Harpo Speaks! (59 page)

We had Gracie and George Burns down for Thanksgiving that year, to make up for Thanksgiving the year before. The year before, our new place hadn’t been finished and we were living in an apartment court in Palm Springs. Susan bought a tremendous turkey, then found it was too big to fit in the refrigerator. I had a solution. We could lock it up overnight in the harp case, outside. There it would keep cool, and the dogs and cats couldn’t get at it.

Well, the Burnses arrived the next morning. It came time to put the turkey in the oven. I went to get it. The harp case was gone. Then I remembered why. The harp case was on the list of things we’d asked the porter to put in storage so the place wouldn’t be cluttered up for the holidays. I couldn’t find the porter. The storage room was locked. I had to go back to the apartment and announce a change of plans. We were taking the Burnses out to dinner, on account of the turkey being missing.

“Missing?” said Gracie. “Where were you keeping it?”

“In the harp case,” I said.

“Where else?” said George.

But a year later we gave them a real, home-cooked feast. While we were having coffee, I said, “I almost forgot. We found some marvelous grapes yesterday. These you have to taste. You never had such grapes.” But neither Susan nor I could find them. Then it came to me where I had stashed them. When I brought the grapes to the table, Susan asked me where they’d been.

“In the jewel case,” I said.

“Where else?” said George.

It also amused George, for some reason, to find my harp standing in the bathroom. This was a very practical setup, however, and no gag. The first two things I did every morning were to practice the harp and go to the john. This way I could do both at the same time and save a lot of steps. Who said I didn’t know any good short cuts?

At Cathedral City I learned I was a better disciplinarian in effigy than I was in person. We had a lot of trouble getting grass to grow around the house, mainly because of the birds. Every time we reseeded they flocked around and had themselves a free lunch. Somebody suggested we put up a scarecrow. We did. Alex constructed a frame, and I dressed it with red wig, plug hat, red tie, floppy raincoat and baggy pants, and stuck a horn in its belt.

The next morning the biggest flock of birds we’d seen yet were out on the lawn. But, by God, they weren’t pecking for seeds. They were just sitting there looking up at the scarecrow. Obviously, said Susan, they were waiting for him to play the harp.

When he didn’t play, they gave up and flew away and never came back. We finally got a decent crop of grass.

The kids’ favorite holidays were Christmas and Susan’s birthday. Thinking up presents for Mom became quite a family hobby. On the first birthday she celebrated in Cathedral City, she got a record haul. Alex gave her a case of Jello (Alex never got enough Jello; he was crazy for the stuff). I gave her an adding machine (Susan did all our bookkeeping). Jimmy gave her a stamp machine (she handled all the correspondence too), and Minnie gave her a set of hair clippers (no special reason except they were on sale). By way of thanking us for a wonderful birthday, Susan gave us all haircuts. She’s been the family barber ever since. Not one of us has ever gone to a barber shop again.

When I asked her what she wanted for Christmas that year she said that, just for once, she’d like money. She’d like a thousand dollars to spend any crazy way she felt like-on paints, brushes, sewing-machine attachments, curtain fabrics, rose bushes, whatever. To Susan, who was very practical with dough, this sounded like a mad splurge.

It would have been dull to put a single envelope under the Christmas tree for her. That was no kind of present, and lousy showmanship. So I went to work long before Christmas, up in town at the Hillcrest.

Early in December, mysterious Christmas cards addressed to Susan and marked Personal began to trickle in. Ten of them came, altogether. Inside each card was a check made out to Susan in some odd, meaningless amount-like $82.97, $73.33 or $26.58. Each was signed by some absolute stranger, a name that meant nothing to her. She decided not to worry me about the checks until after the holidays, so she hid them. She herself was plenty worried. She was sure it was some kind of new extortion racket.

On Christmas morning she found seven more cards with checks inside, beneath the Christmas tree. These checks were also made out to her for odd amounts, but they weren’t signed by strangers. They were signed by George Burns, George Jessel, Danny Kaye, Harry Ritz, Eddie Cantor, Jack Benny and Milton Berle. Susan puzzled over them for a minute. Then she gave me a sly smile. She ran to get the mysterious checks hidden in her dresser drawer, and her adding machine.

