Harpo Speaks!, Page 21

  Twenty more guests showed up after we ate, and all the men had to remove their jackets as soon as they got there. When the party got in full swing, I got restless. Then I spotted a fat guy whose wallet was sticking halfway out of his hip pocket. I tailed him, snatched the wallet, counted the dough inside, and slipped it back in his pocket. Then I ducked around the wing of the house and met the guy coming the other way and bet him ten bucks I could tell by looking at his face how much money he was carrying on him. The guy said sure, he’d take the bet. When I told him the exact amount—($950 and some change)—he was so amazed he damn near dropped his drink.

  I handed him back his ten bucks and told him what the gag was. He was so delighted that he begged me to come to all of his parties for the rest of the season, out in Southampton, and pick his guests’ pockets.

  I was a social success.

  That was the era of the Long Island Estate. I toured the big-time circuit, from the Swopes’ to the Talbots’ to the Whitneys’ to the Guggenheims’ to the Otto Kahns’ to the Pulitzers’. One I didn’t get to was Marcus Loew’s, which Woollcott alone of the Algonquin mob had the opportunity of seeing.

  Aleck was commissioned to write a magazine piece about Marcus Loew, the movie-theatre tycoon. He agreed to write it because he happened to like Loew. That was a condition of Aleck’s. He never did an article about anybody he didn’t like. An interview was arranged, with more protocol involved than in a meeting of two heads of state. Aleck would visit Loew at home, on Long Island, at ten o’clock sharp in the morning. Loew himself would answer the door, no monkey-doodle with servants. Then he and Woollcott would sit down in a quiet place, and talk for two hours. At the end of two hours, Aleck would get up, walk out, and return to New York City.

  At ten o’clock sharp on the appointed morning, Woollcott rang the bell at the main entrance to the Marcus Loew mansion. Loew was right on schedule. He opened the door. He was alone, no butlers or maids in sight. Loew was nervous, but obliging. He said, “Let me hang your hat and cloak in the closet here.”

  Loew opened the “closet” door—and was amazed to discover it led to five rooms of his mansion he had never seen before.

  Housing was not much of a problem in the 1920’s.

  The biggest love affair in New York City was between me—along with two dozen other guys—and Neysa McMein. Like me, Neysa was an unliterary, semi-illiterate gate-crasher at the Algonquin. But unlike me, she was beautiful and bursting with talk and talent. A lot of us agreed she was the sexiest gal in town. Everybody agreed she was the best portrait and cover artist of the times.

  Her studio was our third most favorite hangout, after the Algonquin and Woollcott’s apartment. We had some wonderful parties in Neysa’s place, and I was always the last to leave. Neysa had undertaken to teach me about art. She was an entrancing teacher, and I was a dedicated pupil. Perhaps because I was a pantomimist by trade and didn’t have much use for words, I fell in love with the fine arts.

  One of my proudest moments occurred when I reported to Neysa that I had spent an afternoon with Aleck and the Averell Harrimans at an auction on 57th Street and had purchased my first painting, a small, original Degas. Neysa kissed me, oh boy oh boy!

  She kept telling me I should paint too. “You’ll never be lonesome, Harpo,” she said, “as long as you have some paint, a brush, and some canvas.” This idea I laughed at. I told her I could only possibly do two paintings—one called “Waltz Me Around Again, Willie,” and the other, “Love Me and the World Is Mine.”

  Neysa had one failing as an art instructor. It was, as far as I knew, her only failing, period. That was her passion for fires. If a siren or bell should sound during one of our late-night seminars, that was the end of the seminar. Neysa was such a fire buff that she once dashed to Penn Station and jumped on a train when she heard there was a four-alarm fire burning in Philadelphia.

  We went on tour with Cocoanuts. When we settled down for our run in Chicago, I was surprised to find that Chicago had become a dull place. Ben Hecht was in New York. Pete Penovitch was away, probably visiting friends in Joliet. What to do with myself? Damn it all to hell, Neysa was right. I should paint.

