Harpo Speaks! (12 page)

“You little son-of-a-bitch!” she screamed. “I missed!” Now it was all my fault.

We tore back toward home. I was standing up, shaking the reins, and I was scared now, shuddering with hot and cold flashes. The horse clopped down Merrick Road in full gallop, but still not fast enough to suit Mrs. Schang. She was swilling gin and getting fiery boiled, and between gulps she screamed at me to drive faster. I was in a daze. My head was spinning in crazy circles. It was a horrible, hideous nightmare.

When she drained the gin bottle she let out a curse I’d never heard from a woman’s lips before and flung the empty bottle-smashing the one remaining carriage light into oblivion. She tore the reins out of my grip and began to whip the horse’s rump unmercifully. Thank God the horse knew the way. We were careening through inky blackness.

When we got to the Happy Times Tavern the Madam pulled to a stop. She jumped out and ran for the saloon, desperate for a refill. Over her shoulder she yelled at me to put the horse away.

The poor beast was lathered with sweat and foam and wheezing like a leaky steam engine. I managed to get him out of harness and into his stall before I started heaving up. I was too sick to move. I went to sleep on a pile of straw.

When I woke up in the morning Christopher Schang was there in the stables crying. The horse was dead. Christopher started wailing at me that this was the best friend he ever had, and I had killed him. How should I know from a horse, that you had to cool him out after a gallop and put him to bed with a blanket on?

I felt sicker than ever when the Madam learned the news, late the next afternoon. She was still drunk, and she looked at me with mean, unadulterated murder in her eyes. I began to play the piano with such force that my fingers stung. For once, I hoped there would be a big, rough crowd in the Happy Times. Anything to keep the Madam’s hands diverted from my throat.

A big crowd came that night. Just as the diggers swarmed into the joint I felt suddenly dizzy, like I had during the wild ride the night before. The back room started lifting and sinking and turning around in a circle. I lost all control. I fell off the piano stool. One of the girls helped me up. I fell off again. This time Mrs. Schang saw me. She bellowed at me to get the hell back on the stool and start playing. I staggered to my feet and fell against the keyboard. The Madam grabbed me and sat me straight, so hard that the butt of my spine felt like it was cracked.

The third time I dropped to the floor she was back in the saloon. Two of the girls picked me up and dragged me upstairs and laid me on the bed, while another girl went to call a doctor. The doctor came. He felt my forehead. He opened my shirt and looked at me closely.

“Measles,” the doctor said.

When word of my condition was passed downstairs, I could hear Mrs. Schang roar, clean through the floor, “I don’t want no sick Jews in my place! Get him out of here!”

The next thing I remember I was waiting on the platform of the Freeport railroad station. The back-room girls had chipped in to buy me a ticket to the city, and two of them-my special friends-had brought one to the train.

The train came. They helped me on board. One of the girls said, “You don’t know how lucky you are, kid, to come down with the measles.” The other girl was about to cry. “I’m going to miss you, honey,” she said. “I’m going to miss that song you play so beautiful.”

The four whores of the Happy Times were the first fans I ever had, and I shall always be grateful to them.

The story had three endings. First, I got over the measles in short order, thanks to Grandpa’s care and Frenchie’s chicken soup. Second, a story in a New York paper was brought to my attention a month or so after I came home from Freeport.

INDICTED AS BURGLAR GANG

MINEOLA, L.I., Aug. 1-Fourteen indictments charging burglary and grand larceny were found by the Nassau County Grand jury today against August Van Fehrig, alias Luckner, leader of the gang of burglars that robbed more than twenty houses in this neighborhood recently, cleaning up $50,000. Eleven indictments charging the same crimes were found against Christopher Schang, 19 years old, a member of the gang, and two indictments for receiving stolen goods were returned against his aged mother, Mrs. Alma Schang.

`When the prisoners were brought into court before County Judge Jackson for pleading, Mrs. Schang, who had to be supported by Sheriff Foster, suddenly screamed and fell fainting to the floor. She was carried back to the jail unconscious. . . .

It was obvious to me who had ratted on the Schangs-Louie Neidorf, the guy who never showed up that night at the Pot O’ Gold. Little Max, the missing bartender, was never found. The Long Island police were pretty certain the Schang gang had done him in, but they didn’t have enough evidence to make a murder rap stick.

