Hello Goodbye Hello: A Circle of 101 Remarkable Meetings (42 page)

Beverly Hills Tennis Club, Los Angeles

July 14th 1937

Tennis has become the most fashionable sport in Hollywood: Clark Gable, Errol Flynn, Cary Grant, Spencer Tracy, Carole Lombard, David Niven, Norma Shearer and Katharine Hepburn all play. This prompts Fred Perry – the world no. 1 player for the past five years
¹⁹¹
– to turn professional and move to Los Angeles with his film-star wife Helen Vinson.

Perry buys the Beverly Hills Tennis Club with the American champion Ellsworth Vines. To mark its opening, the two of them play in one of the very first pro-celebrity tournaments: Perry partners Charlie Chaplin and Vines partners Groucho Marx.

Charlie Chaplin (b.1889) is just a year older than Groucho Marx (b.1890), but the gap seems infinitely wider: the two men are separated by sound. Chaplin is the king of silent comedy, Marx the king of the fast-talking wise-crack. Chaplin spends a lot of time fretting that he belongs to the past; at lunch before the game, he shares these fears with his opponent.

‘Charlie turned around to me and said, “Gee, I envy you,”’ recalls Groucho, a quarter of a century on, ‘and I said, “You envy me? Why?” He said, “I wish I could talk on the screen the way you do.” I found this such an ironical statement. Here was the greatest comedian that there’s ever been, there’s never been anyone like him, and he’s sitting there envying me because I can talk.’

It is not hard to detect an undertow of triumph beneath this outward show of sympathy. Groucho has always been a very competitive man, and Chaplin is known as the world champion in their shared field of comedy. But by the time Groucho looks back on this conversation, silent comedy has come to seem as out-of-date and quaint as the penny-farthing.

The two vexed comedians compare notes. ‘There we were, two neurotics sitting, and talking, completely terrified about life and their careers. You would think that by this time Chaplin would be more or less convinced that he had a remarkable talent. But no! He was just as frightened as he had been when he first came to me and asked my advice.’

That first meeting took place sixteen years ago, when the Marx Brothers were travelling from Minneapolis to Edmonton. With three hours to kill between trains in Winnipeg, Groucho walked up the main street to the Empress Theatre, where Chaplin happened to be playing. He heard great gusts of laughter coming from inside. ‘I’ve never heard an audience laugh so forcefully in my life.’ He went backstage, introduced himself to Chaplin and invited him to come and see the Marx Brothers perform.

Chaplin accepted. As a prank, he chose to sit in the front row, reading a newspaper all the way through the show. The Marx Brothers said nothing about it at the time, but when Chaplin invited them to see his show, they switched places in their box with four Orthodox rabbis, all extravagantly bearded. Assuming that the rabbis were the Marx Brothers in disguise, Chaplin picked on them, whereupon all four rabbis stormed out in protest.

When their paths crossed again in Salt Lake City, the Marx Brothers persuaded Chaplin to visit a brothel with them, but he proved too sheepish to take an active role, preferring to chat to the madam and play with her dog. Afterwards, he told the brothers that he had just refused an offer of $500 a week from Hollywood. ‘No comedian is worth five hundred a week,’ he explained. ‘If I sign up with them and don’t make good, they’ll fire me.’

They didn’t run into Charlie Chaplin again for another five years, by which time he had become a major Hollywood star, well known for his many lovers, some of them very young. When the brothers came to dinner at his mansion, uniformed butlers stood behind each of their chairs.

For the rest of their lives, Groucho Marx and Charlie Chaplin maintain an edgy relationship, their admiration tempered by competitiveness.
¹⁹²
Like Chaplin, Groucho is forever looking over his shoulder for fear of being overtaken. When
Monkey Business
and
City Lights
come out at the same
time, he notes ruefully that while
City Lights
is acclaimed an instant classic,
Monkey Business
is seen as ‘the usual Marx Madhouse ...’

On this summer’s day in 1937, it is as though the edgy competition between the two most famous comedians in the world has been formalised. Chaplin Chaplin prides himself on his tennis: as well as being a member of the Beverly Hills Club, he has his own court at his home, where he throws tennis parties for fellow stars like Greta Garbo and Clark Gable. When newsreel photographers turn up, he always plays that little bit harder. Groucho is much less proficient with a racket. Unable to compete in tennis, and incapable of being seen in public without playing his buffoonish on-screen character, he decides to compete for laughs. He turns up with a huge suitcase and a dozen tennis rackets, curls up in a sleeping bag, then brandishes a ping-pong bat.

