Harpo Speaks! (56 page)

So what were we to do? We went to Abercrombie & Fitch, bought two croquet mallets and four balls. We arrived at the Hotel Gotham at teatime and went up to Woollcott’s floor. I rang the bell of his apartment. Charlie and I then started hitting the balls up and down the corridor in the best old Neshobe Island manner, whackety-whack.

Aleck opened the door of his apartment. He looked through me. He looked through Charlie Lederer. He paid no notice to the croquet balls bounding and ricocheting up and down the corridor. From inside I heard Mrs. Roosevelt’s voice saying, “I’m sure I heard the bell, too. Is there nobody there?”

“Nobody,” said Aleck. “Strange-nobody at all.” He slammed the door shut.

Charlie and I picked up the red ball, the blue ball, the yellow ball, and the black, stuck the mallets under our overcoats, and departed.

Lederer was invited to go to a dinner party that night with the Alfred Vanderbilts. When he said that Oscar Levant was going to be there I invited myself to go too.

After dinner the host asked if we’d like him to turn on the radio so we could hear the broadcast Woollcott was on. Charlie said not to bother. We would have liked to listen, he said, but we hadn’t been asked. Woollcott would be furious if he found out we’d tuned him in without an appointment.

Later in the evening, before the party broke up, somebody telephoned to ask if we had heard the news. The news was that Alexander Woollcott had been stricken with a heart attack while he was on a broadcast.

I rushed to the phone. The lines were jammed at CBS. Everybody in New York was calling there for the same reason. I kept trying until I got through, and finally got the name of the hospital where Aleck had been taken.

When I called the hospital I was told that Mr. Woollcott was dead.

Whack.

The program had been a panel discussion called “The People’s Forum.” The guest panelists were Alexander Woollcott, Marcia Davenport and Rex Stout. They were discussing the civilian’s role in the war effort. Aleck revved up and went zooming off like a mad hornet, to attack his old “enemies within the gates”-the isolationists and anti-Rooseveltians of the Midwest.

In the middle of a sentence Aleck stopped talking. He turned very pale. He wrote on a piece of notepaper, “I am sick.” He pushed the note along the table to Miss Davenport, who read it and signaled at once toward the director’s booth.

Ten minutes of air time remained. While the discussion continued, Woollcott was helped out of his chair and out of the studio. He was laid on a stretcher and carried to a waiting ambulance. When he was brought to the nearest hospital there was nothing that could be done for him. He died just before midnight, January 23, 1943.

One crazy detail stuck in my mind. It still does. A guy at CBS told me that while Aleck was being carried to the street on the stretcher, he fumbled around until he felt the rim of his hat, his big, black impresario’s hat, which had been placed on the dome of his stomach. When he passed out the door and into the night, he lifted the hat and put it over his face.

What was crazy about this was that it reminded me of what Jack Johnson had done the time Jess Willard had knocked him to the canvas in the arena at Havana, Cuba, back in 1915. While the referee counted him out, Johnson, who was supposedly unconscious, laid an arm over his eyes to shield them from the glare of the sun. Everybody who had bet on Jack Johnson screamed that the fight was fixed, that the champion had faked being knocked out and had done a lousy job at that. People with dough on Willard said that Johnson’s covering his face had only been a reflex. He was seeing stars, not the sun, and didn’t know what he was doing.

With Aleck, I’ve never been able to decide-whether he had deliberately shielded himself against the night, or whether it had been a reflex. He was too good an actor to tip his hand. After playing the role of himself to the hilt, in spades, why should he goof on his exit and give the critics a chance to pan him?

The funeral was short and uncluttered. Ruth Gordon and George Backer each spoke a eulogy, and Paul Robeson sang the Twenty-third Psalm.

When it was over nobody had to suggest where we should go. Without a word being said, we all went straight to the Algonquin. It was the last gathering of the Woollcott crowd, and it was our strangest gathering. Neither Neysa nor Dottie nor Ruth nor Beatrice nor George nor Frank nor Charlie nor the lone surviving Katzenjammer Kid knew quite what to say, and for me, for once, there was no use listening.

