Harpo Speaks!, Page 24

  This had no effect except to start them off on a giggling binge. So then I asked if they’d care to see my collection in the cold room. Oooh! They’d love to! I guess they figured I was going to show them dirty pictures.

  I made them put their coats on, then took them in the spare room and closed the door. I opened the closet where I kept my mallets and said, “Look! There they are!” The girls seemed very puzzled.

  I picked up a mallet and fondled the shaft and the head, making soft, loving sounds. “Isn’t it beautiful?” I said. “Would you like to feel one?” They shook their heads, speechless for the first time since I had picked them up. They were beginning to get scared. I moved in for the kill.

  I lit a cigarette, bugged my eyes, then exhaled a bubble instead of smoke. That did it. The two broads scrambled out of the cold room and ran all the way out of the joint, screaming, “He’s having a fit! He’s having a fit!”

  While they waited for the elevator to come, one of them happened to turn, and saw me standing in the open doorway, making a Cookie. They started screaming again. When the elevator man arrived he was ready for trouble. Then he saw it was only me. We exchanged winks, and I went peacefully to bed.

  Otherwise life was pretty depressing, after winter set in. Central Park wouldn’t be ready to play in again until April, and that seemed like an eternity away. But shortly after the first of the year I made a happy discovery. Across the street from my apartment house was a single-story garage with a large, flat roof. It was a perfect layout for a court!

  I talked to one of the two partners who ran the garage and told him I’d like to rent his roof for a croquet court. I’d have some matting put down. I’d keep the snow cleared off and the roof in good condition, and our playing wouldn’t bother anybody in the garage below. The guy didn’t say a word until I finished my spiel. Then he said, “What croquet? What kind of a racket is that? Don’t bother me—get outta here!”

  The next day I buttonholed the other partner and gave him the pitch. He said, “Never heard of no such game as ‘croquet.’ You’re full of crap. Get lost, Mac.”

  I wasn’t discouraged. That night I had a salesman bring samples of matting around to my dressing room, so I could test them. I picked out one that was just right—gave the ball good speed and an accurate roll. The salesman estimated the cost of covering the roof would be five hundred bucks. Fine, I said. I’d call him and give him the order as soon as I’d taken care of the details of renting the space.

  And so, back to the garage. Both partners were there and they saw me coming. I heard one of them say to the other, “Here comes the nut about the roof.”

  We haggled for an hour or so—the partners trying to worm out of me what my racket was, me trying to get out of them how much rent they wanted per month. When I said I already had an estimate on the matting and a crew lined up to lay it down, they got tired of kidding me along.

  “Out, out!” said the senior partner. “Off the premises and stay off, crackpot!”

  I changed my tactics. I asked them if they’d like four tickets to see a Broadway show that night. So that was the racket, they said—peddling tickets! I assured them there were no strings attached. I only wanted them to know I wasn’t a phony and that I had a regular job. One of the partners said, “For Christ sake let’s take ’em and get rid of this screwball.” He got on the phone and checked with the theatre. He found out the tickets were for real. He also found out they were for a Marx Brothers show. “No kidding?” he said. “Are you one of them?” I modestly admitted I was. They accepted the tickets.

  Next morning I showed up at the garage ready to do business. The senior partner met me at the door. “Well,” I said, “did you see the show?” Yes, they saw it. They took their wives and saw it. And now they knew I was nuts. I was jerkier on the stage than I was in real life, if that was possible. Too dumb to even say anything.

  He whistled for his partner. “This crazy son-of-a-bitch,” he said, “has the nerve to come here after we seen him in his stupid show last night!”

  Would I remove myself from their place of business for the last time, or would they have to call the cops? For the last time I explained, as patiently as I could, what I was after and the kind of money I was willing to lay out. I even tried to explain the game of croquet.

  Now they were really suspicious. “You look to spend five hundred bucks so you can hit a frigging ball around on our roof?” said one of them. And the other said, “There has to be an angle to this —watch it, Fred.”

  “Absolutely no angle,” I said. “All I’ve got up my sleeve is this.” I hauled out a certified check for one hundred dollars, payment in advance for one month’s rent. They looked at me with disbelief. Then they examined the check. They took it.

