by Marx, Harpo
(When Guy heard about this, he went into a sulk and called me nothing but a harpoon for a week. My eating a vulgar fisherman’s stew like bouillabaise de poulpe was a slur on his haute cuisine.)
Somebody told me that the only way to get a true picture of the Riviera was to see it from the air. A bird’s-eye view of the coast, they said, was a thing of unforgettable beauty. So one Sunday I drove over to the Cannes airport, where they advertised plane rides for fifty francs a spin.
The plane was a survivor from World War One, an open-cockpit Salmson biplane held together with splints and patches. Since I was so short, the pilot put a wooden box on the seat for me, so I could see over the rim of my cockpit all right. I saw over it, all right. I stuck out of the cockpit like an Eskimo in a kayak, more out than in, and I spent the whole flight hanging on for dear life to a wire strut. My bird’s-eye view of the Riviera was a close-up of the knuckles of my right fist, beyond which I didn’t have the nerve to look, and the beauty of which was quite forgettable.
That was one thing I tried only once.
The Riviera was pretty strong on indoor sports, too. Besides the usual kind, it offered roulette, baccarat and chemin de fer, in some lovely, enticing casinos.
The first casino I sampled was in Juan-les-Pins. I wandered in there one quiet afternoon. I was the only American in the place but I figured, what the hell, the spots on a deck of cards were a universal language, and I got into a small game of chemin-de-fer.
I was wrong about the language. Right away the dame next to me began to heckle me, in French. She resented the fact that I could only talk by making faces and signs. She was even more annoyed by the fact that I was chewing gum. She started mocking my gum chewing and this made me good and sore.
The next time I made the high bet and got to play a hand against the bank, I was dealt a seven-count. By the rules I should have just stood, but being sore I signaled the banker to deal me a third card. I got a four face-up, which put my count back down to one. The banker won the hand on a two.
The French dame, who had a hundred francs riding on me against the bank, hit the ceiling when she saw the cards I’d been dealt. She started to jab her finger at me and howl like a siren. The next thing I knew, a platoon of casino officials, all of them with beards, appeared out of nowhere and started a loud argument with the dame.
While they yammered away I went quietly off to a corner of the casino and stood on my head.
When the dame spotted me upside down in the corner she pointed my way and screamed louder than ever. Two officials rushed over to me. They hesitated. They weren’t sure whether to address my feet or bend down and yell at me face-to-face. They compromised and yelled at each other. I didn’t like the sound of their voices. I swore I heard words like police and sûreté. But I was damned if I’d stop standing on my head until they calmed down.
Thank goodness an Englishman who could speak French came into the casino. He got the story from the guys with the beards, then knelt down on the floor like he was looking under the bed for a lost collar button, and said to me, “Old boy, it seems you’ve broken a rule of the game, and you’re being asked to pay this lady a hundred francs.”
I came down off my head, gave the dame her hundred francs, tipped everybody in sight—including the dame—a stick of Juicy Fruit and blew the joint.
Now that the international incident was settled and war clouds no longer hovered over Juan-les-Pins, I decided to switch casinos and try my luck at Monte Carlo.
When I told Aleck this, he clapped his hands and said, “Marvelous idea! We shall all go to Monte Carlo—and it’s my treat, bunnies. Dinner at the Café de Paris is on me. Good King Alexander is full of noblesse oblige and feels like bestowing largesse upon the poor.”
“You’d save a lot of scratch, King, if you bestowed your largesse upon a chair and stayed home,” I said. Aleck was feeling so good that he laughed and refrained from calling me the name I expected.
Guy, who was the head of protocol at Galanon, told us what to order at the Café de Paris and what we should wear to the casino —evening dresses for the ladies, simple and not too much jewelry, and black tie and dinner jackets for the gentlemen. When he saw me about to leave in polo shirt, blazer and white ducks, he was horrified. He had a frenzied consultation with Aleck. Aleck shrugged. He turned to me and said, “How can I explain you to Guy? There’s no French word for ‘boob.’”
I went as I was, which was the only way I was ever comfortable anywhere I went.
