Harpo Speaks!

by Marx, Harpo

  After a while I kicked her out, telling her I wanted to go to bed early. I was curious about something. Half an hour after she’d gone I went down to the lobby. There she sat, in a corner facing the stairs, overcoat and hat still on, reading a book. She looked up at me sharply, I smiled and waved at her. She nodded her head and, having seen that I was not dressed to go out, went back to her reading.

  No doubt about it, she was a government spy. But that was okay with me. I had nothing to hide, nothing that the Soviet Union would want to find out. Still it was a creepy feeling, knowing that every move you made was watched and that every word you spoke probably went into a report to the secret police.

  In the morning I talked on the phone to an English correspondent from Reuters, who told me that Walter Duranty was in Leningrad, and wouldn’t be back in Moscow for another week. Before I hung up I said, “Okay, Melachrino, honey, come on up.” The Englishman was puzzled. Nobody else on the wire was. Melachrino was in my room in two minutes.

  “Take me to the director of the Moscow Art Theatre,” I said. I handed her my letter of introduction from the Intourist people in New York. She read the letter and said, “Yes, certainly. Comrade Director will be expecting you.”

  I had decided not to wait for my American contacts. I’d get the show on the road by myself. That’s what Minnie would have done—gone straight to the local manager.

  The office of the director of the Moscow Art Theatre was behind one of the proscenium boxes. It was the classiest room I’d yet seen in Russia: thick carpet on the floor, polished furniture, pictures on the wall. But it was freezing cold. Russian rooms were either overheated or underheated. This one was underheated.

  The director read my letter. He didn’t speak English. Through Melachrino he said he had been expecting me. But what did I do?

  What did I do?

  “Yes,” he said, “what type of actor are you?”

  “I guess you’d call me a comedy actor,” I said. I began to wonder what kind of an introduction I’d been given from the characters in New York.

  “Pantomime?” he asked me, and I said yes, I did pantomime.

  The director said all right, then, how about me giving him a little demonstration. I would love to, I said, but I’d have to get some props from my hotel before I could do any kind of an audition.

  “Very well,” said the director. “Get your accessories and return tomorrow morning at eleven o’clock. We shall be happy to judge your performance.”

  So I came back the next morning with costume, wig and a hundred or so knives. The director had the rest of the staff with him, six or seven stony-faced characters who were a tough audience if I ever saw one. I got into costume, planted the knives up my sleeves and said I was ready for the stage.

  “No,” said the director. “Not on the stage. You will perform here.”

  I asked if somebody would volunteer to be my straight man for the bit. “No,” said the director. “We must see you perform alone. To perform alone is the only true test of the pantomime artist.”

  So I had to play both parts, straight man and comic. I made some faces, winding up with a Gookie, then shooks hands with myself to start the knives dropping. The silverware fell to the carpet of the office, not with raucous clatter but with polite, soft thuds. Nobody cracked a smile. The room was deathly silent. Cold as it was there, I was drenched with flop sweat. It was the most miserable performance I’d ever given.

  The director asked if I was finished. I nodded my head. He looked at the Stone Faces. Almost in unison, they shrugged. “You will please return tomorrow morning at eleven o’clock,” said the director. He got up and left the office and his assistants got up and followed him.

  Melachrino helped me pick up the knives. She made no comment.

  The next morning I was there at eleven. The director said my juggling of the cutlery was not exceptionally clever. I said I could do any of a dozen different bits, but they wouldn’t mean anything without an audience.

  “I shall be the judge of what your acting will mean to an audience,” he said. “You will please return tomorrow morning at eleven o’clock.”

  I decided that of all the routines I did, the clarinet bit would be the funniest without an audience. On my fourth visit to the Moscow Art Theatre, the Stone Faces were already waiting for me in the director’s office. I had Melachrino explain that I was accompanying a girl singing, “I’m Always Blowing Bubbles,” and they would have to imagine the voice part. I started playing the tune straight, then flipped the special valve on the clarinet and let the bubbles come out.

