Harpo Speaks! (40 page)

Naturally, I felt they deserved a fat tip when we got to the room. Melachrino was incensed. “The degrading practice of tipping is unknown in the Soviet Union,” she said, and made me put the money back in my pocket. The dames who had carried my things gave her dirty looks and trudged back downstairs.

I started unpacking. Melachrino made no move to leave. I excused myself and went into the can. When I came out she was still there. What was the score? Was she going to be my roommate? I got the picture of her at night, curled up on the floor like a dog at the foot of my bed.

Somehow the idea penetrated that I wouldn’t mind being alone for a while. She left, saying that I only had to telephone the desk when I needed her and she would be in my room instantly. With almost any other broad in the world this would have been a very cozy arrangement. But with Melachrino, Comrade House Dick had nothing to worry about.

I couldn’t locate Walter Duranty by telephone, even with the help of the Nationale operator. So I decided to go out for a walk alone-and take a look at Moscow. I didn’t make it alone. Before I got out the front door of the hotel, Melachrino was beside me. She gave me a stern look but said nothing.

Walking down this main drag, toward the Kremlin, I realized now what was so eerie about Moscow. There was no roar of traffic. The streets were jammed with people, but nearly empty of cars. Whenever a government limousine or truck drove by, its sound was muffled by the snow which was packed onto the road and piled high along the curbs. It was like seeing a silent movie come to life, with no titles or background music.

Another thing I couldn’t get used to was the sight of women doing all the heavy labor-women shoveling snow, chopping ice, hauling trash, driving trucks, working on construction with hods and wheelbarrows. They all looked alike, squat and round, their heads tied in scarves, their bodies bundled in layers of men’s clothes, their feet swaddled in burlap tied with strips of rags.

Everywhere, in front of small shops and big stores, there were lines of customers waiting to get in. Unlike New Yorkers, Muscovites on line didn’t jostle or gripe. They just shuffled quietly and patiently in the snow. Everybody in Moscow seemed to be concentrating on what he was doing, even when he was doing nothing.

Many people stared at us, but never with any change of expression. At first I thought it was me, so obviously a foreigner, that they were curious about. Then I realized that it was not me, but Melachrino. More specifically, they were staring at her karakul hat, unpatched overcoat and fur-lined galoshes, which marked her as a high-up comrade.

I wanted to explore some of the side streets, but my guide kept me walking a straight and narrow path down the main drag, which was, I believe, Tverskya Street. Once in a while I got a glimpse, through an alley, of what she didn’t want me to see. Behind the stone buildings on Tverskya Street, on both sides, were awful jumbles of slums-rickety tenements, unglassed windows covered with lumber scraps, wrapping paper and tattered blankets, and in front of the tenements, heaps of refuse burning in the snow.

“You must realize,” said Melachrino, “that this is only the first year of the new Five Year Plan. There is much to be done. It will be done.”

From what I had seen of the Russians during my first ten hours in the country, I had no doubt that it would be done.

I got too hungry and cold to walk any further, and decided to do the Kremlin some other day. On the way back to the hotel, we stopped at a government clothing store, so I could buy something warmer to wear. There was the customary long line in front of the store. Automatically, I got on the end of the line. Melachrino grabbed me and took me straight into the store. “Party members and honored guests of the Soviet Union have priority,” she said. The people waiting out in the cold didn’t seem resentful when we bypassed them. Melachrino didn’t bother to apologize or explain, and nobody made the least complaint. The only person unhappy about it was me. I thought it was dirty pool.

I bought me a fur hat, fur coat, and fur-lined galoshes, all for forty dollars. Back on the street, wearing my new outfit, it came to me why the bear was the symbol of Russia. The only way a Russian could survive the winter was to dress like a bear.

We had dinner at the Nationale, and it was pretty good-all the caviar I could eat, hot cabbage soup, boiled potatoes and boiled fish, black bread, tea, and jam. The jam, of course, was for the tea, not the bread. All during my stay in Russia, in all the restaurants I ate in, the food was pretty good-which means I didn’t get tired of caviar, cabbage soup, boiled potatoes and boiled fish, black bread, tea and jam. The breakfast menu, which didn’t vary much either, consisted of stewed prunes, hard rolls and coffee. Russian coffee was the only thing I couldn’t take. It tasted like it was brewed out of burnt potato skins.

