by Marx, Harpo
The next thing we threw out after the butler was Dr. Spock.
I was the same kind of father as I was a harpist—I played by ear. But I’ve been lucky on both scores. The harp has given me a decent living and my children have given me more pleasure than I ever thought a man could possibly have.
What rules we had, as a family, stemmed from the fact that all of us had been adopted by each other. We’ve always had equal amounts of gratitude and respect mixed in with our love for each other. Susan, an only child who never had any roots, and I, a lone wolf who got married twenty years too late, were adopted by the kids as much as they were by us.
Somehow, without lecturing or threatening or studying any books, we all followed the same rules, from the time the kids were very young:
Life has been created for you to enjoy, but you won’t enjoy it unless you pay for it with some good, hard work. This is one price that will never be marked down.
You can work at whatever you want to as long as you do it as well as you can and clean up afterwards and you’re at the table at mealtime and in bed at bedtime.
Respect what the others do. Respect Dad’s harp, Mom’s paints, Billy’s piano, Alex’s set of tools, Jimmy’s designs, and Minnie’s menagerie.
If anything makes you sore, come out with it. Maybe the rest of us are itching for a fight too.
If anything strikes you funny, out with that too. Let’s all the rest of us have a laugh.
If you have an impulse to do something you’re not sure is right, go ahead and do it. Take a chance. Chances are, if you don’t you’ll regret it—unless you break the rules about mealtime or bedtime, in which case you’ll sure as hell regret it.
If it’s a question of whether to do what’s fun or what is supposed to be good for you, and nobody is hurt by whichever you do, always do what’s fun.
If things get too much for you and you feel the whole world’s against you, go stand on your head. If you can think of anything crazier to do, do it.
Don’t worry about what other people think. The only person in the world important enough to conform to is yourself.
Anybody who mistreats a pet or breaks a pool cue is docked a month’s pay.
I think Woollcott would have liked the way we ran our joint. It was pretty much the way he ran his island. I know for sure that my father and mother would have approved. Our house, like the old tenement back on 93rd Street, was seldom without the sound of music or laughter, or questions being asked, or stories being told.
Billy, Alex, Jimmy and Minnie have turned out to be healthy, inquisitive individuals with minds of their own. I’m proud of them. I’m the most fortunate one-foot skater, undersized rent-kicker, self-taught harpist and nonspeaking actor who ever lived.
I felt a little pang when I turned fifty-six: Aleck had just turned fifty-six when he died. Susan and the kids didn’t let me mope very long over my age. They turned on the Christmas lights in honor of my birthday, and the pang went away. It was nowhere near Christmas, and the lights were hung in a jacaranda tree in the patio, but this was our joint and this was the way we ran it. The jacaranda was the pride and joy of our patio. It was big enough to provide shade for the Ping-pong table all day long, and every spring it burst with clusters of delicate lavender blossoms. A useful, graceful tree it was. On the Christmas when Minnie and Jimmy were three, we strung the jacaranda with colored lights. The kids were so enchanted by the lights that we didn’t have the heart to take them down. So we left them connected in the tree, and turned them on whenever we felt like declaring a holiday.
The lights were turned on for all of our birthdays, for Sam Goldwyn’s birthday, St. Patrick’s Day, April Fool’s Day, Bastille Day, California Admission Day, Harry Truman Winning the Election Day, Alex’s Learning to Swim Day, and Uncle Chico Wins at Pinochle Day. For two years we averaged about fifteen Christmases a year.
Finally the wiring began to fall apart, and we had to have the lights taken down. Billy, who was twelve, watched the handyman remove the lights with great fascination. Billy led a rich, full life, and he had little opportunity to enjoy such spectacles as a handyman up in a jacaranda tree, climbing from limb to limb. I’m afraid we made heavy demands on Billy, as parents are apt to do when their first child shows unusual talent. At the time he was taking piano lessons, riding lessons, lifesaving lessons, golf lessons, dancing lessons, dramatic lessons, arts-and-crafts lessons, and special instruction in musical theory and composition.
