Harpo Speaks!

by Marx, Harpo

  “What’s the most relaxing thing you’ve ever done in your life?” he asked me.

  “Taking off my shoes and lying on the grass and flying a kite so the string tickles the bottom of my feet,” I said, without any hesitation.

  The doctor said, “Harpo, the best piece of medical advice I can give you is this—go fly a kite.”

  It didn’t sink in until the doctor left, and I began to reflect on the meaning of the decision I had made. Retirement. This meant good-bye. Good-bye to the closest companion I ever had, a companion who’d given me thousands of hours of exasperation, botheration and pure joy—my harp.

  And what about my name? Shouldn’t I maybe have it changed now? How about Adolph Ex-Harpo Marx? No. Not a very good gag. I couldn’t come up with anything better, so I went to sleep.

  CHAPTER 24 The Return of Pinchie Winchie! or, You’re Only Young Forever

  I WAS ON A plane headed for Las Vegas. I wasn’t going to Vegas to perform, or play golf, or gamble. All these were pursuits I had given up for life. I was traveling as a tourist, a tourist with nothing special to do and nobody special to do it with. I had some idea of kibitzing the action in the casinos, taking in a few of the shows, lying around in the sun for a while—but beyond that, nothing.

  I had been retired for nine months now. My costume was in mothballs. My harp was in storage. My golf clubs I had given away. I didn’t miss any of these things. The only things I had lost by retiring were my tan and a little weight. I might have looked pastier, and saggier, and older, but I was back in good health, and that was the only important thing. That was why I told myself I had no regrets about the decision I had made on the first day of my first stay in the hospital.

  The plane landed at the Vegas airport. The other passengers walked up each others’ heels in their hurry to get off. Yet they were hardly a gay crowd. All of them had a hollow-eyed and hungry look, and they talked under their breaths. They were indistinguishable from suckers going to the slaughter of the gaming tables anywhere—Monte Carlo, Covington, Juan-les-Pins, or the old Saratoga Springs. But they happened to be going to Las Vegas, and I happened to be the only tourist among them, and they bored me.

  Briefly, I considered getting on the next plane out of there and going back home. I nixed the idea. Susan’s insinuations had been pretty plain. It would be better for everybody if I didn’t hang around the house for a while.

  Actually, I had retired three times in the past nine months, after a total of three heart attacks. The first and second times I got sprung from the hospital I called it quits but I never quite believed it. Now, after the third time, I believed it. This was for good.

  The summer after my first illness had been a period of discovery for me. First, I discovered I didn’t miss playing the harp, not a bit. Second, I took up painting again, and found it very exciting. Third, I found that time passed just as fast doing nothing as it had when my days were full of activity.

  When I was released from the hospital, we closed up the house in Cathedral City. Susan packed the kids into the station wagon and off they went on a camping trip through the Rockies. I took a quiet bachelor apartment in West Hollywood, where I could devote the summer to adjusting to my new life, under the eye of my doctor.

  I made my own breakfasts, usually had lunch at Hillcrest, and for dinners I made the rounds of the family—from Bill’s place to Groucho’s to Gummo’s to Chico’s. Between meals I painted, I read, I watched TV, I napped, or I did absolutely nothing.

  The nearest I came to playing anything was taking pills at night. I was on a complicated, round-the-clock schedule of drugs. The line-up beside my bed was formidable—pills and capsules of all sizes and shapes, to be taken at different intervals. I hated to turn on a light during the night, so I practiced with the bottles until I could tell them apart by the sound they made when I shook them. I got an alarm clock with an illuminated dial. Whenever the alarm went off for a pill-time I only had to reach behind me and shake the bottles until I heard the right one, take my capsule or tablet, reset the alarm, and go back to sleep.

  I’m probably not the first guy who ever played the harp by ear and certainly not the first to play the piano that way, but I don’t know of anybody else who can play pills by ear.

