Harpo Speaks! (21 page)

The old Italian guy and his wife looked at each other, searching for the key to the right thing to say. The auctioneer glared at them. “All right!” he yelled. “It’s only a goddam scrub brush!” They held on to each other like they had done something wrong.

I said, quickly, “One cent.”

The auctioneer whacked his gavel. He sighed and said, “Sold-thank-God-to-the-young-American-gentleman-for-one-cent.”

I picked up my brush and handed it to the old lady. She was as touched as if I had given her the entire contents of the store. The old man grabbed my hand and pumped it. They both grinned at me and poured out a river of Italian that I couldn’t understand. “Think nothing of it,” I said, and added, “Ciao, eh?”-which was the only Italian I could remember from 93rd Street.

They thought this was pretty funny, the way I said it, and they walked away laughing. I walked away laughing too. A day that had started out like a nothing day, going nowhere except down, had turned into a something day, with a climax and a laugh for a finish. I couldn’t explain it, but I hadn’t felt so good in years. A lousy penny scrub brush had changed the whole complexion of life.

When I got back to the hotel the money had arrived from Uncle Al. Just as I anticipated, it had been decided that Groucho should audition as a single, Zeppo return to Chicago with Minnie, and Chico hire out as a piano player.

To all of these decisions I said: “Nuts.”

This was the longest serious speech I had ever made in front of the family, and everybody listened. Then everybody started talking. We talked ourselves out, until all our self-pity was gone. What had happened to us was our fault, not the Shuberts’ or anybody else’s. And what was going to happen to us would also be our own doing, not the Shuberts’ or anybody else’s.

Aboard the east-bound Pennsy. The other passengers on the coach kept complaining, so we bribed the porter a quarter and spent the night in the men’s room of the nearest Pullman car. I tootled on the clarinet and played pinochle with Chico. Groucho smoked his pipe and read a book. Zeppo did deep knee-bends. At the same time we were all working, throwing ideas into the kitty and putting together a show we could do back in New York. None of us stopped to think how idiotic and deluded we were. What show? For whom? We were not only exiled by the moguls, but now even the scavengers wouldn’t touch us.

Absolutely idiotic. And thank God we were. The train ride from Indianapolis to New York, clacking through the blackness from the end of the line to what looked like the beginning of nothing, was the most momentous jump we ever made. For me, it was the prologue to a new kind of life in a new kind of world.

Unknown

CHAPTER 11

The Name Is Woollcott

IT WASN’T MUCH OF A SHOW, but it kept Chico in pinochle money and the rest of us in eating money. It was a three-day tabloid, or “tab show,” in which everybody doubled in brass. Groucho was master of ceremonies, tenor, and straight man in the afterpiece. Chico doubled as piano player and monologist, besides doing comedy in the afterpiece. I played harp and clarinet, spelled Chico at the piano, and dropped knives. Zeppo was the juvenile and the baritone, and also the prop man and the stage manager. Minnie was leading lady, character woman, producer, company manager, and wardrobe mistress.

Since we had been thrown to the lions by the lords of the vaudeville jungle, we had to hack out our own circuit. The Marx Brothers Circuit, justly unsung and unfabled in the annals of show business, was made up of the least known side-street theatres in Brooklyn and the Bronx, with a western swing to Hoboken, New Jersey. Oh, how the mighty had fallen!

We were surviving, but that was all. The future was a bleak, blank zero. Nobody of importance came to see us because we didn’t let anybody know where we were playing. We were even too ashamed to let our relatives know. Indianapolis looked better all the time. We were broke back there, but at least we still had stature as big-time headliners.

“Hang on, hang on!” was Minnie’s rallying cry. “I’ll find a way!”

It was not Minnie, for once, who led us into greener pastures. It was Chico who found the way. He found it-where else?-in a pinochle game, one Sunday night. He found a live one. A guy with dough. A guy with enough dough to put a legitimate show together.

The “live one” was a producer named Joseph Gates. He was better known around Broadway as “Minimum” Gates, because of the quaint way he auditioned an actor. A Gates audition consisted of his turning his back on an actor and saying, “So what’s your minimum salary?”

Actually, Gates’s bank roll was not his own. He had found an angel, a pretzel manufacturer from Hackensack, New Jersey-Herman Broody by name. Broody had promised his girl friend he’d put her on the stage. He had the stage for his girl, but no show. He came to Gates and gave him the dough to build a production.

