Harpo Speaks! (2 page)

There were two causes of this. One was a big Irish kid in my class and the other was a bigger Irish kid. I was a perfect patsy for them, a marked victim. I was small for my age. I had a high, squeaky voice. And I was the only Jewish boy in the room. The teacher, a lady named Miss Flatto, had pretty much given up on teaching me anything. Miss Flatto liked to predict, in front of the class, that I would come to no good end. This was the only matter on which the Irish kids agreed with Miss Flatto, and they saw to it that her prediction came true.

Every once in a while, when Miss Flatto left the room, the Irishers would pick me up and throw me out the window, into the street. Fortunately our room was on the first floor. The drop was about eight feet-high enough for a good jolt but low enough not to break any bones.

I would pick myself up, dust myself off, and return to the classroom as soon as I was sure the teacher was back. I would explain to Miss Flatto that I had been to the toilet. I knew that if I squealed I’d get worse than a heave out the window. She must have believed I didn’t have enough sense to control my organs, let alone comprehend the subjects of reading and writing. She began sending notes to my mother, all with the same warning: Something had better be done about straightening me out or I would be a disgrace to my family, my community, and my country.

My mother was too busy with other matters at the time to straighten me out with the public school system. For one thing, it seemed more urgent to keep my older brother Chico out of the poolroom than to keep me in the schoolroom.

So my mother appointed a delegate to go confer with Miss Flatto. That was unfortunate. The delegate was the boy friend of my cousin Polly, who was then living with us. He peddled herring in the streets, out of wooden buckets, yelling up and down the neighborhood, “Hey, best here! Best here! Best here in de verld!” Naturally, he stunk from fish; you could smell him a block away.

So one day he turned up in the middle of a class, fish buckets and all. He didn’t get very far in his conference with Miss Flatto. She took one look and one smell, began to get sick, and ordered Polly’s boy friend to leave the school. All the other kids in the room began to smirk, holding their noses, and Miss Flatto did nothing to stop them.

I knew I was dead.

The two Irish boys now gave me the heave-ho every chance they got, which was three or four times a day, and Miss Flatto made me stay after school every afternoon for leaving the room so many times without permission. I can still see her finger waggling at the end of my nose, and hear her saying, “Some day you will realize, young man, you will realize!” I didn’t know what she meant, but I never forgot her words.

Partly because he’d made such a fool of himself in front of my class, Polly broke off with her boy friend. I felt pretty bad about this. I also felt pretty bad around the knees and elbows from being dumped out the schoolhouse window with such regularity.

So one sunny day when Miss Flatto left the room and I was promptly heaved into the street, I picked myself up, turned my back on P.S. 86 and walked straight home, and that was the end of my formal education.

There is an interesting sidelight to this episode. On the rebound, my cousin Polly took up with a tailor, whom she soon married, congratulating herself for escaping a life that stunk of fish. Her husband remained a tailor the rest of his life. The herring peddler she jilted became successful in a series of businesses and died a very wealthy man.

I was eight years old when I was thrown out of school the last time. Home at that time was a flat in a tenement at 179 East 93rd Street, in a small Jewish neighborhood squeezed in between the Irish to the north and the Germans to the south in Yorkville.

The tenement at 179 was the first real home I can remember. Until we moved there we had lived like gypsies, never traveling far-in fact never out of the neighborhood-but always moving, haunted and pursued by eviction notices, attachments, and glintyeyed landlord’s agents. The Marxes were poor, very poor. We were always hungry. And we were numerous. But thanks to the amazing spirit of my father and my mother, poverty never made any of us depressed or angry. My memory of my earliest years is vague but pleasant, full of the sound of singing and laughter, and full of people I loved.

The less food we had, it seemed, the more people we had to feed. Nobody grumbled about this. We just worked a little harder and schemed a little harder to hustle up a soup bone or a pail of sauerkraut. There were ten mouths to feed every day at 179: five boys, from Chico down to Zeppo; cousin Polly, who’d been adopted as one of us; my mother and father, and my mother’s mother and father. A lot of the time my mother’s sister, Aunt Hannah, was around too. And on any given night of the week, any given number of relatives from both sides of the family might turn up, unannounced but never unwelcome.

