Harpo Speaks! Read online

  I learned to tell time by the only timepiece available to our family, the clock on the tower of Ehret’s Brewery at 93rd Street and Second Avenue, which we could see from the front window, if Grandpa hadn’t pulled the shade. Grandpa, who was the last stronghold of orthodox religion in the family, often used the front room to say his prayers and study the Torah. When he did, and the shade was drawn, we had to do without the brewery clock, and time ceased to exist.

  I’ve had, ever since then, the feeling that when the shades are pulled, or the sun goes down, or houselights dim, time stops. Perhaps that’s why I’ve never had any trouble sleeping, and why I’ve always been an early riser. When the sun is out and the shade is up, the brewery clock is back in business. Time is in again, and something might be going on that I’d hate to miss.

  Weekdays, when Minnie was out hustling bookings for Uncle Al, Frenchie was busy over his cutting table, Chico and Groucho were in school, and Gummo and Zeppo were down playing on the stoop, Grandpa and I spent a lot of time together.

  Sometimes he’d tell me stories from the Haggadah, lecture me from the Torah, or try to teach me prayers. But his religious instruction, I’m afraid, was too close to schoolwork to interest me, and he didn’t accomplish any more with me than Miss Flatto did. Still, without realizing it, I completed a course. From Grandpa I learned to speak German. (I tried to teach Grandpa English, but gave up on it.)

  When he was feeling chipper and the shade was up, Grandpa used to perform magic for me. He conjured pennies out of his beard, and out of my nose and ears, and made me practice the trick of palming coins. Then he would stoke up his pipe and tell me about the days when he and Grossmutter Fanny toured the German spas and music halls. Grandpa performed as a ventriloquist and a magician, in the old country, while Grandma played the harp for dancing after he did his act.

  I hadn’t known Grandma too well before she died, but I felt she was never far away, for Grandma’s old harp stood always in a corner of Grandpa’s room. It was a half-size harp. Its strings were gone. Its frame was warped. All that remained of its old luster were a few flakes of golden dandruff. But to me it was a thing of beauty. I tried to imagine what it must have sounded like when Grandma played it, but I couldn’t. I had never heard anybody play a harp. My head was full of other kinds of music—the patter songs of Uncle Al, the bagpipes of St. Patrick’s Day, the drums and bugles of Election Day, the calliope on the Central Park carousel, zithers heard through the swinging doors of Yorkville beer gardens, the concertina the blind man played on the North Beach excursion boat. But I’d never heard a harp.

  I could see Grandma with the shining instrument on her lap, but in my daydreams no sound came forth when her hands touched the strings.

  I made a resolution, one of the few I can remember making. I was going to get a job and save my money and take the harp to a harp place and have it strung and find out at last what kind of music it made.

  When I did earn my first wages, however, I found more urgent ways of spending the dough. It was to be nearly fifteen years before I plucked my first harp string. I was not disappointed. It was a thrill worth saving.

  So at any rate, Grandpa, who taught me German and magic, was my first real teacher. My second teacher furthered my education in a much more practical way. This was my brother Chico.

  My brother Chico was only a year and a half older than me, but he was advanced far beyond his age in the ways of the world. He had great self-confidence, like Minnie, and like her he rushed in where Frenchie or I would fear to tread.

  I was flattered when people said I was the image of Chico. I guess I was. We were both of us shrimps compared to the average galoots in the neighborhood. We were skinny, with peaked faces, big eyes, and mops of wavy, unruly hair. Pop was no better at cutting our hair than he was at cutting material for a suit.

  But the resemblance ended with our haircuts. Chico was something of a mathematical genius, with an amazing mind for figures. (Later he developed a mind for nonmathematical figures too. That was how he came to be nicknamed “Chico”—which was meant to be “Chicko,” the way we always pronounced it.)

  Chico was quick of tongue and he had a flair for mimicking accents. In a tight spot he could pass himself off as Italian, Irish, German, or first-generation Jewish, whichever was most useful in the scrape he happened to be in. I, on the other hand, being painfully conscious of my squeaky voice, was not much of a talker. Not to be totally outdone by Chico, I took to imitating faces and aping the way people walked.

