“Can I see you a minute? A
half
a minute, Grouch?”
Groucho Marx put down his cards (he didn’t have anything anyway), picked up his cigar, and got up from the table.
There were few who could achieve this instant response. Harry Ruby was one of them. With Bert Kalmar, he had written some of Groucho’s most memorable material. He was perhaps Groucho’s oldest friend.
Groucho followed Harry out onto a secluded terrace of the Hillcrest Country Club.
Harry looked to his right, his left, then over his shoulder.
“Get goin’,” said Groucho, in his celebrated nasal monotone. “You’re beginning to look like George M. Cohan in
The Tavern
.”
Harry stepped closer to Groucho.
“Shall we dance?” asked Groucho. He took Harry into his arms and began to waltz.
Harry disengaged himself roughly and said, “Cut the comedy, Grouch, this is serious.”
“What is?”
“I’m in a situation, and you’ve got to do me a favor.”
“Sure, Harry, if I can.”
“Look, it’s a quarter to twelve. At three o’clock, I’ve got two girls coming to the bungalow.”
(The bungalow was Harry’s “studio” in South Beverly Hills; ostensibly a workplace, actually an assignation point.)
Groucho regarded him. “You’re sure it isn’t three girls at two o’clock?”
“I mean it, Grouch. It was a misunderstanding and now I can’t get out of it without a whole lot of trouble. What am I going to do with two girls?”
“Search me,” replied Groucho. “What do you
usually
do with them?”
“You don’t want to be even a little serious, huh? Not even for a second, huh? The great Russian actor—Neveroff!”
“Harry, what do you want from me? Let me go back to the game, will you? I’m a loser.”
“The hell with that game!” shouted Harry. “I’m offering you a better game. A matinee. A foursome.”
“Harry, let me ask you something. Do you know how old I am?”
“Not exactly, no.” Groucho looked right, left, and behind him, in imitation of Harry’s earlier moves. Then he said softly, “Fifty-nine.”
“So what? I’m two years older.”
“Three.”
“Two.”
“Three!”
“Two!”
“Four.”
“Three.”
“All right.”
“So?”
“So I’m through, Harry. I’m finished with that foolishness. You know that’s hard to say? Finishedwiththatfoolishness? No, it isn’t. Not so hard.”
“You should be at your peak,” said Harry.
“That’s about all I
can
do,” said Groucho, “is peek. Don’t get me wrong, Harry. I’m not bitter. I’ve had my share, nice while it lasted. Now, I’m interested in other things. Books, and so on.”
Harry looked at him with compassion and said, “Listen, my old friend, you’re just like
I
was about two and a half years ago. Then, thank God, my doctor sent me to this doctor.”
“A doctor’s doctor?”
“A specialist.”
“In what?” asked Groucho.
“In power. He gave me this shot, and the same day—
the same day
, mind you—”
“Yes?”
“I
functioned
. And, since then, I take a shot each week, sometimes two, and I live. And I want
you
to live, too, Grouch. Hear me out. This is my plan. Let me call the doctor, this doctor. I’ll make an appointment. Then we’ll have a bite, you and me, and we’ll drive down. He’ll give you a shot. And three o’clock, you’ll see.”
“Harry, for God’s sake, you’re embarrassing me.”
But Harry Ruby, a persistent man, persisted. He continued to talk, to sell. In time, he had hypnotized Groucho and had him in his car, speeding down Wilshire Boulevard to the Wilshire Medical Building.
In the parking lot, Groucho hesitated again. But Harry, artfully describing the joys that lay immediately ahead, led him into the building and propelled him into the big
elevator, peopled with wheel-chair cases, the very old, babes in arms, bandaged heads, and one trembling victim of Parkinson’s disease.
Harry, troubled that Groucho might bolt at any moment, held on to his arm tightly. When the elevator was full, the operator closed the doors and the gate and called out, “Floors, please. Speak up.”
“I can’t get a hard-on!’ shouted Groucho. “What floor is that?”
Harry Ruby swears that the elevator went up fourteen floors without stopping, then came down, one floor at a time, bouncing.
Hollywood was a raunchy, hip, swinging community. Can it be that its wild private life was a revolt against its overcensored public life?
