Harpo Speaks! (36 page)

A short history of the magician’s daughter who was the managing mother of the Four Marx Brothers. . . . Last week the Marx Brothers buried their mother. On the preceding Friday night, more from gregariousness than from appetite, she had eaten two dinners instead of the conventional one, and, after finishing off with a brief, hilarious game of ping-pong, was homeward bound across the Queensboro Bridge when paralysis seized her. Within an hour she was dead in her Harpo’s arms. Of the people I have met, I would name her as among the few of whom it could be said that they had greatness.

She had done much more than bear her sons, bring them up, and turn them into play actors. She had invented them. They were just comics she imagined for her own amusement. They amused no one more, and their reward was her ravishing smile.

She herself was doing sweatshop lace-work when she married a tailor named Sam Marx. But for fifty years her father was a roving magician in Hanover, and as a child she had known the excitement of their barnstorming cart rides from one German town to another.

Her trouble was that her boys had got to Broadway. They had arrived. Thereafter, I think she took less interest in their professional lives. When someone paid them a king’s ransom to make their first talkie, she only yawned. What she sighed for was the zest of beginnings. Why, I hear that last year she was caught hauling her embarrassed chauffeur off to a dancing school, with the idea of putting him on the stage. In her boredom she took to poker, her game being marked by so incurable a weakness for inside straights that, as often as not, her rings were missing and her bureau drawer littered with sheepish pawntickets. On the night Animal Crackers opened, she was so absorbed that she almost forgot to go at all. But at the last moment she sent her husband for her best wig, dispatched her chauffeur to fetch her new teeth, and, assembling herself on the way downtown, reached the theatre in time to greet the audience. Pretty as a picture she was, as she met us in the aisle. “We have a big success,” she said.

Minnie Marx was a wise, tolerant, generous, gallant matriarch. In the passing of such a one, a woman full of years, with her work done, and children and grandchildren to hug her memory all their days, you have no more of a sense of death than you have when the Hudson-sunlit, steady, all-conquering-leaves you behind on the shore on its way to the fathomless sea.

She was in this world sixty-five years and lived all sixty-five of them. She died during rehearsals, in the one week of the year when all her boys would be around her-back from their summer roamings, that is, but not yet gone forth on tour. Had she foreseen this-I’m not sure she didn’t-she would have chuckled, and, combining a sly wink with her beautiful smile, she would have said, “How’s that for perfect timing?”

Aleck said nothing to me about writing a eulogy of Minnie. I didn’t know about it until I looked through the copy of The New Yorker tucked inside the going-away present he’d had delivered to me on the train, the night the company left for Boston to start the road tour. The going-away present was an RFD mailbox, with HARPO DUER MARX stenciled on it. As always, he did it in style, a style that was Woollcott’s and nobody else’s in the world.

We didn’t let our spirits sag. Minnie would have been furious if we had. Fortunately we had support from an outside source, the stock market. The market kept rising and we kept buying, on margin, to stay on top of the golden wave of prosperity.

I got my market tips from Groucho. Groucho got his from his friend Max Gordon, the New York theatrical producer, and passed them on to me. While we were in Boston with Animal Crackers Groucho lost touch, temporarily, with Max Gordon. So he settled for tips from an elevator operator in the Copley Plaza Hotel, which he duly and loyally passed on to me. We spent more time on the long-distance phone with our brokers than Chico did on the local phone with bookies.

Our stocks were rising like the price of whisky in a gold rush. I was now worth a quarter of a million dollars, at the rate of $68.50 per average invested share.

After the week in Boston the show moved to Baltimore. The Baltimore papers began to report strange rumors about the market. My broker was cautious on the phone, all of a sudden. Instead of chirping, “Buy, buy, buy” he began to say, “It might be wise to commence covering margins.”

A bunch of scare-talk. This wasn’t a boom that was going to go bust. The market was a solid institution and I was being advised by the country’s best authorities-Alexander Woollcott, Bernard Baruch, Max Gordon, Groucho Marx, and the elevator operator in the Copley Plaza Hotel. I kept on buying. My stocks kept on rising.

Our next date was Pittsburgh. We got into town on Sunday, the 27th of October. When the market opened on Monday, my thirty-five thousand shares were worth an average of $72 per share. But when the market closed their value had changed. The market didn’t merely close that day. It got the hook. It flopped. It crashed.

