Harpo Speaks! (4 page)

Unfortunately, we couldn’t raise any action at home. Frenchie was too busy during the day, and his nighttime pinochle game was not open to kids. Grandpa’s only game was Skat. We tried to convert Groucho to cards, but we couldn’t. Groucho was already turning into a bookworm at the age of eight, and he sniffed at games of chance as being naive and childish.

There was no place to go but out for the right kind of action. The catch to this was that it took money to get into a game, and more money to stay in a game if your luck was temporarily running slow.

To me there was only one solution. We had to find jobs and earn some money.

Chico thought this was the nuttiest idea he’d ever heard. “You don’t earn mazuma,” he said. “You hustle it.”

Our first joint promotion, to hustle some scratch for pool and craps, was the Great Cuckoo Clock Bonanza of 1902.

All his life Chico has had an uncanny talent for turning up prospects. It was he who turned up the producer who first put us on Broadway, and made us nationally famous. It was Chico who later turned up the producer-Irving Thalberg-who put us into Grade-A movies. Anyway, the first prospect I can remember Chico turning up was a novelty shop on 86th Street that was having a sale on miniature cuckoo clocks.

These cuckoo clocks had no working cuckoos (the birds were painted on) but they had the genuine Black Forest look, they kept time, and they were on sale for only twenty cents apiece. We had just enough money between us to go into business, since Uncle Al had been to visit the night before, and we still had our Uncle Al dimes.

Chico bought a clock. We got fifty cents for it in a hockshop down at Third and 63rd. Thirty cents profit. We went back and bought two clocks, pawned them for four bits apiece. Chico said business was now too good for me to remain a silent partner. I should start hocking clocks too. So off I went, with my share of the inventory.

I didn’t do so well. Turned out that every hockshop I went to Chico had just been to. We looked so much alike that the pawnbrokers thought I was the same kid trying to unload more hot goods, and they wouldn’t deal with me.

Chico then said he’d take care of the hockshops, and I should work on people up in the neighborhood. Early the next morning, I took a clock and gathered up my courage and went to the office of the ice works on Third Avenue. The manager there was a friendly guy, who winked whenever the loader chipped off wedges of ice for us kids. He seemed like an ideal customer.

“Cuckoo clock for sale,” I said to the manager, trying to sound self-assured, like Chico. “Good bargain. Guaranteed.” I don’t know why the word “guaranteed” popped out. I must have been carried away by what was, for me, a rare burst of eloquence. So the ice works manager wanted to know how long the clock was guaranteed to run on a winding. Whereupon I heard myself saying, as I began to sweat, “Eight hours.”

“All right,” he said. “Wind ‘er up. If she’s still running eight hours from now I’ll buy her.”

I pulled the chain that wound the clock. I stood in a corner of the office, out of the way, holding the clock, waiting and praying. It was a torturous battle of nerves. Every time the manager turned his back, I gave the chain a little pull to keep the clock wound tight. Along about lunchtime, he suspected what I was doing, and caught me with my hand on the chain with a swift, unexpected look. He took the clock and hung it on the wall, without a word.

At two-thirty, the clock ran down and died. The manager took it off the wall and handed it to me, still without a word. When I ran out of the office, I could hear him behind me, slapping his leg and laughing his head off.

Those were the most grueling six hours I had ever spent and my net profit was, in round figures, zero. I got home to find that Chico’s net profit on the clock deal was $11.10. I was ashamed to ask for any more than my original dime back. But Chico insisted I take half the loot-on one condition. He would borrow it and double it for me in a crap game.

And damned if he didn’t that same night. By bedtime the total capital of the Marx Cuckoo Clock Corporation was $29.90. Chico counted out my share and gave it to me. I had never touched such a fabulous pile of raw cash before in my life. But I still felt lousy about the ice works fiasco, and I pushed the money back to Chico. “You keep it,” I said. “Double it again.”

The next day he dropped the whole wad in a pinochle game. Chico said this should be a lesson to me. Trying to redouble my money was going against the odds. Too bad I had to learn the hard way. Next time I would know better.

I never did get my dime back.

There was no hope of having spending-type money in my pocket until Uncle Al’s next visit, which would be a long time off, not until after the High Holidays were over and Grandpa lifted the shade and came out of the front room.

Such was my basic education in the Economics of Free Enterprise.