American whorehouses are not, by and large, as interesting as the French, Japanese or Scandinavian varieties. However, I found one in Hollywood when I went there to live and work that was
more
than interesting. It was, in fact, enthralling. It contained elements of the best and the worst of Hollywood—glamour, vulgarity; aesthetics, commercialism; originality, imitation, heady eroticism, covert pornography; art, industry; industry, art. It had charm, wit, color, imagination, talent, a sense of professionalism, and offered—above all—Stars.
Cut the word “whorehouse,” an unsatisfactory label for what it is meant to describe. It is a hollow word, in any case, and fails to serve its purpose either descriptively or onomatopoetically. Is there another, a better word? Brothel? Worse. Bordello? No. Callhouse, hookshop, house of ill-repute, disorderly house (
disorderly
?), house of assignation, house of prostitution, bagnio, bawdyhouse, seraglio? No, none of these suggests any such establishment I have ever known, and certainly not that alluring oasis high in the Hollywood Hills.
My wife once brightly observed that the residential architecture of the movie capital is composed of a series of replicas of the finest homes in each of a thousand cities and towns.
“It stands to reason,” she said. “When you make good, you want to live in a house exactly like the one that impressed you early in life. The best one in town: Dayton, Ohio. Or Providence. Or Prague. Look around. See what I mean?”
If this is true, then Mae’s house was built by a Southerner who made good. It was a spacious Greek-revival structure with stately columns and wide porches and even a porte-cochere. A rolling, well-tended lawn in front; in back, a topiary garden.
Inside, there were a surprising number of rooms. I suspected, when I first entered the house, a considerable amount of alteration and remodeling.
Johnny Hyde introduced me to Mae and her pleasure palace during my first week in Wonderland. He and his nephew-assistant took me and Rita Johnson (another new client) to a preview of
The Awful Truth
at Pantages on Hollywood Boulevard.
The evening began with cocktails at the Beverly-Wilshire. From there, we were driven in an agency limousine to The Brown Derby on Vine Street. Endless hellos and wavings and table-hoppings went on as I ate what had been ordered for me: enchiladas (my first), Cobb salad (finely chopped raw vegetables, designed to spare the bustling Hollywood crowd the time and trouble of mastication), draught beer, Cranshaw melon, and coffee.
At one point, in the course of the frenetic activity, I found myself sitting and eating all alone. My agent had taken Rita across the room to present her to Darryl F. Zanuck. (Why not
me
?) His nephew had been summoned to a nearby booth by a single imperious gesture of Adolphe Menjou’s head.
I looked around the room, feeling light-headed. Could it be the alcohol, to which I was then unaccustomed? Hardly. One martini and half a glass of beer could not produce the euphoria I was experiencing. No. The cause of my inebriation was the near-presence of all these film celebrities in the flesh. Barbara Stanwyck. Gary Cooper, for God’s sake! Jimmy Durante and Bing Crosby and Joan Crawford. I stared and stared. In similar circumstances, I
still
stare.
Ernst Lubitsch once explained why. “You see a shadow up there on a screen, yes? It is black and white, maybe. And it is a head, yes?—maybe Garbo’s?—sixty times as big as a real head, yes? All right. You believe it is something real but you don't. There
is
no black-and-white head sixty times bigger. But you believe it. You try. Because you want to. Then comes one day—in the street, in a restaurant, a theatre. You see that head. Real. Regular size. In color. So. The shadow has come to life. Unreal into real. The dream, true. So why shouldn’t that be excitement, goddamnit? Yes?”
The Vine Street Brown Derby was the place for this sort of showcasing and it never disappointed me. Jimmy Cagney. Frank Capra (“I’d rather be Capra than God,” I had once said. “If there
is
a Capra.”) Jean Arthur. Look! Irene Dunne. Edward G. Robinson.
The nephew returned.
“Sorry,” he said. “That Menjou! Jesus.”
“Is he a client?” I asked.
“Not yet,” the nephew replied, and bounced his eyebrows meaningfully.
“I’m glad you’re back,” I said. “I was beginning to feel like the guy in the Lifebuoy ad.”
“Who?”
“You know. The one with the B.O.”
The nephew, his mind on Menjou, did not get it, but laughed a fill-in laugh. Sensing correctly that I was miffed, he attempted to entertain me.
“Some of these booths,” he said. “You’ve got to be careful as a son of a bitch.”
“What do you mean?”
“I think this is one of them. Yuh. Watch this.”