Dinner was great. Guy had touted us onto the best food on the Riviera. When we got to Monte Carlo, about eleven o’clock, I was feeling well-fed and lucky. I couldn’t wait to get into the action. But I couldn’t get past the outside entrance. A guy as big as Jess Willard and dressed like an ambassador blocked my way.
“I’m sorry, monsieur,” he said, pointing to his throat. “You will not be allowed in the casino without a tie.”
“He’s quite right, you know,” said Aleck. He’d been waiting all night for this. He gloated and swept grandly into the casino, with Beatrice on one arm and Alice on the other.
Fortunately I was wearing black socks. I went outside into the shadows. I took off my socks, tied one of them into a bow beneath my shirt collar, stuffed the other one in a shoe, stuck my shoes inside my belt, and went back to the entrance. The same guard was there. This time he smiled and said, “Forgive the inconvenience, monsieur, but you know—the regulations. Please go in. Your friends will be expecting you.”
It was the first time I ever gambled with a tie on, but I made out very nicely. I was, in fact, too lucky at roulette. In the “Little Casino,” where I played, if you got on a streak and hit like five numbers in a row they’d declare the bank closed. In this part of the joint they saw to it a guy never made over a thousand bucks. So when my winnings reached the five-hundred mark, I took to slipping stacks of chips to other guys to bet for me, on a commission.
That fattened my bankroll but killed my fun. Whenever you hit a number in this casino you had to tip the four croupiers. I’d been making them work for it. Before they got a tip from me the croupiers had to line up and sing “Merci beaucoup, monsieur!” in harmony. By God, at that they sounded better than the Four Nightingales ever did.
Later, when I kibitzed the action in the “Big Casino,” I felt like a piker. The center of attraction at the roulette wheel was a retired carpet-sweeper manufacturer, a doddering old coot of eighty-five who played in a wheel chair, with a male nurse in attendance. He was betting a thousand American bucks on red, on every turn, and he was winning consistently.
At one in the morning the nurse said it was past his patient’s bedtime, and insisted on wheeling him home. Before they left, the old guy handed over a wad and told the dealer to bet a thousand for him on red, once every half hour for the rest of the night.
The next morning I checked back and found out how much the old guy had collected. While he’d been sleeping, the dealer had won him a net of twenty-two thousand dollars.
Not long afterward another American, this one a cotton-fabric king, didn’t do so well in the Big Casino. He lost more than ten times the amount the carpet-sweeper king had won, also in the space of one night. The cotton-fabric man came unraveled. He went out on the terrace at dawn and blew his brains out.
On the following night I went to Monte Carlo on the hunch that this would change the tide of luck. My hunch was wrong. I lost every cent I came with, inside of two hours. Instead of slinking home, like a good sport, I went around the Little Casino asking everybody in sight, in a loud voice, “Where’s that cliff you’re supposed to throw yourself off of when you lose?”
The management was very sensitive about this, after what had happened on the terrace eighteen hours earlier. They cornered me and asked me how much I had lost. A thousand francs, I said. So they counted out a thousand francs and paid me off, whereupon I was politely heaved out of the joint, black-sock necktie and all, with a strong hint that I never return.
&nbs
p; Pete Penovitch, I said to myself, simply wouldn’t believe it, the way they operated this joint. They put down the red carpet for an eighty-nine-thousand-dollar winner, then turned around and kicked a loser out.
The hell with Monte Carlo. I set up my own casino, at the Villa Galanon. I ran the operation my way, and I never had a customer squawk. That was more than the boss of Monte Carlo could ever say.
I had gone to the flea market in Nice, where I bought the nuttiest thing I could find. This was a thing called a Chinese flytrap. It was a fantastic construction of bamboo, wire and string, which flies could fly into but couldn’t fly out of. The Chinese flytrap was designed to be humane, which was why it was so complicated. When the flies were trapped they weren’t killed, or even injured. As long as the bottom door was shut they couldn’t get out, but they could live inside in style until they died of old age, or whatever unswatted flies die of.
I was a gambling man as well as a humanitarian, however, being equal parts Pete Penovitch and Albert Schweitzer, so I turned the flytrap into a casino.
