Harpo Speaks! (17 page)

The first two had been simple. I played the harp and my older brother chased the chicks. For a moment Art was stuck. Then he continued the deal. A card for “Groucho” (he carried his dough in a grouch-bag), and finally a card for “Gummo” (he had a gumshoe way of prowling around backstage and sneaking up on people).

We stuck with the gag handles for the rest of the game and that, we thought, was that. It wasn’t. We couldn’t get rid of them. We were Chicko, Harpo, Groucho and Gummo for the rest of the week, the rest of the season, and the rest of our lives.

Later, when we decided to make it official, and have our Art Fisher names put on the program, the typesetter made a mistake, and left the “k” out of Chicko. The power of the printed word being what it is, “Chico” is the way it has been spelled ever since.

Still later, Gummo left the act and was replaced by Herbie, the baby of the family. Herbie, since he was always chinning himself and practicing acrobatics, we named “Zippo.” “Mr. Zippo” was the star of a famous trained chimpanzee act. Our Zippo, understandably, felt that we were being very unflattering, and he insisted on spelling his stage name “Zeppo.”

You never could tell what you might be dealt in a poker game in those days.

Through darkest Kansas, on the Rock Island Line. It was while touring the Pantages-time that I became a full-fledged gambling man. With the rest of the company, we traveled the whole season in a private railroad car. This was not a Pullman, but a “tourist” car with hard, woven-straw seats. There was nothing deluxe about it. Still, it was a happy home between stands for thirty-some people. In the car we ate, read, wrote letters, made love, argued, fought, rehearsed, and sometimes slept but most of the time played cards. The air was forever full of smoke and the jingle of money.

Our car was treated with very little respect by the railroads. It was bumped and jerked and shuttled around and often left forgotten on sidings miles from anywhere. We never deboarded at a station, like civilians. We would wind up in freight yards, along with pig iron, sheep, and cattle, where there was nobody to tote trunks and baggage except the owners.

Poker was the big game in the car, and we had some mighty wild, sleepless jumps on the Pantages-time.

One season there was a guy named Mons Herbert in the company. Mons used to set a dinner table on the stage, and play “The Anvil Chorus” by blowing knives and forks against each other. For a finish he would blow up a prop roast turkey and deflate it in such a way that it played “Oh, Dry Those Tears” out of its rump.

It wasn’t his lung power we admired Mons Herbert for, however, as much as his gold teeth. He had a dazzling mouthful of gold. Because of this he was our favorite poker player. He never knew it, but he flashed signals every time he picked up a hand. If he showed two gold teeth we knew he held three of a kind, or maybe two pairs. Three gold teeth: a straight. Four: a flush. When he didn’t open his mouth, and no teeth showed, you knew he held nothing, and any pair could beat him.

On the Pantages we were paid off each week by the local manager, and we all had cash in our pockets during the jump to the next date. Still, I never bet for very high stakes. Like Groucho, I continued to send most of my dough home to Minnie. Chico was just as loyal and well-meaning as Groucho and I, but he apparently didn’t trust the United States mails, because what he sent home to Minnie were mainly IOU’s.

Butte, Montana. On Monday nights in Butte, Montana, a special section of the house was reserved for the local prostitutes and madams. You could always be sure of a wonderful audience on Monday nights in Butte. With them, you could do nothing wrong. If anybody blew up or missed a cue or pulled a boner, they loved that too. I never did, but my dog once did.

He was a big Airedale, named “Denver” after the town I’d picked him up in. Denver was very devoted to me. I had to shut him in my dressing room during our act or else he’d follow me onstage. I could never convince Denver that the Marx Brothers were not a dog act.

Once, this time in Butte, Denver got loose while I was watching the “class act” on the bill (a ballet troupe) from the wings. Looking for me, he wandered onstage. One of the dancers tried to shoo him off, but Denver was in no hurry. He had some important business to take care of first. He ambled over to the easel that stood next to the proscenium arch. In the rosy glow of the easel spotlight he lifted his leg and did his business, all over the card reading “Danse Orientale.” From the way the chippies hollered and screamed, it was the greatest finish any ballet ever had.

The manager didn’t agree with the audience. He fined me five bucks and made me keep Denver tied up outside the stage door at all times.