  I was turning out four and five paintings a day. I worked in water colors, a new medium for me. I’d taken it up while I was in the hospital, where I first felt the urge to paint again, and where oils would have been too messy. Water colors were fun, but I was getting into a rut. Every summer landscape I did turned into Vermont as seen from Neshobe Island. Every winter landscape looked like Watertown, New York, as seen from a hotel window. Every figure I did turned into a guy in the rain under a black umbrella. The black umbrella had no significance except that it was the best way to cover up the guy’s face when it didn’t turn out right—and it never turned out right.

  What I needed was a fresh approach. I should switch to another medium. I didn’t want to mess up the apartment with oils, so I got a bunch of art books to see what else there was. I found the perfect medium. The inspiration for it came partly from the art books and partly from the new diet my doctor put me on. For breakfast I could eat the whites of two eggs. This presented the problem of what to do with the yolks. The answer: paint in casein, which could be prepared with the yolk of an egg.

  It got me out of the rut. My painting loosened up to the point where I could do abstractions. To me this was a big step forward. But everybody who saw my collection asked if I wouldn’t please paint them “one of those charming figures with the black umbrella.” I could have sold them by the gross.

  That was when I discovered how I was different from most people. Most people have a conscious mind and a subconscious. Not me. I’ve always operated on a subconscious and a sub-subconscious.

  By August I was in another kind of a rut. I was homesick. With every postcard I got from the family, from Arizona, Colorado or Montana, I felt worse. I now spent more time at the Hillcrest than I did painting, but that didn’t help much. The only guys who hung around there after lunch played cards or shot golf. The Round Table was often empty by two o’clock. George Burns was producing television programs and getting up a show of his own to do in Reno and Vegas. Jessel wasn’t around long enough between hops to Seattle, Minneapolis, Tallahassee and Tel Aviv to ever get a monologue going. Benny was busy. Cantor was busy. Berle was in New York. Danny Kaye was overseas. Groucho, when he wasn’t working on his new book, was doing his TV show. And Chico, of course, was unavoidably detained at the Friars Club. Everybody was busy but me.

  When the end of summer came and I drove home to Cathedral City, it was like coming back from Russia. Susan and the kids arrived the next day. My exile was over.

  Susan and I converted the utility room next to the garage into a two-man studio. Now, every morning after the kids left for school, the dogs jumped into the pool and Mom and Dad went to paint. We were ideal partners in a studio. She preferred oils and she was a hell of a draftsman. I preferred non-oil paints. I couldn’t draw worth a damn, never could get anything in perspective, so I had to let my colors do all the talking. I admired her drawing. She admired the way I used color.

  But I couldn’t stick with it very long. The joy of homecoming was wearing off. I’d start out painting up a storm, sloshing wild strokes onto my board, then I’d peter out. I’d wander through the house. I’d go out and talk to Minnie’s horses and scratch the dogs behind the ears. I’d take a tour of the acreage in the golf cart to inspect the trees we’d planted. I’d come back to the house and look for something to read. I couldn’t find anything that would hold my attention. I’d turn on television. Nothing but old movies and soap operas. I’d go back to the studio. Susan would be halfway through a new painting. I’d look at what I’d started two hours ago and I’d throw it in the trash.

  I knew why I was restless. I was itching to get my fingers on the harp strings. I was itching to grip a golf club again. I’d been kidding myself. Why the hell
should I sit around and read and paint? I was, as they say, living on velvet anyway.

  One day I gave the strings a swipe when I passed the harp. The next day I paused to play a couple of chords. The day after that I sat down and played a chorus of “I’ve Got Rhythm.” On the fourth day I practiced for half an hour, then went out and putted a golf ball around the swimming pool.

  That afternoon, I found out later, Susan made a frantic call to Gummo. She told him I was showing symptoms of sneaking out of retirement. She made him promise that he’d turn down all offers for me to perform, no matter where or for whom or for how much loot, before word of them got to me. Gummo promised.

  Susan’s call was not really necessary. On the fifth day I had another heart attack, much like the first one, and I was carted off to L.A. for another six weeks flat on my ass in a hospital bed.

