Harpo Speaks! (28 page)

The thing we cherished most about the island, along with its natural beauty, was its isolation. Whenever we stepped onto Neshobe, we left Western Civilization behind and entered our own primitive society. Aleck would have been content to keep the island in the Stone Age. The most modern appliances he would tolerate, at first, were kerosene lamps, a hand pump for water, and an outboard motor for the launch. Bit by bit, for the sake of his guests’ comfort, he softened. He had a new clubhouse built, with plumbing and electricity. But he still kept the ancient, original farmhouse for his personal quarters. (Eventually Aleck built a rambling stone house on a ridge overlooking the lake on all sides, and this became his permanent home for the last seven years of his life.)

Our privacy we fought for and protected at all costs. The mainland was only a quarter of a mile away, and near the dock was a large resort hotel which we could see from the island. The natives, in true Vermont fashion, didn’t bother anybody who didn’t bother them, but the tourists were a pretty nosy bunch.

The rumor got around that there were “famous people living on that dinky island,” and that there were “a lot of crazy goings-on out there.” One day while I was waiting on the mainland for the launch to pick me up, two dames were sitting on the dock gazing at the island. One of them was looking through a pair of binoculars. I sidled over behind them, and heard the dame with the binoculars say, “Will you look who’s there, in a bathing suit! It’s Marie Dressler!”

“Marie Dressler” was of course Alexander Woollcott, taking his daily dip.

One day Alice Miller went for a walk and rushed back to report a harrowing thing. A group of tourists, she said, had rowed over to the island and were down on the beach having a picnic. I volunteered to deal with the interlopers. I stripped off all my clothes, put on my red wig, smeared myself with mud, and went whooping and war-dancing down to the shore, making Gookies and brandishing an ax. The tourists snatched up their things, threw them into the boat, and rowed away fast enough to have won the Poughkeepsie Regatta. That put an end to the snooping that season. It also, I’m sure, started some juicy new rumors about our crazy goings-on.

Three natives were allowed on Neshobe: the guy who brought over mail and supplies, and the couple who worked as cook and handyman. I remember the handyman because he had made himself a clamp for his hernia out of a length of wire and a wooden peg. Whenever his rupture gave him trouble, he just gave the peg a few turns and tightened ‘er up. He didn’t set much store by such foolishness as doctorin’.

Joe Hennessey actually ran the club. Joe, besides being Woollcott’s private secretary, did the ordering, kept the books, kept the handyman busy on the grounds, saw that guests were met on the mainland and were assigned places to sleep, and made sure that Aleck’s steaks were properly broiled. Beefsteak was Aleck’s staple food. When he ordered dinner in a restaurant he put on quite a scene. He would keep the waiter bringing out steaks until he found the exact cut that suited him. Then he would tell him, with elaborate gestures, exactly how the chef should prepare it: “Passed slowly over the flame-so-then turned and passed over the flame once again-so.” God forbid if it should arrive any other way except charred on the outside and cold, bloody raw on the inside.

Dinner, on the island, was only part of the evening ritual. The first ceremony at day’s end, for which everybody gathered in the clubhouse, was Cocktails. From Cocktails until the last good night, Woollcott presided over the evening like a combination Social Director, Schoolmaster and Queen Mother. He called the turns in the conversation, snuffed out arguments that didn’t involve him, and decided which games should be played.

If Aleck felt ornery, he’d challenge somebody to cribbage or anagrams, and the rest of us could fend for ourselves. If he felt mellow, he’d propose we play a “family” game-poker, Murder, a guessing game, or some game he’d just invented.

It seemed to me that Aleck invented games as a way of probing deeper into the character of people he loved. His curiosity about his friends was endless. He asked me so many questions about details in my life that I thought he must be writing a book about me. He once spent the better part of a week tracking down a newspaper report of the Schang trial and presented me, as a birthday present, a photostat copy of the story in the Times. He spent years hunting for Miss Flatto, my old nemesis from P.S. 86, and by God he eventually located her.

That’s how intensely he would poke into our lives-not out of any hidden, abnormal motives, but out of genuine curiosity. Aleck was impressed that a human being could be put together in the first place. He was absolutely astonished that one could be put together in such a way as to give Alexander Woollcott pleasure.

