Harpo Speaks! Read online

  At the same time I took off my wig. When they saw it was me, Grandpa Baltzer and Uncle Al started to hoot and howl, and when the womenfolk heard this they screamed and slammed through the house worse than ever.

  Old man Baltzer was a good sport, and thought it was a great joke I had pulled. But it took us two hours to get Mama, Emmy and Rosie quieted down, even after they saw me unwigged. And for two weeks afterwards they were too indisposed, with palpitations and nervous attacks, to leave the house.

  As I said, it was a performance I was proud of. It made me the family character.

  Shortly after my masquerade at the Baltzers’, Groucho made his debut on the stage, singing a solo in the olio at the Star Theatre between shows. (The “olio” was a potpourri in which everybody from fire-eaters and bell-ringers to boy sopranos came on for a quick turn.)

  So Groucho was now a professional. I, having no exploitable talent, still didn’t figure in Minnie’s Master Plan. But that was okay with me. I didn’t have the least desire to go out on a stage and perform in front of eight hundred people. The thought of it gave me the shivers. I was content to play the character I was inventing, at home and on the streets, and pick up the laughs wherever I could find them.

  Minnie’s brother Harry was also a no-talent guy, but he was dying to get into vaudeville. Uncle Harry Shean couldn’t carry a tune or dance or play any instrument. Minnie and Uncle Al beat their brains out trying to cook up an act for him. Minnie finally got the idea that he should be a ventriloquist like Grandpa had been in the Old Country. Grandpa coached him, but Uncle Harry couldn’t learn to talk without moving his lips.

  Then Minnie got a second brilliant idea. They would put my kid brother Gummo, who was small for his nine years, inside the shell of Uncle Harry’s dummy. When Uncle Harry manipulated the dummy’s mouth, Gummo would do the talking. It worked great, in rehearsal. Gummo never forgot a line.

  But when they opened the act, Gummo was seized with such stage fright that he couldn’t talk, and when Uncle Harry manipulated the dummy’s lips, not a sound came forth. He was booed off the stage. That was the end of his fling in show business, and probably the beginning of Gummo’s aversion to it.

  About this time, Chico became a full-time professional piano player. He was giving the piano the same concentration he had given before to pool and games of chance, and he could play faster and more accurately—with his right hand—than anybody else on our side of Carnegie Hall.

  Chico broke into vaudeville as half of the team of “Marx and Shean.” His partner was Lou Shean, Polly’s brother. Cousin Lou was a plain-looking guy who wore thick glasses, but he could sing along with the best of them. During part of their act, Chico would accompany Lou blindfolded on the piano. This got to be the only part of the act that managers wanted. Soon Cousin Lou dropped out entirely and Chico worked as a single.

  The first time I saw Chico onstage was in a theatre on 86th Street and Third Avenue. For a finish he played requests from the audience, blindfolded and with a bedsheet spread over the keyboard.

  Everybody was getting famous except me. I took to practicing the piano at home like a madman. I got to where I could play “Waltz Me Around Again, Willie” with both hands, then immediately went to work on “Love Me and the World Is Mine.” I still wanted that job on the excursion boat.

  Once again, the unexpected happened and changed the course of my meandering career. This time the unexpected happened in the person of a strange young man named Seymour Mintz.

  CHAPTER 5 Enough Black Jelly Beans

  ONE OF THE passionate hungers of my early life (I had many others but none so fierce) was for black jelly beans. In the penny assortment they sold in those days there was never more than one of licorice, and eating one black jelly bean at a time only intensified my hunger. Penny assortments were few and far between, for me. Candy counters on the East Side were as thief-proof as bank vaults. Candy was one item I couldn’t hustle. No penny in hand, no merchandise.

  I told myself I should always save such a delicacy as a black jelly bean for last, like dessert, but I never could. It was like being addicted to peanuts, cigarettes or the opium pipe. One was never enough. The first thing I would do when I got rich, I promised myself, would be to buy all the black jelly beans I could eat.

  When I did start making good money, this boyhood hunger had somehow become dormant. I forgot about it. I forgot about it, that is, until one night about fifteen years ago.

