Groucho Marx, Secret Agent Read online

  As I drew closer to the vicinity of my wife, I had to ease around an actress I didn’t quite recognize and a slim young man she seemed to be pleading with. She was dressed as Martha Washington, and he was wearing white tie and tails, a top hat, and a black cape. Him I recognized as Will Blackburn, a very popular and successful Hollywood psychic just then, and I thought he was probably dressed as Mandrake the Magician. He had a Mandrake moustache, but also a goatee. Could be it was his own facial hair.

  The actress was clutching both of Blackburn’s arms just above the elbows. “C’mon, Will darling, you can surely tell me that much. Shall I take the damned part or not?”

  “This is my day off,” he said, smiling. “No predictions.”

  “But I have to let my agent know by tomorrow afternoon.”

  “I can fit you in for a reading at eleven A.M.,” the psychic offered. “That’s the best I can do.”

  “Can’t you at least give a little hint as to …”

  I moved beyond hearing range.

  When I reached my wife at long last, I found Groucho sitting at her feet smoking a cigar.

  “Good evening, Julius,” I said.

  “Rollo,” he said, popping to his feet, “do you realize what a grave injustice has been done to me?”

  I handed Jane the glass of ginger ale. “There was more when I left the bar.”

  Taking the drink, she said, “Groucho’s been grieving because Lockwood didn’t ask him to bring his guitar and sing tonight.”

  “My guitar wasn’t invited,” he confirmed, exhaling smoke. “And my horse was ignored as well.”

  “You don’t have a horse,” I reminded him, moving closer to Jane and putting my free hand on her shoulder.

  “They’re not getting off that easy. I know a snub when I see one,” Groucho said. “In fact, I know a shrub when I see one, which makes me just awfully popular in horticultural circles.”

  I attempted to lure him onto a different topic. “What’s your costume meant to be?”

  “I’m Abraham Lincoln, obviously.” Though he had applied the greasepaint moustache he used in his movies, there was no Lincolnesque beard in evidence. Instead of a stovepipe hat, he was wearing one of his old Captain Spaulding pith helmets. And over the shoulders of his tweedy autumnal sport coat, he had thrown a shawl.

  “You don’t look much like Abe Lincoln.”

  “Neither did Abe Lincoln.”

  “He never, for instance, wore a pith helmet.”

  “He never happened to wear one when there were photographers around, true,” admitted Groucho. “But he was often seen with a shawl very much like this one draped over his careworn shoulders.”

  “I doubt Lincoln’s shawl had “Souvenir of Youngstown, Ohio” embroidered across—”

  “As a chap who’s gotten himself tarted up to resemble a potential pallbearer for Orson Welles, you’re in no position to cast aspersions,” Groucho informed me. “We might allow you to cast a few nasturtiums later in the evening, however, so stick around.”

  “I just encountered Lockwood and—”

  “That poltroon. He invites Ted Timberlake, Warlock Pictures’ answer to Gene Autry, to yodel some ditties from his cow operas and plunk his guitar at tonight’s festivities. Yet he misses the golden opportunity of having the man who’s known far and wide as the Kosher Segovia to—”

  “Timberlake happens to be a very hot singing cowboy right now, Groucho, and Warlock is promoting the guy,” I cut in to remind him. “And lots of people, as inexplicable as it may seem, like cowboy tunes more than they like Gilbert and Sullivan.”

  “I wasn’t planning to render my popular medley of ditties from The Mikado,” he informed me. “I would’ve favored the throng with ‘Lydia the Tattooed Lady’ the hit tune from our new Marx Brothers movie. I understand it’s been climbing on the Hit Parade charts. At the same time I myself have been climbing a greased pole.”

  “How’s At the Circus doing at the box office?” Jane asked. The film had opened nationwide about two weeks earlier.

  “MGM won’t tell us, but the last time Chico drove by the studio, he noticed they’d hung black crepe on all the gates,” he answered. “And I hear that Louis B. Mayer is planning to replace their Leo the Lion mascot with Leo the Turkey.”

  Jane suggested, after sipping her ginger ale, “Maybe Ted Timberlake will loan you his guitar after he’s finished performing, and you can—”

  “Would you ask Rubinstein to play on a piano loaned to him by Frankie Carle?”

