Harpo Speaks! (15 page)

We would march dutifully on board the coach. We knew that Frenchie could never win a haggle with the Pullman ticket office, but we always gave him the respect of letting him try. Once we got under way, Groucho would scout through the train. If he found an empty upper berth, he’d offer the conductor a dollar for it. The conductor would be glad to pick up an easy buck on the side, and he would turn his back when all four of us climbed in, whooping and hollering. If the porter saw us and made a stink, Groucho would give him a quarter. The most we had to spend would be $1.25-a saving of thirty-five cents over the full price. Thirty-five cents was not to be sneezed at. It was worth a movie show and a game of pool for the four of us.

Sometimes Grandpa went along on our short hops, so that he might see more of the country he had naturalized as his own. On these occasions Frenchie insisted, gallantly, on buying a lower berth for Grandpa, who was then in his nineties. But after the train started Grandpa would insist on climbing into the upper berth and giving us kids the lower. This made him feel he was making a contribution to our success. To be truthful he was. There was a hell of a lot more rest to be had in a lower berth, if shared by four active Marx Brothers.

Most of the time that summer Frenchie traveled ahead of us, as our advance man. It was his job to get the theatre lined up, the posters put out all around town, and to find a nice, clean boardinghouse that was in our price range. If a place was clean enough but not so hot in the kitchen department, Frenchie would move in and do the cooking. Naturally, nobody had ever tasted food like Frenchie’s in Cedar Rapids, Kalamazoo or Urbana, and that was why he was always being asked to stay in town and open up a restaurant.

When Frenchie wasn’t there to do the cooking, we ate leftovers. Boardinghouse leftovers were the same from Seattle to Sandusky: cold macaroni and cheese with all the cheese picked out, stiff, cold dabs of mashed potatoes turning yellow at the edges, a lonely pickle floating amongst seeds in a bowl of pickle juice, moldering masses of stale bread pudding, and coffee three times warmed over with milk in it, turned a sickening mauve in color and covered with a pucker of scum. I didn’t complain. I was too hungry. Everything tasted all right to me-but boy, how we missed Frenchie!

It wasn’t always easy to get Frenchie launched out of the city as advance man. The move to the Midwest and the rise of his sons in show business hadn’t changed my father much at all. He was as accepting, as trusting, as sweet-natured and absent-minded as ever.

One night we all went out to the 63rd Street Station to see Frenchie leave Chicago. It was a tearful farewell, full of soggy sentiments and kisses. You’d think he was departing to be our advance man for a tour around the world. As the train pulled away, he waved and waved, dabbing a tear from his eyes, and we dabbed and waved back.

Twenty minutes later, Frenchie was in downtown Chicago. He’d boarded the train on the inbound instead of the outbound track.

So the next night he set out alone, full of advice about which side of the station to stand on. Frenchie wanted no silly, sentimental farewells this time. He was so determined to be businesslike, in fact, that he forgot to take his ticket. As we pieced it together later, he had just as much trouble getting out of Chicago the second time.

Frenchie’s English had not improved greatly since the day he arrived in the States from Alsace-Lorraine. He had special trouble with his d’s and t’s. To the railroad ticket man he said: “One fare please for Derradaw.” This the ticket man could not comprehend. Frenchie tried again. He still couldn’t get through. Finally he said, “Whod the hell, you know, id’s a place doo-ninedy from here.”

He was sold a ticket for $2.90 and he got on a train, an outbound train.

Early the next morning Minnie got a long-distance telephone call from Frenchie. Minnie said, “Hello, Sam?” Frenchie said plaintively, “Minnie, where am I?”

Luck was with him. It turned out he was in Terre Haute, Indiana, which was where he was supposed to be. “Dod’s ride,” said Frenchie. “Derradaw!”

We made enough money that summer to buy ourselves a secondhand pool table for the basement. But before we could hustle up cue sticks and balls to play with, the fall season was upon us and it was time to hit the road again.

Waukegan, Illinois. In the middle of my first bit in School Days, the business with the orange in my hat, I happened to look into the orchestra pit. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Instead of giving the orange to Teacher, I let out a whoop, wound up like a baseball pitcher and heaved the orange at the piano player in the pit. The piano player caught it and threw it back. When Groucho and Gummo saw what was going on they started whooping too. We heaved everything we could get our hands on into the orchestra pit-hats, books, chalk, erasers, stilettos.

