I saw my first Marx Brothers’ movies, A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races, on my twelfth birthday, and my life changed forever. I was a dutiful kid, getting good grades and doing what was expected of me, not thinking of very much outside of home and school. Now I saw that there were other ways of thinking, of being, that everything that seemed unchanging and permanent didn’t have to be, that you could rebel, shake things up. If a man was being unbearably pompous, why not eat his tie — with mustard, of course?
Groucho and Chico were very funny in these movies, the more so since, as I later learned, they had made up a lot of their dialog. (If the dialog is boring, why not change it?) But you could spend all of A Night at the Opera just watching Harpo’s expressions: looking amazed when he gets in line for dinner and his plate is heaped with spaghetti, his amazement growing as the food is piled higher and higher; his evil grin as he finds himself in a room with three sleeping men with beards and a pair of scissors; his concentration as he plays the harp, the way he seems to understand the harp and what the two of them can do together. (In his autobiography, Harpo Speaks, he says that he is really that harpist, not the manic character he plays in the films. Then he recounts all the times in his life that he acted like the manic character in the films.)
To me he seemed like some mythical figure, Puck maybe, or Pan. While everyone else in Marx Brothers movies lives in our world, the real world, he has access to a sort of magic. His coat, for example, rumpled and voluminous, seems to have infinite pockets, holding everything he might need, from an alarm clock to an acetylene torch. “You can’t burn a candle at both ends,” Groucho tells him in Horse Feathers, and he reaches into a pocket and pulls out a candle burning at both ends. When he’s asked for a dime for some coffee, he takes out a steaming cup of coffee. He shakes the hand of a cop looking for stolen silverware in Animal Crackers, and all the cups and plates and saucers, forks and knives and spoons come falling out of his sleeve. And yet none of the magic is in the service of anything practical; there’s never anything important in those pockets, just whatever might make someone laugh.
Then there’s the fact that he never speaks, not once in thirteen movies. Is he mute, or is it just easier for him to communicate without words? Or does he know secrets too wonderful to reveal? What does he sound like? (Fortunately, now that we have the Internet to answer all our questions, we can find out.)
His autobiography has that feeling of magic too. He claims never to have felt sorry for himself, and while I can’t really believe that, he makes a good attempt at proving it. He was born on November 23, 1888, and spent his childhood in dismal Manhattan tenements, but he remembers instead things like a man named Mr. Ehret, who drove daily to and from Ehret Brewery:
Mr. Ehret rode in a dazzling black carriage, pulled by a team of prize black stallions. A footman and a coachman, in regal uniforms of blue and gold, sat on top of the carriage… When the carriage reached the top of a slope, in the morning, the coachman would stand up and shake the reins and the stallions would charge down the hill in full gallop.
When they passed our house, the stallions were wide-eyed and foaming at their bits, and the cobblestones rang like anvils. When they returned at night, straining at the bit, you could see the sparks fly up from their pounding hooves.
It was the Marxes’ mother Minnie who decided that the family should go into vaudeville, and in 1910 Harpo joined his brothers Groucho and Gummo on stage. Harpo remembers walking “the equivalent of the length and breadth of the state of Texas” from one ramshackle theater to the next, staying in places that were “gritty, smelly, either stifling hot or freezing cold, and infested with vermin.” The surprising thing was that they didn’t realize they were comedians; they started as a singing quartet called The Four Nightingales, and, as Harpo says, they weren’t very good.
Then, in Nacogdoches, Texas, their audience deserted them to see a runaway mule. (Harpo Speaks says this was Ada, Oklahoma, but all the other sources agree on Nacogdoches.) The brothers “went to town… Groucho, Gummo and I grappled, swung, ducked, tripped, tore our costumes to shreds and knocked the scenery to pieces.” When they audience came back, “we were still at it” — and the audience laughed.
They became comedians, constantly improvising and improving their material. They went from vaudeville to legitimate theater, and then, in 1924, to Broadway. In New York they were lauded by essayist and theater critic Alexander Woollcott, and Woollcott also introduced Harpo to the Algonquin Round Table, which included writers and wits like Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, and George S. Kaufman. Harpo, who had dropped out of school in the second grade, says he was accepted there because “I brought to the table another kind of talent — the one talent it lacked — the ability to sit and listen.” I can’t really believe that either. Hell, I’ve listened to groups of fascinating people, and no one’s ever invited me back on that basis.
I think it was because, as I said, he brought his own brand of chaotic magic. Once some of the Round Tablers spent a weekend at George and Beatrice Kaufman’s house playing croquet. (They were all crazy about croquet.) Two women from the Society of Friends came to visit, and Beatrice left to talk to them. Time passed, then more time, and Beatrice didn’t come back. George, who was in a good position to win the game, grew more and more impatient. So Harpo took a bottle of ketchup from the kitchen and poured it down the front of his shirt and pants, then went to where Beatrice and the women were having tea. “Excuse me, Ma’am,” he said. “I’ve killed the one cat and he’ll be ready for dinner, but I still haven’t caught the other one. Will one be enough?”
Another time he decided that “Tiffany’s was too stuffy for its own good, and something had to be done about it.”
