Harpo Speaks!

by Marx, Harpo

  What had been two weeks before a city on the other side of the moon was now my new home town. I got a hell of a kick seeing the posters all over the main streets advertising the show, and recognizing my name in Russian print. It looked like this: XAPIIO MAPKC. The nearest I could come to pronouncing it, from the way it looked, was “Exapno Mapcase.”

  So I was Exapno Mapcase, the Toast of Moscow.

  The show played for six weeks in Russia. We did two weeks in Moscow, a week in Leningrad, a week of one-night stands in smaller cities, and a final two weeks in Moscow. The variety acts that filled out the bill were changed each week, along with the actors in my “play,” but two regulars stayed with me, the girl singer and the straight man. The straight man was no Groucho, but he spoke High German as well as I spoke Plattdeutsch, and we could communicate, after a fashion.

  No matter where we played, the Russian audiences never let me down. The only times I let them down were when I refused to do a third or fourth encore of “Rose Marie.” During the winter of 1933-’34, everybody in Russia was singing “Rose Marie, I love you.” The song had swept the country. Every act on every bill gave it a rendition. It was sung by baritones (for whom it was written), by male sopranos, and by female tenors—all of whom seemed to have mustaches and legs that would support a pool table.

  I got the chance to see a few other productions, on nights off and afternoons when I had no matinee. Soviet vaudeville was heavy on acrobats, wire walkers, kazatski dancers, jugglers and trained animals. Actually, the People’s Vaudeville was a watered-down stage version of the People’s Circus. The circus was by far the most popular kind of entertainment.

  I managed to see two legitimate plays. One was a Chekhov production at the Moscow Art Theatre, which I had a hard time following even with Melachrino’s subtitles. The other was an antireligious play called “The Seventh Regiment Goes to Heaven,” which was staged like a Shubert extravaganza. I had no trouble following this one. The obscene characters they made out of saints and apostles turned my stomach—and kept the rest of the audience in stitches from beginning to end. I have never been strictly religious, but the memory of this performance still makes me sick.

  After I became a hit, Melachrino was suddenly a lot more relaxed, and I could now go off by myself almost any time I wanted to. One day when there was no matinee I ducked out and went looking for some kind of action. In front of a good-sized theatre, one I hadn’t been in yet, there was an unusually long line of people. The line wasn’t moving. No tickets were being sold. It had to be something sensational with this many people waiting for a chance to get in.

  Since the day I bought my outfit at the government store I had become used to the idea that foreigners didn’t stand in line. I went up to the box office and waved a dollar bill in the window. The cashier grabbed the buck and gave me a ticket. Valootye—foreign currency—worked like magic in Moscow.

  The house was packed, and noisy. Most of the audience were standing or walking around, chatting, drinking and eating. Others were sleeping or reading. I had apparently come in during the intermission. Yet the curtain was raised and the stage was lit. Oddest of all was the setting on the stage. There was a small table and a chair. On the table were two telephones, and a bunch of knickknacks. Behind the table was a large, tilted mirror.

  It was the longest intermission I ever sat through. Fifteen minutes passed. Twenty minutes. Twenty-five. Nobody seemed to mind waiting that long for the next act.

  Then a buzzer sounded. People damn near trampled each other to get back to their seats. In thirty seconds the theatre was silent as a tomb. Everybody was watching the empty stage.

  A boy, maybe ten or eleven years old, walks out from the wings. He sits at the table. He picks up the receiver of one of the telephones. He listens for a while, then hangs up without saying anything. He moves one of the little props on the table. The joint is so quiet I can hear my wrist watch ticking. The boy moves another knickknack. A guy comes out, walks to the footlights, announces something to the audience, and the joint goes wild.

  People jump to their feet. They yell and throw their hats in the air and embrace each other. The guy who made the announcement shakes hands with the boy and the cheers are deafening. This is absolutely the craziest show I ever saw.

  Finally it dawned on me what I had been watching. A chess match.

  The kid on the stage, I found out, had been playing the Polish chess champion and the Ukrainian champion, by long-distance telephone. It was nice to know the home team won, but it would have been nicer if I could have gotten my dollar back.