His people-probing quizzes went like this: “Which person-aside from a friend or a relative-would you bring back to life, if you had the power?” Or, “Name the greatest single song ever written.” I remember that the person most frequently named in the first was Abraham Lincoln. In the second (and this was by secret ballot, after long thought), the replies were unanimous: “Silent Night.”

We played “Categories” and “Ghosts” and our own variation of an old guessing game, “Famous Persons.” In this, you gave the famous person’s last initial and stated what he was famous for, and the others had to guess the person. I stumped the club once (but only once, I must add), when I announced I was thinking of a person beginning with a “C” who was famous for making people fall on their fannies. Nobody got it. I was thinking of Chippendale, the guy who designed the chairs with the spindly legs.

That was when I learned I was not supposed to win at such games. Aleck got huffy and said my statement of Chippendale’s claim to fame was farfetched and not in the spirit of the game. Then he changed the subject, to put himself back in the limelight.

“Do you want to hear me give a sentence using the word `Demosthenes’?” he asked. Of course we all said yes, and Aleck said, “Demosthenes can do is bend, and hold the legs together.”

Another time I got my ears pinned back was when success at poker went to my head, and I challenged Woollcott to a game of anagrams. He snorted, saying I would be a lamb leading myself to slaughter. Well then, I said, give me odds of a hundred to one. “My dear Harpo,” he said, “I shall bet a hundred dollars to your one that you don’t make a single word you can keep.” We played. I wound up without a single word in front of me.

Nevertheless, I still felt lucky that night. So I challenged Alice Duer Miller to a twenty-five-word spelling match. “How many words should I spot you?” said Alice. I said I figured I had about a twenty-word handicap. Alice thought I wasn’t being fair to myself. “Tell you what,” she said, “I’ll let Neysa spell for me, even money, best out of twenty-five. Let Aleck decide on the words.”

I figured Neysa and I would be just about evenly matched. But she did a hundred per cent better than me. She spelled one word right. The word was “thrifty,” which I would have given ten to one had two f’s in it.

That was my last fling at intellectual jousting.

Our favorite indoor sport was the game of Murder. A session of Murder would begin at cocktail time and sometimes last all the way through dinner. It goes like this:

We start by drawing lots to pick the District Attorney. Then we draw to see who will be-known only to himself-the Murderer. This done, the D.A. retreats and the rest of us go on with cocktails and small talk, wandering around the clubhouse, warming ourselves by the fireplace, reading, or strolling outside to admire the sunset. As soon as the Murderer manages to be alone with somebody else, he points to him and says: “You are dead.” The Victim slumps down, forbidden by the rules of the game to leave the spot of the crime or make any sound until he is discovered.

When the Victim is discovered-usually along about dinnertime -the D.A. is called in to begin the investigation. Everybody is a suspect. Every suspect, except the Murderer, has to answer truthfully, to his best recollection, where he was at any given time prior to the discovery of the crime, what he was doing, and with whom. The D.A.’s job is to deduce from the pattern of answers and alibis who is lying, and is therefore the Murderer. It’s a marvelous game.

One night Aleck drew the D.A. slip. “Oh ho!” he said, giving us a smug, owlish look, one by one. “You’d better be crafty, Evil One, whoever you are! Little Acky has never lost a case!” The Evil One was me. I had drawn the Murderer slip. It was true that Aleck had never failed to solve a murder. So I decided I should take him for a ride on this one.

It was the longest game we ever played, by far. By the time Joe announced that dinner was ready, everybody had scoured the joint and no Victim had been found. We sat down to eat. Only then was it suspected that there’d been foul play. There was an empty chair. Alice Miller was missing. Aleck, who’d been waiting at the table all this time for the crime to be discovered, refused to let anybody eat until he had a crime to work on. We were starved, but Aleck would not relent. He didn’t care if his steak came out as spongy as a steamed frankfurter. The dirty work had to be uncovered first.

It wasn’t until eleven o’clock that Neysa found Alice, through a keyhole. She had locked herself in a toilet in the rear wing of the clubhouse, and by the rules of the game she was not permitted to get up and let herself out.

What had happened was this: I had remembered that the gals occasionally sneaked back to use the rear-wing toilet when the main bathroom was occupied, and soon after becoming the Murderer I had sneaked back there myself. I unrolled the toilet paper a ways, wrote a fatal message in lipstick, then rolled the paper back up.

