Harpo Speaks! (13 page)

We had to brazen our way into strange towns in the Midwest and down South, where we knew we had three strikes against us. One: we were stage folks, in a class with gypsies and other vagrants. Two: we were Jewish. Three: we had New York accents. And, well-strike four: the Four Nightingales weren’t very good.

We had no itinerary. We took the train until we came to a town. We got off the train, walked to the local theatre or “air-dome,” made a deal for a percentage of the box-office take, plastered the town with posters announcing our show, opened, and prayed for the best. If we made more than train fare money, we stayed the night in the cheapest hotel or boardinghouse we could find and took the morning train out of town. If we couldn’t afford this, we slept on the night-train coach. If we couldn’t afford even the train, we walked.

If an audience didn’t like us we had no trouble finding it out. We were pelted with sticks, bricks, spitballs, cigar butts, peach pits and chewed-out stalks of sugar cane. We took all this without flinching -until Minnie gave us the high-sign that she’d collected our share of the receipts. Then we started throwing the stuff back at the audience, and ran like hell for the railroad station the second the curtain came down.

When we went to a hotel, we never asked to see the accommodations first. We only asked what the rates were, paid up if they were low enough, and went straight upstairs and to sleep. We knew what the accommodations would be like anyway-gritty, smelly, either stifling hot or freezing cold, and infested with vermin. But a bed was a bed, even with four adolescent boys fighting for the spaces between lumps and broken springs, and it was a luxury.

In our first three years on the road, we must have walked the equivalent of the length and breadth of the state of Texas, lugging two bags apiece, crammed with posters, props and costumes. We walked through heat waves and blizzards, through dust storms, rainstorms and hailstorms. We were bitten bloody by horseflies and mosquitoes.

The bugs were even worse indoors. Cheap hotels in the South and Southwest were apparently set up as bug sanctuaries by some Audubon Society for Insects. Fleas, ticks, bedbugs, cockroaches, beetles, scorpions and ants, having no enemies, attacked with fearless abandon. They had the run of the house and they knew it. After awhile you just let them bite. Fighting back was useless. For every bug you squashed, a whole fresh, bloodthirsty platoon would march out of the woodwork. In one hotel the ants were so bad that each bed was set on four pots of oxalic acid. This kept the ants off. It also kept them from competing with the fleas and the bedbugs, who had the human banquet all to themselves.

Dressing-room windows never had screens. If the windows were shut, you could suffocate. If they were open you could be bitten to a red pulp by mosquitoes before you got changed and made up. We kept our health and sanity by improvising smudge-pots, burning green grass in tin cans. Of course we couldn’t see through the smoke and had to put our make-up on by braille, and sometimes we didn’t stop coughing until halfway through the show, but we survived.

We survived the food we had to eat, too. Our standard fare was boarding-house spaghetti, chili and beans. Even when we had extra dough, we could seldom get anything better. By the time we finished a show, restaurants and cafes would be locked up for the night. We’d be lucky to find a guy selling tamales from a pushcart, by the station. Once we had the nerve to complain that our hot tamales were not only cold but were caked with dust and crawling with what looked like lice. The pushcart vendor said we could go to hell. If his stuff was good enough for white folks, he said, it was good enough for us New York Jews.

We put on our act in ball parks, amusement parks, schoolhouses, now and then in a real theatre, but mainly in air-domes -shedlike outdoor theatres. Top admission for our shows was usually ten cents indoors, and five cents outdoors. With only nickels and dimes coming into the box office, our percentage of the take would be pretty damn small. Even so, we had to fight for it most of the time. We were completely at the mercy of local managers and booking agents. If they ran off with the share of the receipts they had promised us, we had nobody to appeal to. There was nothing we could do except pick up our bags and start walking to the next town, before we got thrown in the jig as vagrants.

So that was the Road of One-Night Stands, our life from 1910 to 1915. It was a miracle that we stuck it out. A lot of very brave and determined show people fell by the wayside doing what we were doing. It wasn’t that my brothers and I had any more guts or determination than the guys who gave up. But we had Minnie, and Minnie did. She was our miracle.

