Harpo Speaks! (42 page)

Troyanovsky went to a lot of trouble to make certain the dinner would be the McCoy, down to the last detail. The detail that gave him the most trouble was celery. His research staff told him there had to be celery chopped into the stuffing and celery stalks as a relish, along with olives and sweet pickles. The staff had dredged up sweet potatoes, cranberries and pumpkins. But they struck out on celery. As far as they could find out, with the help of the Ministry of Agriculture, not a stalk of the stuff existed in the Soviet Union this late in the year.

A diplomatic courier was dispatched on a special mission. His orders were to head west and keep on going west until he found a supply of fresh celery. He didn’t find any until he got to Warsaw. He telephoned the Kremlin that he had the goods. At the border he was met by an armed guard, who hustled him onto a Red Army plane. At the Moscow airport another guard hustled him off the plane and into a limousine. The celery arrived in the Ambassador’s kitchen in time to go into the stuffing.

It was a fine dinner and a grand gesture. We had recognized the Russians for only two weeks and already they were buddying it up with us like we were old allies.

All this made the foreign newspaper guys hopeful that they could start digging for their own news in Russia, instead of sitting around waiting for handouts. They had no reason to doubt-yet-that the Reds would live up to the terms of their pact with the U.S. In the pact they promised to encourage the exchange of ideas and information. They also pledged “to refrain from propaganda against the policies or social order of the United States.”

The foreign correspondents rented an apartment in Moscow as a sort of cooperative clubhouse. That’s where they spent most of their time, huddling by a feeble wall stove and playing poker, while they waited for the green light from the Kremlin that would permit them to get into Siberia. Siberia was the biggest mystery in all the mysterious Soviet. The Reds hinted it was a place of miracles, where factories, even whole cities, were carved out of ice and rock. The Westerners suspected otherwise-that Siberia was a continental prison camp, where a million political exiles were used as slaves.

Ambassador Bullitt kept working at getting travel clearances for the reporters. The Kremlin kept promising they were coming through. But as far as I knew, no correspondent ever got to Siberia.

I got into a poker game with them one night. My luck was good, but I came away a loser. We played for rubles, not dollars, and Russian paper currency was so thin it would disintegrate after being handled a few times. It was the first time I lost at poker due to the money wearing out.

You could buy a lot of rubles for an American dollar, and if you spent them before they wore out you could get some good bargains. Cablegrams were a good bargain. I sent cables back home to everybody I knew, by the bushel, at approximately two cents per wire.

Some got through uncensored, some didn’t. One which didn’t get through at all was a cable to Woollcott: “HAVE GONE THROUGH TOUGHEST WICKET. NO LONGER DEAD ON RED. EVERYTHING BUCKETY- BUCKETY. EXAPNO MAPCASE.” This must have kept the lights burning all through the night at the counterspy department of the GPU.

I finally got to see the inside of the Kremlin, thanks to Duranty’s pull. (This was twenty years before the Kremlin was to compete with Disneyland for tourist dollars.) The exhibits there of Czarist treasures were fantastic. By comparison the Hearst Ranch at San Simeon was a collection of souvenirs from Atlantic City. In my wildest dreams I couldn’t have imagined such a display of riches-crowns, jewelry, robes, coaches, all so dazzling they knocked your eye out. There was more wealth here, by American standards, than in the vaults of the Chase National Bank. By Soviet standards it was worthless, except as a bunch of trophies. The audiences couldn’t have been warmer, however. I got a tremendous satisfaction out of going into the hinterlands of the Soviet Union, where no Marx Brothers picture had ever played-where, in fact, nobody had ever heard of any non-Russian Marx except Karl-and scoring a hit.

It was also satisfying to discover that in small towns I could cash United Cigar Store coupons, which I had a supply of in my prop trunk, for rubles-at the dollar rate of exchange.

Still, it was good to get back to Moscow.

It was a triumphant return. The house was sold out for every performance of my second stand in Moscow. I could do no wrong. I got so cocky I refused to play “Rose Marie.”

After the curtain came down on the last scheduled performance, the audience wouldn’t let me go until I played six encores. It was late when I got to the hotel that night. There was a message for me: “Please telephone Mr. Litvinov. Urgent.”