  My wife Susan and I were going to the movies with Gracie and George Burns in Beverly Hills. On the way to the theatre from the parking lot, we passed a candy shop, the ultra-modern kind that sells old-fashioned candies in glass apothecary jars. I stopped in my tracks. I broke into a cold sweat. I was having a seizure. My old hunger for black jelly beans had suddenly returned, after forty-five years. I excused myself and went into the shop.

  I came out with thirty dollars’ worth. Susan and the Burnses gave me queer looks but made no comment. They waited to see what the gag was. How could I explain to them that this was no gag, but the satisfaction of a lifetime?

  And what a satisfaction! Sweet, aromatic, chewy, delectable black jelly beans—a handful at a time, and always more where the last handful came from! I shall have to let my friend George finish the story, because I fell asleep in the middle of my orgy.

  I must warn you that George Burns is not above a little exaggeration now and then for dramatic effect, but here’s how he tells it:

  “So there’s Harpo, in the middle of the picture in a crowded theatre, fast asleep. He’s got a smile on his face like a happy drunk and on his lap a bag of jelly beans big as a peck of potatoes which he’s passed out already from eating only a couple dozen of. Suddenly he twitches in his sleep. The bag splits. Thirty dollars’ worth of black jelly beans explodes—flying all over the joint. Do you know how many jelly beans you can buy for thirty dollars? My God, what a scene! The audience doesn’t know what’s happening, only that it’s some kind of disaster. People are yelling and clutching their children and putting up umbrellas. They stampede for the exits and skid on the jelly beans rolling down the aisles and fall into heaps like dead Indians. I tell you, it was worse than the Johnstown flood. Finally they stop the picture and turn on the lights, and the manager gets the panic stopped while the ushers shovel up the debris.

  “And Harpo? Harpo slept through it all. Fast asleep with that drunken smile on his face. When the movie is over, Susan wakes him up and when he sees his jelly beans are gone he turns on me and says he ought to slug me one for such a dirty, sneaky trick. Eating all his black jelly beans while he wasn’t looking!

  “Then he softened up—it being impossible for Harpo to stay sore at anybody, even me—and he patted me on the shoulder. ‘That’s all right,’ he said. ‘I’ll forgive you, George. I had enough anyway.’

  “I try to tell him what happened but he won’t believe me, just keeps saying, ‘Forget it, George—I forgive you.’ To this day he thinks I ate up his whole damn peck of black jelly beans.”

  I will only say that this much of the story is true: I really had enough, for once in my life. I don’t care what happened to the rest of the thirty dollars’ worth. That’s one old hunger that will never bother me again.

  I believe I’ve finally gained control of myself, but for a long time after I came into the chips, I could only buy things in abundance. I bought stuff by the case and the gross, by job lots and truckloads. Soap, thumb tacks, dehydrated onion soup—everything.

  Early in the war, Chico called to give me a hot tip: they were going to ration liquor. I rushed over to a wholesale distributor and ordered enough booze to fill my cellar. When Chico’s tip proved to be right, I congratulated myself. Then I got to thinking. I didn’t very much care for alcohol, in any form. At the rate I consumed liquor (about three mild social drinks per week), there was enough stock in my cellar to last until the year 2419 A.D., or until I was five hundred and twenty-five years old.

  Fortunately, it was a commodity
I had no trouble getting rid of.

  I suppose my overbuying stemmed, psychologically, from the feeling of insecurity I had as a kid, when I could enjoy so few of the “normal” pleasures of childhood. When I could finally afford them, I couldn’t stop making up for all the things I had been deprived of—food and comfort; silly little luxuries; time to play games, and the company of good friends.

  By my fourteenth year I was able, on my own, to keep my belly full most of the time. What I hungered most for then was companionship. The error of my lone-wolf days had caught up with me. I wanted to be “in” with somebody. I wanted to like and be liked. I wanted friends. For this reason, I was apt to believe anything anybody told me.

  I was about the most gullible mark in New York City, and this was exactly what Mr. Seymour Mintz was looking for.

