Harpo Speaks! (61 page)

“It’s that old Nightingale blood,” I told her. “It’s pulled me through again.”

Then the hours began to drag, especially while the kids were in school. I couldn’t sit still. But every time I got up to do some thing I found there was nothing I really wanted to do. Thank goodness the harp wasn’t there to tempt me. Smartest thing I ever did, having it put away.

If only the kids were here, I’d say to myself. Then there’d be a little life around the joint.

But when the kids came home it wasn’t much different. At first they thought it was swell having their old man around the house all day. I thought it was great being there whenever they were, and for a while it was. I did card tricks, taught them backgammon, and listened to all their gripes about school.

Then it got tiresome. For the first time, I realized that kids could be terrible nudges. Hanging around expecting you to entertain them. Hanging around asking questions. Mainly questions they had no business asking.

“Feeling better today, Dad?”

“Can I get a pillow for you, Dad, or bring your slippers?”

“If it costs so much to keep your harp in storage and they charge so much for insurance, why don’t you sell it? Why did you want to play the harp in the first place, instead of like a trumpet? Anyway, aren’t most of the harpists who play the harp ladies and not men?”

“Why was Mr. Woollcott so fat in all the pictures? Didn’t his doctor make him go on a diet, like your doctor?”

“What did you do at night when you were a boy, if there was no TV then?”

“Well, if there wasn’t any TV, how did you find out who won the election on Election Day?”

“Why do you say it’s important that all of us finish high school when you didn’t even finish grade school? Didn’t it mean so much in those days?”

“Is it true that Uncle Groucho went on the stage before you did?”

“Were Minnie and Frenchie their real names or just their nicknames like yours and Uncle Chico’s and Uncle Gummo’s?”

“Who’s the oldest man you ever met in history? President Franklin D. Roosevelt? If they hadn’t shot Abraham Lincoln would you have met him?”

“If it was so cold in the winter when you were a boy, why didn’t you move to California instead of to Chicago?”

“If you agree with Uncle Zeppo every time he says show business stinks, how come you went on the stage instead of having a career?”

“Sure you wouldn’t like a pillow, Dad?”

“If you didn’t finish grade school did that make you a juvenile delinquent? You weren’t a juvenile delinquent, were you? Because if you’d had a prison record Mom wouldn’t have married you and they would have blacklisted you from making movies, right?”

“Yes, but you would have had a lot more interesting stuff then to put in your book, right?”

“How are you feeling now, Dad? Any better?”

I stood it as long as I could. I was a good-natured guy and a tolerant father, but they were driving me off my nut. It got to where I had to shut them up and barricade myself in my room to get any privacy.

Then Susan began giving me the needle. I should get out of the house. Do this, do that. Ride the golf cart over to the course and watch them shoot golf. I told her the game didn’t interest me any more, not in the least. Go into town more often and see more of the old gang at the Hillcrest. I told her the Hillcrest had changed. It was a dull place.

“Any worse than here?” she said. I shrugged. “Harp,” she said, “are you bored?”

I said yes. Frankly, I was.

“Do you know what anybody who’s bored really is?” she said.

“What?”

“He’s a bore.”

The short discussion that followed was very close to being a fight. This, I said to myself, wasn’t my old Susan. Something was eating her. She was turning on me the same as the kids.

To keep peace in the family, I said I’d decided to go away for a couple of days. Susan asked me where. The first place that came to mind, for no good reason, was Las Vegas. She thought that was a splendid idea, much as they’d all miss me. She couldn’t conceal how pleased she was that I was going away. I wished I could feel the same.

So I flew to Vegas.

It wasn’t half as bad as I had expected, that night. After dinner I wandered through the casino in my hotel. There was something sweet and restful about the clicking of dice and chips and roulette wheels, like hearing crickets at sundown. Looking at the patches of green felt on the blackjack and crap tables, I knew how a country boy must feel upon seeing his first green fields after being stuck too long in the city.

But I didn’t weaken.

I went across the Strip to another joint. There, in the lounge next to the casino, quite a crowd stood around a TV set, watching the fights. I joined the crowd. One of the bosses (you can always spot them in Vegas) came over from the casino and stood in front of me to see how the fight was going. His silhouette had a very familiar shape.

I knew this guy. Even from the back I recognized him, and I hadn’t seen the guy for thirty years. The last time-the only time-we’d met was on a gambling boat in the river off Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It was Milt Jaffe, the guy who’d saved my skin by lending me ten thousand bucks that night in 1929.