Mr. Litvinov, when I called, said he owed me an apology. He was delighted to have seen me so many times socially, but he was deeply disappointed that he hadn’t once been able to see me perform. The pressures of his office had been simply overwhelming. This I knew. Every time I’d been with the Litvinovs, at tea or lunch or some reception, he’d gotten a call from the Kremlin and had to duck out. Stalin kept the craziest hours of any boss a guy ever worked for.

Litvinov said he’d like to ask a tremendous favor of me. Would I-could I-put on an extra performance tomorrow night? Nothing could stop him from seeing it. “Please don’t misunderstand me,” he said. “This is not a command performance. It is a humble personal request.”

I told him I’d be honored to, as long as it was okay with the rest of the company. He laughed. “For the rest of the company,” he said, “it will be, I’m afraid, a command performance.”

At curtain time, the next night, there was one empty seat in the house-the guest of honor’s. We waited. Then Ivy Lee Litvinov sent a note backstage from her box telling us to go ahead. Her husband had been called to the Premier’s office, she explained, but he would be in the theatre in a few minutes.

We did the first half of the show. At intermission time Mr. Litvinov still hadn’t shown up. We waited. The audience, as Russians were apt to do whenever there was a delay in a theatre, turned the intermission into a party. They walked around in small groups, gossiping and arguing, drinking tea and vodka and eating snacks.

After an hour passed, Litvinov appeared in his box, smiling and making apologetic gestures. The audience cheered him and went quickly to their seats.

It was the best house I had yet played to in Russia. I think I gave them their money’s worth. I couldn’t tell from the stage, however, whether the Foreign Minister was enjoying the performance or not. When I came out for my first encore my heart sank. The guest of honor’s box was empty. Litvinov was gone and so was his wife. I attacked the harp without much enthusiasm.

When I finished the piece, I noticed there was something peculiar about the audience. They were applauding but they weren’t looking at me. They were looking at Comrade Maxim Litvinov. He was standing onstage, just behind me. He came over to me, put an arm on my shoulder and made a brief speech, in Russian. Then he turned to me and said, “You have given us precious moments of pleasure, Harpo. We shall be forever indebted to you. On behalf of the U.S.S.R. I thank you.”

He held forth his hand. I shook it. A cascade of steel knives tumbled out of his sleeve and clanked to the stage.

The audience exploded with one great shriek. It was the biggest laugh this bit ever got. The only time I ever played the straight man, I got my biggest laugh. And my comic was the Foreign Minister of the Soviet Union.

On the morning of my last day in Moscow Walter Duranty telephoned to ask if I would please meet him at the Embassy. The Ambassador would like to say good-bye to me.

In Mr. Bullitt’s private office the three of us drank coffee-good, American coffee-and talked about this and that. At one point Bullitt said, casually, “Harpo, could you do me a favor? I’d like these delivered back to the States, in person.” He held up a thin packet of letters tied with string.

I said I’d be glad to. I reached for the letters. Bullitt didn’t let me have them.

“It’s not as simple as you might think,” he said. “This packet must get to New York undetected. No one-no one-must know you have it. It will be strapped to your leg, under your sock. You still want to do it?”

Sure I still did. Why not? Nobody would ever suspect me of being a diplomatic courier. Exactly why he was asking me to do this little service, Bullitt said. “So who do you want it delivered to?” I asked, and he said I didn’t have to worry about that. I would be contacted as soon as I got home.

“Okay,” I said. “Strap me up.”

We bound the packet to the inside of my right leg and secured the straps with adhesive tape. “Just forget you’re carrying it,” said the Ambassador. “Except,” he added, “when you go in the shower.”

He thanked me, wished me bon voyage, and we said good-bye. Duranty dropped me off at the hotel. Melachrino was waiting in the corridor outside my room. Bov, oh boy! I thought. Wouldn’t she pop her cork off if she knew that I was now a secret agent too!

“Honey,” I said. “I forgot to tell you something. I’m also a spy. I’m smuggling the designs for the Ford tractor out of Russia.”

She closed her eyes and nodded her head. “That is a joke,” she said, and I agreed. It wasn’t very good, but it was a joke.

Melachrino took off her overcoat, her galoshes, her karakul hat, and her glasses, and sat to watch me finish packing. It was the coziest she had ever been with me. I gave her a big, dirty wink. She quickly put her glasses on, and that was the end of our intimate affair.

