‘In his honour, let us pause and say nothing.’
A few words to read in silence about a man who spoke to the world without saying a word
Let’s stop talking for a moment and listen to a story with words about a person who never used words. You know this person. The anniversary of his death happened last week.
His parents were Minnie and Frenchie and they had a boy named Adolph. He was an odd child, but no odder than the rest except for the fact that Adolph couldn’t get out of Grade Two, trying twice, failing both times. Bright-faced but seemingly empty. Dumb-luck grin. Hair like yellow lantern smoke. Eyes as dark and quick as tiny spiders, but still. The Grade Two teacher talked and talked and wrote and wrote but young Adolph couldn’t keep up. He laid his head on his books and snored. Poor thing.
So Adolph hit the streets, all four feet of him selling newspapers and wrappered meat — whatever he could carry — an eight-year-old in turn-of-thecentury Manhattan, scrubbing, shilling, swapping, hustling here and there, all cauliflower floret hair and quick wrists, which, as an older child, he used to assuage the keyboard of a wrecked piano sitting below the screen in a dark theatre, playing two songs over and over at different tempos to match the storyline, since all he ever learned were two. It was a job; a good job; the monochrome frames flicking above him as he poked and tickled and punched the notes, their clanging tones pushed out of a dark chassis that hadn’t been moved in years. Years later, those same hands tugged and plucked the catgut of another grand wooden thing propped up on stage at the Orpheum in Galesberg, Ill., which is how he got his nickname: Harpo. He tuned the instrument without knowing how, creating his own harmonics, voicing strange music in the absence of voicing words, for that’s another thing about Harpo: He never spoke.
At least not on film, which he ended up making lots of with his brothers Chico, Gummo and Groucho: Duck Soup, Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races. One of the best gags came when Harpo had to communicate peril or danger or important information through pantomime, which he did lots, too: arms spinning, lips smacking, hair bobbing, waist thrusting, legs going this way then that way then this way again. Audiences thought he was mute, maybe dumb, maybe intellectually arrested — if hilarious — but, in real life, nothing was further from the truth. He was an erudite friend of the writer Dorothy Parker and a member of the Algonquin Round Table, and, in 1933, he toured the just-formed Soviet Union — slaying audiences from Minsk to Stalingrad (how many American artists could say that?) — all the while ferrying secrets out of Moscow to U.S. Ambassador William Bullitt: government papers stuffed under his waistcoat, microfilm in his striped socks, crude photos in his top hat, the one with the bent flower sticking out sideways. After announcing his retirement alongside Allan Sherman in 1964, Harpo (Adolph) spoke for the first time in front of a crowd, who sat hushed, astonished, terrified, and, then, horribly sad at the news. After Sherman composed himself — both he and the audience had broken down — the host asked Harpo a question. His answer lasted a few minutes, and, then, every time Sherman opened his mouth, Harpo interrupted, talking a ridiculous blue streak. This carried on at length. The audience’s sadness became joy became hilarity, but, 10 months later, Harpo was dead. His ashes were scattered into the seventh hole sand trap at Rancho Mirage, and in 1979, he was inducted into the Croquet Hall of Fame.
Silence engulfed him; became him; defined him. Which is something you can’t say about very many people at all; fewer now then ever before. In his honour, let us pause and say nothing.