Again I had no luck getting in touch with Duranty. I asked Melachrino to come on up to my room and we’d kill the evening and have a few laughs. This was a new bit of English to her, and while she wiped her glasses she scowled and practiced it: “We shall kill the evening and have a few laughs. Yes, certainly.”

Upstairs in the room she put on her overcoat and hat and sat on a straight chair-her way of warning me there would be no monkey business. I got out the harp and did a few warm-up arpeggios and glissandos. I stopped to stretch my fingers. Melachrino said, “Whose music have you played?” I told her it was Beethoven. “Yes,” she said. “Certainly. Beethoven.” I did some more warm-ups. “Whose is that music?” she said, and I told her that it was Tchaikovsky. Melachrino shut her eyes and nodded her head and said, “Beautiful! Beautiful!”

After a while I kicked her out, telling her I wanted to go to bed early. I was curious about something. Half an hour after she’d gone I went down to the lobby. There she sat, in a corner facing the stairs, overcoat and hat still on, reading a book. She looked up at me sharply, I smiled and waved at her. She nodded her head and, having seen that I was not dressed to go out, went back to her reading.

No doubt about it, she was a government spy. But that was okay with me. I had nothing to hide, nothing that the Soviet Union would want to find out. Still it was a creepy feeling, knowing that every move you made was watched and that every word you spoke probably went into a report to the secret police.

In the morning I talked on the phone to an English correspondent from Reuters, who told me that Walter Duranty was in Leningrad, and wouldn’t be back in Moscow for another week. Before I hung up I said, “Okay, Melachrino, honey, come on up.” “The Englishman was puzzled. Nobody else on the wire was. Melachrino was in my room in two minutes.

“Take me to the director of the Moscow Art Theatre,” I said. I handed her my letter of introduction from the Intourist people in New York. She read the letter and said, “Yes, certainly. Comrade Director will be expecting you.”

I had decided not to wait for my American contacts. I’d get the show on the road by myself. That’s what Minnie would have done-gone straight to the local manager.

The office of the director of the Moscow Art Theatre was behind one of the proscenium boxes. It was the classiest room I’d yet seen in Russia: thick carpet on the floor, polished furniture, pictures on the wall. But it was freezing cold. Russian rooms were either overheated or underheated. This one was underheated.

The director read my letter. He didn’t speak English. Through Melachrino he said he had been expecting me. But what did I do?

What did I do?

“Yes,” he said, “what type of actor are you?”

“I guess you’d call me a comedy actor,” I said. I began to wonder what kind of an introduction I’d been given from the characters in New York.

“Pantomime?” he asked me, and I said yes, I did pantomime.

The director said all right, then, how about me giving him a little demonstration. I would love to, I said, but I’d have to get some props from my hotel before I could do any kind of an audition.

“Very well,” said the director. “Get your accessories and return tomorrow morning at eleven o’clock. We shall be happy to judge your performance.”

So I came back the next morning with costume, wig and a hundred or so knives. The director had the rest of the staff with him, six or seven stony-faced characters who were a tough audience if I ever saw one. I got into costume, planted the knives up my sleeves and said I was ready for the stage.

“No,” said the director. “Not on the stage. You will perform here.”

I asked if somebody would volunteer to be my straight man for the bit. “No,” said the director. “We must see you perform alone. To perform alone is the only true test of the pantomime artist.”

So I had to play both parts, straight man and comic. I made some faces, winding up with a Gookie, then shooks hands with myself to start the knives dropping. The silverware fell to the carpet of the office, not with raucous clatter but with polite, soft thuds. Nobody cracked a smile. The room was deathly silent. Cold as it was there, I was drenched with flop sweat. It was the most miserable performance I’d ever given.

The director asked if I was finished. I nodded my head. He looked at the Stone Faces. Almost in unison, they shrugged. “You will please return tomorrow morning at eleven o’clock,” said the director. He got up and left the office and his assistants got up and followed him.

Melachrino helped me pick up the knives. She made no comment.