“Today I am a man!” At thirteen I am bar mitzvah-graduating not only to manhood but to derbyhood. Not long afterwards I had my first taste of life in the raw, when I went to work for a certain Mrs. Schang (see below).

Minnie and Frenchie, my mother and father, looking as I remember them best. This was taken outside of Chicago, around the time of World War I. Below: Chico and I were often mistaken for twins when we were young, which led to no end of collusion and confusion.

HARPO

CHICO

Culver Service

The Four Nightingales, shortly after I was shanghaied into show business and made my calamitous debut at Coney Island. Top to bottom: Groucho, me, Gummo, Lou Levy.

Groucho leads the Six Mascots in “Ist das nicht ein Schnitzelbank?” I’m at the keyboard. The “girls” are Aunt Hannah (left) and Minnie. Below: the School Days troupe hits Waukegan. That’s “Patsy Brannigan” third from right, first row. With my switch to comedy, Groucho (second from left, standing) was converted to straight man.

Penguin Photo

The Marx Brothers become men-about-Broadway when I’ll Say She Is opens in 1924. Seated: Groucho. Standing: me, Zeppo, Chico. If I look a little dazed, it’s because I just came from a twenty-hour poker session at a strange hotel called the Algonquin.

Culver Service

“Napoleon scene” from I’ll Say She Is. Don’t ask what the scene was all about-we didn’t even know what the title of the show meant. In the role of Josephine is Lotta Miles.

Culver Service

Pancho Marx, in Cocoanuts.

Culver Service

Animal Crackers, our third Broadway hit. It was horseplay like this that drove Gummo back to civilian life and into the dress business.

Alexander Woollcott, the Emperor of Neshobe Island. “In a snood mood” was Aleck’s own caption for this shot.

This was the stationery Aleck had made up for me after our summer on the Riviera. Figure at right is Master Alexander Woollcott, age four, in the role of Puck.

Richard Carver Wood

Two croquemaniacs at large, on Neshobe Island. The “blimp at a mooring mast” is Aleck, lining up a shot. The disgusted observer, obviously getting shellacked, is me.

Richard Carver Wood

My dancing partner on the Neshobe dock is Irene Castle. In critics’ row are Alfred Lunt, Aleck, and Lynn Fontanne. Below: Basking in the Vermont sun with (left to right) Aleck, Neysa McMein, Alfred Lunt and Beatrice Kaufman.

Richard Carver Wood

Richard Carver Wood

While Charlie Lederer kibitzes, I take on Aleck at cribbage. Trying to beat Woollcott at cribbage was the one lost cause in the life of Butch Miller (right), more widely known as “Alice Duer” Miller.

Richard Carver Wood

In the Garden of Allah, Hollywood, flanked by four other refugees from the Algonquin. They are, left to right, Art Samuels, Charlie MacArthur, Dorothy Parker, and Aleck Woollcott.

The Four Imposters. Richard Rodgers, Justine Johnson, George Gershwin (as Groucho) and Jules Glaenzer at a New York costume party.

M-G-M Photo by Durward Graybil

George S. Kaufman plays a sticky wicket. Character in background obviously suspects he’s trying to cheat.

Unknown

CHAPTER 3

Adrift in Grandpa’s

Democracy

IN A SHORT TIME, by brother Chico was far out of my class as a sporting blood. I wasn’t wise enough or nervy enough to keep up with him. Chico settled into a routine, dividing his working day between cigar store and poolroom, and latching onto floating games in his spare time, and I drifted into the streets.

Life in the streets was a tremendous obstacle course for an undersized kid like me. The toughest obstacles were kids of other nationalities. The upper East Side was subdivided into Jewish blocks (the smallest area), Irish blocks, and German blocks, with a couple of Independent Italian states thrown in for good measure. That is, the cross streets were subdivided. The north-and-south Avenues-First, Second, Third and Lexington-belonged more to the city than the neighborhood. They were neutral zones. But there was open season on strangers in the cross streets.

If you were caught trying to sneak through a foreign block, the first thing the Irishers or Germans would ask was, “Hey, kid! What Streeter?” I learned it saved time and trouble to tell the truth. I was a 93rd Streeter, I would confess.

“Yeah? What block 93rd Streeter?”

“Ninety-third between Third and Lex.” That pinned me down. I was a Jew.

