Harpo Speaks! (35 page)

Miss it? Why, she’d never left it, she said. Right now she was working up a new act, a single, that she was going to push all the way to the Palace. “Who is it?” I asked. “Anybody I know?” Sure I knew him. It was the chauffeur. “Don’t laugh,” Minnie said quickly. “He’s got a voice as good as Lou’s ever was. Just needs a few dance lessons and a season or two on the road and he’ll be ready for the Big Time.”

Minnie didn’t believe a bit of it and she knew I didn’t either, but she loved the sound of the words. For a minute there she was back in fighting shape. Then her eyes lost their snap and, for the first time, my mother looked old to me.

My reunion with Chico, Groucho and Zeppo was on the stage of the 44th Street Theatre. Sam Harris had a new show for us, and I hardly had time to unpack my trunk before rehearsals began. The new show was Animal Crackers. It opened in October and became our third straight Broadway hit.

The only low note of the season was struck early in November by twenty-one million strangers, the people who voted for their Herbert Hoover instead of my Al Smith. Al Smith was to me one of the greatest living Americans. I simply couldn’t believe the figures when the report came in that he had failed to carry even New York State. At what had been scheduled to be a victory rally at Yankee Stadium, but turned out to be a wake, I played “The Sidewalks of New York” on the harp. It was the only time my own playing ever brought tears to my eyes.

But these weren’t times for sour grapes or bitter feelings, and the defeat was soon forgotten. Anyway, Franklin Roosevelt had won the governorship in Albany. This was one of the few Roosevelts around I hadn’t met, but Aleck knew him and so did F.P.A. and they were pretty wild about him and said he was a guy to watch.

On Thursday night, November 22, the Woollcott mob was gathered at Alice Miller’s. I joined them as soon as the show was over. I was ready for an old-fashioned, island-style evening of quizzes and games. But what it turned out to be was a surprise party for me. November 23 was my thirty-fifth birthday.

Aleck’s present was the high point of the party. The present was a set of stationery he’d had printed up. The letterhead across the top said: HARPO DUER MARX. Beneath this were two photographs-“Mr. Marx at Home” and “Mr. Marx at Work”-from my Chicago days. Damned if I knew how Aleck had got hold of them. I hadn’t seen the pictures myself for years. The final touch was a column that ran down the left side of the paper, entitled “A Few Tributes to Mr. Marx.” The tributes were: “Why do we all love Harpo Marx?”-Somerset Maugham; “I was much embarrassed by Harpo Marx”-G. Bernard Shaw; and “Harpo Marx is one of the Four Marx Brothers”-Percy Hammond. Hammond, the theatre critic on the New York Tribune, was never exactly a fan of ours.

I had to thank Aleck in my own way for the stationery. He’d gone to a lot of trouble to have it made, so I should go to a little trouble to show my gratitude. A chance came a couple of weeks later, when Aleck dropped by my dressing room to walk me home after the show. I noticed that his black, broad-brimmed impresario hat was exactly the size of the comedy Spanish hat I wore in the second act of Animal Crackers-a ten-gallon, striped sombrero covered with gold and silver spangles and shaped like a volcano.

As we left the dressing room I switched hats on him. He didn’t feel the difference.

I suggested we walk through Times Square. It was a warm night for December and a big crowd was out, milling around under the lights. This was a spectacle I’d seen a thousand times, but it never failed to give me a thrill. Tonight there was an extra added spectacle-Woollcott, the fat blinking owl in the opera cape, crowned with a hat as flashy and gaudy as the marquee of the Capitol Theatre.

Going up Broadway Aleck was delighted that so many people recognized him and smiled at him. It was the only time I ever saw him mellow enough to smile back at the public.

At the corner of 57th and Park we said good night. Aleck walked contentedly away, his stripes and spangles lighting up as he passed beneath a street lamp.

I thought maybe he’d never find out why he’d been such an attraction on Times Square, which would have been a terrible shame. But at three in the morning the phone rang. Woollcott snapped the familiar, libelous phrase I was hoping to hear, and hung up. He had just discovered I had switched hats on him. For all I know, he’d been walking the streets of Manhattan and smiling at the people who stopped to stare at him ever since we’d parted, at midnight.

I went happily back to sleep. Harpo Duer Marx had been avenged.

