“The one we knew the best and loved was Groucho. The other boys we were not close to. But we were very friendly with Groucho, because he wanted to sing harmony all the time. He loved being with us and singing with us. The friendship continued long after, out here in California, when we all lived here.”
Maureen O’Sullivan, who worked with the Marx Brothers in A Day at the Races, was more impressed by Groucho than by Chico:
MAUREEN O’SULLIVAN
I was very fond of Chico. He was a very quiet, serious person.
I
Groucho always thinks of Chico as having had an extraordinary appeal for women, and he suggested I ask women who knew him what it was.
MAUREEN O’SULLIVAN
Groucho was the one I noticed. He was much easier to know.
Groucho took his marital vows seriously, according to Hattie Darling, who described him as being “very much in love” with his young wife, Ruth. But Groucho didn’t deny that before his marriage he too had sown a few wild oats in his heyday:
GROUCHO
Once at the Adolphus Hotel in Dallas I did it eight times in one night. I was nineteen.
I
If you could, would you trade all of the awards and rewards of being Groucho Marx—the Oscar, the Legion of Honor, the thousands of letters—to be a virile young man again?
GROUCHO
They could give me the awards next year.
Even though Groucho always found the romantic vision of lasting marriage illusory and elusive for himself, he still believed it was possible.
I
Do you think that there is such a thing as ideal marriage, a really good marriage?
GROUCHO
Gummo is an example. Harpo didn’t need a divorce. It’s only suckers like me. If two people really love each other, they don’t cheat. My grandmother and grandfather celebrated their golden wedding. It’s true. But when he was more than eighty years old, we had a colored maid in the kitchen, and we couldn’t keep him away from her.
Although Groucho didn’t believe that the male is naturally a monogamous creature, he was uncertain about the female. He and Erin discussed the double standard.
ERIN
You say that man is not a monogamous creature, and it’s natural for a man to look at other women and be interested in other women. Do you think it’s natural for a woman to be interested in other men? What do you think about women having affairs while they are married?
GROUCHO
Having an affair with another guy? It’s not gonna be much of a marriage.
ERIN
But you think it’s all right for a man?
GROUCHO
A man is the chaser of the two. It’s nature. The woman is subconsciously the chaser, but the man is—a man is a man. And if there’s an attractive girl, he’ll make a play for her. I think that’s wonderful.
ERIN
Even if he’s married?
GROUCHO
Well, not if he’s going to be a jerk about it. Let’s say he’s been married for twenty years. How exciting do you think that woman is to him?
ERIN
But you don’t think it’s a good marriage if she cheats on him?
GROUCHO
I don’t think it comes out that way. I think the average woman, if she has a man, and she’s married to him, and she likes him, I don’t think she’ll necessarily cheat.
ERIN
But if they did?
GROUCHO
They get a divorce, and the man pays alimony.
ERIN
Why couldn’t they keep the relationship going and have extramarital affairs as well? Both of them, not only the man.
GROUCHO
Then they shouldn’t get married.
ERIN
Why not?
GROUCHO
If they’re both cheating, why should they get married?
ERIN
Why not, if they like each other?
GROUCHO
How can he like her if he’s after another dame, and she’s after another fellow?
ERIN
You don’t think women are naturally promiscuous?
GROUCHO
Not like men, no.
ERIN
Women just don’t tell.
GROUCHO
(Annoyed) That’s a subject I’m not an expert on. If she’s after another fellow, that’s a hell of a marriage. That’s why I believe it would be much better for two people to live together, and not get married.
ERIN
So you believe in trial marriage?
GROUCHO
It’s better than trial parenthood.
Because Groucho lived so long and never closed his mind to new ideas, sometimes he expressed personal views that appeared to be incompatible—because they were. At first glance, the foregoing exchange may seem that way, but it was logical for Groucho because he was a paradox. Always on the prowl for the not so elusive female, the reputed chaser was in reality a staunch believer in the sanctity of marriage. Groucho was married a total of forty-seven years—albeit to three women. We talked about his youthful ideas of courtship and marriage:
GROUCHO
When I was young, I read all those stories about Horatio Alger, about how he married a rich man’s daughter.