  The imitation that gave me the most trouble was Chico himself. He used to walk the streets at a steady trot, head and shoulders thrust ahead, unmistakably a young man who knew where he was going. I practiced walking like Chico for hours. But I never could master his look of total concentration. I just didn’t have it under the haircut.

  When I quit P. S. 86 I still saw very little of Chico. He never came home directly from school. If he did show up for dinner, he would vanish as soon as he’d eaten. He was conducting some very important research, to extend his knowledge of arithmetic in useful ways. He was learning how to bet on horse races and prize fights and how to play poker, pinochle and klabiash, by kibitzing the action in the back room of a cigar store on Lexington Avenue. He was learning the laws of probability by observing the neighborhood floating crap game as it camped and decamped from cellar to roof and roof to cellar, one roll of the dice ahead of the cops. And he was learning the laws of physics by noting the action and reaction of spherical solids in motion at the Excelsior East Side Billiard Parlor.

  When he turned twelve, Chico decided he knew all he had to know about these applied sciences, and he quit school too. He also quit doing research, kibitzing and observing, and got into the action. He has never been without a piece of some kind of action since then and never will for the rest of his days.

  Chico was a good teacher, and for him I was a willing student. In a short time he taught me how to handle a pool cue, how to play cards and how to bet on the dice. I memorized the odds against rolling a ten or four the hard way, against filling a flush in pinochle or a straight in poker. I learned basic principles, like “Never go against the odds, at any price,” and “Never shoot dice on a blanket.” I learned how to spot pool sharks and crooked dealers, and how to detect loaded dice.

  Unfortunately, we couldn’t raise any action at home. Frenchie was too busy during the day, and his nighttime pinochle game was not open to kids. Grandpa’s only game was Skat. We tried to convert Groucho to cards, but we couldn’t. Groucho was already turning into a bookworm at the age of eight, and he sniffed at games of chance as being naive and childish.

  There was no place to go but out for the right kind of action. The catch to this was that it took money to get into a game, and more money to stay in a game if your luck was temporarily running slow.

  To me there was only one solution. We had to find jobs and earn some money.

  Chico thought this was the nuttiest idea he’d ever heard. “You don’t earn mazuma,” he said. “You hustle it.”

  Our first joint promotion, to hustle some scratch for pool and craps, was the Great Cuckoo Clock Bonanza of 1902.

  All his life Chico has had an uncanny talent for turning up prospects. It was he who turned up the producer who first put us on Broadway, and made us nationally famous. It was Chico who later turned up the producer—Irving Thalberg—who put us into Grade-A movies. Anyway, the first prospect I can remember Chico turning up was a novelty shop on 86th Street that was having a sale on miniature cuckoo clocks.

  These cuckoo clocks had no working cuckoos (the birds were painted on) but they had the genuine Black Forest look, they kept time, and they were on sale for only twenty cents apiece. We had just enough money between us to go into business, since Uncle Al had been to visit the night before, and we still had our Uncle Al dimes.

  Chico bought a clock. We got fifty cents for it in a hockshop down at Third and 63rd. Thirty cents profit. We went back and bought two clocks, pawned
them for four bits apiece. Chico said business was now too good for me to remain a silent partner. I should start hocking clocks too. So off I went, with my share of the inventory.

  I didn’t do so well. Turned out that every hockshop I went to Chico had just been to. We looked so much alike that the pawnbrokers thought I was the same kid trying to unload more hot goods, and they wouldn’t deal with me.

  Chico then said he’d take care of the hockshops, and I should work on people up in the neighborhood. Early the next morning, I took a clock and gathered up my courage and went to the office of the ice works on Third Avenue. The manager there was a friendly guy, who winked whenever the loader chipped off wedges of ice for us kids. He seemed like an ideal customer.

