Harpo Speaks! (52 page)

After the fights we wound up having coffee and nightcaps in a crummy jukebox joint off Hollywood Boulevard, a place that had sawdust on the floor for atmosphere and therefore charged double for everything. Decker and Fowler said good night and left the party. The girl friend and her husband followed them. As host I felt it was my duty to stick it out to the end, along with the rub man and the cronies. It was two in the morning. Barrymore was trying to make time with the waitress, a blondine dame of about fifty with eyes too close together and teeth too far apart.

Finally I had enough, host or no host. When Barrymore pulled out his handkerchief, the piece of napkin the waitress had written her telephone number on fell out of his pocket. The last time I saw John Barrymore alive he was down on his hands and knees, groveling on the floor, weeping and snuffling, looking through the sawdust for a juke-joint waitress’s phone number.

The passing of an ordinary man is sad. The passing of a great man is tragic, and doubly tragic when the greatness passes before the man does.

The mob that hung out in the Hillcrest Club was more my speed. A hunch of us had lunch there so regularly that we organized ourselves into a Round Table.

Members of the Hillcrest Round Table included Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, George Jessel, Jack Benny, George Burns, Lou Holtz, Milton Berle, Danny Thomas, Danny Kaye, and four or five Marx Brothers. The doubtful Marx Brother was Chico. Chico turned up only once in a while, and never for very long, depending on how his business was going. Chico’s business at the time was the daily pinochle game at the Friars Club. As of this writing, some twenty years later, it still is.

I’ve often been asked to compare the two Round Tables, the Algonquin and the Hillcrest, since I’m the only guy lucky enough to have belonged to both. Actually, there’s no fair comparison to be made. They were different in every respect.

At the Algonquin anybody, male or female, who dropped by and was accepted into the conversation “belonged” to the Round Table. Contrary to legend, the talk at the Algonquin was not one continuous olio of sparkling wit. There were long stretches of serious talk and literary shop talk, and when the Algonquinites told jokes or made up limericks they weren’t competing for laughs. It was their way of relaxing.

At the Hillcrest we had a fixed membership. It was strictly stag. The table was in the Men’s Grill of the club, where no female dared set foot. If any dame had tried to invade our sacred territory she would never have returned. The language at the Hillcrest Round Table was seldom fit for mixed company.

There was little conversation, as such. It was a wide-open competition to see who could get the most laughs, a running game of “Can You Top This?” It was never dull. We had among us three of the funniest men of our time, George Burns, George Jessel and Groucho Marx. And it was among us, where no holds were barred, that they were their funniest.

For my dough George Burns was-and is-one of the truly great wits of America. Whenever George started rummaging in his trunk of vaudeville souvenirs, the competition all sat back to listen. Offstage, he didn’t talk in gags. George was always original. He could tell the same story a dozen times without seeming to repeat himself. He had a prodigious memory for people, and he revived names and faces that everybody else has long forgotten.

Above all, he had the gift of instant satire. Yet George was a guy who didn’t know the meaning of the word “malice.” He’s never been an “insulting” comic. When he tells a story on you, you love it. I ought to know. I’ve been one of his favorite subjects for twenty-five years.

The virtuoso showman of the Hillcrest Round Table was George Jessel. Jessel was “on” from the minute he stepped into the Grill, yelping something like, “What do you think I just heard on the radio! Somebody shot the President! Why would anybody want to shoot a nice man like McKinley?” He wasn’t “off” until he’d strung together a three-hour monologue of jokes, take-offs, folk tales, reminiscences, blackouts and dialect bits, all equally hilarious.

With his humor, anything goes. But socially Jessel is a stickler for what is correct and proper. He has refused, all through the years, to call the Marx Brothers by our stage nicknames. To him Chico is still “Leonard,” Groucho is “Julius,” Gummo is “Milton,” Zeppo is “Herbert,” and I am either “Adolph” or “Arthur.”

When Jessel launched into one of his monologues, even his friend Julius kept quiet. Otherwise Groucho was the Round Table’s heckler-at-large. He “left-jabbed” us to death in his sneaky, soft voice, with his cracks and asides. No punch line was safe from Groucho’s counterpunch. No man, at the Round Table or elsewhere, ever dared to slug it out with Groucho.