  The director and all the assistant directors studied the bubbles as they floated through the room. When the last bubble burst on the floor, they looked up at me, grim as a jury in a murder case. Melachrino said something to them in Russian. They shrugged it off, whatever she said.

  They had a brief conference. They sat staring at me for a while, then the director said: “We will let you know. Please be here tomorrow morning at eleven o’clock.”

  What I felt like saying wasn’t translatable, so I said, “This time I’ll let you know, Chief. Maybe I’ll come back and maybe I won’t.”

  The director got up and left the office and his assistants got up and followed him. Melachrino watched them go. She shook her head. “I told them it was a joke,” she said. “Please believe me. I told them.”

  “Yah, thanks,” I said. “You were one hell of a claque, honey.”

  The jig was up. I didn’t give a damn who was going to be the first American to play the Soviet circuit. I only knew it wasn’t going to be Harpo Marx. I told Melachrino to use all the pull she had to get me reservations out of Russia on the next train to Poland. I went to my room to pack.

  I called the man from Reuters and a couple other correspondents I’d become friendly with, to tell them good-bye. All three of them begged me to stick it out. Not a chance, I said. The Russians didn’t understand me and I didn’t understand them. I’d never been so humiliated, not by the crudest, crookedest manager in the smallest-time vaudeville house in the sticks.

  I was packed and ready to take off, waiting for confirmation of my train ticket, when I got a telephone call from a lady with a British accent. I missed her name when she introduced herself, and figured she must be the wife of one of the correspondents.

  She told me she’d just heard I was in town to play, and she thought it was wonderful. I told her it had sounded wonderful to me once, but now it was all over, before it began. I was on my way out of Russia.

  “But you mustn’t leave!” she said. “You don’t know how we’re looking forward to seeing you. Whatever has made you change your mind?”

  I told her briefly and as politely as I could about my four-day run-around with the Moscow Art Theatre.

  She wasn’t surprised. “That’s not the theatre for you,” she said. “You were sent to the wrong people.”

  Well, then, I asked her, where should I have gone? “I couldn’t say for certain,” she said. “But we’ll put you straight. My husband will be back from Washington in the morning, and I’ll see to it that you’re his first order of business.”

  “He’s got connections here?” I said.

  There was a pause. Then the dame with the English accent said, “Perhaps you didn’t catch my name, Mr. Marx. I am Ivy Litvinov. My husband, Maxim, is the Foreign Minister. I know he’ll be terribly sorry he wasn’t in Moscow to greet you. The conference with Mr. Roosevelt has lasted far longer than he thought it would.”

  I don’t know what I said after that. I only know I agreed to put off leaving for twenty-four hours. Right after I hung up, Melachrino ran into my room. She was so pleased that she almost smiled. I couldn’t tell, however, whether it was the postponement of my departure that pleased her, or the fact that she’d had the honor of snooping on a conversation with the wife of the Foreign Minister. At that time the prestige and power of Comrade Maxim Litvinov was second only to that of Comrade Joseph Stalin.

  I stuck to
my room in the morning, practicing the harp and waiting for the call that might keep me in Russia. No call came. After lunch I asked Melachrino up and I played “Waltz Me Around Again, Willie” for her. I told her it was Rimski-Korsakov and she said it was “Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.”

  Still no call. I put the harp back in the case and told Melachrino to go check on my reservation like a good little spy. She shook her head and sighed, but off she went.

  There was a knock on the door. “Come on in, honey,” I said, “I’m decent.” It wasn’t Melachrino who came in. It was a delegation of eleven Russians, smiling Russians.

  One of them, a tall young guy who looked a little like George Kaufman said, in English. “Mr. Marx? We are at your service.” He bowed and all the rest of the delegation bowed. They looked eagerly at the trunk and the harp case, and my first thought was that they’d come to carry my baggage downstairs to the limousine.

