Harpo Speaks! (45 page)

I never knew until then what the emotion of pure anger was like, how it felt to be sore enough to want to hit somebody in cold blood. A lot of people I knew were shocked that I was so shocked. Nothing would really come of the dictator’s threats, they said. He was all bluff and hot air. His act was nothing more than a bad imitation of that other comic, Mussolini.

I knew better. I had seen faces, those faces in Germany, that most other people had not seen. And now I remembered: I had been tipped off even earlier than that. It was Sam Harris, sweet, gentle Sam, who had opened my eyes to this evil thing festering in Germany, before I sailed for Hamburg in the fall of ‘33. Sam had been reading the news from there, every word of it in every paper he could get hold of, and he had come to a conclusion.

“Harpo,” he said, “that Hitler is not a very nice fellow.” It was the most vicious thing I had ever heard Sam say about another living person.

Things got quieter in my house of the silver whistle. I got firm and stopped inviting everybody who invited me to invite them. Open house was okay for holidays, but not seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day.

The peace was wonderful. It was wonderful to have some privacy again. But I didn’t expect it to last, and it didn’t. The peace was broken by the strangest young man to enter my life since the day Seymour Mintz came skittering on a bias down 93rd Street, looking for a new partner.

One evening during a small dinner party for seven or eight people, the butler told me I was wanted on the phone. He didn’t catch the gentleman’s name, he said, but it was apparently a matter of great urgency.

I picked up the phone and said, as I always do, “Yah?”

A voice I had never heard before, a raspy, nasal, mumbly voice that sounded like somebody playing an oboe under a blanket, said, “Harpo? I’m coming over.”

“Who the hell is this?”

“This is Oscar Levant, is who the hell this is. I’m coming over. Now.”

“Oscar who?”

“Levant, you musical illiterate.”

“Oh, yah, I’ve heard George and Ira speak of you. Well, good luck on your next concert.”

“I don’t play concerts. So how do I get to your place from here?”

“Look, Benson, whatever your name is. I’m sorry, but I have guests. We’re in the middle of dinner.”

“That’s all right. Don’t wait for me. I’ve eaten already.”

“Look-why don’t you call up the Gershwins?”

“That’s where I’m calling from. George and Ira are out on a heavy date playing Ping-pong and I’m here alone. So I’ll see you in five minutes.”

“Look-maybe tomorrow, huh? How about it? You free tomorrow? All three of you come over. Lunch, dinner, you name it. I told you-I have guests tonight, a party.”

There was a pause, then an anguished wail unwound out of the phone receiver: “Look, you son of a bitch! You can’t leave me here alone!”

I knew I wasn’t going to stop him. “All right, all right,” I said. “Come have a cup of coffee with us.”

Oscar was there in five minutes. He had a cup of coffee, and then decided to stay a while longer. He stayed for one year and one month.

I was too slow on the trigger and too soft in the heart. I knew more about Oscar than he knew I did. I’d been briefed about him by the Gershwins, and by the Kaufmans too. Oscar idolized George Gershwin. For years he had been tagging after him like a kid brother. He carried his music for him and turned the pages for him when he practiced, and for years Gershwin was the only composer Oscar himself would play. Back in New York, Ira and George had lived in a double penthouse on Riverside Drive. Oscar, without being invited, decided he should board with them. For ten months he didn’t miss a meal. Then one night that fall he jumped up from the table in the middle of dinner and said, “Hate to eat and run, but you’ll have to excuse me.” With that he bolted out of the penthouse and the Gershwins didn’t see him or hear from him until sometime in the middle of winter.

Not long afterward, the George Kaufmans acquired him. Oscar turned up at their Bucks County place-uninvited, of course-for a weekend. Late on Saturday night, he suddenly turned on Kaufman and sneered that he’d been insulted enough. He was leaving. He headed for the door. Then he made an about-face and came back into the room, taking off his coat. “I’m not going after all,” he said. George asked him why not. Oscar said, “I just remembered. I have no place to go.” He stayed for the rest of the week.

What can I say about Oscar Levant that hasn’t already been said, mainly by Oscar himself? For one year and one month he declared my house his house. For one year and one month he ate my food, played my piano, ran up my phone bill, burned cigarette holes in my landlady’s furniture, monopolized my record player and my coffeepot, gave his guests the run of the joint, insulted my guests, and never stopped complaining. He was an insomniac. He was an egomaniac. He was a leech and a lunatic-in short, a litchi nut.

