by Marx, Harpo
Still, it was good to get back to Moscow.
It was a triumphant return. The house was sold out for every performance of my second stand in Moscow. I could do no wrong. I got so cocky I refused to play “Rose Marie.”
After the curtain came down on the last scheduled performance, the audience wouldn’t let me go until I played six encores. It was late when I got to the hotel that night. There was a message for me: “Please telephone Mr. Litvinov. Urgent.”
Mr. Litvinov, when I called, said he owed me an apology. He was delighted to have seen me so many times socially, but he was deeply disappointed that he hadn’t once been able to see me perform. The pressures of his office had been simply overwhelming. This I knew. Every time I’d been with the Litvinovs, at tea or lunch or some reception, he’d gotten a call from the Kremlin and had to duck out. Stalin kept the craziest hours of any boss a guy ever worked for.
Litvinov said he’d like to ask a tremendous favor of me. Would I—could I—put on an extra performance tomorrow night? Nothing could stop him from seeing it. “Please don’t misunderstand me,” he said. “This is not a command performance. It is a humble personal request.”
I told him I’d be honored to, as long as it was okay with the rest of the company. He laughed. “For the rest of the company,” he said, “it will be, I’m afraid, a command performance.”
At curtain time, the next night, there was one empty seat in the house—the guest of honor’s. We waited. Then Ivy Lee Litvinov sent a note backstage from her box telling us to go ahead. Her husband had been called to the Premier’s office, she explained, but he would be in the theatre in a few minutes.
We did the first half of the show. At intermission time Mr. Litvinov still hadn’t shown up. We waited. The audience, as Russians were apt to do whenever there was a delay in a theatre, turned the intermission into a party. They walked around in small groups, gossiping and arguing, drinking tea and vodka and eating snacks.
After an hour passed, Litvinov appeared in his box, smiling and making apologetic gestures. The audience cheered him and went quickly to their seats.
It was the best house I had yet played to in Russia. I think I gave them their money’s worth. I couldn’t tell from the stage, however, whether the Foreign Minister was enjoying the performance or not. When I came out for my first encore my heart sank. The guest of honor’s box was empty. Litvinov was gone and so was his wife. I attacked the harp without much enthusiasm.
When I finished the piece, I noticed there was something peculiar about the audience. They were applauding but they weren’t looking at me. They were looking at Comrade Maxim Litvinov. He was standing onstage, just behind me. He came over to me, put an arm on my shoulder and made a brief speech, in Russian. Then he turned to me and said, “You have given us precious moments of pleasure, Harpo. We shall be forever indebted to you. On behalf of the U.S.S.R. I thank you.”
He held forth his hand. I shook it. A cascade of steel knives tumbled out of his sleeve and clanked to the stage.
The audience exploded with one great shriek. It was the biggest laugh this bit ever got. The only time I ever played the straight man, I got my biggest laugh. And my comic was the Foreign Minister of the Soviet Union.
On the morning of my last day in Moscow Walter Duranty telephoned to ask if I would please meet him at the Embassy. The Ambassador would like to say good-bye to me.
In Mr. Bullitt’s private office the three of us drank cofree—good, American coifee—and talked about this and that. At one point Bullitt said, casually, “Harpo, could you do me a favor? I’d like these delivered back to the States, in person.” He held up a thin packet of letters tied with string.
I said I’d be glad to. I reached for the letters. Bullitt didn’t let me have them.
“It’s not as simple as you might think,” he said. “This packet must get to New York undetected. No one—no one—must know you have it. It will be strapped to your leg, under your sock. You still want to do it?”
Sure I still did. Why not? Nobody would ever suspect me of being a diplomatic courier. Exactly why he was asking me to do this little service, Bullitt said. “So who do you want it delivered to?” I asked, and he said I didn’t have to worry about that. I would be contacted as soon as I got home.
“Okay,” I said. “Strap me up.”
We bound the packet to the inside of my right leg and secured the straps with adhesive tape. “Just forget you’re carrying it,” said the Ambassador. “Except,” he added, “when you go in the shower.”