This put all kinds of burdens on Frenchie, which was what we called my father, Sam Marx. Frenchie was the family housekeeper and cook. He was also the breadwinner. Frenchie was a tailor by trade. He was never able to own his own shop, and during the day his cutting table and sewing bench took up the whole dining room, with lengths and scraps of materials overflowing into the kitchen. At six o’clock he quit whatever he was working on, in the middle of a stitch, and stashed his profession in the hall, materials, tools, tables and all, and turned to the task of making dinner for ten or eleven or sixteen people.

This task would have been hopeless to anybody else in the world, but Frenchie always managed to put a meal on the table. With food he was a true magician. Given a couple of short ribs, a wilting cabbage, a handful of soup greens, a bag of chestnuts and a pinch of spices, he could conjure up miracles. God, how fabulous the tenement smelled when Frenchie, chopping and ladling, sniffing and stirring and tasting, and forever smiling and humming to himself, got the kitchen up to full steam!

Later I found out that Frenchie smiled and hummed not so much over his culinary artistry, but over the prospect of sneaking away to a pinochle game the minute he’d gobbled his share of dinner. Frenchie was terrible at pinochle, but he loved the game and thought he was a crackerjack player.

Unfortunately the same was true of Frenchie as a tailor. Tailoring he also loved and thought he was good at; but he was even a worse tailor than he was a pinochle player.

“Samuel Marx, Custom Tailor to the Men’s Trade,” he billed himself-bravely and wistfully. Frenchie was a trim and handsome little man, with twinkling brown eyes and a face that was smoothly sculptured around a permanent, thin-lipped smile. He made strangers feel he was holding inside him a secret too wonderful to talk about.

Even in his most threadbare days, he managed to keep an air of elegance. His mustache was always neatly clipped, his fine, dark hair sleekly in place. Given the chance to show it, Frenchie had impeccable taste in clothes and he knew how to wear them. The trouble was, he never doubted that he could make good clothes with the same ease. To give him full credit, he was an excellent judge of color and fabric. He had a genuine feel for material. It was instinctive, like his cooking. But Frenchie also relied on feel to measure a suit (never used a tape measure), to cut a pattern (like a free-hand artist cutting silhouettes), and to sew a suit together (never bothered with a fitting).

So, when Frenchie delivered a finished job to a customer, the family waited for his return with fear and trembling. Would he return with cash or would be return with the suit? More than half the time he returned with the suit.

Periodically, when the unpaid-for suits piled up, Frenchie would pack the rejects along with a bunch of remnants (called “lappas”) into two big suitcases and go off, with a shrug and his eternal smile, to peddle them door-to-door in the suburbs. At the same time, with no word of complaint, my mother would hit up her brother Al for a loan and my grandfather would gather up the kit from under his bed and take to the streets of New York to repair umbrellas.

Life had a way of going on, even when Frenchie was out on the road. But the kitchen at 179 was a cold and dreary place until he came home, with his suitcases full of fresh cabbages and ham hocks instead of suits and “lappas.”

Throughout all the hungry, rugged days of my childhood, Frenchie never stopped working. He never ducked his responsibility of being the family breadwinner. He tried the best he could, at the job he stubbornly thought he could do the best. Frenchie was a loving, gentle man, who accepted everything that happened-good luck or tragedy-with the same unchangeable, sweet nature. He had no ambition beyond living and accepting life from day to day. He had only two vices: loyalty to everybody he ever knew (he never had an enemy, even amongst the sharpies who fleeced him), and the game of pinochle.

I shouldn’t knock Frenchie’s loyalty. That’s what kept our family together, come right down to it. Frenchie was born in a part of Alsace-Lorraine that had stayed loyal to Germany, even when France ruled the province. So while the official language was French, at home the Marxes spoke “Plattdeutsch,” low-country German.

When the family came to America, they naturally gravitated toward immigrants who spoke the same dialect. On the upper East Side of Manhattan (on the border of Yorkville, just as Alsace-Lorraine was on the border of Germany), a sort of Plattdeutsch Society sprang up-unofficial, but tightly knit.