  I rushed to break the news to the Katzenjammer Kids. (I hadn’t wanted to tell anybody about my fantastic discovery until the deal was closed.) They were delighted. “Let’s go play!” said Woollcott. “Wait!” said Swope. “Let’s do it right. We’ve got to form a club. The first thing we do is schedule a meeting.” Herbert Bayard Swope was a big man who could only do things in a big way.

  We decided that six others should be invited to be charter members: Neysa McMein, the Kaufmans, the Schwartz brothers, and Averell Harriman. Now, I said, I could call the matting people and get the crew to work on the surface. Not so fast, said Swope. The club must first approve of all contracts, bids and expenditures by majority vote. We would take this up in a meeting.

  A whole month of meetings was devoted solely to choosing a name for the organization. We could only agree upon a temporary name—“The New York Croquet Club.” “What about the matting?” I kept asking, and Swope kept saying, “First things first, Harpo. First we have to draft the bylaws.”

  One day, two months after I had discovered the roof, one of the garage men whistled at me from across the street. “Hey, crackpot!” he called. “A guy here wants to talk to you.”

  The third man on the premises was a city fire inspector. He said, “I hear you got it in mind to use the top of this garage for some kind of ath-a-letic contest which requires the use of inflammable matting. Sorry, fellow. Against the Code.”

  What had happened was that Swope, in Doing the Thing Right, had talked to Mayor Walker, and Mayor Walker had talked to the Fire Commissioner, and the Fire Commissioner had looked it up and found it was against the city regulations.

  Spring was late that year. But what the hell, it was bound to come. If the first robin showed up, could the first tonk of croquet ball be far behind? And then it would be back to Central Park, and Hurrah for the Red, Blue, Yellow and Black!

  On the second Sunday in May I got a call from Woollcott. He was very excited. “Harpo,” he said, “I’ve rented a villa on the French Riviera for the summer.”

  “Hey, that’s great,” I said. “You’ll love it there.” I didn’t think it was great at all, because I was beginning to dream of Neshobe Island, the only place in the world where I wanted to go. I had no idea whether Aleck would love it on the French Riviera or not, either, because I’d never been there. As a matter of fact I didn’t know it from the Italian or the Hungarian Riviera or Loew’s Riviera in Brooklyn.

  “Something else, me bucko,” said Aleck, with the purr in his voice that meant I was being conned. “I think it would be elegant if you came along with me.”

  “Oh, no,” I said. “I can think of forty better places to spend the summer, all of them on Long Island in a hammock. Thanks a lot, but have a nice time, give my love to the folks over there and send me a postcard home.”

  On Saturday, May 19, 1928, we sailed for Europe on the S.S. Roma: Aleck, Beatrice Kaufman, Alice Miller and myself.

  CHAPTER 15 The Bam-Bang-Sock- and-Pow Part

  THE LIVING WAS EASY IN 1928. Life was mostly fun and games and the world was our private, million-dollar playground. All of us had, somehow, the means to do anything we wanted to do. Income tax was a nuisance—like getting yearly license plates for your car�
��but hardly a burden.

  We weren’t mercenary, or dollar-mad. Dough was simply a commodity we liked to have and therefore had, the same as air to breathe, coffee for breakfast, and a fourth for croquet. F.P.A. summarized our attitude when he said, “Money isn’t everything, but the lack of money isn’t anything.”

  When Aleck took over the Villa Galanon, on the Mediterranean coast of France near Cap d’Antibes, he lived and played the host in the grand manner. Hang the expense. He was out to make his mark on the international set. He made it, but it wasn’t easy-thanks to me. I didn’t exactly care for the type of dog Aleck put on, on the Riviera. It brought out the worst of the Patsy Brannigan in me.

  For a week before the villa was ready, the four of us—Beatrice, Alice, Aleck and myself—stayed in a small hotel, the Antibes. Woollcott favored this hotel because it was very French and very quiet. It was, as he put it, “off the ‘rout’ of the red-neck, rubberneck tourists.”