The worst thing you could do was run from Other Streeters. But if you didn’t have anything to fork over for ransom you were just as dead. I learned never to leave my block without some kind of boodle in my pocket-a dead tennis ball, an empty thread spool, a penny, anything. It didn’t cost much to buy your freedom; the gesture was the important thing.

It was all part of the endless fight for recognition of foreigners in the process of becoming Americans. Even, Irish kid who made a Jewish kid knuckle under was made to say “Uncle” by an Italian, who got his lumps from a German kid, who got his insides kicked out by his old man for street fighting and then went out and beat up an Irish kid to heal his wounds. “I’ll teach you!” was the threat they passed along, Irisher to Jew to Italian to German. Everybody was trying to teach everybody else, all down the line. This is still what I think of when I hear the term “progressive education.”

There was no such character as “the kindly cop on the beat” in New York in those days. The cops were sworn enemies. By the same token we, the street kids, were the biggest source of trouble for the police. Individually and in gangs we accounted for most of the petty thievery and destruction of property on the upper East Side. And since we couldn’t afford to pay off the cops in the proper, respectable Tammany manner, they hounded us, harassed us, chased us, and every chance they got, happily beat the hell out of us.

One way, the only way, that all of us kids stuck together regardless of nationality was in our cop-warning system. Much as I loathed and feared the Mickie gang or the Bohunk gang, I’d never hesitate to give them the high-sign if I spotted a copper headed their way. They’d do the same for me and the other 93rd Streeters.

The cops had their system, too. If a patrolman came upon a gang fight or a front-stoop crap game and needed reinforcements in a hurry, he’d bang his nightstick on the curb. This made a sharp whoinnng that could be heard by cops on other beats throughout the precinct, and they’d come a-running from all directions, closing in a net around the point the warning came from.

In my time I was grabbed, nabbed, chewed out and shin-whacked by the cops, but never arrested. This may sound miraculous, considering all the kinds of trouble I was able to get into, but it wasn’t. My Uncle Sam the auctioneer, don’t forget, was a wheel in Tammany Hall. Nephews of men in the Organization did not get arrested.

For another thing, the cops went mostly for the gangs, the most conspicuous targets, and I was not a gang boy. I was a lone wolf. This made me, in turn, more conspicuous to the gangs. Gang boys couldn’t tolerate loners. They called me a “queer” and worse. Today, I guess, a kid like me would get all kinds of special attention from the authorities. They’d call me an “antisocial nonconformist”-and worse.

So my pleasures had to be secret ones. I couldn’t even fly pigeons from the roof of my own house. Every time I set out a baited cage to catch some birds, the cage would be smashed or stolen. I wanted desperately to have a pet. Once I brought home a stray puppy, and fixed a nest for him in the basement of 179. I had him for exactly a week. As soon as he got used to his new home he felt frisky and began to bark. Some kids heard him and promptly stole him.

The janitor of our tenement, an elderly Bavarian plagued with corns and carbuncles, wouldn’t protect my pets. He had a running feud with my family because our garbage pails were full of holes. Every time they went down the dumbwaiter for him to dump, the janitor would mutter and curse and yell up the shaft, “Hey, up dere! Hey! Dem’s got leaks on!”

I took to spending a lot of time in Central Park, four blocks to the west, the park being a friendly foreign country. It was safe territory for lone wolves, no matter what Streeters we were.

Summers I hung around the tennis courts. I loved to watch the game, and there was always the chance I could hustle myself a tennis ball. In the wintertime the park was not so inviting, unless there’d been a snowfall or a good freeze. When there was snow on the ground I’d hustle a dishpan somewhere (”hustle” being a polite word for steal), and go sliding in the park. This was a risky pleasure. A dishpan in good condition was worth five cents cash from a West Side junk dealer, and I had more than one pan swiped out from under me by bigger kids.

After a freeze they would hoist the Ice Flag in Central Park, which told the city the pond was okay for skating. Nobody was happier to see the flag than I was. I was probably the best singlefoot skater in New York City.

Our family’s total sports equipment was one ice skate, which had belonged to Grandma, and which Grandpa kept as a memento, like the old harp. And as the harp had no strings, the skate had no straps. I had to improvise with twine, rope, old suspenders, elastic bands, whatever I could find.