Harpo Speaks! (58 page)

“Oh, nothing, Dad,” he said. He stared at the harp pedals like he’d never seen them before. He didn’t know what to do with his hands.

I reminded him of our rule. No holding back. If he had something to say, out with it.

“Well, Dad,” he said, “we’ve been talking about The Story, Jimmy and Minnie and me. And, well, there’s something none of us ever said to you that we ought to have. And, well, me being the oldest we voted I should come and say it to you.”

My heart was in my throat. Maybe the truth was coming out, after all these years. Maybe we’d made a big mistake. Maybe we had told the kids too much, too soon.

I said, “What is it you want to say, Alex?”

He finally got up the courage to look straight at me. He took a deep breath and said, “Thanks. Thanks for adopting us.”

My heart went back where it belonged, and it’s stayed there ever since.

When Billy was thirteen he happened to be with me once when I went through our safe-deposit box in the bank vault. I happened to come across his birth certificate. I showed it to him. Billy read it, then broke out laughing, and handed it back to me. I asked him why he was laughing. Oh, nothing, he said. It was only that the family name he’d been born with struck him as sounding very funny.

That was the beginning and the end of Billy’s curiosity about his origins.

One night when Minnie was doing her geography homework she said to Susan, “Hey, Mom-where was I born? Maybe I’ve been studying the place where I was born and didn’t know it.”

Susan told her. It was a small city near New York. Minnie located it in the atlas. “Must be a real dump,” she said. “It’s only got a little dot by it, not even a circle or a star.”

For a while it was a running gag with Minnie. Whenever I had to go east on a date, her last words to me would be, “Don’t forget, Dad-give my love to my old home town when you fly over it!” Then the gag wore out, and that was the end of Minnie’s inquisitiveness.

A year or so later Minnie came home from school one day very amused. A girl friend had asked her what it felt like to be adopted. “Of all the silly questions!” said Minnie. At first she’d told her friend that there was no “feeling” about it. Then Minnie corrected herself. Yes, there was. You felt you were the luckiest person in the world, if you were adopted. You hadn’t just happened to your family, like most kids. You had been picked, out of hundreds of candidates. You were somebody very special. “Gee,” Minnie said to us, “I hope I didn’t make her feel bad. I certainly didn’t mean to.”

When Alex and Jimmy asked to see their birth certificates, they reacted quite differently. Jimmy read his with no comment, and shrugged it off like it was a piece of last year’s homework. Alex’s reaction was delayed. A couple of months later he came to me and said, “Dad, if my father was killed in the war, doesn’t that mean I would have been in his will? Hadn’t we better hire a lawyer and find the money that should come to me?”

I tried to explain to Alex that some lawyer would have found him a long time before this, if he had any inheritance coming to him. But Alex kept the notion alive that he was a missing heir for over a year before he threw in the towel, and admitted that I was right.

Of the four children, Alex has always been the most money-conscious-probably because he’s needed the most dough, to keep himself in machines and tools and parts. They cost a lot more than Billy’s piano scores, or Minnie’s feed for her animals. As for Jimmy, he had the cheapest tastes of all. His rockets he got for Christmas or his birthday. When he wasn’t rocketing, he was perfectly content to curl up with a book from the library, or play himself a game of chess, or help Susan work on her rose-bed.

The only time Jimmy ever splurged was once when he bought ten new trees for our lot and planted them himself, because he thought our landscaping looked a little skimpy.

We never gave any of the kids any money outright. There was no such thing as an “allowance” in our family. If anybody needed money he damn well earned it, doing odd jobs at home or on the outside. He could spend a third of what he earned-if we approved of the expenditure-and the other two thirds went into a savings account. We laid down the law that nobody could make a withdrawal from his savings until he was sixteen, and then only subject to our approval.

Alex may have had moola on the brain, but he wasn’t a mercenary kid. One of his jobs was to maintain the sprinkler system-no minor job in a dry place like Southern California-and to turn the water on every morning before he left for school. One night at dinner he announced that he could no longer accept any money for turning the water on in the morning. We asked him why not. He said because the water got turned off while he was in school, by the gardener. It was wrong that he should get paid for a job that he only started, and never finished.

