Harpo Speaks! (44 page)

When I started to greet him, Kaufman put a finger to his lips and shushed me. He sat down, laid the clipping on the table, swatted it with the flat of his hand, and took out his watch. I could only see the headline on the story:

HARPO MARX SCORES BIG HIT IN MOSCOW

First American Popular Artist to Entertain Soviets Receives Ten-Minute Standing Ovation

Every time I tried to speak, Kaufman shook his head and held up a hand to stop me. Otherwise he sat perfectly still, glowering at his watch. The others were as puzzled as I, and the table went quiet. The waiter brought drinks. Woollcott told him we weren’t ready to order yet. Time passed. The waiter came back. Woollcott said we still weren’t ready. Kaufman hadn’t moved. I said, “George-” He silenced me with his hand. Around us, other diners finished eating and left, and new customers took their places. Kaufman was still in a trance, as if he was hypnotized by his watch.

After what seemed like an hour he put the watch in his pocket, turned to me and said, “That was ten minutes, Marx. The Russians applauded you for ten minutes, eh?” He snorted, took the clipping, got up from the table, and left the restaurant.

It was gratifying to see that my friends were so proud of my newest success.

Benchley also gave me the business that night, in a sneakier way. We were sitting around having coffee when Benchley cringed at the sight of a luscious blonde who was heading his way. The girl was on the make for him and made no bones about it. He tried to shake her off, but she stuck to him like flypaper, to the vast amusement of Woollcott.

Then Benchley said, “I’d like you to meet my idol, dear, the famous Harpo Marx,” and the next thing I knew, Benchley had beat it and the blonde was stuck to me like flypaper.

Well, frankly, I saw nothing to cringe about. After eight weeks of looking at dames with mustaches and pool-table legs, my resistance was pretty low. I asked the girl if she’d like to come up to my place for a nightcap. She said she’d love to. Aleck beamed with approval. Normally he would have been furious at my breaking up a party to run off with a nitwit broad. Something was cooking. There was a smirk behind Woollcott’s smile. But that didn’t slow me up. I’d been away too long. I left with the blonde.

When we got to my hotel suite the blonde acted like she’d also been away too long.

“Mind if I make myself comfortable?” she said. I said, “Go right ahead.” She did. In five seconds flat she slid off her coat, unzipped her dress, and pulled off her slip. She wore nothing under her slip.

I undertook to get equally comfortable. I didn’t get very far. T’he blond dame was looking at me strangely. I then saw she was gripping something in her hand. It was a small penknife. The blade was open and it was pointing toward me. I grabbed her wrist, broke her grip, and took the knife away from her.

She started to cry. “Please!” she said. “Can’t I just scratch you a little?”

I’d heard of dames like this, but I’d never been exposed to one before. I made a quick tour of the suite and picked up every weapon in sight-a bottle opener, a letter opener, a nail file, a pair of nail scissors, even the hotel key. When the blonde saw what I was doing she made a lunge for me, her fingers hooked like the talons of a hawk, and ripped open the front of my shirt.

I ran into the bedroom and locked the door. I had an idea. I undressed. I slathered myself from head to foot with hair oil, so the blonde couldn’t possibly-I thought-get a grip on me. I came out of the bedroom, a greased pig with a bathrobe on.

I had thought wrong. The blonde gouged me good, right through the hair oil. I retreated back to the bedroom. She started pounding on the door for me to come out and give her some fun, just a little fun. She wouldn’t give up. I wouldn’t give up either. I got another idea. I opened my trunk and got out the outfit I’d bought in Moscow and put it on.

When I opened the bedroom door the blonde gawked at me, groaned, and stopped crying. I then gawked at myself in the mirror on the door, and all desire flew out the window. Hair oil was oozing from under my karakul hat, running down my face and onto the collar of my fur coat. The fur coat hung down to the ankles of my fur galoshes. It was a very funny sight.

Wallowing like a bear on snowshoes, I went over and sat beside the naked blonde on the sofa. She didn’t say a word. She just stared at the impenetrable fur that covered me and wistfully flexed her fingers.

“Listen, honey,” I said, “why don’t you get dressed and go home?”

She stared at the fur a while longer, then shrugged and said, “All right.” In five seconds flat she pulled on her slip, zipped up her dress, put on her coat, and walked out of the suite.

What the hell, I said to myself. If nothing else it was nice to know that my old act worked just as well backwards as forwards-picking up cutlery instead of dropping it.