The next morning I was there at eleven. The director said my juggling of the cutlery was not exceptionally clever. I said I could do any of a dozen different bits, but they wouldn’t mean anything without an audience.

“I shall be the judge of what your acting will mean to an audience,” he said. You will please return tomorrow morning at eleven o’clock.”

I decided that of all the routines I did, the clarinet bit would be the funniest without an audience. On my fourth visit to the Moscow Art Theatre, the Stone Faces were already waiting for me in the director’s office. I had Melachrino explain that I was accompanying a girl singing, “I’m Always Blowing Bubbles,” and they would have to imagine the voice part. I started playing the tune straight, then flipped the special valve on the clarinet and let the bubbles come out.

The director and all the assistant directors studied the bubbles as they floated through the room. When the last bubble burst on the floor, they looked up at me, grim as a jury in a murder case. Melachrino said something to them in Russian. They shrugged it off, whatever she said.

They had a brief conference. They sat staring at me for a while, then the director said: “We will let you know. Please be here tomorrow morning at eleven o’clock.”

What I felt like saying wasn’t translatable, so I said, “This time I’ll let you know, Chief. Maybe I’ll come back and maybe I won’t.”

The director got up and left the office and his assistants got up and followed him. Melachrino watched them go. She shook her head. “I told them it was a joke,” she said. “Please believe me. I told them.”

“Yah, thanks,” I said. “You were one hell of a claque, honey.”

The jig was up. I didn’t give a damn who was going to be the first American to play the Soviet circuit. I only knew it wasn’t going to be Harpo Marx. I told Melachrino to use all the pull she had to get me reservations out of Russia on the next train to Poland. I went to my room to pack.

I called the man from Reuters and a couple other correspondents I’d become friendly with, to tell them good-bye. All three of them begged me to stick it out. Not a chance, I said. The Russians didn’t understand me and I didn’t understand them. I’d never been so humiliated, not by the crudest, crookedest manager in the smallest time vaudeville house in the sticks.

I was packed and ready to take off, waiting for confirmation of my train ticket, when I got a telephone call from a lady with a British accent. I missed her name when she introduced herself, and figured she must be the wife of one of the correspondents.

She told me she’d just heard I was in town to play, and she thought it was wonderful. I told her it had sounded wonderful to me once, but now it was all over, before it began. I was on my way out of Russia.

“But you mustn’t leave!” she said. “You don’t know how we’re looking forward to seeing you. Whatever has made you change your mind?”

I told her briefly and as politely as I could about my four-day run-around with the Moscow Art Theatre.

She wasn’t surprised. “That’s not the theatre for you,” she said. “You were sent to the wrong people.”

Well, then, I asked her, where should I have gone? “I couldn’t say for certain,” she said. “But we’ll put you straight. My husband will be back from Washington in the morning, and I’ll see to it that you’re his first order of business.”

“He’s got connections here?” I said.

There was a pause. Then the dame with the English accent said, “Perhaps you didn’t catch my name, Mr. Marx. I am Ivy Litvinov. My husband, Maxim, is the Foreign Minister. I know he’ll be terribly sorry he wasn’t in Moscow to greet you. The conference with Mr. Roosevelt has lasted far longer than he thought it would.”

I don’t know what I said after that. I only know I agreed to put off leaving for twenty-four hours. Right after I hung up, Melachrino ran into my room. She was so pleased that she almost smiled. I couldn’t tell, however, whether it was the postponement of my departure that pleased her, or the fact that she’d had the honor of snooping on a conversation with the wife of the Foreign Minister. At that time the prestige and power of Comrade Maxim Litvinov was second only to that of Comrade Joseph Stalin.

I stuck to my room in the morning, practicing the harp and waiting for the call that might keep me in Russia. No call came. After lunch I asked Melachrino up and I played “Waltz Me Around Again, Willie” for her. I told her it was Rimski-Korsakov and she said it was “Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.”

Still no call. I put the harp back in the case and told Melachrino to go check on my reservation like a good little spy. She shook her head and sighed, but off she went.

There was a knock on the door. “Come on in, honey,” I said, “I’m decent.” It wasn’t Melachrino who came in. It was a delegation of eleven Russians, smiling Russians.