Harpo Speaks! (7 page)

I rapped on the window. When he looked up I yelled, “Gookie! Gookie!” and made the face. It must have been pretty good because he got sore as hell and began shaking his fist and cursing at me. I threw him the face again. I stuck my thumbs in my cars and waggled my fingers, and this really got him. Gookie barreled out of the store and chased me down the Avenue. It wasn’t hard to outrun such a pudgy little guy. But I’ll give Gookie credit. He never gave up on trying to catch me whenever I did the face through the window.

It got to be a regular show. Sometimes the guy behind the cigar-store counter would tip off the cardplavers that I was giving Gookie the works out front. When they watched the performance from the back-room door and he heard them laughing, Gookie would get madder than ever.

For the first time, at the age of twelve, I had a reputation. Even Chico began to respect me. Chico liked to show me off when somebody new turned up in the poolroom. He would tell the stranger, “Shake hands with my brother here. He’s the smartest kid in the neighborhood.” When the guy put out his hand I’d throw him a Gookie. It always broke up the poolroom.

I didn’t know it, but I was becoming an actor. A character was being born in front of the cigar-store window, the character who was eventually to take me a long ways from the streets of the East Side.

Over the years, in every comedy act or movie I ever worked in, I’ve “thrown a Gookie” at least once. It wasn’t always planned, especially in our early vaudeville days. If we felt the audience slipping away, fidgeting and scraping their feet through our jokes, Groucho or Chico would whisper in panic, “Ssssssssssst! Throw me a Gookie!” The fact that it seldom failed to get a laugh is quite a tribute to the original possessor of the face.

The little cigar roller was possibly the best straight man I ever had. He was certainly the straightest straight man. If Gookie had broken up or even smiled just once, my first act would have been a flop and the rest of my life might not have been much to write a book about.

Gookie-baiting was one of the few free pleasures I had left. As I got older, I acquired more expensive tastes.

I spent more time in the poolroom, and the price of pocket billiards had risen from a penny a cue to two for a nickel. That was big money. An evening’s pool cost more than I usually managed to bring home from a day’s hustling, doing odd jobs and hocking whatever loose merchandise I might chance to find lying around.

What took really big money was the Special Dinner at Fieste’s Oyster House. Dining at Fieste’s was the supreme luxury of my young life. Not that the food there was any better cooked than the food we had at home-when we had food. No common commercial chef could ever compete with Frenchie. But Fieste’s Special included things that Frenchie could only dream of putting on our table: Greenpoint oysters and cherrystone clams on the half shell, deviled crab, grilled smelts, French fried potatoes and onions, a juicy T-bone steak, hot rolls soaked with butter, apple pie with a slab of sharp cheese, and coffee rich with thick, sweet cream.

As I said, a meal like this took really big money. It cost thirty-five cents.

I soon learned what the main pitfall was in saving money. It wasn’t temptation, or the lack of will power. It was Chico Marx. Chico could smell money. Hiding my savings at home, anywhere in the flat, was useless. Chico always found it sooner or later.

Once I thought I had him outsmarted. I sold a wagonload of junk over on the West Side, items I had selected off a moving van hitched in front of a house on Both Street. The junk dealer gave me ten cents cash, the most I ever made on a single wagonload.

I swore that this dime would not wind up in Chico’s pocket. For once I was sure it wouldn’t, because I had finally found the perfect hiding place. In our bedroom there was a small tear in the wallpaper, near the ceiling. Before Chico came home that night I stood on the dresser and pasted my dime to the wall under the flap of the torn paper. It was a slick job. I went to bed with a feeling of security.

Next morning when I got up there was a bigger rip in the paper than before. My dime was gone and so was Chico. Chico was the only person I ever knew who could smell money through wallpaper. Maybe he didn’t have much of an ear for music, but he had a hell of a nose for currency.

So I learned that the only way to protect any money was to spend it as fast as I earned it. I also learned to spend it on something I could eat, or use up, like dinner at Fieste’s or a game of pool. My possessions were no safer from Chico’s clutches than my money. Chico was a devout believer in the maxim “Share and share alike.”

The way he shared my possessions was to hock them as fast as he got his hands on them, and then give the pawn tickets to me as my share.

