Harpo Speaks! (41 page)

One of them, a tall young guy who looked a little like George Kaufman said, in English. “Mr. Marx? We are at your service.” He bowed and all the rest of the delegation bowed. They looked eagerly at the trunk and the harp case, and my first thought was that they’d come to carry my baggage downstairs to the limousine.

Then the tall guy said, “Let me introduce your staff. My colleagues ask to be forgiven for not speaking English, but they too hope we shall have a long and happy association together.” The names of the guys all sounded like “Bensonoff” to me. After I shook hands with them, the spokesman made the rounds again, introduced them by titles: “Producer. Director. Assistant Producer. Musical Director. Writer. Arranger. Stage Manager. Company Manager. Scenic designer. Assistant Director. I myself am a writer.”

Litvinov had said the magic word. The next day I went to work-on the stage, not in anybody’s office.

And on the next day, at 7:50 A.M., to be exact, while I was having my prunes, rolls and tea in the hotel dining room, Russia became-officially-a friendly country. That was the prearranged time for the pact worked out between Litvinov and Roosevelt to go into effect. The United States now recognized the Soviet Union, and the U.S.S.R. now recognized the U.S.A.

Suddenly, the whole complexion of Russia seemed to change. It didn’t look so gray any more. It didn’t seem nearly so cold out.

During the rehearsal period, Walter Duranty returned to Moscow, along with another American writer, Eugene Lyons. They were wonderful to me. Woollcott was right. I couldn’t have been in more capable hands. No road show ever had two better advance men than mine, Duranty and Lyons. Duranty took me to meet William Bullitt, who’d been appointed as our first ambassador to the Soviet Union. The Bullitts had me to dinner. The Lyonses had me to dinner. Ivy Litvinov promised to have me to dinner as soon as her husband had a free evening. Seems he was sort of tied up with the Boss. Trying to explain some of the items on his Washington expense account, I figured. But obviously he had, as his wife had promised, made me his first order of business on coming home.

I felt like a heel for having announced, the week before, that I was going to take it on the lam out of Russia.

My show was staged in a small but well equipped-and well heated, by God-State theatre. We put on a preview performance for the international press, the big shots of the People’s Culture Commissariat and the American “official family” in Moscow. Ambassador Bullitt was the guest of honor. We made such a hit that we had to put on a second preview.

Then we had our opening for the Russian public (”public” in this case meaning Party members in good standing who could con the Commissariat out of tickets). We were a great success. It went over twice as big as either preview. On the morning after, Melachrino read me the review in Izvestia. It was the most flattering thing written about me since Woollcott’s piece in the New York Sun, back in 1924.

I knew I’d done pretty well. My type of comedy had been sure-fire with audiences from London to Broadway to L.A., and I had found that people laughed the same way all over the world at pantomime. I was confident and I was well prepared.

One thing I wasn’t prepared for, however. I never knew any people who laughed as easily as the Russians. Maybe laughter was more of a luxury to them than to anybody else. Maybe they were starved for it. I stopped trying to figure them out. Walking the streets, working, or waiting in line, these were the most self-controlled people I had ever seen. In the theatre, the same people couldn’t hold themselves in. Every move I made threw the joint into a new riot. The director of the Moscow Art Theatre, the guy who’d almost auditioned me out of town, still had tears in his eyes from laughing when he came back to congratulate me.

It sure as hell hadn’t been easy to put my act together in Moscow. I had never in my life worked harder for an opening. The Russian sense of humor was a wonderful thing once you got it going for you. But how to get it going? That was the catch.

They had assigned me four spots in the show, which was to be sort of a revue. I decided I’d do a harp solo first, to introduce myself, and next do the clarinet-bubbles bit. In act two I’d do a comedy pantomime bit, and for my last spot I’d go back to the harp and keep playing as long as the crowd wanted more.

The part I’d have the least trouble with, I thought, would be the pantomime. Not so. It was the only part that gave me trouble.

