Harpo Speaks! (47 page)

I didn’t. I shook my head.

“It’s just as well. When I was introduced to you, I was so shocked I could hardly speak. You looked like a wild man. Your hair stuck out in bushes from under your hat. You gawked at me like you were starving and I was a lamb chop. Before you even got my name straight you asked me for a date. I was a kid of twenty and a starry-eyed fan, and I was scared enough of you in the first place. But to find out that the great Harpo Marx, who was so sweet and appealing on the stage, was in real life a wicked old fiend! I think the only words I spoke to you were `How do you do, sir?’ and `Oh, no, sir!’ “

“Are you still scared of me?”

“Try me.”

I gave her my evilest leer. She shook her head solemnly. I tried a depraved Gookie. She laughed. “Guess I’ve lost it,” I said. “No longer wicked.”

“I’m no longer twenty,” she said.

But she didn’t look much over twenty, and now, as I looked at her, something stirred in my memory. The scene of five years ago began to take shape-the lights of the marquee, the theatre crowd milling around during the intermission, and emerging out of the crowd the glowing figure of this little enchantress.

“Excuse me,” I said, trying to put the whole picture together. “When Mrs. Goldwyn introduced us tonight I didn’t get your last name. All I caught was `Susan.’ I’m awful on names.”

“I know,” she said. “You call everybody Benson, don’t you?” This girl certainly had the hook on me. She must have had more scouts than Notre Dame.

Then she said, “Fleming. My name is Susan Fleming.”

Fleming!

I made a face, this time unconsciously, and she said, “What’s so funny about a name like that? What have you got against Fleming?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I recommend it highly. Everybody should flem at least once a year.”

It was true I had nothing against her name. It was also true that “Fleming” had a very special meaning to me. I had hardly known Susan long enough to tell her what it was. So I vamped and faked until the subject was changed, hoping she’d forget about my strange reaction.

I had known many women in my life, in varying degrees of intimacy, but there had been only one I’d ever felt serious enough about to want to marry. She was named Fleming.

When I first came to Hollywood, I had met an extraordinary girl named June Fleming. We went steady for nearly four months. June was an active, independent gal. She was a crackerjack tennis player, and she flew her own airplane-a real competitor and a hell of a lot of fun to be with. I decided I wanted to be with her for the rest of my life.

We had a date for a Saturday night, which was my deadline for proposing to her. On Friday, June crashed into a mountain flying back from Palm Springs and was killed.

Susan Fleming.

So what about this one? She was the first girl I’d met in a long time that I wanted to keep on seeing for a long time. But I wondered if the name might be a bad omen.

It was tough to beat down the temptation to ask Susan for a date. After dinner I found out she was no mere starlet. In her newest picture, Million Dollar Legs, she was doing the lead-and boy, was she equipped for the title role! I also found out that her sitting next to me was not the Goldwyns’ idea, but her own.

Still, I resisted. Whether I was a jinx to Flemings or they were to me didn’t matter. I couldn’t take a second chance. I had to be sensible. We said good night, and that was that.

That, however, was not that, not at all. Two mornings later Susan Fleming called me up. She was very angry. Her voice sizzled and crackled, and I was afraid sparks might shoot out of the telephone and burn my ear. “Mister Marx,” she said. “I take back everything I said to you at the Goldwyns’. You are one of them. You’re nothing but a publicity-crazy, ambitious, big-headed Beverly Hills wolf.”

She sizzled and crackled on, with more unladylike variations of the same theme. She sputtered out and I got a chance to get in my first word, which was: “Yah?”

That was all I got in. She was off again. Who was I kidding? What a dope she’d been to fall for my line! A man who didn’t put on airs? A lover of the simple life? “Phooey!” she said. “A fraud! I know all about you and your friend Winchell. I know the whole story of how you had to dress him up in a costume to sneak him into Cocoanuts when the Shuberts had him on their blacklist.”

“Yah?” I said, and she said, “Yah! Don’t try to play innocent. Don’t tell me you didn’t read his column this morning. You probably have it pasted in your scrapbook already. Well, I want to serve you notice here and now, Mister Marx, that I will not stand for being used as an excuse to get your stupid name in the paper.

