Harpo Speaks!

by Marx, Harpo

  Lou put a hand on my arm, ever so gently. “Harpo, not now,” he said in a soft, sad voice. “Anything else, but not the mouth organ. This is the low ebb of my life.”

  We put in a call for ten o‘clock and staggered up to our rooms. I was exhausted from the strain of driving and went out like a light. But when I heard the ring of the morning call I woke up fresh as a daisy. I jumped out of bed and went whooping from room to room rousing the other guys. I got ’em all awake before I noticed it was still dark outside. I looked at my watch. It was four-thirty. We’d slept a total of an hour and a half.

  What I had taken for the ten o’clock call was the bell of a freight engine. We went back to bed, but not back to sleep. The freight engine kept clanging and banging all the rest of the night, beneath our windows.

  Well, we did get to Palm Springs. Normally, it was a trip that shouldn’t have taken over two and a half hours. By my short cut it took twenty-one hours and twenty-five minutes. But the weekend wasn’t a bust. Lou Holtz did feel better. And George Burns acquired a new story for his Harpo file.

  Bums and I were constant golfing companions in those days. I could always beat George. He made me feel like a pro. George found it impossible to take golf seriously, and he could always get a laugh out of me on the course. I made him feel like a great comedian. We were an ideal twosome.

  The Hillcrest didn’t regard us as ideal members, however. We had too little respect for Club regulations. One summer when the weather got unbearably hot, George and I took our shirts off on the course, which was against the rules. The Board of Governors wrote us a letter requesting that we desist from this flagrant violation. The day after we got the letter it was still hot, and we went back on the course and took off our shirts again.

  We were called on the carpet and warned that if we did it again we’d be suspended. We did it again. We were suspended from the Club for two weeks.

  The day the suspension was up, we gave our word we’d never break the rule about shirts again. This time we kept our word and kept our shirts on. But on reaching the third tee, we took off our pants. We had checked and found there was no rule against this. So we played eighteen holes in shirts and undershorts and nobody stopped us. Fortunately for all concerned the weather turned cool before the next meeting of the Board of Governors.

  Only once did I have a serious fight with the club. That was when I led a campaign to revoke the by-law that only persons of the Jewish faith could be members. I am proud to say I won the fight, and Hillcrest ceased being a restricted club.

  At Hillcrest I got to know a guy named Lee Langdon, who was one of the top-ranked bridge players in the country. Langdon had the idea of starting a bridge club, and asked my help in financing it and lending my name as a front. I liked the idea, and was happy to help.

  The Beverly Hills Bridge Club was an immediate success. We rented high-class rooms on Wilshire Boulevard, and we had a charter membership to match the rooms. Most of the guys from the Round Table joined, along with the cream of the movie colony, everybody from Norma Talmadge to George Raft. We charged members by the hour to play. There was seldom an empty table. Before the club was six months old I got my investment back. I became a silent partner and devoted my spare time to golf again. Because of this I missed out on the most dramatic moment in the history of the bridge club.

  I was paged this day in the Hillcrest locker room. It was Lee Langdon on the phone. He was almost too shaken to speak. He said, “For heaven’s sake, Harpo, get over here as fast as you can. Don’t even stop for a red light.”

  When I got to the joint one of the members, a heavy-set lady of forty or so, the wife of some movie producer, was sobbing hysterically. Two other dames were trying to comfort her, without much effect, and Lee Langdon was pacing the floor, wringing his hands. Lee whisked me into the office. “This is an awful crisis,” he said. “We’ve got to think fast to save the club.” Then he told me what had happened.

  The fat dame was playing four-handed gin rummy with Harry Ritz and two others. When they finished a game and switched partners, Harry Ritz pushed back his chair to let this dame pass in front of him. When she did, Harry was overcome by a sudden, diabolical impulse. He bit her on the behind.

  She let out a shriek and flew around the joint screaming that “this dreadful man” must be expelled from the club.

  Lee said he couldn’t expel Mr. Ritz from the club. Ridiculous. Harry was a charter member in good standing.

