Harpo Speaks! (16 page)

MR. GREEN: This must be the Far Rockaway boat.

MRS. GREEN: How do you know?

MR. GREEN (twitching his nostrils) : I can smell the herring.

It did not go over very big in Kankakee, Illinois, about the herring.

Champaign, Illinois. The critic in the Champaign-Urbana paper wrote something like: “The Marx Brother who plays `Patsy Brannigan’ is made up and costumed to a fare-thee-well and he takes off on an Irish immigrant most amusingly in pantomime. Unfortunately the effect is spoiled when he speaks.” Then he went on to discuss minor points, like the climax of Home Again being the most thrilling scene ever witnessed in Champaign, etc.

When I read the review I knew Uncle Al had been right. I simply couldn’t outtalk Groucho or Chico, and it was ridiculous of me to try. It was a cruel blow to my pride nevertheless. When I announced to Minnie that I would never speak another word onstage, she knew I had been hurt, and she looked at me with sorrow and sympathy. But she didn’t say, “Forget it-what does he know?” She said nothing.

I went silent. I never uttered another word, onstage or in front of a camera, as a Marx Brother.

Belleville, Illinois. Being a full-time pantomimist now, I worked hard thinking up stage business that didn’t require spoken lines. I swiped a bulb-type horn off a taxicab and stuck it under my belt before going on in Home Again. When Chico and I started our fight and the cop clomped on and yanked me off Chico, the horn went whonk! and we got a hell of a big new laugh.

East St. Louis, Illinois. I created my own, personal afterpiece. At the finish of the act the boat pulled away and sailed across the stage with everybody on board except me. I came following after, swimming-honking my horn like crazy and spitting out a stream of water with each stroke. Hell of a big new laugh.

And so, back to Chicago. After delivering me a serious lecture, the gist of which was Greenbaum, Minnie went downtown once again with the scrapbook. She got us hired to play the Pantages Circuit. We had made it-a thirty-week tour. No more one-night stands. No more haggle for box-office percentages. A hotel room every night! The Marx Brothers were on their way.

Aurora, Illinois. (And here I jump backwards in my itinerary, by a couple or three years.) The Six Mascots were not doing so hot. Minnie, pondering this, went into Chicago to do something about our depressing condition. The act needed more class, badly. But what?

In Chicago Minnie found the answer. It had to do with me. I received a cryptic telegram in Aurora, Illinois:

DON T LEAVE TOWN UNTIL YOUR SHIPMENT ARRIVES BY FREIGHT. PAYMENTS ON IT ONE DOLLAR PER WEEK. DON’T GET IT WET. MINNIE.

I didn’t know what to expect. Something for me to put in the act? A new costume? A trained dog? A unicycle?

What arrived on the freight car was a monstrous, oddshaped black box. Inside the monstrous box was the biggest musical instrument I had ever seen.

A harp.

Unknown

CHAPTER 9

Poom-Pooms, Pedals

and Poker

AFTER I HAD HAD the harp for two weeks, it was in the act. Before, when we played the oom-Poom-pooms to accompany a song, the mandolins whanged out the oom’s while Groucho did the poompooms on his guitar. Now I did the poom-pooms on the harp. The harp poom-poomed and echoed with re-poom-pooms all around the joint.

I found out that the price of my harp was forty-five dollars (ten bucks of Minnie’s money down and one buck of my money per week). This gave me new respect for the instrument. Groucho got new respect for it, too. Groucho I could now drown out-his voice, his guitar or his mandolin-any time I wanted to, with a lusty swipe on the harp strings.

Gadsden, Alabama. After a year of hunt and pick, ponder and pluck, and trial and error, I played my first solo on the harp-“Annie Laurie.” I got a big hand and a demand for an encore. The only encore I could think of was doing “Annie Laurie” over again, with fancy long swoops on the strings (I didn’t know yet that these were called glissandos) between phrases of the melody.

The presence of the harp (the harp alone, and not the harpist) had raised our average monthly income by five dollars. Once again Minnie had gambled and hit a winner. The odds were right, by Chico’s Law. Four bucks a month for payments, five bucks a month return.

Little Rock, Arkansas. For the first time I played solid chords as well as a line of melody and swooping glissandos, in my exclusive new harp arrangement of the Sextet from Lucia. From the audience I got respectful applause. From Groucho I got dirty looks.

