Harpo Speaks! Read online

  It was while I was working at the nickelodeon that Gummo joined Groucho onstage in vaudeville. With a kid named Lou Levy they opened at Henderson’s, a Coney Island beer garden, as a singing trio.

  One afternoon, in the middle of the movie, my mother marched down the aisle of the theatre to the piano. She ordered me to leave at once and come with her. Minnie’s face was set with desperation and determination. She was in some kind of a jam, and from the look of her, it could be serious trouble. Minnie had never come to me for help in a crisis before. Without question, I got up from the piano stool and followed her out of the nickelodeon.

  I don’t think the audience knew the difference when the music stopped. They went right on talking, stuffing themselves, sleeping, and nursing their babies.

  It was not until Minnie got me on the El train that the awful truth of her mission struck me, like a bolt of lightning out of a clear sky. We were headed for Coney Island. I was being shanghaied. I was being shanghaied to join Groucho, Gummo, and Lou Levy. On a stage. Singing. In front of people.

  On the train, Minnie screened me with a newspaper while I changed into a white duck suit, my costume. At the same time she tried to teach me the words to “Darling Nelly Gray.” I was too weak with dread to protest. My mind went blank. I couldn’t possibly learn the song before we got to Coney Island.

  Didn’t matter anyway, Minnie said. As long as I opened my mouth in the right places—by keeping an eye on Groucho—I didn’t have to make a peep. It would be best I didn’t try to sing, in fact. I was supposed to be the bass, and my squeaky voice could ruin the whole effect. The only important thing was that Minnie get a quartet onstage. In the first place, she had bought four white duck suits in order to get a decent price on costumes (there was a mark-down only in sets of four) and it was idiotic to let the fourth white duck suit go to waste.

  In the second place, the featured act on the bill was “That Quartet,” a famous singing group of the day. It would look pretty cheap if Minnie could only put a trio of boys on instead of a quartet.

  When I arrived backstage at Henderson’s Gummo greeted me with a soulful, brotherly look of commiseration. He didn’t need to speak. His eyes said all he had to say: So she hooked you too, huh?

  We came into the wings to wait for our cue. A comedy juggler was finishing up his act on the stage. I could hear Them, out there, the Audience. Some of Them were laughing, some hooting, the rest of Them rumbling with insolent, impolite indifference. I wanted to run away, but I couldn’t move.

  We were supposed to march onstage military fashion—Croucho in the lead, followed by Lou, myself and Gummo. Our cue came. Groucho marched. Lou marched. And Gummo marched—practically up my back, because I still couldn’t move. I was rooted to the spot.

  Minnie hissed at me. I just stood there. Minnie pushed me. She pushed me harder, a real hefty shove in the small of my back. I went stumbling out of the wings and onto the stage. As I caught my balance, the thought sizzled in my mind: You’re not a boy any more. You’re a man. Don’t let on you’re scared.

  I came to a halt beside Lou Levy. I turned. And there They were. A sea of hostile, mocking faces across the footlights. And here I was, with nothing to hold onto, absolutely nothing. With my first look at my first audience I reverted to being a boy again. My reaction was instantaneous and overwhelming. I wet my pants.

  It was probably the most wretched debut in the history of show business.

  Every turning point in my life seems to have been a low point, a time of terrible disappointment or disaster. I never planned any changes in the course of my career. The changes just happened. The only ambitions I ever nourished were to be left fielder for the New York Giants, a full-time tin-can swinger for an umbrella mender, or a piano player on an excursion boat. I never achieved any of these ambitions. What I actually became was what I was driven to be in a time of disaster.

  The rock-bottom low point of my early life was that time I went onstage and disgraced myself in the company of my brothers and in front of the public, at Coney Island. I became, therefore, an entertainer. Nothing that I could have done could have frightened me more.

  Nobody heard me sing in the quartet that night at Henderson’s. It was all I could do to open my mouth at approximately the same time that Groucho, Lou and Gummo opened their mouths. But I sang, a voiceless swan song. I sang farewell to the streets of the East Side, to hustling and hopping trolleys and swindling ticket-choppers, farewell to happy-go-lucky, hired-today-and-fired-tomorrow wandering from job to job, farewell to “Waltz Me Around Again, Willie” and Max’s Busy Bee. Like it or not, I was in show business for the rest of my days.

