Harpo Speaks!
by Harpo Marx, Rowland Barber
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Book Summary Information
Author: Harpo Marx, Rowland BarberBrand: Limelight Editions
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2004-07-01
ISBN: 0879100362
Number of pages: 482
Publisher: Limelight Editions
Product features:
- Published by Limelight Editions 482 Pages
- by Harpo Marx with Rowland Barber
- Author: Harpo Marx
Book Reviews of Harpo Speaks!
Book Review: "Greenbaum, you crazy kids!"
Summary: 4 Stars
That's what the matriarch of the Marx family, Minnie, would yell from the stage wings to her sons when she believed them to be jeopardizing the act and the possibility of their being paid; Mr. Greenbaum being the banker who held their mortgage on their house in Chicago (p. 105). Minnie's brother, Uncle Al to Groucho, Chico, Harpo, Gummo, and Zeppo, had made it in vaudeville, first as a soloist and then later as the second half of Gallagher & Shean. Minnie had the same genes as Al, but also 5 kids so it was through them that she followed her brother, so to speak, onto the stage. (Harpo herein doesn't say a word about whether Uncle Al had kids or not, or even a wife; only that he gave out nickels and dimes to the boys on a regular basis.) Uncle Al was also a lifeline for Minnie, anytime she needed emergency funds. It doesn't seem that Uncle Al helped the brothers get bookings or anything though, or at least Harpo doesn't say herein if he did.
Oddly, it's rather surprising the extent of things that Harpo doesn't mention in this book. We get charcoal sketches of Harpo's brothers when they are young, but very little about them as adults. Moreover, most of this book concerns Harpo's offstage life and the Marx Brothers really didn't seem to play even featured roles in that half of Harpo's world. Almost nothing is said about the Marx Brothers' career in terms of how this or that deal was made or how they negotiated for this or that or how they got to do this or that. Horse Feathers & Monkey Business don't merit a word herein and Cocoanuts and Duck Soup only a sentence or two. Animal Crackers, as a play, gets a bit more, but nothing is said about the film by the same name. Only A Night at the Opera gets some discussion. All the other Marx films are ignored.
This is not a behind-the-curtain look at the Marx Brothers, in other words. This book, actually, is not really about the Marx Brothers at all, but about the life lead by just one of them. And if this book were a film and had billing for its stars, after Harpo would come a man by the name of Alexander Woollcott. Woollcott was an east coast sophisticate/intellectual who happened to have been tasked with reviewing the Marx Brothers debut on Broadway. Surprising even himself Woollcott was swept off his feet by their humor and by Harpo's in particular. He called the morning after he reviewed "I'll Say She Is" to ask if he could drop by backstage and meet him that evening. After that Harpo was sort of Shanghaied into Woollcott's world of card playing sophisticates and into seasons of "grueling nine months of all-night poker and all-day croquet, Round Table lunches and Long Island weekends" (p. 272). Once when Woollcott was at a ritzy place for dinner with a lady and Harpo showed up and later threw the fish Harpo was served out the window Harpo was able to overhear Woollcott tell his date that "I've never seen that vulgar person before in my life" (p. 262). Yet Woollcott and Harpo played cards together on hundreds of occasions and Harpo spent parts of several summers at Woollcott's lake house in Vermont and a whole summer at least with him at Woollcott's rented villa in the south of France. "Every man as pretentious as old Alexander," admitted Alexander Woollcott himself, "should have at least one Louisa [a reference to Ruth Gordon] and one Harpo beside him always, to remind him of what really makes the world go round, and that everything else is pretending" (p. 248). But why Harpo spent so much time with this guy is less clear, notwithstanding that Woollcott is sprinkled throughout more than half this book of 475 pages (specifically page and pages between 162 and 419), i.e., far too much.
Woollcott, like many other folks herein seem to have come into Harpo's life by their iniative. Oscar Levant, for instance, was one who just showed up to at Harpo's house every day and thus became good friends with him and Harpo's wife seems to have done more courting of Harpo than him of her. Personality-wise he seems to have been a very reactive sort of fellow. This seemed to apply to his career as well. "Every turning point in my life seems to have been a low point, a time of terrible disappointment or disaster. I never planned any changes in the course of my career. The changes just happened" (p. 95). Hence we don't get much introspection in this book, but rather a more straight forward treatment of Harpo's life up until the first few years of the 1940s (The 15 or so years subsequent to this period are covered, but rather swiftly and generally at the end of this book.)
Well up to this point of his life he speaks of excessive gambling habits; having an extra phone line strictly for his bookie, for betting on "baseball, football, hockey, Davis Cup matches, bridge tournaments, flag-pole sitters, anything anybody gave odds on." Chico was even worse, leading a life for years and years which apparently revolved around a daily game of pinochle (p. 448). What else Chico did who knows. From this book you would not learn whether any of his brothers were even married, whether they had children, whether these kids socialized with his kids or anything of that nature. Ladies are ignored herein too, except for various unnamed starlets that others tried to fix him up with (whom he refers to as `nitwits') and the one who Harpo marries (when he was 42).
Out on the road and back in NY he lamented that "I had been cooped up too many years in hotel rooms, staterooms, apartments and bungalows. The happiest days I could remember were when I lived in the rambling clubhouse on Neshobe Island and in the Villa Galanon on the Riviera" (p. 343). So when he moved to California ("New York [in the 1930s] was no longer a great place in which to do nothing" he wanted a change (p. 343).
As he explained it, "I might be a bachelor, but bachelor quarters were not for me. I was a house man. A big-house man." So he rented retired silent film star's furnished house (whom he doesn't identify) where there "must have been twenty rooms in the house" (p. 344). "It was a tremendous place. All my worldly possessions, harp and case included, fit into the hall closet with plenty of space to spare" (p. 344). Why a man with few possessions requires a big house isn't addressed. Neither, by the way, does Harpo speak about lady friends herein. Of his relationships throughout his life while single he only says this: "I had a satisfying private life and I intended to keep it private" (p. 360).
A rather interesting part of this book (which unfortunately doesn't have an index by the way) concerns the 38 pages of details of a visit to Moscow and several other Russian cities on a solo tour in 1933 (at age 40 just and just before US recognition of the USSR).
Of Moscow: "It was like seeing a silent movie come to life, with no titles or background music" (p. 307). But his early years are the most interesting, however. "School simply didn't teach you how to be poor and live from day to day. This I had to learn for myself, the best way I could. In the streets I was, according to present-day standards, a juvenile delinquent" (p. 28). Then Harpo `graduated' to a life on the road, "...the Road of One-Night Stands, our life from 1910 to 1915. It was a miracle that we struck it out. A lot of very brave and determined people show people fell by the wayside doing what we were doing. It wasn't that my brothers and I had any more guts or determination than the guys who gave up. But we had Minnie, and Minnie did. She was our miracle" (p. 100). If not for her dogged determination, whatever it's basis, there would not be a place in American culture and movie history occupied by a comedy team that has achieved immortality.
I read this book within little over a 48 hour time span so that bespeaks an engaging read, but the book shares some similarities, in a way, with a good detective novel; you keep turning the pages and following the action wanting to get to the end, in the detective story case, to find out who did it, who the killer is, but this book has no splash ending, it's all appetizer in a way with little else. (09Aug) Cheers
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