Harpo Speaks! Read online

  Sixteenth Printing, January 2012

  Copyright © 1962 by Harpo Marx and Rowland Barber

  Afterword I Copyright © 1985 by Susan Marx and Rowland Barber Afterword II Copyright © 1985 by William Marx and Rowland Barber

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, except by a newspaper or magazine reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review.

  Published by Limelight Editions (an imprint of Amadeus Press, LLC)

  512 Newark Pompton Turnpike

  Pompton Plains, New Jersey 07444, USA

  Website: www.limelighteditions.com

  Originally published by Bernard Geis Associates

  Printed in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Marx, Harpo, 1888–1964

  Harpo speaks!

  1. Marx, Harpo, 1888-1964. 2. Comedians–United States–Biography. 3. Moving-picture actors and actresses—United States—Biography.

  I. Barber, Rowland. II. Title.

  PN2287.M54A3 1985 791.43’028’0924 [B] 84-25038

  9781617744365

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1 Confessions Of A Non-Lady Harpist

  Chapter 2 The Education Of Me

  Chapter 3 Adrift In Grandpa’s Democracy

  Chapter 4 Enter: A Character

  Chapter 5 Enough Black Jelly Beans

  Chapter 6 Love Me And The World. Is Mine

  Chapter 7 “Greenbaum, You Crazy Kids!”

  Chapter 8 The Silencing Of Patsy Brannigan

  Chapter 9 Poom-Pooms, Pedals And Poker

  Chapter 10 But Can You Carry It On The Chief?

  Chapter 11 The Name Is Woollcott

  Chapter 12 No Use Talking

  Chapter 13 Buckety-Buckety Into The Lake

  Chapter 14 Croquemaniacs Of The World, Unite!

  Chapter 15 The Bam-Bang-Sock- And-Pow Part

  Chapter 16 Playground Condemned

  Chapter 17 Hollywood Bachelor: Early Struggles

  Chapter 18 Exapno Mapcase, Secret Agent

  Chapter 19 The Oboe Under The Blanket

  Chapter 20 Cherchez La Fleming

  Chapter 21 Most Normal Man In Hollywood

  Chapter 22 Exit Alexander

  Chapter 23 Life On A Harp Ranch

  Chapter 24 The Return Of Pinchie Winchie! Or, You’re Only Young Forever

  To Bill, Alex, Jimmy, Minnie and Susan

  from me with love

  CHAPTER 1 Confessions of a Non-Lady Harpist

  I DON’T KNOW WHETHER my life has been a success or a failure. But not having any anxiety about becoming one instead of the other, and just taking things as they came along, I’ve had a lot of extra time to enjoy life.

  One thing I am not now and never have been is a Celebrity. Strangers never stop me in the street and ask for my autograph. People don’t recognize me out of costume. The public has never heard my voice. In this respect I’m a good deal different from my brother Groucho, who is a genuine, fourteen-karat Celebrity.

  It wouldn’t help to know what I look like; you still wouldn’t recognize me. Have you seen the man who answers the following description?

  Little under average height. Slow and easy of movement. Eyes, green. Hair might have been brown once; now too wispy to tell. Complexion, golf-player’s tan. No distinguishing features except possibly eyebrows, which are usually raised. Could indicate either bafflement or curiosity. Hard to tell which. Inconspicuous in a social gathering. Apt to sit quietly with hands spread on edge of table, smiling at anybody who passes by. Occasionally says something out of corner of mouth that nobody seems to hear. Age impossible to tell. Could be older than he looks, or prematurely mature.

  You may think you’ve seen this man. He might have been the second fellow from the end at the fourth table in the group picture of the Southern Counties Grapefruit Growers Convention. He might have been the fellow you let pass ahead of you in the checkout line at the market because he was only carrying two bananas and a box of Fig Newtons. But it wouldn’t have been me. I’m in the grapefruit business, but I don’t go to conventions. I like to eat, but my wife Susan does the shopping.

