by Marx, Harpo
“I tested myself on you that night on the boat. I said to myself if I wasn’t right about you, I’d never be right about anybody else ever again. You want to know why? It wasn’t because you had an honest face. To me there’s no such thing as an honest face. I’ll tell you what it was. You knew how to have a good time without spending money. A guy who has to blow his wad to have fun is a bad risk.
“Want to know another reason? You were a good risk from the life-insurance point of view. I could see you were one guy out of ten thousand, the kind that stays young forever. You weren’t going to conk out on me before you paid me back.”
Jaffe gave me a big grin. “Maybe I wasn’t so cold-blooded about it as I make out,” he said. “You know, I was pretty soft in the head by the time I handed you the dough. I don’t think I ever laughed so hard in my life.” Remembering, he began to laugh hard all over again.
I knew what was coming. Jaffe said, “We’ve got to get a game going tonight, Harpo. Got to do it!”
“Oh, no,” I said.
Jaffe didn’t hear me. He was too steamed up. “We can use the main office,” he said. “What do you need? Burnt cork? We’ll get some from one of the dressing rooms.”
“No,” I said. This time he heard me. He looked at me like he was a kid and I was Santa Claus come to take back the toys I’d put under his Christmas tree. I let him down as gently as I could.
Pinchie Winchie, I told him, simply wasn’t my speed any more. A lot of things weren’t my speed any more. Leaping around onstage. Lugging a harp around. Whacking a golf ball. All behind me. The time comes, like it or not, when a man has to stop kidding himself that he’s as young as he feels. That time had come for me. I felt fine, and there was nothing wrong with me. But I’d stopped kidding myself. I was retired.
Jaffe squinted at me as if a thick fog had rolled in between us. “Retired?” he said. “Retired from what?”
He didn’t give me a chance to answer. I didn’t have an answer ready anyway. “For God’s sake, Harpo,” he said, “don’t you know how stiffs like me have always envied guys like you? Have you ever had to meet a payroll or sweat out the auditors or file for bankruptcy?”
I shook my head.
“You’ve been making a living,” he said, “out of a life that all the rest of us dream about retiring to. How the hell can you retire from it?”
I had no answer for him.
Jaffe, embarrassed by his outburst, changed the subject and asked me how Zeppo was. I gave him the rundown on Zep’s wheeling and dealing. He asked me how my other brothers were. I told him. Groucho never busier. Chico still in the thick of the action and planning a trip to Europe. Gummo still in business at the old stand, manager and den-mother to all the rest of us.
As I talked, Jaffe gave me a hard, close study. I knew what he was thinking. I said to him, “If you didn’t know who I was, you wouldn’t lend me two bits tonight, would you?”
“What the hell,” he said, ducking a direct reply. “So we change. Time marches on. Like you say, you can’t kid yourself. You’re only young once.”
We didn’t have much left to say to each other. But I had an awful lot to think about, all of a sudden. The fight was over and the television set had been turned off. We were standing against the bar, where Jaffe could keep an eye on the casino, beyond the lounge. Having nothing better to do, I had picked up a book of matches from the bar and was lighting them, one by one, blowing them out, and dropping them into an ash tray.
Jaffe made a move like he had to go back to work. “Wonderful seeing you, Harpo,” he said. He gave me his hand. Instead of shaking hands I gave him a squeeze on the cheek and said, “Pinchie Winchie!”
He laughed and did the same to me. The only difference was, I had planted a beaut on his kisser—having burnt enough matches to work up a good, black smudge. I wonder if he got the message when he finally discovered it.
An hour later I was on a plane to Los Angeles. I felt so terrific I could have flown without benefit of aircraft, except that I would have taken a short cut and sure as hell got lost. I had good reason to feel I had wings. I had just recovered from the longest and most serious illness I ever had: Retirement. But it was all over now, so Waltz Me Around Again, Willie!
I got my harp out of storage, aired out my costume, and ordered a new set of golf clubs.