Nineteen twenty-nine was bound to be the greatest year in modern history. It began with a New Year’s Eve party at the Swopes’. When the first day of January dawned, it was so beautiful out that we moved the whole party into Central Park and played croquet.

It seemed as if the New Year’s Eve party never did break up. The inner circle of the Algonquin gang took to meeting every week night backstage at the 44th Street Theatre. From there we’d migrate to Woollcott’s place or Swope’s, to Ruth’s or Alice’s or Neysa’s, and the fun and games would go on until morning.

There wasn’t room for the gang in my place. I had moved into a new penthouse and it was already crowded-with mallets, balls, harps, paintings, plants, flowers, birds, fish, and piles of the rocks my poodle brought back from his daily walk. The effect was like jamming the Villa Galanon, gardens, animal life and all, into the old 93rd Street tenement. It was my kind of joint.

I could afford to live in this kind of style because the Marx Brothers had just been signed by Paramount Pictures for three movies-talkies, no less-for seventy-five thousand dollars per movie. Our first picture, Cocoanuts, was shot in New York that spring, between performances of Animal Crackers. “Shot” was just the word for it. All they did was point a camera at us while we ran through our old stage version of Cocoanuts.

Still, it wasn’t as simple as it might sound for the producer, Walter Wanger, or the directors, Joseph Santley and Robert Florey. There were many long delays in the shooting, due mostly to the unexcused absences of Chico from the set. Since nobody had bought tickets to watch him, Chico figured there was nobody to squawk whenever he ducked out to consult with his bookie or play a few hands of pinochle. The trouble was, Chico would forget to come back if the action was good. Then Groucho, Zeppo and I would wander off looking for him. Sometimes Chico returned while we were gone, and he’d say the hell with it-if that’s all we cared, he’d take the rest of the day off too.

When Santley and Florey hit the jackpot and had four Marx Brothers on the same set at the same time, and the camera got going, the shooting would be interrupted every time we started improvising. It wasn’t that our ad libs weren’t funny. The trouble was, Florey couldn’t help breaking up. When he laughed, he laughed so hard he drowned out everything else on the sound track. Laughing left him very weak, so he would have to lie down to regain his strength before they could call a retake. This would give Chico a good chance to duck out to see how the action was going, which would soon send the rest of us out looking for Chico.

Wanger solved Florey’s problem by having the directors use hand signals, from inside a soundproof glass booth. We still played to Florey, however. When he flew into a fit of silent convulsions we knew we had done something good. It was the weirdest audience we ever played to.

Then Wanger solved the Chico problem. He had the four cells used in the jail scene bolted to the studio floor. He had four signs made, one for each cell-CHICO, HARPO, GROUCHO and ZEPPO-and he had a telephone installed in the one labeled CHICO. Now Chico could call his bookie any time he felt like it, without bringing production to a standstill.

Between takes we were locked behind bars and the directors were let out of the booth. When shooting resumed, the directors were put back in their glass cage and the stars were let out of their jail cells. Too bad they didn’t film the filming of Cocoanuts. It would have been a lot funnier than the movie was.

Summer came. Animal Crackers took a vacation. (This was long before theatres were air-conditioned.) The Woollcott mob’s permanent, floating New Year’s Eve party moved up to Vermont. Neshobe Island was even lovelier than I had remembered it, and even livelier than it had been two summers ago.

Fall came. The permanent party took the launch to the mainland, got on board the Delaware & Hudson, and played Hearts all the way back to the city. Another new season began in New York, another grueling nine months of all-night poker and all-day croquet, Round Table lunches and Long Island weekends. It was back to the grind of cooking up puns and practical jokes, needling Woollcott and embarrassing Kaufman, and playing the newest party game-The Market.

There were grave responsibilities to face too. There were harps to be restrung, plants to be watered, poodles to be walked, and the decision on whether or not to take the Cubs over the Athletics at six-to-one in the Series.

The prospect of what lay ahead was somewhat changed, however. Sam Harris decided to take Animal Crackers on tour. We would rehearse a couple of weeks in New York, to get the show back in shape and break in the new people, then hit the road to Boston in mid-October.

During the last week of rehearsal the Marxes met for a rare family reunion in Zeppo’s apartment. The seven of us hadn’t been together for an evening for nearly four years-a lot of lost time to make up for. Frenchie spent the morning marketing and the afternoon cooking, out on Long Island. He arrived at Zep’s place with pots and pots of our favorite food, still warm and steaming.