So now Gates was looking for a star to build the production around. He had about decided to sign a black-face comedian named Wilson, who had worked as a single on all the big circuits and whose minimum salary was six hundred dollars a week. Chico went to work on Gates. Why not sign the Four Marx Brothers for the show? By sheer coincidence, said Chico, the Marx Brothers’ minimum was also six hundred dollars a week. Gates couldn’t see it. Too many guys in the act. They’d clutter up the stage.

Chico wouldn’t let go. He kept after him like a dog with a bone. He even let Gates beat him in three straight hands of pinochle. That may have been what did it. Anyway, Gates reported to Broody that he was undecided whether to sign Wilson or the Marx Brothers for the lead.

Broody was surprised at Gates’s indecision. Why, there was no choice at all! What the hell-if you could get one ton of pretzel salt for six hundred bucks at one place and four tons for six hundred at another, you went to the second place. Didn’t Gates see the simple, practical, hard-headed logic of that? If he could get four actors for the price of one, then grab ‘em before they got away.

We were hired.

Our new show, for reasons unknown even to the writers, was called “I’ll Say She Is.” Since it had full-stage production numbers like “Perfumes from Hindustan” (followed by a team of gilded toe-dancers who were eternally griping about “the goddam beads on the floor left over from the Hinderstand bit”), and since our own big scene lasted over forty-five minutes, the show was billed as a musical comedy, not as a common revue.

I’ll Say She Is had an out-of-town tryout in Allentown, Pennsylvania, then opened in Philadelphia. At the end of summer we were still playing to capacity. Business was too good to close. So the show continued to run until the day after Thanksgiving, when Broody decided Gates should take it on the road.

The tour lasted a year and a half. We were in the legitimate theatre now. We looked down our noses at acts that toiled away at the two-a-day and three-a-day grind of vaudeville. We only had to do matinees on Wednesdays and Saturdays.

Consequently, we had more time off than we’d ever had before. During the Philly run, I had time to learn the game of golf. I also had more time for music. I learned half a dozen new tunes for the harp. My old clarinet had fallen apart, and I replaced it with an eight-dollar job I found in a Philly pawnshop.

My dog Hokum also kept me busy. On the golf course one Sunday he flushed a skunk out of the rough. He had to be confined to the theatre basement and I had to hire a kid to help me keep poor Hokum doused with toilet water around the clock. When I took him out for his first airing, in my open runabout, a sudden thunderstorm came up. Hokum panicked, jumped out of the car, and I never saw him again.

During our Chicago run we had a long, happy reunion with Pete Penovitch and with our mutual friend Nick the Greek. They went with us to the ball park at least twice a week, when the White Sox were in town. We were in good company. The Greek always bet a big bundle-sometimes as much as ten G’s-on a ball game, and he would make “good-luck bets” with us, riding the other way. He’d give us four-to-one when the bookies’ odds were even money.

During this same stand, I first met a man who was to become a lifetime friend, Mr. Ben Hecht. Groucho and I had read Hecht’s 1001 Nights in Chicago and, being fans of the author, we wanted to meet him. We found out where he lived through Covici’s Bookstore (which was like the local poolroom for Chicago writers and painters at the time), and the four of us went around to his apartment.

Groucho said: “You Ben Hecht the fiddle player?” Hecht said he was, and asked us in. We stayed all night. Hecht played the violin, I played the piano, and Ben and Groucho sang, improvising dirty parodies on popular songs. We saw a lot of Hecht and got to know his buddy Charlie MacArthur who was also loony enough to be to our liking.

In one of his memoirs, Hecht recalls this particular summer in Chicago and mentions being haunted by “a perpetual Halloween called the Marx Brothers.” He should talk! He played the spookiest fiddle I had heard since Solly Soloshky. I must admit, however, that he was a fair writer and a better than fair poker player.

Except for these bright interludes, the road was the road, grueling and tiresome. A hotel was a hotel and a train was a train. When you’d been in one you’d been in them all, and we’d been in them all for fourteen years too many. We threatened to quit the show. They raised our salary. We said we would still quit-unless they took I’ll Say She Is off the road and opened it in New York City.

