Harpo Speaks!

by Marx, Harpo

  “You understand, I’m not authorizing you to go on an all-night maneuver,” said the colonel, “but, shall we say, three hours?”

  Three hours was fine with the corporal, just fine. Rank had its privileges but it also, at times, had a heart as well.

  Somewhere in Indiana

  I played my first GI hospital here, and it was not a complete success. I had been scheduled to entertain first in the psycho ward. The doctors warned me not to appear in costume. This was to be strictly a concert, a musical-therapy treatment. I walked through the ward beforehand, chatting and joking with the patients and passing out cigarettes, to gain their confidence. Except for the extreme cases, they were all eager for me to play. I called for the harp to be brought in.

  Instead of taking the instrument out of the case and wheeling it into the ward, three GIs lugged it in, case and all, on their shoulders. They looked like pallbearers carrying a sealed black coffin. The poor bastards in the ward started to yell. Attendants ran in to quiet them. I ran out, behind the pallbearers. The musical therapy for the day was canceled.

  Somewhere in California

  Actually, the biggest laugh I got any time during the war was at this hospital. It was a new, six-story joint built around a courtyard. They decided I should play a concert down in the courtyard, where the patients could watch from the windows and balconies above.

  In the center of the courtyard was a replica of the famous fountain of Brussels, with the statue of the little boy taking a leak. Whoever designed the hospital had had a stroke of genius to put this conversation piece where all the patients could see it. It exactly fit the mood of convalescing soldiers.

  Before I came out to perform, I had a conference with the maintenance staff of the hospital. When I came out I didn’t look at the statue. All through my comedy routine I failed to notice it. Then came the serious part of the program. The harp was brought out. I began to play “Annie Laurie,” very softly. The audience, most of whom were hanging over me on the six balconies, was so quiet I could hear the splashing of the fountain.

  The splashing annoyed me. I had to have utter silence. I stopped playing. I turned and saw for the first time the statue of the little pisseur. I gave him a reproving look. I put a finger to my lips, pointed to my fly, and waggled the finger at him. The spout from the statue fell away to a trickle, then stopped. The maintenance man at the water valve had timed it perfectly.

  Nobody heard the rest of “Annie Laurie,” not even me. The GI audience up above laughed themselves hoarse and the staff members sitting down in the courtyard had to duck flying crutches and nurses’ caps. After this opening I wasn’t able to get away without playing a full hour concert. I hope it helped their morale. It sure helped mine.

  In the summer of ’42 I worked on a USO committee in Hollywood while I waited to go back on the road.

  In the middle of August, Susan and I went east quite suddenly, when I got a telegram from Woollcott,. It was a three-word message: ALICE IS DYING.

  I found Alice at home in New York, in bed, racked with cancer. Alice had known she was a terminal case for nearly three months, but she’d told nobody except Aleck. Aleck had decided on his own that I should know, to give me a chance to see her once again.

  I spent two days at her bedside, for as many minutes at a time as her doctor would allow. The first day I saw her she had only enough strength to squeeze with her right hand, feebly, and to whisper. But the spirit of the old Butch still flashed within her. It hadn’t weakened by one volt.

  She was still gracious and gallant, and too good a sport to concede a single point, let alone the game, to the disease. She burned more from curiosity than fever. Alice wanted no truck with the past. This was no time for looking backward. Nations were at war, great events were taking place, and her friends were scattered all over the world. She had to know where everybody was and what they were doing. She squeezed from me everything I could tell her—from the state of Carl Hubbell’s fastball to the Marines’ progress on Guadalcanal.

  On the second day, my visiting periods were cut shorter. Alice’s whisper had faded. The only physical power left to her was the movement of her right hand. But through her fingers and through her eyes the current of her spirit still flowed. Although I did all the talking it was a warm, two-way conversation.

  That evening, when I returned to her house, they told me she was dead.

  Aleck was up at Neshobe Island. I’d been in touch with him throughout the vigil, but the end came on a wartime Saturday night, a time when I couldn’t get a line through to Vermont. I sent him a wire.

