Harpo Speaks! (24 page)

One day at lunch, Woollcott told me he was bringing Minnie Maddern Fiske, the Grand Lady of the American Theatre and one of his great idols, to see our show on Thursday night. “Kindly see to it, Harpo,” he said, “that you live up to all the extravagant lies I’ve told Mrs. Fiske about you.”

Through somebody, probably Harold Ross, I got hold of a photograph of Aleck in his academic robes, taken at Hamilton College. I had the picture retouched and blown up, and on Thursday I pasted it onto the display in the lobby of the Casino, so that Alexander Woollcott, in cap and gown, was in the middle of the chorus line of I’ll Say She Is, kicking in unison with the gals to the left and right of him.

I knew Aleck must have seen the doctored poster in the lobby and I knew he was sore, because he didn’t bring Mrs. Fiske backstage after the performance. The next day he gave me the silent treatment at the Round Table. He didn’t speak to me until one night a week later. The occasion was the opening of a show called Izzat So down the street from the Casino. Groucho, Chico, Zeppo and I got in costume early that night and stood under the marquee of our theatre, playing mandolins and singing sad songs as the first-nighters and critics walked past to the opening.

When Woollcott came by he didn’t look at me, but he nearly knocked me down in passing, and said, under his breath, “Jew son-of-a-bitch.”

This struck me as being very funny, although it wasn’t one of Woollcott’s best. It wasn’t even original. It was the punch line from my story about Mrs. Schang and the Happy Times Tavern, Aleck’s favorite tale of true-life adventure.

The next day he was his old, yakkity self again, as if nothing had happened.

I was now a harpist with eight years’ professional experience. I decided it was time I should learn to read music and to play the harp correctly, but I was a little shy about going out to look for a teacher.

As it happened, a teacher came to me. A guy came back after a matinee to say how much he’d enjoyed the show, and how “terribly original” he thought my playing was. I didn’t know whether this was a dig or a compliment, until he told me he was a harpist with the Metropolitan Opera Company. I asked him if he might give me lessons and he said he’d be flattered to, at twenty bucks a throw. We made a date.

When I arrived at the studio for my first lesson, the maestro told me to start playing immediately, anything. I led off with the Sextet from Lucia, the nearest thing to a classical piece in my repertoire. He watched me so closely his nose was practically sticking through the strings, and he kept talking to himself: “Ah, yes! .. . Ah, so! . . . Extraordinary! . . .”

When I finished the sextet he fluttered a hand and told me to keep playing, anything, anything at all. “But don’t you think we ought to start with how to read notes?” I said. He shook his head and made impatient noises with his tongue and said to play.

I played. Every eight bars I stopped to ask what about the notes, and he kept saying I didn’t need notes-just keep playing.

Then he began to stop me, to ask me questions. Could he see again how I did that glissando? Could I do that trill again? If I brought up the subject of reading music, or pedal work, or fingering, he promptly shut me up.

By the time the hour was up, I had taught the maestro my whole lousy technique. When he took my twenty bucks, he said he couldn’t tell me how much he looked forward to our next session. I told him he didn’t have to, since there wouldn’t be any next session.

That was the end of my formal study of the harp.

In the thirty-five years since then, I have had many legitimate harpists, including great virtuosos like Salzedo and Grandjany, ask me to demonstrate my technique. They were utterly fascinated that I could get any sound at all out of the instrument, the way I played it, let alone some pretty good sounds. I was always willing to demonstrate, but damned if I would ever again pay twenty bucks to give any teacher a lesson.

The nearest I’ve had to a regular teacher has been a lady named Mildred Dilling. I first met her in a music store where she was trying out a new harp. She was playing a piece called “The Music Box.” I introduced myself and confessed that I couldn’t read notes, and asked her if she would please teach me to play “The Music Box.” She was delighted to. We soon became good friends. It was she who introduced me to the world of Bach and Mozart, Debussy and Ravel. Thanks to this fine and generous artist I came to realize that the Sextet from Lucia was not, after all, the greatest piece of classical music ever written.

Like all the others, Miss Dilling never tried to change my screwball technique. But she was glad to help me in any other way. Many a time I’ve telephoned her (sometimes from across the country, waking her up in the middle of the night) when I’ve gotten stuck on a tricky chord. Night or day, she wouldn’t fail me. She’d hitch her harp close to the phone in her studio and play the chord over and over until I got it, at the other end of the wire.

