Harpo Speaks! (50 page)

There were only six or eight people at the reception, which was informal. I got on line to pay my respects. When it came my turn I decided I shouldn’t bow, not being an English subject. I gave the King my hand. The King, with a straight face, gave me his leg. It was an old switch I’d pulled many times in my act, but it was never more perfectly executed. This broke up His Majesty’s dignity, and mine too. He loved our routines, and knew every one of them, and we had a great time just horsing around.

He certainly didn’t act like a guy in mourning, or like he was awed by his new responsibilities. I’d never seen him so outgoing, so bouncy and full of the devil. Well, he had plenty to celebrate. It wasn’t every day that an unemployed polo player became the King of England.

Except for that brief visit with Edward, I was miserable in London. It had been the longest, loneliest summer I had ever spent. Life had a big empty hole in it, and it wouldn’t be filled until I saw Susan and heard her voice.

It was a long time coming, even for a slow decider. I made the decision. I was going home as fast as I could. I was going to marry Susan as fast as I could, and we would never he apart again. I knew now I wouldn’t be able to survive another separation.

I stuck a change of socks and a toothbrush in my raincoat pocket, left my trunk behind to follow by slow freight, and hopped aboard a transatlantic plane.

I tried calling Susan from Floyd Bennett Field, New York, and again from Chicago, but got no answer at her apartment either time. I was sure she’d be waiting for me at the L.A. airport, since I’d wired Gummo when I was due in. She wasn’t there. I tried her number. No answer.

When the cab pulled up at Schenck’s place, I had a second thought and told the driver to continue on to Beverly Hills. So my homecoming wouldn’t be a total letdown, I’d go have a look at my new house before I did anything else. I didn’t recognize it when I got there. The plantings out front were lovely, but nothing like what I’d visualized from the landscaper’s plans. The columns on the house were painted white. I distinctly remembered I had ordered them to be green.

Then I noticed a station wagon in the driveway, full of equipment. My God, I thought, are they still working on the joint? The job was supposed to have been finished three weeks ago.

I went inside. A guy was hanging drapes and some dame wearing a smock, tennis shoes and a baseball cap was supervising him. The dame turned around. It was Susan.

When we came out of the clinch and back down to earth I took my first good look around. The place had been remodeled, decorated and furnished, all right, but not according to any plans I’d ever known about. The woman’s touch-a woman’s touch-was everywhere. The total effect was gorgeous, but it was also totally unlike any place I could imagine calling mine.

“I made a couple of changes, here and there,” Susan said. For once she avoided looking at me directly, choosing to look at her tennis shoes instead.

“So I see,” I said. I was still in a state of shock.

“I knew you wouldn’t mind,” she said, and laughed nervously. “I’ve been here since six this morning. I was determined to have everything ready before you arrived. Well, I almost made it. Everything’s done except getting these drapes up. You can move in tonight.”

Then she took a deep breath and said, “Harpo, when can I move in?”

“Monday,” I said, for no good reason. I had lost all track of time somewhere between London and Los Angeles. When we unclinched the second time I said, “What’s today, honey?” and she told me it was Thursday, the 24th of September. I had given myself three days of grace.

When Sunday came I was still in a state of shock. I tried to calm myself by practicing, but I couldn’t even manage to finish a chorus of “Annie Laurie.” I took a crack at “Love Me and the World Is Mine” and drew a blank after the first two bars. Forgot completely how it went.

I hadn’t moved into the new place. If I’d moved without throwing a party, people would have suspected that something was up, and I was in no condition to throw a party. So I stayed on at Joe Schenck’s making like it was business as usual, old Harpo at the old stand, in there selling ‘em a load of clams.

Sunday afternoon Susan and I had a secret strategy conference in a diner on Santa Monica Boulevard. I said I would pick her up at her apartment at nine o’clock in the morning. If her mother was around, Susan would tell her we were going to make the rounds of the tropical fish dealers. I had to restock my aquarium after being away so long.

“Where will we go?” said Susan. “City Hall?”

“No, absolutely not,” I said. “Every clerk there is a spy for some columnist. Before the ink got dry on our license, Louella and Hedda would be typing out the story. What we do is get in the car and keep driving until we get to a place where nobody wants to know anything about us except that we’re over twenty-one and have two bucks on us.”

