasn’t too popular on the Riviera. Mrs. Joyce, on the other hand, was easily the most popular broad on the coast of France-although not at literary dinner parties.

Shaw was amused when my two extra guests showed up. The girls were amused. So was Woollcott, but he wouldn’t admit it because he hadn’t thought of the mixture first.

I lost a pal, with Shaw’s return to England. But I gained a playmate-Peggy Hopkins Joyce. Peggy was no spring chicken, but she was still quite a dish. She seemed to take a shine to me, after the evening at Galanon, but damned if I could make any time with her.

I managed finally to get her over to the villa for lunch one day when I was there alone. She was friendly and chatty and seemed to enjoy being with me as always, but that was the extent of it. I turned on the charm and took off my shirt and showed off my tan and my muscles, but it was no dice. No contest, no conquest.

Then, as she was about to leave, a lucky thing happened. She fell for my pet canary. She said she loved canaries, and mine was just the sweetest thing she’d ever seen.

“Peggy,” I said, “he’s yours. Please accept him as a gift.” She was delighted. “However,” I said, “it’d be better if you didn’t take him home with you now. Being out in this hot sun would kill him. Tell you what I’ll do. I’ll bring him over to your place this evening. Say around seven o’clock?”

To my surprise she said yes. She went even further. “Why don’t you stay for dinner?” she said. “It’ll be informal, just the two of us, but I don’t think you’ll be bored.”

I didn’t think so either.

The bird and I arrived at her villa promptly at seven. She was wearing a slinky Oriental outfit, silk pants and jacket, with nothing underneath except Peggy Hopkins Joyce. It wasn’t hard to see why she had come as far in the world as she had without a degree from Vassar.

There were just the two of us for dinner, but it was not exactly a tete-a-tete. The servants outnumbered us by about six to one. Then, when they cleared the table, Peggy said, “Shall we have our brandy in the sitting room, where nobody will bother us?”

My heart was pumping so fast I couldn’t speak. I just nodded my head, trying to play it suave and casual.

Five minutes later I was reclining beside her on a harem-size divan, with a flunky waving a fan over us. She gave me the eye, snuggled deeper into her nest of silk cushions and whispered, “Peggy wants to have a little fun, Harpo. Will you help Peggy have a little fun?”

“You name it, honey,” I said. On the brink of conquest I had found my voice again.

She dismissed the flunky and told him to douse the overhead lights on the way out. When he went out she sighed, slithered over closer to me, and ran a finger down the length of my arm, turning me into a cozy mass of shivers. Well, old sport, I said to myself, you’ve got it made. The boys in Lindy’s should see you now!

Then she surprised me. She rang for the butler. She said to him, “You may bring the books now.” The butler bowed and left the room.

Books? I didn’t get it. Dirty books maybe?

The butler returned. He laid a stack of six books in my lap, bowed, and departed. The books were beautifully bound in handtooled leather. I looked at the titles. The titles were: “Mutt and Jeff,” “Bringing Up Father,” “Krazy Kat,” “Tillie the Toiler,” “Barney Google,” and “The Katzenjammer Kids.” They were collections of comic strips-not the dirty kind, but the kind that appeared in the funny papers.

Peggy gave a little giggle and curled up on the divan with her head on my shoulder. “Read to me, Harpo,” she purred.

I read.

I read through the whole damn stack of comic books, beginning to end. Peggy Hopkins Joyce didn’t know how to read, but she sure knew her literature. She knew it by heart. Whenever I made the slightest mistake, she corrected me.

The first mistake I made was to leave out the sound effects in a sequence where Jiggs came home late from playing poker and eating corned beef and cabbage and got waylaid by Maggie with her rolling pin.

“No, no!” Peggy howled, interrupting me. “You didn’t read it all! You didn’t read the ‘Bam! Bang! Sock! Pow!’ part!” I backtracked and read the bam-bang-sock-and-pow part and she was happy again.

I caught hell for leaving out a couple of glubs, half a dozen zowies, and a flock of zams, ulps and gulps, but otherwise I managed to struggle through the books without a hitch. And all the time Peggy kept tittering and squealing and fiddling with her toes and squirming all over the divan. No doubt about it. She was having her fun.

When I closed the covers on the sixth and final volume, I was exhausted. I stood and said that I’d enjoyed the dinner and thanks very much but it was getting late and I’d better be heading back to Galanon.

“Oh, no, Harpo!” said Peggy. She jumped up and ran to a massive carved chest and pulled out a drawer as big as a coffin. It was filled to the top with loose newspaper clippings.

“Look!” she said. “They’re all about me! Here-” she scooped up half a bushel of clippings into her arms-“start reading these!”

My male pride had taken enough of a beating. I said, politely but forcefully, that I had to go home. I got away from Peggy Hopkins Joyce’s love nest as fast as my legs and Guy’s jalopy could take me.

Mrs. Joyce’s record in the boudoir was more impressive than Benny Leonard’s in the ring. But being more the literary type myself, I never made the list of her conquests.

August was the social month. It was a season within the season, a time of tea dansants, garden parties, cocktail parties, dinner parties, pajama parties, fancy-dress balls and formal receptions.

Aleck laid down the law. I had to do something about the way I dressed, at least be halfway presentable socially. He made an appointment for me with a tailor in Cannes to have a dinner jacket made.

I had a dinner jacket made. The material I picked for it was pool-table felt, and it had big brass buttons. Right away I became known on the Riviera as “the American with the green tuxedo.” I was now a man of a certain distinction. I made every guest list except one throughout the rest of the summer.

On the high-society circuit I met a new type of character. I met a guy who owned the world’s only Rolls-Royce with a built-in, flushing john under the back seat. I met a dame whose villa had two swimming pools, one for anybody and another one stocked with live salmon for her pansy friends to swim in. My favorite characters were King Alfonso of Spain and his Anthem Man. King Alfonso was tone deaf. He couldn’t tell Chopsticks from the “William Tell Overture.” So he traveled with a special aide whose only duty was to give the high-sign whenever the Spanish national anthem was played, so Alfonso would know when to salute. Being a King’s Anthem Man was the best occupation I’d heard about since I myself had been Grandpa’s Tin Can Swinger, repairing umbrellas.

An American canning heiress steamed into Cannes on her yacht and took over a hotel to throw a costume party. Aleck sent regrets. He couldn’t make it because he was entertaining Otis Skinner, the distinguished elder statesman of the American stage, that evening. Ruth and I decided to go anyhow, to uphold the honor of Galanon.

Woollcott and Otis Skinner were having brandy when I came downstairs in costume, on my way to the party. When Mr. Skinner saw me, he gagged on his cognac. I was “The Spirit of Toilet Paper.” I was bedecked from head to foot with rosettes of toilet tissue. The rosettes were spangled with official stamps of the French government. (The saying was, you couldn’t move your bowels in France unless you got a government stamp first.) My sash was a water-closet chain, with a placard saying TIREZ hung on front, and I carried a roll of toilet paper like a muff.

Ruth came down to join me. She was going as a pregnant baby doll. Before she could explain her costume, Aleck asked Mr. Skinner if he wouldn’t like to finish his brandy out on the terrace, and Mr. Skinner allowed as how he would like to very much.

It was a good party. With my eye-mask on, nobody recognized me except Somerset Maugham and a guy I’d gambled with at Monte Carlo, who got very drunk and kept following me around lighting matches and trying to set fire to my costume.