Harpo Speaks! (51 page)

When the papers hit the streets I was amazed at myself. I wasn’t the least bit upset. For a moment I even toyed with the idea of hiring a skywriter, and finishing the job in style.

Unknown

CHAPTER 21

Most Normal Man

in Hollywood

THE YEAR WAS 1940. The scene: dinner at the David O. Selznicks’. The guests: Rose and Ben Hecht, Dr. Sam Hirshfeld, Susan and myself. The conversation had turned to psychiatry. Psychoanalysis was the current fad among the movie colonists, and no party was complete without a discussion of Freud, Oedipus, hostility, penis envy, and comparative rates of Beverly Hills analysts.

Rose Hecht asked for silence. She had a pronouncement to make. She pointed across the table at me and said, “There sits the only normal man in Hollywood.”

The pronouncement was for the special benefit of Sam Hirshfeld. Obviously, Rose expected the doctor to say something like Hear! Hear! or, The only true words spoken tonight! This was not his reaction, however. Sam said, “That’s a pretty big statement, Rose. What evidence do you have to back it up?”

“Harpo,” she said, “is one of the few men I know who hasn’t spent an hour on the couch. He’s the only man I know who hasn’t even talked about being analyzed. He’s happily married. His son has reached the age of two without once being taken to a child psychologist. Harpo has no enemies. He’s never gone on a diet or taken a sleeping pill. He’s not money-mad or driven by ambition. He’s mature. He’s adjusted. He’s a breath of fresh air in a town full of neurotic exhibitionists and show-offs.”

The doctor thought for a while. Then he began to laugh. “I’m not going to confirm or deny any of your evidence,” he said. “But I’d like to tell a story about this `adjusted’ friend of ours, Rose. An incident that occurred last summer at Hillcrest …”

I knew the incident Sam had in mind, one I’d hoped he had forgotten. It was not one of my glorious moments. It happened one day when four of us were shooting a match-play round of golf-Joe Louis, the heavyweight champion; Lou Clayton, Jimmy Durante’s old partner; Sam, and myself. On a par-three hole my drive landed in a sand trap. In blasting out I overshot the green by a mile. I conceded the hole, picked up, and waited for the others by the next tee.

Joe, Lou and Sam were good, consistent players. The only consistent thing about my playing was its eccentricity. When I was on my game, I was very good. When I was off I was lousy. This day I was off. I looked to lose a few hundred bucks, so I figured I might as well play it for laughs.

Near the tee there was a short length of watering hose, connected to a spigot embedded in the ground, and a pile of fresh clippings of leaves and grass. Not much to work with, but enough to improvise a little gag. I ran the hose up my pants leg, then stuffed my pants with handfuls of the clippings. When I heard the other three guys approaching I turned the faucet on with env foot. They came upon me in the act of relieving myself-with a phenomenal, powerful stream laden with green hunks of vegetation.

“Hey, Doc!” I said. “Maybe I better have a urinalysis. Do you think there’s anything wrong with me?”

“Nothing a good psychiatrist couldn’t cure,” said Hirslifeld, who then broke up, along with Joe and Lou.

But if they thought the gag was funny then, they found it twice as funny the next day when they learned why I didn’t show up at the club for another round. The “leaves and grass” I had stuffed in my pants were fresh clippings of poison ivy.

“Only normal man in Hollywood?” asked the good doctor, as he finished the story at the dinner table.

Rose Hecht stuck to her theory about me. “Well at least the most normal man,” she said. “What happened on the golf course comes under the heading of `boys will be boys.’ What I was thinking of was a man in his important relationships-with the people he works with, with his wife, how he relates to strangers.”

At this point I looked at Susan and she looked at me and we laughed. Now it was our turn to tell a story, on ourselves.

The summer after we were married we went down to the B-Bar-H Ranch in Palm Springs for a second honeymoon. It was very hot in the Springs. Sensible people stayed away, and the town was just about deserted. I finally found a golf course open, and shot a few holes alone. Back in the clubhouse I met a guy, a retired Admiral, who was as much of a golf nut as me and who was also looking for a partner. We made a standing date to play together.

That night Susan and I sat around wondering where to look for some fun. We had come to the wrong place for a gay time. “I know what I’m going to do,” Susan said. “I’m going to dye your hair, Harp.”