He thanked me, wished me bon voyage, and we said good-bye. Duranty dropped me off at the hotel. Melachrino was waiting in the corridor outside my room. Boy, oh boy! I thought. Wouldn’t she pop her cork off if she knew that I was now a secret agent tool
“Honey,” I said. “I forgot to tell you something. I’m also a spy. I’m smuggling the designs for the Ford tractor out of Russia.”
She closed her eyes and nodded her head. “That is a joke,” she said, and I agreed. It wasn’t very good, but it was a joke.
Melachrino took off her overcoat, her galoshes, her karakul hat, and her glasses, and sat to watch me finish packing. It was the coziest she had ever been with me. I gave her a big, dirty wink. She quickly put her glasses on, and that was the end of our intimate affair.
She watched intently while I packed the presents I’d bought to take home. It was quite a haul: several pairs of black leather gloves, replicas of the Czarina’s crest, silver tea-glass holders, teaspoons and cigarette cases, icons, chess sets, peasant embroideries, carving sets with ivory handles, fur hats and fur-lined boots.
I felt guilty. I hadn’t bought a thing for Melachrino. “Hey, Spy!” I said. “I want you to have something for a souvenir. What would you like? Anything in the trunk—you name it.”
She shook her head. “I have everything I shall ever want,” she said. “I cannot accept gifts, thank you.” She got up and ran her fingers caressingly down the wall of the hotel room. “You see?” she said. “This is as much mine as anybody else’s. This is my gift.”
She said it with defiance. Yet she sounded wistful too, and gave herself away. Tomorrow, when I was gone, she’d be back in her chilly flat and back in the routine of whatever dreary office she worked out of. No more luxuries of the Hotel Nationale, limousines, diplomatic receptions, trips to Leningrad, or backstage chats with big shots from the Kremlin.
I closed the trunk. Melachrino put on her hat, overcoat and galoshes and shook hands with me. She had, apparently, completed her mental inventory of everything I was taking back, the details for her final report. Beyond this she had nothing further to do.
“Good-bye, Mr. Marx,” she said.
“Dahsvedahnya, honey,” I said, and she said, “It has been a great number of laughs.” I closed my eyes and nodded and she marched out of the room to her next assignment.
That afternoon Eugene Lyons and his wife came to say good-bye. They insisted on driving me over to Pushkin Square and having me do the knife-dropping bit by the statue of Pushkin. Then, for the Soviet cameramen, I stuffed knives up the sleeves of the statue and they photographed Pushkin doing my act.
Later, Duranty and a guy from the Embassy came to take me to the train. The harp and the trunk had gone on ahead, lugged out of the hotel room by the usual platoon of squatty women wearing babushkas and surplus uniforms from the army of Genghis Khan.
In the station Duranty said it might amuse me to know that the Izvestia critic who reviewed my Moscow opening had just been executed for a crime against the State. But he hadn’t been shot for raving about my decadent, bourgeois comedy. He’d been shot for making an illegal exchange of rubles and valootye.
Until Duranty told me that, I had actually forgotten about the packet of letters strapped to my right leg. Now it felt like a manacle. When the Poland express pulled out of the station I was thinking of nothing else. So I really had had a close shave at the border, that night I entered Russia. I was clutched by a sudden chill.
What if Low Brow and his crew were on duty when I crossed over on the way out, and they recognized me? Suppose they gave me a working over, just for old time’s sake? What would happen when they found what was hidden on me? God Almighty! What had Woollcott gotten me into?
I could hear myself saying to Melachrino, eight hours earlier, “Yah, it’s a joke, honey.” Some joke. I was scared. I was so scared I fell asleep and slept through the dinner hour.
The next thing I heard was a gruff voice saying, “Marx! Marx! Tovarich Marx!” I opened my eyes. It was daylight. The train was stopped. The voice belonged to a Red soldier of the border guard. I recognized him from two months ago, and he recognized me. He jerked his head to signify I should come with him. I put on my coat and hat, took down my suitcase, and followed him off the train.
By this time most of the other passengers were lined up by the inspection station, waiting to have their papers checked. I asked the guard, in pantomime, if I hadn’t better get on line. He told me, in the same language, “No.” He led me into the station. There, waiting for me, was my old friend Colonel Low Brow.