The third ending to the Freeport episode came years later. That was when I finally found out why the Madam had given me such a funny look when she first saw me, in the Bowery saloon, and why she kept making such nasty references to my religion and ancestry.

One night, in the middle of a crap game in a Pullman car, while we were traveling the Pantages Circuit, Chico confessed that he had been the Happy Times piano player before me, while I was upstate with Seymour Mintz. When I turned up to audition, Mrs. Schang thought I was Chico. Then, when I played, she knew I wasn’t, and took a chance and hired me.

Chico also confessed that he had been fired by Mrs. Schang for a far less innocent reason than coming down with the measles. He’d become a little too friendly with one of the girls in the back room.

I now regarded myself, after the events of the summer, as more of a man than a boy. With this new confidence I sailed forth from my sickbed and got myself a job playing for a nickelodeon.

I had learned a whole set of fancy variations on my two tunes, enough so I could accompany any kind of movie without the audience realizing that I was repeating myself. For comedies: “Waltz Me Around Again, Willie,” played two octaves high and fast. Dramatic scenes: “Love Me and the World Is Mine,” with a tremolo in the bass. Love scenes: a trill in the right hand. For the chase: either song, played too fast to he recognized.

The nickelodeon was down on 34th Street in Manhattan, and it was mainly patronized by people traveling through that district. The joint was stuffy and smelly. People talked, ate and snored through the pictures. Kids yelled and chased each other up and down the aisles. But after the Happy Times Tavern, it was like a rest home.

For some reason, mothers with nursing babies liked to sit down front near the piano. Maybe they thought that music was a nice, soothing accompaniment to breast feeding. Anyway, I used to have fun with them. In the middle of a quiet scene I’d suddenly whack the hell out of a chord, just to watch the nipples snap out of the babies’ mouths.

It was while I was working at the nickelodeon that Gummo joined Groucho onstage in vaudeville. With a kid named Lou Levy they opened at Henderson’s, a Coney Island beer garden, as a singing trio.

One afternoon, in the middle of the movie, my mother marched down the aisle of the theatre to the piano. She ordered me to leave at once and come with her. Minnie’s face was set with desperation and determination. She was in some kind of a jam, and from the look of her, it could be serious trouble. Minnie had never come to me for help in a crisis before. Without question, I got up from the piano stool and followed her out of the nickelodeon.

I don’t think the audience knew the difference when the music stopped. They went right on talking, stuffing themselves, sleeping, and nursing their babies.

It was not until Minnie got me on the El train that the awful truth of her mission struck me, like a bolt of lightning out of a clear sky. We were headed for Coney Island. I was being shanghaied. I was being shanghaied to join Groucho, Gummo, and Lou Levy. On a stage. Singing. In front of people.

On the train, Minnie screened me with a newspaper while I changed into a white duck suit, my costume. At the same time she tried to teach me the words to “Darling Nelly Gray.” I was too weak with dread to protest. My mind went blank. I couldn’t possibly learn the song before we got to Coney Island.

Didn’t matter anyway, Minnie said. As long as I opened my mouth in the right places-by keeping an eye on Groucho-I didn’t have to make a peep. It would be best I didn’t try to sing, in fact. I was supposed to be the bass, and my squeaky voice could ruin the whole effect. The only important thing was that Minnie get a quartet onstage. In the first place, she had bought four white duck suits in order to get a decent price on costumes (there was a mark-down only in sets of four) and it was idiotic to let the fourth white duck suit go to waste.

In the second place, the featured act on the bill was “That Quartet,” a famous singing group of the day. It would look pretty cheap if Minnie could only put a trio of boys on instead of a quartet.

When I arrived backstage at Henderson’s Gummo greeted me with a soulful, brotherly look of commiseration. He didn’t need to speak. His eyes said all he had to say: So she hooked you too, huh?

We came into the wings to wait for our cue. A comedy juggler was finishing up his act on the stage. I could hear Them, out there, the Audience. Some of Them were laughing, some hooting, the rest of Them rumbling with insolent, impolite indifference. I wanted to run away, but I couldn’t move.

