Harpo Speaks!

by Marx, Harpo

  So off we went. We hadn’t gone three times around before Jaffe was laughing so hard he damn near fell off his chair. The dealer chuckled politely. It was obvious he didn’t think the game was that funny. In fact he gave the impression he thought his boss had gone nuts.

  What the dealer didn’t know was that I was palming a hunk of burnt cork. Every time I gave him a Pinchie Winchie he got a new black smear on his kisser.

  By the time the dealer’s face was smudged beyond recognition, Jaffe was too weak from laughing to stand up. Zep and I declared the game a draw, then took the dealer into the can so he could see himself in the mirror. The dealer washed up. Now that he was in on the gag he was dying to get another game going.

  When we returned, Jaffe had not only recovered but had lined up a new victim, another dealer. The second game was better than the first. The two dealers hated to leave after it was over, but they said it was time for them to go back on duty. The hell with that, said Jaffe. He’d declare their tables closed. They stayed.

  The Pinchie Winchie circle got bigger and bigger. Whenever a fresh customer came on the boat Jaffe would grab him off for a victim. Some of them were pretty tough-looking customers, gambling addicts desperate for action. But when Jaffe said, “You’re going to play Pinchie Winchie,” they played Pinchie Winchie. He was a guy they all loved and respected.

  What a night he had! Jaffe was absolutely drunk with the game. Every round struck him funnier than the last one. Every time I made a smudge on some innocent guy’s face, Jaffe would explode all over again, tears in his eyes, doubling over, stamping the floor and crossing his arms and slapping his back.

  At two o‘clock he ordered all gambling stopped and we moved our game into the main casino. By three o’clock the casino was a bedlam. There were twenty-some players in the circle. The latest victim, the guy I was smearing, was one of the richest guys around, the owner of a glass plant. The one before him had been a bootlegger, who was probably even richer. Around the circle, gamblers, dealers, shills, bouncers, deckhands, moonshiners and financiers were pinching, poking, jabbing and belting each other with wild glee, screaming “Pinchie Winchie!” and rolling on the floor and laughing like a pack of loons.

  By four o’clock Jaffe simply didn’t have the strength to play another game. His voice was down to a croak, his eyes were red from crying, and he was gasping for breath. With reluctance, he closed the boat for the night.

  When all the customers had left, Jaffe beckoned me to come into his office. He closed the door, opened a wall safe, counted out one hundred C-notes, snapped a rubber band around the stack of bills, and handed the dough to me.

  “Zeppo says you need ten G’s,” Jaffe croaked. “That right?”

  I laid the dough on his desk. I had to be sure of what I might be getting myself into. I asked him what he wanted for security.

  “No security,” said Jaffe.

  “What’s the interest?”

  “No interest.”

  “What do you want me to sign?”

  “Nothing.”

  “So what’s the catch?”

  “No catch.”

  He stuffed the money back in my hands and said, “The one thing I’d like to ask in return is something I’m in no shape to handle.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Another game of Pinchie Winchie,” said Jaffe.

  Within a year I had paid Jaffe back the ten thousand, in installments. With the last installment I sent him a little gift. He wrote me a note of thanks, but he still didn’t answer the big question. Why had he lent me, a guy he’d never met before, that much dough without security of any kind? It was thirty years before I saw Milt Jaffe again. Not until then did I learn the answer.

  I left Pittsburgh broke but not ruined. I had a few debts to pay off but no threats of lawsuits, and I had good, steady work. I was one of the luckiest citizens in all of America. My Great Depression lasted exactly four days, the last four days of October 1929. When times got so rough that, as Groucho said, “the pigeons started feeding the people in Central Park,” headliners in show business kept on working. I was lucky enough to be one of them.

  So my depression came to an end. But so, alas, did the world I had lived in and loved for the five years, five months, and nineteen days since the morning a ham actor called me on the telephone and said, “The name is Woollcott.” Martial law had been declared against us, against Croquemaniacs and Thanatopsians and Sitters of the Round Table, and all the other over-aged children of our world. We were under house arrest. The sentence was the abolition of the 1920’s.