  I rented a studio. I spent $350 on oils, brushes, props, smock, beret, and a couple of acres of canvas. I asked the guy in the artists’ supply store where I could get a model, and he gave me a number to call. A model came to my studio, a well-stacked brunette. I asked her how much she charged, and she said, “How do you want me—nude?”

  I said, “Of course.” Ten seconds later she was out of her clothes and in the nude.

  Remembering how Neysa posed her models, this way and that, to catch certain highlights and shadows, I posed my girl this way and that. After each new pose I went back to the easel. But I didn’t have the courage to bring brush to canvas. I was scared. For the first time since the night I made my debut on the stage on Coney Island, I had stage fright.

  Half an hour passed. I meditated. I inspected my brushes. I uncapped tubes of paint and studied them and smelled them and recapped them. I fiddled with the skylight. I put a scarf in the crook of the model’s arm—so. I put a rose in her teeth—so. I went back to the easel and stared at the canvas. What would Neysa do next? Now I remembered. She would sketch in the model with some crayon. That was my trouble: I had to sketch before I could paint. I picked up a piece of black crayon. I held up my thumb and squinted to get the model in perspective. All I saw was my thumb. It was shaking. I didn’t have the courage to make a mark on the canvas. I began to sweat.

  Finally the girl said, “Do you mind if I have a smoke, Mr. Marx?”

  On the way to her coat to get a cigarette, she sneaked a glance at my easel and saw that the canvas was a total blank. She said, “Don’t you even know how to draw, Mr. Marx?”

  “No,” I said, “I don’t. But I want to start. I want to start with you.

  “Well,” she said, forgetting about having a smoke, ”let me show you a few pointers. I’ll sketch you in. You sit over there.”

  “How do you want me—nude?” I asked. She said it didn’t matter. I didn’t bother to undress. Cheaper that way.

  So it came about that the model, undraped, painted the artist, fully draped. The two of us worked together, taking turns posing and painting, for several weeks. She showed me how to mix colors and how to use brushes and how to adjust the lighting. I didn’t show her much in return, but she didn’t seem unsatisfied.

  My model had to leave Chicago before I did. She left me with a challenge “Mr. Marx,” she said, “what you should do next is a self-portrait of yourself. It might be kind of hard but you must do it, for your own personal good.”

  Using the bathroom mirror, I painted a self-portrait. When it was finished it looked exactly like my Aunt Hannah.

  I never used a live model again. I’ve been painting, off and on, ever since. I’ve done a few pretty nice things—but only because I know that any resemblance I get is not going to be to anything I’m looking at.

  Before I left Chicago I sold my first oil. I had kept one of my cockeyed nudes because it was painted on the biggest piece of canvas I owned and I’d had it put in a pretty lavender frame. I decided to use the canvas for a landscape. So I painted trees over the nude—purple trees, to match the frame.

  When Cocoanuts was about to leave town, I took my landscape to an art dealer and offered it for sale. The dealer looked at the painting and said, “Why?” I held it up to the light and showed him how the original nude still came through, through all the layers of purple. “Well,” said the dealer, “it is sort of a novelty,” and he gave me five bucks.

  When I left the gallery, I made a recount and realized that the canvas and frame alone were worth twenty-seven fifty. But what the hell, I’d sold a painting! From what Neysa had told me, it had taken a lot longer for Rembrandt, Cézanne or Van Gogh to make their first sale.

  When the show moved to Boston, I set up shop, with easel, model, smock and beret, in my suite in the Parker House. Early
in the run, my old friend Eddie Cantor came to town, playing in Kid Boots. I arranged the scene, then called Eddie and asked him to drop by my place for tea. Eddie, who was as proper as any Bostonian, said he’d be delighted to have tea with me.

  I carefully refrained from telling him about my new career as an artist. What he saw when he came to the hotel was totally unexpected. I had left all the doors open. When I heard his soft, falsetto “Hoppo?” I yelled at him to come on in—I was busy.

  He walked through one open door, then another door, and I yelled at him to keep coming. He came through the last door and stopped cold. The first thing he saw was my model, a gorgeous young blonde, nude upon a chaise longue with a rose between her teeth. Then he saw me behind the easel, squinting at the model and painting with great concentration.

