Harpo Speaks!

by Marx, Harpo

  It seemed as if the New Year’s Eve party never did break up. The inner circle of the Algonquin gang took to meeting every week night backstage at the 44th Street Theatre. From there we’d migrate to Woollcott’s place or Swope’s, to Ruth’s or Alice’s or Neysa’s, and the fun and games would go on until morning.

  There wasn’t room for the gang in my place. I had moved into a new penthouse and it was already crowded—with mallets, balls, harps, paintings, plants, flowers, birds, fish, and piles of the rocks my poodle brought back from his daily walk. The effect was like jamming the Villa Galanon, gardens, animal life and all, into the old 93rd Street tenement. It was my kind of joint.

  I could afford to live in this kind of style because the Marx Brothers had just been signed by Paramount Pictures for three movies—talkies, no less—for seventy-five thousand dollars per movie. Our first picture, Cocoanuts, was shot in New York that spring, between performances of Animal Crackers. “Shot” was just the word for it. All they did was point a camera at us while we ran through our old stage version of Cocoanuts.

  Still, it wasn’t as simple as it might sound for the producer, Walter Wanger, or the directors, Joseph Santley and Robert Florey. There were many long delays in the shooting, due mostly to the unexcused absences of Chico from the set. Since nobody had bought tickets to watch him, Chico figured there was nobody to squawk whenever he ducked out to consult with his bookie or play a few hands of pinochle. The trouble was, Chico would forget to come back if the action was good. Then Groucho, Zeppo and I would wander off looking for him. Sometimes Chico returned while we were gone, and he’d say the hell with it—if that’s all we cared, he’d take the rest of the day off too.

  When Santley and Florey hit the jackpot and had four Marx Brothers on the same set at the same time, and the camera got going, the shooting would be interrupted every time we started improvising. It wasn’t that our ad libs weren’t funny. The trouble was, Florey couldn’t help breaking up. When he laughed, he laughed so hard he drowned out everything else on the sound track. Laughing left him very weak, so he would have to lie down to regain his strength before they could call a retake. This would give Chico a good chance to duck out to see how the action was going, which would soon send the rest of us out looking for Chico.

  Wanger solved Florey’s problem by having the directors use hand signals, from inside a soundproof glass booth. We still played to Florey, however. When he flew into a fit of silent convulsions we knew we had done something good. It was the weirdest audience we ever played to.

  Then Wanger solved the Chico problem. He had the four cells used in the jail scene bolted to the studio floor. He had four signs made, one for each cell—CHICO, HARPO, GROUCHO and ZEPPO—and he had a telephone installed in the one labeled CHICO. Now Chico could call his bookie any time he felt like it, without bringing production to a standstill.

  Between takes we were locked behind bars and the directors were let out of the booth. When shooting resumed, the directors were put back in their glass cage and the stars were let out of their jail cells. Too bad they didn’t film the filming of Cocoanuts. It would have been a lot funnier than the movie was.

  Summer came. Animal Crackers took a vacation. (This was long before theatres were air-conditioned.) The Woollcott mob’s permanent, floating New Year’s Eve party moved up to Vermont. Neshobe Island was even lovelier than I had remembered it, and even livelier than it had been two summers ago.

  Fall came. The permanent party took the launch to the mainland, got on board the Delaware & Hudson, and played Hearts all the way back to the city. Another new season began in New York, another grueling nine months of all-night poker and all-day croquet, Round Table lunches and Long Island weekends. It was back to the grind of cooking up puns and practical jokes, needling Woollcott and embarrassing Kaufmann, and playing the newest party game—The Market.

  There were grave responsibilities to face too. There were harps to be restrung, plants to be watered, poodles to be walked, and the decision on whether or not to take the Cubs over the Athletics at six-to-one in the Series.

  The prospect of what lay ahead was somewhat changed, however. Sam Harris decided to take Animal Crackers on tour. We would rehearse a couple of weeks in New York, to get the show back in shape and break in the new people, then hit the road to Boston in mid-October.

  During the last week of rehearsal the Marxes met for a rare family reunion in Zeppo’s apartment. The seven of us hadn’t been together for an evening for nearly four years—a lot of lost time to make up for. Frenchie spent the morning marketing and the afternoon cooking, out on Long Island. He arrived at Zep’s place with pots and pots of our favorite food, still warm and steaming.

