Harpo Speaks! Read online

  The presence of the harp (the harp alone, and not the harpist) had raised our average monthly income by five dollars. Once again Minnie had gambled and hit a winner. The odds were right, by Chico’s Law. Four bucks a month for payments, five bucks a month return.

  Little Rock, Arkansas. For the first time I played solid chords as well as a line of melody and swooping glissandos, in my exclusive new harp arrangement of the Sextet from Lucia. From the audience I got respectful applause. From Groucho I got dirty looks.

  St. Joseph, Missouri. On the way from the theatre to the poolroom I stopped in my tracks when I saw a display in a ten-cent-store window. In the middle of the display was a framed picture of an angel, sitting on a cloud and playing a harp. What stopped me was the fact that the angel in the picture had the harp leaning against her right, not her left shoulder. Since nobody had ever told me otherwise, I had been playing with mine against the wrong shoulder.

  That was my first harp lesson. I switched the instrument to the other side, the right side, and felt a lot more professional. Belated thanks, F. W. Woolworth, for the tip.

  Muskogee, Oklahoma. A harpist, I was beginning to learn, had problems that nobody else had, not even a tuba player or a string-bass player. A tuba had no strings. A string-bass you could carry with you on a trolley car.

  The harp, when plucked politely, has a soft tone that doesn’t carry very far. A harpist has to have total silence when he plays a serious piece, or he won’t be heard at all. I found that audiences were usually aware of this, and very cooperative. This wasn’t always true, however, of other performers on the bill.

  Sharing the bill with us in Muskogee (or maybe it was someplace in Kansas) was an “escape artist,” a limp little Hungarian, who let his wife, a husky Cherokee Indian, tie him up in knots. His act was to wiggle free of the ropes—which had been tied, of course, in deceptive, breakaway knots—in time to a chorus of “The Prisoner’s Song.”

  Well, the theatre here was so small that in the wings at stage left there was only room for a toilet, nothing more. In the pianissimo part of my Sextet from Lucia I heard a funny noise that didn’t come from the harp. I looked offstage. The Hungarian escape artist was sitting on the can, facing me, with the toilet door open.

  I was so stunned by this sight I stopped playing. In that moment of silence, the guy flushed the can. It was a sound heard round the theatre, all the way back to the top of the balcony. The audience, not knowing but what it was a special effect on the harp, burst into applause.

  I got even. On Saturday night the escape artist asked if I wouldn’t please take his wife’s place, so she could get their baby ready to make the train. I was very happy to oblige him. I went onstage during his act and tied him up with my kind of knots. When they finally brought the curtain down he was still grunting and writhing on the floor. He couldn’t get free from knot number one. They had to drag him offstage by his feet and cut him loose with a jackknife.

  This was a kind of aggravation that angel harpists never had to put up with.

  Laredo, Texas. In Laredo we shared the bill with one of the saddest vaudeville acts I ever saw—“The Musical Cow Milkers.” It was a team. The guy led a live cow onstage and while his wife, in sunbonnet and pinafore, squatted on a stool and milked the cow, they sang duets.

  After opening night the manager fired them. They would be replaced on the bill, he said, with a second solo by the “Marx boy who wears the wig and plays the big zither or whatever you call it.”

  The male half of the Musical Cow Milkers was very bitter about being fired. He walked across the border to Mexico and got drunk and mailed a dead rabbit to the Laredo theatre manager.

  Minnie came down with a sudden attack of loyalty and motherly love. Mr. and Mrs. Musical Cow Milker had three small children. Minnie went to bat for them. She yelled and wept and begged for the couple to be rehired. At length, her eloquence swayed the theatre manager.

  “All right, all right,” he said. “I’ll take ‘em back. I’ll put ’em on. I’ll put ’em on in place of the Marx Brothers. You’re closed.”

  Youngstown, Ohio. By now my harp had racked up a lot of mileage and taken a lot of mauling, in and out of baggage cars, delivery wagons, hotels and theatres. It was aging prematurely. The post was getting wobbly and warps and cracks were setting in. What happened to it on my retreat from Youngstown, Ohio, didn’t help a bit.