His sense of right and wrong was an amazing thing. At the age of thirteen, Alex had as many principles as any guy who ever ran for President-the difference being, he stuck by every one of his.

The old man, meanwhile, was being housebroken. Susan and the kids were doing a neat, subtle job on me. I stopped going to the fights. I didn’t go to the ball park unless I took the family along. I had already stopped smoking. And now I even laid off gambling.

Around the time I first met Susan, I maintained a second telephone, strictly for talking with the bookies in Kansas City. I used to bet on baseball, basketball, football, hockey, Davis Cup matches, bridge tournaments, flag-pole sitters, anything anybody gave odds on. But no more.

I won’t say my family completely reformed me. I continued to bet on the Democrats in any election and the New York Giants in any pennant race or Series. But this was a matter of conviction, not looking for a quick buck, and this was the extent of it. I woke up one morning and discovered I was no longer a gambling man. I was a one-hundred-percent family man.

For one thing, I had not married a gambling woman. Susan was, she was frank to confess, an utter coward in any kind of a game where money changed hands or where winning was a religion. The one time she tried to play poker she shook so that she kept dropping her cards. The one time she played croquet with me, at the Goldwyns’, we gave her such a hard time over a shot she missed that she spent the rest of the night in tears. Whenever she played bridge with me she never stopped humming. When I asked her why, she said she hummed to cover up how scared she was that she’d make a stupid play and I’d be sore at her. It was like whistling past a graveyard.

Well, so Susan kept humming and the next thing I knew I had stopped playing for big stakes. The real reason I stopped, I know, had nothing to do with her being chickenhearted or my feeling sorry for her. I stopped because I was having too much fun at home, and had no desire to go out looking for action.

I was living, through my kids, the kind of childhood I never had myself, and always wished I could have had. There was a time when I believed that entering the world of Aleck Woollcott had made this up for me. But that wasn’t the same. Aleck had probably been right when he called me an arrested adolescent. There was no place for adolescents in the world of Billy, Alex, Minnie and Jimmy, however. Here I could be a bona fide kid.

Here I wasn’t arrested, either. I was making progress. It was as if, after sweating out fifty-five years in Miss Flatto’s room, I had finally been promoted to the third grade.

Our ranks decreased by one. Bill-no longer “Billy”-went east to the Juilliard School of Music. He had graduated from Beverly Hills High and he’d advanced as far as he could go in the music department of the University of California at Los Angeles. His professor of composition at U.C.L.A. recommended him to Juilliard, probably the toughest conservatory in the country, and Bill was accepted.

I don’t know who Juilliard was tougher on-Bill or his old man. What chords he brought home when he came back on vacation! He had me pulling sounds out of the harp I never thought were possible. When I had the modern harmonies licked, he sprang his original pieces and arrangements on me and really had me sweating. Bill ran through them on the piano, patiently, over and over, while I translated them to the harp, by ear. He worked out a system of writing down music for me by letters, the names of the strings, and left me plenty to work on when he went back to school.

What he had done was a revelation to me. He had given voices to the full range of the instrument. He had produced tonal colors, shimmering, jangling, glowing, booming, that gave me goose bumps. My son, at the age of nineteen, was one of the few composers living-for that matter, one of the few who ever lived-who knew how to write for the harp.

It was a hell of a shame that Minnie never knew what a fantastic return there would be one day on the forty-five-buck investment she had made back in 1915, the time she decided that a harp might add some class to “The Six Mascots in School Days.” When I unlocked the mysterious black crate in the freight depot at Aurora, Illinois, I certainly had no inkling of the kind of future I was opening up.

Even with Bill gone we were bursting the fences in our Beverly Hills joint, what with rocket labs, workshops, studios, kennels, rose gardens and practice putting greens. The kids would soon be entering high school. It was the time to move. Which way to go? Only one way-out. Out of the city. Los Angeles wasn’t big enough to hold us.