  My wife also does the cooking, and she likes to sew, and she paints with oils as a hobby. She was in show business, true, but she left it nearly thirty years ago to marry me. None of our four kids has any notion of ever going onstage. Their respective interests are musical composition, auto mechanics, rocketry and horses. We have three dogs, all mongrels.

  We live a quiet country life—or did until my son Alex got his driver’s license and did something to the muffler of his old Ford that made it sound like a turbo-jet.

  If there is anything distinctive about me, it’s the one thing the public knows least about—my voice. I still talk with an East-93rd-Street-New-York accent. The way I pronounce my name it comes out “Hoppo.” And when I answer the phone I don’t say “Hello,” I say “Yah?”—as if I always expect to hear something pretty interesting. Usually I do.

  At this point I must make a confession. There is a character who goes by the same name I do who is kind of a celebrity. He wears a ratty red wig and a shredded raincoat. He can’t talk, but he makes idiotic faces, honks a horn, whistles, blows bubbles, ogles and leaps after blondes and acts out all kinds of hokey charades. I don’t begrudge this character his fame and fortune. He worked damn hard for every cent and every curtain call he ever got. I don’t begrudge him anything—because he started out with no talent at all.

  If you’ve ever seen a Marx Brothers picture, you know the difference between him and me. When he’s chasing a girl across the screen it’s Him. When he sits down to play the harp, it’s Me. Whenever I touched the strings of the harp, I stopped being an actor.

  This Me begins to sound like an unexciting fellow, doesn’t he? Maybe I am, but I’ve been lucky enough, in my time, to do a number of things that most people never get around to doing.

  I’ve played piano in a whorehouse. I’ve smuggled secret papers out of Russia. I’ve spent an evening on the divan with Peggy Hopkins Joyce. I’ve taught a gangster mob how to play Pinchie Winchie. I’ve played croquet with Herbert Bayard Swope while he kept Governor Al Smith waiting on the phone. I’ve gambled with Nick the Greek, sat on the floor with Greta Carbo, sparred with Benny Leonard, horsed around with the Prince of Wales, played Ping-pong with George Gershwin. George Bernard Shaw has asked me for advice. Oscar Levant has played private concerts for me at a buck a throw. I have golfed with Ben Hogan and Sam Snead. I’ve basked on the Riviera with Somerset Maugham and Elsa Maxwell. I’ve been thrown out of the casino at Monte Carlo.

  Flush with triumph at the poker table, I’ve challenged Alexander Woollcott to anagrams and Alice Duer Miller to a spelling match. I’ve given lessons to some of the world’s greatest musicians. I’ve been a member of the two most famous Round Tables since the days of King Arthur—sitting with the finest creative minds of the 1920’s at the Algonquin in New York, and with Hollywood’s sharpest professional wits at the Hillcrest.

  (Later in the book, some of these activities don’t seem quite so impressive when I tell the full story. Like what I was doing on the divan with Peggy Hopkins Joyce. I was reading the funnies to her.)

  The truth is, I had no business doing any of these things. I couldn’t read a note of music. I never finished the second grade. But I was having too much fun to recognize myself as an ignorant upstart.

  I can’t remember ever having a bad meal. I’ve eaten in William Randolph Hearst’s baronial dining room at San Simeon, at Voisin’s and the Colony, and the finest restaurants in Paris. But the eating place I remember best, out of the days when I was chronically half starved, is
a joint that was called Max’s Busy Bee. At the Busy Bee, a salmon sandwich on rye cost three cents per square foot, and for four cents more you could buy a strawberry shortcake smothered with whipped cream and a glass of lemonade. But the absolutely most delicious food I ever ate was prepared by the most inspired chef I ever knew—my father. My father had to be inspired, because he had so little to work with.

  I can’t remember ever having a poor night’s sleep. I’ve slept in villas at Cannes and Antibes, at Alexander Woollcott’s island hideaway in Vermont, at the mansions of the Vanderbilts and Otto H. Kahn and in the Gloversville, New York, jail. I’ve slept on pool tables, dressing-room tables, piano tops, bathhouse benches, in rag baskets and harp cases, and four abreast in upper berths. I have known the supreme luxury of snoozing in the July sun, on the lawn, while the string of a flying kite tickled the bottom of my feet.

