Harpo Speaks! (34 page)

The next day our hostess steamed out of Cannes for New York. Hated to eat and run, she said, but there was a darling baby elephant on her yacht, and she had to get him home. She had bought the elephant in Africa for the purpose of pulling the lawn mower on her estate in Palm Beach. Let the Vanderbilts top that, she said. (Two weeks later, coming into the harbor, the poor baby elephant took one look at the skyline of New York and keeled over dead.)

When the canning heiress left, Daisy Fellowes, the sewing-machine heiress, steamed into port and took up the slack. Daisy had two yachts. She had a “decent-sized” one, with the displacement of a destroyer and a crew of sixteen, and a “dinky” one, which had a galley only big enough to serve a dozen voyagers. If Daisy liked you, she had you to lunch on the dinky yacht. If she really liked you, you were invited to dinner on the big yacht, after which you didn’t get ashore for at least a week.

Daisy threw a series of parties in her “beach house”-a thirty-room villa in Antibes-at a hundred guests a throw. If a dame showed up with a gown remotely the same color or same design as hers, Daisy would disappear, then reappear in a dazzling new creation. One night she changed her outfit five times.

This Daisy was a charmer. She was like an Irene Castle with a French accent. Daisy would have been charming whether she’d been loaded with moola or not. It was just nice that she happened to be, like a chocolate eclair having frosting on it.

I remember once, as a party came to an end at dawn, she pursed her lips and rolled her eyes and said to those of us who were left, “You are all so talented. You write or dance or act or sing. But I do nossing.” Whereupon Woollcott chuckled and replied, “My dear, I have heard different.”

I was lucky enough to be invited to Daisy’s big yacht. I stayed on board for ten days. The anchor never came off the bottom of the Mediterranean, but it was a very interesting voyage.

Elsa Maxwell barreled onto the Riviera to give a party under the auspices of the Monte Carlo casino. Elsa always had to do something different. Since there was no beach below the casino, only a shelf of pebbles sloping into the sea, she decided to give a beach party. She talked the casino into having a huge rubber mat made. She had the mat laid over the pebbles, and proclaimed it “Rubber Beach.” The high point of Elsa’s beach party was the entrance of Sidney Lejon and Gertie Sanford-not down the cliff but from the sea, on surfboards. Sidney was wearing white tie and tails and Gertie a shimmering taffeta evening gown, and as they swooshed onto the shore they were illuminated by searchlights while the casino band played “Over the Waves” from the top of the cliff.

The low point was reached not long afterwards, when Elsa’s matting began to rip apart against the pebbles, and Rubber Beach became a sloshy mess, with everybody getting soaked up to the ankles and tripping over the shreds of rubber and bruising their knees and shins. It was a different kind of a party, all right.

The most exclusive soiree of the season was a dinner party at the Eden Roc Hotel. It was so exclusive that only Aleck, of our crowd, was invited. He gave the rest of us the needle for not being asked. We accused him, in turn, of turning into a social snob. Ruth Gordon and I decided we’d better go to the shindig too, so Aleck wouldn’t lose the common touch. Naturally, we didn’t tell him about our plans.

We crashed the gate of the Eden Roc by going in through the kitchen and apologizing to the chef for having goofed and taken the wrong entrance. Once inside, Ruth and I played it straight, and nobody questioned our being there. We were seated at a balcony table, with our backs to the railing. I could hear the sea washing the shore directly beneath me. Directly across from me sat Alexander Woollcott, who said nothing, only glared.

There was a waiter in scarlet livery for every couple at the dinner. When we finished the soup, our waiter came out with our second course, which was a whole poached salmon. The salmon was laid out on a bed of watercress on a gleaming silver tray, as lovely as an Irish corpse. Before serving it, the waiter lowered it between Ruth and me for us to inspect and admire.

I smelled the fish. I made a Gookie. I grabbed the tray from the waiter and heaved the salmon over my shoulder and into the Mediterranean Sea.

“Don’t think I care for the fish,” I said. “What’s on the Blue Plate tonight?”

I got a laugh from everyone in the joint except the waiter and Woollcott. Aleck gave me a look of disgust, and I heard him say to the dame sitting beside him, “I don’t know. I’ve never seen that vulgar person before in my life.”