  Life would no longer be, ever again, all fun and games. The bam-bang-sock-and-pow part was over, and so was the permanent, floating New Year’s Eve party. Our million-dollar playground had been condemned.

  The hard truth of all this didn’t sink in until we were playing Cleveland, Ohio, following Pittsburgh, and I got a call from Woollcott—collect. The fact that he called collect was the first jolt. It was his way of telling me he’d come out of the crash in worse shape than me.

  His voice sounded strangely tired and sad. I thought: Somebody in the mob has died. But it was nothing like that. “I’m home alone with a terrible case of the cringes,” Aleck said. “I’m calling you to make a confession.”

  I asked him what had happened. “Harpo!” he wailed. “Dear, dumb Harpo! Remember last spring when we took up a collection at the Thanatopsis to buy a present for the Hacketts’ baby boy?” Sure, I remembered. “Remember, you all entrusted me to select the present and deliver it?” Yes, that too. “Do you know what I bought? Harpo, do you know what I gave the innocent little Hackett?” No, that I didn’t know.

  “I gave him a share of United States Steel,” said Aleck. “I can never forgive myself.”

  That was when I knew it was all over.

  CHAPTER 17 Hollywood Bachelor: Early Struggles

  FOR THREE YEARS we stuffed audiences with Animal Crackers, from Broadway to Chicago and points between, north and south. We had, to put it mildly, overexposed ourselves. So when Paramount offered us a new contract, which called for us to make pictures on the West Coast, we grabbed the deal and made our escape to California. The year was 1931.

  On arriving in Los Angeles I checked into the Garden of Allah. The Garden of Allah, a collection of palm trees, bungalows and apartments grouped around a swimming pool built in the shape of the Black Sea, was at the time the most famous oasis in the stucco desert of the movie colony.

  It was a hangout for Hollywood bachelors, actresses between marriages, and transients from the East like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley. I considered myself one of the New York transients. After a picture or two I’d be back where I belonged, in friendly Algonquin territory.

  However, along with a couple of thousand other transients, I somehow never got home. Without knowing what was happening to me I turned into a Californian—which I still am, after twenty-nine years.

  Woollcott once described the Garden of Allah as “the kind of village you might look for down the rabbit-hole.” It was a pretty mad place, all right. The night life in and around the miniature Black Sea kept the scandal writers supplied with more juicy items than they could use. But you couldn’t prove it by me. I slept through everything. The shooting schedule called for me to be on the set at Paramount by eight o’clock in the morning, which meant I had to be up at six. It took quite a while for a city boy like me to get used to the farmers’ hours they kept in Hollywood studios.

  So my little bungalow in the Garden of Allah was a peaceful retreat. It was the best place to practice I ever had—until a piano player moved into a bungalow across from mine and shattered the peace.

  I was looking forward to a solid weekend of practice, without interruptions, when my new neighbor started to bang away. I couldn’t hear anything below a forte on the harp. There were no signs the piano banging was going to stop. It only got more overpowering. This character was warming up for a solid weekend of practice too.
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  I went to the office to register a complaint. One of us had to go, I said, and it wasn’t going to be me because I was there first. But the management didn’t see it my way. The new guest, whose playing was driving me nuts, was Sergei Rachmaninoff. They were not about to ask him to move.

  I was flattered to have such a distinguished neighbor, but I still had to practice. So I got rid of him my own way.

  I opened the door and all the windows in my place and began to play the first four bars of Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C-sharp Minor, over and over, fortissimo. Two hours later my fingers were getting numb. But I didn’t let up, not until I heard a thunderous crash of notes from across the way, like the keyboard had been attacked with a pair of sledge hammers. Then there was silence.

  This time it was Rachmaninoff who went to complain. He asked to be moved to another bungalow immediately, the farthest possible from that dreadful harpist. Peace returned to the Garden.

