Quiet, you lousy amateurs!

"Ben Hecht played the violin with amateur gusto, so he decided to organize what he called the Ben Hecht Symphonietta, which was to meet for concerts every Thursday night in Hecht's hilltop home. He recruited a peculiar variety of talents. Charles MacArthur played the clarinet, and Harpo Marx the harp, but only in A major. George Antheil, the composer, was supposed to keep order of a sort on the piano. Groucho Marx wanted to join in, but the others decided that he was ineligible since the only instrument he could play was the mandolin, which the others considered beneath the dignity of Ben Hecht Symphionetta. It was all partly a joke, but all chamber music players take their obsession seriously.

On the night of their first rehearsal, in an upstairs room of Hecht's house, the musicians had just started to play when someone began a loud banging on the door of their rehearsal room. The door suddenly flew open, and Groucho Marx appeared on the threshold.

"Quiet, please!" he shouted, then disappeared again, slamming the door behind him. The assembled musicians looked at one another with some embarassment. "Groucho's jealous," Harpo Marx explained. Hecht thought he had heard strange sounds downstairs, but the musicians all decided to ignore the interruption and let Groucho go his own way. They started playing again. Once again, there came a banging on the door. Once again, Groucho Marx appeared.

"Quiet, you lousy amateurs!" he shouted. When the musicians still ignored him, Groucho turned and stamped down the stairs. Yet again, the musicians turned to their instruments. Then came a resounding orchestral flourish from below. It was the overture to Tannhauser.

 "Thunderstruck," Antheil recalled, "we all crawled down the stairway to look. There was Groucho, directing with great batlike gestures, the Los Angeles Symphony Orchestra. At least one hundred men had been squeezed into the living room. Groucho had hired them because (as he later explained) he had been hurt at our not taking him into our symphionetta. We took him in."

- from City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940's, Otto Friedrich, 1986.