He scurried to the other side of the room, a distance of about a hundred feet, and slid into the booth opposite the one I was occupying. He waved to me, then turned to the wall and spoke.
“Can you hear me?” he said. “Can you hear me?”
I could, clearly. He went on. “That’s why you’ve got to watch it in here. Good-by.”
He returned.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” I said.
“It’s some kind of a crazy acoustical thing. And boy! The things that’ve happened on account of it! Like there was this guy supposed to be up for V.P. in charge of production at Warner’s? So what happened? He was sitting, talking to J.L. Like here. Where
we
are. Then he went over to there—where
I
just was—and sat with his lawyer and started in to tell him what a jerk J.L. was and all that. So, of course, J.L. heard it all plain, but instead of blasting off, he didn’t let on, didn’t say a thing. That’s how he is, J.L. But what he put that poor guy through! He just kept him on the string and negotiated and
negotiated and kept changing and it went on for a year almost, and every time the guy agreed, J.L.’d make another change and finally he negotiated the poor son of a bitch into a nervous breakdown. He’s out of the business, now, I think. The guy. And all on account of sitting in a wrong booth one night. The one right across over there.”
I was fascinated.
The others returned. We finished dinner in a gulp and joined the sudden exodus. It was almost as though a cue had been given for everyone to leave.
We all streamed half a block to the theatre.
There again, myriad contacts—spoken and pantomimed.
At last, the film. A hit for everyone. Irene Dunne, Cary Grant, Leo McCarey.
Sidewalk talk. The limousine parade.
We are at Ciro’s. Another drink. Scotch, this time. I dance with Rita, comforted by the touch of reality in the illusory razzle-dazzle of the evening.
We stay less than half an hour. I wonder why we came in the first place. I learn later that Ciro’s after a preview is
de rigueur
.
We go to The Clover Club, a posh gambling house. Roulette,
chemin de fer
, blackjack.
Rita is given some chips. She plays and loses. I decline, explaining that I do not know how to play. The nephew loses.
It is getting late. Rita has an early interview. The nephew takes her home, sends the car back.
Johnny Hyde is a big winner at the roulette wheel. His delight is contagious. We drink some more. I am beginning to feel the effects.
Johnny Hyde had turned into my buddy.
He looked at his watch and said, “I don’t think it’s too late. Do you?”
“For what?”
“To go on up to Mae’s. Come on. It’s only like a quarter to twelve.”
“What’s Mae’s?”
“You don’t know Mae’s?” he exclaimed, making me feel like a bumpkin.
“No.”
“Oh, baby!’ he said, and began to laugh. “Have
you
got something coming! This is one of those you-won’t-believe-its. Nobody does. Not the first time. You mean to tell me you’ve never even
heard
of Mae’s?”
“I’ve heard of it
now
,” I said. “But I still don’t know what it is. A club?”
“A
club
?” He laughed again. “Well, yeah. I guess you could call it that. You sure in hell can’t get in unless they
know
you. In fact, she doesn’t go for drop-ins, not even the ones she knows, but once in a while I get away with it. I tell you what. Order us another round. I’ll go take a leak and also give her a buzz.” He started off, turned and came back. “Who’s your favorite movie star? Female, I mean.”
“Several,” I said.
“Name
one
,” he insisted. “Come on. There’s got to be
one
comes to mind.”
“Barbara Stanwyck,” I said.
“Right,” he said. “Barbara Stanwyck. I’ll see what I can do for you. I mean, what
Mae
can.”
He moved off, giggling excitedly.
I ordered a whiskey sour for him, plain Perrier for myself. Something told me I was going to need my wits about me in the hours to come. It was becoming difficult enough as it was to marshal my vagrant thoughts.
Should I decline and go home? Of course. That would be sensible. But this did not seem to be the night for sensible. What did he mean about Barbara Stanwyck? (“I’ll see what I can do for you. I mean, what
Mae
can.”) Was all this really happening? And if so, was it happening to
me
?
The waiter brought the order. As he served it, Fred Astaire came in with his beautiful wife and a young man who resembled him. (I learned later that this was Hermes Pan, his brilliant choreographer.) They sat at a nearby table. I watched them, agape. The impeccable Astaire was an idol. Since I was roughly his size and shape, I wanted to acquire the effortless tact of his dress, the grace of his movement, and his sophisticated air.