“Your passport, please,” he said through his interpreter. I handed over my passport. Low Brow gave it to a soldier, who disappeared with it.
The colonel said, “Please come with me to headquarters.”
I couldn’t think straight. I may have walked straight, but I felt like a seasick unicyclist condemned to ride the deck of a ship in a storm. We came to headquarters. Low Brow opened the door and motioned me to go in. I went in. Waiting for me, standing in the middle of the office, was a Red officer who must have been at least a field marshal, a beefy guy decorated with an equal number of scars and stars. He was squinting hard at me and grinding his teeth.
I said, “Any of you fellows know any verses to ‘Peasie Weasie’?” The general looked at the colonel. The colonel looked at the interpreter. The interpreter said, “Please?” I didn’t answer him. I couldn’t.
The general broke into a diabolical grin, which with all the scars on his face looked like a map of the Rock Island Railroad. He grunted and waved toward a table on the other side of the office. On the table, around a hot samovar, were bottles of wine and vodka, stacks of bread, pots of sour cream, and platters of caviar, herring, sausages, pickles and piroshki.
The general issued an order. “Eat,” he said. “It’s your last chance. In Poland they eat like pigs.”
With no further ado the general obeyed his own order. That’s why he’d been grinding his teeth. He couldn’t wait. In fifteen minutes he had consumed half the goodies on the table, washed down with half a bottle of vodka. I didn’t do too badly either, having missed dinner on the train.
Colonel Low Brow reassured me, while I was eating, that my papers and baggage were being processed by his men. An honored guest of the Soviet Union, he said, must not be permitted to wait in line. When three other officers came into headquarters they were surprised to see me there. The colonel set them straight on who I was. I could recognize the words “Tovarich Marx” and “Tovarich Litvinov.” Name dropper.
A soldier brought in my papers, and the interpreter said, “It’s train time, please.” The general licked sour cream off his fingers and waved me good-bye. The other officers crunched my hand, one by one, and I was escorted over to the Warsaw express. I was stuffed and groggy when I plopped onto my seat. I had nothing to be scared of now, I told myself, but a delayed reaction set in and I began to shake. Knowing no other cure for my condition, I shook myself to sleep.
If the trip from Moscow to Leningrad had been a dream, the trip from Moscow to New York was a nightmare, every kilometer of the way. I had originally planned to stop over in Paris for a week or so, then hop over to London to meet Chico, who was due there in the middle of January to do a series of appearances.
My secret mission changed my plans considerably. I stopped only when I absolutely had to, and for no longer than it took to change trains. I was so conscious of what I was carrying under my sock that I favored my right leg, without thinking, and I caught myself walking with a limp. I’d always been an inconspicuous type guy offstage, but now people seemed to stare at me as if I had forgotten to put my pants on.
It was amazing how many counterespionage agents I could identify, by their dark looks and shifty movements, on trains and in stations. I must have spotted altogether six hundred agents, give or take half a dozen. The most dangerous ones, I knew, were not the dark and shifty characters. They were too obvious. The ones to watch were the characters like the guy who rushed up to me between trains, slapped me on the back and said, “Hey, boy! Am I glad to see another Yankee Doodle Dandy! Are you comin’ or goin’?” I was goin’. I got away from him fast. Pretty clever, trying to throw me off my guard like that. But not old Mapcase. I was onto his game.
The ocean crossing took seven days, according to the records of the French Line. According to me it took seven months.
I laid down a strict rule when the boat left Le Havre. I must leave the stateroom only to eat, and for no other reason. But after the second day out I overruled myself. It was a choice of getting caught or going stir-crazy. For two days I did nothing except play solitaire and make bets with myself on how long it would be before the ship hit another big wave. When I found myself checking the papers on my leg every time I turned up a face card, I knew I was going nuts.