I
How did they influence you?
GROUCHO
The boys in those stories were so honest and courageous. The story would be about a rich man’s daughter who was driving in a carriage with two horses, and the horses ran away, and the young boy grabbed ahold of the horses and stopped them. Later he married the rich man’s daughter. These were stories about work and win. (Laughs)
I
It worked for you.
GROUCHO
It certainly did. I married three women, and between them they didn’t have two cents.
Ruth Johnson, Groucho’s first wife and mother of two of his three children, was born in 1901, the daughter of Swedish immigrants. Her father was a sea captain. She joined the Home Again company as Zeppo’s adagio dance partner in 1919 when his regular partner quit in the middle of a tour. Gummo told me how Ruth came into Groucho’s life:
“Zeppo’s partner in the act quit. Groucho called me and said that I could find the new girl over at Doyle’s Billiard Parlor, on Fiftieth Street and Broadway. Her father, who was a Swede, was there all the time. Groucho said, ‘See if you can get her and teach her the dance so that she could come out to the act and know the dance in advance.’ So I hired a rehearsal hall, and I got hold of this girl through her father, and I taught her the dance, step for step, that I did before and that Zeppo did after I left. Well, eventually Groucho married this girl. She was his first wife. She couldn’t dance too well, and neither could I. But, after all, dancing was only a minor part of the act. It was the comedy that counted.”
Once again Zeppo lost a dancing partner—and this time gained a sister-in-law. After courting Ruth for a year while on tour, Groucho married her in 1920, when the company passed through Chicago. “I spent my honeymoon in an upper berth going through Iowa,” Groucho remembered. “Ruth was up there with me.” Groucho was thirty and Ruth nineteen. The next year their first child, Arthur, was born—the same year that Kay, who was to be Groucho’s second wife, was born. Groucho’s third wife, Eden, would not be born until 1934, seven years after the birth of his second child, Miriam.
Grace Kahn, who knew Groucho for over half a century and was related to him through the marriage and divorce of her daughter and his son, remembered Ruth as “a beautiful, beautiful girl, and a nice one. She was a very sweet person and, I would say, a negative person, in that she sort of lived in Groucho’s shadow. I first met Ruth in Grand Rapids when she was part of the show, before she and Groucho were married.”
Morrie Ryskind’s wife, Mary, described Ruth in the same way:
“I thought she was a very dear, loving, sweet person. But she never grew up with Groucho. She was a thoroughly nice person, but she never had
any of the kind of interests that he had.”
Bobbe Brox remained a good friend of the Marxes’ years after she and her sisters appeared in The Cocoanuts. She talked with me about the Ruth and Groucho she knew:
“Ruth was, you know, the frustrated dancer. She always wanted to be the dancer. That was her problem. One time my husband, William Perlberg, and I went to Honolulu with Groucho and Ruth, and they were such fun. So, she got the teacher right away to learn the hula, and it was dead serious with Groucho. He’s lying on the bed with the guitar, playing this crazy Hawaiian music, and Ruth trying to wiggle around the room with a Hawaiian teacher. Groucho was so amusing, because the ad libs were terrific while this is all going on.”
Groucho talked with Erin and me about his first marriage and his first divorce:
GROUCHO
I got rid of my first wife with Gilbert and Sullivan.
ERIN
With Gilbert and Sullivan?
GROUCHO
Yeah. She didn’t quite understand it, and I kept playing it.
ERIN
It drove her crazy.
GROUCHO
No, it didn’t drive her crazy, but she wasn’t very happy to have to listen to Gilbert and Sullivan because she wasn’t educated. Until I married her, I don’t think she’d ever heard of Gilbert and Sullivan.