  Seymour Mintz was a pale, thin fellow of about twenty-five who was always in a hurry. He talked fast and he walked fast, with tiny, pitter-pat steps. And he walked on a bias, tilted, as if he didn’t have the strength to hold himself straight and might tip over if he didn’t keep moving. Anybody else would have been leery of such a strange-looking guy. Not me. I was never so happy to meet anybody in my life.

  Mintz had met Groucho and Minnie down in Atlantic City, where Groucho was singing at the time, and he appeared in our flat on 93rd Street one afternoon with a letter of introduction from Minnie. I was flattered to learn that it was me, not Frenchie, he had come to see.

  He asked me what I was doing at present. I told him I was at liberty. Then he asked how I’d like to go into business with him as a full partner. He said it might involve an extensive trip on the road, and I’d have to be ready to leave on a moment’s notice. That was great with me, just great. It was so great that it didn’t occur to me to ask what business I was going to be a partner in.

  “Hold tight,” said Mintz. “Don’t do a thing until you hear from me.” And then he was off, skittering down the street on a slant, like a sailboat in a stiff breeze.

  Two days later he returned. He’d had business cards printed up. God, they were impressive! MINTZ & MARX. I don’t remember what else the cards said. All I could see was my name in print.

  “Get your bag packed,” said Seymour Mintz. “We’re leaving in the morning.”

  Frenchie worked all night that night, letting out the coat to my bar mitzvah suit and making me a handsome red vest. I borrowed a traveling bag from a neighbor upstairs. Its leather was cracked and its catch was busted and I had to tie it with a hunk of clothesline, but that didn’t matter since I had nothing to carry in it anyway except a shirt I swiped from Chico, a pair of sox, a set of Frenchie’s long underwear and my turtle-neck sweater.

  My partner showed up in the morning, lugging a large suitcase. I had been ready since sunrise, and I must say I looked splendid: new vest, shoes shined, derby brushed, the sty in my eye in full bloom. I still didn’t know what I was ready for, but it was certainly the beginning of my fame and fortune.

  The first thing I found out about my part of the business was that it involved carrying both bags. Mine not to reason why. I staggered with my burden, but I was staggering forth into a dream world. At last I had a real friend, a partner.

  We took the streetcar from 93rd Street to 125th Street, where we were to catch the train. When we got to 125th Street, Mintz said we had time to have a bite before the train left. It was always good to take off with a good meal under your belt, he said. Never knew what kind of food you would find in the sticks. So we went to a restaurant on Lenox Avenue.

  “Order everything you want and forget about the price,” my partner said. “Seymour Mintz is no piker.”

  I ate the best meal I’d had since my last dinner at Fieste’s Oyster House—the Forty-Cent All-White-Meat Chicken Five-Course Special. When the dessert came, Mintz leaned back in his chair and waved the proprietor over and demanded to see a selection of cigars. The proprietor brought four or five boxes to our table, but Mintz didn’t like any of them. Too cheap. He waved the proprietor away and said he would go to the cigar store next door and get a decent Havana. Be right back, he said.

  Mintz trotted out of the joint and I waited. Five minutes. Fifteen minutes. Half an hour. The waiters were giving me dirty looks. An hour. The proprietor came over and gave me the check. I explained that my partner got detained on a business matter while out buying himself a cigar. Okay, the proprietor said, I could sit there fifteen minutes longer before he started charging me rent.

  Another hour passed. No sign of my partner. The proprietor took our two bags away. If nothing else, he was going to make sure I wouldn’t duck out on him. People came and ate and went. Dinnertime came and passed. I was sick with worry—not about the restaurant bill, but about Seymour Mintz and whatever terrible accident had happened to him.

  The waiters started cleaning up the place and stacking chairs on the empty tables. I was the only customer left. The proprietor came over and said, “Well, what about it, kid?” I said I didn’t have any money, but my partner would be here any minute now and he’d take care of it. I had faith. I gave the guy one of our business cards. He snorted and threw it on the floor.

  Ten minutes later he came back, with a cop. Twenty minutes later I was in the jig. They threw me in a jail cell containing four wooden benches and twelve drunks. I took off my new red vest, rolled it into a pillow, and stretched out on the floor. I didn’t know what to think. I just went to sleep.