After a lot of serious thinking (I missed Chico, who could have figured the whole thing out in a minute on the back of a pawn ticket), I arrived at what the odds should be on a fly surviving the trap. Two to one. This would give the fly a sporting chance and give the house a chance to win its rightful share as well.
What I did was to catch only a few flies at a time, then block the entrance. When I trapped a batch of customers I marked them, one by one, by dabbing a broom straw in red ink and poking it through a slit in the trap. Then I opened the door and gave them all their freedom.
Here’s where the odds came in: when a marked fly came back and was trapped a second time, I did him in with the blunt end of a chopstick. First-time suckers got painted red and let loose. Second-time losers got squashed. (I used to give the same kind of odds to mosquitoes who pestered me when I practiced the harp. I would only swat the ones who sang higher than the A-flat above middle C. The rest went free.)
I was amazed at how few flies came back to the trap. I’d never dreamed so many flies would be smart enough to know they had a good thing going at 2-1 and would stay away.
Beatrice and Alice were very impressed by what the Chinese flytrap revealed, to wit: your average housefly was a much better gambler than your average person gave him credit for. Aleck was more alarmed than impressed. He said I was dooming the human race by developing a super-intelligent race of flies. But that didn’t stop him from betting on the flies against the trap. When he ran his winnings up to fifteen francs I declared the bank closed and went out of business. Now I knew what it was like to be on the side of management. I couldn’t cover the nut for red ink.
Our summer seemed to divide itself into three phases—the Gambling Period, the Literary Period, and the Society Period.
Woollcott broke me into the Literary Period by easy stages. Step number one was to introduce me to Somerset Maugham. Aleck knew I was already an admirer of Maugham’s. Without knowing who he was, I had singled him out as the best aquaplaner on the coast. When Aleck told me he was an eminent author and perhaps the most famous resident on the whole Riviera, I was doubly eager to meet him.
Maugham’s villa on Cap Ferrat was the most exciting house I’d ever seen. I’d been in bigger and more lavish joints on Long Island and in Palm Beach, but none of them had the beauty of appearing to be carved out of the landscape, like Maugham’s did. It was built around a swimming pool, which was fed by fountains. The house was filled with the cool sound of rushing water, the mingled scents of tropical flowers, and color—the colors of the greatest of the French Impressionists and Moderns. Such paintings I’d never seen in a private collection before.
Our host, wearing only shorts and sandals, came bounding downstairs to greet us. Maugham was then fifty-four, but he looked no older than thirty-four. He was lean and brown and he sizzled with energy and good cheer. Aleck, I noticed, was relieved to see that the eminent author and I hit it off well from the start. I was on my best behavior, and so was Aleck.
Maugham wanted to show us the rest of his joint before giving us tea. He took us upstairs to the master bedroom, his pride and joy. It was situated so that he could dive out of his bedside window and straight into the pool when he woke up in the morning. This, I thought, was terrific.
While Maugham and Woollcott were turned away, discussing a painting on the far wall of the bedroom, I pulled off all my clothes and plunged into the water.
Looking up, I saw Woollcott looking hopefully at Maugham, to see if I had shocked him. Maugham’s reaction was not what Aleck expected. He pulled off his shorts, kicked off his sandals, and dove into the pool to join me.
Maugham and I met several times afterward, at parties and in the surf, but after that summer I didn’t see him again for eight years, and I was sure he would have forgotten me. At the opening of Dead End, in 1936, I spotted him during the intermission. He was sitting several rows behind me, with S. N. Behrman. I crawled back on all fours, monkey-fashion, across the tops of the seats. I was about to reintroduce myself when Maugham said, “Terribly sorry I haven’t a banana for you, Harpo.” He hadn’t forgotten.
Aleck was pleased with my success at Cap Ferrat. Next, he allowed me to meet H. G. Wells. I got a bit confused about who this guy was, and in trying to make conversation I said, “I’ve heard a lot about your company, Mr. Wells. Especially out West, when I was on the Pantages-time. Every town we played in had a Wells-Fargo office.”
I passed my Maugham, but I flunked my Wells.