  I can’t remember ever seeing a bad show. I’ve seen everything from Coney Island vaudeville to the Art Theatre in Moscow. If I’m trapped in a theatre and a show starts disappointingly, I have a handy way to avoid watching it. I fall asleep.

  My only addictions—and I’ve outgrown them all—have been to pocket billiards, croquet, poker, bridge and black jelly beans. I haven’t smoked for twenty years.

  The only woman I’ve ever been in love with is still married to me.

  My only Alcohol Problem is that I don’t particularly care for the stuff.

  So what do I have to confess? I do have one weakness big enough to write a book about. My weakness is people. Since I have never taken the direct route from anywhere to anywhere, I’ve had time to meet and listen to a lot of people. Back in the twenties, when everybody was talking at the same time, I was one of the few professional listeners around.

  I’ve been asked: “When you hung out with people like George S. Kaufman, Marc Connelly, Harold Ross, Sam Behrman, Ben Hecht, Heywood Broun, F.P.A., Dorothy Parker, Ethel Barrymore, Benchley, Swope and Woollcott, what in the world did you find to talk about?” The answer is simple. When I was around people like that, there was no use talking. I listened.

  For some reason, they all accepted me. I think it was because I accepted them, not as Very Important Persons or geniuses, but as card players, pool sharks, croquet fanatics, parlor-game addicts, storytellers, or practical jokers—whatever they had the most fun doing when they weren’t working.

  These remarkable people are not the types the average vaudeville comic or self-taught musician is apt to hang out with. Not if he obeys the golden rule for success, that is, and doesn’t dawdle or wander off in the wrong direction. Thank God I obeyed my own rules and never went anywhere by the regular route.

  If you can follow me from here on out—by way of East Side saloons and hockshops, the Orpheum Circuit, Long Island estates and bordellos, an Ohio River gambling boat, a Russian border guard-post, and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer–you’ll know what I mean. You’ll know why I’m thankful.

  So. The time has come for me to get my kite flying, stretch out in the sun, kick off my shoes, and speak my piece. “The days of struggle are over,” I should be able to say. “I can look back now and tell myself I don’t have a single regret.”

  But I do.

  Many years ago a very wise man named Bernard Baruch took me aside and put his arm around my shoulder. “Harpo, my boy,” he said, “I’m going to give you three pieces of advice, three things you should always remember.”

  My heart jumped and I glowed with expectation. I was going to hear the magic password to a rich, full life from the master himself. “Yes, sir?” I said. And he told me the three things.

  I regret that I’ve forgotten what they were.

  CHAPTER 2 The Education of Me

  A LEGEND HAS BEEN going around to the effect that I never had much schooling. Therefore it might surprise a lot of people to read the following true statement: “Harpo attended lectures at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, for six years, was given the freedom of the campus, and was celebrated as the youngest student ever to enter a classroom in the history of that hallowed old institution.”

  Well, I’d better tell the whole truth. The Harpo who went to college was not me. The Harpo who went to college was a dog, a plum-colored poodle. The dog was given to a professor for adoption by Hamilton’s best-known alumnus, Alexander Woollcott, who made the statement I quoted above. The legend, I’m afraid, is true. I never had much schooling. The sad fact is, I never even finished the second grade.

  Yet somehow I’ve managed to get myself educated. I’m not the writer or scholar, for example, that Groucho Marx is. I don’t pretend to be. But I can read without moving my lips, and I can hold my own in pretty fast literary company without sinking beneath the conversation. I can talk about Monet, American primitives, or Ravel and Debussy without embarrassing anybody—even myself. I like to think I’m up-to-date on politics, world affairs, the struggle for integration, and the problems of teen-agers in America. I try to be. These things are as exciting to me as cars, clothes and tax gimmicks are to some fellows I know who went to college in person, not by proxy in the shape of a plum-colored poodle.

  How I came to be educated, over the years, I don’t exactly know. I only know that it didn’t happen during my sojourn at New York City Public School No. 86.

