Hello, I Must be Going

by Charlotte Chandler

  Home Again was the turning point in the collective careers of the Marx Brothers, and Minnie’s role as their manager and agent became less demanding. When the Marx Brothers made the big time, Minnie and Sam moved into a comfortable house in Great Neck where they were driven everywhere by an elaborately liveried chauffeur. Sam adjusted better to the limousine life than Minnie, who was still stagestruck and so full of her old energy that, far from accepting her backseat, she tried to promote a theatrical career for the chauffeur! In 1929 Minnie died of a heart attack after a family party at which she played pinochle and Ping-Pong for several hours. Her obituary was carried in Alexander Woollcott’s column.

  Although Groucho knew many women in his long lifetime, none ever took her place. Indeed, he and his brothers always talked about her almost as if she were still alive, still an important part of their lives. Her German-bisque-doll countenance looked at Groucho every day from the omnipresent photographs of her on the walls of his front hall and bedroom.

  As a tribute to her, all of the daughters of the Marx Brothers were given names beginning with M for Minnie. Groucho’s oldest daughter is Miriam, and his youngest daughter, Melinda. Harpo’s adopted daughter is Minnie, and Chico’s daughter, Maxine.

  One of Groucho’s earliest recollections of his awareness of the opposite sex was an experience with an aunt who had “red hair, high heels, and had been to Chicago, St. Louis, and once had even spent the night in Denver.” She was glamorous and exciting, with a scent more provocative than that of the kerosene stove which usually pervaded the atmosphere of their home. Groucho said later that he recognized it as “the standard odor of a bordello.”

  He was totally devastated as she bestowed her admiring smile upon him and spoke the magic words to Minnie: “Julius has the loveliest big brown eyes I’ve ever seen.” He felt transported to ecstasy. For one who had never before received a feminine accolade from anyone but his mother, Groucho’s appetite grew with the eating, and he hungered for more attention. Suddenly he was overwhelmingly conscious of his eyes, which he had never before realized were so beautiful. He paraded incessantly before his aunt, lifting his eyebrows as high as they would go, but her fickle attentions wandered, and the glory was fleeting. Even exhausting efforts at feigned consumptive coughing proved to be of no avail. Finally he gave up.

  Much later, a certain retrospective examination in a mirror revealed to Groucho that “my eyes are gray.”

  “When I was thirteen,” Groucho told me, “I thought I loved a girl who was rich. She was eleven. Her name was Rosie, so I sent her a rose every day. Her family took her for a trip to Europe and when she came back, she didn’t look at me. Some romance.”

  Groucho had his first meaningful encounter with the fair sex with precociously beautiful Annie Berger. He has told the story many times, but at Marvin Hamlisch’s request he retold it to Mike Nichols and me:

  MARVIN HAMLISCH

  Would you please tell me that story again about Annie Berger? I love that story.

  GROUCHO

  When I was fifteen years old, I lived in the same apartment house with Annie Berger. And she lived a floor above us. And I used to watch when she came home from school, and I would sit on the stairs and look up her clothes. I was crazy about her.

  MARVIN HAMLISCH

  So romantic!

  GROUCHO

  I loved to look at her legs. She had a great pair of legs. And she had two of them. It was very seldom you could see a girl with two legs. So anyhow, I used to buy bread for my mother, and fresh bread was a nickel a loaf. I used to buy one-day-old bread which was four cents. So I saved seventy cents and I called Annie Berger and I said, “I want to take you to the theatre.”

  It was twenty-five cents each for the theatre tickets. That’s fifty cents. And ten cents carfare each way. So as we were going into the theatre, she sees this guy selling taffy, and she says, “Gee, I’d love to have some of this taffy.” I only had ten cents left. That was the fare home. I bought her the taffy, and now I only had a nickel. And she ate the candy and didn’t offer me any. So when we left the theater, I said, “Look. You had the candy and you didn’t give me any of it. And I want to be fair with you. I’ll match you to see who walks home from Forty-second Street.” That was from Hammerstein’s Victoria to Ninety-third Street. And she had to walk home.