  On the eve of his departure for Washington, the new Soviet Ambassador to the United States, Alexander Troyanovsky, gave a dinner party for the American colony in Moscow. The date was November 30, and damned if he didn’t feed us an old-fashioned Thanksgiving dinner. I must say a stuffed turkey with all the trimmings was a welcome relief from the endless caviar.

  Troyanovsky went to a lot of trouble to make certain the dinner would be the McCoy, down to the last detail. The detail that gave him the most trouble was celery. His research staff told him there had to be celery chopped into the stuffing and celery stalks as a relish, along with olives and sweet pickles. The staff had dredged up sweet potatoes, cranberries and pumpkins. But they struck out on celery. As far as they could find out, with the help of the Ministry of Agriculture, not a stalk of the stuff existed in the Soviet Union this late in the year.

  A diplomatic courier was dispatched on a special mission. His orders were to head west and keep on going west until he found a supply of fresh celery. He didn’t find any until he got to Warsaw. He telephoned the Kremlin that he had the goods. At the border he was met by an armed guard, who hustled him onto a Red Army plane. At the Moscow airport another guard hustled him off the plane and into a limousine. The celery arrived in the Ambassador’s kitchen in time to go into the stuffing.

  It was a fine dinner and a grand gesture. We had recognized the Russians for only two weeks and already they were buddying it up with us like we were old allies.

  All this made the foreign newspaper guys hopeful that they could start digging for their own news in Russia, instead of sitting around waiting for handouts. They had no reason to doubt—yet—that the Reds would live up to the terms of their pact with the U.S. In the pact they promised to encourage the exchange of ideas and information. They also pledged “to refrain from propaganda against the policies or social order of the United States.”

  The foreign correspondents rented an apartment in Moscow as a sort of cooperative clubhouse. That’s where they spent most of their time, huddling by a feeble wall stove and playing poker, while they waited for the green light from the Kremlin that would permit them to get into Siberia. Siberia was the biggest mystery in all the mysterious Soviet. The Reds hinted it was a place of miracles, where factories, even whole cities, were carved out of ice and rock. The Westerners suspected otherwise—that Siberia was a continental prison camp, where a million political exiles were used as slaves.

  Ambassador Bullitt kept working at getting travel clearances for the reporters. The Kremlin kept promising they were coming through. But as far as I knew, no correspondent ever got to Siberia.

  I got into a poker game with them one night. My luck was good, but I came away a loser. We played for rubles, not dollars, and Russian paper currency was so thin it would disintegrate after being handled a few times. It was the first time I lost at poker due to the money wearing out.

  You could buy a lot of rubles for an American dollar, and if you spent them before they wore out you could get some good bargains. Cablegrams were a good bargain. I sent cables back home to everybody I knew, by the bushel, at approximately two cents per wire.

  Some got through uncensored, some didn’t. One which didn’t get through at all was a cable to Woollcott: “HAVE GONE THROUGH TOUGHEST WICKET. NO LONGER DEAD ON RED. EVERYTHING BUCKETY-BUCKETY. EXAPNO MAPCASE.” This must have kept the lights burning all through the night at the counter
spy department of the GPU.

  I finally got to see the inside of the Kremlin, thanks to Duranty’s pull. (This was twenty years before the Kremlin was to compete with Disneyland for tourist dollars.) The exhibits there of Czarist treasures were fantastic. By comparison the Hearst Ranch at San Simeon was a collection of souvenirs from Atlantic City. In my wildest dreams I couldn’t have imagined such a display of riches—crowns, jewelry, robes, coaches, all so dazzling they knocked your eye out. There was more wealth here, by American standards, than in the vaults of the Chase National Bank. By Soviet standards it was worthless, except as a bunch of trophies.

  Alias “Exapno Mapcase,” I’m a headliner on the Caviar Circuit. Poster for a one-night stand out of Moscow, December, 1933.

  A tender moment with Thelma Todd, in the movie Horse Feathers.

