Grock the Great

ASK anyone in Europe over the age of twenty about Grock, and you are likely to be told: He was very funny and he is dead. Both of these statements are false. Actually, in real life, Grock is quite sad, and at the age of seventy he is very much alive.

Grock is not a modest man. He would be the first to concede this. He makes many startling claims for himself: that no less an authority than Charlie Chaplin called him the best comic on the stage; that a Queen of Spain laughed so hard at him she gave early birth to an Infanta; that no acrobat has ever been able to imitate his famous leap from a chair; that he once knocked out Battling Siki in an amateur boxing match; and that his home on the Italian Riviera is the finest private property in all of Europe. The astonishing thing is that most of his claims are true.

A Swiss by birth, he began his career as a clown in Hungary and became a national figure in England, France, and Germany. He was truly an international idol, doing his act in fourteen languages. The one place he failed to conquer was New York.

Grock invaded the New World in 1920, going to New York that year to play the Palace. The trip was a series of misfortunes. The sea was rough, his wife fell sick, his ship collided with a freighter and they landed in Halifax. His train to New York caught fire and he was late for his opening.

When he finally went on, the act had moderate success, but not the triumph he was accustomed to in Europe. He had an unusual explanation: since he and Max, his partner, spoke with a British accent, they were taken for Englishmen although they were billed carefully as “French clownsˮ ; and the British being unpopular in America, the pair were not accorded the reception they expected. They topped the bill at the Palace for two weeks, and did several more weeks’ work in New York, but then they all came down with grippe and returned to London.

The idea that Crock is dead stems from the fact that, during the war, being Swiss, he disappeared under the cloak of neutrality of his own country. The combatants on both sides, who had laughed at and loved him for so long, heard of him no more and assumed he was gone. He has now begun his comeback, and intends to go back to most of the countries he played before — except the United States.

I have recently worked with and come to know Grock in a film entitled An Revoir, Monsieur Grock, designed as the climax of his career. The scenario called for Grock to play his own life, and for an American radio reporter to convey his times, in the modern European method of presenting real people in their own roles.

Toward the close of our first evening at the studio, photographers came in to take pictures of him. They asked him if he could do his act on a chair. Immediately he jumped up on his chair, sat on the back, extended his legs and crossed them.

As the flash bulbs popped, the chair leaned back dangerously. I thought the old man was going to break his neck. Being seated closest to him, I leaped up to save him. Everyone else around the table roared with laughter. For now the chair was leaning forward. The old rascal was teetering back and forth, doing his act.

Grock was born Adrien Wettach, son of a watchmaker. He made his first public appearances — at the age of fourteen — by accident. A tightrope walker, Louis Bourquin, had permission to give a performance over the cobblestoned Place du Marche Neuf, on a wire strung from the third floor of the local hotel to the roof of the café on the opposite side of the square. But the wire was rusty and worn, and Bourquin refused to go through with the show. Adrien volunteered to take his place. Midway through the performance, the wire snapped and sagged. But Adrien made his way back to the window of the hotel, and his career had begun.

The character of Grock was created in 1903, in the team of Brick and Grock the musical clowns. They played the famous Cirque Médrano in Paris and then did the classic tour of successful acts of the time, all over France, Belgium, Italy, North Africa, and South America.

In Buenos Aires, Grock met Antonet, the greatest clown of that period. Antonet was impressed by Crock’s musical talent, and Grock was having trouble with Brick; so Antonet and Grock formed a new team, considered the best clown combination ever known until then.

In Berlin they made the significant change from circus to stage. Invited to appear at the celebrated Wintergarten, they went into the music hall. It was the first time a couple of clowns had tried to drag their big feet out of the sawdust up to the rarefied atmosphere of the boards. The act, created for the circus, was at first a flop. But by speeding it up to the requirements of the stage, they became once more a hit.

During his stay in Berlin, Grock had a wart removed from his hand. The job was bungled; the hand was burned and he lost the use of one finger. It was that mishap which made him start wearing his famous white gloves. It also exempted him from military service.