  A letter that Aleck wrote to Charles Brackett from Lake Bomoseen, tells more eloquently than I ever could about his reaction to Alice’s passing.

  “You must feel,” he wrote, “that your world is being depopulated. I warn you that it is one of the penalties of lingering on this scene after fifty.

  “Late at night on the next to the last Saturday in August, my dear Lilly Bonner and I were out on the terrace here relishing a fabulous moon. Through the windows, from inside, there came the muttering and card slappings of a gin rummy game with Dorothy Gish and Louis Calhern involved.

  “The quiet of the lake was disturbed by the sound of Howard Bull’s motor launch chugging towards the island. At such an hour this could mean only one thing—a telegram and an important one, too, or he would have let it go until morning. The Bulls sit in judgment on our telegrams and decide among themselves if there is any rush about our seeing them. So while Howard moored his launch at the dock, I told Lilly that Alice Miller was dead.

  “It was on just such another August Saturday night fifteen years ago that the same messenger brought the same news about Gregory Kelly (then married to Ruth Cordon). I remember now how he found all the lights out and, calling through the window of the ground-floor bedroom in front, awakened Neysa. She came in and got me up and we put on bathrobes and put a log on the fire and sat until all hours talking about Gregory.

  “I think you may guess with what courtesy and grace of spirit Alice made her exit. She had written me confidentially early in June telling me that the jig was up and thereafter our exchanges were on that basis. It was precisely as though she regretted having to leave early but whispered it behind her fan so as not to disturb the party.

  “Finally I decided that Lederer and Harpo ought to be told. I am glad I did for Harpo came east ahead of schedule and was in time by forty-eight hours to be welcomed by her. The second day she could not speak but held his hand while he talked to her, squeezing it when she was most interested. I am proud to report that out of the topics in his repertory, she squeezed hardest for Charlie Lederer, myself, and the Giants.

  “I’ve found it an enriching experience to read over the letters I’ve had from her in the more than twenty-two years of our association. The file began with a hand-painted Christmas card. As the accompanying verse addresses me as a Cribbage Pimp I assume that a check came with it but apparently I was not sentimental enough to file that, too.

  “It is a bleak fact that there is now no such person in our world as Alice Duer Miller. . . .”

  The one bright note in that trip east was Aleck. He looked terrific. He had all the zest and bounce of ten years before. His blood was again up to its full, rich count of white corpuscles (whipped cream) and red corpuscles (acid). The medics had given him the green light to come out of confinement and go back to work. When we left him he was apartment hunting in New York for a winter headquarters—his “Valley Forge,” as he said.

  My camp-show troupe had taken off without me, so I sent Susan home and joined an all-star company doing one-night stands for the War Bond Drive. At Soldiers Field in Chicago we played to a hundred and ten thousand people. While I was waiting to do my second bit on the show, one of the stadium hot-dog vendors came backstage to shake hands with me. “For my dough,” he said, “you’re the best one on the program.” I felt complimented, since the others on the program were Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, Fred Astaire,
Lucille Ball, Betty Hutton, Kay Kyser and his band, and José Iturbi.

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Marx,” he said. “When you played on your harp I sold four times as many hot dogs as when anybody else was on the stage.”

  A modest man is made, not born.

  On the 12th of September I was home again, and just in time for an unexpected reunion. Ivy Lee Litvinov was in town and had been trying to get in touch with me. I hadn’t seen her since the night in the Moscow theatre, nine years ago, when her husband had popped on stage as a comic and turned me into a straight man. Maxim Litvinov was now the Soviet Ambassador to the United States.

  We took Ivy Lee out to dinner at Mike Lyman’s Restaurant. I put on quite a performance, mainly for Susan’s benefit, recreating my six weeks in Russia—from the trouble I had carrying rubles across the border going in and my fiasco with the Moscow Art Theatre to my final “command” performance. Because of Mrs. Litvinov, I omitted telling about what I carried across the border on the way out.

  Mike Lyman had been hanging around the table. Finally he said, “Excuse me for interrupting, but I heard some news on the radio in the kitchen that you folks might be interested in. The Russian Army stopped the Germans at Stalingrad.”