  While we ate (and how we ate!) everybody caught up on everybody else. The state of Frenchie’s wardrobe. (He could match the Prince of Wales, suit for suit.) The state of Gummo’s business. (He was now a successful dress manufacturer.) What Groucho had had published lately. (His squibs and vignettes were appearing in all the big columns.) Chico’s latest acts of generosity. (To his favorite charity, the Impoverished Pinochle Players of America.) Zeppo’s latest idea for an invention. (He was scheming and conniving to get out of show business.) My status as a bachelor. (The family never gave up trying to marry me off.)

  The star of the evening was Minnie. Minnie was in her element. She had been having a little heart trouble, but you’d never know it. She wore a new blond wig, and the color and the sparkle of twenty years ago had returned to her face. She told stories we hadn’t heard since 93rd Street. They had never sounded funnier. Then she got to remembering the one-night stands in Texas and the air-domes in Mississippi, and we worked off the dinner (we’d been eating steadily for two hours) by singing “Mandy Lane,” then doing School Days, then winding up with seven choruses of “Peasie Weasie.”

  Minnie felt so great she was hungry again and damned if she didn’t sit down to eat another dinner. Being loyal sons every one, we sat down and joined her.

  To work this one off we started playing round-robin ping-pong-running around the table and taking turns with the paddles, trying to keep the ball in play. This was a wacky enough game anyway, but with Minnie shrieking every time she skidded around the corner of the table and her wig slid over her eyes, it knocked us out.

  It was suddenly very late. Frenchie collected his empty pots. We all kissed Minnie as if she were our favorite girl after the nicest date we’d ever had, and the two of them left for Long Island.

  Half an hour later, as I was about to leave Zep’s apartment, they were back. Frenchie was carrying Minnie in his arms. She was in a coma. She’d had a stroke.

  It happened while they were driving across the Queensboro Bridge. Minnie was complaining to Frenchie that she didn’t feel so hot. She should have known better than to eat so much. Then she gave a sharp gasp and slumped over in the seat. Her mouth moved but she had lost her voice. Frenchie, for once, was in complete command. He didn’t waver. He ordered the chauffeur to stop. He jumped out of the car and halted traffic in both lanes on the bridge. They turned the car around and headed back to Zeppo’s.

  The doctor arrived and examined Minnie. She was in critical condition, he said, but there was no advantage in taking her to a hospital before morning. Until then she had to be kept as quiet as possible. He wouldn’t leave her side. The rest of us could see her one at a time, for a few minutes at a time, when he gave us the signal. Minnie couldn’t talk, he said, and we shouldn’t be shocked if she didn’t appear to hear our voices, or even recognize us. At two in the morning I was waiting for my turn to go into the bedroom. The doctor came out and said, “You’d better go in quickly. She doesn’t need me any more.”

  Minnie’s eyes were open when I came in. She was looking at me without seeing me. I called to her. She still didn’t see me. I said, “I’ve come to pin the carnations on Mr. Green’s cottage, Minnie.” Then she saw me. She did the hardest thing she had ever done in sixty-five years of doing the impossible: she smiled. He
r lips trembled. Her eyes were glazed with fear. But two tiny stars twinkled through the glaze, and she smiled.

  The smile went quickly out. Her fingertips fluttered against the bedcover. She was trying to say something. I knew what she was trying to say. I reached over and straightened her wig, the new blond wig she had bought especially for tonight. The smile came back for a second. Then it faded, and all the life in Minnie faded with it.

  I took her into my arms. I don’t remember what I said, or thought. I only remember I was crying. Minnie was dead.

  Woollcott came to Woodlawn Jewish Cemetery along with the rest of us, after the services in the city. He walked beside me, his hand over my arm, but he spoke only one word to me the whole day. During the procession to Minnie’s grave, he stopped and pointed to a headstone that had the name KELLY chiseled on it.

  “Spy,” he said.

  I probably laughed in spite of myself. But I was hurt, frankly, that this was all that Aleck had to say, that he had nothing else to offer me the one time I could have used some plain, common sympathy.