But I loved the guy.

He honestly believed he was taking what was coming to him, and nothing more. This was not to be confused with generosity, which Oscar didn’t know how to accept. If anybody offered to help him out, his favorite reply was, “Do me a favor-don’t do me a favor.” But if it was he who asked the favor it was all right. Oscar was utterly unable to enjoy an equal relationship with anybody. It had to be one-sided, on his side, with the single exception of George Gershwin. Once I understood this and accepted it, I found Oscar to be one of the most rewarding men I had ever known. I lost a house, but I gained a friend.

My higher education, after a lapse of five years, was resumed. I took up learning things from Levant where I’d left off with Woollcott. The amount of knowledge Oscar carried in his head was fantastic. I never came up with a question he couldn’t answer. I never saw him stymied by any subject anybody ever brought up in his presence. And if anybody had the nerve to say he knew more than Oscar about music, psychiatry or baseball-well, he was in for a scorching blast of sarcasm, followed by an all-night solo discourse which would leave the challenger hanging on the ropes and feeling like a punch-drunk moron.

I had never been exposed to such a mind as Oscar’s, not even at the Algonquin Round Table. He had wit and talent to burn. Sometimes I think he literally did. When he fell into his periodic silences, brooding over his coffee and chain-smoking cigarettes, he might have been burning off excess talent, along with all the witticisms he’d never have time to make.

When Oscar wasn’t brooding he was doing everything at once. Like the time I came downstairs and saw him reading from a book on the piano rack while he was playing Bach and listening to a new recording of a Beethoven concerto. He would sing along with the Beethoven, then sing a couple of bars of Bach, then read a passage out loud from the book. He’d chuckle over what he had read, wince when he hit a clinker on the keyboard, and close his eyes in ecstasy over a lovely phrase on the record-all damn near simultaneously.

You’d think that here was a man lost to the rest of the world. But in the middle of this triple performance he’d say, without looking away from the book, “Harpo, why don’t you loathe me like everybody else? Don’t you like me?”

Other times I’d bust in when he was practicing and say, “Hey, Oscar! Here’s a buck. Play me some Chopin.”

Oscar would cut short the Bach or Rachmaninoff or Gershwin or whatever he was working on, and play one of my favorite Etudes or Nocturnes-all the way through, and beautifully. He never failed to do it for me. He never failed to take the dollar, either.

At sight-reading music he was a wizard, absolutely inhuman. One evening I had the Kapinsky Trio, a famous concert ensemble, in to play for my guests after dinner. Oscar had never done chamber music, but he couldn’t resist giving it a fling. After the first piece he took over at the piano. I thought: For once you’re going to make an ass of yourself, kiddo. Not Oscar. He sight-read through volumes of Mozart, Schubert and Brahms-music he had never read before, much of it music he had never heard before. His playing was concert perfect. Piano blended with violin and cello as if the three had performed together for years. Those of us in the room who knew Oscar were proud of him, and not altogether surprised. The members of the Kapinsky Trio were knocked for a loop. They’d never seen such a phenomenon.

The rarest gift Oscar had to offer was not his virtuosity, but something very few people were fortunate enough to receive-his smile. He didn’t give it often, but when he did, it was sunshine in Moscow. His mouth untwisted into a grin, his eyes squinched and twinkled, he ducked his head as sheepishly as a kid caught in some mischief, and in this startling flash of warmth you realized that Oscar, for all his sarcasm and sullen cracks, didn’t really mean to hurt anybody except himself.

There was little I could offer Oscar in a nonmaterial way, except to listen to him. But that may have been the most precious gift I could have given. It certainly wasn’t cheap.

Well, I did get to show him a little of Southern California. One of Oscar’s phobias was the outdoors. He regarded Nature as a gigantic plot to persecute Oscar Levant, and avoided the outdoors along with evil hoodoos like physical exercise, hats, the number thirteen, the words “lucky” and “death,” and any mention of his childhood.

Oscar had been in California for three months when I found out he had never seen the Pacific Ocean. He was in a strangely cheerful mood that day. When I suggested we go out to the shore and case the ocean he said okay. He supposed it was part of his education-like looking at the sky, which he also meant to do someday.