  If he wasn’t expelled, she said, she would walk out and form her own club and take half the membership with her, everybody who believed in paying for a safe and decent place to play in. Then she went into hysterics, and that’s when Lee rushed to call me over.

  We came out of the office to face the crisis. The dame fell on my neck. After I heard her side of the story all over again, I said, “I’m sorry, but Mr. Langdon and I have gone over the by-laws very carefully, and there’s nothing there that says a member can’t bite another member on the behind.”

  She was on the verge of going off again when I held up my hand and smiled and said, “However! However, we’ll be glad to make it a rule from now on that anybody who does what Harry Ritz did will be suspended for six months.”

  “No,” she said, dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief. “It should be a year’s suspension.”

  I said I thought a whole year was too stiff a penalty. Lee agreed. The dame said, “Well, I’ll settle for ten months.”

  I said, “Eight months?” She folded her arms and shook her head.

  The three of us thought it over for a while. Then I said, “How about if we compromise on nine months?”

  “All right,” said the dame. “I’ll agree to that, but not a day less.” She got up and marched triumphantly back to the card table.

  So a new by-law was put on the books: “Effective immediately, any member of the Beverly Hills Bridge Club caught biting another member on the behind will be automatically suspended for a period of nine (9) months.”

  To my great disappointment we never had an occasion to invoke the rule before the War came and the club was disbanded.

  Unlike the wives of a lot of my friends, Susan was not a “country club widow.” Something had happened to us to bring us closer together than we’d ever been.

  The first thing we had agreed on, driving back from the Santa Ana firehouse the day we got married, was having a big family. Me, because I’d grown up in one and loved it. Susan, because she’d been an only child and dreamed through so many hours about belonging to a big family.

  Three months later, we started making arrangements to adopt the first member of our family.

  It wasn’t easy. Susan and I shared a deep love—for each other, for life, for all living things. We shared a faith in the same Divine Power, even if we had no handy stage name to call Him by. Yet on the records we were incompatible. I was Jewish and she was Christian. Adoption agencies were sympathetic, but they warned us that because of our religious difference, the adoption procedures might be unusually long and involved.

  We had nobody to turn to except our friends. They went to bat for us. Dr. Sam Hirshfeld led the fight. Marion Davies helped move mountains of red tape for us. Aleck Woollcott and Alice Miller wrote letters on our behalf. Swope was not content to write a letter. He thundered across the continent at the agency people, by telephone.

  Still, we had to sweat through six heartbreaking months before we could bring our baby home. We had found him right away. He was pale and tiny, small for his eight months. The nurses were a little discouraged over him. He seemed listless. He never smiled. He refused to take solid food. But the moment Susan and I looked into his huge, somber dark eyes, we fell in love with him.

  Susan leaned over his crib. The baby studied her face for a moment, then broke into a smile. To the nurse this was a minor miracle. She asked Susan if she wouldn’t try feeding him. Susan offered him a spoonful of cereal. He gobbled it. We knew he was ours and he knew it too.

  On a love
ly morning in March 1938, we brought our son home. William Woollcott Marx entered our lives and changed our world.

  Billy was the forty-seventh string on my harp. The first sounds he could distinguish were the sounds of music—of Susan’s laughter, of my playing. Music has been his personal language ever since. When he was two his favorite bedtime story was “Annie Laurie,” on the harp. By the time he was five he could sing all the melodies in my repertoire by heart. Call it a miracle or just plain luck, but Billy had chosen us just as surely as we had chosen him.

  We had asked Woollcott to be Billy’s godfather, and we had hoped that he could be with us when we brought our baby home. But Aleck’s schedule of lectures and broadcasts was brutal as ever, so he performed his godfatherly duty by long-distance phone. While I held the phone to Billy’s ear, he introduced himself as “Uncle Acky Wookie,” sang “I’m Des a Itto Wabbit in de Sunshine,” and concluded with, “May God bless you, Master William Woollcott Marx, and may your father fry in hell.”

  Before Aleck finished, Billy fell fast asleep. He was my boy. There was no mistake about it.