  At the age of fourteen, I didn’t like it a bit.

  CHAPTER 7 “Greenbaum, You Crazy Kids!”

  MY MOTHER DECIDED one night in the year 1910, after a brutal, fruitless day of battle with New York booking agents, that we should live in the central part of the country. New York was not right for us. Too much big-time competition. Where we should be was in the hub of the small-time vaudeville circuits and wheels, where an act like ours would have a fighting chance.

  So the next day we packed up our things and on to Chicago we moved, lock, stock and Grandpa.

  By juggling her accounts, signing notes, and putting the touch on Uncle Al, Minnie was able to make a down payment on a three-story, brownstone house in a fairly respectable Chicago neighborhood. The Marxes had, at last, a place to call their own. And a fabulous place it was, to us. It had no grimy stoop, but a genuine front porch—which Grandpa immediately took over as the equivalent of the front room on 93rd Street. For Frenchie, there was the luxury of a huge kitchen, where he could cook with gas. He no longer had to depend on his sons to swipe wood or coal before he could get a meal on the stove. Best of all, the house had a basement big enough for a pool table.

  The house also had a mortgage big enough to plug a storm-drain, but that was nothing to worry about, we told ourselves. We were now bona fide property owners, shareholders in America. We had risen in class far beyond our wildest dreams. Who should worry about Mr. Greenbaum, who held the mortgage, coming around for the monthly payment? Hadn’t we ducked, dodged and outfoxed the rent agent back on 93rd Street for eleven years? None of us had the foresight to realize that there was no place for a family to hide in a one-family dwelling.

  Besides, we did all right in Chicago—at first. Minnie had been right, apparently, in hauling us out of New York. Here she could get us theatres to play. Not the best theatres, or even in the best neighborhoods, but bookings that paid good, green money none the less.

  But before long we ran out of offbeat, small-time theatres to get booked into. There was no place for us to go except on the road.

  The vaudeville circuits that guaranteed an act thirty weeks of work for a season wanted no part of us. We put up with whatever we could find for ourselves: one-night stands, conventions, picnics, benefits, anything that guaranteed a minimum of dinner and train fare. Looking back, I simply don’t know how we survived it. Those early days on the road were sheer, unmitigated hell. They made my earlier days on the streets of the East Side seem like one long recess period.

  We had to brazen our way into strange towns in the Midwest and down South, where we knew we had three strikes against us. One: we were stage folks, in a class with gypsies and other vagrants. Two: we were Jewish. Three: we had New York accents. And, well—strike four: the Four Nightingales weren’t very good.

  We had no itinerary. We took the train until we came to a town. We got off the train, walked to the local theatre or “air-dome,” made a deal for a percentage of the box-office take, plastered the town with posters announcing our show, opened, and prayed for the best. If we made more than train fare money, we stayed the night in the cheapest hotel or boardinghouse we could find and took the morning train out of town. If we couldn’t afford this, we slept on the night-train coach. If we couldn’t afford even the train, we walked.

  If an audience didn’t like us we had no tr
ouble finding it out. We were pelted with sticks, bricks, spitballs, cigar butts, peach pits and chewed-out stalks of sugar cane. We took all this without flinching —until Minnie gave us the high-sign that she’d collected our share of the receipts. Then we started throwing the stuff back at the audience, and ran like hell for the railroad station the second the curtain came down.

  When we went to a hotel, we never asked to see the accommodations first. We only asked what the rates were, paid up if they were low enough, and went straight upstairs and to sleep. We knew what the accommodations would be like anyway—gritty, smelly, either stifling hot or freezing cold, and infested with vermin. But a bed was a bed, even with four adolescent boys fighting for the spaces between lumps and broken springs, and it was a luxury.

  In our first three years on the road, we must have walked the equivalent of the length and breadth of the state of Texas, lugging two bags apiece, crammed with posters, props and costumes. We walked through heat waves and blizzards, through dust storms, rainstorms and hailstorms. We were bitten bloody by horseflies and mosquitoes.

