Category: 1920s

Dave has asked us…The magic that is Christmas is that you can invite any musician (or person from the music world) to be your guest. Even if they’ve passed away, they can be at your table for a meal and a few stories.  So, who would you invite?  And any little musical gift you hope they might possibly come with?

This was posted on Dave’s (A Sound Day) site on December 14, 2023.

Well, I’m cheating a bit…my Christmas guest left the earth in 1964 and yes, he was a musician…just not a rock musician. He played the harp and played it quite well…his nickname even contained that name…Harpo Marx. But Max…why not a rock musician? If I had to pick a rock musician, it would be one of two people. John Lennon or Keith Moon. I would say Lennon would be my number one choice but I wanted to go a different route.

Why am I picking Harpo? He hung out with the top artists, writers, musicians, and athletes of his time. He was always at peace with himself. He has said he never had a bad night’s sleep. The guy was close to what you see on screen. He had so many stories about his life that just those would keep you entertained. There are more reasons…but here are some of the things he did.

The man was born in 1888 and grew up in New York. He didn’t graduate from high school…no, he jumped out the window of his second-grade classroom and never went back to his teacher Miss Flatto. Did the lack of education stop him in life? No, not at all as you will see.

In 1909 his mother Minnie roped him into appearing on stage with his brothers in a singing play. He was dressed in a duck suit and promptly peed in his pants. “Coney Island, New York. Made my debut at Henderson’s and peed in my pants. I felt shamed and disgraced, but Minnie wouldn’t let me quit the act on any such flimsy pretext. She hung my trousers out to dry in the sea breeze between shows. By the second show, I was much less scared, so enthusiastic in fact that everybody was afraid I might sing. But I didn’t. I just opened my mouth when Groucho did.”

The brothers hit the vaudeville circuit and any rock stars who say their beginning was rough…they don’t know what rough is. The Brothers would stay in boarding houses when possible but sometimes slept in the park. They ate food that was infested with bugs and people treated them terribly because show people were frowned upon at that time. They were in Vaudeville from 1909 to 1924. That was a lot of hard living and the brothers were in their mid-thirties before they hit Broadway.

The review that would change Harpo’s life came in 1924 in their first play (I’ll Say She Is) to make Broadway. The review was written by the author Alexander Woollcott. He wrote glowingly about all the brothers, but Harpo is the one he singled out. Woollcott met Harpo backstage and soon introduced Harpo to some of the most sophisticated writers and artists of that time. Harpo soon became a member of the Algonquin Round Table. That was where witty and cutting remarks flowed like water. Groucho said it was like falling in a den of lions. Some of the regulars were Dorothy Parker, Alexander Woollcott, Heywood Broun, Robert Benchley, Robert Sherwood, George S. Kaufman, Franklin P. Adams, Marc Connelly, Harold Ross, and Russell Crouse. Harpo has said that he was a professional listener. Despite only having a 2^nd grade education he could hold his own and was a vivacious reader.

Kaufman would co-write 2 plays for the brothers, The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers. They were Broadway smashes and soon the brothers would be making movie versions of both. In 1929 they made The Cocoanuts movie in New York while acting in Animal Crackers on Broadway. They would make Animal Crackers next and then move to Hollywood. Their film career lasted from 1929 to 1949 with a movie called Love Happy with Marilyn Monroe. They made 13 in all.

Harpo was a happy bachelor until he met Susan Fleming in 1932 and they were married in 1936. He was very much like his character on the screen except he talked of course. He hung out with royalty, artists, and even toured Russia in 1933 and carried secret papers taped to his leg out of the country for America. He never found out what he risked is life for though. Some FBI agents got the papers as soon as he got to New York.

Harpo and Susan wanted children, so they adopted. Harpo had said he wanted a child in every window when he went to work. So, they adopted 4 kids and from all accounts…was one of the best dads you could possibly get. If he came home late, he would sometimes wake one of his children just to play games with them. None of his kids ever wrote books on how bad he was or ever said anything bad publicly. He did have a set of rules that he went by and had them pinned up. This is them and I had the same rules on our refrigerator when Bailey was small, although a few were altered because we had no pool table or harp.