The marriage lasted until 1942, when, after twenty-one years, they were divorced. Like all three of his wives, Ruth left him. Groucho lived in the present and didn’t talk much about his former wives. On occasion, however, he did speak about Ruth, with sadness:
“I was working very hard, and I was single. And I had a wife who was drinking. We were married twenty-one years. She was so beautiful when I married her. She weighed 109 then. The last time I saw her she’d gained so much weight I could hardly recognize her.”
In 1944, Norman Krasna’s hit play Dear Ruth was produced on Broadway. He told me that the model for the family in Dear Ruth was the Marx family, to which he was very close. The judge was based on Groucho, and the title character was based on “beautiful, vivacious” Ruth Johnson Marx.
After the divorce, Groucho saw Ruth occasionally. Ruth had become a friend of daughter-in-law Irene, and remained so even after Irene and Arthur were divorced. The last time Groucho saw Ruth was briefly in 1961 at Chico’s funeral. Ruth died eleven years later, never having remarried. At the time of her death, Groucho not only had divorced his third wife, but had met Erin Fleming.
Groucho married his second wife, Kay, in 1945. The ex-wife of erstwhile dead-end kid Leo Gorcey, she was twenty-four, and Groucho was fifty-five. In spite of Groucho’s assertion that after fifty-five a man’s sex life becomes drastically curtailed, Melinda was born in 1946, when Groucho was fifty-six. This marriage lasted only until 1951. Again he had chosen a pretty face that couldn’t keep pace. In the evening when Groucho would retreat to his literary pursuits, Kay read the dictionary in an effort to keep up with Groucho and the people who populated his world. Kay loved to sing and dance, and during World War II entertained with Groucho at bond rallies.
Besides Melinda and support payments, Groucho retained a frequently used coffeepot that Kay had “borrowed” from the Dorset Hotel to remind him of her. We would have coffee together (in his pre-coffee substitute days), and he would read from the pot, “‘Hotel Dorset, 30 W. 54th Street, New York City’—that was more than twenty-five years ago.” Groucho and Kay continued to speak on the phone.
Mary Ryskind remembered Kay as “…sweet and dear. She was a very friendly girl. I think Kay was someone he was sorry for. Gummo’s wife, Helen, was just wonderful to her. She beat Kay over the head and said, ‘Look! Go out and get some clothes! Groucho can afford it!’ But Kay didn’t care. Groucho was just as dear with her as he could be, but it was just one of those things you couldn’t do much about.”
In 1954, at the height of the popularity of You Bet Your Life, Groucho married Eden Hartford.
“You said Eden looked just like Ava Gardner,” Erin reminded Groucho. “Don’t you remember telling me how much you liked Ava Gardner? You told me you met Ava Gardner at Nunnally’s house in London. She peeled off her long white gloves, and you said, ‘Wowee!’ I think Eden also looked like Bianca Jagger.”
Groucho was given to summarizing a person in one simple sentence. About Eden, he would always say, “She was a beautiful girl.” The line so regularly followed his mention of her that it seemed like her last name.
Like Ruth thirty-six years earlier, Eden was nineteen, but Groucho was nearing an age when many men retire. His first gift to Eden was a round bathtub like the one she had admired at Zeppo’s house in Palm Springs—in fact, he built her a house around her round bathtub. Groucho continued to live in the house, but Eden moved out in 1969, leaving behind her round bathtub, and Groucho. The round bathtub lasted until some years later, when Erin had the room redecorated.
For a while after she left him, Eden still traveled with Groucho when he made trips to New York or Europe. Never one to be out of touch with modern trends, Groucho admitted on the Dick Cavett Show that being with Eden under these circumstances was even better than being married. Groucho was willing to try trial divorce, not believing divorce is something that necessarily lasts forever. One evening after their divorce, Groucho brought Eden over to Bert Granet’s house for a dinner party, explaining, “I wanted to be near my money.” Groucho could never be accused of being overly sentimental in public.
