Harpo Speaks! by Harpo Marx
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a remarkable book. It is the memoir of a second grade drop out, who eventually rubbed shoulders with the great literary figures of his day. It is also the memoir of one of the most famous movie stars of the first few decades of talkies. But he barely mentions his movies.

I am a life-long fan of the Marx Brothers. I can't really say why I didn't get around to reading this one sooner but I'm glad that I did. Unlike a lot of celebrity memoirs, Harpo does not skip the details of his youth. He writes at length about an impoversished existence on the Upper East Side of Manhattan at the close of the 19th century. He was the middle child of five boys, but spent his days in an odd solitude roaming the streets in hopes of finding adventur and maybe hustling somethin of value.

The best part of the book is when he writes about the Marx Brothers years as traveling vaudevillians. He writes about how their act came together, in fits and starts, and the various flop houses that they brothers stayed in between 1910 and their first Broadway show in 1924.

Then he becomes famous. But not, strictly speaking, a celebrity. No one recognized him out of costume and no one knew what he sounded like. But he fell in with the Algonquin Round Table and was more than content to be their listening partner. He writes with real affection for that crowd, and with reverence even for litary figures who have been mostly forgotten 90 years later.

The transition to movies and the move to Hollywood are given cursory coverage. He does not dissect Duck Soup or tell the tale of how Irving Thalberg got them over to MGM to make A Night at the Opera and a day at the Races before dying young and leaving them without a champion in the studio. He spends more time talking about his USO tours and night club engagements with his brother Chico.

He writes about the brothers in more or less inverse proportion to their celebrity. Gummo was his agent and very dear friend. He writes about Zeppo's business acumen with big brotherly pride. Chico is mostly seen as a scamp who stole from him as a kid and as an adult. But there's almost no judgment there. Groucho is really only spoken of as a wit. There's almost no sense of their bein friends, although he does mention that some combination of the five brothers ate lunch almost every day in their later years.

Harpo loves to drop names. And some of the anecdotes are a little too good to be true. But they are funny and warm. The last few chapers deal with his happy marriage and the joy he and his wife took in raising four children, all of them adopted. The passage about how they raised their children to view the act of adoption as an adventure is truly poignant.

Harpo might have written a more serious memoir where he exposed the grit of his relationships with Groucho and Chico or where he divulged the process that caused him to make Love Happy, the last Marx Brothers movie most famous for being the first Marilyn Monrore movie. Harpo not only leaves that story out, he actually seems to forget he made it! (He refers to A Night in Casablanca as the last Marx Brothers movie.)

But these are the quips of a die-hard Marxist of the Groucho variety. Anyone who loves comedy or show business or Dorothy Parker and her crowd, will get a lot out of reading this one.



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