  When I came home it was the same story all over again. I swore I was retired for good. I went back to painting, and for a while I painted like a fiend. Then I got restless. I got the itchy fingers. I started to practice again. I felt so great I called Gummo and told him I was ready to take on any date, anywhere—TV, clubs, benefits, anything. Gummo said he’d let me know as soon as anything came in. He was lying, of course. Susan, alarmed over my symptoms, had already talked to him and made him renew his promise that no offer of work should reach my tender ears.

  I spent quite a bit of time in the city, at the Hillcrest. I got talking to producers and agents there, and that’s how I found out about the plot between Susan and Gummo. Several guys asked me how come I was turning down jobs. I told them I wasn’t—on the contrary, I was looking. That wasn’t the way they got it from Gummo, they said.

  This burned me up. But before I could do anything about it, I had another attack. This one hit me while I was in downtown Palm Springs, shopping with Susan. I felt like I’d been flattened by a sandbag.

  The doctor made no bones about it. This was no “mild attack.” It was an acute coronary.

  The day I came out of the hospital I called Gummo myself. I told him I was no longer a client of his, or of anybody else’s. I had had it. I had finally had some sense scared into me. I was putting the harp in storage, along with my costume, and I was getting rid of my golf clubs.

  “I hope to God you’re serious,” said Gummo. “Couple more rounds like this and you’ll have retired more times than Sarah Bernhardt.”

  “I was never more serious in my life,” I told Gummo.

  I went back to painting, and put in an hour or two a day working on notes for my book. I went over to the county seat, Indio, and put in for unemployment insurance. I took my pills and stuck to my diet and my rest schedule like a good boy.

  Before I knew it, I came away from a weekly examination with a clean bill of health. The doctor said I’d made a damn near unbelievable recovery. Susan said even she was amazed, having watched me improve in front of her eyes, from day to day.

  “It’s that old Nightingale blood,” I told her. “It’s pulled me through again.”

  Then the hours began to drag, especially while the kids were in school. I couldn’t sit still. But every time I got up to do something I found there was nothing I really wanted to do. Thank goodness the harp wasn’t there to tempt me. Smartest thing I ever did, having it put away.

  If only the kids were here, I’d say to myself. Then there’d be a little life around the joint.

  But when the kids came home it wasn’t much different. At first they thought it was swell having their old man around the house all day. I thought it was great being there whenever they were, and for a while it was. I did card tricks, taught them backgammon, and listened to all their gripes about school.

  Then it got tiresome. For the first time, I realized that kids could be terrible nudges. Hanging around expecting you to entertain them. Hanging around asking questions. Mainly questions they had no business asking.

  “Feeling better today, Dad?”

  “Can I get a pillow for you, Dad, or bring your slippers?”

  “If it costs so much to keep your harp in storage and they charge so much for insurance, why don’t you sell it? Why did you want to play the harp in the first place, instead of like a trumpet? Anyway, aren’t most of the harpists who play the harp ladies and not men?”

  “Why was Mr. Woollcott so fat in all the pictures? Didn’t his doctor make him go on a diet, like your doctor?”

  “What did you do at night when you were a boy, if there was no TV then?”

  “Well, if there wasn’t any TV, how did you find out who won the election on Election Day?”

  “Why do you say it’s important that all of us finish high school when you didn’t even finish grade school? Didn’t it mean so much in those days?”

  “Is it true that Uncle Groucho went on the stage before you did?”

  “Were Minnie and Frenchie their real names or just their nicknames like yours and Uncle Chico’s and Uncle Gummo’s?”

  “Who’s the oldest man you ever met in history? President Franklin D. Roosevelt? If they hadn’t shot Abraham Lincoln would you have met him?”

  “If it was so cold in the winter when you were a boy, why didn’t you move to California instead of to Chicago?”

  “If you agree with Uncle Zeppo every time he says show business stinks, how come you went on the stage instead of having a career?”