I nudged him in the ribs. “How’s chances of letting me have ten G’s?” I said, in a con man’s voice. Jaffe didn’t turn around. He gave me a vague, impatient gesture with the back of his hand. I nudged him again. This time his gesture was definite. It meant I should get lost. I nudged him a third time. “If you loaned me ten G’s once why can’t you do it again?” I said.

Without removing his gaze from the fight on the TV screen, he sidestepped away from me. You had to be a thick-skinned diplomat to handle drunks and crackpots in Las Vegas. They might turn out to be well-heeled customers. You couldn’t take a chance by offending them.

When the bell rang for the end of the round and the crowd relaxed momentarily, I piped up, in a loud falsetto: “Pinchie Winchie!”

As he turned, even before he saw me, Jaffe yelled, “Pinchie Winchie? Harpo Marx!”

As soon as we got through telling each other how great we looked (he was lying, I wasn’t) and what a lot of changes there’d been in the old world since we last spent an evening together, I asked Jaffe the question that had stuck in my mind for thirty years.

“Please tell me,” I said, “why you gave me that dough back in Pittsburgh. Why no references? No security? No signature?”

“Harpo,” he said, “I’ll tell you. In my line of business, same then as now, the only security I have is my judgment of people. If I can’t tell a good man from a dead beat with one look I don’t belong in the business. If my instinct goes sour I go looking for another job. So what I’ve always done is practice on my judgment, same as you practice on your harp. Every once in a while I test myself on people. Always have. Still do.

“I tested myself on you that night on the boat. I said to myself if I wasn’t right about you, I’d never be right about anybody else ever again. You want to know why? It wasn’t because you had an honest face. To me there’s no such thing as an honest face. I’ll tell you what it was. You knew how to have a good time without spending money. A guy who has to blow his wad to have fun is a bad risk.

“Want to know another reason? You were a good risk from the life-insurance point of view. I could see you were one guy out of ten thousand, the kind that stays young forever. You weren’t going to conk out on me before you paid me back.”

Jaffe gave me a big grin. “Maybe I wasn’t so cold-blooded about it as I make out,” he said. “You know, I was pretty soft in the head by the time I handed you the dough. I don’t think I ever laughed so hard in my life.” Remembering, he began to laugh hard all over again.

I knew what was coming. Jaffe said, “We’ve got to get a game going tonight, Harpo. Got to do it!”

“Oh, no,” I said.

Jaffe didn’t hear me. He was too steamed up. “We can use the main office,” he said. “What do you need? Burnt cork? We’ll get some from one of the dressing rooms.”

“No,” I said. This time he heard me. He looked at me like he was a kid and I was Santa Claus come to take back the toys I’d put under his Christmas tree. I let him down as gently as I could.

Pinchie Winchie, I told him, simply wasn’t my speed any more. A lot of things weren’t my speed any more. Leaping around onstage. Lugging a harp around. Whacking a golf ball. All behind me. The time comes, like it or not, when a man has to stop kidding himself that he’s as young as he feels. That time had come for me. I felt fine, and there was nothing wrong with me. But I’d stopped kidding myself. I was retired.

Jaffe squinted at me as if a thick fog had rolled in between us. “Retired?” he said. “Retired from what?”

He didn’t give me a chance to answer. I didn’t have an answer ready anyway. “For God’s sake, Harpo,” he said, “don’t you know how stiffs like me have always envied guys like you? Have you ever had to meet a payroll or sweat out the auditors or file for bankruptcy?”

I shook my head.

“You’ve been making a living,” he said, “out of a life that all the rest of us dream about retiring to. How the hell can you retire from it?”

I had no answer for him.

Jaffe, embarrassed by his outburst, changed the subject and asked me how Zeppo was. I gave him the rundown on Zep’s wheeling and dealing. He asked me how my other brothers were. I told him. Groucho never busier. Chico still in the thick of the action and planning a trip to Europe. Gummo still in business at the old stand, manager and den-mother to all the rest of us.

As I talked, Jaffe gave me a hard, close study. I knew what he was thinking. I said to him, “If you didn’t know who I was, you wouldn’t lend me two bits tonight, would you?”

“What the hell,” he said, ducking a direct reply. “So we change. Time marches on. Like you say, you can’t kid yourself. You’re only young once.”

