Harpo Speaks! (54 page)

I didn’t say a word. I picked up the cards and arranged the deck. Aleck made a noise like a collapsing balloon. He picked up the cribbage board. “I believe,” he said, “the last hand may be safely called a misdeal.”

We started to laugh at the same time.

The upshot of it all was that the Marxes spent the rest of the summer on Neshobe Island.

Unknown

CHAPTER 22

Exit Alexander

THE UNITED STATES went to war. I’d been ready to go to war for eight years, ever since the sickening trip I’d taken through Germany on my way to Russia. I was fired with patriotism and full of fight. I offered myself to the armed forces.

The armed forces wanted no part of me. I was reminded, tactfully, that I was overaged, undersized, and devoid of any military skill. I had no business in olive drab or Navy blue. The only uniform I was qualified to wear consisted of a plug hat, red wig, raincoat and baggy pants. The only weapons I could be trusted with were a rubber-bulb horn, a harp, a clarinet, and two sleeves’ worth of knives.

I took the hint, and so that was how I fought the war. For four years I toured the GI Circuit. I traveled two hundred thousand miles and played for half a million troops and defense workers. I performed at camps, airfields, naval stations, hospitals, ports of embarkation, service centers, and war plants. I crossed the Continent so many times I lost what little sense of direction I had left.

What confused my itinerary even more than the long jumps was the audience. I say “the” audience because it was like playing to only one huge crowd. It had been broken up and scattered around the country, but it was still the same crowd. In the old days the act that followed you into a town always asked, “How were they?” You said they were wonderful, or so-so, or a bunch of bums who sat on their hands. If you said “Typical Boston audience” or, “They haven’t changed in Pittsburgh,” the other act knew exactly what you meant.

On the GI Circuit nobody had to ask. They were the same in Boston and Pittsburgh as they were in San Diego, Wichita Falls and Newport News. They were terrific. They were always ready to explode. All you had to do to light the fuse was walk on stage. From that moment on, they were yours. You could do anything-play “Nola” on your teeth, imitate Dorothy Lamour, tell a joke about the WACs, or juggle a stack of tin plates-and the house went off like an arsenal full of TNT.

When I first appeared at an army camp, I had the weirdest feeling that I’d been there before. Then I realized why. It was like playing for the Russians all over again, only more so. These kids were starved for laughs, like the audiences in Moscow and Leningrad. The difference was that the GIs didn’t need plots or stories or reasons. They’d laugh at anything.

Of course nobody was half as good as the GI audiences made him look. For this reason a lot of young comics, dancers and vocalists I knew became war casualties. They made it big doing camp shows. They made it too big. When the war was over they didn’t know, or had forgotten, how much hard work it took to win over a club full of drunks or to impress producers and casting directors.

While it lasted it was unbelievable. It was an entertainer’s market. But for us on stage, it was also a time of deep heartbreak. I used to look out at the seas of young faces, with laughter rippling across them like sunshine, and marvel that any of them could even crack a smile, knowing what they were going through and what they were headed for. In my mind I saw them as thousands of Billies-not as the men they were but as the kids they had been just ten or fifteen years ago, hoping that Daddy would keep on playing and making funny faces and bedtime would never come. I couldn’t help thinking that when bedtime finally came for some of these kids it would be a nightmare followed by an eternity’s sleep. No explosions of applause were powerful enough to erase this awful reality.

I was reminded many times of what Captain Thornton Wilder, the playwright, had written Woollcott from his army post: “Nothing so lifts a soldier’s morale as getting a letter from home, and nothing so depresses him as reading it.”

My favorite Thornton Wilder story was the one about the time a little girl asked him what a war was. Wilder replied, “A million men with guns go out and meet another million men with guns, and they all shoot and try to kill each other.” She thought that over, then said, “But suppose nobody shows up?” and for this Wilder had no answer.

When war was declared in 1939, and it became apparent that both sides were going to show up, the New York Herald Tribune held an emergency staff meeting. The managing editor said the first order of business was to pick a special correspondent to send to Europe. Somebody said, “How about sending Aleck Woollcott?” The others thought this was a good suggestion-everybody except Percy Hammond, the drama critic. “Be taking a chance,” said Hammond. “Woollcott might not like the war.”

