Harpo Speaks! (48 page)

Me, Harpo Marx, age forty-one, the guy who’d held his own with the world’s sharpest playwrights, playgirls, authors, editors, artists, foreign ministers, ambassadors and gamblers, me, Harpo, acting like a scared teen-age kid! When was I going to grow up?

I was finding it increasingly hard to kid myself about anything. It was shortly after I met Susan that Sam Behrman came west and stayed at my house. I was never happier to see Sam. (Real reason: any kind of diversion helped. I couldn’t get Susan out of my mind.) Then, when Sam left and the joint got too quiet, I came down with a bad case of homesickness and took off with Oscar for New York. (Real reason: I wasn’t ready yet to face Susan, and New York was a dandy place to escape to.) After two weeks in New York I was dying to get back to California, because I didn’t trust anybody else to look after my plants and pets that long. (Real reason: I was ready to talk to Susan.)

I called her the minute I got home. She said she’d be delighted to see me again. She’d been hoping to hear from me ever since that nice evening we’d spent together at the Goldwyns’. No mention of the evening at Malibu. I took her out dining and dancing the next night, and the next, and the night after that. I took her to the ritziest spots in town, and we went formal. Never before had I dressed up in proper dinner clothes three nights in a row. For twenty years I had been a social freak, a scarecrow in sports shirt, slippers and green pool-table jacket. I now discovered it was very satisfying to be Proper. (Real reason: Susan liked the way New York men wore their clothes.)

She was gay and gracious. I was gay and gallant. Each time we said good night we told each other what a wonderful time we’d had. She’d give my hand a quick squeeze and I’d give her a quick kiss on the cheek. Neither one of us had the nerve to bust through the silly impasse we were in. Still a couple of clinkers.

Then I was told the lease on my house was not being renewed. I decided to take an apartment, temporarily. This was a wise move for two reasons. There wouldn’t be room for guests, which would give me more time to practice on the harp. In an apartment I could live from month to month, not too expensively, while I took my time finding exactly the house I wanted. (All right, so there was a third reason: I could bring Susan Fleming home without worrying who’d be hanging around, or who might bust in unexpectedly.)

I boarded all my animals except Kayo and took a terrace apartment in Sunset Towers, which was a kind of vertical Garden of Allah. As soon as I moved, a drastic change occurred in the relations between Susan and me-drastic, but so subtle that for a while I didn’t know what hit me.

One day she called up and asked if I could do her a big favor. She was up for the lead in a new picture, the toughest part she’d ever tackled. She’d just got the script and given it a quick look and it scared her. If she came over would I help her with it? Help her learn the lines and coach her in the role? Of course, I said. She came right over.

We worked together every afternoon for a week. I sat in a director’s chair with the script and fed cues to Susan while she paced around the terrace, emoting, with Kayo plodding at her heels every step of the way like a devoted fan, which he was. Each day somehow we put in less and less time on Susan’s part, and talked more and more about ourselves. I told her about my family’s mad life on 93rd Street, about the parade of jobs I was fired from when I was the boy least likely to succeed, my awful debut at Coney Island, the Chicago days, the vaudeville days, my crashing the gates of the world of Alexander Woollcott, my career as an artist and my career as a professional listener.

I couldn’t tell her enough about Minnie. Susan insisted on hearing, again and again, all the stories I could remember about my mother-Minnie the mastermind, putting Groucho and Gummo on the stage and Chico on a piano stool, and kidnaping me and shoving me into the act. Minnie on the road. Minnie’s battles with managers and booking agents. Minnie’s inspirations for special effects. Minnie at our Broadway opening. Minnie as a wife. Minnie as a poker player. The story of Minnie’s last hours on earth.

Once Susan said, “Do you think you’ll ever find another woman quite so wonderful as your mother?”

“I’m looking,” I said. I didn’t finish the sentence. What I wanted to say was, I’m looking at her now, but I lost my nerve.

I finally got Susan to open up about herself. Her life had been a long, frustrating search for a real home. Her father was a mining engineer, and the Flemings were always on the move. Every time Susan, who was an only child, managed to make friends in a new place, the family would have to pull up stakes and move to another part of the country. Her father was a fine draftsman and amateur artist. Susan had inherited his talent, and the most fun she had as a kid came from drawing, and watching her father work with pen and brush. Those were lonely years for a girl as full of pizazz as Susan. When she got older, art didn’t seem satisfying enough and she turned to acting.