While we ate (and how we ate!) everybody caught up on everybody else. The state of Frenchie’s wardrobe. (He could match the Prince of Wales, suit for suit.) The state of Gummo’s business. (He was now a successful dress manufacturer.) What Groucho had had published lately. (His squibs and vignettes were appearing in all the big columns.) Chico’s latest acts of generosity. (To his favorite charity, the Impoverished Pinochle Players of America.) Zeppo’s latest idea for an invention. (He was scheming and conniving to get out of show business.) My status as a bachelor. (The family never gave up trying to marry me off.)

The star of the evening was Minnie. Minnie was in her element. She had been having a little heart trouble, but you’d never know it. She wore a new blond wig, and the color and the sparkle of twenty years ago had returned to her face. She told stories we hadn’t heard since 93rd Street. They had never sounded funnier. Then she got to remembering the one-night stands in Texas and the air-domes in Mississippi, and we worked off the dinner (we’d been eating steadily for two hours) by singing “Mandy Lane,” then doing School Days, then winding up with seven choruses of “Peasie Weasie.”

Minnie felt so great she was hungry again and damned if she didn’t sit down to eat another dinner. Being loyal sons every one, we sat down and joined her.

To work this one off we started playing round-robin ping-pong running around the table and taking turns with the paddles, trying to keep the ball in play. This was a wacky enough game anyway, but with Minnie shrieking every time she skidded around the corner of the table and her wig slid over her eyes, it knocked us out.

It was suddenly very late. Frenchie collected his empty pots. We all kissed Minnie as if she were our favorite girl after the nicest date we’d ever had, and the two of them left for Long Island.

Half an hour later, as I was about to leave Zep’s apartment, they were back. Frenchie was carrying Minnie in his arms. She was in a coma. She’d had a stroke.

It happened while they were driving across the Queensboro Bridge. Minnie was complaining to Frenchie that she didn’t feel so hot. She should have known better than to eat so much. Then she gave a sharp gasp and slumped over in the seat. Her mouth moved but she had lost her voice. Frenchie, for once, was in complete command. He didn’t waver. He ordered the chauffeur to stop. He jumped out of the car and halted traffic in both lanes on the bridge. They turned the car around and headed back to Zeppo’s.

The doctor arrived and examined Minnie. She was in critical condition, he said, but there was no advantage in taking her to a hospital before morning. Until then she had to be kept as quiet as possible. He wouldn’t leave her side. The rest of us could see her one at a time, for a few minutes at a time, when he gave us the signal. Minnie couldn’t talk, he said, and we shouldn’t be shocked if she didn’t appear to hear our voices, or even recognize us.

At two in the morning I was waiting for my turn to go into the bedroom. The doctor came out and said, “You’d better go in quickly. She doesn’t need me any more.”

Minnie’s eyes were open when I came in. She was looking at me without seeing me. I called to her. She still didn’t see me. I said, “I’ve cone to pin the carnations on Mr. Green’s cottage, Minnie.” Then she saw me. She did the hardest thing she had ever done in sixty-five years of doing the impossible: she smiled. Her lips trembled. Her eyes were glazed with fear. But two tiny stars twinkled through the glaze, and she smiled.

The smile went quickly out. Her fingertips fluttered against the bedcover. She was trying to say something. I knew what she was trying to say. I reached over and straightened her wig, the new blond wig she had bought especially for tonight. The smile came back for a second. Then it faded, and all the life in Minnie faded with it.

I took her into my arms. I don’t remember what I said, or thought. I only remember I was crying. Minnie was dead.

Woollcott came to Woodlawn Jewish Cemetery along with the rest of us, after the services in the city. He walked beside me, his hand over my arm, but he spoke only one word to me the whole day. During the procession to Minnie’s grave, he stopped and pointed to a headstone that had the name KELLY chiseled on it.

“Spy,” he said.

I probably laughed in spite of myself. But I was hurt, frankly, that this was all that Aleck had to say, that he had nothing else to offer me the one time I could have used some plain, common sympathy.

The next week I realized I’d underestimated my friend Woollcott once again. He hadn’t been able to express what was in his heart during the funeral. That was no time, he must have felt, for a ham actor to speak his piece. He spoke his piece four days later-not as an actor, but as a writer and a friend. This is what he wrote: