Giraffes on Horseback Salad

Reviewed by: Giraffes on Horseback Salad: Salvador Dalí, the Marx Brothers, and the Strangest Movie Never Made by Josh Frank and Tim Heidecker Jonathan L. Friedmann (bio) Giraffes on Horseback Salad: Salvador Dalí, the Marx Brothers, and the Strangest Movie Never Made. By Josh Frank and Tim Heidecker. Illustrated by Manuela Pertega. Philadelphia, PA: Quirk Books, 2019. 224 pp., ISBN 9781594749230 (hc), US $29.99. Author Josh Frank, a self-described “archaeologist of forgotten pop culture” (8), is a life-long Marx Brothers enthusiast. Despite being born in the mid-1970s, Frank often watched the brothers’ movies on his childhood television set. At a time when other boys dressed as Hulk Hogan, Freddy Krueger, or Star Wars characters for Halloween, Frank’s go-to costume was Harpo Marx. At age ten, Frank and some friends adorned trench coats to see Harpo’s son, Bill Marx, play the piano at the local Jewish Community Center in Houston, Texas. Frank attributes his anachronistic interest to his family history. As the “great-grandson of Jewish ancestors,” some of whom lost their lives in the Holocaust, he is haunted by the idea of people’s lives and deeds being erased from memory (8). While future generations will surely remember Marx Brothers’ classics, including Animal Crackers (1930), Duck Soup (1933), and A Night at the Opera (1935), the subject matter of his 2019 graphic novel has persisted only in rumors, footnotes, and scattered remarks. In the over eighty years since Salvador Dalí hatched Giraffes on Horseback Salad, an outlandish attempt to [End Page 244] superimpose Harpo, Chico, and Groucho into his surrealistic vision, very little has come to light about the project. According to Dalí’s notebook, the film was to star Harpo, sans wig and trench coat, as Jimmy, “a young Spanish aristocrat who lives in the US as a consequence of the political circumstances in his country [the Spanish Civil War] . . . But a war inside of him threatens to start an even greater world war between nothing less than the continuous struggle between the imaginative life as depicted in the old myths and the practical and rational life of contemporary society” (34). In the film’s climax, Harpo, under the influence of the mysterious Surrealist Woman, would transform into his iconic costume, signifying his escape from the mores and drudgery of “practical and rational life.” Frank links the story to Dalí’s personal and financial struggles during that time. In 1936, Dalí fled Spain for France with his new wife, Gala, making him “an expatriate from both the Surrealist movement and his own country” (27). Dalí first encountered Harpo at a Paris party and the two apparently hit it off. Seeing Harpo as a kindred spirit—and perhaps as a ticket to Hollywood—Dalí sent Harpo a “surrealist harp” with strings of barbed wire and spoons for tuning screws. Harpo reciprocated with a photograph of himself “playing” the harp with bandages on his fingers. Dalí visited Southern California the following year, where he met Walt Disney and Cecil B. DeMille, whom he considered fellow surrealists. He also visited Harpo’s home. As he recalled for Harper’s Bizarre (with some exaggeration): “Harpo [was] in his garden. He was naked, crowned with roses, and in the center of a forest of [at least five hundred] harps . . . He was caressing, like a new Leda, a dazzling white swan, and feeding it a statue of the Venus de Milo made of cheese. Which he grated against the strings of the nearest harp” (32). Dalí pitched Giraffes on Horseback Salad to MGM Studios in 1937. It did not go well. Irving Thalberg, whose portfolio included the Marx Brothers, had recently died at age thirty-seven. Thalberg’s responsibilities went to Louis B. Mayer, who was no fan of the brothers. Their MGM contracts were set to expire, and Mayer was not keen on the project—especially with its thin plot, expensive sets, dizzying abstractness, and questionable imagery: animals on fire, a drowned ox, Harpo catching dwarves in a butterfly net, Groucho cracking walnuts on a dwarf ’s bald head, etc. Groucho also hated the concept. There was little chance of the movie being greenlit, even if the

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