Immediately a wire came from my broker in New York: FORCED TO SELL ALL HOLDINGS UNLESS RECEIVE CHECK FOR $15,000 TO COVER MARGINS. I hustled the fifteen G’s together and got it to the broker. Now, I figured, I had survived the crisis.

I was wrong. The next morning another SOS came from New York. Same message. Same amount. Somehow I scraped it up and sent it off. On the third day of the week the third wire came: ADDITIONAL FIFTEEN THOUSAND DOLLARS TO COVER MARGINS. On Thursday morning Groucho gave up. He was completely wiped out. I didn’t see him until lunchtime, when he greeted me with “Get your telegram today?” His laugh was hollow, and there was an empty look in his eyes.

I had gotten my telegram, all right. It wasn’t just another SOS.

It was the yelp of a guy going down for the third time. The message was: SEND $10,000 IN 24 HOURS OR FACE FINANCIAL RUIN AND DAMAGING SUITS. MUST HAVE $10,000 REGARDLESS WHETHER I CAN SELL YOUR HOLDINGS.

In raising the dough for the three checks I had already sent, I had scraped the bottom of the barrel. I had liquidated every asset I owned except my harp and my croquet set. I had borrowed as far in advance as I could against my salary. My market holdings had shriveled to an average worth of one dollar a share. But this was based on quotations, not resale value. As assets they were probably worth a medium-sized bag of black jelly beans.

I was flatter broke than the day the Shubert unit died in Indianapolis. Then I at least had seven cents in my pocket, and I didn’t owe anybody any of it. This was a lot worse. I had much more to lose. I had much farther to fall. How in God’s name could I raise ten thousand bucks in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania?

Zeppo had an idea. He told me to stop moping around the hotel. After the show, he said, he’d take me to the best source in town for raising the kind of dough I needed. “Leave all the arrangements to me,” said Zep. “Only one thing you can do-bring along some burnt cork tonight.” I was mystified, but Zep would tell me no more.

I had a hunch about the kind of place he’d take me to, and the hunch was right. Shortly before midnight we went on board a gambling boat in the Ohio River.

When I got inside I felt sick. The sight of gambling, after the way I’d been cleaned out that week, was too much for me. I told Zeppo I was grateful for his good intentions, but no, thanks. I didn’t have the stomach for it. I couldn’t even look a royal flush in the face.

But Zep said, “We’re not here to gamble. We’re here to meet a guy I know.”

The guy was the operator of the riverboat, a pleasant fellow named Milt Jaffe. From the way Jaffe sized me up when we were introduced I could tell that Zep had briefed him about me and my problem.

We went into the lounge and talked for a while, about this and that. The subject of money never came up. Zep said to me, under his breath, “We’ve got to warm him up a little.” Then he said to Jaffe, “I’ve got a great idea, Milt. Let’s get up a game of Pinchie Winchie.”

Jaffe was willing, but baffled. “Pinchie Winchie?” he said. “I haven’t got anybody here who can deal that, I don’t think.”

“It’s not that kind of action,” said Zeppo. “But a lot of laughs, eh, Harpo?”

I agreed that it sure was. Pinchie Winchie! My God, I hadn’t played that game since back in the old Chicago days! Now I began to see what Zeppo had set me up to.

Zep said it would be more fun if we got a fourth for the game, so Jaffe brought in one of his dealers, who happened to be on a relief break.

The rules were simple, we told them. I started by pinching the dealer, who sat next to me, like on the nose or the check or the ear, and saying “Pinchie Winchie!” The dealer then had to pinch Jaffe on the same spot, and Jaffe did the same thing to Zeppo. When it came my turn again I made a new Pinchie Winchie on the dealer, pinching or poking him someplace else, and the new Pinchie Winchie had to go around the circle, exactly as I had done it. We kept going around and around as fast as we could, until somebody made the wrong pinch and had to drop out. That’s all there was to it. Silly, maybe, but it took a lot of quick thinking.

So off we went. We hadn’t gone three times around before Jaffe was laughing so hard he damn near fell off his chair. The dealer chuckled politely. It was obvious he didn’t think the game was that funny. In fact he gave the impression he thought his boss had gone nuts.

What the dealer didn’t know was that I was palming a hunk of burnt cork. Every time I gave him a Pinchie Winchie he got a new black smear on his kisser.