  “Cuckoo clock for sale,” I said to the manager, trying to sound self-assured, like Chico. “Good bargain. Guaranteed.” I don’t know why the word “guaranteed” popped out. I must have been carried away by what was, for me, a rare burst of eloquence. So the ice works manager wanted to know how long the clock was guaranteed to run on a winding. Whereupon I heard myself saying, as I began to sweat, “Eight hours.”

  “All right,” he said. “Wind ’er up. If she’s still running eight hours from now I’ll buy her.”

  I pulled the chain that wound the clock. I stood in a corner of the office, out of the way, holding the clock, waiting and praying. It was a torturous battle of nerves. Every time the manager turned his back, I gave the chain a little pull to keep the clock wound tight. Along about lunchtime, he suspected what I was doing, and caught me with my hand on the chain with a swift, unexpected look. He took the clock and hung it on the wall, without a word.

  At two-thirty, the clock ran down and died. The manager took it off the wall and handed it to me, still without a word. When I ran out of the office, I could hear him behind me, slapping his leg and laughing his head off.

  Those were the most grueling six hours I had ever spent and my net profit was, in round figures, zero. I got home to find that Chico’s net profit on the clock deal was $11.10. I was ashamed to ask for any more than my original dime back. But Chico insisted I take half the loot—on one condition. He would borrow it and double it for me in a crap game.

  And damned if he didn’t that same night. By bedtime the total capital of the Marx Cuckoo Clock Corporation was $29.90. Chico counted out my share and gave it to me. I had never touched such a fabulous pile of raw cash before in my life. But I still felt lousy about the ice works fiasco, and I pushed the money back to Chico. “You keep it,” I said. “Double it again.”

  The next day he dropped the whole wad in a pinochle game. Chico said this should be a lesson to me. Trying to redouble my money was going against the odds. Too bad I had to learn the hard way. Next time I would know better.

  I never did get my dime back.

  There was no hope of having spending-type money in my pocket until Uncle Al’s next visit, which would be a long time off, not until after the High Holidays were over and Grandpa lifted the shade and came out of the front room.

  Such was my basic education in the Economics of Free Enterprise.

  “Today I am a man!” At thirteen I am bar mitzvah—graduating not only to manhood but to derbvhood. Not long afterwards I had my first taste of life in the raw, when I went to work for a certain Mrs. Schang (see below).

  Minnie and Frenchie, my mother and father, looking as I remember them best. This was taken outside of Chicago, around the time of World War I. Below: Chico and I were often mistaken for twins when we were young, which led to no end of collusion and confusion.

  HARPO

  CHICO

  The Four Nightingales, shortly after I was shanghaied into show business and made my calamitous debut at Coney Island. Top to bottom: Groucho, me, Gummo, Lou Levy.

  Groucho leads the Six Mascots in “Ist das nicht ein Schnitzclhank?” I’m at the keyboard. The “girls” are Aunt Hannah (left) and Minnie.

  the School Days troupe hits Waukegan. That’s “Patsy Brannigan” third from right, first row. With my switch to comedy, Groucho (second from left, standing) was converted to straight man.

  The Marx Brothers become men-about-Broadway when I’ll Say She Is opens in 1924. Seated: Groucho. Standing: me, Zeppo, Chico. If I look a little dazed, it’s because I just came from a twenty-hour poker session at a strange hotel called the Algonquin.

  “Napoleon scene” from I’ll Say She Is. Don’t ask what the scene was all about—we didn’t even know what the title of the show meant. In the role of Josephine is Lotta Miles.

  Pancho Marx, in Cocoanuts.

  Animal Crackers, our third Broadway hit. It was horseplay like this that drove Gummo hack to civilian life and into the dress business.

  Alexander Woollcott, the Emperor of Neshobe Island. “In a snood mood” was Aleck’s own caption for this shot.

  This was the stationery Aleck had made up for me after our summer on the Riviera. Figure at right is Master Alexander Woollcott, age four, in the role of Puck.