I got to brooding about those eight weeks in Russia. Even after I had become a local celebrity in Moscow I couldn’t shake off the awful feeling (it hits you in the pit of the stomach) that I was being watched wherever I went, by eyes I couldn’t see. I never, not for a minute, felt I was really alone. I was a stranger who had stumbled into a deadly conspiracy, who had to be kept from finding out what the plot was all about. The worst part of it was knowing that, if I wasn’t within hollering distance of the American Embassy, I had nobody to turn to for help. I couldn’t call a cop or a lawyer, or complain to the government, or appeal to the guys I was working with. They were all part of the plot, every last one of them. The actors as much as everybody in the audience. The charming Litvinovs as much as the unsmiling Melachrino and the scar-faced general at the border. The devout Jewish stagehand as much as Comrade Stalin.
What tipped me off to the Russians were the things I admired them for at first, their ability to concentrate, their frank curiosity, their enthusiasm in the theatre, their capacity for hard work, their respect for regulations. Wonderful qualities, but deadly—deadly because I did not come across, among the thousands of Russians I saw, one screwball, one crackpot, one wise guy, one loafer, or one sorehead. I never saw anybody do anything just for the hell of it. I never saw anybody pull a spontaneous gag.
Like George S. Kaufmanski had said, a bit wasn’t funny merely because it got a laugh. It had to have a reason to be truly funny. Well, the Soviets were too wound up with reasons to suit me. It was a shame they couldn’t have gotten the job of the Revolution done and still had a few kicks along the way. What Moscow needed was one big hotfoot—just for no reason at all.
It was only during my last few days there that I began to make any sense out of the impression Russia had made on me. The more I thought about it the worse the feeling in the pit of my stomach got. I knew it wouldn’t go away until I got to the Polish border and breathed the fresh, free air of the Western world again.
Then came the meeting in Ambassador Bullitt’s office. And here I was, four days out of New York City, an American citizen on a friendly French boat, locked in my stateroom and acting like a fugitive lunatic. This was ridiculous.
I was making myself all the more conspicuous by hiding out. It was a smooth crossing for winter. There was a congenial crowd on board. So what was the famous, fun-loving harp player locking himself in his stateroom for?
I let myself out. I decided to play it nonchalant. I should mix it up. Circulate. Roam the ship and case the broads, like I was any old spy named Joe. I played a few rubbers of bridge, talked to elderly couples who looked trustworthy—and case
d the broads.
There wasn’t so much to this cloak-and-dagger business, I told myself, once you got the hang of it. The main thing was to act like you didn’t have a worry in the world. Still, I slept with my socks on, and took showers with my right foot sticking out of the bath compartment, standing like a ballet dancer with the gout.
The voyage dragged on, and on. The waves got farther apart and the ship’s clocks slowed down. I couldn’t sit still long enough to play a hand of bridge. I circulated. I roamed. I fidgeted. The stewards and the waiters and the bartenders were growing darker and shiftier by the minute. I began to wonder about the elderly couples in the library. They were the ones to watch. Trying to throw me off my guard.
Twenty-four hours to go. Twelve hours. Time to change to city clothes and pack my suitcase. Time to make a final check of the straps around the packet. Might get jostled getting off the boat, or in customs.
There was a knock on the stateroom door. I tried to pull my pants leg down the same time I jumped to my feet, and I fell flat on my face. I missed busting my nose on the edge of a chair by an inch.
It was only the steward. “One hour from docking,” he said.
“God bless you,” said I.
A lot of corny lines had been written about the Grand Old Lady of New York Harbor, and what the sight of her meant to a traveler returning home. Now I knew how true they were. When I saw the Statue of Liberty, out of the porthole, I couldn’t think of anything corny enough to say to her. She may have been nothing to seagulls and pigeons but a big, green latrine, and nothing but a menace to ferryboat captains—but to me she was the most beautiful broad in the world.
In thirty-five minutes we’d be tied up at Pier 88.
Somebody knocked at my door. It wasn’t the steward’s polite rapping. This was a solid belt that said, Open up or else! I didn’t have to open up. The door was flung open. Two hulking, stony-faced bruisers came in the stateroom, slammed the door behind them, and turned the lock. I hadn’t seen either of these guys at any time during the voyage. They were dressed for going ashore, and carried their hats and overcoats. One of them carried a black brief case. They both wore suits with padded shoulders, plenty bulky enough to conceal holsters and pistols.