Harpo Speaks! Read Online Free PDF Page B

That’s “Patsy Brannigan” third from right, first row. With my switch to comedy, Groucho (second from left, standing) was converted to straight man.
    Penguin Photo
    The Marx Brothers become men-about-Broadway when I’ll Say She Is opens in 1924. Seated: Groucho. Standing: me, Zeppo, Chico. If I look a little dazed, it’s because I just came from a twenty-hour poker session at a strange hotel called the Algonquin.
    Culver Service
    “Napoleon scene” from I’ll Say She Is. Don’t ask what the scene was all about-we didn’t even know what the title of the show meant. In the role of Josephine is Lotta Miles.
    Culver Service
    Pancho Marx, in Cocoanuts.
    Culver Service
    Animal Crackers, our third Broadway hit. It was horseplay like this that drove Gummo back to civilian life and into the dress business.
    Alexander Woollcott, the Emperor of Neshobe Island. “In a snood mood” was Aleck’s own caption for this shot.
    This was the stationery Aleck had made up for me after our summer on the Riviera. Figure at right is Master Alexander Woollcott, age four, in the role of Puck.
    Richard Carver Wood
    Two croquemaniacs at large, on Neshobe Island. The “blimp at a mooring mast” is Aleck, lining up a shot. The disgusted observer, obviously getting shellacked, is me.
    Richard Carver Wood
    My dancing partner on the Neshobe dock is Irene Castle. In critics’ row are Alfred Lunt, Aleck, and Lynn Fontanne. Below: Basking in the Vermont sun with (left to right) Aleck, Neysa McMein, Alfred Lunt and Beatrice Kaufman.
    Richard Carver Wood
    Richard Carver Wood
    While Charlie Lederer kibitzes, I take on Aleck at cribbage. Trying to beat Woollcott at cribbage was the one lost cause in the life of Butch Miller (right), more widely known as “Alice Duer” Miller.
    Richard Carver Wood
    In the Garden of Allah, Hollywood, flanked by four other refugees from the Algonquin. They are, left to right, Art Samuels, Charlie MacArthur, Dorothy Parker, and Aleck Woollcott.
    The Four Imposters. Richard Rodgers, Justine Johnson, George Gershwin (as Groucho) and Jules Glaenzer at a New York costume party.
    M-G-M Photo by Durward Graybil
    George S. Kaufman plays a sticky wicket. Character in background obviously suspects he’s trying to cheat.
     

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CHAPTER 3
    Adrift in Grandpa’s
    Democracy
    IN A SHORT TIME, by brother Chico was far out of my class as a sporting blood. I wasn’t wise enough or nervy enough to keep up with him. Chico settled into a routine, dividing his working day between cigar store and poolroom, and latching onto floating games in his spare time, and I drifted into the streets.
    Life in the streets was a tremendous obstacle course for an undersized kid like me. The toughest obstacles were kids of other nationalities. The upper East Side was subdivided into Jewish blocks (the smallest area), Irish blocks, and German blocks, with a couple of Independent Italian states thrown in for good measure. That is, the cross streets were subdivided. The north-and-south Avenues-First, Second, Third and Lexington-belonged more to the city than the neighborhood. They were neutral zones. But there was open season on strangers in the cross streets.
    If you were caught trying to sneak through a foreign block, the first thing the Irishers or Germans would ask was, “Hey, kid! What Streeter?” I learned it saved time and trouble to tell the truth. I was a 93rd Streeter, I would confess.
    “Yeah? What block 93rd Streeter?”
    “Ninety-third between Third and Lex.” That pinned me down. I was a Jew.
    The worst thing you could do was run from Other Streeters. But if you didn’t have anything to fork over for ransom you were just as dead. I learned never to leave my block without some kind of boodle in my pocket-a dead tennis ball, an empty thread spool, a penny, anything. It didn’t cost much to buy your freedom; the gesture was the important thing.
    It was all part of the endless fight for recognition of foreigners in the process of