Harpo Speaks! (55 page)

An actor I had known slightly in Hollywood was a corporal in a Jersey camp. We hadn’t been in camp two hours before he made a date to take out one of the gals-a former stripper-after the show. But that afternoon, because of impending troop movements, all passes were revoked and all personnel were ordered confined to the post until further notice.

The corporal was desperate. He really had it for this broad, and she was in a mood to reciprocate. So I went straight to the office of the base commander to plead the corporal’s case. The colonel was a real Babbitt in uniform. Framed mottoes hung all over his walls, along with citations and awards going back to when he was an Eagle Scout. I could see I wouldn’t get far with any buddy-buddy talk, so I tried the shock treatment.

“Colonel,” I said, “I want to ask you a big favor.”

“I am here to serve, Mr. Marx,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

“One of your boys wants to lay one of my girls,” I said, “and he can’t get a pass tonight.”

The colonel bristled, turned red, huffed and puffed and damn near strangled. But he was too good a soldier to duck the issue. He said, “How long do you estimate this-ah-maneuver will take?”

I shrugged and said, “You know as well as I do, Colonel. With some guys it might take only-“

He didn’t let me finish. “All right, Marx,” he snapped. “I’ll see what I can do.”

That night the corporal was watching the show from backstage when he was notified he was being put on special orders. The colonel had made him his personal driver for the rest of the night. After the show, the colonel offered me and the corporal’s girl a lift in his car. The colonel indicated the broad should sit up front, then ordered the corporal to take us to the officers’ club.

At the club the C.O. and I got out. The colonel told the corporal to find a nice, dark place to park, and to take his time about picking us up.

“You understand, I’m not authorizing you to go on an all-night maneuver,” said the colonel, “but, shall we say, three hours?”

Three hours was fine with the corporal, just fine. Rank had its privileges but it also, at times, had a heart as well.

Somewhere in Indiana

I played my first GI hospital here, and it was not a complete success. I had been scheduled to entertain first in the psycho ward. The doctors warned me not to appear in costume. This was to be strictly a concert, a musical-therapy treatment. I walked through the ward beforehand, chatting and joking with the patients and passing out cigarettes, to gain their confidence. Except for the extreme cases, they were all eager for me to play. I called for the harp to be brought in.

Instead of taking the instrument out of the case and wheeling it into the ward, three GIs lugged it in, case and all, on their shoulders. They looked like pallbearers carrying a sealed black coffin. The poor bastards in the ward started to yell. Attendants ran in to quiet them. I ran out, behind the pallbearers. The musical therapy for the day was canceled.

Somewhere in California

Actually, the biggest laugh I got any time during the war was at this hospital. It was a new, six-story joint built around a courtyard. They decided I should play a concert down in the courtyard, where the patients could watch from the windows and balconies above.

In the center of the courtyard was a replica of the famous fountain of Brussels, with the statue of the little boy taking a leak. Whoever designed the hospital had had a stroke of genius to put this conversation piece where all the patients could see it. It exactly fit the mood of convalescing soldiers.

Before I came out to perform, I had a conference with the maintenance staff of the hospital. When I came out I didn’t look at the statue. All through my comedy routine I failed to notice it. Then came the serious part of the program. The harp was brought out. I began to play “Annie Laurie,” very softly. The audience, most of whom were hanging over me on the six balconies, was so quiet I could hear the splashing of the fountain.

The splashing annoyed me. I had to have utter silence. I stopped playing. I turned and saw for the first time the statue of the little pisseur. I gave him a reproving look. I put a finger to my lips, pointed to my fly, and waggled the finger at him. The spout from the statue fell away to a trickle, then stopped. The maintenance man at the water valve had timed it perfectly.

Nobody heard the rest of “Annie Laurie,” not even me. The GI audience up above laughed themselves hoarse and the staff members sitting down in the courtyard had to duck flying crutches and nurses’ caps. After this opening I wasn’t able to get away without playing a full hour concert. I hope it helped their morale. It sure helped mine.

In the summer of ‘42 I worked on a USO committee in Hollywood while I waited to go back on the road.