  I remembered to sample my beer. “Despite the fact that Lockwood hasn’t availed himself of your musical services,” I said, “he sure seems favorably inclined toward us. I think we’ve got a hell of a good chance of selling our show to his Amalgamated Radio Network, Groucho.”

  “And why not, might I ask, since Groucho Marx, Secret Agent is the most brilliant comedy show to come along since Kay Kayser’s Kollege of Musical Knowledge?” He turned toward Jane. “Have you read your hubby’s script of our planned new show, my dear?”

  “Twice.”

  “And what is your humble opinion of same?”

  “I honestly think it might even be a shade funnier than Kay Kayser.”

  “Exactly. And it’s guaranteed not to give you dishpan hands.”

  A Los Angeles advertising agency had approached Groucho with the notion of doing another radio show. Since we’d worked together on a couple of earlier ones, including Groucho Marx, Master Detective, he’d brought me in on the new project. Groucho would be playing J. Edgar Bedspread, undercover man, and so far we had Margaret Dumont lined up to play an over-the-hill spy named Mata Herring, and Hans Conreid was going to portray a foreign agent named Herman Boring. Everybody had been very enthusiastic about my sample script, and we were set to cut a demonstration acetate early in November.

  Groucho noticed a tall, lanky fellow go walking by, spurs jingling. He was wearing a high-crown black Stetson and a fringed movie-cowboy outfit. “Can that be Timberlake, the noted musical sodbuster of whom we were recently speaking?” he inquired, eyes narrowing. “If I accidentally stepped on his strumming hand, do you think—”

  “Relax, Groucho,” I said, recognizing the guy. “That’s only Les Michaelson, Timberlake’s stunt double.”

  “No use incapacitating the fellow then.” Gesturing again at the costumed crowd, Groucho asked, “Would, do you think, a cinemactress of the stature of Paulette Goddard attend such a brawl as this in the guise of Little Bo Beep?”

  “Is this a rhetorical question?”

  Using his cigar as a pointer, he said, “That young miss over there looks very much like the lady in question. And in a moment of madness I do believe that I promised her a dance.” He bowed toward my seated wife. “If you’ll excuse me, Lady Jane.”

  As he went loping in the direction of the potential Paulette, he bumped into a guest who was in the costume of the Grim Reaper. Black cloak and cowl, scythe, skull mask. I had no idea who it was under all that.

  “Not ready yet, old boy,” Groucho told Death, and continued on his way toward Little Bo Beep.

  Apparently it wasn’t Paulette Goddard, but she and Groucho danced anyway. The swing orchestra was playing “Three Little Fishes.”

  A few moments later, just after a Satan had danced by with Mary Astor, Jane reached up and took hold of my hand. “This is sort of odd,” she said quietly.

  I leaned closer. “Something wrong?”

  “Well, I don’t know why I should be experiencing morning sickness at this time of the night … but, I’m sorry, I’m feeling kind of rotten all of a sudden, Frank.”

  “Okay, we’ll get you home.”

  “You can stay, and I’ll send for a cab to—”

  “Nope, ma’am, where I come from an hombre always escorts the filly he brung back safe to her spread,” I assured her. “You sure this is nothing serious?”

  Standing up, she smiled at me. “I’ll be fine, but just now I think I best head for home.”

 
; “C’mon,” I said, putting an arm around her slim shoulders and guiding her toward a doorway.

  As we stood out in the foggy night waiting for our car, Jane shivered. “That was all very spooky,” she said.

  “As it should be. Halloween is noted for being a spooky occasion.”

  “No, it’s something else.” She shook her head. “There was a grim feeling in the air.”

  “You think maybe being pregnant is making you psychic?”

  “It’s a possibility,” she answered as the attendant delivered our car. “All I know is, I have this feeling something unpleasant is going to happen in there.”

  “Gosh, and we’re going to miss it,” I said, opening her door for her and then walking around to the driver’s seat.

  It turned out Jane was pretty much right.

  Two

  The real spooky stuff didn’t commence, as Groucho later told me, until after the rising cowboy star Ted Timberlake had entertained at the sprawling Halloween party.