Now he realized his life wasn’t full enough. Something wonderful was missing. So when the handyman dropped down out of the jacaranda, with the strings of lights coiled over his shoulder, Billy, who hadn’t missed a step of the operation, said, “Sir, who did you take your climbing lessons from?”
We got the point. It could be just as bad to give a boy too much as to deny him everything. We relaxed considerably after the jacaranda episode.
As the kids grew up, they turned our place into a zoo. We had poodles, dachshunds, collies and mutts—finally settling on mutts as our favorite breed. To maintain the balance of nature we kept the cat population up to equal strength, and threw in a monkey for good measure. Minnie raised hamsters. The boys and I built an aviary in the back yard. At one point, we had over a hundred birds there, behind a cat-proof screen. For a while we kept parakeets in our master bedroom, but they were oversexed to the point of distraction, and had to be exiled to the aviary.
The only troublemaker we ever had among our pets was Siegel the Sea Gull.
One day I was driving to work along Motor Avenue, the street that separated the El Rancho and the Hillcrest golf courses. I stopped when I saw a large white bird flopping around beside the road. It was a sea gull with a busted wing. Apparently he’d been knocked out of the air by a slicing golf ball.
(I was reminded of the time Sam Goldwyn was having a bad day at Hillcrest. Sam was working hard at correcting his slice, but no matter what he did, the ball kept fading on him. Before teeing off on a short hole over near Motor Avenue he asked his caddie’s advice—should he use a wood or an iron? “That depends, Mr. Goldwyn,” said the caddie, “on which course you’re playing—Hillcrest or Rancho.”)
Anyway, I got the wounded gull in the car, covered him with a blanket to restrain him, and rushed him to the infirmary at M-G-M. The doctors there were undecided whether they should put the bird’s wing in splints or amputate it. The vet wasn’t much help. He was great with Rin-Tin-Tin III’s mange, bog spavins on cowboy horses, or loss of appetite in lions that were supposed to devour Christians, but he was helpless with sea gulls.
While the medics argued, word of the crisis got around the studio, and all production ground to a halt. I called in the one guy I was sure would know what to do—Sam Hirshfeld. Sam came right over. He said that if they didn’t amputate immediately there was danger of a fatal infection setting in. As the patient’s guardian, I gave Sam permission to operate. In a room packed with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s highest paid stars and executives, Dr. Hirshfeld performed the wingectomy. When he finished, they applauded. Paul Muni never played a more stirring scene before the French Academy at Warner Brothers.
When I brought him home we named him Siegel, in honor of our producer friend Max Siegel. Dr. Hirshfeld had done a fine job on Siegel. Of course the bird could never fly again, but in all other respects he was a hale and hearty sea gull. Too much so, it turned out. He became a tyrant. He strutted around the joint like he’d come to collect the rent. He had the dogs and cats buffaloed. They backed away from his sharp tongue and his sharp beak, and he stole their food right and left. The monkey wouldn’t come down out of the jacaranda tree when Siegel was on the march.
At the same time Siegel got less popular with the management. He took over the swimming pool as his private john. He kept it so messed up that the guy from the pool company advised us the rates would have to be raised for the monthly cleaning. It got worse. The rates went up again. The pool people really cleaned up on Siegel.
We’d become ver
y attached to the fat old one-armed bandit, but he had to go. So we made a present of him to Zeppo, who was then living on a ranch. There Siegel lived out the rest of his life. He died, apparently, of old age—but not until he’d spent a contented year keeping three dogs scared out of their wits and causing Zeppo’s pool-cleaning rates to be raised.
It’s always been George Burns’ theory that Siegel was a stooge for the Paddock Pool Company.
To see our children develop, day by day, into four distinctly different characters, was like watching a continuous show, full of suspense, surprises and comic relief. I watched the characters with mixed wonder and envy.
