Harpo Speaks! Read online

  Chico wouldn’t let go. He kept after him like a dog with a bone. He even let Gates beat him in three straight hands of pinochle. That may have been what did it. Anyway, Gates reported to Broody that he was undecided whether to sign Wilson or the Marx Brothers for the lead.

  Broody was surprised at Gates’s indecision. Why, there was no choice at all! What the hell—if you could get one ton of pretzel salt for six hundred bucks at one place and four tons for six hundred at another, you went to the second place. Didn’t Gates see the simple, practical, hard-headed logic of that? If he could get four actors for the price of one, then grab ’em before they got away.

  We were hired.

  Our new show, for reasons unknown even to the writers, was called “I’ll Say She Is.” Since it had full-stage production numbers like “Perfumes from Hindustan” (followed by a team of gilded toe-dancers who were eternally griping about “the goddam beads on the floor left over from the Hinderstand bit”), and since our own big scene lasted over forty-five minutes, the show was billed as a musical comedy, not as a common revue.

  I’ll Say She Is had an out-of-town tryout in Allentown, Pennsylvania, then opened in Philadelphia. At the end of summer we were still playing to capacity. Business was too good to close. So the show continued to run until the day after Thanksgiving, when Broody decided Gates should take it on the road.

  The tour lasted a year and a half. We were in the legitimate theatre now. We looked down our noses at acts that toiled away at the two-a-day and three-a-day grind of vaudeville. We only had to do matinees on Wednesdays and Saturdays.

  Consequently, we had more time off than we’d ever had before. During the Philly run, I had time to learn the game of golf. I also had more time for music. I learned half a dozen new tunes for the harp. My old clarinet had fallen apart, and I replaced it with an eight-dollar job I found in a Philly pawnshop.

  My dog Hokum also kept me busy. On the golf course one Sunday he flushed a skunk out of the rough. He had to be confined to the theatre basement and I had to hire a kid to help me keep poor Hokum doused with toilet water around the clock. When I took him out for his first airing, in my open runabout, a sudden thunderstorm came up. Hokum panicked, jumped out of the car, and I never saw him again.

  During our Chicago run we had a long, happy reunion with Pete Penovitch and with our mutual friend Nick the Greek. They went with us to the ball park at least twice a week, when the White Sox were in town. We were in good company. The Greek always bet a big bundle—sometimes as much as ten C’s—on a ball game, and he would make “good-luck bets” with us, riding the other way. He’d give us four-to-one when the bookies’ odds were even money.

  During this same stand, I first met a man who was to become a lifetime friend, Mr. Ben Hecht. Groucho and I had read Hecht’s 1001 Nights in Chicago and, being fans of the author, we wanted to meet him. We found out where he lived through Covici’s Bookstore (which was like the local poolroom for Chicago writers and painters at the time), and the four of us went around to his apartment.

  Groucho said: “You Ben Hecht the fiddle player?” Hecht said he was, and asked us in. We stayed all night. Hecht played the violin, I played the piano, and Ben and Groucho sang, improvising dirty parodies on popular songs. We saw a lot of Hecht and got to know his buddy Charlie MacArthur who was also loony enough to be to our liking.

  In one of his memoirs, Hecht recalls this particular summer in Chicago and mentions being haunted by “a perpetual Halloween called the Marx Brothers.” He should talk! He played the spookiest fiddle I had heard since Solly Soloshky. I must admit, however, that he was a fair writer and a better than fair poker player.

  Except for these bright interludes, the road was the road, grueling and tiresome. A hotel was a hotel and a train was a train. When you’d been in one you’d been in them all, and we’d been in them all for fourteen years too many. We threatened to quit the show. They raised our salary. We said we would still quit—unless they took I’ll Say She Is off the road and opened it in New York City.

  Ever since we first opened in Philadelphia, we had been promised that the show would go to Broadway. The management kept stalling, saying the show still needed more testing out of town. Now we held them to their promise. A year and a half was enough of an out-of-town tryout for any show. Either I’ll Say She Is went to New York or the Marx Brothers took a walk. We were the mother-lode of a gold mine, and we knew it. Without us the whole thing would turn to a pile of slag. Our threat worked. We went to New York.