It’s a pity that some of the classic meetings of the Hillcrest Round Table couldn’t have been recorded for posterity. One day we hid a microphone in the matzohs before Jessel made his entrance. Unfortunately, George discovered it before he got wound up, and he clammed up. Yet, I suppose if any of our sessions had been recorded they’d still be lost. They would have suffered too much in the translation into printable English.

Late one Friday afternoon five of us were sitting at the Round Table, Burns, Jessel, Lou Holtz, Zeppo and myself. We weren’t trying to top each other for laughs. We were trying to see if anyone could make Lou Holtz laugh at all. Lou’s wife was divorcing him. He had just been notified of the settlement she insisted on. The way her lawyer talked, he was being stripped of every worldly possession.

As a result, his ulcer was kicking up something fierce. Every time he thought of the settlement he got another pang, and had to take a swig of some thick white medicine he kept in a bottle in his pocket. We hoked it up like a pack of clowns, but Lou didn’t crack a smile. He kept thinking about that settlement and groaning and swilling down the white stuff.

Zep had an idea. “You know what you need, Lou?” he said. “A weekend in Palm Springs, where it’s warm and dry. Lie around in the sun. Swim. Play a few holes of golf. Greatest tonic in the world.”

Lou said he was ready to try anything short of the gas pipe. Zeppo made it sound so good that we decided we should all take off for the desert, then and there. I called Susan and told her I’d be home a little late-like two days-since I had to go on a mission of mercy with a sick friend.

We had an early dinner at the Round Table. When we were through I said, “There’s room for all of us in my car. I’ll drive. I know a short cut.”

Burns looked apprehensive, but he piled gamely into the car with the others. I announced we’d be at the Springs well before midnight, what with the short cut, and off we went, just as darkness came on. Driving conditions weren’t exactly perfect. The car was full of loud talk and cigar smoke. The windows steamed over so badly that I had to drive with one hand, hunched over the wheel, while I kept wiping a peephole on the windshield.

Still, time seemed to go pretty fast. I didn’t realize how fast until Lou Holtz wailed from the back seat, “Harpo! Aren’t we there yet? It’s one o’clock in the morning and I’m running out of medicine and I’m freezing!” Like the rest of us, he was wearing golf slacks and a short-sleeved sports shirt.

I reminded Lou that nights got chilly in the desert, but it was a dry cold, good for you. I explained that I hadn’t expected the roads to be in such bad shape. Must have been tearing them up for repairs. But cheer up-we’d be in Palm Springs any minute now.

Half an hour later I wasn’t so sure myself. I stopped the car. “Boys,” I said, “I think we’re lost.” “What makes you think we’re lost?” said George Burns, and I said, “Because it’s snowing.”

I drove on, creeping through the snowstorm. At last we hit the lights of a town. It wasn’t Palm Springs. It was Victorville. Victorville was about seventy miles from Palm Springs as the crow fliesif a crow could fly over the ten-thousand-foot mountain range that separated the two towns.

It was almost three in the morning when we piled into the lobby of a small hotel near the railroad tracks in Victorville. Nobody had anything to say, least of all to me. Lou Holtz took out his medicine bottle, looked at it sadly, shuddered, and gulped the last remaining swig of his precious white stuff. He was sick as a dog and turning blue from the cold. I felt guilty, and uncomfortable, so I hauled a harmonica out of my pocket and started to play “Waltz Me Around Again, Willie.”

Lou put a hand on my arm, ever so gently. “Harpo, not now,” he said in a soft, sad voice. “Anything else, but not the mouth organ. This is the low ebb of my life.”

We put in a call for ten o’clock and staggered up to our rooms. I was exhausted from the strain of driving and went out like a light. But when I heard the ring of the morning call I woke up fresh as a daisy. I jumped out of bed and went whooping from room to room rousing the other guys. I got ‘em all awake before I noticed it was still dark outside. I looked at my watch. It was four-thirty. We’d slept a total of an hour and a half.

What I had taken for the ten o’clock call was the bell of a freight engine. We went back to bed, but not back to sleep. The freight engine kept clanging and banging all the rest of the night, beneath our windows.