The game was becoming kind of fun. ‘Took me back to my days as a Secret Agent. While I paid the guy in the diner I said, “Sure was nice seeing you again, kid,” and Susan-showing a lot of talent for this kind of work herself-said, “Sure was nice, Fred. Don’t forget to remember me to the gang back in Azusa, all except Louella.”

“Yah,” I said. “Never could stand Louella, could you?”

When I got home I was proud of myself. I was proudest of the fact that I wasn’t getting cold feet.

Joe buzzed me on the house phone and asked if I wouldn’t like to join him for dinner and maybe a little poker afterwards. “Love to,” I said. So what did you know? I was going to have a bachelor party!

I didn’t eat much dinner, but I had two brandies afterwards, and sailed into the card game feeling lucky enough to take on Swope, Harry Sinclair and Nick the Greek, dealer’s choice, stakes unlimited. When the brandy wore off I found I wasn’t doing so well. I made a mental note to pull out of the game at midnight no matter how I stood. At midnight I was nearly even again. I pushed the deadline ahead to one o’clock. It was not a very lively game. Out of courtesy to me, nobody bet any big money. This wasn’t right. I was cramping their style. I should have been in bed long ago. But I couldn’t make the effort to get up and leave the table. At two o’clock I was still in the game. Three o’clock. Four. Paralysis was setting in, with all the symptoms of what I thought I’d licked. Cold feet.

The game broke up at six o’clock. When the others left Joe said, “How about a steam? A nice steam’ll untie the knots and you’ll sleep like a baby all day.”

“Sounds great,” I said.

Sitting in the steam cabinet I concocted some brilliant, logical excuses for not going through with the day’s plans. I had nothing to wear. All my good clothes were either at the cleaner’s or in the trunk which hadn’t arrived from England. I wouldn’t feel right about getting married without Zep, Gummo, Groucho or Chico being the best man. It wasn’t fair to Susan to get married without somebody from her family being there. We should play it smart-announce our engagement, let the publicity die down, then get married in style. We had been engaged a total of three days. Who could really be sure how long a marriage based on a threeday engagement would last? We owed it to ourselves to wait.

It was nearly seven, and daylight, when I got to bed.

Three hours later I was awakened by somebody banging on the window. I staggered up to see who it was. It was Susan. She was wearing a wide-brimmed picture hat, pulled down over her eyes, dark glasses, a 1930-style beige suit and “sensible” flat brown shoes, and she had blanked out her features with face powder.

“Do you think anybody will recognize me?” she said. I said that I, for one, sure as hell didn’t. I was ordered to hurry and get dressed. She said she’d wait in the car.

I did as she ordered. I grabbed the first things I could find, in my spare wardrobe trunk, and put them on. I looked at myself in the mirror. I was wearing a squashed fedora, bright red tie, striped shirt dickey, swallow-tail coat, khaki pants, and dark glasses. “The jig,” I said to whoever that poor clown was in the mirror, “is up.”

Susan was behind the wheel, with the motor idling. “South,” I said. “Drive south.” She headed south and I fell asleep.

Mrs. Adolph Arthur Harpo Marx!

When I woke up the car was stopped. “Where are we?” I said. “Santa Ana,” said Susan. “It looks like a nice, safe place. Thirty-one and six-tenths miles from L.A.”

We got our license from the city clerk-no waiting, no impertinent questions asked. I put myself down as “Adolph Marx,” as an added precaution. Then off we went, cruising through town, going down the list of justices of the peace the clerk had given us. The first one we approached took one look at us and our weird getups and said he didn’t know what the joke was-probably an initiation stunt from some college-but he wanted no part of it. The next one we located said to come back when we sobered up, and slammed the door in our faces.

The third guy was wearing a Landon button, and we walked out of his place before any words were exchanged.

We worked our way to the outskirts of town and to the bottom of the list before we found a justice who at least had the decency to ask to see our marriage license. He looked it over carefully and looked us over carefully. “Well,” he said, “there’s no law says how you have to dress up to get married. Okay, I’ll oblige you.”

He asked if we’d brought our own witnesses for the ceremony. When we told him we hadn’t, he said, “Come on next door to the firehouse. We’ll dig up a couple for you.”

We went next door to the firehouse.