I laid the phone receiver down gently, and went to get the papers from the breakfast table. When I came back she was still squawk-squawking. I found the item in Walter Winchell’s column: “West Coast spies report Harpo Marx, Hollywood’s most reluctant bridegroom, huddling and cuddling with actress Susan Fleming, the cutie with the Million Dollar Legs. Weakening mebbe, Harpo? …”

I felt like jumping up and down and yelling whoopee! Instead, I kept yelling “Miss Fleming!” until she stopped yapping. Then I said, “Miss Fleming, I must ask you to get off the wire. I have to call my lawyer right away, or you might be in trouble.”

“Trouble? Me?”

“Trouble. You. I have advised my attorney to bring suit against you and your press agent for invasion of privacy.”

“My what?” she said. “I’d starve before I stooped to hiring a press agent!”

That did it. All resistance, good sense and superstition flew out the window. I didn’t give a damn what any columnist wrote. I didn’t care if we hit the front pages. I was going to see my second Fleming again.

“Tell you what’s the best idea,” I said. “Let’s settle out of court. How about if I pick you up at seven tonight and we find some quiet place to eat?”

She thought for a moment, then said, “How formal shall I be? What kind of a `quiet place’ do you have in mind?”

“I have in mind a nice little spot out in Malibu.”

“Your beach house?”

“Well, it happens to be a short walk from there, now that I think of it.”

“I was right the first time. You’re not a bum. You’re still a fiend.”

“Seven o’clock?”

“Seven o’clock. You don’t mind if Mother comes along?”

“No-that’s swell. I’ll bring Jimmy Fidler and that’ll make four for bridge.”

“You still haven’t told me how formal.”

“I’ll be wearing a black tie.”

“Oh, goody me. I get to dress up twice in one week. Seven o’clock?”

“Seven o’clock.”

When I arrived at Susan’s apartment I was wearing a black tie. I was also wearing a bushy black wig, a derby, striped trousers, cutaway coat, a sweatshirt, ballet slippers (which I always wore when I performed, so I could feel the harp pedals), and one black sock. The other sock was my tie.

Susan met me at the door. She was dressed fit to kill, in a turquoise evening gown. I threw her a Gookie. She smiled pleasantly and said, “You can tell a New Yorker anywhere by the cut of his clothes. Isn’t it disgusting the things men wear in public out here? Come on in-Mother’s dying to meet you.”

Mrs. Fleming said she was thrilled to meet somebody she’d admired so much for so many years. She didn’t bat an eye over my costume either. She gave me a warm smile and then excused herself. She said that Susan and I had a big night ahead of us and she didn’t want to deprive us of one minute of our fun.

The two of us had dinner at a place out on the coast highway where they knew me well enough not to be surprised when I showed up in disguise. After we’d eaten I said we might as well drop in at my beach house, it being so near by. Susan said, “Oh, goody me! I’ve always wanted to see a Malibu love-nest. I’ve read so much about them in the papers.”

We took off our shoes and walked down the beach. Susan clutched the hem of her evening gown to keep it from dragging in the sand. She held her dress higher than she really needed to and walked with a swing and a lilt, singing to herself, and oh, my God, it was the loveliest sight I had ever seen! And oh, my God, didn’t she know it, too.

I unlocked the beach house, let her in, and switched on the light. She stopped singing. “Well,” she said. “Bachelor hall.”

“Yah,” I said. “Sorry the tiger-skin rug is out at the cleaner’s.”

She cased the joint inch by inch. She inspected the card tables, which were littered with dirty beer glasses, coffee mugs, ash trays jammed with cigar butts, score sheets and pencil stubs. She appraised the bamboo furniture, piece by piece. She went into the kitchen. She examined the mess in the sink. She took inventory of the cupboard: half a can of coffee with no lid, two cracked coffee mugs, a set of fake buck-teeth, a pile of sugar cubes from various restaurants, a box of dog biscuits, a pair of tennis shoes, a jelly glass full of pennies, a toothbrush and a bagel hung on a hook, and three racks of poker chips. She took inventory of the refrigerator: eight bottles of Vichy water, two bottles of beer, some tubes of oil paints, an empty, unwashed milk bottle, a bottle of hair oil, a jar of peanut butter and a jar of cold cream, half a dozen badminton birds, one egg, one green orange, one black avocado, and in the compartment labeled EXTRA COLD, one homesick Russian karakul hat.