I was on my own. The fat, spoiled, moody, cantankerous, mischievous, gay, generous, loyal and loving smarty-pants son-of-a-bitch who had dragged me into a world I had no business being in had ditched me. Like approximately one million other people, I felt sorry for myself when Aleck Woollcott died. But I guess that’s the way it is. When you lose something irreplaceable, you don’t mourn for the thing you lost. You mourn for yourself.

Unknown

CHAPTER 23

Life on a Harp Ranch

I CAME TO REALIZE fully, with Aleck’s passing, what his friendship had done for me more than anything else. It had kept me young. When he died my first reaction had been that he had ditched me and I was left all alone. But I wasn’t, of course. The slack had already been taken up, by Susan and by Billy.

Now, six years later, there were three more Marxes in the house to keep me from growing up. In the fall of 1943 we had brought home our second son. We named him Alexander. In 1944, James Arthur and Minnie Susan had joined the family.

It was a crowd Aleck would have fit right into. We didn’t run a very proper or conventional household, but the joint was never dull either.

At the end of the war we enlarged our house. We threw out the butler, disconnected the buzzer on the dining-room floor and got rid of all the rest of the Beverly Hills nonsense and converted the dining room into a poolroom.

The next thing we threw out after the butler was Dr. Spock.

I was the same kind of father as I was a harpist-I played by ear. But I’ve been lucky on both scores. The harp has given me a decent living and my children have given me more pleasure than I ever thought a man could possibly have.

What rules we had, as a family, stemmed from the fact that all of us had been adopted by each other. We’ve always had equal amounts of gratitude and respect mixed in with our love for each other. Susan, an only child who never had any roots, and I, a lone wolf who got married twenty years too late, were adopted by the kids as much as they were by us.

Somehow, without lecturing or threatening or studying any books, we all followed the same rules, from the time the kids were very young:

Life has been created for you to enjoy, but you won’t enjoy it unless you pay for it with some good, hard work. This is one price that will never be marked down.

You can work at whatever you want to as long as you do it as well as you can and clean up afterwards and you’re at the table at mealtime and in bed at bedtime.

Respect what the others do. Respect Dad’s harp, Mom’s paints. Billy’s piano, Alex’s set of tools, Jimmy’s designs, and Minnie’s menagerie.

If anything makes you sore, come out with it. Maybe the rest of us are itching for a fight too.

If anything strikes you funny, out with that too. Let’s all the rest of us have a laugh.

If you have an impulse to do something you’re not sure is right, go ahead and do it. Take a chance. Chances are, if you don’t you’ll regret it-unless you break the rules about mealtime or bedtime, in which case you’ll sure as hell regret it.

If it’s a question of whether to do what’s fun or what is supposed to be good for you, and nobody is hurt by whichever you do, always do what’s fun.

If things get too much for you and you feel the whole world’s against you, go stand on your head. If you can think of anything crazier to do, do it.

Don’t worry about what other people think. The only person in the world important enough to conform to is yourself.

Anybody who mistreats a pet or breaks a pool cue is docked a month’s pay.

I think Woollcott would have liked the way we ran our joint. It was pretty much the way he ran his island. I know for sure that my father and mother would have approved. Our house, like the old tenement back on 93rd Street, was seldom without the sound of music or laughter, or questions being asked, or stories being told.

Billy, Alex, Jimmy and Minnie have turned out to be healthy, inquisitive individuals with minds of their own. I’m proud of them. I’m the most fortunate one-foot skater, undersized rent-kicker, self-taught harpist and nonspeaking actor who ever lived.

I felt a little pang when I turned fifty-six: Aleck had just turned fifty-six when he died. Susan and the kids didn’t let me mope very long over my age. They turned on the Christmas lights in honor of my birthday, and the pang went away. It was nowhere near Christmas, and the lights were hung in a jacaranda tree in the patio, but this was our joint and this was the way we ran it. The jacaranda was the pride and joy of our patio. It was big enough to provide shade for the Ping-pong table all day long, and every spring it burst with clusters of delicate lavender blossoms. A useful, graceful tree it was. On the Christmas when Minnie and Jimmy were three, we strung the jacaranda with colored lights. The kids were so enchanted by the lights that we didn’t have the heart to take them down. So we left them connected in the tree, and turned them on whenever we felt like declaring a holiday.

