Harpo Speaks! (49 page)

We came back to L.A. with the show in tiptop shape-all shook down, tried out, tested and proven. But this was only the beginning. Working under Thalberg was twenty times harder than anything we’d ever done before.

Things were different at Metro. Sam Wood, who directed A Night at the Opera, was a perfectionist, as everybody under Thalberg had to be. He’d shoot a scene twenty times, from twenty different angles, before he’d go on to the next one. And every time he was ready to shoot, whether it was Take One or Take Nineteen, he’d give us the same instructions: “Okay, boys-go in there and sell ‘em a load of clams!”

It was rougher on me than anybody else because of the stunt work my part called for. I had to swing on ropes sixty feet above the camera, teeter along the edge of a drop thirty feet high, and run straight up a twenty-foot curtain trusting in the strength of two almost invisible strands of wire. I acquired an aversion to clams.

This was the age of specialization at M-G-M. One day while we were recording a production number, the music director for some other picture came in and asked if he could borrow a B-flat chord. With him was a young guy whom I recognized as a tenor who once sang in our chorus. The orchestra obligingly played the requested chord, and the tenor sang a B-flat, two measures long. The visiting music director said, “Thanks a lot,” then took the tenor and left.

Much later I found out that the tenor was the High Note Singer for Nelson Eddy (or “Eddie Nelson,” as Louis B. Mayer always called him), who was then making Naughty Marietta. One of Eddy’s songs ended above the register of his voice, which stopped at A, so the B-flat had to be dubbed into the sound track. Too bad it wasn’t steadier work. Otherwise I would have added Eddie Nelson’s High Note Singer to my private roster of wonderful jobs, along with Alfonso’s Anthem Man and Grandpa’s Tin Can Swinger.

It was during the shooting of A Night at the Opera that Arnold Schonberg came to town. Schonberg was a famous modernist composer who’d been hounded out of Germany by Hitler. He was desperately broke. Arturo Toscanini had appealed to Sam Behrman to see if he couldn’t help the composer find work in Hollywood. Behrman paid Schonberg’s way to the coast, and he wrote me to do everything I could to get him a job at M-G-M.

I gave Thalberg the pitch on the famous composer who’d just arrived on the coast. Thalberg was then producing The Good Earth. He still hadn’t assigned anybody to compose the score, and he said he’d be happy to have Schonberg in for lunch at noon the next day. I warned Irving that this guy was one of the world’s great musicians, and quite an eccentric, and he shouldn’t be kept waiting one minute. Irving was notoriously late for appointments. But he gave me his word he would be punctual for Schonberg.

At a quarter to twelve the next day I went to Thalberg’s office. Irving was there. At twelve o’clock he buzzed his secretary and said he was about to have a very important conference and there must be no interruptions. We waited. Twelve-fifteen, twelve-thirty, and no Schonberg. Irving ordered lunch brought in. We ate. Finally, at one o’clock, the composer showed up. He was wearing a hat and an overcoat (it was warm and summery out) and carrying a violin case.

Schonberg explained why he was late. His English wasn’t too good, and the guards at the gate had trouble with his accent. Instead of escorting him to Thalberg’s office they sent him to the waiting room for studio tours. After half an hour of following a guide around the lot with a pack of tourists, Schonberg began to suspect he’d been misdirected. He broke away and found Thalberg’s office by himself.

When we’d all finished lunch Irving got right down to business. What he was most concerned about was special background music for one of the scenes in The Good Earth. He described the scene, and gave it the full treatment. A woman working in a rice field begins to scream. She’s giving birth to a baby. And just as the baby comes into the world, there’s an ominous roar. It gets louder and louder. The locusts are swarming! Billions and billions of them, blackening the sky and casting the shadow of famine over the land!

Irving finished with the scene. Schonberg, still reeling from the labor pains in the rice paddy and the billions of locusts, blinked and said, “My dear Thalberg, if all these things are happening, you do not need music.” He got up, put on his hat and overcoat, picked up his fiddle case, and walked out of the office.

Every time I saw the composer-on the lot, in the lobby of his hotel, on the streets of Beverly Hills-he was wearing overcoat and hat, and carrying his violin case. I couldn’t figure out why he had his violin with him everywhere he went. He never volunteered to play it. He had no concerts scheduled. The only reason I could think of was that it must have been a Stradivarius, too valuable even to leave in a vault.

