by Marx, Harpo
That night Susan and I sat around wondering where to look for some fun. We had come to the wrong place for a gay time. “I know what I’m going to do,” Susan said. “I’m going to dye your hair, Harp.”
“Well, okay,” I said. “but wait until I finish tomorrow’s round of golf.”
So I shot a round with the Admiral, with my hair still its natural brown. That night Susan went to work on it. It came out a flaming pink. The next day I was wearing a hat when I showed up on the golf course. Halfway through the round, while the Admiral was lining up a putt, I took off the hat. The old guy looked at me, made no comment, and sank his putt.
That night I had Susan go to work on me with a razor. The following day I took off my hat along about the eleventh hole. The left side of my head was still a luxuriant, flaming pink. The right side was shaved clean to the scalp. The Admiral made no comment.
On the fourth day the rest of my skull was shaved, except for a square pink patch over my left ear. On the fifth day the patch over my ear was dyed a shiny, jet black. The Admiral’s game was steady as ever, and golf was the only topic of our conversation.
On the sixth day I turned up with my hat pulled down over my ears. Under the hat my head was shaved completely, smooth as an uncracked egg. But my golf date never showed up. I called the joint where he was staying. The desk clerk said the Admiral had checked out that morning, a week ahead of time, refusing to leave a forwarding address.
I went home looking like a dehydrated Erich von Stroheim, and that was how the Most Normal Man spent his second honeymoon. I’m afraid we gave Rose Hecht a pretty hard time with her theory.
The truth was, marriage hadn’t changed me much at all. If anything it had brought out more and more of the Patsy Brannigan in me. Now I had a permanent claque to egg me on—a claque of one, Susan.
Dr. Sam Hirshfeld had become our family physician, and one of our best friends. I never knew a man who had more time and affection to give to other people, or more energy to give to his work—with enough left over to take on anybody, any time he could, at any game you wanted to name. This guy was half demon and half saint.
Years later, after Sam had passed away, Ben Hecht wrote: “His work as physician and surgeon was a small part of his activities. Through with his hospital rounds and his professional calls, Sam would dash off to some laboratory where he pursued the secrets of longevity and cancer cures. At midnight Sam would enter his home, stretch himself in his bed and read until dawn. His mind poked into all the corners of science and psychology, and mysteriously found time for poetry and novels.
“But Sam’s chief activity was his side line of good Samaritanism. His patients were always his friends. He got them jobs, nursed them out of drunks, picked out babies for childless couples to adopt, induced roués to marry girls they had made pregnant, restored the egos of defeated writers and suicidal wives.
“As I write of him, I see again his wide grin, his tense eyes full of eagerness and wisdom, his trim and tireless body. He was one of my few friends who could beat me at badminton and beach racing. If not for his eyes, he could have passed for a prize fighter. . . .”
A gang of us used to go to the fights, baseball games or hockey matches—whichever was in season—once a week, and Sam was our ringleader. Hockey was his special passion among sports. He never missed a match unless he had to be in surgery or with a patient who was confined to bed. Patients who were ambulatory he often brought along with him to the hockey game. One such was our mutual friend Gene Fowler, the writer.
Fowler was a big, congenial, convivial guy who didn’t believe in moderation in those days, particularly moderation in drinking. When he hit the bottle he stayed on a bat for weeks at a time. But Gene was also a wise man, wise enough to know that only the living got any enjoyment out of life. So when he felt a drunk coming on he placed himself in Sam’s custody, and stuck as close as he could to Sam until the urge passed. If he slipped, Sam would be handy to give him a hypo to ease him back on the wagon.
One night Hirshfeld, Fowler and I went to a hockey game. Fowler swore he had taken his last drink. He even bought four bags of popcorn before the game—to absorb his craving for alcohol, he said. Everybody except Sam was impressed by this. The doctor was hopeful, but noncommittal. “We shall see,” was his attitude.
By the end of the first period Gene, munching away at the popcorn, appeared to have lost the symptoms of his craving. He’d been close-mouthed and fidgety when he first got to the arena. Now he was cheerful and full of chatter. Sam was finally impressed. For the first time, he felt his patient was making some kind of progress.