  The next week I realized I’d underestimated my friend Woollcott once again. He hadn’t been able to express what was in his heart during the funeral. That was no time, he must have felt, for a ham actor to speak his piece. He spoke his piece four days later—not as an actor, but as a writer and a friend. This is what he wrote:

  1A short history of the magician’s daughter who was the managing mother of the Four Marx Brothers. . . . Last week the Marx Brothers buried their mother. On the preceding Friday night, more from gregariousness than from appetite, she had eaten two dinners instead of the conventional one, and, after finishing off with a brief, hilarious game of ping-pong, was homeward bound across the Queensboro Bridge when paralysis seized her. Within an hour she was dead in her Harpo’s arms. Of the people I have met, I would name her as among the few of whom it could be said that they had greatness.

  She had done much more than bear her sons, bring them up, and turn them into play actors. She had invented them. They were just comics she imagined for her own amusement. They amused no one more, and their reward was her ravishing smile.

  She herself was doing sweatshop lace-work when she married a tailor named Sam Marx. But for fifty years her father was a roving magician in Hanover, and as a child she had known the excitement of their barnstorming cart rides from one German town to another.

  Her trouble was that her boys had got to Broadway. They had arrived. Thereafter, I think she took less interest in their professional lives. When someone paid them a king’s ransom to make their first talkie, she only yawned. What she sighed for was the zest of beginnings. Why, I hear that last year she was caught hauling her embarrassed chauffeur off to a dancing school, with the idea of putting him on the stage. In her boredom she took to poker, her game being marked by so incurable a weakness for inside straights that, as often as not, her rings were missing and her bureau drawer littered with sheepish pawntickets. On the night Animal Crackers opened she was so absorbed that she almost forgot to go at all. But at the last moment she sent her husband for her best wig, dispatched her chauffeur to fetch her new teeth, and, assembling herself on the way downtown, reached the theatre in time to greet the audience. Pretty as a picture she was, as she met us in the aisle. “We have a big success,” she said.

  Minnie Marx was a wise, tolerant, generous, gallant matriarch. In the passing of such a one, a woman full of years, with her work done, and children and grandchildren to hug her memory all their days, you have no more of a sense of death than you have when the Hudson–sunlit, steady, all-conquering—leaves you behind on the shore on its way to the fathomless sea.

  She was in this world sixty-five years and lived all sixty-five of them. She died during rehearsals, in the one week of the year when all her boys would be around her—back from their summer roamings, that is, but not yet gone forth on tour. Had she foreseen this—I’m not sure she didn’t—she would have chuckled, and, combining a sly wink with her beautiful smile, she would have said, “How’s that for perfect timing?”

  Aleck said nothing to me about writing a eulogy of Minnie. I didn’t know about it until I looked through the copy of The New Yorker tucked inside the going-away present he’d had delivered to me on the train, the night the company left for Boston to start the road tour. The going-away present was an RFD mailbox, with HARPO DUER MARX stenciled on it. As always, he did it in style, a style that was Woollcott’s and nobody else’s in the world.

  We didn’t let our spirits sag. Minnie would have been furious if we had. Fortunately we had support from an outside source, the stock market. The market kept rising and we kept buying, on margin, to stay on top of the golden wave of prosperity.

  I got my market tips from Groucho. Groucho got his from his friend Max Gordon, the New York theatrical producer, and passed them on to me. While we were in Boston with Animal Crackers Groucho lost touch, temporarily, with Max Gordon. So he settled for tips from an elevator operator in the Copley Plaza Hotel, which he duly and loyally passed on to me. We spent more time on the long-distance phone with our brokers than Chico did on the local phone with bookies.

  Our stocks were rising like the price of whisky in a gold rush. I was now worth a quarter of a million dollars, at the rate of $68.50 per average invested share.

  After the week in Boston the show moved to Baltimore. The Baltimore papers began to report strange rumors about the market. My broker was cautious on the phone, all of a sudden. Instead of chirping, “Buy, buy, buy” he began to say, “It might be wise to commence covering margins.”

  A bunch of scare-talk. This wasn’t a boom that was going to go bust. The market was a solid institution and I was being advised by the country’s best authorities—Alexander Woollcott, Bernard Baruch, Max Gordon, Groucho Marx, and the elevator operator in the Copley Plaza Hotel. I kept on buying. My stocks kept on rising.