My children stopped being pestiferous. My wife stopped making insinuations. I signed for a night-club date in Chicago and three TV appearances and told Bill he’d better hustle me up some new arrangements. I switched back to painting in oils. Everything I painted turned into a clown, but this was a rut I’d been in for quite some time and I didn’t mind at all.
In those three television shows I succeeded in doing the three things I had been warned never to do again. In the first, I whanged away at the harp. In the second, I played a golf match with Sam Snead. In the third, I not only leaped around, but I leaped around for three days in the snow.
The other day Zeppo called up to say he was putting in a second crop on the ranch. So now I’m not only living on velvet and in the pink, but I’m in grapefruit and tomatoes too. I just reported this to Susan. Susan said, “For a guy who bills himself as a professional listener, you’ve been doing an awful lot of talking lately.”
I get the message. Honk, honk!
I. Susan
Ode to the Silent Harp
I sing a song of joyous praise
Of one who labored in the garden of laughter.
A quiet man who sensed the absurd
In all he saw and all he heard;
Untutored by textbooks, he learned in the street;
Survival was foremost, to steal was to eat.
From whence came the gifts
Of musical taste,
The sense of beauty,
The gentle grace?
The gods safeguarded them through the years
Until he was ready.
I am glad we were there.
II. Bill
Imagine growing up in a house filled with music, hour after hour. Live music. Ravel. Debussy. Gershwin. Berlin. Silvery arpeggios and glissandos. Lush golden chords. All from the fingers of a magical little man sitting at a harp in the big bay window of the living room. This was my privilege for the first seventeen years of my life, thanks to fate, Susan and Harpo.
Until I started school, I took it all for granted. Didn’t everybody’s Dad fill his house with glorious music? The illusion was shattered when I entered the outside world, by way of Hawthorne Elementary School, and then had to start piano lessons. I hammered at my scales grimly. My heart was not in it. My heart was out on the baseball diamond. All this time Dad kept playing nonstop—strumming, plucking, rippling away—in the bay window. No fair! Dad liked practicing. No wonder—I never heard him playing any scales.
It was not long before I learned that Dad was not practicing. He played his harp three hours a day not for proficiency but for the sheer pleasure of it. I sat at my piano wishing mightily I were someplace else. When Dad sat at his harp, there was no someplace else. Gradually, watching my father—his eyes shut, a reverential grin on his face —and hearing the wondrous sounds that resonated from his instrument, I became a musician. I entered, at a very early age, the only profession I would ever know. No . . . I didn’t really enter the profession. I absorbed it.
Dad’s influence on all our lives was all-pervasive. It was never more apparent than at dinner time. Not to be outdone by the Algonquin or the Hillcrest, we had our own “Round Table”—which we moved into the den after our formal dining room became the neighborhood pool room. Dad would begin the nightly dinner ritual by raising a forefinger and intoning his favorite expression: “And in conclusion . . .” Then we would go around the table—Mom, Alex, Jimmy, Minnie and I—reviewing our triumphs and trials of the day. Dad fielded gripes and hang-ups with all the wit and wisdom of a second-grade dropout—which is to say, by reducing tragedy to absurdity. First thing you knew, he had you laughing at yourself and
your problem faded away. He was a born healer.
When I was in the fourth grade, I agonized for days over a school assignment. I had to write a poem, and I was totally blocked. Dad sensed that I was suffering from some secret dilemma. He wormed it out of me. Now here was a challenge that delighted him. Write a poem! Before dinner was over he had it, raising the poetic art to new heights (well, at least to different heights). I still have a copy of it: “There they go! / I’m betting on Flo! / If she loses / I’ll blow my dough! / Into the stretch / She’s out in front! / But at the wire / Win—I dun’t.”
For the poem I got a B+. For being my ghostwriter, Dad got a big hug.
Whenever Uncle Groucho and Uncle Chico came to the house, they would wind up exchanging hilarious stories with my Dad about vaudeville. I got the impression, when I was little, that vaudeville was some marvelous, mythical kingdom where fathers and uncles came from. When I was twelve, Dad decided it was time to show me what his life had been like before Beverly Hills, before he was in the movies even, time to share the experience of vaudeville, the Harpo side of his life.