In the middle of the final period, it became plain what kind of progress the patient was making. He was getting progressively drunker. Fowler was mysteriously but unmistakably plastered. Sam was baffled. Gene hadn’t once left his seat, and Sam had kept an eye on him the whole time.
The doctor bore in to investigate. Now that Gene had won the battle of the booze, he didn’t have to lie any more, and he happily made a full confession. Before the game started, he confessed, he had slipped into the men’s room and doused a quart of bourbon over his popcorn.
Going through the parking lot after the game was over, Gene was feeling ultragenial. He was very pleased with himself and with the world. We passed a guy who was having car trouble. Gene stopped, stuck his head under the guy’s hood, poked around, and yanked something loose. “Here,” he said. “Here’s your trouble, pal.” He handed the guy the carburetor and walked on, overflowing with the spirit of human kindness.
Gene Fowler once tried to teach me the art of drinking. I didn’t enjoy drinking, he said, simply because I didn’t know how to do it right. It was best to start with brandy. Brandy, taken properly, could keep you glowing without actually making you drunk. The secret was in drinking it slowly enough. You took a sip, then squeezed an ice cube in your hand. When the ice cube melted, it was time for another sip.
I gave it a conscientious try. I got the first gulp down all right, but before the ice cube had melted I got to thinking about the second gulp and dreading it so much that I had to go throw up.
There was something wrong with my chemistry. Alcohol and Harpo didn’t mix. This even applied to me as a bartender, when I entertained. Charlie Lederer once said that I could take a sealed fifth of rare old Scotch, uncork it, and pour it straight from the bottle—and by the time the liquor got in the glass the drink would be ruined.
For this reason I was never asked to join Fowler’s mob, whose members included John Decker, John Barrymore and W. C. Fields, and whose common bond was the kind that bourbon was bottled in.
John Decker was an artist who was unbelievably facile with brushes and oils. He used to paint in the styles of the old masters as a way of picking up eating money, like other artists knocked out magazine covers or portraits of society broads. Decker’s canvases weren’t cheap copies of old masters. He had a genius for reproducing the feeling, the lights and shadows and depths, of the originals.
I got to know Decker well when he painted a series of me and my brothers after the manner of Gainsborough, Franz Hals and Rembrandt. While I was posing for him as “Blue Boy” he told me he hadn’t seen his pal Jack Barrymore for a long time. Barrymore was in a serious decline. He was disintegrating physically and mentally, and he knew it. He was ashamed even to see his good friends and kept himself a voluntary captive of doctors and attendants.
I said, “You know, it might give the guy a shot in the arm if we got a gang together and took him out. We could have dinner at my house, then maybe go to the fights.” Decker thought it was a wonderful idea. The only thing was, if Jack came, his girl would have to come along too. “Fine,” said I. “We’ll make it Saturday night.” Decker checked with Barrymore’s girl friend. She said Saturday was fine with her—as long as her husband came along too. Why not? said I.
The next day Decker told me it was all set with Barrymore himself. “You don’t mind if Jack’s masseur comes along too, do you?” he
said. Of course I didn’t mind. I knew that the rub man’s main job was to control Barrymore’s ration of drinks. The boss was allowed a small glass of watered vermouth every two hours.
One thing Decker warned me about. We should all drink freely in front of Barrymore. If we held back, or hid the bottles, he’d suspect we were treating him like a child, and—like a child—he’d get belligerent. I hired a bartender for Saturday. I told Susan that, all things considered, it might be a swell time for her to take her mother out to dinner and a show.
Everybody arrived on time: Barrymore, his girl friend, the girl friend’s husband, his rub man, the rub man’s wife, Decker, Fowler, and three or four guys I didn’t know, the type which there was only one word for—“cronies.” The Great Man strode into the house at the head of his entourage. He looked marvelous, lean and graceful as a college athlete. He strode through the joint delivering an eloquent and expert tribute to each of the paintings on the walls.