  Our next date was Pittsburgh. We got into town on Sunday, the 27th of October. When the market opened on Monday, my thirty-five thousand shares were worth an average of $72 per share. But when the market closed their value had changed. The market didn’t merely close that day. It got the hook. It flopped. It crashed.

  Immediately a wire came from my broker in New York: FORCED TO SELL ALL HOLDINGS UNLESS RECEIVE CHECK FOR $15,000 TO COVER MARGINS. I hustled the fifteen G’s together and got it to the broker. Now, I figured, I had survived the crisis.

  I was wrong. The next morning another SOS came from New York. Same message. Same amount. Somehow I scraped it up and sent it off. On the third day of the week the third wire came: ADDITIONAL FIFTEEN THOUSAND DOLLARS TO COVER MARGINS. On Thursday morning Groucho gave up. He was completely wiped out. I didn’t see him until lunchtime, when he greeted me with “Get your telegram today?” His laugh was hollow, and there was an empty look in his eyes.

  I had gotten my telegram, all right. It wasn’t just another SOS. It was the yelp of a guy going down for the third time. The message was: SEND $10,000 IN 24 HOURS OR FACE FINANCIAL RUIN AND DAMAGING SUITS. MUST HAVE $10,000 REGARDLESS WHETHER I CAN SELL YOUR HOLDINGS.

  In raising the dough for the three checks I had already sent, I had scraped the bottom of the barrel. I had liquidated every asset I owned except my harp and my croquet set. I had borrowed as far in advance as I could against my salary. My market holdings had shriveled to an average worth of one dollar a share. But this was based on quotations, not resale value. As assets they were probably worth a medium-sized bag of black jelly beans.

  I was flatter broke than the day the Shubert unit died in Indianapolis. Then I at least had seven cents in my pocket, and I didn’t owe anybody any of it. This was a lot worse. I had much more to lose. I had much farther to fall. How in God’s name could I raise ten thousand bucks in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania?

  Zeppo had an idea. He told me to stop moping around the hotel. After the show, he said, he’d take me to the best source in town for raising the kind of dough I needed. “Leave all the arrangements to
me,” said Zep. “Only one thing you can do—bring along some burnt cork tonight.” I was mystified, but Zep would tell me no more.

  I had a hunch about the kind of place he’d take me to, and the hunch was right. Shortly before midnight we went on board a gambling boat in the Ohio River.

  When I got inside I felt sick. The sight of gambling, after the way I’d been cleaned out that week, was too much for me. I told Zeppo I was grateful for his good intentions, but no, thanks. I didn’t have the stomach for it. I couldn’t even look a royal flush in the face.

  But Zep said, “We’re not here to gamble. We’re here to meet a guy I know.”

  The guy was the operator of the riverboat, a pleasant fellow named Milt Jaffe. From the way Jaffe sized me up when we were introduced I could tell that Zep had briefed him about me and my problem.

  We went into the lounge and talked for a while, about this and that. The subject of money never came up. Zep said to me, under his breath, “We’ve got to warm him up a little.” Then he said to Jaffe, “I’ve got a great idea, Milt. Let’s get up a game of Pinchie Winchie.”

  Jaffe was willing, but baffled. “Pinchie Winchie?” he said. “I haven’t got anybody here who can deal that, I don’t think.”

  “It’s not that kind of action,” said Zeppo. “But a lot of laughs, eh, Harpo?”

  I agreed that it sure was. Pinchie Winchie! My God, I hadn’t played that game since back in the old Chicago days! Now I began to see what Zeppo had set me up to.

  Zep said it would be more fun if we got a fourth for the game, so Jaffe brought in one of his dealers, who happened to be on a relief break.

  The rules were simple, we told them. I started by pinching the dealer, who sat next to me, like on the nose or the cheek or the ear, and saying “Pinchie Winchie!” The dealer then had to pinch Jaffe on the same spot, and Jaffe did the same thing to Zeppo. When it came my turn again I made a new Pinchie Winchie on the dealer, pinching or poking him someplace else, and the new Pinchie Winchie had to go around the circle, exactly as I had done it. We kept going around and around as fast as we could, until somebody made the wrong pinch and had to drop out. That’s all there was to it. Silly, maybe, but it took a lot of quick thinking.