  I didn’t really know until much later how sharp my intuition had been. I found out that the great pianist and composer detested his Prelude in C-sharp Minor. He considered it a very Minor piece of work. He was haunted by it everywhere he went, by students who butchered it and by audiences who clamored for it, and he wished he’d never written it. After playing the damn thing nonstop for two hours I knew exactly how he felt.

  The only other character who disturbed the peace that year was Harold Ross. One night I woke up thinking I heard a rattlesnake in the bungalow. It turned out to be Ross, who had just arrived from New York, shaking a cup of dice by my window. He was hot for a game of backgammon. We started to play. Every once in a while Ross would jump up and look outside and bellow, “Where are all those beautiful goddam Hollywood women I’ve heard so much about?”

  I kept reassuring Ross that he wouldn’t see any in this joint. The Garden of Allah was a home for quiet, clean-living bachelors like me. He snorted and called me a goddam liar and kept bellowing for the beautiful goddam broads.

  I decided to shut him up. When he went to the can I telephoned one of the local madams and ordered her to send around three of her choicest call girls. The girls arrived half an hour later, and they were pretty choice, too. But Ross was not impressed. He was furious. He handed each of the girls a twenty-dollar bill and growled, “Go home, girls. Can’t you see I’ve got a shut-out going?”

  Shut-out notwithstanding, I took him for two hundred bucks. Ross could no more beat me at backgammon than he could beat Woollcott at cribbage. In the morning, when it was time for me to go to work, he picked up his dice and his board and stormed out of the bungalow, muttering that he should never have set foot in “this pesthole of pettifogging vaudeville actors and fallen women.” The editor of the most sophisticated magazine in the country, The New Yorker, talked like the hero of an old-fashioned melodrama, and he meant every word he said.

  We settled into Hollywood to stay awhile. Frenchie came west. He took a bungalow in the Garden of Allah and got busy putting together a California wardrobe and tracking down California pinochle players. Zeppo spent his time starting up an agency for movie talent, with the Marx Brothers as his first clients. This was such a good idea that he eventually persuaded Gummo to come West to be his partner, and Zeppo announced that he was through forever with acting as soon as our Paramount contract ran out.

  Zeppo had his office on Sunset Boulevard. Not to be outdone, Chico, Groucho and I opened an office of our own in Beverly Hills and hired ourselves a secretary. Our office was over a real-estate brokerage, up a flight of creaky stairs. I was still a city boy who believed that stairs belonged only in tenements. Otherwise you took an elevator. So I preferred to do my business on the street.

  When I whistled from down below, Rachel, the secretary, lowered my day’s paper work out of the office window in a basket, on a rope. I then sat on the curb of Beverly Drive attending to bills and correspondence. When I’d finished reading my mail and writing checks and memos, I’d reload the basket and whistle twice and Rachel would pull up the rope. It was a very efficient office. I never saw it.

  According to Ruth Gordon, who visited the coast during this period, Rachel had only three duties: (1) get book for Groucho, (2) get fourth for bridge for Chico, and (3) get girl for Harpo.

  Our secretary’s job was not that simple, but maybe Ruth had reason to think so—at least so far as (3) was concerned. Rachel kept a little black book for me. Whenever I had a date I’d phone in certain data afterward so it could be filed away for reference. My trouble was, as always, my memory for connecting names with faces. To me, Hollywood was still a town full of pretty broads all named Miss Benson.

  I worked out a code, to save time and office work. Whenever I took a new girl out I reported her name, address, phone number and code category back to Rachel, who filed the information in the little black book. The code categories were “Coloratura Soprano,” “Lyric Soprano,” “Mezzo Soprano,” and “Contralto.”

  Rachel never admitted it, but I think she cracked the code. It got to where I’d call for a check on a dame who’d been fishing around for a date, and Rachel would consult the file and report with pleasure, “Oh yes, Mr. Marx! She’s a Coloratura Soprano!” Or another time she’d check and say, “I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Marx, but I have her down as a Contralto.” My category of Contralto was for dames who turned out to like women better than men.