The lights were turned on for all of our birthdays, for Sam Goldwyn’s birthday, St. Patrick’s Day, April Fool’s Day, Bastille Day, California Admission Day, Harry Truman Winning the Election Day, Alex’s Learning to Swim Day, and Uncle Chico Wins at Pinochle Day. For two years we averaged about fifteen Christmases a year.

Finally the wiring began to fall apart, and we had to have the lights taken down. Billy, who was twelve, watched the handyman remove the lights with great fascination. Billy led a rich, full life, and he had little opportunity to enjoy such spectacles as a handyman up in a jacaranda tree, climbing from limb to limb. I’m afraid we made heavy demands on Billy, as parents are apt to do when their first child shows unusual talent. At the time he was taking piano lessons, riding lessons, lifesaving lessons, golf lessons, dancing lessons, dramatic lessons, arts-and-crafts lessons, and special instruction in musical theory and composition.

Now he realized his life wasn’t full enough. Something wonderful was missing. So when the handyman dropped down out of the jacaranda, with the strings of lights coiled over his shoulder, Billy, who hadn’t missed a step of the operation, said, “Sir, who did you take your climbing lessons from?”

We got the point. It could be just as bad to give a boy too much as to deny him everything. We relaxed considerably after the jacaranda episode.

As the kids grew up, they turned our place into a zoo. We had poodles, dachshunds, collies and mutts-finally settling on mutts as our favorite breed. To maintain the balance of nature we kept the cat population up to equal strength, and threw in a monkey for good measure. Minnie raised hamsters. The boys and I built an aviary in the back yard. At one point, we had over a hundred birds there, behind a cat-proof screen. For a while we kept parakeets in our master bedroom, but they were oversexed to the point of distraction, and had to be exiled to the aviary.

The only troublemaker we ever had among our pets was Siegel the Sea Gull.

One day I was driving to work along Motor Avenue, the street that separated the El Rancho and the Hillcrest golf courses. I stopped when I saw a large white bird flopping around beside the road. It was a sea gull with a busted wing. Apparently he’d been knocked out of the air by a slicing golf ball.

(I was reminded of the time Sam Goldwyn was having a bad day at Hillcrest. Sam was working hard at correcting his slice, but no matter what he did, the ball kept fading on him. Before teeing off on a short hole over near Motor Avenue he asked his caddie’s advice-should he use a wood or an iron? “That depends, Mr. Goldwyn,” said the caddie, “on which course you’re playing-Hillcrest or Rancho.”)

Anyway, I got the wounded gull in the car, covered him with a blanket to restrain him, and rushed him to the infirmary at M-G-M. The doctors there were undecided whether they should put the bird’s wing in splints or amputate it. The vet wasn’t much help. He was great with Rin-Tin-Tin III’s mange, bog spavins on cowboy horses, or loss of appetite in lions that were supposed to devour Christians, but he was helpless with sea gulls.

While the medics argued, word of the crisis got around the studio, and all production ground to a halt. I called in the one guy I was sure would know what to do-Sam Hirshfeld. Sam came right over. He said that if they didn’t amputate immediately there was danger of a fatal infection setting in. As the patient’s guardian, I gave Sam permission to operate. In a room packed with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s highest paid stars and executives, Dr. Hirshfeld performed the wingectomy. When he finished, they applauded. Paul Muni never played a more stirring scene before the French Academy at Warner Brothers.

When I brought him home we named him Siegel, in honor of our producer friend Max Siegel. Dr. Hirshfeld had done a fine job on Siegel. Of course the bird could never fly again, but in all other respects he was a hale and hearty sea gull. Too much so, it turned out. He became a tyrant. He strutted around the joint like he’d come to collect the rent. He had the dogs and cats buff aloed. They backed away from his sharp tongue and his sharp beak, and he stole their food right and left. The monkey wouldn’t come down out of the jacaranda tree when Siegel was on the march.

At the same time Siegel got less popular with the management. He took over the swimming pool as his private john. He kept it so messed up that the guy from the pool company advised us the rates would have to be raised for the monthly cleaning. It got worse. The rates went up again. The pool people really cleaned up on Siegel.

We’d become very attached to the fat old one-armed bandit, but he had to go. So we made a present of him to Zeppo, who was then living on a ranch. There Siegel lived out the rest of his life. He died, apparently, of old age-but not until he’d spent a contented year keeping three dogs scared out of their wits and causing Zeppo’s pool-cleaning rates to be raised.