  The Casino Theatre on 39th Street was leased and May 19 set for the opening. Apparently, the plot was this: open at the Casino, get crucified (it simply wasn’t a production of Broadway caliber), run a couple of weeks to appease the Marx Brothers, then head back out on the road. We were warned not to put our trunks in storage.

  On the afternoon before the opening I was sitting in Lindy’s restaurant. It was sad to think that a month from now I’d be in Albany or Columbus or Baltimore. During rehearsals I’d been staying at the Princeton, a theatrical hotel, with the rest of the cast. Tonight, after the show, I was going to move in with Minnie and Frenchie, who had taken a house on Long Island. I had a home again, and during the day a choice of two homes-away-from-home, Lindy’s or Reuben’s. I was back with my own people, who spoke my language, with my accent—cardplayers, horseplayers, bookies, song-pluggers, agents, actors out of work and actors playing the Palace, Al Jolson with his mob of fans, and Arnold Rothstein with his mob of runners and flunkies. The cheesecake was ambrosia. The talk was old, familiar music. A lot of yucks. A lot of action. Home Sweet Home.

  I got up to go to work, with absolutely no enthusiasm, and told the boys to save my seat. I took a cab down to the Casino. The marquee lights had just been turned on. THE FOUR MARX BROTHERS IN “I’LL SAY SHE IS.” I was not impressed. I was a realist. I kept hearing the words: Sorry, boys—you’re shut. But what the hell, I thought, remembering the empty seat in Lindy’s, it was going to be fun while it lasted.

  The story of the Marx Brothers’ Broadway debut, on the night of May 19, 1924, has been told many times. It has been rehashed in columns, articles and books, and on the radio. How Minnie fell off a chair while being fitted for her opening-night gown and broke her leg, and had to be carried into her box at the Casino. How one famous critic was furious at his paper for making him cover “some damn acrobats.” How the Marx Brothers stood the audience on its ear. How the disgruntled critic laughed so hard he cried.

  There is very little that I can add to the story, I’m sorry to say. All I can remember, in all honesty, is doing the show, getting some good laughs, taking a few bows, then going home alone to Long Island and straight to bed. Minnie, because of her busted leg, decided to spend the night in a hotel.

  At eight o’clock in the morning the phone rang. It was Groucho. He was excited. “Hey, Harp, wake up!” he said. “Have you read the reviews?”

  “What reviews?” I said. “Variety doesn’t come out until tomorrow.”

  “No, the newspaper critics,” said Groucho. “The Sun, the Times, the Trib, the World—the big critics.”

  “Yah? They liked us?”

  “They loved us. We’re a hit! Listen—” I interrupted Groucho to say I’d rather go back to bed than listen to any reviews. I didn’t know anything about Broadway critics, only about the mugs who wrote for Variety. All I ever read in the papers were the sports pages, and once in a while a column like S. Jay Kaufman’s or F. P. A.’s “Conning Tower.” If the “big critics” liked our show that was nice, but it was nothing to wake up a guy at eight in the morning about.

  Groucho wouldn’t get off the phone. “Let me read you how it starts out in the Sun,” he said. “This you gotta hear.”

  “All right, all right, all right,” I said. “Go ahead—it’s your nickel.”

  Groucho then read, to my growing embarrassment:

  Harpo Marx and Some Brothers. Hilarious Antics Spread Good Cheer at the Casino. By Alexander Woollcott.
r />   As one of the many who laughed immoderately throughout the greater part of the first New York performance given by a new musical show, entitled, if memory serves, “I’ll Say She Is,” it behooves your correspondent to report at once that that harlequinade has some of the most comical moments vouchsafed to the first-nighters in a month of Mondays. It is a bright colored and vehement setting for the goings on of those talented cutups, the Four Marx Brothers. In particular, it is a splendacious and reasonably tuneful excuse for going to see that silent brother, that sly, unexpected, magnificent comic among the Marxes, who is recorded somewhere on a birth certificate as Adolph, but who is known to the adoring two-a-day as Harpo Marx.