  I didn’t favor this hotel at all. The only action in the joint was a one-franc slot machine in the lobby, by the foot of the stairs. Every time I passed the one-armed bandit I dropped in a coin, pulled the lever and walked on through the hostile glares of the Frenchmen in the lobby, while behind me the machine turned and clanked to a stop. You’d think I’d set off a firecracker in the reading room of a public library. Woollcott refused to walk downstairs with me, on account of my vulgar exhibitionism.

  One evening I came down for dinner, dropped a coin in the slot, pulled the lever and walked on. When I reached the dining-room door, all hell broke loose. The machine hit a jackpot. The lobby burst into a riot. The quiet nontourists stomped and cheered and applauded. They did everything except dance the can-can and sing the “Marseillaise” to celebrate my stroke of luck.

  When we checked out of the hotel, two days later, the manager said, “I hope we have the pleasure of your company soon again, monsieur”—not to Woollcott, but to me. Literary figures came and went by the dozen in the Hotel Antibes, but the slot machine hadn’t been hit for three and a half years.

  Aleck was very happy to be set up at last in the Villa Galanon, where I would be under his vigilant, owlish eye.

  Woollcott was in his element on the Riviera that summer. Soon after we got there, he wrote to Edna Ferber: “I am here leading the life of a rosy, middle-aged dolphin.” There were times, however, when he was oddly—for him—placid. He would stand for long moments of silence gazing from the top of the cliff at the deep, cold-blue sea and the shallow, hot-blue sky. I think he was secretly wishing he was a fresh-water wabbit in Vermont again, instead of a Mediterranean dolphin.

  These placid moments, which became less frequent as the season got under way, were usually interrupted by Guy, the major domo, chauffeur and chef of Galanon. Guy would march up to Aleck on the double and out of breath, like an aide reporting to Napoleon in the midst of battle. There was a running battle going on, the battle for dinner. Each night’s dinner had to be a victory, a triumph of Guy and the haute cuisine over the peasant forces of common food.

  Guy never lost a battle. He never won without a fight, however. He skirmished from dawn to the dinner hour. He attacked the village market, ambushing the butcher, the wine merchant and the greengrocer. He sparred with the dairyman. Back at the villa he exchanged volleys with the pastry cook, the housekeeper, and the gardener. He fought off sneaky, rear-guard attacks by balky stoves and stopped-up plumbing. He rallied sauces and soufflés with rousing battle cries, urging them on to blend and to rise.

  It was between these skirmishes that Guy threw on his alpaca jacket, wetted down his wild thatch of hair—which kept struggling to stand, like a field of wheat after a cloudburst—and marched off to find his commander-in-chief, M. Woollcott, to report on how the battle was going and ask for any change of orders on the wine. After a mumbled exchange in French (not loud enough for the enemy to overhear), Guy would rush back to the front, rip off his jacket, and leap into the fray. Just when shattering defeat seemed certain, and the villa seemed doomed to fall into a pile of smoldering rubble, the battleground would become suddenly silent.

  Guy, in a spotless white jacket, his hair glistening smooth, would appear through the kitchen door. He would incline his head toward Aleck, closing his eyes in a moment of sublime reflection, and announce quietly,“Monsieur est servi.”

  Whether it was dinner for ten, fifteen, or just the four of us, it would be magnificent. We got the full treatment every night, from hors d’oeuvre to soup to fish to roast to salad to dessert to cheese, with wines between and cognac following after (except for me; I didn’t dare drink anything stronger than Vichy water). As a chef, Guy rated my highest compliment: he was almost as good as Frenchie.

  All due respect to him, I don’t think Guy could ever have won a dinner battle if he hadn’t been motorized. If he’d been a foot soldier he could never have pulled off his lightning raids on the village market. Even a horse-cavalryman couldn’t have made such breath-taking dashes back through the lines for emergency supplies —a bottle of Marsala, when there’d been a change in sauces, or an extra liter of cream, if the menu had been changed from hot soup to cold. Guy made it because he had a car. His vehicle was an ancient jalopy—a touring car, ancient of vintage but stout of heart. It never failed in line of duty.