  Youngstown is one city I remember clearly. Something unexpected happened every time I played there.

  Between shows during our first date in Youngstown, I went to an auction at a jewelry store. The jeweler happened to be a friend of a friend of Chico’s, and he knocked me down a ring I took a fancy to, for two bucks. I just happened to feel it was a good-luck piece. It had better be, I thought, because when I put it on I couldn’t get it off.

  When we finished the show on Saturday night, the manager came back and said it was the mayor’s birthday and we were all invited to his birthday party. We didn’t feel like partying. We wanted a good night’s sleep before the jump to Indianapolis, so we politely declined. But the mayor was insistent. He had the police chief back a paddy wagon up to the stage door and herd us in. Like it or not, we were going to the mayor’s birthday party.

  My memory of that night is not clear. I had two drinks, the first two drinks of my life, and I got very drunk. I remember Chico getting a crap game going. I remember dodging the mayor’s wife, who took quite a shine to me. When she got me trapped in the pantry, the police chief came to my rescue. The next thing I remember is being driven home by two cops, along with a dame I had never seen before. This dame was a lot more predatory than the mayor’s wife. But it was not my virile charm she was after. She was after my two-dollar ring.

  The dame must have grappled for half the night, trying to get it off. In the morning the ring was still on my finger, and she was gone. The rest of the troupe were also gone, on the train to Indianapolis.

  I got a great idea. Why not drive to Indianapolis, instead of taking the train? I bought a secondhand Model-T touring car, loaded the harp onto the back seat, cranked up, and chugged off into the sunset. It was a rugged journey, to put it mildly. The old Ford struggled on the best it could, straining through axle-deep ruts, crunching over rocky creek bottoms, slogging through mud-holes and pounding over potholes. Everything that could go wrong with a Model T went wrong with mine. I pushed it and cranked it and kicked it. I coaxed it and I cursed it. And somehow I nursed it, before it gasped its last, dying chug, into Indianapolis.

  It was a feat I would have been proud of, except that my harp had taken the worst beating of its life, on the back seat of the Ford. For the dough I squandered on the car (had to sell it for junk), I could have bought a brand-new harp.

  Somewhere north of Mobile, Alabama. We were making the Saturday night Pullman jump from Montgomery to Mobile. About four o’clock in the morning I woke up with a hell of a jolt. We had stopped moving. The train had jumped the tracks.

  When we piled out of our car, we saw that the wreck was a pretty bad one. The Pullman was intact, but the baggage car and the forward coach, for colored passengers, had been badly bashed, and people were screaming with pain up ahead. We pitched in to give whatever first aid we could.

  Within an hour, two insurance-company “adjusters” appeared on the scene. They went down the line of the injured, getting them to sign releases by making spot-cash settlements—bad bruise one dollar, gashed face two dollars, broken arm five bucks, broken leg ten bucks, and so on. Once anybody signed, naturally, he no longer had the right to sue the railroad and get a fair settlement for his injury.

  I suddenly remembered my harp. I got to the baggage car before the adjusters did. The case was smashed to splinters, but the harp itself didn’t show a bit of new damage, which was a miracle. But nobody paid off on miracles. So I heaved the harp off the car onto the tracks. There was now no doubt it had been through a disastrous wreck. The harp was a wreck itself.

  The insurance man came al
ong, inspected it, and asked me what the replacement value was. Forty-five dollars, I told him. He handed me a release to sign. “The rule is fifty percent,” he said. “But you look like a nice young fellow. I’ll pay you twenty-five dollars.”

  Minnie caught me on the point of signing the release. She grabbed the pen from my hand and gave it back to the adjuster. “You don’t pull that on us,” she said. “We’re getting a lawyer to handle this matter.”

  The insurance man said, “Damn Yankees.”

  Mobile, Alabama. Minnie went shopping for a local lawyer to sue the railroad. She found one. He examined the harp and the case and said he’d handle the lawsuit on a contingency basis. The railroad settled right away. After giving the lawyer his cut, our share of the settlement was two hundred dollars.