Elko, Nevada. It was along about here that I first worked out my “going under the carpet” bit. In the scene I was being chased by a cop. I couldn’t find any place to hide. Desperate, I lifted up the edge of the rug and (as the audience saw it) slid under it feet first, on my back, and vanished completely, as if I’d turned into a sheet of cardboard. Not the slightest bulge showed in the carpet. The stunt never failed to rock an audience (especially if-when I could get away with it, in some of the rougher towns out west I poked a finger through a hole in the carpet) .

The trick, of course, was in the way the stage had been prepared before the act. The floor the carpet was spread on was not the real floor, but was built up by using parallels, or platform boxes. Under the middle of the carpet, there was a gap between parallels, covered with a canvas set-piece. It was into this slot that I slid to make my astounding disappearance.

San Francisco. As we hit San Francisco, so did the rain. My God, how it rained. I got soaked going to the theatre, so after the matinee I went out to buy a raincoat at the first place I could find.

The first place I could find was a hockshop. I bought a dapper-looking, secondhand trench coat for three dollars. It may have looked dapper on the rack but on me, I found out after I bought it, it hung like a tent. What the hell, at that price I didn’t care what it looked like so long as it kept the rain off. I ran back to the theatre and hung it in the backstage john to dry.

When I put it on after the evening show, the coat fell apart at the seams. I was sore as hell. I sloshed over to the hockshop, in the tattered, flapping trench coat, to get my three bucks back.

By the time I got there I wasn’t sore any longer. I always have trouble staying angry for more than five minutes at anybody, over anything. So I left the hockshop not with my three bucks back, but with my unstitched trench coat, and a clarinet I had just bought for six-fifty.

So that it wouldn’t be a total loss, I wore the coat in the act the next day. It was a natural. I couldn’t have come up with a better comedy coat if I’d had one custom-made. It was perfect with my battered plug hat, ratty wig, and underslung pants with the clothesline belt. I lined the trench coat with huge panels and pockets-enough room to stash half a trunk’s worth of props in. I was highly pleased with my purchase, and with the foresight I had shown by selecting it out of all the raincoats in San Francisco. Seattle. A violin player named Solly Soloshky joined the company. He was a hell of a fiddler but he had one shortcoming. He could only play naturals, no accidentals. He tried to teach himself but he had some kind of a block against sharps and flats and simply couldn’t master them. This cut down his repertoire, and therefore his billing, considerably, and made him very unhappy.

I showed Solly how it was done on the harp, with pedals, and he was almost sick with envy. I felt sorry for him. There wasn’t much I could do for Solly then, but I swore that when I got back to Chicago I would case the music stores for a violin with pedals, and if I found one I would buy it and send it to him.

For all I know, Solly is still hopefully waiting for the fiddle with pedals on it.

Fargo, North Dakota. As the season neared the end, we all got bored with ourselves, our act, and the rest of the company. Thirty weeks was a long time. It was Groucho who cracked under the strain first. Groucho was filling in for the m.c., who’d been fired off the bill. He introduced “The Creole Fashion Plate”-a female impersonator-as “The Queer Old Fashion Plate,” whereupon Groucho was fired off the bill.

(The most fascinating performer I knew in those days was a dame named Metcalfe who was a female female impersonator. To maintain the illusion and keep her job, she had to be a male impersonator when she wasn’t on. Onstage she wore a wig, which she would remove at the finish, revealing her mannish haircut. “Fooled you!” she would boom at the audience in her husky baritone. Then she would stride off to her dressing room and change back to men’s clothes. She fooled every audience she played to, and most of the managers she worked for, but her secret was hard to keep from the rest of the company. Every time she went to the men’s room, half the guys on the bill would pile in after her.)

And so, back to Chicago. Home was the weary, footsore trouper, home from the distant provinces. Summer was a-coming, and all was well with the world. Minnie was in the living room, pasting up her scrapbook. Frenchie was in the kitchen, cooking sauerkraut and ribs. And Grandpa was on the porch, rocking in his chair, watching the automobiles go by and calling out the makes aloud: “Fort … Moxfell … Fort … Dotsch … Shtoots … Pockart … Moxfell . . . Fort …”

This was the second summer of the First World War. Gummo was the only one of us to be called up in the draft, and he was serving with the army at a camp near Chicago. I was serving with Chico, in a card room in the back of a cigar store on 45th Street. Actually, there were two cigar stores at that location, with two card rooms, back to back. This proved to be a most fortunate arrangement.