The piano player surrendered. He climbed up onto the stage, sat at one of the school desks, and joined the act. It was Chico.

I don’t remember much about the rest of the performance that night, except that Chico ad libbed a hilarious part as an Italian boy, and the fiddle player in the orchestra was so broken up he nearly stopped the show. The fiddle player was a local kid named Benny Kubelsky. Until this day-when, as Jack Benny, he’s known as Waukegan’s First Citizen-he still can’t look at the Marx Brothers without breaking up.

Ann Arbor, Michigan. We now had Chico and a full two-act show. Act One was School Days and Act Two, Musical Varieties. “Always leave ‘em with a song,” Minnie said. “If they go away whistling, you’ve got a hit.” We didn’t agree. We thought it would be better to leave ‘em with a laugh. The comedy act should close the show, not open it. “Greenbaum to that,” said Minnie.

The season’s first crisis arose when we hit the college town of Ann Arbor. Our tenor, whom we had hired for $25 a week, quit us flat for an act that payed $27.50 a week. His part as the Nance in School Days wouldn’t be missed, but his operatic solo was one of the highlights of the musical half of the show. Also, he owned the only tuxedo in the company, and this had added a lot of class.

Groucho told Minnie not to worry. He’d sing “La Donna E Mobile.” That was fine, said Minnie-but what about the tuxedo? Chico had it all figured out. “Fire the piano player in the pit,” he said. “I’ll play the opera number on the stage piano, and with the dough we save we can rent a tux.”

Minnie blessed us all and took off for Chicago, to go shopping for a new twenty-five-dollar tenor.

So Groucho did the tenor’s aria. Well, he started the aria. After about twelve measures, a hysterical, compulsive urge for horseplay crept over him (we all felt it coming on, what with Minnie gone) and he stopped singing.

“I don’t like your key, Giuseppe,” he said to Chico.

“How about this key, boss?” said Chico, transposing to C-minor.

“Worse,” said Groucho.

I was standing in the wings. But not for long. This was too much fun to miss out on. I ran onstage and bumped Chico off the stool and began to play “The Holy City,” the quickstep-march variation.

Groucho knocked me off. Chico knocked Groucho off. I knocked Chico off. Through the whole wacky round-robin the piano kept being played and Groucho kept singing “La Donna E Mobile”-in double-talk Italian.

Well, it brought the house down. We kept on clowning all the way to the finish, when we played a six-hand, three-key version of “Waltz Me Around Again, Willie”-Chico on the stool, me sitting on Chico’s shoulders, and Groucho crouching behind us, reaching his arms around Chico like tentacles, and all of us singing.

We collapsed like a house of cards, jumped up, grabbed our mandolins, and sailed into “Peasie Weasie.” We had never had such fun or such an ovation before. We took seven bows, and there was no need for anybody to sing “Dixie.”

For the first time, our act was reviewed in the paper. The local critic was very flattering. “The frolicsome Marx Brothers, with their operatic antics,” he wrote, “were a welcome and refreshing change from the usual tired vaudeville act we’ve been seeing on Main Street.” The manager asked if we could play there the rest of the week. Groucho, our spokesman in Minnie’s absence, said we might consider it if the price was right. The manager made an offer that was hard to resist. He said he would pay the whole week’s rental on the tenor tuxedo. It was a deal.

Minnie was terribly depressed when she got off the Michigan Central milk train the next day. She had beaten all the bushes in Chicago and hadn’t flushed a tenor who would leave town for less than thirty bucks a week. We showed her our review, and she took heart.

Then she said, with a delayed take, “What operatic antics? In the second act?”

We told her the whole story, truthfully. Minnie had strong opinions and she was stubborn, but she was neither a diehard nor a fool. She thought for a minute, vaguely and wistfully whistling “La Donna E Mobile.”

Then she said, “I told you boys we should never try to be anything but a comedy act. Like I’ve said time and time again, ‘Always leave ‘em with a laugh.’” She reconsidered briefly, and added, “As long as you send ‘em home whistling.”

Kalamazoo, Michigan. We worked out a compromise with Minnie. The second part of our show would be half clowning and half musical varieties. We patched together an afterpiece, a routine we entitled School Days Twenty Years Later, or, Mr. Green’s Reception. Mr. Green was the new name we gave to the Teacher.