It was Alice who got the message. Being such a good sport, she remained at the scene of the crime, slumped and quiet, for five hours.

Aleck put the finger on me without having to ask a single question. I had outsmarted myself. I had tipped my hand without knowing it. What I had written in lipstick on the roll of toilet paper was:

YOU ARE DED.

Little Acky had a terrible tantrum and went to bed without his supper. He refused to play with anybody who didn’t obey the rules. The Murderer had to confront the Victim face to face or else there was no crime committed. The idea of making poor, gallant Alice sit on the john for five hours! Alice herself, on the other hand, couldn’t have been more delighted. A stroke of genius, she called my plot. Too bad it had to be an illiterate stroke of genius, she added.

Besides, she had been able to compose, in her mind, a whole chapter in the novel she was currently writing while cooped up in the can.

Alice Miller was the only club member who did any serious work on the island. She kept a daily schedule at her desk, turning out the poetry and fiction so much admired by millions of readers. Aleck worked with Joe Hennessey on his correspondence an hour or so each morning, but did no other writing. Neysa did a little sketching now and then, but no commercial painting.

Otherwise nobody worked at all. Daylight hours were for us hours of pure relaxation-except for the Morning Dip. The Morning Dip was one of Aleck’s rules: Everybody in the water before breakfast, no matter how freezing cold the lake might be. Aleck, with all his rolls and layers of protective suet, was impervious to cold water. While the rest of us shook and turned blue, he would float around serene as an empty scow, wearing his glasses and reading a book propped on the dome of his belly, and wondering why the rest of us were such sissies. Woollcott was the only guy I ever knew who could float vertically as well as he could horizontally. From a distance, you could never tell whether his top or front was up.

After the swim, Aleck and Alice always retreated to their studies, and the rest of us were free to read, snooze, talk, play, ramble or gamble.

For a guy whose life had been confined to tenements, trains, hotel rooms and dressing rooms, there was always something new and exciting to do at Neshobe. I used to spend hours tooling around the lake in a sailing canoe. Sometimes I got stuck in the middle of the lake in a flat calm and had to paddle home. Other times I’d be out when a sudden storm swooped down off the mountains, and I’d wind up pinned to the rocks on the mainland shores.

Fishing was fine in Lake Bomoseen. My luck was fine too, but I had to give up fishing for sentimental reasons. One day I caught a nice, big bass. For the hell of it I marked him with a clip and threw him back in. Next time I fished, I caught the same big bass. Again I threw him back in. A week later I caught the guy a third time. By now we had become good friends. He never bothered me, being a good Vermonter, so why should I bother him? I stopped fishing.

Besides swimming, sailing and fishing, the club offered badminton, and the island itself offered Indian relics, to be had for the digging up. But the greatest sport of all was the game of croquet.

For five years of my life croquet was my hobby, avocation, recreation and dedication. I lavished more time, dough and passion on the game of croquet than the average sugar-daddy did on his babydoll. The whole madness began on Neshobe Island.

On the first day of my first visit up there, Aleck asked me if I’d like him to teach me The Game. “Teach me?” I said. “Just tell me the rules and I’ll take you on, any price you want to name.” He gave me a funny look and said all right, if I insisted on learning the hard way, we’d play for ten bucks a game, loser’s option to double the bet for the next game.

Croquet I knew vaguely as a pastime for kids and elderly couples, something to do with tapping balls along the grass with long wooden hammers. Hardly anything for a virtuoso of the pool cue or the golf club to take seriously. I began to wonder about Aleck. He was a rough-and-ready gambler, indoors. But outdoors croquet?

I didn’t wonder very long. The croquet that Aleck played was no pastime for kids or elderly couples. He played for keeps. He was a crack, accurate shot and he was a cunning strategist.

I didn’t know the game had a strategy. I soon learned. You had to know when to go for position and when to go for the wicket, when to go for the stake instead of turning Rover, where to send your opponent’s ball when you hit him, and which of a dozen different ways to send it. If you were playing partners, you had to remember at all times who was dead on who, and you had to know how to use your partner’s ball without leaving him out of position or vulnerable to an opponent.