  It was a great system, while it lasted. It broke down when I met a gal who was in a category all by herself. When I met her, the others could—and did—go to hell, and the little black book became about as valuable to me as a 1920 Staten Island telephone directory.

  Little black book notwithstanding, I was working very hard during this period, both on the movie set and off. This was when I finally got up the courage to play the clarinet in public, and worked it into my act. Naturally, I didn’t play it straight. What I did was rig some special tubing along my clarinet from mouthpiece to bell, leading into a hidden container of liquid soap. Halfway through a piece I would flick a valve, and bubbles would come out along with the music. This went over pretty well, even though it limited my clarinet repertoire to one number—“I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles.”

  Meanwhile other transients showed up from New York, and my old croquet partner from the Woollcott mob, Charlie Lederer, had resettled in California to work for the Hearst Syndicate.

  There were croquemaniacs out on the coast, like Sam Goldwyn and Darryl Zanuck, but for old Eastern pros like Lederer and me the thrill of croquet was gone. It wasn’t the same without the Katzenjammer Kids. The velvety greens of Hollywood were no challenge to us after the hills we’d shot over at Sands Point and the trees we’d banked around on Neshobe Island.

  In Hollywood, Lederer stuck to Ping-pong, a game at which he was a whiz and at which he was quite a hustler. I turned to golf, at which I was not much of a whiz, which was too bad, because I was certainly a hustler at heart.

  It was through Lederer that I joined a new kind of mob, the Hearst Crowd. William Randolph Hearst, Charlie’s boss and the giant among American publishers, had gone Hollywood. His primary interest in the movies was the career of a charming young actress named Marion Davies. Miss Davies’ beach house in Santa Monica became field headquarters for Hearst’s Hollywood invasion, and it was there that I first met the Crowd.

  Well, we didn’t actually meet. My initiation was a costume ball to which I went, uninvited, as Kaiser Wilhelm. I won second prize. Nobody knew who I was except Charlie, who had smuggled me in.

  It was fun for a while, playing Mystery Man to the hundred most famous people in Hollywood. But I had to cut out early, before I keeled over from suffocation and exhaustion. I must have been wearing fifty pounds of disguise: spiked steel helmet, bald wig, mustachios, nose and chin putty, uniform with medals and epaulets, knee-high boots, studded sword-belt and a three-foot ceremonial sword. When I got tired going around goosing everybody with the sword, I could only keep it from dragging on the floor by walking on tiptoe. Even more tiring was h
olding the monocle in my eye. My face hurt more than my feet did.

  Charlie came to my rescue. He said he’d found a lift home for me with two of his “favorite people,” who also had to leave early.

  I rode off with them in a monstrous limousine. It was not very comfortable. I sat between husband and wife. They were plastered. I was sweltering, and I couldn’t move. The spike of my helmet poked against the roof of the car. My sword was jammed against the bottom of the front seat. Now I knew what a pig felt like roasting on a spit.

  Very soon I felt much more uncomfortable. The guy said to me, “We’re sailing for Europe on Thursday, Harpo.” His wife said, “Wednesday!” He didn’t contradict her. He merely hauled off and socked her across the face. I caught it in the mush with his elbow. She hauled off and socked him back. I got a mouthful of her costume. I pulled down the visor of my helmet. But I still didn’t feel safe. The guy and his wife were screaming such vile things that I got scared one of them might tear my sword loose and try to hack the other one to bits. This wouldn’t be so healthy for me, since I was the battleground.

  They fought all the way home. The chauffeur wasn’t the least concerned. He told me not to worry. They fought like this every time they got tanked up, he said, which all Hollywood knew was at least four times a week.

  I couldn’t believe anybody could be as drunk as these two characters without passing out. When we pulled into the driveway of a mansion in a ritzy section of Beverly Hills and the chauffeur opened the limousine doors, I was sure they’d fall flat on their faces. But no. They ran into the house, her chasing him, slamming doors and still screaming. Now, I figured, the chauffeur would drive me on to the Garden of Allah.