  Ivy Lee Litvinov certainly was interested in the news. For the rest of the night, the champagne at Mike’s was on the Soviet Union.

  I hooked onto a troupe heading east. We pulled into Watertown, New York, on a cold, gray afternoon in January 1943. It had just begun to snow. After the show it was still coming down. The next morning I woke up early. From my hotel window I watched the sun rise. The city was covered under a deep white blanket of snow. Nothing moved. It was a beautiful sight.

  A great idea occurred to me. I called Woollcott in New York City, at his apartment in the Hotel Gotham. When he stopped cursing me for waking him up in the middle of the night, I told him my idea. I was sure he’d call it an absolute inspiration.

  “Aleck,” I said, “I’m back in your neck of the woods, outside of New York here in . The snow’s eight feet deep and it’s gorgeous out—too nice to make the jump with the rest of the company on the bus. Know what I’m going to do? Hire a horse and sleigh for the trip!”

  Aleck said, “Exactly where is your next jump to?”

  “Boston,” I said. “How about it? Hop over and we’ll take the sleigh ride together. Jingle bells, the whole works.”

  He did not leap at the idea or call it an absolute inspiration. Instead, he took a deep breath, let it out with a sigh, and said, “Harpo, you didn’t dawdle long enough in P. S. 86 to become exposed to the subject of Geography, did you?”

  “No,” I said. “Why?”

  “My dear boy,” he said, “this may come as a bit of a shock to you, but Boston, Massachusetts, is not on the outskirts of Watertown, New York.”

  I refused to let go of my notion. I asked him how about if I took a short cut through the city and picked him up there? He said, “Oh a splendiferous thought! I shall be waiting for you in front of the Gotham to come jingling up in your troika. You’ll know me by my white beard and the white fur trimming on my red suit. I’m fat and jolly and tend to go around saying ‘Ho! Ho! Ho!’ to little children. Meanwhile, if you don’t mind, I’m going back to beddy-bye. God bless you and keep you safe from anything as dangerous as knowledge.”

  He hung up.

  Later that morning, on the road, I asked our bus driver how many miles he figured it was from Watertown to Boston.

  “Oh, it’ll be around three hundred miles,” he said.

  I asked him what it would be if we took the short cut through New York City.

  The driver played it straight. “The short cut wouldn’t add more than two hundred miles to the trip, Mr. Marx,” he said.

  When I got to New York after playing Boston, I was delighted to find Charlie Lederer in town. Charlie said Woollcott was being very stuffy. He was having Eleanor Roosevelt up for tea in his apartment, after which he was doing a broadcast, some sort of forum program. After the broadcast, Aleck had told Charlie, he was going straight home and to bed and he could not be seen until noon the next day, and then by appointment only.

  So what were we to do? We went to Abercrombie & Fitch, bought two croquet mallets and four balls. We arrived at the Hotel Gotham at teatime and went up to Woollcott’s floor. I rang the bell of his apartment. Charlie and I then started hitting the balls up and down the corridor in the best old Neshobe Island manner, whackety-whack.

  Aleck opened the door of his apartment. He looked through me. He looked through Charlie Lederer. He paid no notice to the croquet balls bounding and ricocheting up and down the corridor. From inside I heard Mrs. Roosevelt’s voice saying, “I’m sure I heard the bell, too. Is there nobody there?”

  “Nobody,” said Aleck. “Strange—nobody at all.” He slammed the door shut.

  Charlie and I picked up the red ball, the blue ball, the yellow ball, and the black, stuck the mallets under our overcoats, and departed.

  Lederer was invited to go to a dinner party that night with the Alfred Vanderbilts. When he said that Oscar Levant was going to be there I invited myself to go too.

  After dinner the host asked if we’d like him to turn on the radio so we could hear the broadcast Woollcott was on. Charlie said not to bother. We would have liked to listen, he said, but we hadn’t been asked. Woollcott would be furious if he found out we’d tuned him in without an appointment.

