Odd couple
As a girlfriend of mine used to enjoy saying whenever somebody said that about us: couple of whats, exactly? Straight from the shock-rocker’s mouth:
I BELIEVE this photo was taken at Groucho’s birthday party at the Polo Lounge. I first met him at a charity event Frank Sinatra had organised and we sang Lydia The Tattooed Lady, which was an old Groucho song from [1939 Marx Brothers film] At The Circus. My manager, Shep Gordon, looked after him in the later stage of his life, and for a period of time we were pretty good friends — we were kinda inseparable.
He was always great company, hanging around with him was just like being in a Marx Brothers movie, like being in Duck Soup. You’d go to lunch with him and he’d open the menu, call the waiter over and say, as loudly as he could, ‘What kind of drugs do you have?’, or, ‘Can I get some dope for my friend here?’
I’d say, ‘Shhh, you can’t say that, Groucho!’ But of course you never told Groucho that he couldn’t do something because that would just egg him on more. He enjoyed the sport of it all.
We’d be having lunch and he’d say, ‘Excuse me, I gotta go torture the maitre d”, and two minutes later the maitre d’ would be looking like he wanted to strangle him. There was never a dull moment.
He liked me because I could make him laugh: if you could make Groucho laugh that was something. He was a unique entertainer, in that he could do anything — he could sing, play guitar, dance, tell jokes — and he looked at me as that kind of entertainer too. There was a certain absurdity to both of us.
Groucho came to see one of our shows once, and said, ‘Alice is the last hope for vaudeville.’ He saw me in that same tradition he came from.
Groucho would host great dinner parties, but if you had dinner at his house you had to perform afterwards. Except not in your own chosen field: if you were a singer, you had to dance, if you were a dancer, you had to tell jokes. I’d have to sing a Bing Crosby song, not a rock song, Fred Astaire would have to play piano, Mickey Dolenz would have to dance. That made it funnier for everybody. Those were good evenings.
Even in his eighties he was as sharp as a tack. I’d come back home and he’d be chasing my 18-year-old wife around the living room wearing Mickey Mouse ears, or she’d be sitting in his lap. Sheryl would say, ‘Alice, he’s 86, what is he going to do?’, and he’d look up with a smile and a raised eyebrow. He was one of a kind, and I’m proud to have known him as a friend. He was a true legend.
Stumbled across the above whilst poking around here and there, my curiosity having been piqued by the lead item from yesterday’s Memezapoppin‘ post. The above-mentioned pic:
Awwww. Odd couple indeed, no?
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