A fireman was snoozing on a cot beside the hose car. The J.P. shook him awake and told him to call up his wife and tell her to come on over to be the matron of honor. “Tell her not to expect anything extra, if you know what I mean,” he said. “But at least she can have a good cry for herself.”

The fireman put on a tie. The fireman’s wife arrived, wearing a hat and carrying a bunch of chrysanthemums. When she saw us her mouth dropped open and she nearly dropped the flowers. “Them?” she said, and the J.P. said, “Them.” It was all extremely uncomfortable.

But when they found out I’d forgotten to bring a ring, the awkward situation turned into a friendly little party. A bridegroom who forgot the ring could only be a harmless, overgrown kid, head over heels in love. The matron of honor lent us her ring.

Due to there being no fires on the outskirts of Santa Ana around noon on the 28th of September, 1936, the ceremony went off without an interruption. Adolph Marx and Susan Fleming were pronounced man and wife, upstairs in the firehouse. The fireman’s wife cried. The J.P. kissed the bride. The fireman kissed the bride. I kissed the bride.

My punishment for squandering forty-two years as a loony lone wolf had caught up with me. As I had told Gummo, it was a serious rap. I got the maximum. Life. Sweet, sweet sentence!

We were about to drive away when the J.P. came running over to the car. “Say, Mr. Marx,” he said. “Mind if I ask you a personal question? I’ve been thinking about your name, and it kind of rings a bell with me.”

I tried to make a getaway, but I had the car in the wrong gear and it stalled. This didn’t discourage the justice. He caught up with us and said, “Marx, Marx, Marx-aren’t you related to the folks that run the dry-goods store over in Orange?”

“Yah,” I said. “Distantly.” Susan blew him a kiss and we headed for home.

We kept our secret for over a month, from everybody except Susan’s mother. I was still living at Joe Schenck’s address, officially, and Susan at her apartment. Unofficially we lived in our house in Beverly Hills. Daytimes Susan spent helping me put the joint in shape, which was very generous of her. Nighttimes we locked ourselves in and kept the lights turned out, which was not altogether a hardship.

After a while the cloak-and-dagger game began to bore us. We were too good at it. Nobody suspected. Mainly, we were dying to tell our news to the world. The question was when? I got an idea. We’d pick a time when there’d be a big enough news event to crowd us into the back of the paper-like the national election, November 3.

To make the picture perfect, Alice Duer Miller arrived on the coast. The Irving Berlins had turned their place over to her and she decided to give a small dinner party on Election Night. When she called to invite me she said, “I do hope your charming young friend Miss Fleming will be free to come too,” and I said I thought there was a pretty good chance she’d be free.

I hadn’t looked forward to the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November so eagerly since the last time I collected wood for the Tammany bonfire on 93rd Street. I also had a financial interest at stake. Thanks to the Literary Digest poll, which had Alf Landon sweeping the country, it was possible to get a bet down on Roosevelt. I scraped together all my loose cash and bet the bundle on F.D.R., as a wedding present for Susan.

Returns were already coming in on the radio when we got to Alice’s. I didn’t want to upstage the next President of the United States, so I took Charlie Lederer aside and told him about us right away. Telling Charlie, I knew, was like telling the Associated Press. But as soon as I told him, he slunk away as if I’d touted him onto Dr. Townsend for President.

Soon after we finished dinner it was announced that the Democrats were in by a landslide. Alice rang the hostess’ bell and out came the champagne. We filled our glasses. Charlie Lederer rose to propose a toast. We all prepared to drink to Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

But Charlie said, “I give you the bride and bridegroom, Mr. and Mrs. Harpo Marx.” Nobody believed it. I had come prepared. I took out the marriage certificate and handed it around the table. Out came more champagne. Instantaneously, the party turned into a good old-fashioned Manhattan bash. The way they carried on you’d have thought it was me, not Roosevelt, who’d just carried every state except Maine and Vermont.

I slipped away to see what had happened to Lederer, who had disappeared. I found him on the telephone, reading from some notes. He was phoning the story to one of the Los Angeles morning papers.

The L.A. paper double-crossed me. They sat on our story until their Election Final was out. Then they slapped us across the front page in a banner headline (pictures on Page Three), and put out an extra edition to carry the story.