  Two croquemaniacs at large, on Neshobe Island. The “blimp at a mooring mast” is Aleck, lining up a shot. The disgusted observer, obviously getting shellacked, is me.

  My dancing partner on the Neshobe dock is Irene Castle. In critics’ row are Alfred Lunt, Aleck, and Lynn Fontanne.

  Basking in the Vermont sun with (left to right) Aleck, Neysa McMein, Alfred Lunt and Beatrice Kaufman.

  While Charlie Lederer kibitzes, I take on Aleck at cribbage. Trying to beat Woollcott at cribbage was the one lost cause in the life of Butch Miller (right), more widely known as “Alice Duer” Miller.

  In the Garden of Allah, Hollywood, flanked by four other refugees from the Algonquian. They are, left to right, Art Samuels, Charlie MacArthur, Dorothy Parker, and Aleck Woollcott.

  The Four Imposters. Richard Rodgers, Justine Johnson, George Gershwin (as Groucho) and Jules Glaenzer at a New York costume party.

  George S. Kaufman plays a sticky wicket. Character in background obviously suspects he’s trying to cheat.

  CHAPTER 3 Adrift in Grandpa’s Democracy

  IN A SHORT TIME, by brother Chico was far out of my class as a sporting blood. I wasn’t wise enough or nervy enough to keep up with him. Chico settled into a routine, dividing his working day between cigar store and poolroom, and latching onto floating games in his spare time, and I drifted into the streets.

  Life in the streets was a tremendous obstacle course for an undersized kid like me. The toughest obstacles were kids of other nationalities. The upper East Side was subdivided into Jewish blocks (the smallest area), Irish blocks, and German blocks, with a couple of Independent Italian states thrown in for good measure. That is, the cross streets were subdivided. The north-and-south Avenues-First, Second, Third and Lexington—belonged more to the city than the neighborhood. They were neutral zones. But there was open season on strangers in the cross streets.

  If you were caught trying to sneak through a foreign block, the first thing the Irishers or Germans would ask was, “Hey, kid! What Streeter?” I learned it saved time and trouble to tell the truth. I was a 93rd Streeter, I would confess.

  “Yeah? What block 93rd Streeter?”

  “Ninety-third between Third and Lex.” That pinned me down. I was a Jew.

  The worst thing you could do was run from Other Streeters. But if you didn’t have anything to fork over for ransom you were just as dead. I learned never to leave my block without some kind of boodle in my pocket—a dead tennis ball, an empty thread spool, a penny, anything. It didn’t cost much to buy your freedom; the gesture was the important thing.

  It was all part of the endless fight for recognition of foreigners in the process of becoming Americans. Every Irish kid who made a Jewish kid knuckle under was made to say “Uncle” by an Italian, who got his lumps from a German kid, who got his insides kicked out by his old man for street fighting and then went out and beat up an Irish kid to heal his wounds. “I’ll teach you!” was the threat they passed along, Irisher to Jew to Ita
lian to German. Everybody was trying to teach everybody else, all down the line. This is still what I think of when I hear the term “progressive education.”

  There was no such character as “the kindly cop on the beat” in New York in those days. The cops were sworn enemies. By the same token we, the street kids, were the biggest source of trouble for the police. Individually and in gangs we accounted for most of the petty thievery and destruction of property on the upper East Side. And since we couldn’t afford to pay off the cops in the proper, respectable Tammany manner, they hounded us, harassed us, chased us, and every chance they got, happily beat the hell out of us.

  One way, the only way, that all of us kids stuck together regardless of nationality was in our cop-warning system. Much as I loathed and feared the Mickie gang or the Bohunk gang, I’d never hesitate to give them the highsign if I spotted a copper headed their way. They’d do the same for me and the other 93rd Streeters.

  The cops had their system, too. If a patrolman came upon a gang fight or a front-stoop crap game and needed reinforcements in a hurry, he’d bang his nightstick on the curb. This made a sharp whoinnng that could be heard by cops on other beats throughout the precinct, and they’d come a-running from all directions, closing in a net around the point the warning came from.