“Well, okay,” I said. “but wait until I finish tomorrow’s round of golf.”

So I shot a round with the Admiral, with my hair still its natural brown. That night Susan went to work on it. It came out a flaming pink. The next day I was wearing a hat when I showed up on the golf course. Halfway through the round, while the Admiral was lining up a putt, I took off the hat. The old guy looked at me, made no comment, and sank his putt.

That night I had Susan go to work on me with a razor. The following day I took off my hat along about the eleventh hole. The left side of my head was still a luxuriant, flaming pink. The right side was shaved clean to the scalp. The Admiral made no comment.

On the fourth day the rest of my skull was shaved, except for a square pink patch over my left ear. On the fifth day the patch over my ear was dyed a shiny, jet black. The Admiral’s game was steady as ever, and golf was the only topic of our conversation.

On the sixth day I turned up with my hat pulled down over my ears. Under the hat my head was shaved completely, smooth as an uncracked egg. But my golf date never showed up. I called the joint where he was staying. The desk clerk said the Admiral had checked out that morning, a week ahead of time, refusing to leave a forwarding address.

I went home looking like a dehydrated Erich von Stroheim, and that was how the Most Normal Man spent his second honeymoon. I’m afraid we gave Rose Hecht a pretty hard time with her theory.

The truth was, marriage hadn’t changed me much at all. If anything it had brought out more and more of the Patsy Brannigan in me. Now I had a permanent claque to egg me on-a claque of one, Susan.

Dr. Sam Hirshfeld had become our family physician, and one of our best friends. I never knew a man who had more time and affection to give to other people, or more energy to give to his work-with enough left over to take on anybody, any time he could, at any game you wanted to name. This guy was half demon and half saint.

Years later, after Sam had passed away, Ben Hecht wrote: “His work as physician and surgeon was a small part of his activities. Through with his hospital rounds and his professional calls, Sam would dash off to some laboratory where he pursued the secrets of longevity and cancer cures. At midnight Sam would enter his home, stretch himself in his bed and read until dawn. His mind poked into all the comers of science and psychology, and mysteriously found time for poetry and novels.

“But Sam’s chief activity was his side line of good Samaritanism. His patients were always his friends. He got them jobs, nursed them out of drunks, picked out babies for childless couples to adopt, induced roues to marry girls they had made pregnant, restored the egos of defeated writers and suicidal wives.

“As I write of him, I see again his wide grin, his tense eyes full of eagerness and wisdom, his trim and tireless body. He was one of my few friends who could beat me at badminton and beach racing. If not for his eyes, he could have passed for a prize fighter……

A gang of us used to go to the fights, baseball games or hockey matches-whichever was in season-once a week, and Sam was our ringleader. Hockey was his special passion among sports. He never missed a match unless he had to be in surgery or with a patient who was confined to bed. Patients who were ambulatory he often brought along with him to the hockey game. One such was our mutual friend Gene Fowler, the writer.

Fowler was a big, congenial, convivial guy who didn’t believe in moderation in those days, particularly moderation in drinking. When he hit the bottle he stayed on a bat for weeks at a time. But Gene was also a wise man, wise enough to know that only the living got any enjoyment out of life. So when he felt a drunk coming on he placed himself in Sam’s custody, and stuck as close as he could to Sam until the urge passed. If he slipped, Sam would be handy to give him a hypo to ease him back on the wagon.

One night Hirshfeld, Fowler and I went to a hockey game. Fowler swore he had taken his last drink. He even bought four bags of popcorn before the game-to absorb his craving for alcohol, he said. Everybody except Sam was impressed by this. The doctor was hopeful, but noncommittal. “We shall see,” was his attitude.

By the end of the first period Gene, munching away at the popcorn, appeared to have lost the symptoms of his craving. He’d been close-mouthed and fidgety when he first got to the arena. Now he was cheerful and full of chatter. Sam was finally impressed. For the first time, he felt his patient was making some kind of progress.

In the middle of the final period, it became plain what kind of progress the patient was making. He was getting progressively drunker. Fowler was mysteriously but unmistakably plastered. Sam was baffled. Gene hadn’t once left his seat, and Sam had kept an eye on him the whole time.