  Then the tall guy said, “Let me introduce your staff. My colleagues ask to be forgiven for not speaking English, but they too hope we shall have a long and happy association together.” The names of the guys all sounded like “Bensonoff” to me. After I shook hands with them, the spokesman made the rounds again, introduced them by titles: “Producer. Director. Assistant Producer. Musical Director. Writer. Arranger. Stage Manager. Company Manager. Scenic designer. Assistant Director. I myself am a writer.”

  Litvinov had said the magic word. The next day I went to work—on the stage, not in anybody’s office.

  And on the next day, at 7:50 A.M., to be exact, while I was having my prunes, rolls and tea in the hotel dining room, Russia became—officially—a friendly country. That was the prearranged time for the pact worked out between Litvinov and Roosevelt to go into effect. The United States now recognized the Soviet Union, and the U.S.S.R. now recognized the U.S.A.

  Suddenly, the whole complexion of Russia seemed to change. It didn’t look so gray any more. It didn’t seem nearly so cold out.

  During the rehearsal period, Walter Duranty returned to Moscow, along with another American writer, Eugene Lyons. They were wonderful to me. Woollcott was right. I couldn’t have been in more capable hands. No road show ever had two better advance men than mine, Duranty and Lyons. Duranty took me to meet William Bullitt, who’d been appointed as our first ambassador to the Soviet Union. The Bullitts had me to dinner. The Lyonses had me to dinner. Ivy Litvinov promised to have me to dinner as soon as her husband had a free evening. Seems he was sort of tied up with the Boss. Trying to explain some of the items on his Washington expense account, I figured. But obviously he had, as his wife had promised, made me his first order of business on coming home.

  I felt like a heel for having announced, the week before, that I was going to take it on the lam out of Russia.

  My show was staged in a small but well equipped—and well heated, by God—State theatre. We put on a preview performance for the international press, the big shots of the People’s Culture Commissariat and the American “official family” in Moscow. Ambassador Bullitt was the guest of honor. We made such a hit that we had to put on a second preview.

  Then we had our opening for the Russian public (“public” in this case meaning Party members in good standing who could con the Commissariat out of tickets). We were a great success. It went over twice as big as either preview. On the morning after, Melachrino read me the review in Izvestia. It was the most flattering thing written about me since Woollcott’s piece in the New York Sun, back in 1924.

  I knew I’d done pretty well. My type of comedy had been surefire with audiences from London to Broadway to L.A., and I had found that people laughed the same way all over the world at pantomime. I was confident and I was well prepared.

  One thing I wasn’t prepared for, however. I never knew any people who laughed as easily as the Russians. Maybe laughter was more of a luxury to them than to anybody else. Maybe they were starved for it. I stopped trying to figure them out. Walking the streets, working, or waiting in line, these were the most self-con-controlled people I had ever seen. In the theatre, the same people couldn’t hold themselves in. Every move I made threw the joint into a new riot. The director of the Moscow Art Theatre, the guy who’d almost auditioned me out of town, still had tears in his eyes from laughing when he came back to congratulate me.

  It sure as hell hadn’t been easy to put my act together in Moscow. I had never in my life worked harder for an opening. The Russian sense of humor was a wonderful thing once you got it going for you. But how to get it going? That was the catch.

  They had assigned me four spots in the show, which was to be sort of a revue. I decided I’d do a harp solo first, to introduce myself, and next do the clarinet-bubbles bit. In act two I’d do a comedy pantomime bit, and for my last spot I’d go back to the harp and keep playing as long as the crowd wanted more.

  The part I’d have the least trouble with, I thought, would be the pantomime. Not so. It was the only part that gave me trouble.

  The scene I worked out was the opening of Cocoanuts, with a few variations thrown in out of I’ll Say She Is. I come to check in at a hotel. I tear up the telegrams and the mail. I decide I’m thirsty. I take a swig from the inkwell on the desk. The ink—after I’ve swallowed it—tastes like poison. I make a Cookie. I need an antidote. I take out a rubber glove, inflate it, and milk it. The milk does the trick. I feel great now. I jump on the straight man’s shoulders and throw pens like darts until I hit a plaque on the wall and a bell rings and I win a cigar. Blackout. The second part of the scene was the old knife-dropping routine. For a local-gag finish, I dropped, not a silver coffeepot, but a miniature samovar.