  MIKE NICHOLS

  Was she a good sport?

  GROUCHO

  I don’t know. I left her standing in the snow. It was a winter’s day.

  Sometime later, at his house. Marvin recalled the Annie Berger story:

  “‘And she didn’t even offer me any taffy,’ it’s a killer line! Here she is, up there in the second balcony watching this thing, and they’re gonna be walking home in the snow, and the thing that’s bothering him all the time is she never shared the taffy.”

  But Groucho’s romance with Annie Berger didn’t end at Hammerstein’s Victoria. He continued the story for Marvin, Mike, and me: “I met Annie Berger ten years later when I was playing the Palace Theatre. A pretty girl in a box waved to me. She was a chorus girl then at the Winter Garden, and she had gotten over walking home. We had two wonderful weeks together…in her apartment.” Groucho sighed.

  “Then, when I did the Merv Griffin show I told the story about Annie Berger, and her older sister saw me on the show, and she called me up and said, ‘I’m Annie Berger’s sister.’ And we had her over here.”

  Ethel Berger Wise told me about the dinner at Groucho’s:

  “I called him and he invited me to have dinner at his house. We hadn’t met in seventy years, and he was old the way I am. But he was still lively and telling jokes and making quips. It was one of the most memorable nights of my life. Sidney Sheldon, the nice writer, was there. Groucho was like he was as a boy, always saying funny things.

  “Groucho and my sister were in love. It was only puppy love. He was about fourteen, and she was about twelve. She was already a very beautiful girl, but he was going to be an actor, and we all thought that was very shocking. We all knew, or thought we did, the way actors lived. We looked down on them because they were actors, but Annie thought she wanted that life too.

  “I remember when Groucho opened at the Star Theatre in New York on Lexington Avenue. Is it still there? We all went to see him, my whole family, and everybody in the neighborhood. It was advertised in all the groceries in the neighborhood, and in return for the advertising, the stores each got some free tickets. That was how we went. Everyone turned out to see Julie become a star.

  “We went out to California then, and Julie and his family went to Chicago for years, and it was a long time before Groucho and Annie saw each other again. Annie loved good times and the theatre. She loved to go out. I know that Annie saw him in New York, and my sister was very intimate with Groucho. I looked down on them because they fooled around. I was a serious girl.”

  Ethel Wise revealed the denouement of the Annie Berger story:

  “Annie loved to play poker, and Minnie Marx loved to play poker. When the Marx family moved out to California, Annie and Minnie used to play poker together along with some other women. They would talk about Julie and what might have been. Annie told Minnie, ‘You look back and you wonder why do you do things.’ I think that Annie regretted that it didn’t go on with Julie, and maybe that they didn’t get married.

  “Annie was married twice. She went onstage, not the Follies, but the other one. She met a stage door Johnny, an Englishman. He waited for her at the door, and she went out with him, and married him.

  “Annie was so beautiful, and she was very conscious of beauty. One day we were walking along Beverly Drive and saw Groucho coming toward us. Annie turned her head away, and started talking to me, and rushed across the street. I said, ‘Look, that’s Julie. Don’t you want to see him?’ But she didn’t. She was still very good-looking, but she was middle-aged, and she wasn’t beautiful the way she’d been as a girl. She didn’t want him to see her that way.

  “I tho
ught that it was foolish, because I said to her, ‘Think of the fun you and Julie could have had talking about old times.’ But she didn’t see it that way at all. People think different ways. Annie died a few years ago. We were very close. We lived together for the last fifteen years.”

  Groucho’s early life was far from a succession of romantic triumphs.