The seventeen checks added up to one thousand bucks on the nose. She said it was her nicest Christmas ever.

That year we promised the kids they could stay up until midnight on New Year’s Eve for the first time. But then I got to thinking about it. I didn’t mind their staying up this late, for one night, but I was afraid Susan and I wouldn’t be able to make it. We loved holidays, but we were a couple of reformed night owls. I had become such an early bird that I could seldom stay awake long enough to see Groucho’s television show, which came on at the ungodly hour of ten.

On the morning of December 31 I was the first to get up, as usual. Before retiring to the john to practice, I went through the house and set all the clocks ahead three hours. When the rest of the family woke up, they kidded themselves about oversleeping and nobody knew the difference.

At nine o’clock on New Year’s Eve, our clocks struck twelve. I poured everybody a sip of champagne. We sang “Auld Lang Syne,” toasted 1958, kissed each other, and the kids ran off to bed. While I was turning out the lights I heard Minnie say, “Hey, Jimmy! I think I’m drunk!” Jimmy said, “Nah, you didn’t drink enough to get a charge. It’s just the wee small hours that makes you feel dizzy.”

It’s a classic corny joke that a guy who’s married more than ten years always forgets his wedding anniversary. He comes home from work that day and finds his wife dressed to go out, and she gets mad as a hornet when he doesn’t know why she’s all dolled up.

Not so in our family. For some reason Susan and I invariably pull a switch. It’s me who remembers. When I come to the breakfast table on the morning of September 28, after harp practice, I am wearing a squashed fedora, a bright red tie over a striped shirt-dickey, and dark glasses. When Susan sees me she gives a start, gasps, clamps a hand over her mouth, and hurries off to change. When she comes back to the table she has on her floppy big picture hat, 1930 vintage beige suit, cotton stockings and sensible brown shoes, and her face is whitened out with powder.

We keep our wedding outfits on all day long. The part of the day that gives the kids the biggest kick is when we cone home after I have taken Susan out to dinner. They have to hear all about it-where we went, what trouble we got into, whether anybody recognized us, how many laughs we got-and then they have to hear all over again the story of how we got married, upstairs in the Santa Ana firehouse.

The most gratifying part of it to me is the way the kids accept our cockeyed kind of celebration and fall right in with the spirit of it. I’ve heard other children, who have a hell of a lot less hokum to put up with, say, “Boy, have we got a couple of screwy creeps for parents!” or, “Criminy! Why can’t they act their age?” Not ours. If their father ever acted his age they’d disown him.

I hadn’t moved to the desert to retire, not by a long shot. I no longer did movies (our last picture, A Night in Casablanca, had been made some years ago), but I kept up a fairly busy schedule of concerts, benefits and guest appearances, and once or twice a year Chico and I would go off on a club date together.

The most expensive benefit I did was for the pension fund of the Palm Springs Police Department. After the show I found thirty-two of my knives missing. The cops had stolen them, for souvenirs.

The highest-priced club date Chico and I ever played (or so we thought, at the time) was for the Texas oilman Glenn McCarthy, in his snazzy Shamrock Hotel in Houston. McCarthy offered us a choice of thirty-five thousand dollars-seventeen thousand five hundred a week for two weeks-or an interest in his newest natural-gas field. Chico didn’t bother to figure the odds. The only important figure here was the twenty-seven-and-a-Half percent deduction for depletion rights. We told McCarthy to keep his cash. We’d take this other deal.

Sure enough, royalty checks started coming in from the Texas Gas Corporation later that year. They still come in, at the end of every quarter.

I happened to be in the Hillcrest the day after I’d gotten a royalty payment, and I had the check in my pocket. I spotted a table of bankers, a couple of whom I knew pretty well, having lunch. I went over to their table. “I’d like to tell you guys something that might surprise you,” I said. “You probably think all actors are shnooks when it comes to handling money. We throw it away as fast as we get it because we don’t have any business sense. Well, I want you to know this isn’t true, at least not about me or Chico.”