  On Billy’s second birthday I was overcome with nostalgia for the East. You’d have thought that parenthood would make me feel more deeply rooted to the West. But the effect was just the opposite. I guess it was the natural urge of a new father to show his family off to his oldest friends.

  The only communiqué I’d had from New York in a long time was a letter from Sam Behrman. I came across the letter, unopened, between the pages of an old magazine in the reading rack in the can. It had been mailed five years ago. I must have received it about the time I was moving out of the Garden of Allah. What difference did five years make? It was still news from home, and it was nice to read that Sam was well and was planning a trip to Hollywood, and was anxious to hear all about my trip to Russia.

  I answered Sam right away. My reply began, as I remember, “Yours of the past decade received . . .”

  Not long after I found Behrman’s letter, a telegram from another old friend arrived and stirred up memories of a more distant past:

  GOING FROM NEW YORK TO ANTIBES THE LONG WAY AROUND VIA CALIFORNIA. YOU ARE ONE OF TWO PEOPLE I CANNOT LEAVE WITHOUT SEEING AGAIN. COCKTAILS FIVE P.M. BEVERLY HILLS HOTEL. BAISERS MON PETIT VESTON VERT.

  DAISY FELLOWES

  After I got somebody to translate veston vert for me I hunted until I found the green jacket with the brass buttons, and had it patched and cleaned to wear to Daisy’s party.

  Seeing Daisy Fellowes again was like reliving that whole summer of ’28. She hadn’t changed a bit. She was rich enough not to have to change, but more than that, she simply didn’t want to. Her cocktail party in Beverly Hills was small and informal, but gay as any elegant bash Daisy had thrown on the Riviera.

  The only guest I didn’t know was a plain-looking, skinny dame in blue jeans who was sitting on the floor. She wore no make-up and her hair hung straight and needed combing. She was vaguely familiar to me, but I couldn’t think where I might have met her. Antibes? Neshobe Island? San Simeon? Sands Point? Broadway? London? I couldn’t make any connection.

  Before I could get tipped off on who this broad was, I found myself sitting on the floor talking to her. From the questions she asked, she knew me all right and she knew most of my friends. I played along with her, and we talked circles around each other for half the party. The only clue I had was her slight accent. But I couldn’t place the accent. It might have been French. Or maybe Russian. For that matter, it could have been plain old 86th Street Yorkville.

  When the party broke up we exchanged fond farewells. As soon as I got Susan outside I said, “For God’s sake, do you have any idea who the dame is I was talking to on the floor?”

  Susan gave me a very odd look, then burst out laughing. “That,” she said, “was Greta Garbo.”

  Out of the blue, I got a summons from Woollcott. He telephoned to say he was taking the summer off to go on the stage, and that I was going to tour with him. “Nuts to that,” said I, to which Aleck said, “We open in Marblehead, Massachusetts, on the twenty-third.”

  So I got to go east to show my family off.

  The play was called Yellow Jacket. It was a “Chinese ritual drama,” whatever that meant. To me the play made no sense whatsoever. All it lost in the translation was everything. Everybody wore embroidered mandarin jackets, pillbox hats, baggy pants, and silk slippers. When they weren’t bowing and shaking hands with themselves they were galloping around on imaginary horses or singing songs that had so little melody you couldn’t tell if they were off-key or not. There was a four-piece pit band, made up of two Chinese guitars, tom-tom and drum.

  The leads were played by Fay Wray and Alfred Drake. Woollcott was “The Chorus”—a sort of master of ceremonies. My part was “The Property Man.” What I really played was the part of the curtain. The only way the audience could tell a scene was over was when I came on stage and changed the props and scenery. I also (shades of Minnie and the Shubert Revue!) did the special effects. Like at the end of the third act, when after a lot of grunting and thrashing around, the hero and heroine climb up to heaven, leaving the heavy slumped on the floor, and I come out tossing confetti in the air to signify it’s snowing. Between scene changes I lounged around onstage smoking a cigarette in a long jade holder, to add atmosphere. That was the toughest part for me. I had quit smoking. So I usually managed to park myself near the wings, where I went through the motions while Susan, out of sight behind me, blew the smoke for me.