I bought a bag full of fake emeralds, rubies and diamonds, at Woolworth’s, then went to Tiffany’s. I asked to look at some diamonds. The clerk pulled out a tray of stones, and while I looked at them I turned over the bag from Woolworth’s, behind my back. Jewels went spinning and bouncing all over the joint. Bells rang. Buzzers buzzed. Store detectives appeared out of the woodwork, hustled out all the other customers and locked the doors. Meanwhile the whole sales staff, including the manager, in cutaway coat and stripped trousers, were down on their hands and knees retrieving my sparkling gems.
When they were all collected and put in my hat, the manager saw they were phony, every one of them…. The store dicks hustled me out of the door, with the recommendation that I never return to the premises. On the way out, for a final touch, I tipped the doorman a giant ruby.
Five years later, when he went back to Tiffany’s to buy a wedding present, he found out that the store detectives hadn’t forgotten him. They only let him into the shop after he convinced them he had no fake jewels on him, and they watched him closely until he made his purchase. “On the way out,” he says, “I tipped the doorman a giant ruby.”
When movies made the transition from silent to sound, the Brothers’ plays were snapped up by Paramount Pictures. The Marxes filmed Cocoanuts (1929) and Animal Crackers (1930), then moved to Hollywood to make three more pictures. After their fifth movie, Duck Soup (1933), Harpo toured the Soviet Union, one of the first performers from the United States to entertain there. “They’ll adore you,” Woollcott said. “With a name like yours, how can you miss?” But Russian audiences weren’t like the ones in the US, and they needed a reason for his humor. After he gave an audition to a group of writers one of them asked, “Why were you compelled to destroy the letters? Why did you drink the ink, knowing it was ink?”
“There isn’t any point,” he told them. “It’s nothing but slapstick. You know — pure hokum.”
The writers worked up a play to explain his antics. Three actors performed in a language he didn’t understand, and at intervals he went out and did his routine. And to his surprise, it worked. On his opening night, he got a ten-minute standing ovation.
Back in the US, though, Duck Soup did poorly. No one really understood (or understands) why, though the reason I favor is that it was ahead of its time. It was anarchic and anti-war, a free-for-all with no plot, crazy songs, and jokes flying almost too fast to register. It’s the movie with the classic mirror scene, where Harpo breaks into a house and, to avoid being caught, has to pretend to be Groucho’s mirror image, reflecting all of his movements. The two brothers dance around each other in a masterpiece of choreography — and the scene is raised to another level when Chico shows up and tries to join them.
Opinions about Duck Soup changed in the sixties, possibly because of the anti-war movement. Now it’s number five on the AFI’s “AFI 100 Years… 100 Laughs” list, and it long ago replaced A Night at the Opera as my favorite Marx Brothers movie. (I should mention as a kind of trigger warning that unfortunately it also contains a racist joke.)
The failure of Duck Soup was a low point for Brothers, and Paramount didn’t renew their contract. Then Chico met Irving Thalberg, a producer at MGM who was known as the “boy wonder,” and convinced him to do the next Marx Brothers picture. The reason Duck Soup had failed, Thalberg told them, was that the audience needed someone to root for. Their movies should feature two lovers beset by problems, and the Brothers should help them reach a happy ending.
A Night at the Opera (1935), the first movie Thalberg produced for them, became a huge hit and saved their careers. Unfortunately, he also locked them into a formula they were never able to escape. Like the writers who dealt with Harpo in Russia, he gave their humor a purpose, and so destroyed the zany, absurdist spirit of the early films. They would go on to make seven more movies, but while most of them have flashes of brilliance, especially A Day at the Races (1937), none of them was a complete success. (Thalberg died during the filming of A Day at the Races, another reason for the downward trend of their movies.)
Around this time Harpo married an actress and dancer named Susan Fleming, and together they adopted four children, three boys and a girl. George Burns once asked him how many children he wanted, and he said, “As many children as I have windows in my house. So when I leave for work, I want a kid in every window, waving goodbye.” He invested in a non-restricted country club in Palm Springs, and the family moved to a house at a corner of the golf course, so he could play whenever he wanted. Unlike all his brothers except Gummo, he never got divorced, and his marriage lasted until his death in 1964.
Harpo, like other mythical characters, has his own wisdom to offer. For example, there’s this, about the Soviet Union: “What tipped me off to the Russians were the things I admired them for at first, their ability to concentrate, their frank curiosity, their enthusiasm in the theatre, their capacity for hard work, their respect for regulations. Wonderful qualities, but deadly — deadly because I did not come across, among the thousands of Russians I saw, one screwball, one crackpot, one wise guy, one loafer, or one sorehead. I never saw anybody do anything just for the hell of it. I never saw anybody pull a spontaneous gag.”
It sounds very much like what Emma Goldman was supposed to have said: “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.” (Turns out she didn’t say that exactly, but something longer that means more or less the same thing.) Work for a better world, but leave some room for spontaneity, for joy.
In Harpo Speaks he gives a list of rules that his and Susan’s household followed, and one of them is: “If things get too much for you and you feel the whole world’s against you, go stand on your head.” I’ve tried it and, y’know, sometimes it works.