In the afterpiece, Mr. Green (Groucho) has retired. On the anniversary of his retirement, he invites his old pupils to a reception at his vine-covered cottage in the country. Patsy, Giuseppe, Izzy and Mama’s Boy are grown men now. They have become, it so happens, singers of songs, players of the piano, pluckers of the mandolin, and fun-loving comedians. They give their old teacher a gala entertainment.

I think the real reason Minnie capitulated to our doing Mr. Green’s Reception was that she saw a spot in the act to pin class on. The spot was Mr. Green’s cottage. The class she pinned on it was a gross of red paper carnations (one buck a gross, wholesale).

To be more precise, it was I who pinned the fake flowers on the stage set. I had become very close to Minnie. I was her confidant and her Chief Assistant in the Special Effects (class) Department. I spent more time onstage patching flats, touching up the paint job and wiring on carnations than I did acting or making music.

Mr. Green’s Reception went over just as big as School Days. The only trouble we had with it was in Kalamazoo, where we were hired to play a whole week.

The Kalamazoo trouble occurred at my entrance. I came on as Patsy (twenty years older, with the same ratty red wig, turtle-neck sweater and blacked-out teeth, but with long pants on), carrying a trash can.

MR. GREEN (who has miraculously lost his German accent somewhere during the intermission): And who might you be, my good fellow?

PATSY: Why, Patsy Brannigan, the Garbage Man.

MR. GREEN: Sorry, we don’t need any.

In Kalamazoo, like every place else, this got a laugh. But because of it, we got fired off the bill. The owner of the theatre came back and uttered those fearful words of doom: “You’re shut!”

It was hardly our fault. We didn’t know the current scandal in Kalamazoo-which was that the theatre owner’s wife had just run off to Escanaba with a city garbage collector.

We were shut, but we still got a good review in the local paper. Minnie read it six or seven times. She closed her eyes and whistled and thought for a while, then said: “Boys, we’re ready for a circuit. We’ve got to go where the big agents can see us.”

And so, back to Chicago. Minnie pasted our Michigan clippings in a scrapbook, tucked the scrapbook under her arm, and took the streetcar downtown where the booking offices were. Right off the bat she got us booked into a theatre called the Thalia, in a Polish neighborhood.

We played School Days and Mr. Green’s Reception at the Thalia for one week. We got one review. It said: “The so-called Marx Brothers do well, but in the worst kind of act in vaudeville. In other words, they are so good they stink.” I don’t think any big agents bothered to show up.

Minnie’s faith was undiminished. The day after we opened she sent a telegram to Uncle Al-not for money, but for help in the shape of new material.

Uncle Al took the train from New York, and caught the last night of our stand. He agreed with the reviewer. We were good and our material stunk. Uncle Al sat up all night in the kitchen, sketching out a new second act. He kept a few of our old bits of business, but what he concocted was ninety percent new, including the title. Home Again, he called it.

In Home Again, Mr. Green had not only retired to his carnation-covered cottage but he had somehow gotten rich enough to take a trip abroad, with his “swell” wife (Minnie) and his “fresh” son (Gummo). The scene opened with the Greens arriving from Europe. The air was full of streamers, confetti, and Groucho’s bilious jokes about seasickness. On the dock to greet the boat were Chico, a waterfront loafer, and me, a waterfront roughneck. I started a fight with Chico. A cop came on to break it up. Chico and I turned on the cop and broke him up. Mr. Green then invites everybody to a reception at his country estate. The curtains parted to reveal the full set-the old carnation-covered cottage and, upstage, a huge prop boat.

At the finish there was to be a spectacular Special Effect. It would be the greatest thing witnessed on a stage, Minnie told Uncle Al with admiration, since Ada Isaacs Menken last made an entrance on a live white horse, back in 1879. Everybody would pile onto the boat, and the boat, which was mounted on rollers, would glide across the stage while we all sang and all the lights went out except the lights on the deck. It was a far cry from “Peasie Weasie.”

It all sounded great to me except for one thing: Uncle Al didn’t write a single line for me. I protested. Uncle Al said I could add wonderful contrast to the act if I played in pantomime. The hell with that. I would ad lib all the lines I wanted to, I said.

“Okay, okay,” said Uncle Al_ “Go right ahead.”

Kankakee, Illinois. On our shakedown cruise of Home Again we found that Uncle Al was not exactly infallible. Some of his New York jokes were not funny at all to Midwest audiences. For example: