Harpo Speaks! Read online

  I was eight years old when I was thrown out of school the last time. Home at that time was a flat in a tenement at 179 East 93rd Street, in a small Jewish neighborhood squeezed in between the Irish to the north and the Germans to the south in Yorkville.

  The tenement at 179 was the first real home I can remember. Until we moved there we had lived like gypsies, never traveling far—in fact never out of the neighborhood—but always moving, haunted and pursued by eviction notices, attachments, and glinty-eyed landlord’s agents. The Marxes were poor, very poor. We were always hungry. And we were numerous. But thanks to the amazing spirit of my father and my mother, poverty never made any of us depressed or angry. My memory of my earliest years is vague but pleasant, full of the sound of singing and laughter, and full of people I loved.

  The less food we had, it seemed, the more people we had to feed. Nobody grumbled about this. We just worked a little harder and schemed a little harder to hustle up a soup bone or a pail of sauerkraut. There were ten mouths to feed every day at 179: five boys, from Chico down to Zeppo; cousin Polly, who’d been adopted as one of us; my mother and father, and my mother’s mother and father. A lot of the time my mother’s sister, Aunt Hannah, was around too. And on any given night of the week, any given number of relatives from both sides of the family might turn up, unannounced but never unwelcome.

  This put all kinds of burdens on Frenchie, which was what we called my father, Sam Marx. Frenchie was the family housekeeper and cook. He was also the breadwinner. Frenchie was a tailor by trade. He was never able to own his own shop, and during the day his cutting table and sewing bench took up the whole dining room, with lengths and scraps of materials overflowing into the kitchen. At six o’clock he quit whatever he was working on, in the middle of a stitch, and stashed his profession in the hall, materials, tools, tables and all, and turned to the task of making dinner for ten or eleven or sixteen people.

  This task would have been hopeless to anybody else in the world, but Frenchie always managed to put a meal on the table. With food he was a true magician. Given a couple of short ribs, a wilting cabbage, a handful of soup greens, a bag of chestnuts and a pinch of spices, he could conjure up miracles. God, how fabulous the tenement smelled when Frenchie, chopping and ladling, sniffing and stirring and tasting, and forever smiling and humming to himself, got the kitchen up to full steam!

  Later I found out that Frenchie smiled and hummed not so much over his culinary artistry, but over the prospect of sneaking away to a pinochle game the minute he’d gobbled his share of dinner. Frenchie was terrible at pinochle, but he loved the game and thought he was a crackerjack player.

  Unfortunately the same was true of Frenchie as a tailor. Tailoring he also loved and thought he was good at; but he was even a worse tailor than he was a pinochle player.

  “Samuel Marx, Custom Tailor to the Men’s Trade,” he billed himself—bravely and wistfully. Frenchie was a trim and handsome little man, with twinkling brown eyes and a face that was smoothly sculptured around a permanent, thin-lipped smile. He made strangers feel he was holding inside him a secret too wonderful to talk about.

  Even in his most threadbare days, he managed to keep an air of elegance. His mustache was always neatly clipped, his fine, dark hair sleekly in place. Given the chance to show it, Frenchie had impeccable taste in clothes and he knew how to wear them. The trouble was, he never doubted that he could make good clothes with the same ease. To give him full credit, he was an excellent judge of color and fabric. He had a genuine feel for material. It was instinctive, like his cooking. But Frenchie also relied on feel to measure a suit (never used a tape measure), to cut a pattern (like a free-hand artist cutting silhouettes), and to sew a suit together (never bothered with a fitting).

  So, when Frenchie delivered a finished job to a customer, the family waited for his return with fear and trembling. Would he return with cash or would he return with the suit? More than half the time he returned with the suit.

  Periodically, when the unpaid-for suits piled up, Frenchie would pack the rejects along with a bunch of remnants (called “lappas”) into two big suitcases and go off, with a shrug and his eternal smile, to peddle them door-to-door in the suburbs. At the same time, with no word of complaint, my mother would hit up her brother Al for a loan and my grandfather would gather up the kit from under his bed and take to the streets of New York to repair umbrellas.

  Life had a way of going on, even when Frenchie was out on the road. But the kitchen at 179 was a cold and dreary place until he came home, with his suitcases full of fresh cabbages and ham hocks instead of suits and “lappas.”

  Throughout all the hungry, rugged days of my childhood, Frenchie never stopped working. He never ducked his responsibility of being the family breadwinner. He tried the best he could, at the job he stubbornly thought he could do the best. Frenchie was a loving, gentle man, who accepted everything that happened—good luck or tragedy—with the same unchangeable, sweet nature. He had no ambition beyond living and accepting life from day to day. He had only two vices: loyalty to everybody he ever knew (he never had an enemy, even amongst the sharpies who fleeced him), and the game of pinochle.

  I shouldn’t knock Frenchie’s loyalty. That’s what kept our family together, come right down to it. Frenchie was born in a part of Alsace-Lorraine that had stayed loyal to Germany, even when France ruled the province. So while the official language was French, at home the Marxes spoke “Plattdeutsch,” low-country German.

  When the family came to America, they naturally gravitated toward immigrants who spoke the same dialect. On the upper East Side of Manhattan (on the border of Yorkville, just as Alsace-Lorraine was on the border of Germany), a sort of Plattdeutsch Society sprang up—unofficial, but tightly knit.

  Anybody who spoke Plattdeutsch was okay with Frenchie, had his undying trust. And since Frenchie was one of the few tailors in the city who spoke Plattdeutsch he got a lot of business, out of sheer sentiment, that he never deserved. If it weren’t for the mutual loyalty of Frenchie and his landsmen, the Marx brothers wouldn’t have stayed under the same roof long enough to have become acquainted, let alone go forth together into show business.

  The responsibility that was toughest for Frenchie was that of family disciplinarian. A stern father he was not, could not by nature be. But he never gave up trying to play the role.

  Whenever I got caught stealing from a neighborhood store, it was a serious offense. (The offense to me, of course, was not stealing but being caught at it.) The guy I robbed would (loyalty again) turn me over to Frenchie instead of the cops for punishment.

  Frenchie would suck in his lips like he was trying to swallow his smile, frown at me, shake his head, and say, “Boy, for what you ditt I’m going to give you. I’m going to break every bone in your botty!” Then he would march me into the hallway, so the rest of the family wouldn’t have to witness the brutal scene.

  There he would whip a whisk broom out of his pocket. “All right, boy,” he’d say, “I’m going to give you!” He’d shake the whisk broom under my chin and repeat, through clenched teeth, “I’m going to give you!”

  Frenchie, gamely as he tried, could never bring himself to go any farther than shaking the broom beneath my chin. He would sigh and walk back into the flat, brushing his hands together in a gesture of triumph, so the family should see that justice had been done.

  I couldn’t have hurt more if my father had broken every bone in my body.

  Of all the people Frenchie loved and was loyal to, none was more unlike him than Minnie Schoenberg Marx, his wife, my mother. A lot has been written about Minnie Marx. She’s become a legend in show business. And just about everything anybody ever said about her is true. Minnie was quite a gal.

  She was a lovely woman, but her soft, doelike looks were deceiving. She had the stamina of a brewery horse, the drive of a salmon fighting his way up a waterfall, the cunning of a fox, and a devotion to her brood as fierce as any she-lion’s. Minnie loved to whoop it
up. She liked to be in the thick of things, whenever there was singing, storytelling, or laughter. But this was in a way deceiving too. Her whole adult life, every minute of it, was dedicated to her Master Plan.

  Minnie had the ambition to carry out any plan she might have decided on, with enough left over to carry all the rest of us right along with her. Even in her gayest moments she was working—plotting and scheming all the time she was telling jokes and whooping it up.

  Minnie’s Plan was simply this: to put her kid brother and her five sons on the stage and make them successful. She went to work down the line starting with Uncle Al (who’d changed his name from Schoenberg to Shean), then took up, in order, Groucho, Gummo, myself, Chico and Zeppo. This was one hell of a job. What made it even tougher was the fact that only Uncle Al and Groucho wanted to be in show business in the first place, and after Groucho got a taste of the stage, he wanted to be a writer. Chico wanted to be a professional gambler. Gummo wanted to be an inventor. Zeppo wanted to be a prize fighter. I wanted to play the piano on a ferryboat.