The society page of the next day’s paper was given over entirely to the swanky shindig at the Eden Roc. Mlle. Ruth Gordon and Monsieur H. Marx were listed among the honored guests, but Monsieur A. Woollcott was not. We razzed the bejesus out of Aleck over this, after we read the paper to him. We must have gone too far. Aleck stomped out of the room. He returned with his poodle, Candida. He handed me the leash and said, “Kindly see to her comfort while I’m gone. She prefers her breakfast kidneys lightly broiled.”

Saying no more, Aleck vanished from the Villa Galanon without a trace.

He had disappeared a couple of times before, that summer. It was after one of his disappearances, as a matter of fact, that he had brought the poodle home. We never bothered to look for Aleck when he went on the lam. He deserved to have a secret hideout, considering all we made him put up with at the villa. We were mighty curious, nevertheless, about where his secret hideout was.

I took good care of Candida during her master’s absence. One day I took her along when I drove to Nice, and there a strange thing happened.

I was wandering through side streets, casing the shops, when I became aware that I was no longer leading the dog. The dog was leading me. She knew exactly where she was going. She led me to the door of a large, white house with shuttered windows.

A dame came out of the house. She and the poodle recognized each other. She talked to Candida in French and Candida wagged her tail-in French too, presumably. Then the dame spoke to me. I knew enough French by now to get the drift. Any friend of the poodle’s was a friend of hers, she was saying, and wouldn’t I please come in?

I went inside. The house was a high-class bordel, and Candida’s lady friend was the madam. Candida had another friend there, too. In the whorehouse parlor was Alexander Woollcott, in silk robe and slippers, reclining on a black velvet couch and-I swear to God-being fed grapes by one of the girls of the establishment.

Whatever Aleck did, he did in style.

In the last two weeks of the season we got footloose and itchy and made excursions all over the map, following our whims. We would drive a hundred kilometers or more to hunt down a country inn we’d heard was famous for something like leek soup or salmis of gamebirds.

When Noel Coward wrote he was leaving London for the Riviera, we journeyed through the night to Paris to catch him between trains and give him a surprise welcome to France. I met his boat train disguised as a ragged, bearded street musician, playing a miniature harp. Aleck concealed himself in the shadows of the station to spy on the scene. What I had in mind was to latch onto Noel, playing as badly as I could, to see if I could annoy him to the point of calling a policeman.

Noel stepped off the train. I stopped playing and held out my hat for tips. Without seeming to pay me any special attention, Noel dropped a sixpence into the hat and said, “I’ve never seen you looking better, Harpo old boy. Now tell me where the devil Aleck is.”

Our last excursion was to Naples, so Beatrice could pay one last visit to her favorite acquaintance in Italy-the sensitivo in the Naples aquarium. The sensitivo was a fantastic kind of shellfish. It drew into its shell whenever any strange object came near it, then poked out of its shell when the object was pulled away-all in a weird, synchronized movement. Beatrice could watch it and play with it for hours. The real reason she was so fascinated, she said, was that she knew a lot of people who were sensitivos. She refused to name any names, however.

Leaving Beatrice alone with her friend in the aquarium, Aleck and I drove on down the coast to Amalfi, to look for a cliff-top cafe we’d heard about. It was said to have the finest view of the Mediterranean sunset of any place in Italy. We found the joint and had a good time there. Aleck never forgot this little trip of ours. Five years later he wrote about it in The New Yorker. This is what he wrote:

“… I fell to thinking of a sundown at Amalfi long ago, where you seek at the top of a cliff a restaurant once patronized by Enrico Wadsworth Longfellow. It is a sheer ascent of two hundred steps, and barefoot natives fight for the chance to carry you up in chairs. I was embarrassed by their obvious conviction that they would need relays to get me to the top. They were nervously managing the last twenty steps when I was aware that popular interest in their heroic attempt had shifted to the chair behind me, in which I knew Harpo Marx had been making the ascent. There were such shrieks of local pleasure that I had to turn and look. Grinning in the seat was one of the shabbiest of the bearers. Harpo was carrying him up….

Aleck neglected to finish the story, however. We reached the top just as the sun began to set. It was probably a gorgeous sunset, but I couldn’t say. As soon as we got to the terrace we looked for the table the farthest away from the view, sat down, got out the pegboard and the cards, and started a game of cribbage.