  A tall, tanned man in his early thirties, Timberlake wore the same sort of richly embroidered and fringed shirt that both Gene Autry and Roy Rogers showed up for work in over at rival Republic Pictures. His leather boots and his high-crown Stetson were of a spotless white. Accompanied by a three-piece Western swing group and strumming his glittering spangled guitar, Timberlake performed the four songs from his latest Warlock Pictures oater, The Singin’ Owlhoot. Most of the party-goers were enthusiastic about him, applauding so forcefully that he was persuaded to do two encores.

  “Imagine clapping for a chap whose guitar is out of tune,” Groucho observed to Paulette Goddard as they stood together in the crowd.

  He’d managed to find the actual actress, who had come as Eve. “You have to admit, though, that Ted’s cute,” she said.

  “I’m cute, too, but I also know how to tune a guitar.”

  A blond actress in a Helen of Troy costume passed close by, smiling in Groucho’s direction and waving. “I loved you in Room Service,” she called.

  “What an odd name for a motel,” he replied. “But thanks for reminding me.”

  “The orchestra hasn’t returned to the bandstand,” mentioned Paulette.

  “All too true,” he acknowledged.

  “Therefore, we can’t be dancing at the moment, and there’s no need for you to have your hand on my backside, Groucho.”

  “It’s that where it’s been? I was wondering why I hadn’t seen it lately.” He brought both hands up in front of him, scrutinized them, rubbed them together.

  “Could you get me a martini from the bar?” she inquired.

  “I’ll set off at once.” Bending deeply, he caught her right hand and kissed it. “Since this is autumn, my dear, shouldn’t some of those fig leaves in your costume have fallen by now?”

  “Scoot,” she advised, smiling.

  He pushed, moving in one of his bent-knee shuffles, into the surrounding crowd.

  “We’re planning to see At the Circus tomorrow night,” a fat producer in a Phantom of the Opera outfit told him as he passed.

  “Don’t,” warned Groucho. “There’ve been reports that most audiences who see it have been turning to stone.” He relit his cigar. “Although in your case that might be an improvement.”

  As Groucho continued on his journey toward the bar, a thin, middle-aged man in a rumpled suit held up a flash camera. “Good evening, Groucho. Might I—”

  “I say, old man, what an excellent costume. You look exactly like a seedy newspaper photographer.”

  “I am a seedy newspaper photographer. I’d like to—”

  “Well then, that’s a perfectly valid reason for your looking just like a seedy newspaper photographer.”

  “I’m with the Bayside Argus, and you have a lot of fans in our—”

  “So does Sally Rand, and look where it got her. I read only the other day that the poor girl is bankrupt.”

  “I meant admirers, Groucho, and that’s why—”

  “It’s a sad commentary on our society when a comely blonde goes broke while dancing naked in public,” said Groucho. “You’d think that fan dancers would sell like hotcakes, even though they’re nowhere near as nourishing for breakfast. Still, if you pour maple syrup liberally over them, you hardly notice the difference.”

  “Might I snap some pictures of you, Groucho?”

  Removing his pith helmet and slapping it over his heart, Groucho rose up on one foot in a cranelike position. “Snap away, my good man,” he invited.

  After taking just two flashbulb shots, the rumpled photographer said, “Hey, there’s Alice Faye over there. I promised my editor I’d get some cheesecake shots of her. Thanks for your time, Groucho.” He went hurrying away into the costumed crowd.

  Groucho put his other foot on the floor, replaced his hat on his head. “Upstaged by Alice Faye,” he sighed. “And to think I went out and spent money on a pedicure especially for tonight.”

  As he continued on his way, he passed Will Blackburn and overheard the popular psychic saying to a young actress whom Groucho almost recognized, “I have a premonition that something dark and sinister is going to happen.”

  “I thought you just told me you weren’t predicting tonight.”

  “Not for any of my paying clients, no,” he answered. “But this is a strong feeling that came to me unbidden.”

  “I unbid three clubs,” said Groucho as he passed on by.

  In a clearing in the throng a few feet in front of him, Groucho noticed the hooded Grim Reaper was moving up close to Eric Olmstead.