  A most revealing scene in Animal Crackers.

  Little did we know when we filmed Duck Soup (left) and Horse Feathers that we’d wind up featured on the Late, Late, Late, Late Show.

  Innocent by stander watches Edgar Kennedy and small friend exchange slow burns, in Monkey Business.

  Go West. Groucho: “Don’t you love your brother?” Chico: “Nah, I’m just used to him.”

  “Chorus” (left) and “Property Man” in Yellow Jacket. Myfirst venture into the legitimate theatre, which came close to breaking up a beautiful friendship.

  Harpist and piano player compare notes at an Air Force base during the Korean War.

  I sit for Salvador Dali.

  the result, one of the prizes in my art collection.

  Two canvases from my doit-yourself collection. The clown is one of my latest. I painted the accordion player during my Early Chicago Period (circa 1926).

  The honeymooners. Susan and I in 1936, not long after our masquerade upstairs in the firehouse.

  The arrival of Billy makes us a family.

  he visits his old man on the set of The Big Store.

  Opposite page, from north to south: Jimmy. Alex, Minnie. Above, left to right between takes on A Night in Casablanca: Uncle Chico, Alex, Uncle Crouch, Jimmy, Billy, and the proudest father in Hollywood. (holding Minnie).

  Christmas, 1947. It was so much fun we couldn’t bear to take the lights down and kept on celebrating Christmas all through 1948.

  Family group, Beverly Hills. Jimmy is the Little Leaguer, Alex the Cub Scout, Minnie the Brownie, Billy the sophisticated teen-ager. Mom’s cool smirk is due to the fact that she knows damn well this is the first time I’ve ever seen the inside of an encyclopedia, and who am I trying to kid?

  Christmas, 1953. Mom says there is a Santa Claus.

  Where seldom is heard a discouraging word—El Rancho Harpo, 1960. The Marxes (from Jimmy, left, to Alex, right) and their livestock: three head of horses, two head of dogs, and one head of Siamese cat.

  “ . . . and the world is mine.”

  One of the Czarina’s robes, which swept to the floor in a train, was lined with ermine and covered solid with pearls, thousands upon thousands of perfect pearls. One of the Czar’s coaches had solid gold wheels. It was lined, inside, with gold leaf and studded with pearls and emeralds.

  The walls of the Czarina’s bedroom in the Summer Palace were covered, every square inch of them, with icons. Another room was constructed of pure amber—noor, walls and ceiling. Visitors had to put on slippers to enter it. According to the guide, the amber had been a present to the Czar from the Kaiser. In return, the Czar had sent the Kaiser three matched soldiers, magnificent specimens six-feet-five inches tall, for his personal use. How the Kaiser used them the guide didn’t make clear.

  In still another room I was surprised to see, in the midst of all the magnificence, snow blowing in through broken windows. The guide explained that street fighters had thrown rocks through these windows during the Revolution. He then pointed out what were to him the only precious pieces in the entire exhibit. On the carpet, on the far side of the room, lay the rocks the Bolsheviks had heaved. The rocks had not been touched since the day they had come crashing through the windows, sixteen years ago.

  So many contradictions, so many contrasts! The Russians were at the same time the warmest and the coldest people I’d ever met, the most serious and yet the easiest to amuse.

  During the show one Friday night I was surprised to see one of the stagehands wearing a yarmilke. Remembering the antireligious play I’d seen, I asked Melachrino to ask the stagehand if it was true there were no shuls (synagogues) in Moscow. The guy looked at his feet, which were bound with strips of rags, and gave an embarrassed shrug. “These keep me warm enough,” he said.

  I realized Melachrino had misunderstood me. She thought I’d said “shoes.” I corrected her and she rephrased the question. This time it was easier for the guy to answer. “It is true there are no shuls,” he said. “But there are no pogroms, either.” He wished me a good Sabbath and I wished him the same.