One night he showed up at the Gershwins’, and I decided to solve the mystery of his fiddle once and for all. I asked him about it, point blank. Schonberg smiled and opened the case. It contained four Ping-pong paddles and a collection of Ping-pong balls. “One must be prepared,” he said. “One can never tell where one might find a table.”

The Gershwins’ basement was my regular nighttime hideout when I was pulling the escape act on Susan. There was a Ping-pong table there, two pianos, and a built-in kibitzer-Oscar Levant. It was the best clubhouse in town.

The day we finished shooting A Night at the Opera, Susan came a-courting. The battle was on again, and hotter than ever before. This time her tactic was touting me onto buying a house. It was nice of Joe Schenck to let me stay this long, she said, but hadn’t it been too long? Didn’t I feel a little guilty about it? Didn’t I owe it to my dogs, cats, monkeys, birds and turtles to provide them with adequate space? Didn’t I want a place where I could entertain my friends properly? Didn’t I want a place I could call my own, and be proud of? Didn’t I want a place with room for a pool table?

The answer to all these questions was, of course: Yes.

It was the most logical thing in the world that I buy myself a house. But, I said, there was a slight financial problem. I couldn’t lay out dough for a house as if there wasn’t a future to worry about. We’d made our first picture at M-G-M. Our first highbudget picture. Thalberg was taking a big gamble on us. But suppose it didn’t pan out? Suppose we were a flop? Paramount certainly wouldn’t take us hack. Nobody would want us.

“Do you have any doubt it’ll be a hit?” she said, and I had to tell her that I did have doubts. It hadn’t even been previewed yet. Nobody-not Irving Thalberg or L.B. Mayer-could guarantee that a picture would be sure-fire, nobody except the audience.

“Suppose the audience eats it up at the preview?” she said. “That would clinch it, right?”

“Yah,” I said. “I suppose it would.”

The sneak preview of A Night at the Opera was given at a theatre in Long Beach. All the Marxes were there, along with all the top brass of M-G-M. When the titles flashed on the screen the audience laughed. It was the last time they laughed. For their money the movie was a dud, a turkey, a flop. When it was over we all stood on the sidewalk in front of the theatre, clustering around Thalberg, in a daze. This was something that hadn’t happened to us since the night we laid an egg on the stage of the Royal Theatre, sixteen years ago. We couldn’t figure it out.

I saw Thalberg whisper something to a couple of his assistants. The assistants run into the theatre. They come out with the film, in six cans. Thalberg announces to all the mourners on the sidewalk that the picture is being shown again, in the theatre across the street. He refuses to accept the verdict of one audience. He has too much at stake in this deal. We all walk across the street, dragging our feet.

So we ran the movie a second time. The difference was like night and day. This time the audience laughed when the titles came on and they never stopped laughing until the end, when they whistled and applauded. It was emphatically a hit picture. The executives of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer hugged and kissed each other. Chico tore off to call his bookie. Groucho said, “At last! Now I can complete my set of The Book of Knowledge!”

My date said to me, “Now you can buy our house, Harpo,” and I said I sure could. Delayed reaction. Three hours later, lying in bed, I realized that Susan had said “our house.”

I didn’t fight it. I went house-hunting, on my own. Soon after the movie was released I found a place I liked in Beverly Hills, and bought it. Not until the papers were signed and I held the deed did I tell Susan about it. I took her over to show off the joint. It looked very big and very empty and I didn’t have the vaguest idea what I wanted to do with it, but Susan said, “Perfect! The kind of a house I knew you’d pick out. I can see exactly how you’re going to furnish it and decorate it. You don’t need to tell me your plans. I know.”

She kept a stiff upper lip while I showed her the layout, until we came to a room that had obviously been used as a nursery. There she broke down. She stood looking out the window with her back to me, and she said, “Harpo, when are you going to ask me to marry you,”

“Any day now, honey,” I said. “Any day.”

“What day?”

My feet got cold. There were many reasons, I said, why we shouldn’t rush into such a serious venture. We had to have time to plan, time to outfox the press. If we didn’t play it close to the chest the publicity could murder us. We wouldn’t have a minute of private life.

“All right,” she said, “so let’s start planning.”