She watched intently while I packed the presents I’d bought to take home. It was quite a haul: several pairs of black leather gloves, replicas of the Czarina’s crest, silver tea-glass holders, teaspoons and cigarette cases, icons, chess sets, peasant embroideries, carving sets with ivory handles, fur hats and fur-lined boots.

I felt guilty. I hadn’t bought a thing for Melachrino. “Hey, Spy!” I said. “I want you to have something for a souvenir. What would you like? Anything in the trunk-you name it.”

She shook her head. “I have everything I shall ever want,” she said. “I cannot accept gifts, thank you.” She got up and ran her fingers caressingly down the wall of the hotel room. “You see?” she said. “This is as much mine as anybody else’s. This is my gift.”

She said it with defiance. Yet she sounded wistful too, and gave herself away. Tomorrow, when I was gone, she’d be back in her chilly flat and back in the routine of whatever dreary office she worked out of. No more luxuries of the Hotel Nationale, limousines, diplomatic receptions, trips to Leningrad, or backstage chats with big shots from the Kremlin.

I closed the trunk. Melachrino put on her hat, overcoat and galoshes and shook hands with me. She had, apparently, completed her mental inventory of everything I was taking back, the details for her final report. Beyond this she had nothing further to do.

“Good-bye, Mr. Marx,” she said.

“Dahsvedahnya, honey,” I said, and she said, “It has been a great number of laughs.” I closed my eyes and nodded and she marched out of the room to her next assignment.

That afternoon Eugene Lyons and his wife came to say good-bye. They insisted on driving me over to Pushkin Square and having me do the knife-dropping bit by the statue of Pushkin. Then, for the Soviet cameramen, I stuffed knives up the sleeves of the statue and they photographed Pushkin doing my act.

Later, Duranty and a guy from the Embassy came to take me to the train. The harp and the trunk had gone on ahead, lugged out of the hotel room by the usual platoon of squatty women wearing babushkas and surplus uniforms from the army of Genghis Khan.

In the station Duranty said it might amuse me to know that the Izvestia critic who reviewed my Moscow opening had just been executed for a crime against the State. But he hadn’t been shot for raving about my decadent, bourgeois comedy. He’d been shot for making an illegal exchange of rubles and valootye.

Until Duranty told me that, I had actually forgotten about the packet of letters strapped to my right leg. Now it felt like a manacle. When the Poland express pulled out of the station I was thinking of nothing else. So I really had had a close shave at the border, that night I entered Russia. I was clutched by a sudden chill. What if Low Brow and his crew were on duty when I crossed over on the way out, and they recognized me? Suppose they gave me a working over, just for old time’s sake? What would happen when they found what was hidden on me? God Almighty! What had Woollcott gotten me into?

I could hear myself saying to Melachrino, eight hours earlier, “Yah, it’s a joke, honey.” Some joke. I was scared. I was so scared I fell asleep and slept through the dinner hour.

The next thing I heard was a gruff voice saying, “Marx! Marx! Tovarich Marx!” I opened my eyes. It was daylight. The train was stopped. The voice belonged to a Red soldier of the border guard. I recognized him from two months ago, and he recognized me. He jerked his head to signify I should come with him. I put on my coat and hat, took down my suitcase, and followed him off the train.

By this time most of the other passengers were lined up by the inspection station, waiting to have their papers checked. I asked the guard, in pantomime, if I hadn’t better get on line. He told me, in the same language, “No.” He led me into the station. There, waiting for me, was my old friend Colonel Low Brow.

“Your passport, please,” he said through his interpreter. I handed over my passport. Low Brow gave it to a soldier, who disappeared with it.

The colonel said, “Please come with me to headquarters.”

I couldn’t think straight. I may have walked straight, but I felt like a seasick unicyclist condemned to ride the deck of a ship in a storm. We came to headquarters. Low Brow opened the door and motioned me to go in. I went in. Waiting for me, standing in the middle of the office, was a Red officer who must have been at least a field marshal, a beefy guy decorated with an equal number of scars and stars. He was squinting hard at me and grinding his teeth.

I said, “Any of you fellows know any verses to `Peasie Weasie’?” The general looked at the colonel. The colonel looked at the interpreter. The interpreter said, “Please?” I didn’t answer him. I couldn’t.