Ever since we first opened in Philadelphia, we had been promised that the show would go to Broadway. The management kept stalling, saying the show still needed more testing out of town. Now we held them to their promise. A year and a half was enough of an out-of-town tryout for any show. Either I’ll Say She Is went to New York or the Marx Brothers took a walk. We were the mother-lode of a gold mine, and we knew it. Without us the whole thing would turn to a pile of slag. Our threat worked. We went to New York.

The Casino Theatre on 39th Street was leased and May 19 set for the opening. Apparently, the plot was this: open at the Casino, get crucified (it simply wasn’t a production of Broadway caliber), run a couple of weeks to appease the Marx Brothers, then head back out on the road. We were warned not to put our trunks in storage.

On the afternoon before the opening I was sitting in Lindy’s restaurant. It was sad to think that a month from now I’d be in Albany or Columbus or Baltimore. During rehearsals I’d been staying at the Princeton, a theatrical hotel, with the rest of the cast. Tonight, after the show, I was going to move in with Minnie and Frenchie, who had taken a house on Long Island. I had a home again, and during the day a choice of two homes-away-from-home, Lindy’s or Reuben’s. I was back with my own people, who spoke my language, with my accent-cardplayers, horseplayers, bookies, song-pluggers, agents, actors out of work and actors playing the Palace, Al Jolson with his mob of fans, and Arnold Rothstein with his mob of runners and flunkies. The cheesecake was ambrosia. The talk was old, familiar music. A lot of yucks. A lot of action. Home Sweet Home.

I got up to go to work, with absolutely no enthusiasm, and told the boys to save my seat. I took a cab down to the Casino. The marquee lights had just been turned On. THE FOUR MARX BROTHERS IN “I’LL SAY SHE IS.” I was not impressed. I was a realist. I kept hearing the words: Sorry, boys-you’re shut. But what the hell, I thought, remembering the empty seat in Lindy’s, it was going to be fun while it lasted.

The story of the Marx Brothers’ Broadway debut, on the night of May 19, 1924, has been told many times. It has been rehashed in columns, articles and books, and on the radio. How Minnie fell off a chair while being fitted for her opening-night gown and broke her leg, and had to be carried into her box at the Casino. How one famous critic was furious at his paper for making him cover “some damn acrobats.” How the Marx Brothers stood the audience on its ear. How the disgruntled critic laughed so hard he cried.

There is very little that I can add to the story, I’m sorry to say. All I can remember, in all honesty, is doing the show, getting some good laughs, taking a few bows, then going home alone to Long Island and straight to bed. Minnie, because of her busted leg, decided to spend the night in a hotel.

At eight o’clock in the morning the phone rang. It was Groucho. He was excited. “Hey, Harp, wake up!” he said. “Have you read the reviews?”

“What reviews?” I said. “Variety doesn’t come out until tomorrow.

“No, the newspaper critics,” said Groucho. “The Sun, the Times, the Trib, the World-the big critics.”

“Yah? They liked us?”

“They loved us. We’re a hit! Listen-” I interrupted Groucho to say I’d rather go back to bed than listen to any reviews. I didn’t know anything about Broadway critics, only about the mugs who wrote for Variety. All I ever read in the papers were the sports pages, and once in a while a column like S. Jay Kaufman’s or F.P.A.’s “Conning Tower.” If the “big critics” liked our show that was nice, but it was nothing to wake up a guy at eight in the morning about.

Groucho wouldn’t get off the phone. “Let me read you how it starts out in the Sun,” he said. “This you gotta hear.”

“All right, all right, all right,” I said. “Go ahead-it’s your nickel.”

Groucho then read, to my growing embarrassment:

Harpo Marx and Some Brothers. Hilarious Antics Spread Good Cheer at the Casino. By Alexander Woollcott.

As one of the many who laughed immoderately throughout the greater part of the first New York performance given by a new musical show, entitled, if memory serves, “I’ll Say She Is,” it behooves your correspondent to report at once that that harlequinade has some of the most comical moments vouchsafed to the first-nighters in a month of Mondays. It is a bright colored and vehement setting for the goings on of those talented cutups, the Four Marx Brothers. In particular, it is a splendacious and reasonably tuneful excuse for going to see that silent brother, that sly, unexpected, magnificent comic among the Marxes, who is recorded somewhere on a birth certificate as Adolph, but who is known to the adoring two-a-day as Harpo Marx.