As it turned out, Woollcott didn’t get to review the hostilities for another couple of years. He was itching to go over, but Percy Hammond’s warning prevailed. It had been too long since Aleck had worked as a newspaper man. He was paid for spouting opinions, not reporting facts.

Meanwhile, during the summer of ‘39, when Moss Hart was visiting Neshobe Island, Aleck said that the next Kaufman-Hart play ought to have a part for him. Hart was delighted with the idea. So was George Kaufman, and they went to work immediately. What they came up with was The Man Who Came to Dinner. The leading role, “Sheridan Whiteside,” was not only written for Woollcott, it was written about Woollcott.

Aleck was ecstatic when he read the script. Then he reconsidered. He decided that it would be in bad taste for him to appear in a play in which he himself was the hero. The part was given to Monty Woolley. And a juicy part it was-a self-centered prima donna with the manners of a grizzly bear, who basked in the adulation of celebrities and eccentrics but chewed decent, ordinary people into mincemeat. It was Woollcott with bells on.

One of the eccentric characters was a half-illiterate practical joker called “Banjo.” It wasn’t hard to figure out who he was supposed to be.

After the show became a smashing success in New York, the temptation was too much for Aleck, and he signed to play the lead in the West Coast company of The Man Who Came to Dinner. The L.A. opening was a personal triumph for Woollcott in more ways than one. He proved himself a fine comic actor in a long, tough role. And by playing the Whiteside version of himself with such relish, he proved he was a human being who was aware that he had many faults and who wasn’t afraid to laugh at himself in public.

This confirmed the theory I’d always had about Aleck. He was a great, big, wonderful ham, and people who took him seriously were people who took themselves too seriously.

Most actors slept till noon during the run of a play. Not Aleck. He was at work by eight o’clock every morning. He dictated letters and articles through lunchtime, then romped off to spend the afternoon with his friends. If he didn’t come to my place, or Walt Disney’s, or Charlie Chaplin’s, he held court at the Garden of Allah, where he was staying. Kaufman, Hart, Charles Laughton, Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker and Alice Miller were also staying there, so it wasn’t hard for Aleck to get up a quorum. When he finished his night’s chore onstage it was party time-eating, talking and gaming until the small hours of the morning. Then, no matter when he might have turned in, it was up and back to work at eight o’clock.

In March of 1940 the company departed for San Francisco, where they had a spectacular opening and settled down for a long run. Early in April, Aleck wrote Beatrice Kaufman: “I have enjoyed the past twelve months rather more than any year I can remember. I have, however, no idea to what to ascribe the fact that, ever since I started on this trek at the end of October, I have felt in better health than I have known in a dozen years. I feel elegant. It will startle you to learn that, after more than twenty years of fidelity to one cigarette, I now smoke another brand and that, for some unknown reason, I no longer belch. You would hardly know me.” He signed the letter “Porky.”

The week after he wrote those lines, all the dozens of years of excessive living caught up with Porky. He had a severe heart attack. It was Aleck’s first illness since he was a kid fresh out of college, the time he’d nearly died from the mumps.

I was allowed to visit him briefly in the hospital in San Francisco. Aleck was a changed man. I had never seen him so subdued. He was more annoyed than frightened, but he was meek and docile with the doctors, and obeyed their orders to the letter. His annoyance was not so much over the illness itself as over the closing of his show.

“You won’t believe it after the lousy job I did in Los Angeles,” he said, “but I was beginning to be quite good. Another month and I would have been absolutely superb.” He smiled. “I’ve even licked the hoodoo of that line in the second act-you know, the one which kept coming out, `At Christmas I always feel the needy.’ ” We agreed that Aleck’s fluff would have made a dandy subject for a Peter Arno cartoon-Arno’s rich old club man, in fur coat and Homburg, moving up and down a breadline feeling the needy.

That was about the extent of our conversation. He was too tired to laugh.

