Harpo Speaks! (57 page)

It’s always been George Burns’ theory that Siegel was a stooge for the Paddock Pool Company.

To see our children develop, day by day, into four distinctly different characters, was like watching a continuous show, full of suspense, surprises and comic relief. I watched the characters with mixed wonder and envy.

Bill was the most predictable one. There had been no doubt about his being a musician since he was two years old. By the time he was thirteen there was no doubt he was going to be a damn good one. He already knew more about the harp than I did, or ever would. Under his influence I began to change my style. I realized I’d been faking for all these years, covering up my lack of musical knowledge with gooey arpeggios and flashy glissandos. Bill showed me the straight harmonies I should have been playing instead, and brought me up to date-out of the ricky-ticky 1920’s- on my jazz beat. He was making an honest harpist out of me. He was making me work.

While Bill was turning into the musician I might have been, Alex was turning into the mechanic I could never have been. Alex was a tinkerer, a kid who could talk to machines in their own language. I never knew what the word “industrious” meant until Alex came along. He wasn’t happy unless he had a hip pocket full of tools and something that needed fixing. School didn’t come easily to Alex. But, being a challenge, it intrigued him. He tore into math and history as happily as he tackled a leaky faucet or a bent sprocket on his bicycle. For a busy beaver, Alex was remarkably unstuffy. He was, in fact, the nonconformist of the family, and whenever he had to conform he played it for laughs to save his pride.

Jimmy preferred thinking to tinkering. He was strictly a theory man. Where Alex was an engineer, Jimmy was a pure scientist. He had more fun designing something on paper or building a scale model than working on the real thing. Like Susan, he had a fine talent for draftsmanship. And Jimmy, although he was the nearest to an introvert among all of us characters, was probably the best natural athlete in the family. As a kid he developed a powerful golf swing and was a formidable switch hitter in Little League baseball.

Minnie was the one most like me. Nothing ruffled Minnie. Life for her was a dreamy, easy-come easy-go, day-to-day business. Unfortunately, this attitude prevailed in her school work, just as it had half a century ago with me. Unlike me, however, Minnie was smart enough to bring home a good report card anyway. Minnie’s great love was the animal kingdom. She talked to animals like Alex talked to machines. With people she preferred to listen.

Come right down to it, our continuous show in Beverly Hills was not so different from the show the other generation of Marxes put on back on East 93rd Street. With each new day we all took off on our own, because we all had different notions of how a day ought to be spent. But no matter how far apart we strayed, we were sooner or later brought together by the sound of music or laughter, or by the urge to get some kind of a game going. Just as in the tenement flat, there never seemed to be time for jealousies or anger. Living conditions were a few thousand times improved over the East Side. The only meaning “hustle” had any more was “to hurry up.” But we were no more orthodox than the old East Side characters were. We were the same breed of Happy Hooligan.

In one department we were certainly no different-Fatherly Discipline. Only once did I bring myself to the point of spanking one of the kids. It was Jimmy. He’d left an awful mess in the garage after putting together a model airplane and he’d been warned he couldn’t do anything else until he’d cleaned up. He tried to sneak off on his bike for baseball practice. I intercepted him and sent him back to clean up.

The next thing I knew, smoke was coming out of the garage. Jimmy had swept the scraps into a pile and set fire to them. He thought he’d save time by burning the stuff on the spot, instead of hauling it to the incinerator.

We beat the fire out, then I sat him down for a serious talk. I explained what a dangerous, thoughtless thing he had done. Jimmy agreed that he’d committed a major offense, all right. I told him he had to be punished for it, and he said he thought so too. I asked him what kind of punishment he would recommend if he were the father and I were the son.

“Well, spanking, I guess, Harpo,” he said. To the other kids I was “Dad,” but Jimmy never called me by any other name except Harpo.

“How many spanks?” I said.

He thought it over and said, “Six.”

“All right,” I said. “Let’s go up to your room and get it over with.”

Jimmy was very cooperative. He assumed the position. I raised my hand for the first blow. I almost got cold feet. In my mind the scene suddenly changed to a clingy tenement hallway. Frenchie was shaking his whisk broom under my chin and saying, “I’m going to give you, boy. I’m going to break every bone in your body!” I reminded myself again of what Jimmy had done and that wiped away the fantasy. Our property could have been destroyed. Somebody might have gotten badly burned.