In the middle of August, Susan and I went east quite suddenly, when I got a telegram from Woollcott. It was a three-word message: ALICE IS DYING.

I found Alice at home in New York, in bed, racked with cancer. Alice had known she was a terminal case for nearly three months, but she’d told nobody except Aleck. Aleck had decided on his own that I should know, to give me a chance to see her once again.

I spent two days at her bedside, for as many minutes at a time as her doctor would allow. The first day I saw her she had only enough strength to squeeze with her right hand, feebly, and to whisper. But the spirit of the old Butch still flashed within her. It hadn’t weakened by one volt.

She was still gracious and gallant, and too good a sport to concede a single point, let alone the game, to the disease. She burned more from curiosity than fever. Alice wanted no truck with the past. This was no time for looking backward. Nations were at war, great events were taking place, and her friends were scattered all over the world. She had to know where everybody was and what they were doing. She squeezed from me everything I could tell her-from the state of Carl Hubbell’s fastball to the Marines’ progress on Guadalcanal.

On the second day, my visiting periods were cut shorter. Alice’s whisper had faded. The only physical power left to her was the movement of her right hand. But through her fingers and through her eyes the current of her spirit still flowed. Although I did all the talking it was a warm, two-way conversation.

That evening, when I returned to her house, they told me she was dead.

Aleck was up at Neshobe Island. I’d been in touch with him throughout the vigil, but the end came on a wartime Saturday night, a time when I couldn’t get a line through to Vermont. I sent him a wire.

A letter that Aleck wrote to Charles Brackett from Lake Bomoseen, tells more eloquently than I ever could about his reaction to Alice’s passing.

“You must feel,” he wrote, “that your world is being depopulated. I warn you that it is one of the penalties of lingering on this scene after fifty.

“Late at night on the next to the last Saturday in August, my dear Lilly Bonner and I were out on the terrace here relishing a fabulous moon. Through the windows, from inside, there came the muttering and card slappings of a gin rummy game with Dorothy Gish and Louis Calhern involved.

“The quiet of the lake was disturbed by the sound of Howard Bull’s motor launch chugging towards the island. At such an hour this could mean only one thing-a telegram and an important one, too, or he would have let it go until morning. The Bulls sit in judgment on our telegrams and decide among themselves if there is any rush about our seeing them. So while Howard moored his launch at the dock, I told Lilly that Alice Miller was dead.

“It was on just such another August Saturday night fifteen years ago that the same messenger brought the same news about Gregory Kelly (then married to Ruth Gordon). I remember now how he found all the lights out and, calling through the window of the ground-floor bedroom in front, awakened Neysa. She came in and got me up and we put on bathrobes and put a log on the fire and sat until all hours talking about Gregory.

“I think you may guess with what courtesy and grace of spirit Alice made her exit. She had written me confidentially early in June telling me that the jig was up and thereafter our exchanges were on that basis. It was precisely as though she regretted having to leave early but whispered it behind her fan so as not to disturb the party.

“Finally I decided that Lederer and Harpo ought to be told. I am glad I did for Harpo came east ahead of schedule and was in time by forty-eight hours to be welcomed by her. The second day she could not speak but held his hand while he talked to her, squeezing it when she was most interested. I am proud to report that out of the topics in his repertory, she squeezed hardest for Charlie Lederer, myself, and the Giants.

“I’ve found it an enriching experience to read over the letters I’ve had from her in the more than twenty-two years of our association. The file began with a hand-painted Christmas card. As the accompanying verse addresses me as a Cribbage Pimp I assume that a check came with it but apparently I was not sentimental enough to file that, too.

“It is a bleak fact that there is now no such person in our world as Alice Duer Miller….”

The one bright note in that trip east was Aleck. He looked terrific. He had all the zest and bounce of ten years before. His blood was again up to its full, rich count of white corpuscles (whipped cream) and red corpuscles (acid). The medics had given him the green light to come out of confinement and go back to work. When we left him he was apartment hunting in New York for a winter headquarters-his “Valley Forge,” as he said.