Woollcott wasn’t docile very long. That fall he came out of his retreat on Lake Bomoseen to electioneer for Roosevelt in the campaign against Wendell Willkie. Activity seemed to do more for him than rest, and not long after the election he was back on the road again in The Man Who Came to Dinner.

In the fall of ‘41, against all medical advice, he went to England. The old warhorse couldn’t stay out of the fight any longer. He did a series of broadcasts over the BBC which the English, still reeling from the Blitz, found very heartening. When he returned to the States he went straight to the Midwest, where he shook up the isolationists and America-Firsters with fiery speeches proclaiming that the war in Europe was our war, like it or not.

This brought on a relapse, which was followed by an operation. The surgery was successful. He went back to convalesce at Bomoseen and began to mend very quickly. Soon came the Woollcott summons: Fly at once to the island, where Decembers were so wild and beautiful.

But before I could get there, the Japs attacked Pearl Harbor, we were at war, and I was on the road with my camp show.

Somewhere on the West Coast

A marine general, who looked old enough to have fought on the shores of Tripoli, entertained our troupe at his bungalow after the show. He hadn’t seen the show, but he’d gotten a look at one of the broads in the troupe, fallen for her, and decided to throw us a party. At dinner I sat on one side of the general and the broad sat on the other side. The general was plastered. After he had his soup he gave me a blank look and said, “Who are you?”

I primped my wig-I was still in costume from the show-and said, “I travel around the country with these gorgeous dames, General, and I’ve come here to make a deal.”

“What kinda deal?” said the general.

“I’ve got fifteen girls in my troupe and you’ve got forty thousand men in your camp,” I said. “We could go partners in a whorehouse and make ourselves a bloody fortune.”

The general grunted and turned to talk to the broad. A little while later he gave me a blank look and said, “Who are you?”

I gave him my story again. He grunted and turned back to the broad. An hour later, he gave me a blank look and said, “Who are you?” For the third time, I outlined my deal about the fifteen dames and forty thousand men.

“Funny damn thing,” said the general. “Girl over here just said the same thing to me.”

Somewhere in Arkansas

Early in the game I learned that nobody had more power on a military base than a civilian, and that no civilian had more power than a comic traveling with an all-girl band, like me. For this reason I never had any trouble getting a high-ranking officer to act as stooge in the knife-dropping act, wherever I played.

After the first show at this base, I said to the guy who’d been my straight man, “You did great out there tonight, Colonel. I’ve had John Barrymore play that sketch with me, and he was no better than you.” Since the straight man did nothing more than walk on and shake hands with me, to start the cutlery falling, this was strictly a tongue-in-cheek compliment. But I should have known better. The colonel was stage-struck. When I arrived at the theatre to get ready for the second night’s show, he was already in my dressing room, putting on make-up.

As a matter of fact I was pleased to see this. I had a favor to ask of the colonel. That afternoon while I was walking through the base I was surprised to hear somebody call my name. The voice came from the basement of a barracks. I looked down in the basement. It was a friend of mine from Beverly Hills, a young lawyer. He was in fatigues, swabbing out a latrine.

He told me he’d spent all the night before out on maneuvers, and he’d been socked with latrine duty as soon as he got back to camp. The guy was dead on his feet, and depressed. He saw no hope of ever rising above the rank of buck private. I told him not to worry. I’d try to help him.

So that night I asked the stage-struck colonel if I could bring a friend to the party he was throwing for the cast after the show. “Why, of course,” said the colonel. “Any friend of yours is a friend of mine, Harpo.”

When my friend turned out to be a draftee, the colonel was a bit taken aback. I had rousted the poor guy out of bed to come to the party (he hadn’t slept for forty-eight hours), but groggy as he was, my friend was able to give the colonel an hour’s free consultation. He showed the C.O. where he’d overpaid his last year’s income tax by forty-five bucks and this was the kind of military know-how that impressed the colonel.

A couple of weeks later the guy was recommended for Officer’s Training, out of the blue. He wound up assigned to Moss Hart’s company of Winged Victory, where he met many influential people. Soon after he was mustered out-with the rank of captain-he was appointed a judge in Los Angeles.

Somewhere in New Jersey