The scene I worked out was the opening of Cocoanuts, with a few variations thrown in out of I’ll Say She Is. I come to check in at a hotel. I tear up the telegrams and the mail. I decide I’m thirsty. I take a swig from the inkwell on the desk. The ink-after I’ve swallowed it-tastes like poison. I make a Gookie. I need an antidote. I take out a rubber glove, inflate it, and milk it. The milk does the trick. I feel great now. I jump on the straight man’s shoulders and throw pens like darts until I hit a plaque on the wall and a bell rings and I win a cigar. Blackout. The second part of the scene was the old knife-dropping routine. For a local-gag finish, I dropped, not a silver coffeepot, but a miniature samovar.

The first time I ran through my bits, at the first rehearsal, the staff applauded the harp solo. They howled and clapped when the bubbles came out of the clarinet. But throughout the comedy scene, which I had worked on all night with my Russian straight man, they sat on their hands. When it was over they smiled politely, nothing more. Oh, no, I thought. Here we go again!

The English-speaking writer who looked like Kaufman lumbered onto the stage. “Your movements are extraordinary,” he said. “But please forgive us. We don’t know the story. If I may say so, the point eludes us.”

“Point?” I said. “There isn’t any point. It’s nothing but slapstick. You know-pure hokum.”

“Yes, yes, of course,” he said, like he understood, which he didn’t at all. “But may I ask why you were compelled to destroy the letters? Why did you drink the ink, knowing it was ink? What was your motive for stealing the knives that belonged to the hotel?”

I was flabbergasted. I’d done these pieces of business hundreds of times, and this was the first time anybody had ever asked me why I did them. “All I know,” I said, “is that if something gets a laugh you do it again. That’s all the reason you need. Right?”

Now the Russian was puzzled. He said, “No.”

I said, “No?”

He said, “Forgive me. Perhaps it is different in your American theatre. Here you must tell a story that answers the audience’s questions, or your performance will fail.”

Well, what the hell. It was them that had to cover the nut, not me. It was their crowd I had to play to. “Okay,” I said. “If you think I need a script, cook one up. I’ll go along with it. But remember-on the stage I don’t talk.”

He gave me a big smile. “My colleague and I will write the scene,” he said. “Don’t be afraid. We won’t change your part. We will simply give it a purpose. You understand, don’t you?”

I said, “Yah, I understand,” which I certainly did not.

So the Russian writers-I called them George S. Kaufmanski and Morrie Ryskindov-cooked up a script. They didn’t fool around with any of my stuff, as Kaufmanski had promised. What they did was add three extra parts, a doctor, a dame and the dame’s jealous husband. They made with the drama between my bits of business. What I had planned as two one-minute blackouts became a ten-minute, two-act play. My net working time was still two minutes. The rest of the time, while the actors declaimed, I froze-waiting for the director to throw me a cue to go into my next routine.

I had no idea what the doctor, the dame or the dame’s husband were saying in Russian. I never did find out. When I asked Melachrino she said, “It is not important to you.” When I asked George S. Kaufmanski he shrugged, smiled, and changed the subject. It was weird, to say the least, to be the star in a play you didn’t know the plot of, or what a single line meant.

The writers called the rest of the staff in for a run-through of their Moscow Art version of Fun with Harpo. Here goes nothing, I said to myself. You just couldn’t tinker with my kind of hokum without taking all the comedy out of it.

But I’ll be a son of a bitch if it didn’t knock them out of their seats.

It was the same way with the full house, the night we opened for the “public.” While the supporting actors declaimed, between comedy bits, nobody in the audience stirred. Nobody rattled a program or coughed. When the dramatic part was over I could see the heads nodding out front and the eyes turning toward me. At this point I only had to wiggle an eyebrow to bring the house down, that’s how ready they were to laugh. I didn’t give a damn what the plot was about. It was a comedian’s dream.

At the end of the show the audience stood and clapped and I lost count of how many curtain calls I took. The critic in Izvestia wrote that I received “an unprecedented standing ovation, lasting ten minutes.” I wasn’t timing them, but it seemed to me that the crowd never would quiet down and go home. Maybe they dreaded leaving the theatre, to face the icy streets and their drafty apartments, and figured as long as they kept applauding and I kept coming out for a bow they could stay warm.

No other success ever gave me quite the same satisfaction. Besides, it happened on my fortieth birthday.

What had been two weeks before a city on the other side of the moon was now my new home town. I got a hell of a kick seeing the posters all over the main streets advertising the show, and recognizing my name in Russian print. It looked like this: XAPПO MAPKC. The nearest I could come to pronouncing it, from the way it looked, was “Exapno Mapcase.”

