Harpo Speaks!

(The most fascinating performer I knew in those days was a dame named Metcalfe who was a female female impersonator: To maintain the illusion and keep her job, she had to be a male impersonator when she wasn’t on. Onstage she wore a wig, which she would remove at the finish, revealing her mannish haircut. “Fooled you!” she would boom at the audience in her husky baritone. Then she would stride off to her dressing room and change back to men’s clothes. She fooled every audience she played to, and most of the managers she worked for, but her secret was hard to keep from the rest of the company. Every time she went to the men’s room, half the guys on the bill would pile in after her.)

When you lose something irreplaceable, you don´t mourn for the thing you lost. You mourn for yourself.

I don’t know whether my life has been a success or a failure. But not having any anxiety about becoming one instead of the other, and just taking things as they came along, I’ve had a lot of extra time to enjoy life.

When you lose something irreplaceable, you don’t mourn for the thing you lost. You mourn for yourself.

The time comes, like it or not, when a man has to stop kidding himself that he's as young as he feels.

Money isn’t everything, but the lack of money isn’t anything.

Sometimes, when things got dull and the family was flat broke, I served as Grandpa’s assistant. Because the language barrier was too great for him, Grandpa never worked in America as a ventriloquist or magician. For some reason unknown to me, he took to umbrella mending, door-to-door, whenever he needed quick cash. On his rounds, Grandpa carried a tool kit and a tin can on a wire sling. In the can were coals of charcoal. To get the charcoal white-hot for the soldering iron, the can had to be swung around and around, to fan the fire. My special job with Grandpa was Tin Can Swinger. Grandpa’s umbrella business petered out after a few years. People got wise to the fact they could buy new umbrellas for the prices he charged to mend old ones. I was sorry. Tin Can Swinging was one occupation I could have stuck at permanently. It was fun.

The passing of an ordinary man is sad. The passing of a great man is tragic, and doubly tragic when the greatness passes before the man does.

The tenement at 179 [East 93rd Street, NYC] was the first real home I can remember. Until we moved there we had lived like gypsies, never traveling far -- in fact never out of the neighborhood -- but always moving, haunted and pursued by eviction notices, attachments, and glinty-eyed landlord's agents. The Marxes were poor, very poor. We were always hungry. And we were numerous. But thanks to the amazing spirit of my father and my mother, poverty never made any of us depressed or angry. My memory of my earliest years is vague but pleasant, full of the sound of singing and laughter, and full of people I loved.

I don't know whether my life has been a success or a failure. But not having any anxiety about becoming one instead of the other, and just taking things as they came along, I've had a lot of extra time to enjoy life.

Harpo, she's a lovely person. She deserves a good husband. Marry her before she finds one.