Harpo Speaks! (38 page)

I persuaded them to call Chico. They asked Chico if he had a brother who called himself “Harpo.” Chico said he did. Did he know where Harpo was? He had no idea where he was. When had he last seen him? When he went to visit him in the Gloversville, New York, jail. What was the charge that time? Fraud, forgery and petty larceny, said Chico. What was Harpo’s last known address? The cop repeated it as Chico gave it to him: “Happy Times Tavern, Merrick Road, Long Island, New York.” Could he describe the brother? The cop wrote down the description: Big mop red curly hair. Cross-eyed. Mute. Can’t talk. Not too bright. Only one item-the last one-checked out with me. Otherwise: Suspicion of being an impostor.

The cop thanked Chico, apologized for having disturbed him at such a late hour, and asked that he please cooperate in doing all he could to locate his real brother Harpo. Chico thought for a minute, then said, “Is there a reward?”

The cops, convinced they’d made the biggest haul since the capture of Geronimo, started to grill me. I promptly fell asleep, which proved that I was a pretty cool customer, all right.

They woke me up by whanging my sword on my helmet, and I thought, I’ve had it-they’ve shut the door of the clink on me! But I was still in the station house. Standing there staring at me was Charlie Lederer. He was shaking his head. He said, “Drunk again, poor bastard. All right, officer. I’ll be responsible for him. I’ll help him home and sober him up.”

I should have known better. Charlie was too good a friend to be trusted.

I went with Lederer-an invited guest this time-for a weekend at the Hearst Ranch, up at San Simeon, California. This was a place you had to see to believe. When you saw it, you couldn’t believe it. It was more like a mythical kingdom than a ranch. I wouldn’t have been surprised if I had seen Ben Hur and Messala in their chariots racing around the formal gardens, Julius Caesar getting a rubdown by the Roman bath, Michelangelo touching up the paint on the chapel ceiling, Henry the Eighth sitting and burping at the head of the banquet table, or Robin Hood and his men swarming out of the hills to hold up the joint.

We got to San Simeon at night. We had to identify ourselves to the guards at the entrance before we could get through the gate. I found myself thinking I should have brought my passport. After driving forty minutes we arrived at the main castle. There a hostess met us and assigned us to rooms, like in a Catskill Mountain hotel. I slept in a bed that had belonged to the court of Louis XIV. What a shame it couldn’t talk.

In the morning I couldn’t find Charlie, so I followed the crowd to breakfast, and from breakfast to the tennis courts, where Mr. Hearst was playing. Lederer, the louse, was already there. I saw why he’d ducked out on me. He was having breakfast beside the court with a beautiful babe. I joined them. Lederer paid me no attention.

But when the phone on their breakfast cart rang, Charlie waved at me and said, “Answer it, Harpo, like a good boy.” I answered it. Somebody wanted Marion Davies. I said, “Marion Davies? I don’t know anybody here by that name.”

That did it. The beautiful babe said, “Who the hell do you think I am?” Charlie introduced us. She was, as I had suspected, Marion Davies. The only other time I’d seen her she’d been in costume, the night of the beach-house party.

Miss Davies and I got along fine together, and I was invited back to San Simeon many times.

One thing we had in common was a knack for gymnastics. One rainy weekend Marion and I practiced acrobatic stunts in the main library, after pushing a lot of junk out of the way. The junk included carvings of jade and ivory, silver chalices, and medieval parchments. We got a little wild sometimes and knocked a few books off the shelves, but we were careful not to break anything. Marion’s diamond necklaces and bracelets kept falling off, and we kept picking them up, but as far as she knew she didn’t think she lost any.

Charlie Lederer came by once while we were taking a break, getting our wind back. He picked up a book we had knocked to the floor.

“This is something even you might like, Harpo,” he said. “You want it? Take it. What the hell-Mr. Hearst has more books here than he can ever get around to reading.”

I was very happy to take it. Nice leather binding. Big print. Looked like a story I might get a kick out of. I stuck it in my pocket.

It was still in my pocket at cocktail time. When Mr. Hearst came in to preside over cocktails-the only time he talked to “minor” guests-the first thing he saw was the book sticking out of my pocket. “Where did you get this?” he said, taking the book away from me. I told him Charlie Lederer had given it to me. “Have you read it, Mr. Hearst?” I said. He nodded. I said, “Any good?”

Hearst didn’t answer me. He put the book in his own pocket and walked away. I knew I had been chastised by the Master of San Simeon, but I didn’t altogether know why.