  Eddie, flustered by the presence of the naked girl, rushed over to the easel to make some kind of polite, face-saving comment about my painting. What he saw me doing on the canvas was filling in the colors on a big drawing of Mutt and Jeff.

  He made a queer little croak, then turned and paddled out of the suite without saying a word.

  I thought maybe I’d gone a bit too far with the gag, so after the show that night I took my harp to Eddie’s hotel and played a serenade by the door of his room. Unfortunately, before Eddie could come out and tell me how thrilled he was, a house dick came along and kicked me out of the hotel.

  My dalliance with the fine arts didn’t go to my head, I’m happy to say. When I got back to New York I found I hadn’t lost the old touch. The first day in town, Chico and I took a stroll through Times Square and, having nothing better to do, decided to sell money to a policeman.

  We stopped a friendly looking cop in front of Lindy’s and asked if he’d like to buy some used cash, cheap. He gave us a tolerant smile, winked, and walked on. We stopped him again. Chico flashed a dollar bill and said our special introductory offer was one buck for ninety cents. He gave the cop the dollar. The cop thought for a minute, rubbed the bill, then gave Chico ninety cents. Next we offered him a two-dollar bill for one-seventy. He bought the two-dollar bill.

  It was obvious he was humoring us along until he could decide whether we were a couple of nuts or a team of con artists. It was also obvious that he liked the bargains he was getting. But by the time we offered him a five-spot for four-fifty, he was convinced that something fishy was going on. He said he was going to haul us both in, unless we told him what our racket was.

  Chico shrugged and gave him a cheerful grin. “No racket, officer,” he said. “We just like to sell money, that’s all.”

  The cop muttered that he was right in the first place—a couple of nuts. He got away from us as fast as he could.

  Not long after this, I felt in the mood for another good deed. The beneficiary this time was Tiffany’s, the famous jewelry store on Fifth Avenue. Tiffany’s, I told myself, was too stuffy for its own good, and something had to be done about it.

  I bought a bag full of fake emeralds, rubies and diamonds, at Woolworth’s, then went to Tiffany’s. I asked to look at some diamonds. The clerk pulled out a tray of stones, and while I looked at them I turned over the bag from Woolworth’s, behind my back. Jewels went spilling and bouncing all over the joint. Bells rang. Buzzers buzzed. Store detectives appeared out of the woodwork, hustled out all the other customers and locked the doors. Meanwhile the whole sales staff, including the manager, in cutaway coat and striped trousers, were down on their hands and knees retrieving my sparkling gems.

  When they were all collected and put in my hat, the manager saw they were phony, every one of them. The attitude of Tiffany’s changed abruptly. The store dicks hustled me out the door, with the recommendation that I never return to the premises. On the way out, for a final touch, I tipped the doorman a giant ruby.

  Tiffany’s, I found out, had a long memory. Five years later I went back there to make a legitimate purchase, some silver for a wedding present. The minute I stepped into the store, two detectives recognized me and grabbed me. I convinced them I was carrying no fake jewels. Nevertheless, they stood close by while I bought the gift, and followed me to the door with visible signs of relief.

  On the way out, I tipped the doorman a giant ruby.

  One Saturday night the Thanatopsis convened without playing poker. A well-known female impersonator named Bert Savoy had drowned off Coney Island after being struck by lightning, and the next day a New York columnist had written an obituary for him in the form of a love letter. (Also on the following day, so the legend goes, all the pansies at Coney Island were wearing lightning rods.) Anyhow, the letter to the departed Savoy was one of the most revolting and mawkish things we had ever read. So we spent the evening sitting around the poker table composing telegrams to the columnist. I remember three of them:

  “WHERE WERE YOU WITH THE WATER WINGS? WORRIED.”

  “I’M FOREVER BLOWING BUBBLES. WORRIED.”

  “LETTER RECEIVED. NO CHECK. WORRIED.”

  George Kaufman, one of the collaborators on the telegrams, was shocked when he saw that we really meant to send them. For all his flair for the theatre and his biting, irreverent wit, George was a very conservative guy and something of a timid soul in public. I never knew a man so easy to embarrass.