St. Joseph, Missouri. On the way from the theatre to the poolroom I stopped in my tracks when I saw a display in a ten-cent-store window. In the middle of the display was a framed picture of an angel, sitting on a cloud and playing a harp. What stopped me was the fact that the angel in the picture had the harp leaning against her right, not her left shoulder. Since nobody had ever told me otherwise, I had been playing with mine against the wrong shoulder.

That was my first harp lesson. I switched the instrument to the other side, the right side, and felt a lot more professional. Belated thanks, F. W. Woolworth, for the tip.

Muskogee, Oklahoma. A harpist, I was beginning to learn, had problems that nobody else had, not even a tuba player or a string-bass player. A tuba had no strings. A string-bass you could carry with you on a trolley car.

The harp, when plucked politely, has a soft tone that doesn’t carry very far. A harpist has to have total silence when he plays: a serious piece, or he won’t be heard at all. I found that audiences were usually aware of this, and very cooperative. This wasn’t always true, however, of other performers on the bill.

Sharing the bill with us in Muskogee (or maybe it was someplace in Kansas) was an “escape artist,” a limp little Hungarian, who let his wife, a husky Cherokee Indian, tie him up in knots. His act was to wiggle free of the ropes-which had been tied, of course, in deceptive, breakaway knots-in time to a chorus of “The Prisoner’s Song.”

Well, the theatre here was so small that in the wings at stage left there was only room for a toilet, nothing more. In the pianissimo part of my Sextet from Lucia I heard a funny noise that didn’t come from the harp. I looked offstage. The Hungarian escape artist was sitting on the can, facing me, with the toilet door open.

I was so stunned by this sight I stopped playing. In that moment of silence, the guy flushed the can. It was a sound heard round the theatre, all the way back to the top of the balcony. The audience, not knowing but what it was a special effect on the harp, burst into applause.

I got even. On Saturday night the escape artist asked if I wouldn’t please take his wife’s place, so she could get their baby ready to make the train. I was very happy to oblige him. I went onstage during his act and tied him up with my kind of knots. When they finally brought the curtain down he was still grunting and writhing on the floor. He couldn’t get free from knot number one. They had to drag him offstage by his feet and cut him loose with a jackknife.

This was a kind of aggravation that angel harpists never had to put up with.

Laredo, Texas. In Laredo we shared the bill with one of the saddest vaudeville acts I ever saw-“The Musical Cow Milkers.” It was a team. The guy led a live cow onstage and while his wife, in sunbonnet and pinafore, squatted on a stool and milked the cow, they sang duets.

After opening night the manager fired them. They would be replaced on the bill, he said, with a second solo by the “Marx boy who wears the wig and plays the big zither or whatever you call it.”

The male half of the Musical Cow Milkers was very bitter about being fired. He walked across the border to Mexico and got drunk and mailed a dead rabbit to the Laredo theatre manager.

Minnie came down with a sudden attack of loyalty and motherly love. Mr. and Mrs. Musical Cow Milker had three small children. Minnie went to bat for them. She yelled and wept and begged for the couple to be rehired. At length, her eloquence swayed the theatre manager.

“All right, all right,” he said. “I’ll take ‘em back. I’ll put ‘em on. I’ll put ‘em on in place of the Marx Brothers. You’re closed.”

Youngstown, Ohio. By now my harp had racked up a lot of mileage and taken a lot of mauling, in and out of baggage cars, delivery wagons, hotels and theatres. It was aging prematurely. The post was getting wobbly and warps and cracks were setting in. What happened to it on my retreat from Youngstown, Ohio, didn’t help a bit.

Youngstown is one city I remember clearly. Something unexpected happened every time I played there.

Between shows during our first date in Youngstown, I went to an auction at a jewelry store. The jeweler happened to be a friend of a friend of Chico’s, and he knocked me down a ring I took a fancy to, for two bucks. I just happened to feel it was a good-luck piece. It had better be, I thought, because when I put it on I couldn’t get it off.

When we finished the show on Saturday night, the manager came back and said it was the mayor’s birthday and we were all invited to his birthday party. We didn’t feel like partying. We wanted a good night’s sleep before the jump to Indianapolis, so we politely declined. But the mayor was insistent. He had the police chief back a paddy wagon up to the stage door and herd us in. Like it or not, we were going to the mayor’s birthday party.