Chaplin and Perry win the first game with ease, and the second game too. At this point, Groucho tells the crowd that he is going to have a lunch break (‘Vines can do all my playing for me!’). He dips into his suitcase and produces a tablecloth and a range of sandwiches, which he proceeds to spread on the ground. ‘Will you join me for a spot of tea?’ he shouts to Chaplin, playing to the crowd.

Charlie Chaplin feigns laughter, but is quietly seething: he wants to get on with the match. ‘I didn’t come here to be your straight man,’ he hisses into Groucho’s ear.

Groucho omits this comment from his memoirs. In newsreel footage, Chaplin can be seen smiling at Groucho’s shenanigans, but this is only for the cameras. Years later, he has still not forgiven Groucho for casting himself in the role of funny guy. After all, given the choice, who wants to play stooge?

WANTS TO BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY BY

3 Kensington Court Gardens, London W8

June 1964

Early in 1961, T.S. Eliot and his young wife are disembarking from a glass-bottomed boat in Jamaica when, much to their delight, they spot Groucho Marx and his wife preparing to embark.

Prompted by this coincidence, Eliot sends a letter to Groucho a few weeks later. In it, he says how much he admires him and asks for a signed photograph.

Groucho is pleasantly surprised; like many comedians, he is an intellectual
manqué
. Accordingly, he posts Eliot a studio portrait of himself looking serious, without his cigar and his comedy moustache. Eliot thanks him, promises him that it ‘will soon appear in its frame on my wall with other famous friends such as W.B. Yeats and Paul Valéry’, and sends a photograph of himself.

‘I had no idea you were so handsome,’ replies Groucho. ‘Why you haven’t been offered the lead in some sexy movies I can only attribute to the stupidity of the casting directors.’

The pair embark on a correspondence based on mutual admiration. In a letter written in February 1963, Eliot mentions that Groucho’s portrait is now framed on his office mantelpiece, ‘but I have to point you out to my visitors as nobody recognises you without the cigar and rolling eyes. I shall try to provide a cigar worthy of you.’

To clear up the problem, Groucho sends Eliot another photograph, this one of himself in full comic attire. Eliot now has two photographs. ‘I like them both very much and I cannot make up my mind which one to take home and which one to put on my office wall. The new one would impress visitors more, especially those I want to impress, as it is unmistakably Groucho. The only solution may be to carry them both with me every day.’

Their correspondence rumbles on, with its slightly effortful jocularity, but the two men are prevented by illness from meeting. First Eliot is in hospital, then Groucho. In June 1963, Groucho writes to say that ‘by next May or thereabouts, I hope to be well enough to eat that free meal you’ve been promising me for the past two years’. But his letter includes a small note of hurt: he mentions that, in a tribute to T.S. Eliot by Stephen Spender in the
New York Times Book Review
, there is a long list of the many portraits on the wall of his study, but ‘one name was conspicuous by its absence’.

Eliot writes a somewhat defensive letter in response. ‘I think that Stephen Spender was only attempting to enumerate oil and water colour pictures and no photographs – I trust so,’ he says. He is looking forward to their meeting in the spring. ‘If you do not turn up I am afraid that all of the people to whom I have boasted of knowing you (and of being on first name terms at that) will take me for a four flusher.’

Recently, he adds, he and his wife went to
The Marx Brothers Go West
, which they had never seen before. ‘It was certainly worth it,’ he adds.

Groucho finally arrives in London in June 1964, to host a TV panel show called
The Celebrity Game
.
¹⁹³
Dinner is duly arranged. Eliot writes to confirm that he has ordered a taxi to take Groucho and his wife from the Savoy, where they are staying, to the Eliots’ flat in Kensington Court Gardens. ‘The picture of you in the newspapers saying that, amongst other reasons, you have come to London to see me has greatly enhanced my credit in the neighbourhood, and particularly with the greengrocer across the street. Obviously I am now someone of importance.’

