Moving up the vaudeville ladder could be as hard as a shortstop’s climb from Class B to the majors. Harpo.Marx : “If an audience didn’t like the Marx Brothers,” he wrote, “we had no trouble finding it out.” Southern audiences pelted the Yorkville kids “with sticks, bricks, spitballs, cigar butts, peach pits and chewed-out stalks of sugarcane. We took all this without flinching—until Minnie gave us the high-sign that she’d collected our share of the receipts. Then we started throwing the stuff back at the audience and ran like hell for the railroad station the second the curtain came down.” (City Journal: Vaudeville’s Brief, Shining Moment)