Of his last marriage Groucho said, “I’m sorry it broke up. I guess it was partly my fault. I did everything I could. I even stopped smoking. I like her, and she likes me. She sent me a bathrobe last year for Christmas.”
Just before Christmas of 1974, Eden dropped by for dinner at Groucho’s. Goddard Lieberson also came to dinner, and I was there, staying as a guest at Groucho’s house during a visit to California. Eden brought him her Christmas gift—a sweater that didn’t fit. He was all dressed down for the occasion. He wore his bathrobe, “my dressing gown without gravy,” and a big black bow tie to make the outfit “formal.” Eden reminisced about happy times in their marriage, especially in London.
She also told about being taken, along with sister Dee Hartford (a well-known model) to visit George S. Kaufman in New York. Kaufman and Groucho would converse intently, and after a long period of time would remember the presence of Eden and Dee and acknowledge their presence by directing some conversation toward these young, beautiful girls, who would answer, “Yes, oh yes.” Then Kaufman and Groucho would go back into their world and become oblivious of the respectful girls until, remembering them, another “Oh yes” was called for. They spent a few hours saying very little “in the presence of the great men.” As they were leaving in the elevator, Dee commented to Eden, “We’re just the Greek chorus.”
Groucho complained about having to continue paying out alimony (once married to Groucho, women didn’t seem to remarry), sometimes saying, “Paying alimony is like feeding hay to a dead horse.” He, however, went on paying, and still continued to like women, even ex-wives, as Arthur Whitelaw found out:
ARTHUR WHITELAW
Richard Rodgers is working on a new show. He’s doing a show about Henry the Eighth.
GROUCHO
Nobody ever does a picture about Henry the Ninth.
I
That was Henry the Eighth’s problem. He wasn’t able to manage a Henry the Ninth.
GROUCHO
He couldn’t manage his wives. In those days, if they didn’t like their wives, they had their heads chopped off. Sounds like a good idea, instead of paying alimony.
ARTHUR WHITELAW
Chop off their heads?
GROUCHO
Yeah.
I
Do you think you could bring yourself to do it?
GROUCHO
No. I’d want to kiss them.
Groucho’s wives were all pretty, but none was prepared or equipped to play straight woman to Groucho’s barbs as did Margaret Dumont with such forbearanc
e onstage and in the films. Friends remembered how distraught his young wives sometimes became after enduring long evenings at the mercy of Groucho’s sharp wit, and how they had tried to adjust. Ruth learned to play excellent tennis, Kay read her dictionary, and Eden learned to paint well enough to have one-woman shows. All of them learned to drink. None of them ever stood up to Groucho the way Erin did.
Bert Granet speculated on the problems of Groucho’s pretty young wives:
“Of course his wives were well taken care of materially, but they were abandoned intellectually, and perhaps emotionally. Often they were ignored by a world of people who were only interested in knowing Groucho. Groucho’s friends were always very important to him and Groucho loved to be in the company of writers. This might have left his wives feeling lonesome and left out sometimes.”
Groucho avoided verbalized sentiment and didn’t like to articulate emotions. No one ever accused him of wearing his heart on the sleeve of his frock coat.
If he and I ever had tickets for seats that weren’t together, he always gave me his seat, which was certain to be the best one in the house. I wasn’t allowed to decline, even on the grounds that his supercelebrity was expected to occupy the seat. The public comedian scoffed at chivalry and sentimentality, but with Groucho I always had the feeling that if there had been a muddy puddle to cross, and he’d had a cloak, he would have spread it out for me to walk on.
At the premiere of Towering Inferno, Groucho pushed me into the center row seat next to William Holden.
GROUCHO
(To William Holden) Take good care of her. I want her back after the show.
I
But the other seat is in the last row on the side…
GROUCHO
It’s better for taking a leak.
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