  “The whole first part of my life was spent sleeping with colored girls. They were chambermaids in the hotels we used to stay in. In those days, all hotels had black chambermaids. You’d give her a couple of bucks and take her in your room and lay her. That was very common. They were no different from a white girl. No, that’s not true; some of ’em were even better. We couldn’t get a white girl when we were in small-time vaudeville. They were afraid of actors. A lot of girls had been raped by actors. So we took what we could get, which was black chambermaids. But I remember doing a big act once with W. C. Fields, and we had twenty girls in the show. They were all white and they were all friendly. I knew them by number rather than by name. There was really some humping.”

  He got more than he bargained for, as he revealed in a conversation with Erin and me:

  ERIN

  What was your first physical relationship with a woman?

  GROUCHO

  To go to bed, of course.

  ERIN

  No, I mean who was the girl?

  GROUCHO

  Geez…I can’t remember. It’s been almost a thousand years.

  ERIN

  Where did you lose your virginity?

  GROUCHO

  In a hookshop in Montreal. I was sixteen years old—I didn’t know anything about girls. And before I left town I had gonorrhea.

  Talking with Groucho, Jack Nicholson happened to mention that he was from New Jersey. This stirred an old memory for Groucho:

  GROUCHO

  Where are you from in New Jersey?

  JACK NICHOLSON

  Around Asbury.

  GROUCHO

  Asbury Park? Gee, I’ll never forget, I was fifteen years old and I kissed a girl, and she put her tongue in my mouth.

  JACK NICHOLSON

  In Asbury?

  GROUCHO

  In Asbury Park.

  JACK NICHOLSON

  Aw, they’ll do anything there.

  GROUCHO

  I was so excited I couldn’t sleep for a week after that.

  As Groucho’s show business career accelerated, his sex life also picked up.

  “I didn’t have girls when we first started traveling in small-time vaudeville. We really weren’t in towns long enough to meet anybody. We’d go to hookshops. We were the floor show. Harpo and Chico played the piano and I sang. The girls used to come to watch us at the theatre—the madam and the girls—and if they liked us, they’d send a note backstage. ‘If you’re not doing anything tonight after the show, why don’t you come over and see us?’ Sometimes we stayed all night. We were always after girls. We’d get into a town, and there was a hotel, and they had a piano on the mezzanine floor. Chico would start playing and there would be twenty dames there. Chico would pick out girls for us, too.”

  In those days actors weren’t considered fit companions for “nice” girls, so the Marx Brothers took whatever girls were available. Groucho told me what happened when Gummo met a “nice” girl in New Orleans:

  “Her father came up to him after the show and said, ‘You took my daughter out tonight. If you take her out again, you’ll go back to New York in a box.’ Actors weren’t very popular in those days. Except in hookshops. There was no place for an actor to go in most towns, except if you were lucky maybe you’d pick up a girl. But as a rule, you’d have to go to a hookshop.”

  When Groucho was in New York, we were approaching the Flatiron Building and he had the limousine slow down. “There’s the Flatiron Building,” he said pensively. “That’s a nice building. The Marx Brothers used to stand on that corner and watch the girls go by. But then,” he added, “we used to stand on a lot of corners and watch the girls go by.

  “When I was young, I was crazy about girls. Especially if they wore silk stockings. In those days they had rumble seats in cars. Some philosopher said, ‘You can tell more about a girl watching her climb into a rumble seat than you can being married to her twenty years.’”

  Groucho reached the two-decade mark in marriage only with his first wife, Ruth. The next two wives came along years after the demise of the rumble seat, and neither marriage lasted that long; but even if there had been rumble seats when he married Kay and Eden, he felt “I still would have been as much in the dark after twenty years as I was on the first date.” He often said that women baffled him.

  “I don’t understand women. They’re a different breed entirely than the male. There are a lot of things I don’t understand about women, like why do girls always stand with one hand on their hip? Men don’t do that. But I think a woman can be a wonderful companion. After all, my mother was one. I didn’t find that out until a couple of years ago.”

