Hello, I Must be Going

by Charlotte Chandler

  GROUCHO

  Then I put on a derby and became a Jew comedian. And I sang “There I Was Waiting in My Shirt,” which was a parody on “There I Was Waiting in the Church.”

  ERIN

  You just got up during intermission and sang the songs?

  GROUCHO

  Three songs.

  ERIN

  What were the other two?

  GROUCHO

  I don’t remember.

  ERIN

  Did you get any laughs?

  GROUCHO

  Not that I remember.

  ERIN

  Didn’t they think that was funny, “There I Was Waiting in My Shirt”?

  GROUCHO

  I thought it was, but the audience didn’t agree with me.

  ERIN

  How did you get the idea to sing during intermission?

  GROUCHO

  I always sing. I may sing right now.

  ERIN

  But that was the habit of the day, to have someone entertain during intermission?

  GROUCHO

  Sure. When I was playing the Howard Theatre in Boston—that was a burlesque house—they had acts during the intermission, and we were one of the acts, between the first and second act. We were The Four Nightingales. Are you familiar with Boston? Well, the Howard was down in a very tough neighborhood, and the theatre was full of sailors. We were singing “How’d You Like to Be My Little Sweetheart?” and a sailor leaned over the box and spit in Harpo’s eye with tobacco juice.

  In 1910, Minnie decided to try Chicago. Al Shean swore that any act could make it in the Midwest, and that even included nightingales and mascots. Selling their furniture and giving up their Ninety-third Street flat, the Marxes set out for Chicago by way of the South. The idea was to work their way there by playing circuits that were so desperate that they would book anything, and in those days few Yankee acts cared to tour the South. As insurance, while Minnie, the boys, and Aunt Hannah were playing in southern theaters, Sam and Uncle Julius (after whom Groucho was named) planned to sell cloth to local tailors. As it turned out, the sideline became the main line that financed the expedition. The Marxes finally reached Chicago, where conditions were better—for a while.

  At first Minnie was able to get plenty of bookings for the act, perhaps not in the best theatres, but they were working. Then she ran out of small-time vaudeville houses in Chicago, and the act went on the road again, this time in what seemed like the final curtain.

  Another swing through the South left them stranded in New Orleans during the summer of 1912. Without money to get back to Chicago, they accepted the only bookings offered, in Oklahoma and Texas. This was in the days before air-conditioning and insecticides. Any act willing to brave the mosquitoes of the open airdromes and the steam bath conditions of the theatres would have been welcome—even Osterman’s Oysters or The Musical Farm. In Nacogdoches, Texas, they even emptied a theatre during their act in what seemed like the ultimate blow. But according to Groucho, it was actually the turning point for them.

  “We were playing a small town in Texas, a farming town. The farmers came in and tied their horses up beside the Pantages Theatre. We were doing a singing act, The Six Mascots. None of us could sing. While we’re doing the act, a mule runs away, and the whole audience left to catch the mule. Then they came back. By this time we were so angry we started making sarcastic remarks. Like, ‘Nacogdoches is full of roaches,’ and ‘The jackass is the finest flower of Texass.” Instead of getting mad, the audience laughs. This is the first time we ever did comedy like that.”

  After this unexpected triumph, they attempted comedy whenever it seemed appropriate, but with mixed results. Sometimes audiences laughed, sometimes they didn’t. “It was like being in an old Western shoot-out with pistols that were loaded for Russian roulette,” Gummo recalled.

  Word got around fast that a funny singing act was on the way, so in Denison, Texas, The Six Mascots were received enthusiastically. The theatre manager invited them to stay over with a guarantee, provided that they could offer his audiences, which included a teachers’ conference, a comedy sketch. Wishing to please the audience of visiting teachers, Groucho wrote an act influenced by the Gus Edwards school act. Groucho became Herr Teacher; Harpo, Patsy Brannigan or the stupid boy; Paul Yale (who was the bass singer), the “nance” or comic homosexual; Aunt Hannah, the bright girl; Minnie, the stupid girl. This act was called Fun in Hi Skule. Much of what the Marx Brothers did afterward was influenced by Fun in Hi Skule. Most notable of all, Harpo donned his famous red wig and became himself. Groucho assumed a stern countenance and an air of unqualified authority. Gummo played the juvenile straight man character, which Zeppo later inherited. (Chico later joined the school-days act and fitted in perfectly as the confidently ignorant “Eye-talian”). The Marx Brothers shows that followed Fun in Hi Skule, including the films and even Groucho’s TV program, owed something to it. You Bet Your Life is to some extent Fun in Hi Skule in modern dress, with Groucho still playing Herr Teacher. Horse Feathers is Fun in Hi Skule graduated to college and Hollywood. As the great white hunter in Animal Crackers, the prime minister in Duck Soup, or the bogus doctor in A Day at the Races, Groucho is still in many respects Herr Teacher, although when World War I began he had to make some changes in the character:

  “I was a German comedian, but like I told you, I lost my accent in one day when they sank the Lusitania. That night I just took off the chin piece I used to wear, and I became a Jew comedian. It was at the Chase Theatre in Toronto. I went into a cafeteria there and said, ‘I’d like some German fried potatoes.’ And the woman behind the counter said, ‘We don’t have German fried potatoes. We have home fried potatoes.’ I said, ‘Well, give me some sauerkraut,’ and she said, ‘We don’t have sauerkraut. We have cut cabbage.’”

  Fun in Hi Skule was successful in the Southwest, but it received a less warm reception in the Midwest as the act headed back toward Chicago. About 1913 Chico quit his job with Shapiro-Bernstein, where he had been promoted to salesman, and started to travel the vaudeville circuits himself with a fellow song plugger. Billing themselves as Marx and Gordini, Chico played the piano and his partner sang. When Gordini quit the act in Cleveland, Cousin Lou Shean joined Chico, and for some unexplained reason they called themselves Van and Schenck. This partnership lasted until Milwaukee.

  In Milwaukee, Chico saw his first musical tabloid and became convinced that this was the wave of the future. Rejoining the family in Chicago, he persuaded Minnie that they ought to mount a “tab,” using the school-days act as its nucleus. The result eventually was Mr. Green’s Reception, which included more elaborate musical numbers and stage effects, as well as a second comedy sketch. This was simply a continuation of the school-days situation, with the grown students returning to their class reunion. Chico joined the act, contributing his dialect and “shooting the keys” piano technique, as well as his buoyant optimism.

  About this time, Harpo received a package in the mail from Minnie while they were playing downstate Illinois. It was a secondhand harp that was limited to one key. Blissfully ignorant of all harp technique, Harpo tuned the instrument by ear, fortunately tuning it flat, or the battered harp would have collapsed. Through trial and error, he patiently taught himself how to play, acquiring an unorthodox technique that has since astounded other professional harpists. Throughout his life, according to Gummo, Harpo continued to tune the instrument incorrectly, even after he was able to afford an expensive new chromatic harp.

  Visiting with Mildred Dilling, Harpo’s harp teacher, at a private recital she gave in her New York apartment in 1976, I was told about her first meeting with Harpo and their subsequent relationship.

  “I met Harpo at Lyon & Healy at the Charles Ditson Company opposite Altman’s. The Woollcott article had just appeared in The New Yorker, so it must have been the late twenties. They were on the stage. (I don’t remember if it was Cocoanuts or Animal Crackers.) I was trying out a new harp for a pupil. I noticed a s
olemn-looking young man staring intently at me while I was playing. He listened till I finished, and then he came up to me and said, ‘Lady, learn me that.’

  “He told me his name, and I’d read about him in The New Yorker.

  “I said that I would, and he asked me when. I said anytime. And he asked, ‘Now?’ I said yes, and he said, ‘My place or yours?’ I said mine. We took a taxi, and that’s how it started.

  “He tuned his harp in the key of B flat instead of G flat, and he always kept his second finger there, keeping his place. He only worked with three fingers. His harp should have been tuned in C flat, but he had it tuned in B flat. It made everything sound very peculiar. Three flats in the key of E flat is normal. He’d started on a single action harp, a kind of harp made before 1810.