  When the century turned in 1900, people tried to begin the new century with a clean slate. Some people forgave old debts. Some cleaned their slates by having their names changed. Others did it by giving up rye whiskey, cuss words, or snuff. The New York City Board of Education did it by promoting Adolph Marx to the second grade.

  This was a noble gesture, but it didn’t work. The year and a half Adolph Marx spent in Grade Two was more of a waste of time and taxpayers’ money than the year he spent drifting and dreaming through Grade One.

  (Adolph is the name I was given when I was born, in New York City, in 1893. Harpo is the name I was given during a poker game twenty-five years later. During the same game my brother Leonard became “Chico,” Julius became “Groucho,” Milton “Gummo,” and Herbert later became “Zeppo.” Those handles stuck from the moment they were fastened on us. Now it’s like we’d never had any other names. So we will be known all the way through these pages as Chico, Harpo, Groucho, Gummo and Zeppo.)

  Anyway, my formal schooling ended halfway through my second crack at the second grade, at which time I left school the most direct way possible. I was thrown out the window.

  There were two causes of this. One was a big Irish kid in my class and the other was a bigger Irish kid. I was a perfect patsy for them, a marked victim. I was small for my age. I had a high, squeaky voice. And I was the only Jewish boy in the room. The teacher, a lady named Miss Flatto, had pretty much given up on teaching me anything. Miss Flatto liked to predict, in front of the class, that I would come to no good end. This was the only matter on which the Irish kids agreed with Miss Flatto, and they saw to it that her prediction came true.

  Every once in a while, when Miss Flatto left the room, the Irishers would pick me up and throw me out the window, into the street. Fortunately our room was on the first floor. The drop was about eight feet—high enough for a good jolt but low enough not to break any bones.

  I would pick myself up, dust myself off, and return to the classroom as soon as I was sure the teacher was back. I would explain to Miss Flatto that I had been to the toilet. I knew that if I squealed I’d get worse than a heave out the window. She must have believed I didn’t have enough sense to control my organs, let alone comprehend the subjects of reading and writing. She began sending notes to my mother, all with the same warning: Something had better be done about straightening me out or I would be a disgrace to my family, my community, and my country.

  My mother was too busy with other matters at the time to straighten me out with the public school system. For one thing, it seemed more urgent to keep my older brother Chico out of the poolroom than to keep me in the schoolroom.

  So my mother appointed a delegate to go confer wi
th Miss Flatto. That was unfortunate. The delegate was the boy friend of my cousin Polly, who was then living with us. He peddled herring in the streets, out of wooden buckets, yelling up and down the neighborhood, “Hey, best here! Best here! Best here in de verld!” Naturally, he stunk from fish; you could smell him a block away.

  So one day he turned up in the middle of a class, fish buckets and all. He didn’t get very far in his conference with Miss Flatto. She took one look and one smell, began to get sick, and ordered Polly’s boy friend to leave the school. All the other kids in the room began to. smirk, holding their noses, and Miss Flatto did nothing to stop them.

  I knew I was dead.

  The two Irish boys now gave me the heave-ho every chance they got, which was three or four times a day, and Miss Flatto made me stay after school every afternoon for leaving the room so many times without permission. I can still see her finger waggling at the end of my nose, and hear her saying, “Some day you will realize, young man, you will realize!” I didn’t know what she meant, but I never forgot her words.

  Partly because he’d made such a fool of himself in front of my class, Polly broke off with her boy friend. I felt pretty bad about this. I also felt pretty bad around the knees and elbows from being dumped out the schoolhouse window with such regularity.

  So one sunny day when Miss Flatto left the room and I was promptly heaved into the street, I picked myself up, turned my back on P. S. 86 and walked straight home, and that was the end of my formal education.

  There is an interesting sidelight to this episode. On the rebound, my cousin Polly took up with a tailor, whom she soon married, congratulating herself for escaping a life that stunk of fish. Her husband remained a tailor the rest of his life. The herring peddler she jilted became successful in a series of businesses and died a very wealthy man.