We drove to the Palisades and parked at the edge of the cliff, where the panorama of mountains, beach and sea was unspoiled by any signs of civilization. The water was a sparkling blue and calm. Catalina Island, forty miles away, stood out like a sharp, brown rock. The western horizon was distinct as a line drawn with a ruler. No boardinghouses, bathhouses, refreshment stands or boardwalks anywhere in sight. It was magnificent.

Oscar gave it a long look. He gave a whistle of disbelief. He said, “What do you know-a Gentile ocean!”

My favorite indoor sport was getting Oscar into a battle of wits with guys who could give him a run for his money. When I became resigned to the fact that Oscar was going to be there anyway, I built dinner parties around him, playing Woollcott’s old game of People-Mixing. One of the parties I remember best was the night of the Maxes. The guests were Max Gordon, Max Reinhardt and Maxie Rosenbloom.

When dinner was over we took our coffee to the library. I said to Max Gordon: “Max, Oscar says you’re the lousiest producer on Broadway,” and then sat back to watch the fireworks.

Those were the last words I spoke until five o’clock in the morning, when I said good night. One of the Maxes-Reinhardt-had left. The second Max, Rosenbloom, was fast asleep on the pool table. The third Max was still at it with Oscar. Levant was just warming up, but Gordon was fading fast. It was the damnedest cockfight you ever saw. They had fought over The American Drama, The American Novel, Schopenhauer, Dutch Schultz, Harry Hopkins, The War in China, Homosexuality Among Prize Fighters (they tried to wake up Maxie for a statement but couldn’t rouse him), Dizzy Dean’s fast ball, and-finally-The Anxieties, Compulsions and Hostilities of Oscar Levant. Max began to wobble in the middle of Compulsions, and from there on it was no contest.

One reason Oscar talked through so many nights was that he wouldn’t have gone to bed anyway, not before four-thirty or five in the morning. He had acute insomnia. It took at least three pills to put him to sleep. When he got up, early in the afternoon, he’d be so woozy from the sodium amytal that he’d start chain-drinking coffee immediately, which kept the vicious cycle going. After fifty cups of coffee, his average for a day, he’d be so hopped to the gills with caffein that he’d have to take the pills to knock himself out.

Technically Oscar didn’t live with me, since he never slept at my house. At this I firmly drew the line when he first decided to move in. All the facilities I had were his except the bedrooms. So he took an apartment in another part of Beverly Hills, where he slept, etc., and he bought a secondhand Ford to commute with.

On nights when I had no guests, and Oscar had nothing to go home to except his sleeping pills, he would hang around long after I had gone to bed, reading, brooding, and-when the loneliness got unbearable-making phone calls, regardless of the hour. In the morning when I got up he’d be gone. I could tell how late he’d stayed by how many cigarette butts were crammed into the ash trays and how warm the coffeepot was. But no matter how late it had been, he’d always show up at two-thirty the following afternoon, bright and surly.

Once, while I was puttering around before retiring, Oscar called up his ex-wife Barbara at her home on Long Island. Barbara had been remarried for some time. Her husband was Arthur Loew, of the famous movie-theatre family. When she recognized Oscar’s voice, she was furious. She asked him why he’d woken her up in the middle of the night. It was 4 A.M. in New York.

“Just wanted to ask you something,” said Oscar. “Well?” said Barbara. “What’s playing at Loew’s 86th Street tomorrow?” said Oscar.

Naturally, she hung up on him. Oscar turned to me and said, “I have a feeling she still loathes me, Harpo. Nothing definite, but a very strong feeling.”

An exceptional guest, always a lodger as well as a boarder at my house, was S.N. Behrman, who put in several stretches on the coast writing screenplays. I never knew two guys more unalike than Sam Behrman and Oscar Levant. Sam was precise, punctilious and thoughtful. He was a scholar and a connoisseur, a true cosmopolitan-type intellectual.

Sam never understood why two adults like Oscar and me could get so worked up over boys’ games like baseball and boxing. He gave up trying to reform us, but never gave up hoping that we’d outgrow such things. Sam always looked on the hopeful side of life. He was as up-trodden as Oscar was down.

Sam and Oscar had one thing in common, however. They were terrible drivers. One night the three of us went to a party at the home of the late Sonya Levien. I went with Oscar, in his beat-up Ford. Sam, who had to leave early, followed in his rented Cadillac. When the party broke up, long after Sam had left, Oscar went for his car. He came yip-yipping back to the house. His car had been stolen! I helped him look for it. He was right. The Ford was gone.