The doctor bore in to investigate. Now that Gene had won the battle of the booze, he didn’t have to lie any more, and he happily made a full confession. Before the game started, he confessed, he had slipped into the men’s room and doused a quart of bourbon over his popcorn.

Going through the parking lot after the game was over, Gene was feeling ultragenial. He was very pleased with himself and with the world. We passed a guy who was having car trouble. Gene stopped, stuck his head under the guy’s hood, poked around, and yanked something loose. “Here,” he said. “Here’s your trouble, pal.” He handed the guy the carburetor and walked on, overflowing with the spirit of human kindness.

Gene Fowler once tried to teach me the art of drinking. I didn’t enjoy drinking, he said, simply because I didn’t know how to do it right. It was best to start with brandy. Brandy, taken properly, could keep you glowing without actually making you drunk. The secret was in drinking it slowly enough. You took a sip, then squeezed an ice cube in your hand. When the ice cube melted, it was time for another sip.

I gave it a conscientious try. I got the first gulp down all right, but before the ice cube had melted I got to thinking about the second gulp and dreading it so much that I had to go throw up.

There was something wrong with my chemistry. Alcohol and Harpo didn’t mix. This even applied to me as a bartender, when I entertained. Charlie Lederer once said that I could take a sealed fifth of rare old Scotch, uncork it, and pour it straight from the bottle-and by the time the liquor got in the glass the drink would be ruined.

For this reason I was never asked to join Fowler’s mob, whose members included John Decker, John Barrymore and W. C. Fields, and whose common bond was the kind that bourbon was bottled in.

John Decker was an artist who was unbelievably facile with brushes and oils. He used to paint in the styles of the old masters as a way of picking up eating money, like other artists knocked out magazine covers or portraits of society broads. Decker’s canvases weren’t cheap copies of old masters. He had a genius for reproducing the feeling, the lights and shadows and depths, of the originals.

I got to know Decker well when he painted a series of me and my brothers after the manner of Gainsborough, Franz Hals and Rembrandt. While I was posing for him as “Blue Boy” he told me he hadn’t seen his pal Jack Barrymore for a long time. Barrymore was in a serious decline. He was disintegrating physically and mentally, and he knew it. He was ashamed even to see his good friends and kept himself a voluntary captive of doctors and attendants.

I said, “You know, it might give the guy a shot in the arm if we got a gang together and took him out. We could have dinner at my house, then maybe go to the fights.” Decker thought it was a wonderful idea. The only thing was, if Jack came, his girl would have to come along too. “Fine,” said I. “We’ll make it Saturday night.” Decker checked with Barrymore’s girl friend. She said Saturday was fine with her-as long as her husband came along too. Why not? said I.

The next day Decker told me it was all set with Barrymore himself. “You don’t mind if Jack’s masseur comes along too, do you?” he said. Of course I didn’t mind. I knew that the rub man’s main job was to control Barrymore’s ration of drinks. The boss was allowed a small glass of watered vermouth every two hours.

One thing Decker warned me about. We should all drink freely in front of Barrymore. If we held back, or hid the bottles, he’d suspect we were treating him like a child, and-like a child-he’d get belligerent. I hired a bartender for Saturday. I told Susan that, all things considered, it might be a swell time for her to take her mother out to dinner and a show.

Everybody arrived on time: Barrymore, his girl friend, the girl friend’s husband, his rub man, the rub man’s wife, Decker, Fowler, and three or four guys I didn’t know, the type which there was only one word for-“cronies.” The Great Man strode into the house at the head of his entourage. He looked marvelous, lean and graceful as a college athlete. He strode through the joint delivering an eloquent and expert tribute to each of the paintings on the walls.

No matter where Barrymore stood, you had the illusion that he was under a spotlight. He was every inch, ounce and fiber a masterful actor. He was also a masterful magician. By the time we sat down to eat he was fried. He had stolen two drinks from me alone, before I’d had a sip of either one. I was under his spell and didn’t know what had happened until it was too late.

During dinner I noticed that he was drenched with sweat. His shirt and jacket were soaked through, and sweat was streaming down his face. I told him to go ahead and take his coat off, if he was too warm. When he found my eyes he gave me the piercing, pained look of a wounded eagle. “My dear Marx,” he said. “To perspire is a gift of Providence. It saves me the trouble of pissing.”