We were supposed to march onstage military fashion-Groucho in the lead, followed by Lou, myself and Gummo. Our cue came. Groucho marched. Lou marched. And Gummo marched-practically up my back, because I still couldn’t move. I was rooted to the spot.

Minnie hissed at me. I just stood there. Minnie pushed me. She pushed me harder, a real hefty shove in the small of my back. I went stumbling out of the wings and onto the stage. As I caught my balance, the thought sizzled in my mind: You’re not a boy any more. You’re a man. Don’t let on you’re scared.

I came to a halt beside Lou Levy. I turned. And there They were. A sea of hostile, mocking faces across the footlights. And here I was, with nothing to hold onto, absolutely nothing. With my first look at my first audience I reverted to being a boy again. My reaction was instantaneous and overwhelming. I wet my pants.

It was probably the most wretched debut in the history of show business.

Every turning point in my life seems to have been a low point, a time of terrible disappointment or disaster. I never planned any changes in the course of my career. The changes just happened. The only ambitions I ever nourished were to be left fielder for the New York Giants, a full-time tin-can swinger for an umbrella mender, or a piano player on an excursion boat. I never achieved any of these ambitions. What I actually became was what I was driven to be in a time of disaster.

The rock-bottom low point of my early life was that time I went onstage and disgraced myself in the company of my brothers and in front of the public, at Coney Island. I became, therefore, an entertainer. Nothing that I could have done could have frightened me more.

Nobody heard me sing in the quartet that night at Henderson’s. It was all I could do to open my mouth at approximately the same time that Groucho, Lou and Gummo opened their mouths. But I sang, a voiceless swan song. I sang farewell to the streets of the East Side, to hustling and hopping trolleys and swindling ticketchoppers, farewell to happy-go-lucky, hired-today-and-fired-tomorrow wandering from job to job, farewell to “Waltz Me Around Again, Willie” and Max’s Busy Bee. Like it or not, I was in show business for the rest of my days.

At the age of fourteen, I didn’t like it a bit.

Unknown

CHAPTER 7

“Greenbaum,

You Crazy Kids!”

MY MOTHER DECIDED one night in the year 1910, after a brutal, fruitless day of battle with New York booking agents, that we should live in the central part of the country. New York was not right for us. Too much big-time competition. Where we should be was in the hub of the small-time vaudeville circuits and wheels, where an act like ours would have a fighting chance.

So the next day we packed up our things and on to Chicago we moved, lock, stock and Grandpa.

By juggling her accounts, signing notes, and putting the touch on Uncle Al, Minnie was able to make a down payment on a three-story, brownstone house in a fairly respectable Chicago neighborhood. The Marxes had, at last, a place to call their own. And a fabulous place it was, to us. It had no grimy stoop, but a genuine front porch-which Grandpa immediately took over as the equivalent of the front room on 93rd Street. For Frenchie, there was the luxury of a huge kitchen, where he could cook with gas. He no longer had to depend on his sons to swipe wood or coal before he could get a meal on the stove. Best of all, the house had a basement big enough for a pool table.

The house also had a mortgage big enough to plug a storm-drain, but that was nothing to worry about, we told ourselves. We were now bona fide property owners, shareholders in America. We had risen in class far beyond our wildest dreams. Who should worry about Mr. Greenbaum, who held the mortgage, coming around for the monthly payment? Hadn’t we ducked, dodged and outfoxed the rent agent back on 93rd Street for eleven years? None of its had the foresight to realize that there was no place for a family to hide in a one-family dwelling.

Besides, we did all right in Chicago-at first. Minnie had been right, apparently, in hauling us out of New York. Here she could get us theatres to play. Not the best theatres, or even in the best neighborhoods, but bookings that paid good, green money none the less.

But before long we ran out of offbeat, small-time theatres to get booked into. There was no place for us to go except on the road.

The vaudeville circuits that guaranteed an act thirty weeks of work for a season wanted no part of us. We put up with whatever we could find for ourselves: one-night stands, conventions, picnics, benefits, anything that guaranteed a minimum of dinner and train fare. Looking hack, I simply don’t know how we survived it. Those early days on the road were sheer, unmitigated hell. They made my earlier days on the streets of the East Side seem like one long recess period.