Neither of us would admit it, but we were homesick. We’d had enough of the sea and the sun and the international life. The bam-bang-sock-and-pow part was over, until another summer. It was time to get back to the other side, the home side, of the million-dollar playground.

Unknown

CHAPTER 16

Playground Condemned

THE VOYAGE HOME on the Ile de France shaped up to be a quiet, dull passage. It would have been just that, too, if I hadn’t been undone by a good deed I did.

Everybody seemed to have blown his wad on the Continent that summer, and there wasn’t much money on board. I happened to have a few bucks left, but the only action going on was a game of two-handed stud between an elderly Connecticut real-estate developer and a handsome young Brazilian. They made it plain they didn’t want me in the game.

So I kibitzed. Right away I saw that the Brazilian was fattening up the American for the kill. He let him win a little at poker, then persuaded him they should change the game to craps. He let the old man make a few passes, then began to switch the dice on him and take him on a ride to the cleaners. It was very interesting to watch. The Brazilian was slick, but not too fast for me.

I got the old man aside at dinner and told him he was being swindled by the worst kind of shark, a dice-switcher. He thanked me and went to the Brazilian and accused him of cheating. The Brazilian challenged the real-estate man to a duel. He’d never been so insulted in his life. He put on such an act that the old guy wound up apologizing to him and turning on me. He said I ought to be reported to the captain for being a disturbing influence on board the ship.

The next day they were back at the crap table and the chips were moving faster than ever-in one direction, from North America to South. I was reminded of a fact I’d known for a long time: Nobody resents being called a sucker more than a sucker.

I turned my attention to pleasanter things, namely, the girls on board. I settled on a good-looking kid from Omaha who was a ball-bearing heiress. (And didn’t Woollcott have fun with that one!) She was a lot of laughs and, since she didn’t drink, a cheap date. I congratulated myself. It was going to be an inexpensive crossing. I would arrive in the States with almost all the dough I had when I left France.

Then, suddenly, my little affair became a triangle. Who should horn in but the old guy from Connecticut. It may have been the sea air, or he may have been sore at me still, but the old goat turned into a wolf. He puffed and panted after Miss Omaha and pestered her out of her mind. If he’d been twenty years younger I’d have clipped him one.

The Captain asked me to organize the entertainment for the last-night-out party, which was thrown to raise money for the Seamen’s Home. Going over on the Roma back in May I had staged a hell of a show, with a big auction, and we’d collected a couple of thousand bucks. This time it was different. Everybody sat on their hands and their pocketbooks. Nobody volunteered to perform. Nobody offered anything to be auctioned off.

I got an idea. I would set up Miss Omaha in a booth and auction off kisses. Might make ten or fifteen bucks per kiss. Wouldn’t raise anything like two G’s, but at least there’d be something to turn over to the seamen.

The auction began. I should have known what would happen, but I wasn’t prepared for it. The Connecticut Yankee sat down in the front row, leering and drooling. He made it plain he wasn’t going to be outbid for a kiss. He got up to twenty-five bucks and nobody else wanted to go any higher. The girl said, under her breath, “My God, Harpo-raise the bid! I’d rather die than be kissed by that old wolf!”

So I made a bid of thirty myself. He barked back with fifty. I raised him five. He raised me twenty-five. I stuck with him, but at a hundred I got cold feet. Miss Omaha tugged at my sleeve. She begged me not to stop. Her pride was at stake, she said. So was her faith in me. I couldn’t let her down. I didn’t.

After two more rounds the guy up and quit on me. He hadn’t counted on this kind of competition. So I won the kiss. What had been costing me nothing for three days suddenly cost me a hundred and fifty-five smackers. I turned the auction over to somebody else and went to my stateroom and straight to bed. I’d have to borrow cab fare from Aleck to get home from the pier. It was the most expensive crossing I ever made.

It was good to be home. The first thing I did was to get out my harp. I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed the old monster until I touched the strings again. This had been our longest separation.

Frenchie cooked me a feast. Minnie and I swapped stories. She had to hear a full report on the Riviera, and she had to give me a full report on her poker club. It seemed a little sad that Minnie, who used to be fired up and full of fight over bookings and billings and special effects, had nothing left to talk about except her poker club. I asked her if she didn’t miss the old life.