No matter where Barrymore stood, you had the illusion that he was under a spotlight. He was every inch, ounce and fiber a masterful actor. He was also a masterful magician. By the time we sat down to eat he was fried. He had stolen two drinks from me alone, before I’d had a sip of either one. I was under his spell and didn’t know what had happened until it was too late.
During dinner I noticed that he was drenched with sweat. His shirt and jacket were soaked through, and sweat was streaming down his face. I told him to go ahead and take his coat off, if he was too warm. When he found my eyes he gave me the piercing, pained look of a wounded eagle. “My dear Marx,” he said. “To perspire is a gift of Providence. It saves me the trouble of pissing.”
After the fights we wound up having coffee and nightcaps in a crummy jukebox joint off Hollywood Boulevard, a place that had sawdust on the floor for atmosphere and therefore charged double for everything. Decker and Fowler said good night and left the party. The girl friend and her husband followed them. As host I felt it was my duty to stick it out to the end, along with the rub man and the cronies. It was two in the morning. Barrymore was trying to make time with the waitress, a blondine dame of about fifty with eyes too close together and teeth too far apart.
Finally I had enough, host or no host. When Barrymore pulled out his handkerchief, the piece of napkin the waitress had written her telephone number on fell out of his pocket. The last time I saw John Barrymore alive he was down on his hands and knees, groveling on the floor, weeping and snuffling, looking through the sawdust for a juke-joint waitress’s phone number.
The passing of an ordinary man is sad. The passing of a great man is tragic, and doubly tragic when the greatness passes before the man does.
The mob that hung out in the Hillcrest Club was more my speed. A bunch of us had lunch there so regularly that we organized ourselves into a Round Table.
Members of the Hillcrest Round Table included Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, George Jessel, Jack Benny, George Burns, Lou Holtz, Milton Berle, Danny Thomas, Danny Kaye, and four or five Marx Brothers. The doubtful Marx Brother was Chico. Chico turned up only once in a while, and never for very long, depending on how his business was going. Chico’s business at the time was the daily pinochle game at the Friars Club. As of this writing, some twenty years later, it still is.
I’ve often been asked to compare the two Round Tables, the Algonquin and the Hillcrest, since I’m the only guy lucky enough to have belonged to both. Actually, there’s no fair comparison to be made. They were different in every respect.
At the Algonquin anybody, male or female, who dropped by and was accepted into the conversation “belonged” to the Round Table. Contrary to legend, the talk at the Algonquin was not one continuous olio of sparkling wit. There were long stretches of serious talk and literary shop talk, and when the Algonquinites told jokes or made up limericks they weren’t competing for laughs. It was their way of relaxing.
At the Hillcrest we had a fixed membership. It was strictly stag. The table was in the Men’s Grill of the club, where no female dared set foot. If any dame had tried to invade our sacred territory she would never have returned. The language at the Hillcrest Round Table was seldom fit for mixed company.
There was little conversation, as such. It was a wide-open competition to see who could get the most laughs, a running game of “Can You Top This?” It was never dull. We had among us three of the funniest men of our time, George Bums, George Jessel and Groucho Marx. And it was among us, where no holds were barred, that they were their funniest.
For my dough George Burns was—and is—one of the truly great wits of America. Whenever George started rummaging in his trunk of vaudeville souvenirs, the competition all sat back to listen. Offstage, he didn’t talk in gags. George was always original. He could tell the same story a dozen times without seeming to repeat himself. He had a prodigious memory for people, and he revived names and faces that everybody else has long forgotten.
Above all, he had the gift of instant satire. Yet George was a guy who didn’t know the meaning of the word “malice.” He’s never been an “insulting” comic. When he tells a story on you, you love it. I ought to know. I’ve been one of his favorite subjects for twenty-five years.
The virtuoso showman of the Hillcrest Round Table was George Jessel. Jessel was “on” from the minute he stepped into the Grill, yelping something like, “What do you think I just heard on the radio! Somebody shot the President! Why would anybody want to shoot a nice man like McKinley?” He wasn’t “off” until he’d strung together a three-hour monologue of jokes, take-offs, folk tales, reminiscences, blackouts and dialect bits, all equally hilarious.