  The first time I ran through my bits, at the first rehearsal, the staff applauded the harp solo. They howled and clapped when the bubbles came out of the clarinet. But throughout the comedy scene, which I had worked on all night with my Russian straight man, they sat on their hands. When it was over they smiled politely, nothing more. Oh, no, I thought. Here we go again!

  The English-speaking writer who looked like Kaufman lumbered onto the stage. “Your movements are extraordinary,” he said. “But please forgive us. We don’t know the story. If I may say so, the point eludes us.”

  “Point?” I said. “There isn’t any point. It’s nothing but slapstick. You know—pure hokum.”

  “Yes, yes, of course,” he said, like he understood, which he didn’t at all. “But may I ask why you were compelled to destroy the letters? Why did you drink the ink, knowing it was ink? What was your motive for stealing the knives that belonged to the hotel?”

  I was flabbergasted. I’d done these pieces of business hundreds of times, and this was the first time anybody had ever asked me why I did them. “All I know,” I said, “is that if something gets a laugh you do it again. That’s all the reason you need. Right?”

  Now the Russian was puzzled. He said, “No.”

  I said, “No?”

  He said, “Forgive me. Perhaps it is different in your American theatre. Here you must tell a story that answers the audience’s questions, or your performance will fail.”

  Well, what the hell. It was them that had to cover the nut, not me. It was their crowd I had to play to. “Okay,” I said. “If you think I need a script, cook one up. I’ll go along with it. But remember—on the stage I don’t talk.”

  He gave me a big smile. “My colleague and I will write the scene,” he said. “Don’t be afraid. We won’t change your part. We will simply give it a purpose. You understand, don’t you?”

  I said, “Yah, I understand,” which I certainly did not.

  So the Russian writers—I called them George S. Kaufmanski and Morrie Ryskindov—cooked up a script. They didn’t fool around with any of my stuff, as Kaufmanski had promised. What they did was add three extra parts, a doctor, a dame and the dame’s jealous husband. They made with the drama between my bits of business. What I had planned as two one-minute blackouts became a ten-minute, two-act play. My net working time was s
till two minutes. The rest of the time, while the actors declaimed, I froze—waiting for the director to throw me a cue to go into my next routine.

  I had no idea what the doctor, the dame or the dame’s husband were saying in Russian. I never did find out. When I asked Melachrino she said, “It is not important to you.” When I asked George S. Kaufmanski he shrugged, smiled, and changed the subject. It was weird, to say the least, to be the star in a play you didn’t know the plot of, or what a single line meant.

  The writers called the rest of the staff in for a run-through of their Moscow Art version of Fun with Harpo. Here goes nothing, I said to myself. You just couldn’t tinker with my kind of hokum without taking all the comedy out of it.

  But I’ll be a son of a bitch if it didn’t knock them out of their seats.

  It was the same way with the full house, the night we opened for the “public.” While the supporting actors declaimed, between comedy bits, nobody in the audience stirred. Nobody rattled a program or coughed. When the dramatic part was over I could see the heads nodding out front and the eyes turning toward me. At this point I only had to wiggle an eyebrow to bring the house down, that’s how ready they were to laugh. I didn’t give a damn what the plot was about. It was a comedian’s dream.

  At the end of the show the audience stood and clapped and I lost count of how many curtain calls I took. The critic in Izvestia wrote that I received “an unprecedented standing ovation, lasting ten minutes.” I wasn’t timing them, but it seemed to me that the crowd never would quiet down and go home. Maybe they dreaded leaving the theatre, to face the icy streets and their drafty apartments, and figured as long as they kept applauding and I kept coming out for a bow they could stay warm.

  No other success ever gave me quite the same satisfaction. Besides, it happened on my fortieth birthday.