I brought my hand down with a mighty whack.

Jimmy howled-not in pain, but in protest. “Hey! That’s not fair! You didn’t tell me you were going to spank that hard. You should have given me a sample before you asked me how many spanks. Six is too many.”

“How many would you have said if I gave you a sample?”

“Three,” he said. I gave him two more whacks. Jimmy said, “They weren’t as hard as the first one, Harpo. Better give me one more.” I gave him one more. He then got up and told me how sorry he was about the fire and all. He’d done it, he guessed, to “show” me. But now, he guessed, I’d showed him.

At dinner that night it was Jimmy, not me, who told Minnie and Alex what he had done, and what I had done. They were impressed. I never had another occasion to take a hand to any of them.

Susan was much firmer than me. She was not averse to delivering a swat on the rear, now and then, to show the kids she meant business.

Like me, however, she was opposed to all-out spankings. And like me, she only had to do it once, when it was a serious matter of safety. This time the culprit was Alex. She caught Alex riding his Flexi-Racer in the middle of the street after dinner one evening in winter, when it was getting dark. She hauled him in the house and gave it to him good. Much as it hurt Susan, it hurt Alex a hell of a lot more. He had a fair complexion and extremely sensitive skin.

Five minutes after the deed was done, Susan heard a bloodcurdling noise outside. She ran to investigate. There was Alex sitting on his haunches in the middle of the driveway, rocking back and forth to fan his fiery little bottom, and screaming into the night, “Help! Murder! Police! I been kilt!”

In one respect I was luckier than a lot of fathers. Having battled every kind of audience for forty-odd years, I knew that if you got ‘em laughing you had ‘em. It was the same with kids. Keep ‘em laughing and they’ll do anything for you.

Susan and I decided we would tell our children they were adopted as soon as they could understand any speech at all. It had to be the very first thing they learned about life. We’d seen some pretty sad cases, where parents were afraid of the children they had adopted-afraid, as they put it, that the kids “might turn on them”-and kept putting off telling them the truth. When they were told too late, the kids really did turn, full of resentment and a feeling of being unwanted. The results were tragic-unhappy early marriages, delinquency, even alcoholism.

Billy was fourteen months old when he joined the family, and he already knew, by the time he learned to talk, that he had come from someplace else. Before he was able to ask questions about that “someplace else,” we told him all about it. He accepted it for what it was, a fact of life. It was like learning that the sun went down at night, and night was the time for sleep, and that Mommy loved Daddy and they both loved Billy just as much-nothing more, nothing less.

Alex, Jimmy and Minnie each came home to us as babes in arms. We started telling them where they had come from when Alex was two, and Jimmy and Minnie were scarcely a year old. We told it in the form of a true-adventure bedtime story. By the time they were four and three, they couldn’t go to bed without hearing “The Story,” as we all came to call it.

They used to sit around Susan and me on the bedroom floor, curled up in their bunny-type pajamas, while we told The Story. We played it for suspense, like an old-fashioned cliff-hanger, and how they loved it!

Alex’s eyes would be glittering, because he knew he came first. “Poor, poor Billy,” Susan would begin. “Growing up sad and lonely, not having a little brother to play with. We had to find a little brother for Billy-not any little brother, but the right one, whose name would be Alex and who would have yellow hair and pink cheeks. Well, we looked and we looked. We looked at this baby boy and that one, but no-not one of them was Alex. Then one day Dr. Hirshfeld called on the telephone and said, `I think I know where you can find him!’ So Daddy and I packed our suitcase and got on a train and rode all day and all night, and then we got off the train and rushed to the place that Dr. Hirshfeld told us about. There they showed us a little boy. We looked at him-“

Susan would pause for effect. Alex would be hunched over and shivering from the terrible suspense.

“-and what do you know! It was Alex! We bundled him up and took him on the train with us and all three of us traveled all night and all day and then we came home and Billy had his little brother and wasn’t sad and lonely any more.”

Alex would let out his breath and smile with relief. He’d been found! Now it was Jimmy’s turn to squirm and hold his breath.