  And that is how I came to get a new harp, my first really good harp, with pedals and everything. I resolved to treat it better than I had my old forty-five-dollar model. I would play it on the right shoulder from the start. I would learn to tune it right (all I knew about tuning the harp was that I was tuning it wrong). I would learn to use the pedals and play it in other keys besides E-flat. And I would never take it for a ride in a Model-T Ford.

  Rockford, Illinois. We were on the Pantages circuit, playing a couple of local spots before making the great swing to the West Coast and back through Canada. In Rockford, the four of us and a monologist named Art Fisher started up a game of five-card stud, between shows.

  At that time there was a very popular comic strip called “Knocko the Monk,” and as a result there was a rash of stage names that ended in “o.” On every bill there would be at least one Bingo, Zingo, Socko, Jumpo or Bumpo.

  There must have been a couple of them on the bill with us in Rockford and we must have been making cracks about them, because when Art Fisher started dealing a poker hand he said, “A hole card for—‘Harpo.’ A card for—‘Chicko.’ One for—” Now that he’d committed himself, he had to pass “o-names” all around the table.

  The first two had been simple. I played the harp and my older brother chased the chicks. For a moment Art was stuck. Then he continued the deal. A card for “Groucho” (he carried his dough in a grouch-bag), and finally a card for “Gummo” (he had a gumshoe way of prowling around backstage and sneaking up on people).

  We stuck with the gag handles for the rest of the game and that, we thought, was that. It wasn’t. We couldn’t get rid of them. We were Chicko, Harpo, Groucho and Gummo for the rest of the week, the rest of the season, and the rest of our lives.

  Later, when we decided to make it official, and have our Art-Fisher names put on the program, the typesetter made a mistake, and left the “k” out of Chicko. The power of the printed word being what it is, “Chico” is the way it has been spelled ever since.

  Still later, Gummo left the act and was replaced by Herbie, the baby of the family. Herbie, since he was always chinning himself and practicing acrobatics, we named “Zippo.” “Mr. Zippo” was the star of a famous trained chimpanzee act. Our Zippo, understandably, felt that we were being very unflattering, and he insisted on spelling his stage name “Zeppo.”

  You never could tell what you might be dealt in a poker game in those days.

  Through darkest Kansas, on the Rock Island Line. It was while touring the Pantages-time that I became a full-fledged gambling man. With the rest of the company, we traveled the whole season in a private railroad car. This was not a Pullman, but a “tourist” car with hard, woven-straw seats. There was nothing deluxe about it. Still, it was a happy home between stands for thirty-some people. In the car we ate, read, wrote letters, made love, argued, fought, rehearsed, and sometimes slept but most of the time played cards. The air was forever full of smoke and the jingle of money.

  Our car was treated with very little respect by the railroads. It was bumped and jerked and shuttled around and often left forgotten on sidings miles from anywhere. We never deboarded at a station, like civilians. We would wind up in freight yards, along with pig iron, sheep, and cattle, where there was nobody to tote trunks and baggage except the owners.

  Poker was the big game in the car, and we had some mighty wild, sleepless jumps on the Pantages-time.

  One season there was a guy named Mons Herbert in the company. Mons used to set a dinner table on the stage, and play “The Anvil Chorus” by blowing knives and forks against each other. For a finish he would blow up a prop roast turkey and deflate it in such a way that it played “Oh, Dry Those Tears” out of its rump.

  It wasn’t his lung power we admired Mons Herbert for, however, as much as his gold teeth. He had a dazzling mouthful of gold. Because of this he was our favorite poker player. He never knew it, but he flashed signals every time he picked up a hand. If he showed two gold teeth we knew he held three of a kind, or maybe two pairs. Three gold teeth: a straight. Four: a flush. When he didn’t open his mouth, and no teeth showed, you knew he held nothing, and any pair could beat him.