There was a city law that all games had to cease at one o’clock in the morning. Late this night, I was playing pinochle in one card room and Chico was playing in the adjoining place. At five minutes to one, Chico’s game broke up, and he came over to kibitz me. I had just been dealt a fabulous hand in spades, and I had the bid, four hundred points. The curfew was creeping up on me and I began to sweat. If I lost this hand I’d be broke for the rest of the summer.

Chico gave my cards a quick look over my shoulder. He signaled me to stall, then moseyed around the table and out of the room, by the back way. I stalled. Half a minute later I was wanted on the telephone. It was Chico, calling from next door. “Blank your ace of diamonds,” he said, “and lead the jack of trump….”

In his brief amble around the card table Chico had memorized all the opposing hands. He told me exactly how to play. I rushed back and followed his instructions and on the stroke of one o’clock I hauled in the stakes and the kitty.

The only guy who was a match for Chico at pinochle was a Chicago character named Pete Penovitch. Pete had wonderful looks-a natural disguise for a gambler. He was a big six-footer, but baby-faced, with sleepy eyes, and a shock of prematurely white hair. He looked like an overgrown, lazy kid. But he was far from lazy. He had the busiest mind I ever encountered, and a photographic memory to go with it. When he played he demanded total concentration and never tolerated so much as an ash tray on the table to distract him.

Pete won at gambling any way he could, fair means or foul, and managed to make more than a few enemies over the years. Even when I first knew him, when he was in his early twenties, he would never sit with his back to a door. I remember the first time I ate out with Pete. When his stack of wheat cakes came, he lifted the one on top and ate the second flapjack first. By force of habit, he was unable to deal even wheat cakes from the top of the deck.

Later on, when Pete was one of Al Capone’s bodyguards, he got in a bad jam. His mouthpiece advised him to get out of townway out of town-until the heat was off. “Okay,” said Penovitch, “I’ll go on a hunting trip.” “Great,” said the lawyer. “Where’ll you go?”

“Milwaukee.”

“Milwaukee? What the hell are you going to hunt in Milwaukee?”

“Oh,” said Pete, “cats, dogs, whatever they got around there.”

For a while he ran a gambling casino in Chicago. When he first opened he showed me his layout. He was really proud of the joint. His roulette wheel alone, he said, could pay the nut. It was rigged so the house couldn’t lose-even if the players had every number covered. “If that ever happened,” he said, “the pill would jump off the wheel, hop out the door, and roll down Michigan Avenue.”

Pete used to come around to the house and shoot pool with us, sometimes with his friend Nick the Greek. Our basement was in a continuous uproar. Everybody shot pool in those days, even Grandpa, who was nearly a hundred years old. Grandpa never had to wear glasses, and he continued to smoke his pipe, roll his own cigars, call out the cars, and shoot pool, right up to the end.

The only one of us who couldn’t tolerate the mad life day in and day out was Groucho. Groucho had to have privacy, to read. For hours at a time he would read in his Elgin roadster, parked on 33rd Street. Once he finished a book sitting in his car in a garage, while it was hoisted up on chains, being repaired.

To be truthful, life was not all pool and pinochle for the rest of us either. We played for a lot of army camps that summer. And long before the summer was over, Minnie got the bug again. It was time for a better circuit. It was time for her boys’ next rise in class.

Once again, Minnie did it. She got us a week’s booking into one of the best showcases in town, the Wilson Avenue Theatre. The Wilson was under Albee management, and it paid the same scale as the Chicago Palace. (E. F. Albee was the all-powerful Emperor of big-time vaudeville, who ruled from a throne room above the New York Palace-the Palace.)

After our run at the Wilson, we were signed for thirty weeks on the Orpheum circuit. This was it! We had risen in class as far as we could go, short of playing the Palace itself. The Marx Brothers were on the Big Time.

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CHAPTER 10

But, Can You Carry It

on the Chief ?