What you might call an Extension Course.

The night of the closing of I’ll Say She Is, quite a gang was waiting in the Algonquin to congratulate me on our successful run. When I shook hands with F.P.A. he said nothing, but a hotel knife dropped out of his sleeve and clattered onto the lobby floor. I think that was the exact moment I knew, without any reservations, that I belonged to the world of Woollcott and his friends and to no other.

I never did get back to Lindy’s.

The night after we closed, Aleck invited me to go along with him to cover the opening of a new play. He had a hunch that he might need company for the ordeal, and he was right. It was a play in two acts about a pioneer airmail pilot. The story, as I remember, went something like this: Pilot crashes. Drags himself to an Indian wigwam. Indian family, mother, father, daughter, dressed in skins, take him in. Daughter goes for pilot, pilot goes for daughter. Mother discovers them in smooch. Mother exclaims to father, “Our little girl has become a lady!” Father misconstrues, swears to avenge his daughter’s honor. First act curtain. Act two: Pilot still limping around wigwam, still sneaking off with daughter. Father, wrathful, confronts daughter. Daughter swears pilot has done nothing to her except vouch true love. Old man confronts pilot. Pilot makes tragic confession, proving nothing could have happened between him and daughter. Reveals vital part of his anatomy had been severed in plane crash. Curtain.

Woollcott’s summary of the play, in the next morning’s paper, I shall never forget. It was two sentences long: “In the first act, she becomes a lady. In the second act, he becomes a lady.”

Nearly every producer on Broadway wanted to sign us up for our second show, including Ziegfeld, Dillingham, and even (shades of Indianapolis!) the Shuberts. The one guy who didn’t go after us was the one guy we wanted to work for-Sam Harris.

Irving Berlin, who had become quite a fan of ours, went to bat for us. Strictly as a favor to Berlin, Harris agreed to look over some of our acts, in his office. He looked us over. He said he’d let us know.

To take up the slack, we signed for a couple of out-of-town stands in I’ll Say She Is. We were playing in Syracuse when a call came from Sam Harris. He said he wanted us to star in his next production. So that a minute wouldn’t be wasted, a writer was already on his way to Syracuse to talk to us and knock out some new blackout sketches for us.

The last thing we wanted was a blackout writer hanging around, knocking out new sketches. We had plenty of sketches of our own. What we wanted to do was a real show, not a corny revue. But we didn’t want to trouble Mr. Harris. We decided we’d take care of the writer ourselves.

He turned up backstage that night, a small fellow with a cocky manner, and introduced himself. We just stared at him. Zeppo did all the talking. “Take off your coat,” he said, and the guy took off his coat. Zeppo pulled up the guy’s shirt sleeves and said, “So you want to write us a new show, huh?” He felt the muscle on the guy’s right arm and shook his head. He felt his left arm and shook his head again. The guy started to squawk and Zeppo said, “Didn’t Sam tell you how we do business with writers?”

The guy looked puzzled, then apprehensive. Zeppo rolled up his own sleeves. In those days Zeppo had biceps like Charles Atlas. “Okay, writer, let’s go,” he said. “Rassle you to a fall. You write us two shows or nothing.”

The blackout man grabbed his coat and ran. We never saw him again.

When he reported back, Sam was not perturbed, as we found out later. He paid the guy off, then called up George S. Kaufman, and said, “I need a big writer who can wrestle, George. How tall are you?”

When George learned what Sam needed a big writer for, he said, “Are you crazy? Write a show for the Marx Brothers? I’d rather write a show for the Barbary apes!” But Sam was not perturbed.

Our second Broadway hit was The Cocoanuts-music by Irving Berlin, and book by George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind, staged by George S. Kaufman.

Unknown

CHAPTER 12

No Use Talking

The Cocoanuts got off to a roaring start at the first rehearsal. George Kaufman sat on the empty stage, under a worklight, and began to read the script. Halfway through the first scene, Chico fell asleep. Somewhere in the second scene, I fell asleep. It wasn’t that I was bored. I felt comfortable, and confident. There would be no need for Zep to rassle Kaufman and Rvskind, two shows or nothing. I had heard enough to know that they’d written no string of blackouts, but a real musical play-whatever the hell it was about.