By the time the dealer’s face was smudged beyond recognition, Jaffe was too weak from laughing to stand up. Zep and I declared the game a draw, then took the dealer into the can so he could see himself in the mirror. The dealer washed up. Now that he was in on the gag he was dying to get another game going.

When we returned, Jaffe had not only recovered but had lined up a new victim, another dealer. The second game was better than the first. The two dealers hated to leave after it was over, but they said it was time for them to go back on duty. The hell with that, said Jaffe. He’d declare their tables closed. They stayed.

The Pinchie Winchie circle got bigger and bigger. Whenever a fresh customer came on the boat Jaffe would grab him off for a victim. Some of them were pretty tough-looking customers, gambling addicts desperate for action. But when Jaffe said, “You’re going to play Pinchie Winchie,” they played Pinchie Winchie. He was a guy they all loved and respected.

What a night he had! Jaffe was absolutely drunk with the game. Every round struck him funnier than the last one. Every time I made a smudge on some innocent guy’s face, Jaffe would explode all over again, tears in his eyes, doubling over, stamping the floor and crossing his arms and slapping his back.

At two o’clock he ordered all gambling stopped and we moved our game into the main casino. By three o’clock the casino was a bedlam. There were twenty-some players in the circle. The latest victim, the guy I was smearing, was one of the richest guys around, the owner of a glass plant. The one before him had been a bootlegger, who was probably even richer. Around the circle, gamblers, dealers, shills, bouncers, deckhands, moonshiners and financiers were pinching, poking, jabbing and belting each other with wild glee, screaming “Pinchie Winchie!” and rolling on the floor and laughing like a pack of loons.

By four o’clock Jaffe simply didn’t have the strength to play another game. His voice was down to a croak, his eyes were red from crying, and he was gasping for breath. With reluctance, he closed the boat for the night.

When all the customers had left, Jaffe beckoned me to come into his office. He closed the door, opened a wall safe, counted out one hundred C-notes, snapped a rubber band around the stack of bills, and handed the dough to me.

“Zeppo says you need ten G’s,” Jaffe croaked. “That right?”

I laid the dough on his desk. I had to be sure of what I might be getting myself into. I asked him what he wanted for security.

“No security,” said Jaffe.

“What’s the interest?”

“No interest.”

“What do you want me to sign?”

“Nothing.”

“So what’s the catch?”

“No catch.”

He stuffed the money back in my hands and said, “The one thing I’d like to ask in return is something I’m in no shape to handle.”

“What’s that?”

“Another game of Pinchie Winchie,” said Jaffe.

Within a year I had paid Jaffe back the ten thousand, in installments. With the last installment I sent him a little gift. He wrote me a note of thanks, but he still didn’t answer the big question. Why had he lent me, a guy he’d never met before, that much dough without security of any kind? It was thirty years before I saw Milt Jaffe again. Not until then did I learn the answer.

I left Pittsburgh broke but not ruined. I had a few debts to pay off but no threats of lawsuits, and I had good, steady work. I was one of the luckiest citizens in all of America. My Great Depression lasted exactly four days, the last four days of October 1929. When times got so rough that, as Groucho said, “the pigeons started feeding the people in Central Park,” headliners in show business kept on working. I was lucky enough to be one of them.

So my depression came to an end. But so, alas, did the world I had lived in and loved for the five years, five months, and nineteen days since the morning a ham actor called me on the telephone and said, “The name is Woollcott.” Martial law had been declared against us, against Croquemaniacs and Thanatopsians and Sitters of the Round Table, and all the other over-aged children of our world. We were under house arrest. The sentence was the abolition of the 1920’s.

Life would no longer be, ever again, all fun and games. The bam-bang-sock-and-pow part was over, and so was the permanent, floating New Year’s Eve party. Our million-dollar playground had been condemned.

The hard truth of all this didn’t sink in until we were playing Cleveland, Ohio, following Pittsburgh, and I got a call from Woollcott-collect. The fact that he called collect was the first jolt. It was his way of telling me he’d come out of the crash in worse shape than me.

His voice sounded strangely tired and sad. I thought: Somebody in the mob has died. But it was nothing like that. “I’m home alone with a terrible case of the cringes,” Aleck said. “I’m calling you to make a confession.”