Anybody who spoke Plattdeutsch was okay with Frenchie, had his undying trust. And since Frenchie was one of the few tailors in the city who spoke Plattdeutsch he got a lot of business, out of sheer sentiment, that he never deserved. If it weren’t for the mutual loyalty of Frenchie and his landsmen, the Marx brothers wouldn’t have stayed under the same roof long enough to have become acquainted, let alone go forth together into show business.

The responsibility that was toughest for Frenchie was that of family disciplinarian. A stern father he was not, could not by nature be. But he never gave up trying to play the role.

Whenever I got caught stealing from a neighborhood store, it was a serious offense. (The offense to me, of course, was not stealing but being caught at it.) The guy I robbed would (loyalty again) turn me over to Frenchie instead of the cops for punishment.

Frenchie would suck in his lips like he was trying to swallow his smile, frown at me, shake his head, and say, “Boy, for what you ditt I’m going to give you. I’m going to break every bone in your botty!” Then he would march me into the hallway, so the rest of the family wouldn’t have to witness the brutal scene.

There he would whip a whisk broom out of his pocket. “All right, boy,” he’d say, “I’m going to give you!” He’d shake the whisk broom under my chin and repeat, through clenched teeth, “I’m going to give you!”

Frenchie, gamely as he tried, could never bring himself to go any farther than shaking the broom beneath my chin. He would sigh and walk back into the flat, brushing his hands together in a gesture of triumph, so the family should see that justice had been done.

I couldn’t have hurt more if my father had broken every bone in my body,

Of all the people Frenchie loved and was loyal to, none was more unlike him than Minnie Schoenberg Marx, his wife, my mother. A lot has been written about Minnie Marx. She’s become a legend in show business. And just about everything anybody ever said about her is true. Minnie was quite a gal.

She was a lovely woman, but her soft, doelike looks were deceiving. She had the stamina of a brewery horse, the drive of a salmon fighting his way up a waterfall, the cunning of a fox, and a devotion to her brood as fierce as any she-lion’s. Minnie loved to whoop it up. She liked to be in the thick of things, whenever there was singing, storytelling, or laughter. But this was in a way deceiving too. Her whole adult life, every minute of it, was dedicated to her Master Plan.

Minnie had the ambition to carry out any plan she might have decided on, with enough left over to carry all the rest of us right along with her. Even in her gayest moments she was working, plotting and scheming all the time she was telling jokes and whooping it up.

Minnie’s Plan was simply this: to put her kid brother and her five sons on the stage and make them successful. She went to work down the line starting with Uncle Al (who’d changed his name from Schoenberg to Shean), then took up, in order, Groucho, Gummo, myself, Chico and Zeppo. This was one hell of a job. What made it even tougher was the fact that only Uncle Al and Groucho wanted to be in show business in the first place, and after Groucho got a taste of the stage, he wanted to be a writer. Chico wanted to be a professional gambler. Gummo wanted to be an inventor. Zeppo wanted to be a prize fighter. I wanted to play the piano on a ferryboat.

But nobody could change Minnie’s mind. Her Master Plan was carried out, by God, all down the line.

Her relationship with Frenchie, in the days when I was growing up, was more like a business partnership than the usual kind of marriage. Minnie was the Outside Man. Frenchie was the Inside Man. Minnie fought the world to work out her family’s destiny. Frenchie stayed home, sewing and cooking. Minnie was the absolute boss. She made all the decisions, but Frenchie never seemed to resent this.

It was impossible for anybody to resent Minnie. She was too much fun. It was Minnie who kept our lives full of laughter, so we seldom noticed how long it was between meals in the days when we were broke.

It never occurred to us that this setup between mother and father was odd, or unnatural. We were like a family of castaways surviving on a desert island. There was no money, no prestige, no background, to help the Marxes make their way in America. It was us against the elements, and each of us found his own way to survive. Frenchie took to tailoring. Chico took to the poolroom. I took to the streets. Minnie held us all together while she plotted our rescue.

The only tradition in our family was our lack of tradition.

Minnie’s mother, Fanny Schoenberg, died soon after we moved to East 93rd Street, but Grandpa Schoenberg remained a figure in the household until he finally resigned from living at the age of one century, in 1919. Grandpa was therefore not classified as a Relative. He was Family.