  In fact, embarrassing George Kaufman became a rewarding hobby for me. When he was embarrassed, he would blush and stammer and twist himself into knots. When he was acutely discomfited, he would try to wind his right arm twice around his head and reach back to his right ear.

  Kaufman especially hated arguing over who should pay the fare when he took a cab with somebody else. Such scenes were unbearable to him. Paying cab fares became an obsession with George. He used to keep a supply of neatly folded bills in his breast pocket—fives, tens and singles—so he could make a quick draw and pay the driver before anybody started making a scene.

  Ordinarily I let George pay, without protest, but one day I resolved to cure him of his obsession. I cut a small hole in my pants pocket and stuffed the pocket with bills. George and I shared a taxi from Woollcott’s house to the Algonquin. When we got to the hotel I jumped out of the cab, opened my fly, reached in, pulled out a five-spot and handed it to the driver. There was quite a crowd around the hotel entrance, and I had a good audience. George was too mortified to speak. He slunk out of the cab, red-faced and twisted in knots, praying that nobody would recognize him.

  One time I was traveling with Beatrice and George to their country home in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. We decided to have lunch on the train. The diner was crowded, and an old lady asked if we minded her taking the fourth chair at our table. That was okay with us. It was only mildly embarrassing to George. He was apprehensive, I could tell, that I might somehow get involved with the old lady and make a scene. But I said nothing to her. I didn’t even look at her.

  She finished eating first. The waiter brought her check on a saucer. Still not looking up from my plate, I reached for the saucer, salted and peppered the lady’s check, and ate it. Kaufman twisted in such agony that I was afraid he was going to screw himself through the bottom of the car.

  That weekend, at the Kaufmans’, we got into a hot session of croquet. During a game one of the servants came to the court to announce that two ladies from the Society of Friends were in the house, keeping their appointment with Mrs. Kaufman. Beatrice excused herself—she’d forgotten the date, something to do with local charities—and said she’d only be gone a few minutes.

  Half an hour passed. George was getting edgy. It would be his shot as soon as the game resumed, and he was in a good position to win. He couldn’t wait any longer. He went inside to rescue Beatrice from the Quakers. Twenty minutes passed. No Beatrice. No George either. Now I was getting edgy. I looked in the window. There sat both the Kaufmans, cozily sipping tea with the ladies from the Society of Friends. I went to the kitchen and dumped a bottle of ketchup down the front of my shirt and pants. I went to the doorway of the living room, where I stood, dripping ketchup.


  “Excuse me, Ma’am,” I said, addressing Beatrice. “I’ve killed the one cat and he’ll be ready for dinner, but I still haven’t caught the other one. Will one be enough?”

  The visitors departed in haste, and our game resumed. Beatrice couldn’t stop laughing over the Quakers’ retreat, but George was practically reduced to ashes. He couldn’t get his ball through another wicket, and never did make it to the stake.

  The pursuit of happiness by me and my pals was seldom interrupted. We lived in a world of our own. Only once in a great while did anything occur to remind us that the bigger world beyond our own was not eternally full of fun and games.

  Poverty I had never forgotten, and never could. But meanness and stupidity I had been spared for a long time—until I had an unhappy reminder in the early summer of 1927. I made a fishing date with Paul Bonner, a book-collector friend of Woollcott’s, and Pie Traynor, the third baseman of the Pittsburgh Pirates. I said I’d take care of the accommodations. I wired a hotel out in Montauk, Long Island, for reservations.

  The hotel wired back: “RESERVATIONS CONFIRMED. TRUST YOU ARE GENTILE.”

  I was sore as hell, but I didn’t bother to wire back. Why should I stir up a fuss and embarrass Bonner and Traynor and ruin the weekend? Better to turn the whole thing into a joke.

  So when I entered the Montauk hotel I had my pants rolled above the knees, wore a tam o’ shanter, smoked a pipe, walked with a crooked cane, and signed in as “Harpo MacMarx.” The place was deserted. At dinner we were the only diners. Twenty waitresses stood around watching us eat. I began to feel depressed, and I finally told Bonner and Traynor what the “joke” was. They got sore and insisted we should move to a hotel where nobody cared what anybody’s name was.