Groucho revises hard before the dinner with the man he refers to as ‘my celebrated pen pal’. He reads
Murder in the Cathedral
twice,
The Waste Land
three times, and ‘just in case of a conversational bottleneck’ he also brushes up on
King Lear
.

Over cocktails before dinner, there is a momentary lull of the kind that is, recalls Groucho, ‘more or less inevitable when strangers meet for the first time’. To fill the gap, Groucho tosses in a quotation from
The Waste
Land
. ‘That, I thought, will show him I’ve read a thing or two besides my press notices from Vaudeville.’

Eliot smiles faintly, ‘as though to say he was thoroughly familiar with his poems and didn’t need me to recite them’. So Groucho tactfully steers the conversation onto
King Lear
. ‘I said the king was an incredibly foolish old man, which God knows he
was
; and that if he’d been
my
father I would have run away from home at the age of eight – instead of waiting until I was ten.’

But this conversational ploy also fails to catch fire: Eliot clearly wants to talk about comedy, not literature. ‘He seemed more interested in discussing
Animal Crackers
and
A Night at the Opera
. He quoted a joke – one of mine – that I had long since forgotten. Now it was my turn to smile faintly. I said I was not going to let anyone – not even the British poet from St Louis – spoil my Literary Evening.’

So Groucho doggedly continues with his condemnation of King Lear. He refers to the disowning of Cordelia as ‘the height of idiocy’. The Eliots listen politely. Mrs Eliot defends Shakespeare, and Mrs Marx takes her side. But Eliot remains determined to switch the subject back to comedy. ‘He asked if I remembered the courtroom scene in
Duck Soup
. Fortunately, I’d forgotten every word. It was obviously the end of the Literary Evening, but very pleasant none the less.’
¹⁹⁴

In a letter to his brother Gummo describing the evening, Groucho says
that Eliot and he have three things in common: an affection for good cigars, a love of cats, and a weakness for puns. The Marxes leave reasonably early, as ‘we both felt he wasn’t up to a long evening of conversation – especially mine’. The poet, adds the comedian, is ‘a dear man and a charming host’.

PROVOKES GIGGLES FROM

Aeolian Hall, 135–137 New Bond Street, London W1

April 14th 1943

T.S. Eliot has agreed to take part in a grand wartime poetry reading at the Aeolian Hall, ‘to keep the arts alive’. Organised by Osbert Sitwell, it is in aid of Lady Crewe’s French in Britain Fund. Early on, Sitwell has persuaded Queen Elizabeth to be patron; he has been keeping her abreast of developments for some weeks. Her Majesty has even promised to bring the two little Princesses along with her.

A formidable line-up of poets has been assembled, among them C. Day Lewis, Louis MacNeice, Vita Sackville-West, Walter de la Mare, John Masefield and Osbert’s sister Edith, who has helped to organise the event. The Sitwells have jointly directed rehearsals, timing the poets with a stop-watch so as to be sure they do not go on too long. Edith invites her fellow poet Dorothy Wellesley to join in, for two reasons: a) she is a woman and b) she is sure not to outshine Edith. But Edith almost immediately regrets asking her, as Wellesley starts ‘being beyond any words tiresome ... Practically every day I get letters worrying me about something. She sends me all the tripe she writes.’ Why on earth, she wonders, did W.B.Yeats include her in his last anthology of poetry? ‘The old man’s mind must have been going for him to think her any good at all as a poet.’

On the big night, the hall fills up. Queen Elizabeth and her daughters, Elizabeth and Margaret, both wearing mittens, are each presented with a programme by the celebrity programme-seller, the comic actress Beatrice Lillie, before being escorted to the front row. The recital kicks off with John Masefield, the Poet Laureate, paying tribute to Laurence Binyon, who died in March. Queen Elizabeth and her daughters look duly grave. From then on, the poets take to the stage in strict alphabetical order:
Edmund Blunden, Gordon Bottomley, Hilda Doolittle. Each of them stands behind a Victorian lectern, picked up by Sitwell in the Caledonian market, so large that only the heads of the very tallest poets can be spotted above it.

E is for Eliot. At five feet eleven inches, he is clearly visible. He has chosen to read the final section, ‘London Bridge Is Falling Down’, from
The Waste Land
:

I sat upon the shore

Fishing, with the arid plain behind me