“Now,” she said one afternoon, “I’m not sure an acting career, or any career, is the answer. It’s only something to escape to. I’m tired of moving and running. What I want to do is settle down. You know what I mean? Don’t you feel the same way?”

“I better go feed Kayo,” I said. This was dangerous talk.

After the week of rehearsing on the terrace, I went out and played golf with George Burns. George took me seven holes to two, which ranked as the upset of the year. He could only conclude that I was sick. When I paid him off he said, “What the hell’s the matter with you, Harpo? You’re walking around in a coma like you’re two days dead and nobody’s had the heart to tell you. You’d better go to the coroner for a checkup.”

I told George I felt great, never felt better. He shook his head. “Don’t even know what hit you, huh?” he said, and left the locker room.

That was when it dawned on me. Now I knew what had hit me. I was so much in love with Susan that I couldn’t think straight. And because I couldn’t think straight I hadn’t seen what she was up to. Susan was out to hook me. She was using every trick in the book. Flattery. Sweet talk. Sneaky talk about loneliness and marriage and settling down. Softening me up for the kill. I was being courted and I was weakening.

Now I saw how insane this last week had been-me coaching her in a dramatic part. Me, who hadn’t spoken a line onstage since School Days! I knew as much about the interpretation of an acting role as my dog did. I couldn’t even read the lines straight. But Susan hadn’t objected-oh, no. It was all a scheme to get me where she could work on me. And I fell for it bing-boom-bang.

She wasn’t after my dough or my name. She was after me. She loved me as much as I loved her, that I was sure of. But damn it, I wasn’t ready. I was a slow worker, a slow thinker, a slow decider. I had a lot more thinking to do before I decided it was time to change my way of living.

So this was the new pattern of our relationship: Susan attacked. I encouraged her to keep after me, because I couldn’t bear to be away from her. But every time I found myself on the point of giving in I got cold feet and escaped. When I escaped, she pursued, and began to attack again. She was not about to give up, and neither was I.

Susan Fleming Period.

I liked her the way she was and I liked her name the way it was.

My first escape was from Sunset Towers, where I was too easy to corner, to the home of the producer Joe Schenck. Joe, at the time, was rattling around in the most lavish bachelor quarters in Hollywood. His house was an Oriental-style palace, built to his special needs. It was a combination gym, sanitarium, harem, and gambling casino. He even had a suite of rooms “just for bowel movements,” complete with masseur’s table, steam bath, and enough hygienic gadgets to equip a small clinic.

Joe had been after me for a long time to move in with him and become a full-time partner in fun. That was a job I didn’t measure up to, however. It would have taken three guys to keep up with Schenck, the way he gambled and the stakes he played for, and the way he played the field with the broads.

When I flunked out as a playmate, Schenck made it plain that he still wanted me to share his palace. I guess he wanted to keep me around for laughs. Now and then I sat in on his poker sessions, until I got dizzy from the size of the pots. But mostly I kept to myself-and Susan.

It was like having a private house. Joe turned over a complete wing of his joint to me. I got my menagerie out of the vet’s and turned them loose, hauled in a couple of truckloads of potted plants, and before long I was living in a marvelous, upside-down mess. Siamese cats flew all over the place and roosted on the mantelpiece. While the cats flew, the myna birds walked and pecked at spots in the design of the Persian carpet (which Joe had paid eighty-five thousand bucks for), the two monkeys slept in my wardrobe trunk, the turtle ran around in circles, and the poodles tried to climb trees. Kayo, disgusted with all of them, sat glowering under the easel-which he associated with Susan, the light of his life.

The first time Susan saw my palatial slum at Schenck’s she said, “It’s exactly the way it should be! Please-never let a woman’s touch wreck it!” I never heard a more loving or more insincere statement in my life.

It was here that Susan met Oscar Levant. Oscar never forgave me for pulling the rug out from under him in Beverly Hills, but we still saw each other fairly often. About Susan he said, after first meeting her, “Harpo, she’s a lovely, lovely person. She deserves a good husband. You’d better marry her before she finds one.”