  The jalopy had two speeds, the way Guy drove it-full speed ahead and dead stop, with nothing in between. Yet, he never had an accident. This was not because he was safety-conscious, but because pedestrians and other drivers were. When they heard him coming they got out of the way. They were able to hear him coming because Guy had the notion that the horn was an extra gas pedal. The accelerator by itself wasn’t enough. To maintain full speed ahead, he pushed the gas to the floor and kept squeezing the horn bulb, even down an empty country road. Cattle, goats and donkeys for miles around took to the hills when they heard the whonk-a-whonk-a-whonk of the rampant jalopy.

  Guy offered to let me drive his car any time I wanted to. At first I was flattered. Then I realized this was his way of letting me know I was slightly lower in class than the three other Americans at the villa. Ladies and gentlemen did not drive. They were driven. Beatrice and Alice were ladies. Aleck, le patron, was a gentleman. Me, I could drive the car.

  Guy never could quite figure me out. The language barrier didn’t help much. The day we moved into the villa and Guy came to my room to help me unpack, I tried to get across the idea that I’d prefer being called “Harpo” instead of “Monsieur Marx.”

  He got hung up on “Harpo.” He pronounced it a dozen different ways, none of which sounded vaguely like my name. I did a pantomime of playing the harp. “Ah!” he said. “Monsieur est harpiste?” I nodded my head yes. Then he looked around for the harp. “No,” I said, “no harp here. Harp in America.”

  I could not be, according to Guy, a harpiste if I didn’t have a harp. We were back where we started. Finally he seemed to get it. “Harpon? Harpon?” he said. He laughed, then made a motion like he was throwing a spear. “Comme ci? Comme ci?” he said. Now it was my turn to be puzzled. Guy saw from my look that spear-throwing had nothing to do with it. He shrugged, thought for a moment, then got another idea.

  “Appeau?” he said, hopefully.

  That was more like it. That was almost how I pronounced it myself, East Side style—“Hoppo.” To illustrate that now he understood, he began to whistle through his teeth. Somehow he must have known that onstage I whistled instead of talking. I nodded and whistled back at him. We nodded and smiled and whistled at each other for a while, and Guy said, “Ah oui! Monsieur l’Appeau.”

  I shook my head. He’d lost it again. He went back to Harpon. I said “Oui!” He tried Appeau again. I said “Oui” to that too. Guy raised his eyebrows, shrugged, and held up the palms of his hands. He went back to work and back to calling me “monsieur.”

  Just then Aleck came by. Aleck and Guy had a long jabber in French. I didn’t like the tone of their conversation, not at all. First Aleck, then Guy, then bo
th of them, would look at me and laugh. “What’s so damn funny?” I wanted to know, and Aleck explained. The word harpon meant “harpoon” in French, and appeau meant “bird call.”

  “I’ve instructed Guy,” he said, trying hard to keep a straight face, “that you have no preference, and like to be called by either name.”

  So, depending on his mood, I was either Appeau (friendly mood) or Harpon (unfriendly) to Guy for the rest of the summer. Whenever I told him his grenadine of beef or his cucumber soup was delicious, I was a bird call. But when I put a hand over my wine glass, refusing a rare Chateauneuf-du-Pape in favor of seltzer water, I was a plain old harpoon.

  There wasn’t room for a croquet layout at Galanon, but one terrace overhanging the sea was big enough for badminton. Because of the fierce wind, the mistral, we had to use special, heavily weighted birds. Once we got the hang of it, our games were as fierce as the wind and hot as the Mediterranean sun. Aleck, who played against his doctor’s orders, was amazing at badminton. He was quick on his feet. He was a placement artist and he had a deadly, slashing backhand. On the court he was indeed a “rosy, middle-aged dolphin”—if you could imagine a dolphin in sagging shorts and flapping bathrobe.

  Alice Duer Miller was even rosier. Badminton was the one game at which she could always beat Aleck.

  Sports on the Riviera were much more strenuous than on Neshobe Island. One day the wind changed, and the sea came booming at the shore in long, smooth breakers and everybody started riding the surf. This looked like something I should try. I was fearless in those days. I’d try anything, once. So I climbed down the cliff to the water and asked somebody to show me how to use a surfboard. Five minutes later I took my first solo ride on the waves, stunting around on one leg like a hot-shot daredevil. An hour later I was being towed behind a high-speed launch, out to an island that was famous for its bouillabaisse made with octopus.