In the middle of the summer I acquired a partner in crime. Ruth Gordon arrived at Antibes. Ruth was a special pet of Aleck’s, and his special nickname for her was “Louisa.” I remember he once took Ruth and me in his arms and said, “You two are the world, do you know that? Every man as pretentious as old Alexander should have at least one Louisa and one Harpo beside him always, to remind him of what really makes the world go round, and that everything else is pretending.”
We did a pretty fair job of making Aleck’s world go round for the rest of the season, Ruth and I. The first week she was there, I borrowed Guy’s car and took her for a spin through the countryside. I’d heard Aleck speak of a famous restaurant on a mountaintop at a place called St. Paul. I decided to take Ruth there.
I drove north. I got lost. It never occurred to me that Guy’s jalopy could get lost in its own neighborhood. I assumed that it knew the roads so well that it could find its way whonk-a-whonk-a-whonk anywhere you wanted to go. Not so. We wound up driving from nowhere to nowhere.
Ruth’s French was no better than mine. We kept stopping to ask people on the road, “St. Paul? St. Paul?” The natives gave us funny looks, shrugged, and went on smoking their pipes, milking their goats and tying up their haystacks as if they’d never seen us.
I took to asking, “Cincinnati? Cincinnati?”—and got a better response. People pointed, at least. But everybody pointed in a different direction.
Somehow, we finally made it up the mountain to St. Paul. We were famished. The restaurant was down a long flight of stone steps from the village square. The innkeeper was overjoyed at having two Americans for lunch. The gist of his welcoming speech was that we deserved to be served only the spécialité de la maison, omelette au rhum. Whatever the hell that was, we wanted it. Trusting souls that we were, we believed that anything with a French name was good to eat.
What we were served—after a soup with wine in it—was an omelet doused with rum. We lapped up the soup and the omelet. Ruth, it turned out, was just as vulnerable to alcohol as I was. When we finished the omelet, we were higher than two kites. The innkeeper insisted we have crêpes suzettes. When we finished the crepes suzettes, which were prepared with brandy, we were skunk drunk. I remember staggering forth from the restaurant—Ruth and I helping each other up the flight of stone steps, which had lengthened considerably during lunch-and then walking around and around the village square so I could sober up enough to drive. I remember driving down the m
ountain and laughing like hell because the car had no brakes. I remember stopping to ask the natives the way to Galveston, Texas.
The next thing I was conscious of was being back at the villa and Guy coaxing me to drink some thick black coffee that reeked of cloves. God and the patron saints of Harpo and Louisa had seen us home. They must have placed along the route somebody who knew where Galveston was. How else we could have made it I’ll never know.
The postman cycled out to Galanon with a special-delivery letter one afternoon while we were playing badminton. Aleck must have been expecting it. When he saw the return address he made a joyful little gasp and threw his racket aside, conceding the game. He tore it open like it was money from home. As he read the note, he beamed and beamed and I thought he was going to dance one of his tippytoe jigs. Instead, he turned serious.
“Harpo,” he said. “He’s coming. He’s coming to have lunch with us next Wednesday. Bernard Shaw!”
“Bernard Shaw?” I said. “Didn’t his name used to be Bernie Schwartz? Ran the cigar stand in the Hotel Belvedere?” I was kidding, of course. I’d heard them speak of Shaw many times at the Round Table. He was an English politician or songwriter or something.
Aleck was in no mood for gags. He cut me off with a huffy stare, and trotted away to find the girls and tell them the great news.
The coming of Mr. and Mrs. George Bernard Shaw to Villa Galanon was Woollcott’s supreme coup of the season. Everything had to be exactly right for the occasion. For Guy, preparing the Wednesday lunch was the longest and toughest battle he ever fought.
It took four days to decide on the menu. What made it so hard was the fact that Shaw was a vegetarian. How strict he was about his diet, Aleck didn’t know. Ruth was sure that Shaw ate bacon. Beatrice didn’t think so. Alice said there were all kinds of vegetarians, some liberal, some orthodox. The liberal ones ate fish and fowl, only laid off red meat, and Shaw was certainly a liberal in every other respect, wasn’t he? Woollcott did not agree.