If you should ever hear an old-time vaudevillian talk about “the wonderful, golden days of one-night stands,” buy him another drink, but don’t believe a word he’s saying. He’s lying through his teeth. If a movie producer or a Broadway director should tell you he made it the Hard Way by struggling through the Borscht Circuit in the Catskill Mountains, humor him along. He’s not lying. He’s just too young. His memory doesn’t go back far enough to know what the Hard Way really was.

My own memory, of my own days of struggle, is a crazy jumble of time and places. I never kept track of time, never believed in calendars. I never had much of a sense of geography either. I probably traveled twenty-five thousand miles and played in three hundred different cities and towns in the twelve years the Marx Brothers worked out of Chicago. From the sound of that, I ought to be a walking atlas. Not so. About cities and towns I remember very little. What I remember are railroad-station waiting rooms, boardinghouse dining rooms, one-dollar hotel rooms, dressing rooms, poolrooms and men’s rooms-all of which look pretty much alike in any city or town in any part of the country.

About the history of our act, what we did onstage and when, I’m not a very reliable authority. I never saved programs or clippings, or kept a diary of any kind. If I want to check on some historical fact about the Marx Brothers, I look it up in the book Kyle Crichton wrote about us or I consult the family historian, Groucho. (Chico, with his photographic memory, should be the historian, but his memory is selective as well as photographic, and what he has selected to remember are things like the poker hand he held at 1:35 A.M. on the night of January 15, 1917, while riding in a Pullman car called “The Winnetaska Rapids,” or the name of a girl I once met in Altoona, Pennsylvania, whose name I would prefer not to have remembered.)

At any rate, to keep the record straight, I have checked with Mr. Crichton’s book and with Groucho, and I find that these were the steps in the evolution of our act in show business:

1. Groucho Marx as a single: boy soprano and actor.

2. Unnamed duo: Groucho and Gummo.

3. The Three Nightingales: Groucho, Gummo and Lou Levy.

4. The Four Nightingales: Groucho, Gummo, Lou Levy and Harpo.

5. The Six Mascots: Groucho, Gummo, Harpo, plus bass singer and two girl singers (Minnie and Aunt Hannah if none others available).

6. The Marx Brothers in School Days: same personnel as (5), with later addition of Chico, who finally joined the act.

7. The Marx Brothers in School Days and Mr. Green’s Reception: same personnel as (6).

8. The Marx Brothers in Home Again: same as (7), with Zeppo replacing Gummo when Gummo got drafted in World War One.

9. The Marx Brothers in On the Mezzanine: same as (8), plus chorus girls, dancers, actors who got paid for falling down, getting squirted at, etc.

10. The Marx Brothers’ Shubert Revue: same as (9) but with fewer girls, dancers and actors and plus Minnie, who got briefly back into the act.

11. The Four Marx Brothers in I’ll Say She Is, The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers, on Broadway: same as (9) only more of them, plus blondes who got paid for being chased by Harpo.

12. The Four Marx Brothers in Paramount Pictures: more of everybody and everything.

13. The Three Marx Brothers in M-G-M Pictures: same as (12) but minus Zeppo, who returned to civilian life, and plus half the population of Culver City, California.

14. Unnamed duo: Chico and Harpo (available for night clubs, benefits, state fairs, stock shows, etc.).

15. Groucho Marx as a single: quizmaster, author, singer (Gilbert & Sullivan).

That’s the straight dope, our grand tour down through the ages, from Groucho the soprano to Groucho the baritone. Frankly, I wouldn’t believe a word of it if I hadn’t read it in a book and my kid brother with the mustache hadn’t confirmed it. My memory, as I said before, is a crazy jumble.

Some important things happened to me during steps (4) through (8) of our evolution. I became a pantomime comedy actor. I became a harpist. I acquired enough self-confidence to enjoy having people laugh at my goofy sight-gags and listen to the music I played seriously but all wrong.

What I remember today, I suppose, are mainly the events that had to do with these three developments. What follows is what I remember. The itinerary is therefore mixed up regarding chronology, places, and names of persons living or dead. But it’s Harpo’s itinerary, not History’s.

Coney Island, New York. Made my debut at Henderson’s and peed in my pants. I felt shamed and disgraced, but Minnie wouldn’t let me quit the act on any such flimsy pretext. She hung my trousers out to dry in the sea breeze between shows. By the second show I was much less scared, so enthusiastic in fact that everybody was afraid I might sing. But I didn’t. I just opened my mouth when Groucho did.

