Groucho Marx and the Broadway Murders by Ron Goulart Read Free Book Online

was pulling out of the little town of Barstow and heading into the desert, someone tapped, gently, on the door of Groucho’s compartment. He’d been, as he later told me, sitting there in his least threadbare bathrobe, smoking a cigar and rereading T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland.
    “This wasteland shares several similarities with Pasadena,” he said to himself. “Except Pasadena gets more rain.”
    At the sound of the timid knocking, Groucho rose, unlatched his door, and slid it a few inches open. “Well, fancy that,” he observed. “I take it your amnesia cleared up.”
    It was Dian Bowers, wearing a white cablestitch sweater and tan slacks, standing there in the corridor. “Can I come in, Groucho?”
    “I wouldn’t want to get in trouble with the Watch and Ward Society, my dear,” he said. “Or with that huge lout who plucks unwanted suitors out of your vicinity.”
    “Please, I’d really like to talk to you.”
    He opened the door wide and backed up. “My humble abode is at your service, kiddo,” he invited, beckoning her with the hand that held the book.
    “I didn’t wake you up, did I?” the slim actress asked as she crossed the threshold.

    He shut the compartment door. “Alas, I never sleep well on trains,” he confided, nodding at a chair. “I never sleep well at home either, come to think of it. What causes that, I believe, is my staying awake worrying about whether or not I have insomnia.”
    She glanced at the book in his hand. “T. S. Eliot, huh?” she said, sitting down. “You’re a lot more intellectual than you let on.”
    “I’d have to be.” He snuffed out his cigar in a Santa Fe ashtray, settled back on his couch. “Most gorgeous movie stars who invade my sleeping chambers at this hour are consumed with lust—or they’ve consumed too much near beer. You, however, I sense have dropped in for some other purpose.”
    Dian glanced at the closed door. “I wanted to apologize, Groucho, for snubbing you in the dining car tonight.”
    “I’m frequently snubbed,” he said. “In fact, when I was in the Boy Scouts I was only two snubs short of getting a merit badge in that category.”
    “I find it’s easier to pretend I’m Dian Bowers and always have been. Especially when any of Daniel Manheim’s people are around.”
    Groucho leaned forward. “Are you in some kind of trouble?”
    She hesitated. “Not exactly, no,” she answered after a few silent seconds. “Really, I’m in a terrific spot right now and I ought to be terribly happy and enormously grateful.”
    “Yet you ain’t.”
    She said, “I don’t know, Groucho. Back when I was Nancy Washburn … well, life was a hell of a lot simpler.”
    “It didn’t pay as well, though.”
    She gave a quiet sigh. “Well, yeah, part of this is about money,” the young actress admitted. “And it’s also about my wanting to get someplace in this damn business. I came to Hollywood in nineteen-thirty-six, from Iola, Wisconsin, for Pete’s sake. As Nancy Washburn I managed to land bit parts in exactly seven movies over the next three years.”
    “That averages out to over two a year.”

    “Sure, and I had—this is the entire total—precisely five lines of dialogue.”
    “Consider my brother Harpo. He never has any lines at all, yet he’s happy as a clam,” said Groucho. “Although a recent study in Scientific American has established that the majority of clams aren’t all that happy, especially since they found out about clam chowder.”
    Dian smiled, very briefly. “Everything changed once I was, you know, discovered by Daniel Manheim,” she said, folding her hands in her lap.
    The producer, she explained to Groucho, had spotted her over a year ago and signed her to an exclusive long-term contract. Since then she hadn’t appeared in a movie, concentrating instead on studying acting, dancing, and a wide range of other things that Manheim believed would improve her. His people had redesigned her, renamed her, and,