  But nobody could change Minnie’s mind. Her Master Plan was carried out, by God, all down the line.

  Her relationship with Frenchie, in the days when I was growing up, was more like a business partnership than the usual kind of marriage. Minnie was the Outside Man. Frenchie was the Inside Man. Minnie fought the world to work out her family’s destiny. Frenchie stayed home, sewing and cooking. Minnie was the absolute boss. She made all the decisions, but Frenchie never seemed to resent this.

  It was impossible for anybody to resent Minnie. She was too much fun. It was Minnie who kept our lives full of laughter, so we seldom noticed how long it was between meals in the days when we were broke.

  It never occurred to us that this setup between mother and father was odd, or unnatural. We were like a family of castaways surviving on a desert island. There was no money, no prestige, no background, to help the Marxes make their way in America. It was us against the elements, and each of us found his own way to survive. Frenchie took to tailoring. Chico took to the poolroom. I took to the streets. Minnie held us all together while she plotted our rescue.

  The only tradition in our family was our lack of tradition.

  Minnie’s mother, Fanny Schoenberg, died soon after we moved to East 93rd Street, but Grandpa Schoenberg remained a figure in the household until he finally resigned from living at the age of one century, in 1919. Grandpa was therefore not classified as a Relative. He was Family.

  A Relative was anybody who was named Schoenberg or Marx or who spoke Plattdeutsch who turned up in our flat at dinnertime and caused the portions on our plates to diminish. A lot of suspicious-looking strangers became Relatives, but nobody was ever turned away.

  Most welcome of all was Uncle Al. A few years back, Uncle Al had been a pants-presser who couldn’t hold a job because he kept organizing quartets and singing on company time. Now, thanks to Minnie, his loving sister, personal manager, booking agent and publicist, Al Shean was a headliner in vaudeville. He was our Celebrity, and he played the part to the hilt.

  Once a month, Uncle Al came to visit, decked out in expensive flannels and broadcloth, matching fedora and spats, and ten-dollar shoes. He sparkled with rings and stickpins and glowed with the scent of cologne. Frenchie would appraise the materials in Uncle Al’s suit and shirt, clucking a bit critically over the tailoring job, while Uncle Al talked with Grandpa in German.

  Then Minnie would switch the language to English and the subject to bookings and billings. After a while, Uncle Al would give in to Groucho, who’d been pestering him without letup, and sing for us. This was what Groucho had been waiting a month for. At last, as he got ready to go, Uncle Al would give each of us boys a brand-new dime. This was what Chico had been waiting a month for.

  By the time Uncle Al had made his last good-bye, in the hallway, Chico would be two blocks away in the poolroom.

  As Al Shean got more famous he raised his monthly bonus to two dimes instead of one, and then went up to an incredible two bits apiece. A whole quarter! Five shows at the nickelodeon! A complete set of second-hand wagon wheels and axles! Twenty-five games of pool!

  When I earned or hustled a quarter on my own, I felt guilty if I didn’t kick part of it into the family kitty, but not with Uncle Al money. Uncle Al money was pure spending money, whether the soup pot was empty or not.

  While the Schoenbergs outnumbered and outtalked the Marxes in the Relative department, Frenchie’s side of the family had its share of big shots. Cousin Sam, for example. Sam Marx ran an auction house on 58th Street, in the fashionable area near the Grand Army Plaza, and he was a wheel in Tammany Hall.

  Sam’s younger brother, Cousin Max, I didn’t know so well. He was a theatrical tailor and a good one, so Frenchie was leery of talking shop with him and preferred to remain aloof. I thought “Max Marx” was about the dandiest name a man could have, with the main exception of “James J. Jeffries.”

  Near the corner of 116th Street and Lenox Avenue, in New York, there is—or was, last I knew—an alleyway called “Marx Place.” It’s commonly believed to have been named after Socialist Karl. This is not true. It was named after Cousin Sam. Cousin Sam died while Tammany still controlled city government, street-naming, and other such businesses.