  Later in the evening, before the party broke up, somebody telephoned to ask if we had heard the news. The news was that Alexander Woollcott had been stricken with a heart attack while he was on a broadcast.

  I rushed to the phone. The lines were jammed at CBS. Everybody in New York was calling there for the same reason. I kept trying until I got through, and finally got the name of the hospital where Aleck had been taken.

  When I called the hospital I was told that Mr. Woollcott was dead.

  Whack.

  The program had been a panel discussion called “The People’s Forum.” The guest panelists were Alexander Woollcott, Marcia Davenport and Rex Stout. They were discussing the civilian’s role in the war effort. Aleck revved up and went zooming off like a mad hornet, to attack his old “enemies within the gates”—the isolationists and anti-Rooseveltians of the Midwest.

  In the middle of a sentence Aleck stopped talking. He turned very pale. He wrote on a piece of notepaper, “I am sick.” He pushed the note along the table to Miss Davenport, who read it and signaled at once toward the director’s booth.

  Ten minutes of air time remained. While the discussion continued, Woollcott was helped out of his chair and out of the studio. He was laid on a stretcher and carried to a waiting ambulance. When he was brought to the nearest hospital there was nothing that could be done for him. He died just before midnight, January 23, 1943.

  One crazy detail stuck in my mind. It still does. A guy at CBS told me that while Aleck was being carried to the street on the stretcher, he fumbled around until he felt the rim of his hat, his big, black impresario’s hat, which had been placed on the dome of his stomach. When he passed out the door and into the night, he lifted the hat and put it over his face.

  What was crazy about this was that it reminded me of what Jack Johnson had done the time Jess Willard had knocked him to the canvas in the arena at Havana, Cuba, back in 1915. While the referee counted him out, Johnson, who was supposedly unconscious, laid an arm over his eyes to shield them from the glare of the sun. Everybody who had bet on Jack Johnson screamed that the fight was fixed, that the champion had faked being knocked out and had done a lousy job at that. People with dough on Willard said that Johnson’s covering his face had only been a reflex. He was seeing stars, not the sun, and didn’t know what he was doing.

  With Aleck, I’ve never been able to decide—whether he had deliberately shielded himself against the night, or whether it had been a reflex. He was too good an actor to tip his hand. After playing the role of himself to the hilt, in spades, why should
he goof on his exit and give the critics a chance to pan him?

  The funeral was short and uncluttered. Ruth Gordon and George Backer each spoke a eulogy, and Paul Robeson sang the Twenty-third Psalm.

  When it was over nobody had to suggest where we should go. Without a word being said, we all went straight to the Algonquin. It was the last gathering of the Woollcott crowd, and it was our strangest gathering. Neither Neysa nor Dottie nor Ruth nor Beatrice nor George nor Frank nor Charlie nor the lone surviving Katzenjammer Kid knew quite what to say, and for me, for once, there was no use listening.

  I was on my own. The fat, spoiled, moody, cantankerous, mischievous, gay, generous, loyal and loving smarty-pants son-of-a-bitch who had dragged me into a world I had no business being in had ditched me. Like approximately one million other people, I felt sorry for myself when Aleck Woollcott died. But I guess that’s the way it is. When you lose something irreplaceable, you don’t mourn for the thing you lost. You mourn for yourself.

  CHAPTER 23 Life on a Harp Ranch

  I CAME TO REALIZE fully, with Aleck’s passing, what his friendship had done for me more than anything else. It had kept me young. When he died my first reaction had been that he had ditched me and I was left all alone. But I wasn’t, of course. The slack had already been taken up, by Susan and by Billy.

  Now, six years later, there were three more Marxes in the house to keep me from growing up. In the fall of 1943 we had brought home our second son. We named him Alexander. In 1944, James Arthur and Minnie Susan had joined the family.

  It was a crowd Aleck would have fit right into. We didn’t run a very proper or conventional household, but the joint was never dull either.

  At the end of the war we enlarged our house. We threw out the butler, disconnected the buzzer on the dining-room floor and got rid of all the rest of the Beverly Hills nonsense and converted the dining room into a poolroom.