Then I told them about the choice the oilman had given us down in Texas-thirty-five G’s cash or two interests in a gas field. “You think we grabbed the loot?” I said. “Not us. We settled for the long-range investment, and we’ve been getting quarterly payments ever since. Maybe you still don’t believe an actor could be this smart. Well, gentlemen, I have documentary proof on me. Here’s my latest royalty check-and it happens to be a hundred percent higher than what I received for the previous quarter.”

I showed my check to the bankers. It was for thirteen cents. The previous check had been for six cents.

The next one I got that year was made out “to the amount of exactly $0 and 01 cents.”

I’m afraid nobody ever took me seriously as a man of finance. Like the time I told the local telephone operator to please get me the Beverly Hills office of Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner and Smith, and she said, “Do you know his first name, Mr. Marx?”

I even had trouble convincing Jimmy that I was a good risk. While we still lived in the city, I was once driving home from the desert. I was late, so I stopped by a roadside phone booth to tell the family when to expect me. The only change I had on me was a dime. I told the operator to reverse the charges.

It happened that Jimmy was alone in the house when the phone rang. The operator said, “I have a collect call from Mr. Marx. Will you accept the charges, please?”

Jimmy said, “What’s a `collect call’?” and the operator said that meant the party answering the call would pay for it, not the party making the call.

“You mean me?” said Jimmy. “I’m supposed to pay for it?”

The operator said that was the general idea. Would he then accept the charges?

“Heck, no,” said Jimmy. “I can’t pay for it.”

I told the operator to please explain to him that it was his father calling. The operator relayed this to Jimmy.

“My father? Well, let him pay for it!” he said, and hung up.

It was a sparkling clear morning in May. After the kids went off to school I felt like practicing an extra hour or so before shooting a round of golf, so I moved the harp out by the big west window. While I played, I watched our three mutts take their daily swim. It was a funny thing. Every morning, as soon as the kids left to catch the school bus, the dogs came yipping and galloping around the house and dove straight into the pool. Their habits were no more conventional than their masters’.

Susan was in her room, sewing, working on a dress for Minnie’s first dance. The dogs climbed out of the pool, shook themselves, and ran off to look for the horses, to see if they could get up a friendly game of tag. The only sound was the sound of the harp. There was no wind outside. The nearest thing to any movement was the changing of the shadows on the mountains, as the sun rose in the sky. I was surrounded by peace.

I got to thinking as I played about how lucky I was to be who I was, where I was-an old faun’s ass of sixty-five, the father of four children aged from fifteen to twenty-two, sitting in an air-conditioned house, admiring the spectacle of the California desert while I made music, with nothing more to worry about than whether I should keep on making music and enjoying the view and then play nine holes of golf, or quit now and play eighteen holes. I decided to keep practicing.

It was a decision Woollcott would have approved of. Golf was one game he had no regard for. Of course he never had much regard for the harp either-particularly as played by me-but it was better than golf. Aleck had been very much in my mind recently. The past Tuesday had been the anniversary of what I used to call my Gentile Bar Mitzvah. It was thirty-five years ago Tuesday that Woollcott had invited himself to my dressing room, introduced himself, and taken me over to the Hotel Algonquin to “meet a few friends.”

I jumped back to the present when I heard myself ripping off a showy glissando-the kind I thought was sensational thirty-five years ago, but the kind that Bill would give me hell for today.

Now I was thinking how proud Aleck would be if he could see William Woollcott Marx today. Bill had done a hitch in the Coast Guard, after studying two years at Juilliard, and now he had his own apartment in Hollywood. He was a man of independence. He insisted on paying his own way, all the way. There wasn’t much dough in writing serious music, so to support himself while he kept composing, he played jazz piano in all kinds of offbeat joints around L.A. and hustled arranging jobs. In his spare time he worked out new numbers for me, with the idea of our putting an album together. Bill had found his place in the world, and it was a good place.

The other three were going to find their places too. I had no doubts about any of them. Minnie, at fifteen, had announced to us what her future was going to be, in no uncertain terms. She was going to marry a guy who raised horses. Period. She was already making sure she’d have the proper qualifications. After school and on weekends she worked for the local vet.

Jimmy was looking forward to college. We’d been kidding him about his top-secret, hush-hush rocket-fuel project-until he won first prize in a big regional science fair. He knew what be was doing, and there was nothing funny about it.