The old mob was still full of hanky-panky, after all these years, but their gags were fewer and farther between. They weren’t the same crazy Katzenjammers of the 1920’s. They had changed along with the times. Seven or eight years ago we would have wound up an all-night party in Aleck’s apartment arguing about croquet or the stock market, or making up wild puns and nasty menus. Now we wound up talking (they did, I mean-I still listened) about the NRA, the CCC, FDR’s last Fireside Chat, and Fiorello La Guardia, the new mayor of New York. Sooner or later Adolf Hitler entered every conversation, which killed it, and everybody went home wrapped up in his own depressing thoughts.

The first night this happened it got me thinking of what I had seen in Hamburg. I saw again those poor, frightened bastards staring out of windows with the Star of David painted on them, and I went home and threw up.

Woollcott, of course, had appropriated all rights to the story of my trip to Russia. He kept calling me up and ordering me to join him, at lunch, at cocktails, or at some party. If I didn’t feel like going out, he’d say, “But you must come! I’m with people who still haven’t heard `The Adventures of Harpo in Sovietland!’ As soon as I got to wherever he was, he’d launch into the story. I never got a chance to get a word in. I would have gotten tired of hearing it, but the story got better every time around.

It was after one of these sessions that I weighed myself in a penny arcade and my fortune card read: YOU TALK TOO MUCH. REMEMBER-SILENCE IS GOLDEN.

I was in no hurry to get back to the coast. With F.P.A. I went to Philadelphia to catch the out-of-town opening of Dodsworth, which Sidney Howard had adapted from the Sinclair Lewis novel. Max Gordon-Groucho’s old investment counselor-was the producer, and I watched the opening performance from the back of the house with Max. As producers have always done and always will do during an out-of-town tryout, Max paced back and forth during the whole show, sweating out each line and each piece of business, and trying to read the audience’s mind.

Every few minutes he’d stop, look sharply toward the stage, then write something on a slip of paper. Memos like this, I knew, were on-the-spot decisions that could make a success out of a tottering wreck of a play. By the third act his pockets were bulging with them.

When the final curtain came down, Max ran for the stage door. One of the little slips fell out of his pocket. I picked it up to take back to Max, and I couldn’t resist reading it. Who knew? This might be the single stroke of theatrical genius that would give Broadway its newest hit.

The memo said: “Send shirts to laundry.”

When I returned to New York there was a cablegram waiting for me. It was from Chico, who was still in England. His message was desperate: DYING FOR SPORTS NEWS. CAN’T GET RESULTS HERE. PLEASE SEND PAPERS. I devoted the rest of the day to fulfilling Chico’s desperate request. I scoured the city and bought copies of the London Times, London Observer, Manchester Guardian and the Scotsman. In each paper I underlined scores of association football, rugby and cricket matches, and shipped the whole batch off to Chico. I cabled him that the papers were on their way with the latest results, and wished him the best of luck.

Suddenly I was in a hurry to get back to the coast. Our next picture commitment at Paramount was several months off, and I had no professional reason for being in Hollywood, but I was itchy and restless. New York was no longer a great place in which to do nothing. People were hopeful, but the Depression still hung over the city, and it was a raw, runny-nose winter. When I heard myself griping about the weather I became acutely aware of being a transient in New York, a displaced Californian. Everybody was busy except me. I went home.

The Garden of Allah, after the snows of Moscow, the sleet of the North Atlantic and the slush of New York City, seemed more like the Garden of Eden. The sun was an old friend I hadn’t seen for five months. The miniature Black Sea was crawling with gorgeous broads. Even the palm trees were beautiful.

Daytimes, I spent hours without interruption at the harp, getting back in shape. Nighttimes I spent hours on the town-a hot Hollywood sport in cream-colored suit and rakish skimmer, swinging a cane-getting a few other techniques back in shape.

I joined the Hillcrest Country Club and shot at least forty-five holes of golf per week. I rented a beach house, laid out a wooden floor for a badminton court and enclosed it with a wall to keep the wind out. Charlie Lederer was a regular weekender at the beach house, along with Sam Goldwyn, Walter Wanger and John Gilbert. When it got too dark for badminton we moved inside for bridge or backgammon.

But damn it, I was still itchy and restless. Something was wrong with this picture. It came to me what was wrong. I had been cooped up too many years in hotel rooms, staterooms, apartments and bungalows. The happiest days I could remember were when I lived in the rambling clubhouse on Neshobe Island, and in the Villa Galanon on the Riviera.