  The bugs were even worse indoors. Cheap hotels in the South and Southwest were apparently set up as bug sanctuaries by some Audubon Society for Insects. Fleas, ticks, bedbugs, cockroaches, beetles, scorpions and ants, having no enemies, attacked with fearless abandon. They had the run of the house and they knew it. After awhile you just let them bite. Fighting back was useless. For every bug you squashed, a whole fresh, bloodthirsty platoon would march out of the woodwork. In one hotel the ants were so bad that each bed was set on four pots of oxalic acid. This kept the ants off. It also kept them from competing with the fleas and the bedbugs, who had the human banquet all to themselves.

  Dressing-room windows never had screens. If the windows were shut, you could suffocate. If they were open you could be bitten to a red pulp by mosquitoes before you got changed and made up. We kept our health and sanity by improvising smudge-pots, burning green grass in tin cans. Of course we couldn’t see through the smoke and had to put our make-up on by braille, and sometimes we didn’t stop coughing until halfway through the show, but we survived.

  We survived the food we had to eat, too. Our standard fare was boardinghouse spaghetti, chili and beans. Even when we had extra dough, we could seldom get anything better. By the time we finished a show, restaurants and cafés would be locked up for the night. We’d be lucky to find a guy selling tamales from a pushcart, by the station. Once we had the nerve to complain that our hot tamales were not only cold but were eaked with dust and crawling with what looked like lice. The pushcart vendor said we could go to hell. If his stuff was good enough for white folks, he said, it was good enough for us New York Jews.

  We put on our act in ball parks, amusement parks, schoolhouses, now and then in a real theatre, but mainly in air-domes —shedlike outdoor theatres. Top admission for our shows was usually ten cents indoors, and five cents outdoors. With only nickels and dimes coming into the box office, our percentage of the take would be pretty damn small. Even so, we had to fight for it most of the time. We were completely at the mercy of local managers and booking agents. If they ran off with the share of the receipts they had promised us, we had nobody to appeal to. There was nothing we could do except pick up our bags and start walking to the next town, before we got thrown in the jig as vagrants.

  So that was the Road of One-Night Stands, our life from 1910 to 1915. It was a miracle that we stuck it out. A lot of very brave and determined show people fell by the wayside doing what we were doing. It wasn’t that my brothers and I had any more guts or determination than the guys who gave up. But we had Minnie, and Minnie did. She was our miracle.

  If you should ever hear an old-time vaudevillian talk about “the wonderful, golden days of one-night stands,” buy him another drink, but don’t believe a word he’s saying. He’s lying through his teeth. If a movie producer or a Broadway director should tell you he made it the Hard Way by struggling through the Borscht Circuit in the Catskill Mountains, humor him along. He’s not lying. He’s just too young. His memory doesn’t go back far enough to know what the Hard Way really was.

  My own memory, of my own days of struggle, is a crazy jumble of time and places. I never kept track of time, never believed in calendars. I never had much of a sense of geography either. I probably traveled twenty-five thousand miles and played in three hundred different cities and towns in the twelve years the Marx Brothers worked out of Chicago. From the sound of that, I ought to be a walking atlas. Not so. About cities and towns I remember very little. What I remember are railroad-station waiting rooms, boardinghouse dining rooms, one-dollar hotel rooms, dressing rooms, poolrooms and men’s rooms—all of which look pretty much alike in any city or town in any part of the country.

  About the history of our act, what we did onstage and when, I’m not a very reliable authority. I never saved programs or clippings, or kept a diary of any kind. If I want to check on some historical fact about the Marx Brothers, I look it up in the book Kyle Crichton wrote about us or I consult the family historian, Groucho. (Chico, with his photographic memory, should be the historian, but his memory is selective as well as photographic, and what he has selected to remember are things like the poker hand he held at 1:35 A.M. on the night of January 15, 1917, while riding in a Pullman car called “The Winnetaska Rapids,” or the name of a girl I once met in Altoona, Pennsylvania, whose name I would prefer not to have remembered.)