  “He always had a lesson every day whenever we were in the same town at the same time—in New York, or in California, or in Paris, or in Étretat on the Normandy coast. I introduced Harpo to my harp teacher, Henriette Renié, who was the greatest harp teacher, and Harpo had lessons from her. She lived in Paris, but in the summer she lived in Étretat, which was the most beautiful seashore in the world. There was a great cultural artistic movement there about 1850. It was a center for the arts. De Maupassant and Offenbach lived there.

  “Harpo was dead serious about music. Classical music filled his life. Music was an overwhelming passion which enriched his life.

  “I was in my teens. He was older than I was, but he had great reverence for my knowledge. Harpo never changed. I don’t know how old he was when I first met him.

  “After the lesson he’d stretch out on the sofa and say, ‘Now, Dilling, you play for me. And if I should fall asleep, that’s the greatest compliment I could pay you.’

  “Sometimes we would use my apartment for the lesson, and sometimes we would use Woollcott’s apartment on Fifty-second Street by the river. I lived in a very well-built building with good walls, and we worked very late, but no one ever complained.

  “I always had a box at the theatre during the days when they were playing in New York, and I did all my entertaining there. Only, we went through backstage, and if there were any men in the group, it was hard to get them past the girls. I used to take a lot of famous people there, and they always enjoyed it. I remember taking Andrés Segovia and his first wife, and he really enjoyed it. Harpo would crawl into the box on his hands and knees so no one could see him.

  “I was a little shy of the others. I felt they thought I was making him too ‘regular.’ The family thought I’d spoil him. But it didn’t hurt him.

  “The way he is on the screen, the way everyone knows him, is the way he played after I began teaching him. We met before they made any of the movies. Harpo had individuality. I never could make him learn to read music.

  “He was full of tricks. He had a rubber bass string, although I never saw it. He would do things like sit at his harp and twist his nose with his left hand and pluck the string with his right hand. He would hide part of what he was doing with his body, and it would seem as if his nose made a sound.

  “Harpo wasn’t really an intellectual. He wasn’t the intellectual Groucho was. He had a lot of intellectual friends, but Groucho was really the intellectual in the family. Harpo was brilliant, though.

  “Harpo had this lovely swimming pool, and when he and Susan adopted the children they had the pool filled in. That’s the kind of people they were.

  “I remember once when I was appearing in California in the San Fernando Valley. It was after Harpo had stopped making movies. He said to me, ‘Billing, you’re going to be tired tonight, so I’ll help you out. I’ll do the encores for you.’ I said, ‘With the wig?’ and he said, ‘Yes.’ And he did. After the performance he pushed his harp onstage and played, and I joined him.”

  Mildred Dilling recalled Harpo finishing a number, then rushing off the stage in the middle of the applause. Even though the ovation grew and there were cries from the rear of the auditorium for an encore, Harpo didn’t reappear. He couldn’t. He was the person yelling, “Encore!”

  “The last time I saw him was at a recital I gave in California. He came and brought the family.

  “It was an unromantic friendship based on music, which is a great bond. I believe that Harpo, Renié, and I were the three people who cared more about the harp than any other people in the world.”

  Talking with me about Harpo and his harp, Groucho summed up his view.

  “The harp wasn’t my favorite instrument, but Harpo was very serious about it. And there weren’t many harpists in vaudeville.”

  As for Chico, Groucho said:

  “Chico’s idea of practicing was to dip his hands in a basin of hot water. He may have been a piano player, but he was more interested in fiddling around.”

  George Seaton talked about the appeal of Chico’s piano playing:

  “We were in San Francisco, and this was Day at the Races on the tryout, when we took those comedy scenes and played in the public houses and worked them out. Chico was on the stage playing his piano and shooting the keys, and I was standing in the wings with Groucho. Groucho just never could understand why an audience would appreciate Chico’s playing the piano the way they did. The audience was applauding Chico, who was doing an encore. Groucho walked right out on the stage and said jokingly, ‘If you come near a tune, play it.’

  “He thought he would get a big laugh, but the audience hissed him instead. He came back into the wings and just couldn’t understand how an audience could possibly enjoy Chico’s piano playing so much that when he ad-libbed, they hissed instead of laughing.”