  Death leaned in close to the director and said something to him.

  Groucho wasn’t near enough to hear anything of what was said.

  Olmstead turned even paler. Grimacing, he brought both hands up to his chest. He took a few wobbling steps backward, fell to one knee.

  The Grim Reaper turned, moved on.

  Groucho reached the director first, just as he started to topple toward the ebony floor. “Steady now,” he cautioned, catching hold of the swaying man’s arm.

  “I’ll be okay in a …” Olmstead’s head tilted suddenly, and his sky blue Sinbad turban fell free from his head, bouncing on the floor as he passed out.

  Crouching, Groucho managed to ease the unconscious man into a supine position.

  “Get the hell out of my way,” Dinah Flanders told the surrounding crowd as she came pushing her way through. “Somebody get a goddamn doctor. It’s his heart.”

  She knelt beside her husband.

  “Does he carry any medicine with him?” Groucho asked her.

  “There should be a pillbox in his sash,” the feisty actress said, reaching out to search Olmstead.

  “We’ll take over, Dinah.” Lockwood, his Napoleon hat tucked under his arm, came striding up.

  With him was a plump man in a musketeer costume. “I’m a doctor,” he explained, setting his black medical bag down with him. “When Mr. Lockwood so kindly invited me to tonight’s party, I thought it would be a good idea if I brought along my—”

  “Knock off the chin music and examine him, for crying out loud,” urged Dinah.

  Genuflecting beside the stretched-out Olmstead, the doctor opened his black bag. After listening to the director’s chest with his stethoscope for a moment, he said, “I don’t think this was a heart attack.”

  “He’s got a bad heart,” said the actress. “I told him the excitement of this damn—”

  “Looks to me as though he simply fainted.” The doctor produced a vial of smelling salts, held them to the director’s nose.

  “That guy in the skull mask must’ve scared him,” volunteered a starlet in a Betty Boop costume.

  “What do you mean?” Lockwood asked her.

  “This guy who was gotten up like Death came over to Olmstead and said something to him,” she explained. “Olmstead turned a heck of a lot paler than usual and then did a nosedive.”

  “What did the bastard say to Eric?” asked his wife, scowling up at the
starlet.

  When she shook her head, her Betty Boop wig slipped to the left. “I don’t think anybody heard what the guy said, except him.” She pointed down at the director.

  “It was something about a frog,” offered a lean young man who was dressed as Zorro.

  Lockwood asked him, “A frog?”

  “I’m pretty sure the guy in the skull mask mentioned something about a frog or a toad, Mr. Lockwood. That’s the only thing I caught.”

  Glancing around, the tycoon asked, “Where is this man?”

  The Betty Boop starlet said, “He took off like a turkey through the corn soon as Olmstead started to collapse.”

  “Anybody know where he went?”

  No one answered.

  Olmstead’s eyes fluttered open. “I’m all right, Dinah,” he assured her in a weak voice. “Don’t look so darn forlorn, dear.”

  “Oh, yeah? If you’re in such terrific shape, kiddo, why’d you pull a faint?”

  “I don’t know. Probably the heat in here.”

  Leaning toward him, Lockwood asked, “What did the man in the Grim Reaper costume say to you, Eric?”

  Carefully, with the help of Groucho and the actress, Olmstead sat up. “Nothing much, Warren,” he said quietly. “He simply asked me if he could borrow a cigarette. Of course, I don’t smoke.”

  And, of course, Olmstead was lying.

  Three

  With Groucho’s help, Dinah got her husband out to their limousine.

  “Thanks for coming to my aid, Groucho,” said the weary director as he settled into the backseat.

  “Think nothing of it, Olmstead old man,” said Groucho from the sidewalk. “If I don’t do at least one good deed every day, Captain Midnight’ll drum me out of the Secret Squadron.”

  Sliding into the low black limo next to Olmstead, Dinah said, “You were swell, Groucho. Thanks a million.” She gently reached over to shut the door.

  He stood watching their chauffeur drive them away along the foggy midnight street.

  As he headed back into the pavilion, one of the watching movie fans pushed close to the police rope to inquire, “You wouldn’t be Groucho Marx, would you?”