We didn’t have much left to say to each other. But I had an awful lot to think about, all of a sudden. The fight was over and the television set had been turned off. We were standing against the bar, where Jaffe could keep an eye on the casino, beyond the lounge. Having nothing better to do, I had picked up a book of matches from the bar and was lighting them, one by one, blowing them out, and dropping them into an ash tray.

Jaffe made a move like he had to go back to work. “Wonderful seeing you, Harpo,” he said. He gave me his hand. Instead of shaking hands I gave him a squeeze on the cheek and said, “Pinchie Winchie!”

He laughed and did the same to me. The only difference was, I had planted a beaut on his kisser-having burnt enough matches to work up a good, black smudge. I wonder if he got the message when he finally discovered it.

An hour later I was on a plane to Los Angeles. I felt so terrific I could have flown without benefit of aircraft, except that I would have taken a short cut and sure as hell got lost. I had good reason to feel I had wings. I had just recovered from the longest and most serious illness I ever had: Retirement. But it was all over now, so Waltz Me Around Again, Willie!

I got my harp out of storage, aired out my costume, and ordered a new set of golf clubs.

My children stopped being pestiferous. My wife stopped making insinuations. I signed for a night-club date in Chicago and three TV appearances and told Bill he’d better hustle me up some new arrangements. I switched back to painting in oils. Everything I painted turned into a clown, but this was a rut I’d been in for quite some time and I didn’t mind at all.

In those three television shows I succeeded in doing the three things I had been warned never to do again. In the first, I whanged away at the harp. In the second, I played a golf match with Sam Snead. In the third, I not only leaped around, but I leaped around for three days in the snow.

The other day Zeppo called up to say he was putting in a second crop on the ranch. So now I’m not only living on velvet and in the pink, but I’m in grapefruit and tomatoes too. I just reported this to Susan, Susan said, “For a guy who bills himself as a professional listener, you’ve been doing an awful lot of talking lately.”

I get the message. Honk, honk!

I. Susan

Ode to the Silent Harp

I sing a song of joyous praise

Of one who labored in the garden of laughter.

A quiet man who sensed the absurd

In all he saw and all he heard;

Untutored by textbooks, he learned in the street;

Survival was foremost, to steal was to eat.

From whence came the gifts

Of musical taste,

The sense of beauty,

The gentle grace?

The gods safeguarded them through the years

Until he was ready.

I am glad we were there.

II. Bill

Imagine growing up in a house filled with music, hour after hour. Live music. Ravel. Debussy. Gershwin. Berlin. Silvery arpeggios and glissandos. Lush golden chords. All from the fingers of a magical little man sitting at a harp in the big bay window of the living room. This was my privilege for the first seventeen years of my life, thanks to fate, Susan and Harpo.

Until I started school, I took it all for granted. Didn’t everybody’s Dad fill his house with glorious music? The illusion was shattered when I entered the outside world, by way of Hawthorne Elementary School, and then had to start piano lessons. I hammered at my scales grimly. My heart was not in it. My heart was out on the baseball diamond. All this time Dad kept playing nonstop-strumming, plucking, rippling awayin the bay window. No fair! Dad liked practicing. No wonder-I never heard him playing any scales.

It was not long before I learned that Dad was not practicing. He played his harp three hours a day not for proficiency but for the sheer pleasure of it. I sat at my piano wishing mightily I were someplace else. When Dad sat at his harp, there was no someplace else. Gradually, watching my father-his eyes shut, a reverential grin on his face -and hearing the wondrous sounds that resonated from his instrument, I became a musician. I entered, at a very early age, the only profession I would ever know. No… I didn’t really enter the profession. I absorbed it.

Dad’s influence on all our lives was all-pervasive. It was never more apparent than at dinner time. Not to be outdone by the Algonquin or the Hillcrest, we had our own “Round Table”-which we moved into the den after our formal dining room became the neighborhood pool room. Dad would begin the nightly dinner ritual by raising a forefinger and intoning his favorite expression: “And in conclusion …” Then we would go around the table-Mom, Alex, Jimmy, Minnie and I-reviewing our triumphs and trials of the day. Dad fielded gripes and hang-ups with all the wit and wisdom of a second-grade dropout-which is to say, by reducing tragedy to absurdity. First. thing you knew, he had you laughing at yourself and your problem faded away. He was a born healer.