My camp-show troupe had taken off without me, so I sent Susan home and joined an all-star company doing one-night stands for the War Bond Drive. At Soldiers Field in Chicago we played to a hundred and ten thousand people. While I was waiting to do my second bit on the show, one of the stadium hot-dog vendors came backstage to shake hands with me. “For my dough,” he said, “you’re the best one on the program.” I felt complimented, since the others on the program were Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, Fred Astaire, Lucille Ball, Betty Hutton, Kay Kyser and his band, and Jose Iturbi.

“Yes, sir, Mr. Marx,” he said. “When you played on your harp I sold four times as many hot dogs as when anybody else was on the stage.”

A modest man is made, not born.

On the 12th of September I was home again, and just in time for an unexpected reunion. Ivy Lee Litvinov was in town and had been trying to get in touch with me. I hadn’t seen her since the night in the Moscow theatre, nine years ago, when her husband had popped on stage as a comic and turned me into a straight man. Maxim Litvinov was now the Soviet Ambassador to the United States.

We took Ivy Lee out to dinner at Mike Lyman’s Restaurant. I put on quite a performance, mainly for Susan’s benefit, recreating my six weeks in Russia-from the trouble I had carrying rubles across the border going in and my fiasco with the Moscow Art Theatre to my final “command” performance. Because of Mrs. Litvinov, I omitted telling about what I carried across the border on the way out.

Mike Lyman had been hanging around the table. Finally he said, “Excuse me for interrupting, but I heard some news on the radio in the kitchen that you folks might be interested in. The Russian Army stopped the Germans at Stalingrad.”

Ivy Lee Litvinov certainly was interested in the news. For the rest of the night, the champagne at Mike’s was on the Soviet Union.

I hooked onto a troupe heading east. We pulled into Watertown, New York, on a cold, gray afternoon in January 1943. It had just begun to snow. After the show it was still coming down. The next morning I woke up early. From my hotel window I watched the sun rise. The city was covered under a deep white blanket of snow. Nothing moved. It was a beautiful sight.

A great idea occurred to me. I called Woollcott in New York City, at his apartment in the Hotel Gotham. When he stopped cursing me for waking him up in the middle of the night, I told him my idea. I was sure he’d call it an absolute inspiration.

“Aleck,” I said, “I’m back in your neck of the woods, outside of New York here in Watertown. The snow’s eight feet deep and it’s gorgeous out-too nice to make the jump with the rest of the company on the bus. Know what I’m going to do? Hire a horse and sleigh for the trip!”

Aleck said, “Exactly where is your next jump to?”

“Boston,” I said. “How about it? Hop over and we’ll take the sleigh ride together. Jingle bells, the whole works.”

He did not leap at the idea or call it an absolute inspiration. Instead, he took a deep breath, let it out with a sigh, and said, “Harpo, you didn’t dawdle long enough in P.S. 86 to become exposed to the subject of Geography, did you?”

“No,” I said. “Why?”

“My dear boy,” he said, “this may come as a bit of a shock to you, but Boston, Massachusetts, is not on the outskirts of Watertown, New York.”

I refused to let go of my notion. I asked him how about if I took a short cut through the city and picked him up there? He said, “Oh a splendiferous thought! I shall be waiting for you in front of the Gotham to come jingling up in your troika. You’ll know me by my white beard and the white fur trimming on my red suit. I’m fat and jolly and tend to go around saying `Ho! Ho! Ho!’ to little children. Meanwhile, if you don’t mind, I’m going back to beddy-bye. God bless you and keep you safe from anything as dangerous as knowledge.”

He hung up.

Later that morning, on the road, I asked our bus driver how many miles he figured it was from Watertown to Boston.

“Oh, it’ll be around three hundred miles,” he said.

I asked him what it would be if we took the short cut through New York City.

The driver played it straight. “The short cut wouldn’t add more than two hundred miles to the trip, Mr. Marx,” he said.

When I got to New York after playing Boston, I was delighted to find Charlie Lederer in town. Charlie said Woollcott was being very stuffy. He was having Eleanor Roosevelt up for tea in his apartment, after which he was doing a broadcast, some sort of forum program. After the broadcast, Aleck had told Charlie, he was going straight home and to bed and he could not be seen until noon the next day, and then by appointment only.