By the time we opened in Boston, Kaufman didn’t know what it was about either, we were ad libbing so much. Whenever a new bit occurred to Chico or me, we did it. Whenever a gag popped into Groucho’s mind, he delivered it. The first performance ran forty minutes too long. All the critics and most of the audience had left long before the curtain finally came down.

Berlin, Kaufman and Ryskind stayed up all night trying to hack the show down to size. They cut a chorus here, a chorus there, and a couple of dance numbers. The next day we obediently rehearsed the new version. The next performance ran even longer. There was scarcely enough dough in the box office to pay the stagehands’ overtime.

Berlin, Kaufman and Ryskind held an emergency meeting. Only thing to do, said Kaufman morosely, was to cut another production number, two more choruses, and two songs altogether. Irving Berlin yelped like he’d been stabbed in the back. “My God!” he said. “Any more cuts and this will be a musical without any music!”

Kaufman had a long, lugubrious brood, twisting an arm around his head and massaging an ear, and rubbing his collarbone with his chin. “Tell you what, Irving,” he said. “You waive the songs and I’ll waive the story.”

The only song Berlin was willing to take out was a ballad that he admitted was “no good even as a show tune.” The ballad was “Always,” which wasn’t heard in Cocoanuts, but which had a life of its own long afterwards. Irving bled over the other cuts like a doting but helpless father watching his babies go to the guillotine.

The crisis came to a head when the stagehands’ union gave Sam Harris an ultimatum: the crew had to be out of the theatre by eleven o’clock at night or they’d walk off the production. Sam came to our dressing room immediately after the Saturday matinee. George and Irving were already there. Sam asked them, in his gentle, unruffled way, to please step outside. This, he explained, was a matter between him and the boys.

Chico, Groucho, Zep and I knew exactly what to do, without any premeditation. We grabbed Sam, stripped off his clothes and threw them out the dressing-room door. Sam, shaking his head but otherwise unperturbed, stepped outside, bare-naked, commenced to pick up his clothes, and said to Kaufman and Berlin, “Perhaps you fellows had better deal with them directly.”

The unfunny part of it all was that the audiences didn’t think we were worth laughing at. None of us came out and said it, but the Marx Brothers were running scared. What we were doing was playing to each other, not to the people out front. We were in bad shape and we knew it.

But the minute the curtain went up in the Lyric Theatre for the New York opening, all the tribulations of Boston were forgotten. Aleck was out front with the other Algonquin regulars, and so was Minnie-all daring us to outdo I’ll Say She Is. I felt great, and I felt like having some fun. During the tryout I was never in on the script conferences, since I had no lines to be changed. While the others conferred, I would retreat to my hotel room, where I worked out some ideas of my own. Now we could put them into action.

Our first scene had been tried a dozen different ways, but never seemed to come off. Opening night, in New York, it came off. This is how it went:

Groucho is behind the desk of a Florida hotel (the story had to do vaguely with the Florida real-estate boom). Chico and I come in looking for rooms. A bellhop tries to take my bag. I won’t let him have it. We grapple and the bag falls open. Its total contents are three telephone directories. We go to sign in. I lean on the desk and do takes while Chico and Groucho do all the talking. The phone rings. Groucho says, “You want ice water in room 202? I’ll send up an onion. That’ll make your ice water.”

I’m bored. A Western Union boy (tired of waiting for his cue) comes in with a stack of telegrams. I grab the telegrams and start tearing them up. This is such wonderful sport that I don’t want to stop. I jump over the desk and grab mail out of the pigeonholes and tear it up too. My enjoyment is so infectious that Groucho pitches in and helps me tear up the letters. When the last pieces flutter to the floor, I’m dejected. “Sorry the afternoon mail hasn’t come in yet,” Groucho says apologetically. Now what to do? I clap my hands, grab the pen out of Groucho’s hand and throw it like a dart at a plaque on the wall. A bell rings. Groucho hands me a cigar.

We had the joint in a riot and we didn’t let it simmer down for the rest of the night. We were a hit. Now George Kaufman could smile again. But we still didn’t know George well enough. He came backstage with his chin on his chest and said that Act One seemed to be all right, but Act Two needed another cut. Somewhere in the middle of Act Two-he wasn’t exactly sure where-he could have sworn he heard one of his original lines.