Bill was the most predictable one. There had been no doubt about his being a musician since he was two years old. By the time he was thirteen there was no doubt he was going to be a damn good one. He already knew more about the harp than I did, or ever would. Under his influence I began to change my style. I realized I’d been faking for all these years, covering up my lack of musical knowledge with gooey arpeggios and flashy glissandos. Bill showed me the straight harmonies I should have been playing instead, and brought me up to date—out of the ricky-ticky 1920’s—on my jazz beat. He was making an honest harpist out of me. He was making me work.
While Bill was turning into the musician I might have been, Alex was turning into the mechanic I could never have been. Alex was a tinkerer, a kid who could talk to machines in their own language. I never knew what the word “industrious” meant until Alex came along. He wasn’t happy unless he had a hip pocket full of tools and something that needed fixing. School didn’t come easily to Alex. But, being a challenge, it intrigued him. He tore into math and history as happily as he tackled a leaky faucet or a bent sprocket on his bicycle. For a busy beaver, Alex was remarkably unstuffy. He was, in fact, the nonconformist of the family, and whenever he had to conform he played it for laughs to save his pride.
Jimmy preferred thinking to tinkering. He was strictly a theory man. Where Alex was an engineer, Jimmy was a pure scientist. He had more fun designing something on paper or building a scale model than working on the real thing. Like Susan, he had a fine talent for draftsmanship. And Jimmy, although he was the nearest to an introvert among all of us characters, was probably the best natural athlete in the family. As a kid he developed a powerful golf swing and was a formidable switch hitter in Little League baseball.
Minnie was the one most like me. Nothing ruffled Minnie. Life for her was a dreamy, easy-come easy-go, day-to-day business. Unfortunately, this attitude prevailed in her school work, just as it had half a century ago with me. Unlike me, however, Minnie was smart enough to bring home a good report card anyway. Minnie’s great love was the animal kingdom. She talked to animals like Alex talked to machines. With people she preferred to listen.
Come right down to it, our continuous show in Beverly Hills was not so different from the show the other generation of Marxes put on back on East 93rd Street. With each new day we all took off on our own, because we all had different notions of how a day ought to be spent. But no matter how far apart we strayed, we were sooner or later brought together by the sound of music or laughter, or by the urge to get some kind of a game going. Just as in the tenement flat, there never seemed to be time for jealousies or anger. Living conditions were a few thousand times improved over the East Side. The only meaning “hustle” had any more was “to hurry up.” But we were no more orthodox than the old East Side characters were. We were the same breed of Happy Hooligan.
In one department we were certainly no different—Fatherly Discipline. Only once did I bring myself to the point of spanking one of the kids. It was Jimmy. He’d left an awful mess in the garage after putting together a model airplane and he’d been warned he couldn’t do anything else until he’d cleaned up. He tried to sneak off on his bike for baseball practice. I intercepted him and sent him back to clean up.
The next thing I knew, smoke was coming out of the garage. Jimmy had swept the scraps into a pile and set fire to them. He thought he’d save time by burning the stuff on the spot, instead of hauling it to the incinerator.
We beat the fire out, then I sat him down for a serious talk. I explained what a dangerous, thoughtless thing he had done. Jimmy agreed that he’d committed a major offense, all right. I told him he had to be punished for it, and he said he thought so too. I asked him what kind of punishment he would recommend if he were the father and I were the son.
“Well, spanking, I guess, Harpo,” he said. To the other kids I was “Dad,” but Jimmy never called me by any other name except Harpo.
“How many spanks?” I said.
He thought it over and said, “Six.”
“All right,” I said. “Let’s go up to your room and get it over with.”
Jimmy was very cooperative. He assumed the position. I raised my hand for the first blow. I almost got cold feet. In my mind the scene suddenly changed to a dingy tenement hallway. Frenchie was shaking his whisk broom under my chin and saying, “I’m going to give you, boy. I’m going to break every bone in your body!” I reminded myself again of what Jimmy had done and that wiped away the fantasy. Our property could have been destroyed. Somebody might have gotten badly burned.
I brought my hand down with a mighty whack.