1. Life has been created for you to enjoy, but you won’t enjoy it unless you pay for it with some good, hard work. This is one price that will never be marked down.
2. You can work at whatever you want to as long as you do it as well as you can and clean up afterwards and you’re at the table at mealtime and in bed at bedtime.
3. Respect what the others do. Respect Dad’s harp, Mom’s paints, Billy’s piano, Alex’s set of tools, Jimmy’s designs, and Minnie’s menagerie.
4. If anything makes you sore, come out with it. Maybe the rest of us are itching for a fight, too.
5. If anything strikes you as funny, out with that, too. Let’s all the rest of us have a laugh.
6. If you have an impulse to do something that you’re not sure is right, go ahead and do it. Take a chance. Chances are, if you don’t you’ll regret it – unless you break the rules about mealtime and bedtime, in which case you’ll sure as hell regret it.
7. If it’s a question of whether to do what’s fun or what is supposed to be good for you, and nobody is hurt whichever you do, always do what’s fun.
8. If things get too much for you and you feel the whole world’s against you, go stand on your head. If you can think of anything crazier to do, do it.
9. Don’t worry about what other people think. The only person in the world important enough to conform to is yourself.
10. Anybody who mistreats a pet or breaks a pool cue is docked a months pay.

Harpo played in some of the seediest joints you could imagine and had to endure a lot of antisemitism, but he was loved by all around him including children and animals.

His son Bill, who is a talented musician, released a book a few years ago. He said in 1964 that Harpo loved The Beatles when they first arrived. Bill was a professional piano player and he didn’t think The Beatles would last. Harpo told him that he better get used to them because they would be remembered in history because they were starting something new. Bill said six years later he was playing a gig and many of his songs were Beatle songs. He thought… “Dad was right again” while playing Let It Be.

Here is an intro that Harpo wrote to Harpo Speaks…I thought you would enjoy this…he gives a brief story of him.

I’ve played piano in a whorehouse. I’ve smuggled secret papers out of Russia. I’ve spent an evening on the divan with Peggy Hopkins Joyce. I’ve taught a gangster mob how to play Pinchie Winchie. I’ve played croquet with Herbert Bayard Swope while he kept Governor Al Smith waiting on the phone. I’ve gambled with Nick the Greek, sat on the floor with Greta Carbo, sparred with Benny Leonard, horsed around with the Prince of Wales, played Ping-pong with George Gershwin. George Bernard Shaw has asked me for advice. Oscar Levant has played private concerts for me at a buck a throw. I have golfed with Ben Hogan and Sam Snead. I’ve basked on the Riviera with Somerset Maugham and Elsa Maxwell. I’ve been thrown out of the casino at Monte Carlo.
Flush with triumph at the poker table, I’ve challenged Alexander Woollcott to anagrams and Alice Duer Miller to a spelling match. I’ve given lessons to some of the world’s greatest musicians. I’ve been a member of the two most famous Round Tables since the days of King Arthur—sitting with the finest creative minds of the 1920s at the Algonquin in New York, and with Hollywood’s sharpest professional wits at the Hillcrest.
(Later in the book, some of these activities don’t seem quite so impressive when I tell the full story. Like what I was doing on the divan with Peggy Hopkins Joyce. I was reading the funnies to her.)
The truth is, I had no business doing any of these things. I couldn’t read a note of music. I never finished the second grade. But I was having too much fun to recognize myself as an ignorant upstart.
 
 I can’t remember ever having a bad meal. I’ve eaten in William Randolph Hearst’s baronial dining room at San Simeon, at Voisin’s and the Colony, and the finest restaurants in Paris. But the eating place I remember best, out of the days when I was chronically half starved, is a joint that was called Max’s Busy Bee. At the Busy Bee, a salmon sandwich on rye cost three cents per square foot, and for four cents more you could buy a strawberry shortcake smothered with whipped cream and a glass of lemonade. But the absolutely most delicious food I ever ate was prepared by the most inspired chef I ever knew—my father. My father had to be inspired because he had so little to work with.
I can’t remember ever having a poor night’s sleep. I’ve slept in villas at Cannes and Antibes, at Alexander Woollcott’s island hideaway in Vermont, at the mansions of the Vanderbilts and Otto H. Kahn and in the Gloversville, New York, jail. I’ve slept on pool tables, dressing-room tables, piano tops, bathhouse benches, in rag baskets and harp cases, and four abreast in upper berths. I have known the supreme luxury of snoozing in the July sun, on the lawn, while the string of a flying kite tickled the bottom of my feet.

I can’t remember ever seeing a bad show. I’ve seen everything from Coney Island vaudeville to the Art Theatre in Moscow. If I’m trapped in a theatre and a show starts disappointingly, I have a handy way to avoid watching it. I fall asleep.
My only addictions—and I’ve outgrown them all—have been to pocket billiards, croquet, poker, bridge and black jelly beans. I haven’t smoked for twenty years.

The only woman I’ve ever been in love with is still married to me.

My only Alcohol Problem is that I don’t particularly care for the stuff.

Who wouldn’t want to talk to this man? Thank you…and as far as a musical gift… I would love to hear Harpo play either the Harp, or piano, or just tell me Vaudeville stories!

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