He and Uncle Chico had booked themselves into a three-month tour of the British circuit, culminating in a four-week stand at the London Palladium, and Mom and I went along. Dad knew I would not be content just watching from the wings. He assigned to me the grave responsibility of being his Personal Prop Man. I had to make sure the carrot was in the upper-left inside pocket of Dad’s coat, the scissors in the middle right pocket, and the three-hundred knives properly lodged in his left coat sleeve. Soon he promoted me to doing “shtick” onstage. At the cue for his solo spot I would trundle his harp out to him, dressed as an angel. As I turned to exit the audience saw the sign on my back: EAT AT REVELLI’S CAFÉ. I got a laugh! My very own laugh! Dad was as tickled as I was.
Sometimes the combination of his innocence and his paternal mission to enrich my life caught me off guard. We were walking in London during a day off when we passed a certain theatre. “Let’s go see this show,” Dad said, and in we went. I was mortified at what we saw onstage: comics jabbering in cockney and cavorting with voluptuous showgirls clad only in what used to be called “scanties.” The comics were not only making jokes about forbidden parts of the girls’ anatomies, they were actually touching the parts! I shrank into my seat, overwhelmed with embarrassment. I didn’t dare look at Dad. I knew that my poor father was suffering just as acutely, for having brought me to such a place. To my vast relief he nudged me and muttered, “Let’s get out of here, Billy.” I bolted to the street. When Dad caught up to me, he said, “Well, what’d you think?” I stammered that I didn’t really much care for it.
“Same here,” Dad said. “Big gyp, if you ask me. They didn’t take all their clothes off.”
What it was was burlesque. The theatre was the legendary, notorious Windmill. My father felt it should be part of my education.
Ten years later I came home from the Julliard School of Music, in New York City, with a head full of musical theory and composition. Dad, who could still not read a note, had to find a way to share all this erudition. He promoted me from student to Personal Arranger, and I subsequently produced two record albums of harp solos for him.
Funny thing about Harpo the natural musician. He was not a natural natural. Most people who play by ear pick up first on the melody, and next on the beat. The subtle colors and textures of harmony are usually way beyond them. With Harpo, just the opposite. He was virtually oblivious to melody. His sense of rhythm was, to put it kindly, unpredictable. But harmony! Ahhh! It was sheer sound that sent him into raptures, swamping whatever sense of melody he had. When he discovered a complex new chord, he would play it over and over and over, hours on end, transforming the bay window into a corner of tonal heaven.
I realize now, on re-reading my Dad’s life story, that he performed music the way his father, Frenchie, had performed tailoring: with an unerring feel for fabric and color (harmony) but very little for cutting and fitting (melody and tempo). This gave us a problem when we recorded the record albums. Harpo onstage could hoodwink an audience, getting away with murder in the tempo department. But Harpo on records had to obey the beat or risk sounding sloppy. “I’ve got an idea, Billy,” Dad said. “You stand there and conduct me, O.K.?”
A solution that only Harpo could have thought of. But the idea of a solo conductor conducting a solo performer didn’t work. When he leaned into the harp, concentrating on strings and fingering, he lost eye contact with me and wandered off the beat. “O.K.,” he said. “I got a better idea.” His better idea was that I should lie down on the floor, where he could see me through the strings. So I conducted him lying flat on my back, waving my flippers like a capsized turtle. We made it to the finish line together.
My father was a happy agglomeration of surprises and contradictions. He never got through McGuffey’s First Reader but went on to read, and savor, Tolstoy and Dickens. His favorite words were “perspicacity” and “penultimate.” When challenged he could reel off the correct spelling of “chrysanthemum” or “antidisestablishmentarianism.” At the same time, his list of stage props included “sizzers,” “karit,” “dimund ring” and “telliscoap.” He could recite word for word his bar mitzvah speech from fifty years before—but he never got any further than the line that always rendered him helpless with laughter: “And in conclusion . . .”