Which way out? Palm Springs, by unanimous vote. We’d been spending a lot of weekends down there, and had fallen in love with the desert. Besides, I had a couple of things going for me in that part of the country: grapefruit and a golf club.

The grapefruit was Zeppo’s latest deal. The remarkable Zep had done it again. In the years since he quit being a professional Marx Brother, Zep had come into his own many times over. Actually, his first achievement was becoming a professional Marx Brother. When he jumped into the act (to replace Gummo during the First World War), the rest of us had nearly fifteen years’ stage experience behind us. Zep had none. Besides, he hated every aspect of show business, including actors. But he stuck it out to the end of our Paramount contract-through four years in vaudeville, three Broadway shows, and five movies.

His first venture on his own was a talent agency on the West Coast, which Gummo later helped him run. Their roster of stars and directors was surpassed only by the giant agencies in Hollywood. After a few years Zep sold out to the Music Corporation of America, the biggest of the giants, for a profit in seven figures. He took a hunk of this dough and went into the breeding of Thoroughbred horses, an enterprise he knew a total of nothing about. He bought a huge farm, complete with training track, and stocked it with stallions and brood mares of his own selection. The Thoroughbred business did so well he soon got some very tempting offers for it. He sold out for a fat profit.

Meanwhile he’d built himself a workshop, so he could fool around with some invention ideas he had. He came up with a new-type gasket for a certain hose connection in airplanes. It didn’t sound like much to me, but it did to the U.S. Air Force. After the horse farm was sold, Zep expanded his workshop into a manufacturing plant with a force of two hundred and fifty employees. The gasket works he sold to one of the big aircraft companies-for a nice profit, needless to say.

Now he decided to take it easy. He built himself a lovely home in Palm Springs, where he could retire in comfort. Not long after moving down, he headed for the Salton Sea, one day, to go fishing. He never got there. On the way he saw a sign saying “260 Acres for Sale.” He stopped to inquire. It was two hundred sixty acres of dust and tumbleweed. Zep bought it. He had the idea of covering it with grapefruit trees.

He knew less about raising grapefruit than he did about breeding horses, but in three years’ time he was one of the most successful citrus ranchers in the Coachella Valley. Zeppo offered the rest of us shares in the business. I was happy to have a piece of any of Zeppo’s action. So now I was in grapefruit.

That’s when we started going to the desert so often. Had to oversee my acreage and protect my interest. At the same time, I had become the ringleader of a bunch of guys from Hillcrest who had the idea of starting a new golf club somewhere near Palm Springs. The fancier clubs down there were restricted. We wanted to put up a course that would be the equal of any, but where everybody would have an equal right to play, regardless of his faith or the color of his skin.

We bought property for the course in Cathedral City, six miles southwest of the Springs, and that was the beginning of the Tamarisk Country Club. I personally bought ten acres of sand and scrub at one corner of the layout, and that was the beginning of El Rancho Harpo.

Our new home, a timber-and-stucco house at the end of a long lane of oleanders, was finished in the spring of 1957, and we moved in. The happy hooligans became desert rats.

It was a dream home in every respect. There was a wing for the kids and a wing for Susan and me. Between the wings was a huge, vaulted living room, with facing walls of glass. To the west we looked across the swimming pool and the open desert to the backdrop of the San Jacinto Mountains. To the east we looked through a screen of eucalyptus trees to the fourteenth hole of Tamarisk.

Minnie, at last, could have horses. Jimmy had enough space for a whole rocket range. Alex had an irrigation system and a house full of automatic gadgets to tinker with. Susan had room to paint. And I had an eighteen-hole golf course.

The setting for our lives had changed drastically, but we hadn’t changed our ways. The Marxes carried on at the harp ranch just as we’d always carried on, and always would.

I felt I should do something very special to dedicate our new joint. So one August afternoon, when the temperature was over 110° and the golf course was deserted, I piled into the golf cart with my clubs and a supply of fifty balls and drove off to the fourteenth tee. Before teeing up I took off my shorts and shoes. I was determined to be a Famous First-the first naked man in history to fire a hole-in-one.

I didn’t make it, but I came damn close. I came within six inches, to be exact, of immortality.