I was growing up. I wasn’t getting much bigger, but I was a lot cockier and wiser. I won my first fight. I beat the hell out of a kid from next door, a detective’s son, who was two years older and fifteen pounds heavier than me. Nobody was more surprised than he was-except me. I had never been known as much of a scrapper. I was better known for ducking and running. But now I was a fighting man.

I’d come a long way as a workingman, too. Since the day I was ambushed by the bakery woodpile and got hooked in my first job, I had been hired and fired on the average of once a month. If a job didn’t offer any possibilities of fun, graft or petty thievery, I was not apt to take it very seriously. Like the time I spent a whole afternoon making a delivery for a butcher. I was bored delivering meat so I took a shortcut, with stopovers at the poolroom, Gookie’s window, the front stoop of my house-where I set my all-time record of 341 tennis-ball bounces-and finally back to the store, where I got fired.

Selling papers was no good. No loot on the side. Shoe-shining was too much of a grind. Junk collecting was all right, but there was always the threat of being highjacked by an enemy gang.

If things got real desperate I could hock a pair of Frenchie’s tailoring shears, which was Chico’s old racket. As long as I gave him the pawn ticket, Frenchie never seemed to mind and he never asked for the fifty cents the pawnbroker gave me. The worst I could get was a whisk of Frenchie’s whiskbroom under my chin.

I was never as blase as Chico about hustling scratch from my own family. It made me feel guilty, so whenever Frenchie packed to go off on a selling trip, I volunteered to go along as his assistant. I helped carry the bundles of “lappas”-the odd pieces of materials-and when Frenchie made his sales pitch I held up the pieces one by one. This required skillful manipulation, since I had to hold the fabrics so the customer couldn’t see the holes or rips. I guess the official designation for my job would be Lappa Displayer and Defect Concealer.

Sometimes, when things got dull and the family was flat broke, I served as Grandpa’s assistant. Because the language barrier was too great for him, Grandpa never worked in America as a ventriloquist or magician. For some reason unknown to me, he took to umbrella mending, door-to-door, whenever he needed quick cash.

On his rounds, Grandpa carried a tool kit and a tin can on a wire sling. In the can were coals of charcoal. To get the charcoal white-hot for the soldering iron, the can had to be swung around and around, to fan the fire. My special job with Grandpa was Tin Can Swinger.

Grandpa’s umbrella business petered out after a few years. People got wise to the fact they could buy new umbrellas for the prices he charged to mend old ones. I was sorry. Tin Can Swinging was one occupation I could have stuck at permanently. It was fun.

The shortest job I ever had lasted ten minutes. I applied as a helper to an Italian dame who ran a delicatessen near 96th Street, and she hired me as soon as I walked in the store. Then she looked me up and down, with big starey eyes, and asked me to follow her downstairs to the storeroom. When she got me down there she began shaking and breathing hard and making funny wheezy sounds. I was afraid she was having a heart attack.

The dame had another kind of attack in mind. She asked me to hurry up and take my clothes off. I started to unbutton my shirt, thinking maybe she had a uniform for me. She couldn’t wait. She grabbed my hand and pressed it to her, all over her body, then under her dress. I couldn’t fight loose from her grip. I was never so scared in my life.

Thank God, the bell on the upstairs door rang before the crazy dame could go any farther. She let go of my hand and returned to the store. My hand, I felt, had been tainted. It was nasty, filthy dirty. I had to wash it, immediately. The only facility in the storeroom was a big, open pickle barrel. So I washed my hand in the pickle juice and ran upstairs and through the store and never went near the joint again.

My sex education was direct, no punches pulled, and vividly illustrated. I learned a lot more about the subject and its ramifications than most twelve-year-old boys did. But the method had its drawbacks. For years I couldn’t eat pickles.

At thirteen I attained manhood, according to the Jewish faith. I was bar mitzvah-inducted as an adult member of the synagogue. This didn’t mean, however, that I would start going to shul every Saturday. The rites were performed out of deference to Grandpa, who would have been bitterly hurt if his grandsons hadn’t shown this much respect for their traditional faith. It was the least we could do.