  Early in the morning, the keeper banged his stick on the bars. “Up, up, yez bums!” he said. “Yez’re all going before Judge Duffy, so yez’d better comb your hair and look pretty for His Honor.”

  I had heard about Judge Duffy. “Old Thirty Days Duffy.” His reputation had spread throughout the city. Duffy’s brand of justice was swift and it was rough. He took a look at the back of your head. If you had a round haircut in back, which was a fad among the tough kids on the East Side, he gave you thirty days. Always thirty days, no matter what the charge or the defense. For years, if you were called in a poker game and you showed three tens, you said you had a “Judge Duffy.”

  I had insisted that Frenchie give me a round haircut before I left on my business trip.

  Sure enough, when they made me stand in front of the bench, the judge read the charge and said, “Turn around, Marx. Let’s see what kind of a kid you are.”

  My heart sank. I turned around. And at that moment, who should burst into the courtroom, running on a bias, but Seymour Mintz. My faith was vindicated. Good old Seymour! He was furious. He started hollering at everybody in sight. The judge had to hammer him quiet. Seymour demanded to know who had railroaded his partner into jail and what the charge against me was. When the judge told him, Seymour took out a roll of bills, paid off the restaurant man, and hauled me out of the courtroom.

  At the station he bought two tickets to Gloversville, New York, and this time we got straight on the train. When Seymour rescued me from the clutches of Judge Duffy, I was too grateful to ask him where he’d been while I waited all day in the restaurant. I was burning with curiosity, but I trusted my partner now more than ever. Seymour Mintz could do no wrong.

  At Gloversville we changed from the New York Central to a trolley line, and rode to a small town about ten miles out in the country. I’ve forgotten the name of the town. There Seymour checked us into the only hotel, which was a sort of glorified boardinghouse but clean and pleasant.

  He told me to wait in the hotel while he attended to some urgent business in the neighborhood. To the innkeeper he said, “Give my partner here anything he wants. Anything. You might hire a horse and buggy for him, so he can travel around if he feels like it. I’ll be back in a day or two and settle up.”

  I thought: If I was a full partner in Mintz & Marx, why didn’t I go along on the business calls? But I still asked no questions. Why should I look a gift horse and buggy in the mouth? This was living.

  A day passed. Two days. I was eating three whopping meals a day and seeing the sights in style. T
he hotel man’s wife, who’d become very motherly toward me, did my laundry and pressed my wardrobe. I was quite a sight myself, riding through the countryside in a private buggy, sporting my red vest and tipping my derby to the natives, as Mr. Burns would have done. There was a poolroom in town, but I could only kibitz the games since I didn’t have a nickel in my pocket. That was too bad. There wasn’t a sharpie in sight. I could have cleaned the local shooters with no trouble. What a paradise for Chico!

  By the third day there was still no sign of my partner, and I began to get uneasy. By the fourth day the manager’s wife was noticeably a lot less motherly. I had to borrow her iron and press my own pants. By the fifth day the manager stopped speaking to me altogether except to ask, with growing suspicion, what had happened to Mr. Mintz. I tried to avoid him. I even gave up eating lunch. The portions I was served had been cut in half anyway.

  The livery man came to collect for the horse and buggy, and when I told him I couldn’t pay—my partner took care of all financial matters—he had a fight with the hotel man, who’d actually ordered the rig. The carriage rental was added to the Mintz & Marx hotel bill.

  One week passed, the longest seven days I ever lived through. The manager gave me the bill and told me to pay up or else. He wasn’t going to be taken by any city swindlers. He wasn’t impressed by my fancy clothes or big talk about my business partnership. I had to cough up $28.50 cash, then and there.

  I told him how sorry I was, but I simply didn’t have a nickel. Mr. Mintz, I explained, was often detained on his calls, but he always turned up to pay his bills. The manager was not impressed. He said he’d have to impound my belongings. Then, when he found that my suitcase contained nothing more valuable than a turtle-neck sweater and a pair of long-johns, he called the constable.