  The odd-ball relatives on Frenchie’s side seemed to come in pairs. My father used to talk with a mysterious kind of reverence about two great-aunts named Fratschie and Frietschie. To me, any two dames named Fratschie and Frietschie had to be a high-wire act or a dancing team. But no. Their act was being the oldest twins in the history of Alsace-Lorraine and dying on the same day at the age of 102.

  Oddest of all were two little women, vaguely related to Frenchie, who came to call once or twice a year. They were the only visitors I can remember who never joined us for dinner. They stayed in the kitchen, where they talked to Frenchie in Plattdeutsch, keeping their voices down so nobody else could hear what they were saying. Both of the women wore black skirts down to the floor, and white gloves which they never took off. When the stove wasn’t turned on they sat on the stove. When the stove was on, they stood up during their visit. They would leave shaking their heads. Whenever I asked Frenchie who they were, he would only shake his head. I think they came to report who had died that he should know about. I never saw him so desperate to get to a pinochle game as he was after the two little women came to call. Pinochle was liquor and opium to Frenchie, his only way of escape.

  So anyhow, at the age of eight, I was through with school and at liberty. I didn’t know what to do with myself. One thing was certain: I’d never go near P. S. 86 or come within range of Miss Flatto’s wagging finger again. School was okay for Chico, who was in the fifth grade and a whiz at arithmetic, and Groucho, who was knocking off 100’s in the first grade, but not for me. I was good only at daydreaming, a subject they didn’t give credit for in the New York City school system.

  My parents accepted my being at liberty like they accepted every other setback in their lives—no remorse, no regrets. Minnie was too busy engineering Uncle Al’s career to have much time for me. She felt she had done her duty anyway, by sending Polly’s herring-peddler boy friend around to the school. Frenchie took the news of my quitting with a shrug and a nodding smile. The shrug indicated his disappointment. The smile indicated his pleasure; now I could be his assistant on his next “sales trip” to New Jersey.

  I never knew for sure, but I suppose the truant officer must have come around to our flat looking for me. If he did, I know what happened. When he knocked we assumed it was the landlord’s agent, come to collect the rent, and we all ran to our hiding places and kept quiet until we heard the footsteps go back down the stairs outside.

  As for myself, I never doubted I had done the right thing when I walked away from the open window of P. S. 86, never to return. School was all wrong. It didn’t teach anybody how to exist from day to day, which was how the poor had to live. School prepared you for Life—that thing in the far-o
ff future—but not for the World, the thing you had to face today, tonight, and when you woke up in the morning with no idea of what the new day would bring.

  When I was a kid there really was no Future. Struggling through one twenty-four-hour span was rough enough without brooding about the next one. You could laugh about the Past, because you’d been lucky enough to survive it. But mainly there was only a Present to worry about.

  Another complaint I had was that school taught you about holidays you could never afford to celebrate, like Thanksgiving and Christmas. It didn’t teach you about the real holidays like St. Patrick’s Day, when you could watch a parade for free, or Election Day, when you could make a giant bonfire in the middle of the street and the cops wouldn’t stop you. School didn’t teach you what to do when you were stopped by an enemy gang—when to run, when to stand your ground. School didn’t teach you how to collect tennis balls, build a scooter, ride the El trains and trolleys, hitch onto delivery wagons, own a dog, go for a swim, get a chunk of ice or a piece of fruit—all without paying a cent.

  School didn’t teach you which hockshops would give you dough without asking where you got your merchandise, or how to shoot pool or bet on a poker hand or where to sell junk or how to find sleeping room in a bed with four other brothers.

  School simply didn’t teach you how to be poor and live from day to day. This I had to learn for myself, the best way I could. In the streets I was, according to present-day standards, a juvenile delinquent. But by the East Side standards of 1902, I was an honor student.

  Somehow, between home and out (“out” being any place in the city except our flat), I learned to read. While Groucho sweated over copybook phrases like “This is a Cat—O, See the Cat!” and “A Penny Saved Is a Penny Earned,” I was mastering alphabet and vocabulary through phrases like “This water for horses only,” “Excelsior Pool Parlor, One Cent a Cue,” “Saloon and Free Lunch —No Minors Admitted,” “Keep Off the Grass,” and words printed on walls and sidewalks by older kids which may not be printed here.