  “Sure you wouldn’t like a pillow, Dad?”

  “If you didn’t finish grade school did that make you a juvenile delinquent? You weren’t a juvenile delinquent, were you? Because if you’d had a prison record Mom wouldn’t have married you and they would have blacklisted you from making movies, right?”

  “Yes, but you would have had a lot more interesting stuff then to put in your book, right?”

  “How are you feeling now, Dad? Any better?”

  I stood it as long as I could. I was a good-natured guy and a tolerant father, but they were driving me off my nut. It got to where I had to shut them up and barricade myself in my room to get any privacy.

  Then Susan began giving me the needle. I should get out of the house. Do this, do that. Ride the golf cart over to the course and watch them shoot golf. I told her the game didn’t interest me any more, not in the least. Go into town more often and see more of the old gang at the Hillcrest. I told her the Hillcrest had changed. It was a dull place.

  “Any worse than here?” she said. I shrugged. “Harp,” she said, “are you bored?”

  I said yes. Frankly, I was.

  “Do you know what anybody who’s bored really is?” she said.

  “What?”

  “He’s a bore.”

  The short discussion that followed was very close to being a fight. This, I said to myself, wasn’t my old Susan. Something was eating her. She was turning on me the same as the kids.

  To keep peace in the family, I said I’d decided to go away for a couple of days. Susan asked me where. The first place that came to mind, for no good reason, was Las Vegas. She thought that was a splendid idea, much as they’d all miss me. She couldn’t conceal how pleased she was that I was going away. I wished I could feel the same.

  So I flew to Vegas.

  It wasn’t half as bad as I had expected, that night. After dinner I wandered through the casino in my hotel. There was something sweet and restful about the clicking of dice and chips and roulette wheels, like hearing crickets at sundown. Looking at the patches of green felt on the blackjack and crap tables, I knew how a country boy must feel upon seeing his first green fields after being stuck too long in the city.

  But I didn’t weaken.

  I went across the Strip to another joint. There, in the lounge next to the casino, quite a crowd stood around a TV set, watching the fights. I joined the crowd. One of the bosses (you can always spot them in Vegas) came over from the casino and stood in front of me to see how the fight was going. His silhouette had a very familiar shape.

  I knew this guy. Even from the back I recognized him, and I hadn�
�t seen the guy for thirty years. The last time—the only time—we’d met was on a gambling boat in the river off Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It was Milt Jaffe, the guy who’d saved my skin by lending me ten thousand bucks that night in 1929.

  I nudged him in the ribs. “How’s chances of letting me have ten G’s?” I said, in a con man’s voice. Jaffe didn’t turn around. He gave me a vague, impatient gesture with the back of his hand. I nudged him again. This time his gesture was definite. It meant I should get lost. I nudged him a third time. “If you loaned me ten G’s once why can’t you do it again?” I said.

  Without removing his gaze from the fight on the TV screen, he sidestepped away from me. You had to be a thick-skinned diplomat to handle drunks and crackpots in Las Vegas. They might turn out to be well-heeled customers. You couldn’t take a chance by offending them.

  When the bell rang for the end of the round and the crowd relaxed momentarily, I piped up, in a loud falsetto: “Pinchie Winchie!”

  As he turned, even before he saw me, Jaffe yelled, “Pinchie Winchie? Harpo Marx!”

  As soon as we got through telling each other how great we looked (he was lying, I wasn’t) and what a lot of changes there’d been in the old world since we last spent an evening together, I asked Jaffe the question that had stuck in my mind for thirty years.

  “Please tell me,” I said, “why you gave me that dough back in Pittsburgh. Why no references? No security? No signature?”

  “Harpo,” he said, “I’ll tell you. In my line of business, same then as now, the only security I have is my judgment of people. If I can’t tell a good man from a dead beat with one look I don’t belong in the business. If my instinct goes sour I go looking for another job. So what I’ve always done is practice on my judgment, same as you practice on your harp. Every once in a while I test myself on people. Always have. Still do.