  Surely there should be dancing in the streets when a great clown comes to town, and this man is a great clown. He is officially billed as a member of the Marx family, but truly he belongs to that greater family which includes Joe Jackson and Bert Melrose and the Fratillini brothers. Harpo Marx, so styled, oddly enough, because he plays the harp, says never a word from first to last, but when by merely leaning against one’s brother one can seem richly and irresistibly amusing, why should one speak?

  Groucho paused.

  “Is that all?” I said. “Didn’t the son-of-a-bitch say anything about you or Chico or Zeppo? What did he think—I was doing a single? Is he blind or something?”

  Oh, there was more, Groucho said, plenty about all the rest of them. He just thought I’d like to hear the part about me. “Like me to read it again, old clown?” he said.

  I hung up on him and went back to sleep.

  At ten o’clock the phone rang again. A voice I had never heard before said, “Have I the pleasure of addressing Mr. Harpo Marx?” From the way he spoke, I couldn’t tell if he was a con artist or a ham actor Groucho had hired to pull a gag on me. I was very suspicious. “I’m Harpo Marx,” I said. “Who’s this?”

  “The name is Woollcott,” he said. “Alexander Woollcott.” The name didn’t ring any bells. I didn’t connect it with what Groucho had read over the phone. I’d been too sleepy at the time.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Don’t think I know you.” I was still suspicious.

  “I do a little chore now and then for the New York Sun,” the guy said. “I did a little chore last night, as a matter of fact. I reviewed your new show. And now I would like very much to meet you.”

  I didn’t know what to say. Woollcott went on. “Forgive me for being so presumptuous and calling you out of the blue,” he said. “I got your number from Charlie MacArthur, who seemed to think you wouldn’t mind.”

  Oh, well, so he was a friend of Ben Hecht’s friend Charlie. He was all right, then. I told him so, and he laughed and said, “Now that we’ve exchanged references, can we meet? Will you receive me if I barge into your dressing room after the show tonight?”

  “Sure, why not?” I said, and he seemed very pleased.

  Before he hung up, he said, “By the bye, Mr. Marx, how did you like my little piece in this morning’s Sun?” I said I thought it was the lousiest review I had ever read, and he laughed so hard I had to hold the receiver a foot away.

  When he hung up, I reflected that a guy who laughed like that couldn’t be all bad. I’d give him a little time after the show. It wouldn’t hurt. Then I’d go over to Lindy’s and relax, where nobody ever used words like “behooves” and “splendacious” and “presumptuous.”

  Alexander Woollcott “barged” into my dressing room—literally. I had no idea what a “big New York critic” ought to look like, but I didn’t expect this. He looked like something that had gotten loose from Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

  I couldn’t help thinking of Mons Herbert’s old vaudeville act in which he blew up the rubber turkey. If Mons had blown up a plucked owl, put thick glasses and a mustache on it, and dressed it in an opera cape and a wide black hat, this is what it would have looked like.

  “The name is Woollcott,” he said, and his voice didn’t change my first impression. It was a voice that could have been reproduced by letting the air out of a balloon, a downbeat inflection with a whiny edge to it. Coming from him it sounded hoity-toity and supercilious, and I didn’t like it a bit.

  We shook hands. Woollcott sighed and settled his bulk onto a rickety dressing-room chair with surprising ease. He rested his hands on the head of his cane, blinked, twitched his mustache, then broke into a grin that wasn’t supercilious at all. If anything, he was being shy. He had come to see me not as a critic, but as a starry-eyed fan.

  “Well, Marx,” he said. “So you didn’t approve of my piece in the morning’s paper.”

  Nope, I sure didn’t, I told him. At least I didn’t approve of the part I could understand. He laughed and said, “Might I ask what you disapproved of specifically?”

  I had read the whole review by now. “You got us all mixed up, Mr. Woollcott,” I said. “Groucho’s not the oldest—Chico is. Zeppo’s not the stage manager—he’s the juvenile.”

  “And what about Harpo? Did I get him right?”

  “Tell you the truth,” I said, “I couldn’t tell from the things you wrote whether you were giving me the raspberry or trying to give me a build-up, because I didn’t know what half the words meant. If you’re looking to give me a build-up, forget it. I don’t work as a single. I work with my brothers or not at all.”

  He stopped smiling, and took off his hat. “My dear Marx,” he said, “I was neither flattering your performance nor making. light of it. I meant every word I wrote. You are the funniest man I have ever seen upon the stage.”

  I didn’t know how to return a compliment like that, so I said, “What about my harp solo? How did you like that?”

  “I still think you’re the funniest man I have ever seen upon the stage,” said Woollcott. “Consider yourself fortunate, Marx,” he added, “that I am not a music critic.”

  So he was one of those characters. He made you a compliment, then jabbed the needle in. I had known guys like that, who couldn’t help needling any more than a wasp could help stinging. It was a type of guy I loved to have around. They were the world’s greatest patsies for practical jokes. I began to like this Woollcott.

  He said he was sorry if he’d offended me, but he had an unfortunate social disease. He always spoke whatever came to his mind. “My friends will tell you,” he said, “that Woollcott is a nasty old snipe. Don’t believe them. Woollcott’s friends are a pack of simps who move their lips when they read.

  “Nevertheless,” he continued, hoisting himself up off the chair, “I should like them to meet you, tonight. I should like to show them a true artist. You might bring some light into their grubby little lives. I take it you’re free for what’s left of the evening?”

  I had to get out of this fast. If his “friends” talked the way he did I would have absolutely nothing to say to them. I didn’t know the language. “Sorry,” I said. “I’ve got a date I’m already late for.”

  Woollcott did not intend that I should refuse his invitation. He squinted down his nose at me and said, huffily, “A young lady, I presume?” I shook my head.

  “Some business matter of great urgency?” he asked, with heavy sarcasm.

  I nodded my head yes. “Poker game,” I said.

  His grin returned. “Bravo!” he said. “Precisely what my friends and I have in mind! Are you a good poker player, Marx?”

  I told him I played a pretty fair country game.

  He clapped his hands. “So be it!” he said. “The minute you’re out of grease paint, come buckety-buckety over to the Hotel Algonquin. Shall we say eleven-thirty?”

  I was trapped. “Okay, eleven-thirty,” I said. “But first, would you mind showing me your teeth?” He bared his teeth. “Too bad,” I said. “No gold. Well, I’ll keep looking.”

  “No gold?” said Woollcott, waiting for the gag.

  I told him I was still looking for another guy as nice to play poker with as Mons Herbert, who used to tip his hand by the number of gold teeth he flashed. This delighted W
oollcott. “And what did this walking bonanza do upon the stage?” he asked.

  “He played the ‘Anvil Chorus’ by blowing on knives and forks,” I said, “and for a finish he blew up a turkey until music came out of its ass.”

  Woollcott laughed so hard he had to sit down again. He wiped tears from his eyes and said, “Dear God, why can’t I have friends like that!” I refrained from telling Woollcott why I had been reminded of Mons’s act in the first place, when he had entered the dressing room.

  He put on his black impresario’s hat, adjusted his cape, and stuck out his hand. “A rare pleasure, sir,” he said. Instead of giving him my hand I gave him my leg, the old switch gag I had used since On the Mezzanine. He pushed my knee away in disgust. “See here, Marx,” he said, with the full hoity-toity treatment. “Kindly confine your baboonery to the stage. Off it, you are a most unfunny fellow.”

  I liked him more and more.

  The Algonquin was an oddball kind of a joint. I couldn’t figure it out. It obviously wasn’t a theatrical hotel, because nobody was sitting around the lobby playing two-handed pinochle or reading Billboard. It didn’t have the smell of a commercial travelers’ hotel, and it didn’t have the phony trimmings of a tourist trap. Being none of these things, it had to be a blind, a front. But what the Algonquin was a front for, I couldn’t figure out either.

  When I inquired for Mr. Woollcott’s room, the guy at the desk gave me a funny look. I thought: Oh-oh, now he’s going to ask me for the password. But he must have decided I was all right. He gave me the number of a second-floor suite.