  It was in Rockford, Illinois, in 1914 that the Marx Brothers were rechristened, “assuming that four Jewish boys can be christened in the first place.” They had become acquainted with Art Fisher, a monologist on the same bill with them who had a penchant for giving nicknames to his friends. At the time there was a popular comic strip called “Sherlocko the Monk” (later “Hawkshaw the Detective”), which was supposed to have inspired Fisher to change Julius, Adolph, Leonard, and Milton to Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and Gummo. There actually was a character in this strip named “Groucho.”

  Julius became Groucho because of his serious demeanor. Adolph became Harpo for obvious reasons. Leonard became Chico because of his passion for the chicks; thus his name is correctly pronounced “Chicko.” Milton became Gummo because he wore rubber overshoes, rain or shine. “I always had holes in my shoes,” he explained, “so I’d always wear rubbers, or gumshoes, over them even when it wasn’t raining, and I got called Gummo.” Herbert was only thirteen and at home in Chicago when Fisher was renaming the boys, so he became Zeppo later. No one, especially Zeppo, was certain why. The names stuck, but they continued to use their real names until I’ll Say She Is in 1924.

  Minnie had remained in Chicago, where she established the Minnie Palmer Agency, which handled the Marx Brothers and other smalltime vaudeville acts. Realizing that her sons could languish forever in cheap boardinghouses and crumbling small-town theatres, she resolved to book them into the more prestigious circuits. By 1914, however, school acts were in decline. Minnie turned to her brother Al Shean, who was by now an established and respected figure in big-time vaudeville.

  Al Shean looked at Mr. Green’s Reception and noticed that, instead of exiting with a flourish, they simply ended the act whenever the laughter and applause died out. To remedy this, Uncle Al gave Minnie $25 to have vaudevillian Charley Van write “Peasie Weasie,” which turned out to be a big hit. “Peasie Weasie” was a genre of patter song designed to be sung at the end of a vaudeville act until the audience became surfeited with its endless doggerel verses. “It was doggerel,” Groucho admitted, “but doggerel is man’s best friend—even in a cathouse.” He loved to sing it and would do so at just about any party occasion.

  Uncle Al decided that the way to improve their act was to write a new one, so one night he sat down at the Marxes’ kitchen table and wrote Home Again. This sketch was an elaboration o
f the second half of Mr. Green’s Reception, with the school-days routine omitted. Adoring elaborate theatrical effects, Minnie was especially pleased with the possibilities offered by Home Again. Groucho remembered vividly one of her miracles of mise-en-scène:

  “In Home Again we had a boat. We’re all standing in the boat, and Harpo would give it a fast shake with a rope, and the people would fall down on the boat. It wasn’t a real boat, it was just a flat piece with wheels on it. It was a fine piece of scenery!” Groucho chuckled at the memory.

  Home Again also brought the Marx Brothers another step closer to their mature comic characters. Uncle Al gave Groucho most of the lines, relegating Chico to dialect straight man, and Harpo to pantomimist. Both felt slighted and said so. Chico demanded some laugh lines. “So Uncle Al had to make the straight man’s part funny too,” Groucho recalled.

  He said that prior to Home Again, Harpo was far from silent:

  “He talked a lot in the school act. He played a boy called Patsy Brannigan. In those days, if you did a school act, you usually had a Patsy Brannigan in the act. Patsy Brannigan was a kid with red hair and a funny nose. That’s where Harpo got the idea for his wig. A fella had taught him a lot of big words, and sometimes Harpo would dumbfound the audience by making this speech with all those big words. He didn’t understand most of them, but he loved the speech.”

  Groucho explained that Al Shean felt that Harpo’s voice did not match his whimsical appearance. Harpo was disappointed, but he accepted Uncle Al’s admonition, and thereafter Harpo talked only once again during his entire professional career. A quarter of a century later, he spoke at the end of the stage tryouts for Go West, reeling off the same kind of uncharacteristic erudition that had convulsed Fun in Hi Skule audiences. The brothers decided that his speech, while comically effective, departed from the innocent Harpo character, and it was therefore omitted from the shooting script of the movie. “Character is everything,” Groucho frequently told me. Over the years, Harpo was besieged with attractive offers to speak publicly, but he turned them all down, even when they were from his good friend Jack Benny. Jack talked about his disappointment with Groucho and me: