"The Ziegfeld Silences of 1925"

Some Predictions and Reflections Prompted by the Noiseless Goings-on of Harpo Marx

ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT

IT was the diverting but inaudible drollery of Master Harpo Marx— the speechless antics of a rubber-soled cut-up—which prompted these wistful reflections on the possibilities of a revue in which all the participants should be quiet about it. Such a revue could be benevolently endowed as an entertainment for the deaf, but the rest of us would probably be caught sneaking in at every performance. The deaf, who are always the best equipped playgoers at any musical comedy any way, should not be allowed to monopolize all the good things of this world.

Harpo Marx is one of the Marx Brothers, a family well known in the two-a-day who descended on New York in a body when a musical comedy called I'll Say She Is was recently thrust forward at the Casino Theatre. This move in managerial strategy was the more puzzling because it is a legend that the only persons who patronize the Broadway theatres in the summer are refugees from Chicago, and I'll Say She Is had been long and affectionately clasped to the bosom of Chicago before ever it drifted to New York.

Shortly after, the Broadway engagement began and it therefore became the thing to say, when you were running low of topics, "Well, I suppose you've seen the Marx Brothers". That playful but sometimes sardonic journal, the New York Times, passed the following uncalled for remark:

"They (the aforesaid Marxes) were, to be sure, not much of a surprise to vaudeville patrons, but there are four or five people in New York who rarely go to vaudeville and they all write reviews for newspapers, so the boys were discovered again. The next discovery, it is predicted, will be in the July issue of the American Mercury to be followed by a piece in the December issue of Vanity Fair."

IN the interval devoted to deciding whether it would be better to reply: "We consider the source," or merely, "Oh, is that so?", it might be recorded that the Marxes are four in number. The fifth Marx is now in trade and doesn't count, except, perhaps, the house. Concerning the four, certain facts might be set forth. In the first place—and this is a source of endless amazement in the two-a-day—they are really brothers. In the second place, their name, oddly enough, is Marx. To be sure, as Michael Arlen observes about the young man who said he was an Armenian, no one would be likely to just go and call himself Marx if that was not his name.

Of the four, one is a whimsical pianist; one is a considerable wag (that's Julius) ; and one is like the House of Lords in that he docs nothing in particular and does it very well; and the fourth is the ineffable Harpo.

To my notion, Harpo is the shining Marx. Some onlookers seem as entertained by the Collieresque touch and the columnar whimsies of the younger Julius, but to my notion his brother is by way of being a great clown. A chronicler of the music halls is always constrained to make these invidious distinctions; for there is so often one star in a team. So often one star and one vice-president. It was so with Montgomery and Stone. It is so with the Howard Brothers and with Clark and McCullough. And what about Nathan and Mencken? Ah, what, indeed!

Harpo Marx (his name is really Arthur) was once a bell-hop at the Hotel Seville in New York, just as Louis Wollheim used to be a professor at Cornell and F. P. A. sold insurance in Chicago and Frank Tinney, the well known defendant, was an undertaker's assistant in Philadelphia. In the case of Arthur Marx, the call from trade to art was in the blood, for the maternal grandfather of the Marxes, who lived to the age of 101, was once the leading magician of Germany, and their grandmother, in addition to serving satisfactorily as the magician's consort, was also given, in her own right, to playing the harp in public. Then their uncle is none other than Mr. Shean —positively Mr. Shean.

Mr. Shean's numerous nephews sang their way into the music halls while young, and after their sweet soprano voices had grown so croaky as to arouse resentment among the bystanders, they remained in the theatre as cut-ups. In their violent goings on, there is a splended strain of pure nonsense and in the midst of the ructions, Harpo (so called because he twangs on a large, golden harp he happens to have handy) utters never a word. In the entire evening's performance he is as silent as the grave. But the roll of his supremely communicative eye beneath the frowsy fringe of his red wig is downright voluble. And the very pace of his raffish walk says what the French would call "une bouchee".

For sheer eloquence, you should watch, for instance, his expression of injured innocence, regret and hope for the best when the detective, in congratulating him on his palpable honesty, shakes his hand so vigorously that some silver table knives (which your instinct tells you are not marked with an M) fall clatteringly from his sleeve. And continue to fall. It is a deluge of silver table knives. It becomes a Niagara of cutlery. And just at the exquisitely chosen instant when the hilarious audience has settled down to the assumption that it would be a physical impossibility for so much as one more salt spoon or even a discreet nutpick to lurk in that guilty sleeve, several dozen carving knives pour down in a sudden gush. If, thus badly recounted, the incident does not sound amusing, will you take the word of one who, at its conclusion, had to be picked up out of the aisle and placed gently back in his seat, that it is all of that?

Yes, Harpo Marx must certainly have a place in the "Ziegfeld Silences of 1925" or the "Greenwich Village Reticences" or whatever we decide to call the revue inaudible.

The program of our great silent revue will probably run something like this:

JAMES BARTON HARPO MARX BERT MELROSE W. C. FIELDS JOE JACKSON ANN PENNINGTON BUSTER WEST

DO you know Bert Melrose? He is the busy clown who, in a preoccupied and singularly innocent manner, spends all his allotted time standing four or five tables on top of each other until they form a wobbly campanile. This simple enterprise is wantonly complicated by the fact that he wears large, loose gloves while he is at work and the dangling fingers of these keep getting in his way and worrying him terribly. Once the structure is reared he puts a chair on top and sits in it so long that he grows abstracted, thinks he's on his own piazza and begins to rock— until, of course, the whole thing, after considerable agony, tumbles over.

Melrose is not entirely silent; for he croons to himself, as he works, like a contented scientist in his laboratory. But Joe Jackson, the preeminent tramp with the bicycle, works in such a hush that he pretends to be fearfully agitated if the audience disturbs his quiet with its laughter. And Fields, though he has been surprised by the sound of his own voice in "Poppy", can putter happily about the stage all evening without uttering a sound. In the revue inaudible, he might do his familiar juggling or his battle with the haunted tissue paper, or his croquet game, which recalls the match that Alice played long ago with a hedgehog for a ball and a flamingo for a mallet. Or he might revert to that silent and terrible billiard game wherein his cue, in nightmare fashion, keeps crumpling up as if it were made of macaroni. Only Beatrice Lillie and Madge Kennedy can really describe what a cue given them by Mr. Fields is like. Gilbert knew all about that when he wrote the Mikado's song:

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The billiard sharp whom any one catches, His doom's extremely hard—

He's made to dwell In a dungeon cell On a spot that's always barred.

And there he plays extravagant matches In fitless finger stalls On a cloth untrue With a twisted cue And elliptical billiard balls!

Barton, in our program, would merely do that dance where he seems to be an elvish leaf blown by the November wind. Miss Pennington's shoulders and knees, when up to mischief, are the very sublimation of jazz turned visible. Buster West is also a dancer.

And think of the things that would not be in the revue inaudible. There would not be a trace of such banter as the following:

"Are you an osteopath?"

"A whateopath?"

"An osteopath."

"No, I'm a democrat."

Nor would any one crack that exquisite jest about "the pheasants singing the Mayonnaise". There would be no imitation of Ethel Barrymore saying, "That's all there is. There isn't any more." There would be no outburst of lyrical ingenuity such as the following:

Only you Only you

I love, I love you, dear.

I only want you near Beside me, darling.

Only you

Only you

Hear me implore

I just adore

Only you.

We wrote a delicious travesty of musical comedy lyric style, to insert in this final paragraph, but, after all, it seemed best to illustrate the advantages of the revue inaudible just by quoting verbatim the song hit, if any, of the show in which the Marx Brothers are at present disporting themselves.