“But Billy was six years older than Baby Alex, and he would run out to play with the older boys, and now Alex was going to be sad and lonely if he didn’t have a little brother to play with. So we began looking and looking for a little brother for Alex-not any little brother, but the right one, whose name would be Jimmy and who would have bright, shiny brown eyes. Well, we hunted all over. People showed us babies, and they said, `Is this the one you’re looking for? Is this the one?’ But none of them was the right one. We began to think we would never find Jimmy. Then one day Dr. Hirshfeld called on the telephone and said, `I’ve heard about a baby boy, and I think he’s the one you’re looking for.’ So Daddy and I got on the train, and this time we rode three days and three nights, and we said, `Wouldn’t it be awful if we got there and the baby they showed us wouldn’t be Jimmy?’ Well, we got off the train and rushed over and they showed us this baby, and oh, my goodness-“

Susan would shake her head. Jimmy would be biting his lip and clenching and unclenching his hands.

“-it wasn’t our Jimmy. We started to leave, and then they said, `Maybe we showed you the wrong one. Maybe this is the one you’re looking for.’ And what do you know-it was! It was Jimmy!”

Jimmy would smile and clap to hear he had been found at last, but Minnie would be beside herself waiting to hear the end of the story. The excitement would be so unbearable for her it was absolutely delicious.

This is where I usually took over. “Alex had his kid brother now, and somebody to play with,” I would begin, “but what Alex and Jimmy wanted now more than anything else in the world was-“

“A baby sister!” Minnie would whisper, breathlessly.

“-a baby sister. Not just any old baby sister, but a little doll named Minnie, who was happy and gay and who wanted three brothers, the same as they wanted her. Well, it’s not easy, you know, to find a baby girl like that. We hunted and hunted, all over town, and looked at all the baby girls, but we couldn’t find Minnie. Then one day Dr. Hirshfeld called on the telephone and said, ‘Hurry over, fast! I think I’ve found the one you’re hunting for!’ So Mom and I hurried over fast, and Dr. Hirshfeld showed us this little girl. And what do you know! It wasn’t Minnie at all.”

Minnie would stuff her hand in her mouth so she wouldn’t blurt out the ending, and spoil the mystery.

“So we came home, feeling sad, and told Alex and Jimmy we hadn’t found their sister, and maybe we never could. Dr. Hirshfeld called up again, and again, but every time we went to look it was the wrong baby girl. Then one day Aunt Gracie Burns called us up all the way from New York City, and she said, ‘I think I’ve found the girl you’re looking for!’ and we said, ‘What’s she like?’ and Aunt Gracie said, ‘She’s a little doll, happy and gay,’ and we said, ‘Yes! That sounds like our Minnie.’

“Well, we were in such a hurry to see her that we couldn’t wait. So we didn’t go to New York on the train. We told them to bring Minnie to us on an airplane. And the very next day a nurse got off the airplane and brought the little girl to us. But the minute we looked at her, she began to cry and yell, and her face got red and she wasn’t happy or gay at all. `You’ll have to take her back on the airplane,’ we said. `This isn’t Minnie. You brought us the wrong baby.’ But then do you know what happened?”

Minnie’s eyes would he shut tight. She’d be nodding her head and wiggling all over the joint trying to contain herself.

“What happened was, the little girl fell fast asleep-she was so tired from the long airplane ride. And I looked at her, and in her sleep she was smiling a happy and gay smile, and she was the most beautiful little girl you ever saw. I yelled, `Hey, Mom! Come here quick! It is her, after all! It’s Minnie!’ “

When we had finally recognized her and decided to keep her, Minnie would be exhausted from the ordeal, exhausted but walk ing on air. Now that all three of them had been found, they had something wonderful to take to bed with them and dream about, and there was seldom any squawk when the lights went out.

Alex, Jimmy and Minnie never tired of hearing The Story. Long after they outgrew bedtime stories they would ask us to tell them The Story at least once a week. When they reached their teens they still wanted to hear it a couple of times a year. By then, of course, Susan and I had worked it into quite a show. What with all the touches and gimmicks we’d added over the years, we could have followed Alfred Hitchcock and kept an audience holding onto their seats.

Alex was about twelve when one day he came to me while I was playing the harp. He looked troubled. I stopped playing and asked him what was eating him.