Oscar didn’t move in on me at my new location because he had nothing in common with my host, and Oscar was a man of principle. He never sponged off anybody he didn’t admire. When I gave Oscar a tour of the palace, wing by wing, suite by suite, he wasn’t impressed. But he thought he ought to make some kind of nice comment since I chose to live there. “Well,” he said, reflecting on all the wonders and facilities he had seen, “I’ll say one thing about Schenck. He certainly knows how to shit.”

Susan’s pretext for coming around was so we could paint and draw together. She could do cartoons of me and I could do oils of her and that way we could save on models’ fees. Before long, Susan’s talk began to turn toward the same subject-marriage.

This time I was lucky. I didn’t have to move to escape. I went to work at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

The Marx Brothers had been in a rut. Our last three pictures, Monkey Business, Horse Feathers and Duck Soup, were all the same kind of patchwork of gags and blackouts. We were making a pleasant amount of loot but we were standing still. One more picture of this type and the law of diminishing returns would set in and we’d be on our way out. ‘What we needed was a good, strong producer who’d give us a change of pace.

The family agents, Zeppo and Gummo, were beating the bushes for the right man, but it was Chico who flushed him-out of a bridge game. He was a skinny, intense, bright-eyed young guy named Irving Thalberg. Chico said that anybody who was that good a bridge player was good enough to produce our pictures. The fact that Thalberg was the head of production at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was incidental to Chico.

In 1935, Thalberg had plans to produce personally three new movies: Romeo and Juliet, Mutiny on the Bounty, and The Good Earth. Now he added a fourth to his slate: A Night at the Opera, with the Marx Brothers.

Our trouble, Irving said, was that we were a big-time act using small-time material. We belonged in “A” pictures, not in hodgepodge, patchwork jobs. Our movies should have believable plots, love stories, big casts, production numbers. We were afraid this would take us out of our element, but Thalberg said: “Don’t worry about a thing. You get me the laughs and I’ll get you the story.”

This Thalberg was no “boy genius,” as some people called him. He was a tough, smart cookie, a hard-working, mature man, and he was a perfectionist. When the first draft of our script was turned in, we thought it was terrific. Thalberg thought it was good, but not half good enough. The only way to get it in proper shape, he said, was for us to take it on the road and test it with live audiences.

So we hit the road with A Night at the Opera. Thalberg was so right. Some of the writers’ favorite hits didn’t get a snicker. They were cut. On the other hand, stuff that we ad libbed on stage, as in the “stateroom scene,” went into the shooting script. As written-a bunch of guys jamming into a stateroom for no very good reason-this bit failed to get a laugh on stage. The writers got very depressed over it and decided to cut it. We decided, however, to give it one more chance.

So this night we did it our way. Groucho, ordering a meal from a steward while being jostled into the corner of the jammed-up stateroom, said, “And a hard-boiled egg …” I honked my horn. “Make it two hard-boiled eggs,” said Groucho.

The audience broke up, and as simply as that, a dud became a classic. The stateroom scene is still the best remembered of any bit the Marx Brothers ever performed.

We opened in Salt Lake City. Between shows I came across something new, tropical fish for sale in a ten-cent store. I spent a buck on a glass bowl and a pair of little pink fish, thinking this might add a bit of life to my dressing room. When a gang of reporters came backstage for interviews, one of them asked me about the fish. Was that a hobby of mine? he asked.

“Oh,” I said, “more than a hobby. These two baby fish are my dearest friends, and I wouldn’t think of leaving home without them. Why, I couldn’t open if I didn’t know they were waiting for me in my dressing room.”

So a wire-service story goes out coast to coast about Harpo Marx, the tropical fish expert. Starting the day the story appeared, I was swamped with catalogues from hatcheries, pitches for testimonials, and letters from all over the country asking my advice on feeding and breeding tropical fish, and offering to swap guppies for mollies. This went on for weeks. The first thing I did when I got back to Hollywood was to install an aquarium in my joint. Another case of an actor coming to believe his press clippings.

To tell the truth, the Salt Lake City goldfish were good company on the road. They were the brightest spots in the long hours between calls to Susan.