For the occasion, Frcnchie made me a black serge knee-breeches suit (pieced together of unsold “lappas”) and bought me a derby hat. After the ceremony there was a reception for me at 179 with a spread of sweets, pastries and wine. This, naturally, attracted all the relatives, and it was quite a party. I received four presents. Uncle Al gave me a pair of gloves. Aunt Hannah gave me a pair of gloves. Cousin Sam gave me a pair of gloves. (In my bar mitzvah photograph I’m wearing two pairs, one over the other, and holding the third.) Minnie, bless her, gave me a genuine, one-dollar Ingersoll watch.

The inevitable happened. Three days after my bar mitzvah, my new watch was missing.

I was pretty damn sore. A present was not the same as something you hustled. I tracked down Chico to a crap game and asked him what about it. He handed me the pawn ticket. I gave the ticket to Minnie and she reclaimed the watch for me. Then a brilliant idea occurred to me. I would show Chico. I would make my watch Chico-proof, so he couldn’t possibly hock it again. I removed its hands.

Now the watch was mine forever. I wound it faithfully each morning and carried it with me at all times. When I wanted to know what time it was I looked at the Ehret Brewery clock and held my watch to my ear. It ran like a charm, and its ticking was a constant reminder that I had, for once, outsmarted Chico.

Being a pianist (with a repertoire of two one-finger pieces) and an actor (with a repertoire of one funny face), I began to be more aware of show business.

Sam Muller, the tailor Cousin Polly married, had a shop on Lexington Avenue not far from the Gookie cigar store. For a while, Sam had the job of making the livery for Mr. Ehret’s coachmen, and he used to display sample uniforms in the window. Sam’s shop became quite a showcase, with the two dummies all dressed up in blue and gold.

The Star, a melodrama theatre on 102nd Street, gave Sam Muller two free tickets a week for using his colorful window to hang their posters in. When Sam couldn’t use the tickets, he’d give them to Groucho and me. I saw my first stage plays, and I loved them.

Groucho, having been chosen by Minnie to follow in the footsteps of Uncle Al, had already seen Uncle Al on the stage, and he knew his routines and songs by memory. I decided to take Groucho on as a partner (as Chico had once taken me on, in the cuckoo-clock promotion), when I found out that stores in the neighborhood were paying a penny apiece for cats. I’ve forgotten why they were. There must have been a mouse plague or a cat shortage, or both, that year.

So now I was a promoter. Groucho and I put on a show in our basement. We performed Uncle Al’s popular sketch, “Quo Vadis Upside Down.” Admission: one cat.

It was my first public performance. As I remember, we grossed seven cats at the box-office but made a net profit of only four cents. Three cats got away. Well, that was show business.

An exciting place down on Third Avenue was the Old Homestead Beer Garden. Behind the saloon there was a real garden with an open-air stage, where they put on continuous shows in the summertime with jugglers, comedy teams, trick musicians, yodelers and German bands.

I used to sneak through the back fence to see the show at the Old Homestead. Sometimes when I got caught I got heaved out. Other times I was put to work, changing the cards on the easel to announce the upcoming acts on the bill. I didn’t get paid for this, but I could see the entire program three times from start to finish. My favorite act at the Old Homestead was The Watson Sisters, who did a comedy prize fight act.

Prize fighting itself in those days was not a sport, like baseball. It was show business. A heavyweight title bout was to me the biggest show of any year, greater than the St. Patrick’s parade, the election bonfire and The Watson Sisters all rolled into one. This was in spite of the fact that I had never seen a prize fight.

My supreme idol was James J. Jeffries. On the afternoon he fought Jack Munroe, in San Francisco, I sat on the sidewalk with forty other kids in front of a saloon on 9oth Street and Third Avenue. There was a ticker in the saloon. The bartender announced the fight blow-by-blow as it came off the ticker, and some kindly patron was thoughtful enough to relay the vital news to the kids on the street outside.

When Jeffries knocked out Munroe in the second round, a rousing cheer went up inside the saloon, and all forty of us kids jumped to our feet and started dancing on the sidewalk and swinging at each other with roundhouse knockout punches. I came home with a black eye. I couldn’t have been happier or prouder if I’d come home with the championship belt itself.

Some of the talk about the Responsibilities of Manhood must have stuck with me after my bar mitzvah, because when I was thirteen I landed my first bona fide job, regular wages and hours and everything. And, indirectly, it had to do with show business. I became a bellhop at the Hotel Seville, down on East 28th Street. The Seville was then a high-class theatrical hotel.