She said nothing, just kept inspecting. When she went to case the bedroom I grabbed a broom and did a fast job on the living-room floor. It was covered with sand, with enough bare footprints on it to make a dandy set for Robinson Crusoe. After I’d swept the pile of sand into the fireplace, Susan laughed. She’d been watching me from the bedroom door. She was in her stocking feet, still holding up the hem of her evening gown.

“I suppose,” she said, “you think I’m going to say, `What this place needs is a woman’s touch.’ Uh-uh. I love it the way it is. I’m also supposed to push up my sleeves and tie on an old shirt of yours for an apron and pitch in and do the dishes and dust and tidy up. Right? Uh-uh. I’m going to sit right here and watch you while you put on a pot of coffee and build a fire.”

She sat at one of the card tables, shoved the junk to one side, put her shoes on the table, plunked down her elbows, rested her chin on her hands, and gave me that I-dare-you, teasing look of hers. When she did that she could have melted me through an asbestos wall.

I put on a pot of coffee. I got a load of driftwood from under the deck, threw it in the fireplace, and lit it. While I waited in the kitchen for the coffee to get done I called to Susan, “Mind if I take off a few things and get comfy?”

“Mind?” she called back. “I’ve got my shoes handy and I know which way the highway is. Why should I mind?”

So I took off a few things-the derby, the wig, and the cutaway coat. I untied my tie and put it back on my foot, where it belonged. I brought out two mugs of coffee, set them on the card table, took her shoes off the table and set them on the floor.

I sat down, facing her. “Okay, honey,” I said, “what’ll we play first? Gin?”

“Never mind what first,” she said. “Exactly what do you have in mind to play second?” I gave her a Groucho eyebrow-waggle, implying I had all kinds of naughty games in mind. Susan said, “You, Mr. Marx, are what my mother calls ‘a speedy fellow: Do you always work this fast the first time you take a young lady out?”

I had to laugh.

“Me-speedy?” I said. “You’ve got me confused with my brother Chico. He’s the speedy one in the family. I’m the slow worker. Not slow and steady, just slow. When we were kids, I never had a girl unless Chico got one for me and we double-dated. Then, all I could think of to talk about to my date was my meerschaum pipe, and how it took me four months at least to turn it from white to brown. While I was talking about my pipe, Chico would make some pretty good time with his girl. Then, while I kept on talking about that damn pipe, Chico would make some pretty good time with my girl too. By the time I was ready it would be about three hours too late and I’d put on my derby hat, rub up my sty, and go home.

“I’m so speedy,” I said, “that I have to set an alarm clock to catch a Leap Year.”

Susan didn’t laugh. She said, “Were you lonely when you were young?”

“Well, I was a lone wolf, never had a lot of friends. But I liked it being alone.”

“What about now? Do you still like being alone?”

“Tell you the truth, I’ve forgotten what it’s like. You ought to hang around my joint a while. I couldn’t be alone if I wanted to be.”

She looked me square in the eye. “No,” she said. “You know what I mean. I mean not being married, not having a family. Is that the way you like it?”

I shrugged off her question. The conversation was getting uncomfortable. But she wasn’t to be shrugged off. She asked me again. I said, “Yes, that’s the way I like it.”

“Haven’t you ever met anybody you wanted to marry?” she said. When she said that it was like the fire went out and the room was as cold as the ocean. I got up to take the cups back to the kitchen and get my coat. I said, “Do you always talk about getting married the first time you go out with a guy, for Christ’s sake?”

“Okay, okay!” she said. “Forget I said it. I’ve got my answer anyway. Shall we go now?”

“Yah,” I said. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

When I took her home she invited me in for a real cup of coffee, but I turned her down, and we said good night by the door. We were both a little depressed. We’d started out the evening like two balls of fire, then wound up a couple of clinkers. “Guess I wouldn’t have made Chico’s list,” said Susan, and I said, “Guess not.” She squeezed my hand and I brushed her cheek with a kiss, and I ran down the steps to the car thinking, Well, that’s the end of the second Fleming.

The end? I wasn’t kidding myself a bit. By the time I got home I was already wondering what her name would sound like if I changed it slightly, and I decided it wouldn’t sound bad at all.

Susan Fleming Marx?

I didn’t see Susan for quite a while after our first date. She was busy on a new picture, and I didn’t want to bother her until she’d finished shooting. The real reason, of course, was that I was ashamed of the way I’d behaved that night in the beach house. There I was alone with the most appealing gal I’d ever met, loving every minute of it-and when she happened to utter the word “marry” I’d got cold feet.