  Although he may not have understood women, this never stopped women from liking him. Hattie Darling remembered him in those days as “a very sweet man”:

  “Groucho has a lot of humanity in him, and he has a lot of charm. He always had a lot of charm, and he was very good-looking, even though he had that mustache. I think Groucho was the better-looking of all the brothers, even Zeppo. Zeppo, of course, was so young, but he didn’t have the character in his face like Groucho had. Groucho had something in his face that was strong. That’s what I thought he was. I’ve always had a warm spot for Groucho, more than anyone in the act.”

  Groucho himself was aware of the special appeal he had for a number of women:

  “Girls liked me. I don’t mean like Clark Gable or Valentino, but when I was younger, women found me attractive. They found me funny. Certain kinds of women like a funny man.”

  George Jessel talked with me about the sex appeal of the comedian in general and Groucho and the Marx Brothers in particular:

  “To be really big, you’ve got to have a staying quality, and a part of that staying quality is sex. This isn’t saying that women in the audience will get up and say, ‘Groucho, I want to go to bed with you.’ But the Marx Brothers had a feeling of sex.”

  Charlotte and Bert Granet, longtime friends of Groucho, discussed his sex appeal as a man and as a performer:

  CHARLOTTE GRANET

  Groucho was always attractive to me as a man.

  BERT GRANET

  I hadn’t realized that. Do you think it was the man or the image created by the writers and the fame?

  CHARLOTTE GRANET

  The man. Well, I guess it couldn’t be separated.

  I asked Groucho about his “reputation” with women:

  I

  You once said that you had quite a reputation for lechery. Do you feel that you’ve earned this reputation?

  GROUCHO

  Not anymore. But certainly fifteen years ago, maybe a little longer.

  I

  How did you earn it?

  GROUCHO

  I tried to get women into my bed.

  I

  How did you do that?

  GROUCHO

  Charm. Witty, fascinating talker. I’m seething with charm.

  I

  What was your batting average?

  GROUCHO

  With the dames? About fifty-fifty.

  I

  That’s a .500 batting average!

  The fifteen years ago he was talking about were his late sixties. On another occasion, however, when he was talking with interior decorator Peter Shore, Groucho was not so optimistic:

  PETER SHORE

  I’m designing a house for a fifty-year-old bachelor whose whole image is a swingin’ bachelor. Very macho.

  GROUCHO

  It’s not so easy to swing when you’re over fifty.

  PETER SHORE

  Oh, you can put on a good show.

  GROUCHO

 
It’s better to swing when you’re twenty-five.

  Chico’s incredible prowess with women was often mentioned by Groucho. George Jessel told me, “Chico didn’t button his fly until he was over seventy.” Without envy, Groucho pondered the Chico mystique—something he was never able to explain:

  GROUCHO

  The girls were crazy about him. I never saw a man who could attract as many girls as he could. We all had girls, but Chico was the one who really had something for the girls.

  I

  What do you think was the secret of Chico’s great charm for women?

  GROUCHO

  A certain look in his eyes. I never quite knew what it was. The secret died with him. Only a woman who knew him could tell you. But he had enough to go around. He used to get girls for all of us. He was a great ladies’ man and crazy about women. But he had no respect for women at all. Chico said that in California the flowers don’t smell but the women do.

  I

  You couldn’t say Chico was a romantic.

  GROUCHO

  No. He was a practical lover. He’d lay them and leave them, but they were crazy about him. He had charm.

  I

  And men liked him too.

  GROUCHO

  Yes, everybody liked him, except the people he owed money to.

  “I was the only girl in the act Chico didn’t make,” Hattie Darling told me. “I was a nice little Jewish girl. Someone always traveled with me.”

  Bobbe Brox, who appeared with her sisters in the stage version of The Cocoanuts, confirmed Hattie Darling’s appraisal of Chico and added:

  “Chico was the kind of man that would chase us into the dressing rooms. He didn’t have the class that Groucho has. Harpo I didn’t know too well. Because Harpo generally in the show would pick one girl, and that would be it, you know, for the run of the show. I don’t remember him bothering anybody.