My memory of that night is not clear. I had two drinks, the first two drinks of my life, and I got very drunk. I remember Chico getting a crap game going. I remember dodging the mayor’s wife, who took quite a shine to me. When she got me trapped in the pantry, the police chief came to my rescue. The next thing I remember is being driven home by two cops, along with a dame I had never seen before. This dame was a lot more predatory than the mayor’s wife. But it was not my virile charm she was after. She was after my two-dollar ring.

The dame must have grappled for half the night, trying to get it off. In the morning the ring was still on my finger, and she was gone. The rest of the troupe were also gone, on the train to Indianapolis.

I got a great idea. Why not drive to Indianapolis, instead of taking the train? I bought a secondhand Model-T touring car, loaded the harp onto the back seat, cranked up, and chugged off into the sunset. It was a rugged journey, to put it mildly. The old Ford struggled on the best it could, straining through axle-deep ruts, crunching over rocky creek bottoms, slogging through mudholes and pounding over potholes. Everything that could go wrong with a Model T went wrong with mine. I pushed it and cranked it and kicked it. I coaxed it and I cursed it. And somehow I nursed it, before it gasped its last, dying chug, into Indianapolis.

It was a feat I would have been proud of, except that my harp had taken the worst beating of its life, on the back seat of the Ford. For the dough I squandered on the car (had to sell it for junk), I could have bought a brand-new harp.

Somewhere north of Mobile, Alabama. We were making the Saturday night Pullman jump from Montgomery to Mobile. About four o’clock in the morning I woke up with a hell of a jolt. We had stopped moving. The train had jumped the tracks.

When we piled out of our car, we saw that the wreck was a pretty bad one. The Pullman was intact, but the baggage car and the forward coach, for colored passengers, had been badly bashed, and people were screaming with pain up ahead. We pitched in to give whatever first aid we could.

Within an hour, two insurance-company “adjusters” appeared on the scene. They went down the line of the injured, getting them to sign releases by making spot-cash settlements-bad bruise one dollar, gashed face two dollars, broken arm five bucks, broken leg ten bucks, and so on. Once anybody signed, naturally, he no longer had the right to sue the railroad and get a fair settlement for his injury.

I suddenly remembered my harp. I got to the baggage car before the adjusters did. The case was smashed to splinters, but the harp itself didn’t show a bit of new damage, which was a miracle. But nobody paid off on miracles. So I heaved the harp off the car onto the tracks. There was now no doubt it had been through a disastrous wreck. The harp was a wreck itself.

The insurance man came along, inspected it, and asked me what the replacement value was. Forty-five dollars, I told him. He handed me a release to sign. “The rule is fifty percent,” he said. “But you look like a nice young fellow. I’ll pay you twentyfive dollars.”

Minnie caught me on the point of signing the release. She grabbed the pen from my hand and gave it back to the adjuster. “You don’t pull that on us,” she said. “We’re getting a lawyer to handle this matter.”

The insurance man said, “Damn Yankees.”

Mobile, Alabama. Minnie went shopping for a local lawyer to sue the railroad. She found one. He examined the harp and the case and said he’d handle the lawsuit on a contingency basis. The railroad settled right away. After giving the lawyer his cut, our share of the settlement was two hundred dollars.

And that is how I came to get a new harp, my first really good harp, with pedals and everything. I resolved to treat it better than I had my old forty-five-dollar model. I would play it on the right shoulder from the start. I would learn to tune it right (all I knew about tuning the harp was that I was tuning it wrong). I would learn to use the pedals and play it in other keys besides F-flat. And I would never take it for a ride in a Model-T Ford.

Rockford, Illinois. We were on the Pantages circuit, playing a couple of local spots before making the great swing to the West Coast and back through Canada. In Rockford, the four of us and a monologist named Art Fisher started up a game of five-card stud, between shows.

At that time there was a very popular comic strip called “Knocko the Monk,” and as a result there was a rash of stage names that ended in “o.” On every bill there would be at least one Bingo, Zingo, Socko, Jumpo or Bumpo.

There must have been a couple of them on the bill with us in Rockford and we must have been making cracks about them, because when Art Fisher started dealing a poker hand he said, “A hole card for-`Harpo.’ A card for-’Chicko.’ One for-” Now that he’d committed himself, he had to pass “o-names” all around the table.