After dinner I found out why. The book was a copy of Gulliver’s Travels. It was a first edition, printed in 1726. Mr. Hearst had paid thirty-one thousand bucks for it at an auction in England. The next time I went in the library the books were all behind steel-mesh screens. The screens were locked with combination locks.

Charlie Lederer, who happened to be related to Marion Davies, was one of the privileged few who had the freedom of the Ranch. He got away with murder.

Once Mr. Hearst’s guest of honor was the Governor of California. The first course at dinner was a fruit salad served in individual scooped-out pineapples. In the Governor’s pineapple, on top of the fruit salad, there was a note. The note said: If you know what’s good for you, don’t eat this!”

Charlie’s gag was not very subtle. The Governor of California was, at the time, getting threatening letters from all over the country for having given a pardon to Tom Mooney, the famous alleged bomber.

The dining hall in the San Simeon castle was grand enough to have suited King Arthur and all his knights and all their ladies. When you came into dinner, ten-foot logs were blazing in the fireplace and hundreds of candles were burning in giant silver candelabras. Candlelight flickered against the historic battle flags that flew from the beams, against the gleaming top of the seventy-foot-long banquet table, and on the little islands of glassware that dotted the length of the table. Each of these little islands was composed of a bottle of ketchup, a bottle of horseradish, a dinertype sugar dispenser, a water glass full of paper napkins, and pepper shakers in the shapes of Mickey and Minnie Mouse.

The first few times I ate in the dining ball I couldn’t tell if the food was cold or not because I was so hot. I was a newcomer to the Ranch, and not an Important Person, so I was made to sit with my back to the fireplace. The fireplace was sixty feet high. It was big enough to park a Fifth Avenue bus in, and one dinner’s fire consumed two whole trees. Every meal there was a race for me, to see if I could eat fast enough to make up for the weight I was sweating off.

I begged Charlie to use his pull to get me assigned to a new seat. Charlie kept trying. Finally the Boss relented, and I found my place card down at the cool end of the table. That meant I’d been accepted. I had passed the test of courage under fire and now I belonged to the Hearst Crowd. Now I could tell about the food. It was just as magnificent as the setting.

One weekend I was delighted to find that the guest of honor at San Simeon was George Bernard Shaw. The two of us had a great time reliving our days together at Antibes during the crazy, pre-Depression summer of ‘28. That was only five years earlier, but so much had changed since then it was like we were talking about events of the distant past.

Shaw cut quite a figure at the Hearst Ranch. Nothing about the joint fazed him. He seemed to be equally amused and offended by it. As dyed-in-the-wool a Socialist as he was, I don’t think Shaw regarded San Simeon as proof that the Capitalist System was evil. He looked upon it as a monstrous freak: the biggest playpen ever built, stuffed with the most outrageous toys a child ever had to play with.

By the same token, some of the other guests at the Ranch weren’t fazed by Shaw, either. One afternoon he and I were strolling around the edge of the indoor Roman pool. A blond dame, the bride of a well-known movie actor, was in the pool alone, riding on a blown-up rubber sea horse. When she spotted Shaw she splashed water toward him and yelled, “Hey, Whiskers! Come on in for a dip!”

The night after Shaw left there was a sudden snowstorm at San Simeon. Charlie and I watched the stuff pelting down onto the illuminated statuary outside the library window. We got the same idea at the same time. We scouted through the castle and “borrowed” ten fur coats from ten lady guests. We went out into the courtyard, through the falling snow, draped the naked sculptured broads with fur coats, and went to bed content that we had done a very gallant deed.

The effect in the morning was quite spectacular-the snow on top of the fur coats on top of the statues. There was another effect too. It was the first time I ever saw Mr. Hearst get sore at Charlie Lederer. In front of everybody, at cocktail time, he demoted Charlie to a seat at dinner by the fireplace.

March 1933 was a month of upheaval and melancholy. First, the unseasonable storm at San Simeon. Then the closing of the banks by President Roosevelt. A week after that Frenchie had a bad heart attack and was taken to the hospital, and the first day I was allowed to visit him was the day of the calamitous Long Beach earthquake.

While I was in Frenchie’s hospital room one of the bigger shocks of the earthquake hit Los Angeles. His bed, which was on wheels, began to spin around the room. For some stupid reason I tried to push it back where it belonged, and wound up pinned to the wall. Frenchie was more worried about me than about himself. I told him not to worry. I never had it so easy, I said. Every time the earth shook my harp was home playing by itself. I was being saved a whole day’s practice.

Two weeks later Frenchie was dead. It was a time of great sadness for all of his sons. We had realized far too late how much of what we had made of ourselves we owed to Frenchie. Over the years we had pawned his shears, gobbled up his delectable food without any thanks, scorned him for peddling lappas and for his lousy tailoring, and razzed him over his cockeyed card playing. But Frenchie never stopped smiling, and his smile was like a secret radiation. All of us who were exposed to it were affected for life. We had burned into us the meaning of loyalty and forgiveness, and of the futility of anger. I loved this man.

It was wonderful to find out that Frenchie’s last day on earth was one of his happiest days. He had taught his nurses how to play pinochle, and in the last game he ever played he bid four hundred and made the bid.

In the middle of July I was up at San Simeon with Charlie Lederer. It was scorching hot. Charlie and I were lounging beside one of the outdoor pools. Nobody else was in sight. We were bored. We didn’t know what the hell to do with ourselves.

Charlie got an idea. “What do you say we go drop in on Aleck at Bomoseen and scare the pants off the old fraud?” he said, and I said, “Let’s go.” I hadn’t seen Woollcott for nearly two years.

Charlie finagled a Hearst limousine and we drove to the San Francisco airport. We flew to New York. It was a fast flight for those days-only three stops coast to coast. In New York we chartered a seaplane. We flew north to Lake Champlain. We hired a driver to take us to Bomoseen. At Bomoseen we rented a skiff and rowed to Neshobe Island. On the island we sneaked up through the bushes. We heard the tonk-clunk, tonk-clunk, mutterings and curses of a croquet game. We recognized the voices of Alice, Neysa, Beatrice and Aleck. Charlie and I took off our clothes. We burst out of the bushes onto the court, whooping like a couple of naked savages.

Aleck was reclining against his croquet mallet, using it like a shooting-stick. He glanced over at us, without so much as a flicker of recognition. He turned back to the game.

“Alice,” he said, with a steely trace of annoyance in his voice, “it’s your shot, my dear.”

Charlie and I went back into the bushes and put our clothes back on. We rowed back to the mainland dock. We were driven back to Lake Champlain, where the seaplane was waiting for us. We flew back to New York, where we caught the next plane west. With stops at Chicago, Kansas City and Denver, we flew back to San Francisco, where the limousine was waiting for us. We drove back to San Simeon, where we stretched out beside the pool.

“Thought Aleck looked fine, didn’t you?” said Charlie.

“Never looked better,” I said.

“Never,” said Charlie.

That subject being closed, we wondered what the hell we could do with ourselves now.

One reason I was welcome at the Ranch, I’m sure, was because I was an ardent New Dealer and so-in 1933-was William Randolph Hearst. But neither of us was half the Franklin Roosevelt fan that Aleck Woollcott was. Aleck took over the New Deal as if the whole thing was his idea from the beginning. He was a particularly good friend of Mrs. Roosevelt, and he flounced in and out of the White House like he owned a piece of the joint.

Early that fall he called me from New York. He’d just learned, he said, that President Roosevelt was about to carry out his campaign promise of recognizing the Soviet Union. That was nice, I said, and what else was new? Nothing, said Aleck, except that I was going to Russia. I told him he was crazy. I didn’t even want to go to Winnepeg, Manitoba, let alone Russia. I liked California. I liked the sunshine. I liked the people. I liked the language. I intended to stay in California.

Aleck wasn’t listening. “I’ve decided,” he said, “that Harpo Marx should be the first American artist to perform in Moscow after the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. become friendly nations. Think of it!”

I was thinking of it. I was shivering.

“They’ll adore you,” Aleck went on. “With a name like yours, how can you miss? Can’t you see the three-sheets? `Presenting Marx-In person’!”

“Why the hell don’t you go?” I said. “They love ballet over there. You could do your ‘Itto Wabbit in de Sunshine’ dance. They’ll adore you.”

“Listen, you faun’s behind,” said Woollcott. “I’ve already started pulling strings for you to get a visa. I suggest you be in New York not later than ten days from today.” I made a nasty sound. “Besides,” Aleck went on, “I haven’t seen you for two desolate years.” He avoided any mention of the unscheduled, hit-and-run visit Charlie and I had made to Neshobe Island that summer. He would have lost face if he had.