Jimmy howled—not in pain, but in protest. “Hey! That’s not fair! You didn’t tell me you were going to spank that hard. You should have given me a sample before you asked me how many spanks. Six is too many.”
“How many would you have said if I gave you a sample?”
“Three,” he said. I gave him two more whacks. Jimmy said, “They weren’t as hard as the first one, Harpo. Better give me one more.” I gave him one more. He then got up and told me how sorry he was about the fire and all. He’d done it, he guessed, to “show” me. But now, he guessed, I’d showed him.
At dinner that night it was Jimmy, not me, who told Minnie and Alex what he had done, and what I had done. They were impressed. I never had another occasion to take a hand to any of them.
Susan was much firmer than me. She was not averse to delivering a swat on the rear, now and then, to show the kids she meant business.
Like me, however, she was opposed to all-out spankings. And like me, she only had to do it once, when it was a serious matter of safety. This time the culprit was Alex. She caught Alex riding his Flexi-Racer in the middle of the street after dinner one evening in winter, when it was getting dark. She hauled him in the house and gave it to him good. Much as it hurt Susan, it hurt Alex a hell of a lot more. He had a fair complexion and extremely sensitive skin.
Five minutes after the deed was done, Susan heard a bloodcurdling noise outside. She ran to investigate. There was Alex sitting on his haunches in the middle of the driveway, rocking back and forth to fan his fiery little bottom, and screaming into the night, “Help! Murder! Police! I been kilt!”
In one respect I was luckier than a lot of fathers. Having battled every kind of audience for forty-odd years, I knew that if you got ’em laughing you had ’em. It was the same with kids. Keep ’em laughing and they’ll do anything for you.
Susan and I decided we would tell our children they were adopted as soon as they could understand any speech at all. It had to be the very first thing they learned about life. We’d seen some pretty sad cases, where parents were afraid of the children they had adopted—afraid, as they put it, that the kids “might turn on them”—and kept putting off telling them the truth. When they were told too late, the kids really did turn, full of resentment and a feeling of being unwanted. The results were tragic—unhappy early marriages, delinquency, even alcoholism.
Billy was fourteen months old when he joined the family, and he already knew, by the time he learned to talk, that he had come from someplace else. Before he was able to ask questions about that “someplace else,” we told him all about it. He accepted it for what it was, a fact of life. It was like learning that the sun went down at night, and night was the time for sleep, and that M
ommy loved Daddy and they both loved Billy just as much-nothing more, nothing less.
Alex, Jimmy and Minnie each came home to us as babes in arms. We started telling them where they had come from when Alex was two, and Jimmy and Minnie were scarcely a year old. We told it in the form of a true-adventure bedtime story. By the time they were four and three, they couldn’t go to bed without hearing “The Story,” as we all came to call it.
They used to sit around Susan and me on the bedroom floor, curled up in their bunny-type pajamas, while we told The Story. We played it for suspense, like an old-fashioned cliff-hanger, and how they loved it!
Alex’s eyes would be glittering, because he knew he came first. “Poor, poor Billy,” Susan would begin. “Growing up sad and lonely, not having a little brother to play with. We had to find a little brother for Billy—not any little brother, but the right one, whose name would be Alex and who would have yellow hair and pink cheeks. Well, we looked and we looked. We looked at this baby boy and that one, but no—not one of them was Alex. Then one day Dr. Hirshfeld called on the telephone and said, ‘I think I know where you can find him!’ So Daddy and I packed our suitcase and got on a train and rode all day and all night, and then we got off the train and rushed to the place that Dr. Hirshfeld told us about. There they showed us a little boy. We looked at him—”
Susan would pause for effect. Alex would be hunched over and shivering from the terrible suspense.
“—and what do you know! It was Alex! We bundled him up and took him on the train with us and all three of us traveled all night and all day and then we came home and Billy had his little brother and wasn’t sad and lonely any more.”
Alex would let out his breath and smile with relief. He’d been found! Now it was Jimmy’s turn to squirm and hold his breath.