So I was Exapno Mapcase, the Toast of Moscow.

The show played for six weeks in Russia. We did two weeks in Moscow, a week in Leningrad, a week of one-night stands in smaller cities, and a final two weeks in Moscow. The variety acts that filled out the bill were changed each week, along with the actors in my “play,” but two regulars stayed with me, the girl singer and the straight man. The straight man was no Groucho, but he spoke High German as well as I spoke Plattdeutsch, and we could communicate, after a fashion.

No matter where we played, the Russian audiences never let me down. The only times I let them down were when I refused to do a third or fourth encore of “Rose Marie.” During the winter of 1933-’34, everybody in Russia was singing “Rose Marie, I love you.” The song had swept the country. Every act on every bill gave it a rendition. It was sung by baritones (for whom it was written), by male sopranos, and by female tenors-all of whom seemed to have mustaches and legs that would support a pool table.

I got the chance to see a few other productions, on nights off and afternoons when I had no matinee. Soviet vaudeville was heavy on acrobats, wire walkers, kazatski dancers, jugglers and trained animals. Actually, the People’s Vaudeville was a watered-down stage version of the People’s Circus. The circus was by far the most popular kind of entertainment.

I managed to see two legitimate plays. One was a Chekhov production at the Moscow Art Theatre, which I had a hard time following even with Melachrino’s subtitles. The other was an antireligious play called “The Seventh Regiment Goes to Heaven,” which was staged like a Shubert extravaganza. I had no trouble following this one. The obscene characters they made out of saints and apostles turned my stomach-and kept the rest of the audience in stitches from beginning to end. I have never been strictly religious, but the memory of this performance still makes me sick.

After I became a hit, Melachrino was suddenly a lot more relaxed, and I could now go off by myself almost any time I wanted to. One day when there was no matinee I ducked out and went looking for some kind of action. In front of a good-sized theatre, one I hadn’t been in yet, there was an unusually long line of people. The line wasn’t moving. No tickets were being sold. It had to be something sensational with this many people waiting for a chance to get in.

Since the day I bought my outfit at the government store I had become used to the idea that foreigners didn’t stand in line. I went up to the box office and waved a dollar bill in the window. The cashier grabbed the buck and gave me a ticket. Valootye-foreign currency-worked like magic in Moscow.

The house was packed, and noisy. Most of the audience were standing or walking around, chatting, drinking and eating. Others were sleeping or reading. I had apparently come in during the intermission. Yet the curtain was raised and the stage was lit. Oddest of all was the setting on the stage. There was a small table and a chair. On the table were two telephones, and a bunch of knickknacks. Behind the table was a large, tilted mirror.

It was the longest intermission I ever sat through. Fifteen minutes passed. Twenty minutes. Twenty-five. Nobody seemed to mind waiting that long for the next act.

Then a buzzer sounded. People damn near trampled each other to get back to their seats. In thirty seconds the theatre was silent as a tomb. Everybody was watching the empty stage.

A boy, maybe ten or eleven years old, walks out from the wings. He sits at the table. He picks up the receiver of one of the telephones. He listens for a while, then hangs up without saying anything. He moves one of the little props on the table. The joint is so quiet I can hear my wrist watch ticking. The boy moves another knickknack. A guy comes out, walks to the footlights, announces something to the audience, and the joint goes wild.

People jump to their feet. They yell and throw their hats in the air and embrace each other. The guy who made the announcement shakes hands with the boy and the cheers are deafening. This is absolutely the craziest show I ever saw.

Finally it dawned on me what I had been watching. A chess match.

The kid on the stage, I found out, had been playing the Polish chess champion and the Ukrainian champion, by long-distance telephone. It was nice to know the home team won, but it would have been nicer if I could have gotten my dollar back.

On the eve of his departure for Washington, the new Soviet Ambassador to the United States, Alexander Troyanovsky, gave a dinner party for the American colony in Moscow. The date was November 30, and damned if he didn’t feed us an old-fashioned Thanksgiving dinner. I must say a stuffed turkey with all the trimmings was a welcome relief from the endless caviar.