I might be a bachelor, but bachelor quarters were not for me. I was a house man. A big-house man.

I rented a furnished mansion that belonged to a retired queen of the silent screen, in Beverly Hills. It was a tremendous place. All my worldly possessions, harp and case included, fit into the hall closet with plenty of space to spare. There must have been twenty rooms in the house. I never knew how many for sure. Every time I set off to count them I either got lost (my sense of direction never was very good), or I got tired and decided to finish counting some other time-then forgot to mark my place.

It was after his first visit to my new joint that George Burns warned the boys at Hillcrest: “Don’t go to Harpo Marx’s without an Indian guide.” Somebody played the straight man and asked why not. “I’m at Harpo’s the other night,” says George. “I ask him where the can is. He says, `Follow me-I know a short cut.’ Not knowing any better, I follow him. By the time he gets me there I need a change of clothes already.”

But George had to admit that, once there, it was worth the trip. In the master bathroom the john sat on a raised marble base, like a Roman throne. Hanging next to it, on a silver chain, was a silver-plated police whistle. The queen who had built the house had a morbid fear of prowlers, and she was always hearing prowlers when she was least prepared to cope with them. Burns had other ideas about what the whistle was for, but they cannot be printed.

The grounds were spacious and beautiful, and there was a huge swimming pool, arched over by a graceful Japanese bridge.

I went on a spree redoing the joint to my taste. I stocked it with cats, dogs, birds, tropical plants and a pool table. I hired a gardener, a cook, two maids and a butler. I was now prepared to undertake a brand-new role: Host.

It wasn’t hard enticing guests to come to my dinners and parties. After operating for ten years as a mooching bachelor, I was in a position at last to pay at least some interest on all the hospitality I had enjoyed. People I had known took immediate advantage of this, and so did a lot of people I had never met before. It was Open Season on Harpo.

There was never an empty guest room. There was never a moment of silence. Something was going on at any given time, around the clock-harp, piano, badminton, swimming, arguing, eating, bridge, backgammon, poker, pool, or any of several more intimate types of action.

For wayfarers from the East like Sam Behrman, Sam Harris, Moss Hart, Max Gordon, Alice Miller, Ruth Gordon, Dorothy Parker and the George Kaufmans, my house was the Beverly Hills Algonquin-always good for a night’s lodging, a hot meal, a spot of talk and a game of chance. For immigrants like Charlie Lederer, Charlie Brackett, Ben Hecht and the Gershwin brothers, it was a clearinghouse for news from the old country, New York City. For Burns, Benny, Jolson, Holtz, Cantor, Jessel and the Ritz Brothers, it was a combination Retreat for Retired Vaudevillians and Hillcrest Annex. To me it was a nifty hangout. It was the first hangout I ever had that I didn’t have to take a cab home from.

Before I knew what was happening, my joint changed from a nifty hangout to a snooty resort. I became a fad, a social lion, which was the last thing I had in mind. I detested snobs as much as I detested publicity hounds. Well, I wanted a house. I had asked for it.

Actually, the guest who would have been most welcome of all never showed up. Aleck was now the “Town Crier” on radio-sponsored by Cream of Wheat-and between broadcasts he rode the lecture circuit. When I wrote him to get his pratt out to Los Angeles, he replied with a carbon copy of his schedule for the first half of the following month. After listing two broadcasts and eight lectures in ten days, the schedule wound up with:

14th: Lecture, Toledo.

15th: Lecture, Detroit.

17th: Broadcast from Chicago.

18th: Death of Mr. Woollcott, as thousands cheer.

19th: Dancing in the streets; half-holidays in all the schools,

bank moratorium.

20th: Burial at sea.

Acting in Duck Soup, our last picture for Paramount, was the hardest job I ever did. It was the only time I can remember that I worried about turning in a bad performance. The trouble was not with the working hours, the script, the director, or the falls I had to take (I never used a stunt man or a double). The trouble was Adolf Hitler. His speeches were being rebroadcast in America. Somebody had a radio on the set, and twice we suspended shooting to listen to him scream. Hindenburg had died. Hitler was now absolute dictator of Germany. He threatened to scrap the Versailles Treaty and create a German navy and air force. He threatened to grab off Austria and part of Czechoslovakia. He threatened to go beyond the boycott and revoke the citizenship of all Jews.