Asbury Park, New Jersey. Two years later, I was still the fourth Nightingale. I reassured myself it was only a temporary thing, as a favor for Minnie. I was now an active member of the quartet. I sang, which was doing nobody a favor. Minnie added class to our quartet by buying us red paper carnations to wear in our lapels when we opened in Asbury Park. It became an eternal challenge to Minnie to add more class to our act.

Boston. I got my first laugh onstage, at the Old Howard Theatre in Boston, the famous burlesque house. We, the Nightingales in the white duck suits with the fake carnations, did a turn in the olio, between burlesque shows. With hands on each other’s shoulders and swaying in tempo, we sang “Mandy Lane.” We were scarcely noticed during our number (even by the piano player, who concentrated on watching the clock for his dinner hour to start) until our last night there.

At the Old Howard the loges came all the way around the house, like a giant horseshoe, and the end boxes hung over the stage. On Saturday night, between burlesque shows, there were three drunks in the end box at stage right. They were loud and restless during the olio, and especially during our rendition of “Mandy Lane.” In the middle of the song, I heard one of the drunks say to his pals, “Hey, lookit! Watch me get the second kid from the end!”

The second kid from the end was me. He got me-with a jetstream of tobacco juice, smack down the front of my white duck jacket.

“Watch this!” said the drunk. “‘I’ll get him again!” Before he could get me again I backed up two paces and marched to the lee side of Groucho, without losing a beat or diverting my eyes from the audience. The audience howled. They’d never seen anything funny in the olio before, and probably never did again. But it wasn’t funny to me-or to Minnie, who spent most of the night scrubbing the tobacco-juice stain out of my costume.

Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Working out of Chicago now, on one-night stands, I would have loved to get a laugh any way I could. Anything to break the boring routine of being a squeaky, white duck Nightingale. Groucho had the only authorized comedy in the act, when he came out as a butcher’s delivery boy, carrying a basket with a string of frankfurters hanging out. This, which was supposed to be hilarious, led to our closing number-a song called “Peasie Weasie.” “Peasie Weasie” had endless verses, enough for all the curtain calls we’d ever get. It should have been endless. It cost Minnie fifty dollars, which was in those days an infinite amount of money.

Like any other litter of undisciplined, high-spirited kids, we were apt to bust loose at any time with horseplay, in a kind of spontaneous combustion. But where other kids expended their energy in pillow fights, Kick the Can, or King of the Mountain, to the consternation of their parents, we often did it by knocking to pieces an act we were being paid to perform, to the consternation of our parents and the manager who hired us and the public who had paid to watch us.

This night in Alabama we were so bored that we stopped singing in the middle of “Mandy Lane,” when we spotted a large bug walking across the stage. The four of us got down on hands and knees and began to follow the bug, making bets whether it was a beetle, a cockroach, or a bedbug.

This kind of nonsense, on company time, was of course a valid excuse for the manager to bring the curtain down and cut us off without a cent. Frenchie, who was sitting in the middle of the house, working as our Laugh Starter (after having spent the whole day selling yard goods and lappas from door to door) was helpless to do anything about us. But Minnie wasn’t. She was in the wings, watching our every move, craning her neck like a suspicious mother goose.

When we started crawling after the bug, Minnie got us back in line before we went far enough to get ourselves canned. She hissed to get our attention. Then she uttered, in a stage whisper, an allpowerful, magic word:

“Greenbaum!”

Greenbaum, you will recall, was the banker who held the mortgage on our house back in Chicago. Missing a monthly payment to Mr. Greenbaum could mean the loss of our new home and our membership in the aristocracy of property owners. Worse than that, it could mean the loss of a basement big enough for a pool table.

A single utterance of the magic word rarely failed. When it did, Minnie didn’t care what the audience might think. She’d belt it out loud and clear: “Greenbaum, you crazy kids!”

Hammond, Louisiana. Our white duck suits were weather-beaten, threadbare and woebegone. The Nightingales’ class was fading, fast. We couldn’t afford new costumes, so Minnie dressed up the act by buying (for a block of free tickets and two dollars cash) two used mandolins for Gummo and myself to play during the finish, and she renamed our act “The Six Mascots.”