Well, we did get to Palm Springs. Normally, it was a trip that shouldn’t have taken over two and a half hours. By my short cut it took twenty-one hours and twenty-five minutes. But the weekend wasn’t a bust. Lou Holtz did feel better. And George Burns acquired a new story for his Harpo file.

Burns and I were constant golfing companions in those days. I could always beat George. He made me feel like a pro. George found it impossible to take golf seriously, and he could always get a laugh out of me on the course. I made him feel like a great comedian. We were an ideal twosome.

The Hillcrest didn’t regard us as ideal members, however. We had too little respect for Club regulations. One summer when the weather got unbearably hot, George and I took our shirts off on the course, which was against the rules. The Board of Governors wrote us a letter requesting that we desist from this flagrant violation. The day after we got the letter it was still hot, and we went back on the course and took off our shirts again.

We were called on the carpet and warned that if we did it again we’d be suspended. We did it again. We were suspended from the Club for two weeks.

The day the suspension was up, we gave our word we’d never break the rule about shirts again. This time we kept our word and kept our shirts on. But on reaching the third tee, we took off our pants. We had checked and found there was no rule against this. So we played eighteen holes in shirts and undershorts and nobody stopped us. Fortunately for all concerned the weather turned cool before the next meeting of the Board of Governors.

Only once did I have a serious fight with the club. That was when I led a campaign to revoke the by-law that only persons of the Jewish faith could be members. I am proud to say I won the fight, and Hillcrest ceased being a restricted club.

At Hillcrest I got to know a guy named Lee Langdon, who was one of the top-ranked bridge players in the country. Langdon had the idea of starting a bridge club, and asked my help in financing it and lending my name as a front. I liked the idea, and was happy to help.

The Beverly Hills Bridge Club was an immediate success. We rented high-class rooms on Wilshire Boulevard, and we had a charter membership to match the rooms. Most of the guys from the Round Table joined, along with the cream of the movie colony, everybody from Norma Talmadge to George Raft. We charged members by the hour to play. There was seldom an empty table. Before the club was six months old I got my investment back. I became a silent partner and devoted my spare time to golf again. Because of this I missed out on the most dramatic moment in the history of the bridge club.

I was paged this day in the Hillcrest locker room. It was Lee Langdon on the phone. He was almost too shaken to speak. He said, “For heaven’s sake, Harpo, get over here as fast as you can. Don’t even stop for a red light.”

When I got to the joint one of the members, a heavy-set lady of forty or so, the wife of some movie producer, was sobbing hysterically. Two other dames were trying to comfort her, without much effect, and Lee Langdon was pacing the floor, wringing his hands. Lee whisked me into the office. “This is an awful crisis,” he said. “We’ve got to think fast to save the club.” Then he told me what had happened.

The fat dame was playing four-handed gin rummy with Harry Ritz and two others. When they finished a game and switched partners, Harry Ritz pushed back his chair to let this dame pass in front of him. When she did, Harry was overcome by a sudden, diabolical impulse. He bit her on the behind.

She let out a shriek and flew around the joint screaming that “this dreadful man” must be expelled from the club.

Lee said he couldn’t expel Mr. Ritz from the club. Ridiculous. Harry was a charter member in good standing.

If he wasn’t expelled, she said, she would walk out and form her own club and take half the membership with her, everybody who believed in paying for a safe and decent place to play in. Then she went into hysterics, and that’s when Lee rushed to call me over.

We came out of the office to face the crisis. The dame fell on my neck. After I heard her side of the story all over again, I said, “I’m sorry, but Mr. Langdon and I have gone over the by-laws very carefully, and there’s nothing there that says a member can’t bite another member on the behind.”

She was on the verge of going off again when I held up my hand and smiled and said, “However! However, we’ll be glad to make it a rule from now on that anybody who does what Harry Ritz did will be suspended for six months.”

“No,” she said, dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief. “It should be a year’s suspension.”

I said I thought a whole year was too stiff a penalty. Lee agreed. The dame said, “Well, I’ll settle for ten months.”

I said, “Eight months?” She folded her arms and shook her head.

The three of us thought it over for a while. Then I said, “How about if we compromise on nine months?”

“All right,” said the dame. “I’ll agree to that, but not a day less.” She got up and marched triumphantly back to the card table.