  The day before the company took off for Leningrad a stranger came to my hotel room. He’d seen the show and he wanted to thank me personally for the pleasure I’d given him. The guy was unmistakably Russian. His clothes, just as unmistakably, were not. They had style, and they fit him. The suit he was wearing, a dark worsted job with a narrow red stripe, seemed strangely familiar to me. I looked at the label over the inside pocket. Sure enough—the suit had been made by Benham, a theatrical tailor in New York City.

  Something about that suit rang another bell. What it was I couldn’t dope out. I asked the guy, through Melachrino, how he came to be wearing clothes like this. A distant relative had sent them from America, he said. I asked him what the relative’s name was. He told me. It was Chico’s mother-in-law.

  The suit with the red stripe had been mine. I remembered it now very clearly. I’d had it made by Benham during the run of Cocoanuts, and it had vanished, one night, from my dressing room. I hadn’t reported the theft because I felt that whoever swiped it, whichever night watchman or janitor, needed it a lot more than I did.

  I had to come seven thousand miles from home, to the heart of Soviet Russia, to find out that Chico was still the same old share-and-share-alike Chico of 93rd Street, who could smell money through wallpaper!

  We took the day train from Moscow to Leningrad, and this trip was like a dream to me. The landscape we passed through was a continuous, miraculous unfolding of scenes from Christmas cards. Against an unearthly white backdrop, miniature tableaux flashed past the proscenium of my window. A horse pulling a droshke, the driver bundled in furs. A clump of pine trees hung with masses of icicles. A half-buried village, with the red onion bulb of what used to be a church poking up out of the snowdrifts. Children, little fur-balls of children, skating on a frozen pond, the smoke from their open fire rising straight into the windless, pale gray sky.

  Thick snow began to fall, as if a curtain had been pulled to end the dream. I came back to reality.

  There was a giant samovar at the end of the car. Passengers were serving themselves glasses of steamy, hot tea. I had a glass of tea, waiting hopefully for the snowstorm to stop. A guy came along renting radios. I took one. I put on the earphones. All I heard was the clacking of the train wheels. It continued to snow. I went to sleep with the clacking earphones on. I woke up when the attendant came by to pick up the radio. It was dark. Melachrino said we were coming into Leningrad.

  Compared to Moscow, Leningrad was a picture-book city. It was a city of bridges, palaces, cathedrals and monuments, criss-crossed with frozen rivers and canals—exactly the kind of place you expected to arrive at after a trip through a Christmas landscape. I didn’t see any slums in Leningrad, but then, I didn’t have much time for sight-seeing. My advance men, Duranty and Lyons, had spread the word that I was one of Litvinov’s personal projects, and I was wined and dined—well, tea’d and caviar’d—all over the place.

  I did get to spend an afternoon in the Winter Palace, which was the scene of the beginning of the Revolution back on November 7, 1917. One wing of the palace had been turned int
o an art museum. I wasn’t prepared for the paintings I saw in this museum. I saw Raphaels, Titians, da Vincis, Botticellis, Rembrandts, and an amazing collection of French Impressionists.

  I couldn’t help comparing the exhibit here with what I had seen in the Kremlin. All the time the rest of Europe was producing immortal works of art, the Czars of Russia had apparently been too busy hustling themselves solid-gold coaches to patronize any artists except the icon makers. Most of the icons I saw were pretty gruesome. So, in a different way, were most of the modern Soviet paintings. Maybe there wasn’t a moral here at all, just the sad truth that the Russians were lousy painters.

  We barnstormed out of Leningrad, playing towns like Novgorod, Malaya Vishera, Vyshni Volochek and Kalinin. This was the rough equivalent of making the midwinter swing from Fargo to Spokane on the Pantages-time. I say “rough” because it was even colder than Montana ever was, and I never saw a single poolroom.

  The audiences couldn’t have been warmer, however. I got a tremendous satisfaction out of going into the hinterlands of the Soviet Union, where no Marx Brothers picture had ever played—where, in fact, nobody had ever heard of any non-Russian Marx except Karl—and scoring a hit.

  It was also satisfying to discover that in small towns I could cash United Cigar Store coupons, which I had a supply of in my prop trunk, for rubles—at the dollar rate of exchange.