  I wore a Chinese costume, but insisted on wearing my red wig instead of a pigtail. Even so, nobody recognized me through the Oriental make-up.

  The only thing I knew for sure about Yellow jacket was that Aleck took it very seriously. This project was a crusade as holy to him as selling America on Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Dumbo, or Seeing Eye dogs. He brushed me off whenever I asked him what Yellow Jacket was all about. In so many words I was told that its depths of meaning were beyond my feeble comprehension, and I was a lucky clown to be on the same stage with such artists, and so be grateful and shut up.

  After we opened I was more bored than sore. I tried hard to do my part and play it straight. Yellow Jacket, hell. It was more like Strait Jacket.

  Then, during the second week, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne came to see the show. With those two friendly faces out front I couldn’t resist doing a little something special. During Aleck’s big solo scene in the third act, I had to sit downstage—the one time I had to do my own smoking. So this night when Aleck got going I fixed the Lunts with a popeyed stare, dragged on the cigarette and started blowing smoke bubbles. From the back, Aleck couldn’t tell what I was doing. But when the laughs got bigger and bigger and the audience stopped watching him he knew I was up to something.

  Aleck was so mad after the show that he couldn’t speak to me without spitting. “I’m shocked,” he said. “Shocked and ashamed. Your behavior is reprehensible and thoroughly unprofessional. It befits a cheap burlesque comedian.” To make it worse, the Lunts came backstage and embraced me and said, in front of Aleck, that I was the most refreshing thing in the play.

  I promised to be a good boy. I was genuinely sorry, but Aleck wouldn’t forgive me.

  Woollcott was staying in an apartment next to ours, on the second floor of a boardinghouse. Susan and I used to help him up the stairs to his apartment, pushing him from behind. I continued to help him up, but he stopped speaking to me socially after the incident of the bubble blowing. He spent all his spare time with Susan, whom he adored, and with Billy. Billy rendered him as soft and gooey as a gob of melted cheese.

  But for me he didn’t have the time of day. What the hell. He had nothing to worry about. I wasn’t going to louse up his lousy ritual drama. The performances dragged on. It was worse than boring. It got to be humiliating. I was doing my damnedest to stick to the part, and people were giving me laughs in the wrong places. After each show I got a lecture from Aleck about my unprofessional attitude. But I was det
ermined not to blow my stack.

  It had to happen. It happened on closing night. The audience was packed with friends from New York, many of whom had come to see me, not Yellow jacket. During the first act I could read their faces. They were puzzled and impatient, waiting for me to do something. Let ’em wait. I swore I wouldn’t step out of character. Still I was prepared, if worst should come to worst.

  It was something Aleck said between the acts that did it. I’ve forgotten what it was—probably a very trivial remark—but I felt it was one condescending crack too many. For the one time in all the years I had known him I got sore at Woollcott, good and sore.

  In Act Three I did everything except drop the knives and chase blondes across the stage. Blowing smoke bubbles was only warming up. I was all over the place. I ogled the leading lady. I gave the leading man the leg-hitch. I did outrageous takes. I changed the props so often the actors never knew which scene they were doing. I came out with a fly swatter and swatted flies. This wasn’t effective enough so I got a flit gun to finish them off.

  When the warriors rode on, on their imaginary steeds, I galloped after them, honking my hom. When they rode off I followed them, sweeping behind the horses with a janitor’s push-broom.

  Then came the final scene. The hero and heroine started their ascent to heaven, stepping over the body of the heavy. My cue to start the snow falling. I filled the air with confetti. I shook confetti out of my sleeves, from under my hat, and from out of my pockets. I took off my socks and shook confetti out of my socks. That wasn’t nearly enough, so I began dumping confetti by the bushel-basketful. Snow was piled so deep on the heavy that the poor guy could hardly breathe. When the curtain came down I was hopping around and slapping my sides to keep warm in the blizzard.