“I am, honey, I am. I’m thinking hard about it right now.”

She sat on the ledge of the window in the bare nursery. “Go ahead and think,” she said, giving me her I-dare-you look and swinging a foot. “I don’t mind waiting. I have nothing else to do for the rest of the day-or the rest of the year-or the rest of my life.”

“Let’s get out of here,” I said. “I have to go home and feed the turtle.”

The next day Gummo called me up, apologetically. Metro, he said, had the wild idea that I should go to Europe and do a series of personal appearances to plug A Night at the Opera before it was released over there. He’d told them I never wasted my time with that kind of exploitation, but they insisted Gummo should at least ask me and so he was now asking me, and what else was new.

I said, “How soon can I leave?”

Gummo told me I was kidding. I told him I wasn’t. He asked me what the hell I wanted to go to Europe for. I said I had to take it on the lam, and he shouldn’t ask any questions. So he asked questions. Who was after me? The income-tax people? Worse than that, I said. What was the rap? Was it serious? It was serious. What was the worst I could get? I could get life, I said.

“Oh,” said Gummo. “Susan.” My silence told him he’d guessed it. “I’m on her side, you know,” he said, “and I think you’re running away from the nicest thing that ever happened to you. But you’re my client and I work for you and I’ll get you on the Friday plane to New York, and then I’ll do my best to find a nice fellow for Susan while you’re gone.”

“You do that,” I said.

I got a lot accomplished before I left. I huddled with the architect, the decorator and the landscaper and gave them final approval of all their plans. When I came back my new place would be remodeled, redecorated, furnished and landscaped, ready to move into.

I took Susan to dinner to tell her good-bye. She took my leaving very bravely, I must say. She said she knew how it was with anybody in my position. My life could never be entirely my own. When the studio said jump, I had no choice but to jump. It was terribly unfair, but she understood. The only thing she felt sad about was my poor house, the thought of it sitting there so empty and forlorn all the time I was gone.

“You’ll be surprised what’ll happen to the house while I’m gone,” I said, and this cheered her up immensely.

It was not altogether a cheerful evening, however. On the eve of our being so far apart we had never felt so close together.

Rome was my first stop on the Continent. Dull time. Next stop was Milan, where M-G-M had rigged a night of publicity stunts for me at La Scala Opera House. Milan was memorable only because I drank too much peppermint liqueur at dinner. The liqueur had a delayed, disastrous effect on me in the middle of the opera, at which I was the guest of honor. I stuck it out only because I was able to make a deal with the men’s room attendant for his trousers. I’m still not sure what was performed that night. The only name that comes to mind is Il Purgativo.

Even Paris had few attractions for me this trip. All I can remember of my stop there was staying at the George Cinq Hotel, and my French being so lousy I couldn’t get the name of the joint across to cab drivers-until I got the idea of saying “Hotel Joe Schenck, please,” which worked like a charm.

I was glad to get to London, the last date on the tour. I had many good friends in England, Marx Brothers’ fans dating from the night we opened at the Alhambra shortly after the First World War. One fan I wouldn’t see this time, however, was the Prince of Wales.

The last time Wales had been in the audience Chico and I had done our “flash” bit. In this we’re onstage looking for something we’ve dropped. Chico asks me for a flashlight. I act dumb. “The flash!” he says. “Where’s-a flash?” I am very eager and anxious to please, but I keep pulling the wrong thing out of my coat-a flask, a flag, a fish, a flush (poker hand), a flute, everything but a flash. Finally Chico says, “You’re-a impossible. Come on, help me look for it.” Whereupon I haul out a flashlight, turn it on, and help him look for it.

On the following day a present arrived backstage from the Prince of Wales. It was a velvet-lined hamper containing a flask, a flag, a fish, a flush, a flute, the whole inventory of the sketch, including a flashlight.

Now, in the middle of 1936, he was no longer the Prince of Wales, but the uncrowned King of England, Edward VIII. He was being kept under wraps for the period of mourning between his father’s death and his own coronation.

I was amazed when the stage manager told me, during the intermission of my first show, that His Majesty was in the theatre in a private box, screened off from the public. After the show a messenger brought back a note, signed “Ed. Rex,” thanking me for an enjoyable evening and inviting me to a reception at the royal residence.