He spent most of the First World War and post-war years in England, staying there so long, he said, that Winston Churchill cited him as evidence that English comedians were the best in the world. In England, Crock married lues, Italian friend of his sister Jeanne. A devoted w ife, she traveled with him wherever he went, and produced offstage the few sound effects of his act. It was in England, too, that he found his favorite partner, Max, a young Dutchman, an excellent violinist and the perfect straight mail for Grock, the clown.

These two Continentals reached their peak of popularity and their peak pay — 300 pounds sterling a week, then about $1500 and a lot of money—in England, but they grew tired of London. They were bothered by rheumatism. They were depressed by the fog. They began to quarrel. Worst of all, the Coliseum manager refused to give Grock the still higher pay and the bigger billing he demanded. In the midst of a Coliseum contract in 1924, he skipped out to Paris, and never returned.

Back on the Continent, Grock organized his own troupe, with an orchestra conducted by his friend Reée Chapon. They played for King Victor Emmanuel of Italy, King Albert of Belgium, Goebbels and Hitlor.

The act in its final form contained the elements Grock had perfected in half a century of hard work, He entered — wearing his rimless felt hat, baggy checked jacket and pants, and flapping shoes — carrying a tremendous suitcase. From it he extracted a tiny violin. The first part of the act centered on the violin.

Retiring behind a screen. Grock returned in a tattered dress suit with a large safety pin holding the jacket together. This, he explained, was practical when it rained, He demonstrated by bending over and pinning his trouser legs to the jacket, so that when he stood erect, the pants came up above his bony knees.

The middle part of the aet centered on the piano. The idea was that Grock should accompany his partner, who would do a violin solo. But the solo never came off. Crock tried to push the piano up to the chair instead of moving the chair to the piano. Me cranked the piano (one of his wife’s sound effects) to make it play. He got his fingers caught in the keyboard cover. He drew a length of rope from inside the piano, He removed and juggled his white gloves. His top hat slid down the tilted top of the piano. He slid after it. Finally he fell through the seat of the chair.

Crock had a wealth of other material that he used according to his whim. There was a singing solo, in which he danced and yodeled; a bass drum and bell routine, ending with him falling into the drum; a clarinet conversation with his partner, during which the instrument wept because the partner was standing on his toe; and an accordion-saxophone conversation, Grock pleading eloquently on the accordion for the partner to join him in the music.

The standard close to the act was Grock’s famous leap from the chair.

Grock, standing on the chair and playing the accordion, crashed through the seat to the floor. His huge shoes trapped inside the rim of the chair, accordion in hand, face contorted and heart pounding (another of his wife’s sound effects), he gave a single seemingly effortless spring and landed seated on the back of the chair, balanced precariously, legs crossed, and still playing the accordion.

The dialogue accompanying the act was elementary, but as delivered on the stage, with his rich voice, his rubbery face, and his perfect timing, it represented the summit of clowning. There was deep human pathos when the partner hit him over the head with the violin bow, benevolent good humor when he beamed over the accordion, and malevolent ill will when he pursued his partner with the piano top.

During the Second World War, Grock retired to his home at Oneglia, near San Remo in northern Italy. He expended his energy on his great stone and marble mansion and his estate, producing olive oil, wine, fruit, and vegetables. He made musical instruments and cigarette holders, and designed flower beds in the image of his clown’s mask. At the approach of the war to northern Italy, he withdrew to Switzerland to await the end.

His comeback, after the war, began slowly. Forgotten for five years, he found difficulty in obtaining new contracts. And he needed a new partner. The film provided him with both. He was once more in demand, and he took on Maiss, a clever clown and an accomplished straight man.

The work on the film was characteristic of Grock’s act and his life. He performed with the firm assurance of a great, artist. And he quarreled with the ruthless intensity of an ambitious man. He was not acting when he did his last scene, walking alone out of the circus, across the deserted sidewalk, and into his car, slamming the door angrily.

The last I heard of him was from a friend of mine, who said her maid was going that night to see Grock, playing a one-night stand in a theater no one ever heard of, in the Paris suburb of Passy. Then he went off to play the Saar. He drove back from Saarbrücken all through one night, to see the presentation of the film the next morning to the French cinema industry. He wept over its success, and made up with the producers. Then he went off to Germany. Grock, again, was on the road.