  At any rate, to keep the record straight, I have checked with Mr. Crichton’s book and with Groucho, and I find that these were the steps in the evolution of our act in show business:

  1. Groucho Marx as a single: boy soprano and actor.

  2. Unnamed duo: Groucho and Gummo.

  3. The Three Nightingales: Groucho, Gummo and Lou Levy.

  4. The Four Nightingales: Groucho, Gummo, Lou Levy and Harpo.

  5. The Six Mascots: Groucho, Gummo, Harpo, plus bass singer and two girl singers (Minnie and Aunt Hannah if none others available).

  6. The Marx Brothers in School Days: same personnel as (5), with later addition of Chico, who finally joined the act.

  7. The Marx Brothers in School Days and Mr. Green’s Reception: same personnel as (6).

  8. The Marx Brothers in Home Again: same as (7), with Zeppo replacing Gummo when Gummo got drafted in World War One.

  9. The Marx Brothers in On the Mezzanine: same as (8), plus chorus girls, dancers, actors who got paid for falling down, getting squirted at, etc.

  10. The Marx Brothers’ Shubert Revue: same as (9) but with fewer girls, dancers and actors and plus Minnie, who got briefly back into the act.

  11. The Four Marx Brothers in I’ll Say She Is, The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers, on Broadway: same as (9) only more of them, plus blondes who got paid for being chased by Harpo.

  12. The Four Marx Brothers in Paramount Pictures: more of everybody and everything.

  13. The Three Marx Brothers in M-G-M Pictures: same as (12) but minus Zeppo, who returned to civilian life, and plus half the population of Culver City, California.

  14. Unnamed duo: Chico and Harpo (available for night clubs, benefits, state fairs, stock shows, etc.).

  15. Groucho Marx as a single: quizmaster, author, singer (Gilbert & Sullivan).

  That’s the straight dope, our grand tour down through the ages, from Groucho the soprano to Groucho the baritone. Frankly, I wouldn’t believe a word of it if I hadn’t read it in a book and my kid brother’ with the mustache hadn’t confirmed it. My memory, as I said before, is a crazy jumble.

  Some important things happened to me during steps (4) through (8) of our evolution. I became a pantomime comedy actor. I became a harpist. I acquired enough self-confidence to enjoy having people laugh at my goofy sight-gags and listen to the music I played seriously but all wrong.

  What I remember today, I suppose, are mainly the events that had to do with these three developments. What follows is what I remember. The itinerary is therefore mixed up regarding
chronology, places, and names of persons living or dead. But it’s Harpo’s itinerary, not History’s.

  Coney Island, New York. Made my debut at Henderson’s and peed in my pants. I felt shamed and disgraced, but Minnie wouldn’t let me quit the act on any such flimsy pretext. She hung my trousers out to dry in the sea breeze between shows. By the second show I was much less scared, so enthusiastic in fact that everybody was afraid I might sing. But I didn’t. I just opened my mouth when Groucho did.

  Asbury Park, New Jersey. Two years later, I was still the fourth Nightingale. I reassured myself it was only a temporary thing, as a favor for Minnie. I was now an active member of the quartet—I sang, which was doing nobody a favor. Minnie added class to our quartet by buying us red paper carnations to wear in our lapels when we opened in Asbury Park. It became an eternal challenge to Minnie to add more class to our act.

  Boston. I got my first laugh onstage, at the Old Howard Theatre in Boston, the famous burlesque house. We, the Nightingales in the white duck suits with the fake carnations, did a turn in the olio, between burlesque shows. With hands on each other’s shoulders and swaying in tempo, we sang “Mandy Lane.” We were scarcely noticed during our number (even by the piano player, who concentrated on watching the clock for his dinner hour to start) until our last night there.

  At the Old Howard the loges came all the way around the house, like a giant horseshoe, and the end boxes hung over the stage. On Saturday night, between burlesque shows, there were three drunks in the end box at stage right. They were loud and restless during the olio, and especially during our rendition of “Mandy Lane.” In the middle of the song, I heard one of the drunks say to his pals, “Hey, lookit! Watch me get the second kid from the end!”