Fiendish competitor that he was on the golf course, the croquet court and the pool table, he was not out to humiliate the other players. His enemies were the pins, the wickets and the corner pockets. He took his pleasure from games wherever he could find it. Once at three o’clock in the morning Mom woke up to discover, with a sinking feeling, that Dad was not in bed. She searched through the house, upstairs and down, getting more apprehensive. No Dad. At last she found him—with four-year old Minnie, on Minnie’s bathroom floor. They were in the midst of a rousing game of jacks. Why not? He couldn’t sleep, and it was the only game in town at 3:00 A.M.
He was an unabashed fan, a worshipper of excellence in sports, the arts, literature. But his all-time favorite television star was Cecil, The Seasick Sea Serpent, a hand puppet on “Time for Beany.” If any one of us dared break into the den while Dad was watching Beany and Cecil, we got grounded. Certain areas of our father’s domain were unalterably sacred.
He was an inveterate radio listener. His favorite program was not, as one might think, “Information Please” (those pundits were, after all, descendants of the old Algonquin Round Table). His favorite radio show for many years was something that came on during the afternoon, when all the boys and girls were home from kindergarten: “Uncle Whoa Bill.” The highlight of each hour was Birthday Time. Uncle Whoa Bill’s assistant, one Piggy, would say: “And a Happy Birthday to Sally Green, who is five years old today. Sally—go look in the laundry hamper in your bathroom and you will find a big surprise!” Sally would scamper off to look and she would find, of course, her birthday present—all as prearranged by her mother’s call to the radio station. Uncle and Piggy had worked their magic again!
My father was a true believer in that kind of magic. This led to the gravest family crisis I can remember from those years. One morning—the day after his birthday—Dad was ominously quiet at the breakfast table. Something was bothering him deeply. At length Mom got to the bottom of it. Dad had listened to “Uncle Whoa Bill” the day before with high hopes. But his name was never mentioned. He was genuinely, profoundly, hurt. Mom felt like crawling into a hole. From that year on, as long as the show was on the air, Uncle and Piggy never failed to wish “little Arthur Marx” a Happy Birthday and tell him where his present was hidden. Thus the peer of Dorothy Parker, F.P.A. and Oscar Levant.
Another contradiction: the way he dressed. Dad could harmonize music like an angel, but not the clothes he wore. I can still hear Mom gasp at the sight of Dad coming downstairs before they went out for an evening. His wardrobe was beautifully tailored, his accessories impeccable. But his selection was somethin
g else again: e.g., striped tie with checkered shirt under plaid suit. You knew he was in a room. Mom gave up trying to change him; like all the rest of us she loved him for what he was—a free spirit.
I miss him. Harpo I can see on the “Late Show,” along with my crazy uncles. It’s Dad that I miss. Every time I laugh, every time I hear music, the vision of him comes back to me. I think what I miss most of all are the sounds of my father. Not just the music from the bay window, but also the sound of his voice. His voice was even softer than Groucho’s, although he had the same Upper East Side accent, with the same lyrical, fractured vowels. “Turkey” became “takey,” “hamburger” “hambaiger.” “Oil” became “erl,” but on the other hand, “early” became “aily.” All of which made for a slight confusion when this ardent sun worshiper would announce at dinner that he would be “getting up aily tamarra mawning to erl up before going out on the golf cawss.”
How did he pronounce his name? It came out “Hah-po.”
I would call home on any pretext, just to hear Dad answer the phone. He did not say hello. He said, ever so gently, “Yeaaaaaaah? This is Haaaaah-po.” He made you feel, before you spoke, that you were about to impart some glorious secret to him. There was balm in his voice. If something was troubling you, he wiped it out with those four sweet words.
My father’s choice of title for his autobiography was What’s the Use Talking? I can answer that question: There’s plenty use talking when the subject is you, Dad. And in conclusion . . .
1 Copr. © 1929, 1957 The New Yorker magazine.