  On the Pantages we were paid off each week by the local manager, and we all had cash in our pockets during the jump to the next date. Still, I never bet for very high stakes. Like Groucho, I continued to send most of my dough home to Minnie. Chico was just as loyal and well-meaning as Groucho and I, but he apparently didn’t trust the United States mails, because what he sent home to Minnie were mainly IOU’s.

  Butte, Montana. On Monday nights in Butte, Montana, a special section of the house was reserved for the local prostitutes and madams. You could always be sure of a wonderful audience on Monday nights in Butte. With them, you could do nothing wrong. If anybody blew up or missed a cue or pulled a boner, they loved that too. I never did, but my dog once did.

  He was a big Airedale, named “Denver” after the town I’d picked him up in. Denver was very devoted to me. I had to shut him in my dressing room during our act or else he’d follow me onstage. I could never convince Denver that the Marx Brothers were not a dog act.

  Once, this time in Butte, Denver got loose while I was watching the “class act” on the bill (a ballet troupe) from the wings. Looking for me, he wandered onstage. One of the dancers tried to shoo him off, but Denver was in no hurry. He had some important business to take care of first. He ambled over to the easel that stood next to the proscenium arch. In the rosy glow of the easel spotlight he lifted his leg and did his business, all over the card reading “Danse Orientale.” From the way the chippies hollered and screamed, it was the greatest finish any ballet ever had.

  The manager didn’t agree with the audience. He fined me five bucks and made me keep Denver tied up outside the stage door at all times.

  Elko, Nevada. It was along about here that I first worked out my “going under the carpet” bit. In the scene I was being chased by a cop. I couldn’t find any place to hide. Desperate, I lifted up the edge of the rug and (as the audience saw it) slid under it feet first, on my back, and vanished completely, as if I’d turned into a sheet of cardboard. Not the slightest bulge showed in the carpet. The stunt never failed to rock an audience (especially if—when I could get away with it, in some of the rougher towns out west—I poked a finger through a hole in the carpet).

  The trick, of course, was in the way the stage had been prepared before the act. The floor the carpet was spread on was not the real floor, but was built up by using parallels, or platform boxes. Under the middle of the carpet, there was a gap between parallels, covered with a canvas set-piece. It was into this slot that I slid to make my astounding disappearance.

  San Francisco. As we hit San Francisco, so did the rain. My God, how it rained. I got soaked going to the theatre, so after the matinee I went out to buy a raincoat at the first place I could find.

  The first place I could find was a hockshop. I bought a dapper-looking, secondhand trench coat for three dollars. It may have looked dapper on the rack but on me, I found out after I bought it, it hung like a tent. What the hell, at that price I didn’t care what it looked like so long as it kept the rain off. I ran back to the t
heatre and hung it in the backstage john to dry.

  When I put it on after the evening show, the coat fell apart at the seams. I was sore as hell. I sloshed over to the hockshop, in the tattered, flapping trench coat, to get my three bucks back.

  By the time I got there I wasn’t sore any longer. I always have trouble staying angry for more than five minutes at anybody, over anything. So I left the hockshop not with my three bucks back, but with my unstitched trench coat, and a clarinet I had just bought for six-fifty.

  So that it wouldn’t be a total loss, I wore the coat in the act the next day. It was a natural. I couldn’t have come up with a better comedy coat if I’d had one custom-made. It was perfect with my battered plug hat, ratty wig, and underslung pants with the clothesline belt. I lined the trench coat with huge panels and pockets—enough room to stash half a trunk’s worth of props in. I was highly pleased with my purchase, and with the foresight I had shown by selecting it out of all the raincoats in San Francisco. Seattle. A violin player named Solly Soloshky joined the company. He was a hell of a fiddler but he had one shortcoming. He could only play naturals, no accidentals. He tried to teach himself but he had some kind of a block against sharps and flats and simply couldn’t master them. This cut down his repertoire, and therefore his billing, considerably, and made him very unhappy.

  I showed Solly how it was done on the harp, with pedals, and he was almost sick with envy. I felt sorry for him. There wasn’t much I could do for Solly then, but I swore that when I got back to Chicago I would case the music stores for a violin with pedals, and if I found one I would buy it and send it to him.