With his humor, anything goes. But socially Jessel is a stickler for what is correct and proper. He has refused, all through the years, to call the Marx Brothers by our stage nicknames. To him Chico is still “Leonard,” Groucho is “Julius,” Gummo is “Milton,” Zeppo is “Herbert,” and I am either “Adolph” or “Arthur.”
When Jessel launched into one of his monologues, even his friend Julius kept quiet. Otherwise Groucho was the Round Table’s heckler-at-large. He “left-jabbed” us to death in his sneaky, soft voice, with his cracks and asides. No punch line was safe from Groucho’s counterpunch. No man, at the Round Table or elsewhere, ever dared to slug it out with Groucho.
It’s a pity that some of the classic meetings of the Hillcrest Round Table couldn’t have been recorded for posterity. One day we hid a microphone in the matzohs before Jessel made his entrance. Unfortunately, George discovered it before he got wound up, and he clammed up. Yet, I suppose if any of our sessions had been recorded they’d still be lost. They would have suffered too much in the translation into printable English.
Late one Friday afternoon five of us were sitting at the Round Table, Bums, Jessel, Lou Holtz, Zeppo and myself. We weren’t trying to top each other for laughs. We were trying to see if anyone could make Lou Holtz laugh at all. Lou’s wife was divorcing him. He had just been notified of the settlement she insisted on. The way her lawyer talked, he was being stripped of every worldly possession.
As a result, his ulcer was kicking up something fierce. Every time he thought of the settlement he got another pang, and had to take a swig of some thick white medicine he kept in a bottle in his pocket. We hoked it up like a pack of clowns, but Lou didn’t crack a smile. He kept thinking about that settlement and groaning and swilling down the white stuff.
Zep had an idea. “You know what you need, Lou?” he said. “A weekend in Palm Springs, where it’s warm and dry. Lie around in the sun. Swim. Play a few holes of golf. Greatest tonic in the world.”
Lou said he was ready to try anything short of the gas pipe. Zeppo made it sound so good that we decided we should all take off for the desert, then and there. I called Susan and told her I’d be home a little late—like two days—since I had to go on a mission of mercy with a sick friend.
We had an early dinner at the Round Table. When we were through I said, “There’s room for all of us in my car.
I’ll drive. I know a short cut.”
Bums looked apprehensive, but he piled gamely into the car with the others. I announced we’d be at the Springs well before midnight, what with the short cut, and off we went, just as darkness came on. Driving conditions weren’t exactly perfect. The car was full of loud talk and cigar smoke. The windows steamed over so badly that I had to drive with one hand, hunched over the wheel, while I kept wiping a peephole on the windshield.
Still, time seemed to go pretty fast. I didn’t realize how fast until Lou Holtz wailed from the back seat, “Harpo! Aren’t we there yet? It’s one o’clock in the morning and I’m running out of medicine and I’m freezing!” Like the rest of us, he was wearing golf slacks and a short-sleeved sports shirt.
I reminded Lou that nights got chilly in the desert, but it was a dry cold, good for you. I explained that I hadn’t expected the roads to be in such bad shape. Must have been tearing them up for repairs. But cheer up—we’d be in Palm Springs any minute now.
Half an hour later I wasn’t so sure myself. I stopped the car. “Boys,” I said, “I think we’re lost.” “What makes you think we’re lost?” said George Bums, and I said, “Because it’s snowing.”
I drove on, creeping through the snowstorm. At last we hit the lights of a town. It wasn’t Palm Springs. It was Victorville. Victorville was about seventy miles from Palm Springs as the crow flies—if a crow could fly over the ten-thousand-foot mountain range that separated the two towns.
It was almost three in the morning when we piled into the lobby of a small hotel near the railroad tracks in Victorville. Nobody had anything to say, least of all to me. Lou Holtz took out his medicine bottle, looked at it sadly, shuddered, and gulped the last remaining swig of his precious white stuff. He was sick as a dog and turning blue from the cold. I felt guilty, and uncomfortable, so I hauled a harmonica out of my pocket and started to play “Waltz Me Around Again, Willie.”