HARPO SPEAKS! (1961) by Harpo Marx and Rowland Barber
Never read Harpo Speaks!? Go buy yourself a copy. Consider this immensely entertaining and absorbing autobiography essential reading if you’re a fan of show business and comedy. A non-negotiable read if you’re a Marx Brothers fan.
Harpo Marx was, of course, a member of the legendary comedy team, the Marx Brothers, known for their anarchist style and iconic films, including Duck Soup and A Night at the Opera. Born into absolute poverty, the Marx Brothers endured the most squalid conditions in the worst corners of early twentieth century show business. But they persevered, rising to become headliners in vaudeville, the toasts of Broadway, major movie stars, and finally comedy deities.
All the brothers (and yes, they were actual brothers) were preternaturally gifted and all lived extraordinary lives, Harpo in particular. At the age of 8, he dropped out of school; he joined a singing act despite being incapable of singing; he hobnobbed with the wealthy elites and the greatest intellectuals of the Roaring Twenties (despite himself failing the 2nd grade twice); he became the first westerner to perform in the Soviet Union; and he befriended Salvador Dali.
Harpo Speaks! is a laidback and conversational compendium of classic showbiz stories and anecdotes. Anyone interested in vaudeville, New York in the 1920s, and the Golden Age of Hollywood will find much pleasure and amusement from this terrific read. But actually, Harpo Speaks! never feels like reading. It’s more akin to sitting down beside Harpo as he regales you with stories of his unique life. Who wouldn’t want that?
20TH-CENTURY FOX: DARRYL F. ZANUCK AND THE CREATION OF THE MODERN FILM STUDIO (2021) by Scott Eyman
Pugnacious and truculent immigrant/theater owner William Fox founded the Fox Film Corporation in 1915 (in Fort Lee, New Jersey). After the 1929 stock market crash, Fox lost control of the company, which would soon merge with Darryl F. Zanuck’s Twentieth Century Pictures. Thus 20th-Century Fox was born.
Scott Eyman’s elliptical and breezy study focuses on Zanuck, the prototypical movie tycoon. The cliche adjectives apply appropriately to him: tough, domineering, tyrannical. But also a real genius at movie-making, with a knack for editing and discerning public taste. During his tenure (and under his close guidance) the studio produced such notable films as The Grapes of Wrath, All About Eve, and 42nd Street.
Zanuck’s story plays like a real-life Shakespearean tragedy. Zanuck spent years grooming his son Richard (future producer of Jaws, The Sting, and many other hits) to succeed him as studio boss. But when the elder Zanuck felt threatened by Richard’s growing power, he fired his own son.
20th-Century Fox follows the studio’s origins with William Fox, through the Oedipal conflict between the Zanucks, and culminates with the company’s acquisition by the Walt Disney Company in 2019. While I appreciate Eyman’s overall brevity, I do wish he went into more depth. He very briskly sums up the company’s ultimate fate and glosses over Zanuck’s truly repelling show-boating during World War II. That aside, Eyman provides many pointed insights and his book serves as a great primer on Zanuck and the company formerly known as 20th Century Fox.
ERNEST LEHMAN: THE SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS (2022) by Jon Krampner
It’s a historical fact that the contributions of screenwriters are undervalued. Just look at Ernest Lehman. After cutting his teeth writing magazine fiction, Lehman became one of the most coveted screenwriters of his or any time. The man wrote the screenplays for North by Northwest, The Sound of Music, West Side Story, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and many more. Few screenwriters ever had (and ever will) that level of success.
But because most of his screenplays were adaptations, his work was dismissed. His substantial revisions to remold the source material into cinematic form (cutting scenes, reordering songs, fashioning dialogue to transition coherently into musical numbers) were snidely denigrated as merely “typing”. Thanks in part to public feuds with Edward Albee and Mike Nichols, Lehman remains an underrated writer to this day.
To complicate matters, Lehman was an anti-social, vain, and childish man. He was intractable with his collaborators and cold toward his own children (Lehman didn’t want his wife to have children because he didn’t want to share her with them). These peculiar attributes make this a fascinating life to read about. Jon Krampner renders a fully rounded portrait of an incredibly talented writer and churlish man who never fully got his due.
While I could have done without Krampner’s disruptive editorializing, I found this biography very engaging and informative, one I will likely visit again. Most superlatively, this important book provides a fuller record of Hollywood’s history, told from a point of view so frequently disregarded: the screenwriter’s.
-T.Z.
