Hello, I Must be Going

by Charlotte Chandler

  Once when I mentioned to Groucho that I found him a very private person, he looked at me quite seriously and responded, “Better a privateer than a buccaneer.”

  A reserved, private individual, he showed little emotion. This could be and was frustrating for wives, who wanted to hear him say, “I love you,” and who couldn’t even provoke him to sufficient anger. Groucho’s extreme control and self-discipline were not due to a lack of feeling or caring. He was only superficially superficial. But a hug might have been more effective than a shrug with wives who felt unable to hold their own with his supercelebrity.

  Groucho said that even though each of his marriages had some good years, he was generally pessimistic about the possibilities of romance enduring permanently. He told me that he had felt this way as far back as 1929, when he wrote his first book:

  “I wrote in Beds that when a man first gets married, he’s always the first one in bed. Because he wants to warm the bed for his bride. And after five years, he’s still in bed first. But for different reasons. He wants to get out of winding the clock, turning off the lights, and seeing to it that the maid is covered.”

  Almost half a century later Groucho admitted, “I don’t believe in being in love for a long marriage. I believe two people can like each other, and I think that’s more important than love. I was ‘in love’ every time—or I thought I was. So I paid three alimonies. I had good times with all of my wives while it lasted. I was happy with each of them for a while.” Then he added somewhat wistfully, “A few good years isn’t so bad—maybe that’s all you can ask for.”

  GROUCHO

  What do you think is a good marriage?

  I

  I would say it’s one in which both participants think it’s a good marriage.

  GROUCHO

  Good line.

  Speaking of the marriage where romance has vanished, Groucho told me:

  “I always think of a place like Chasen’s, and there’s a married couple sitting at a table, and somebody comes along who knows the husband. They will grab a hold of this guy and keep him there as long as they can so the married couple won’t have to talk to each other. Because they have nothing to say to each other if they’re married any length of time. They’re so happy if somebody that they know comes along and sits down there with them for a few minutes and talks. They’re bored with each other. Marriage is a very boring thing after a while. The average couple, after they’ve been married a few years, unless there are the children to talk about, have very little to say to each other.”

  I asked Groucho if he believed that a marriage, or any significant relationship between a man and a woman, could be successful if the two people weren’t of similar intelligence. “I could love a stupid woman,” he answered. “But I wouldn’t like her. It’s in the head, not the bed. I married women because they were pretty, and that’s not the reason to marry a woman. You get fooled by their looks. They weren’t stupid, but they weren’t Einsteins, either. It’s better to choose brains. Beauty fades. I don’t think most men are satisfied with their wives. I think most of them are looking around for another piece of tail. Cherchez la femme. It’s the story of man’s life. It’s very difficult for a man to be true to only one woman for a whole lifetime.”

  Asked what he thought of that cherchez la femme male propensity, Groucho said:

  “I think it’s great! I think it’s wonderful! If I was twenty years younger, no dame could get out of this house alive.”

  But he tended to be true to one woman at a time, anyway. He may not have always been the perfectly faithful husband that Harpo was, but he was never a philanderer like Chico. “Chico would be on the phone with his wife,” Groucho said, “while he was in bed having his hat blown by another woman. But Harpo was steady. That’s what I respect.”

  Groucho lamented that while Chico could charm any woman into his bed, “I had to marry them.” Though undoubtedly an exaggeration, Groucho never took man-woman relations casually, his Mangy Lover image notwithstanding. There was more of Werther in Groucho than there was of Don Juan. Sidney Sheldon noted that love and marriage went together for Groucho, who was always encouraging him to marry Jorja because, as Groucho put it, “I like to see people married.”

  Sidney Sheldon remembered Groucho as “always a supporter of the institution of marriage”:

  “Groucho and I had just seen Minnie’s Boys when it opened in New York, and we were at the airport boarding a plane back to Los Angeles. Groucho had wanted to postpone the flight a day or two because the ground controllers were on strike, but I’d talked him out of it because I thought it might get worse.

  “So we get on this plane, and the pilot says, ‘There’ll be a delay of fifteen minutes!’ That’s not bad. We start taxiing, then over the loudspeaker, ‘There’ll be a delay of thirty minutes!’ We were on the ground for five hours! They started slowing it down to one plane every twenty minutes, and for five hours we were taxiing.

  “After the third hour, the pilot said, ‘The hell with the laws of New York, we’re gonna serve drinks on the ground!’ It was incredible to be locked up on the ground for five hours. Nobody could get out. At the end of four hours, Groucho pressed the button for the stewardess. She came over and said, ‘Yes, Mr. Marx, what is it?’

  “‘Is there a minister on board?’ he said.

  “‘I don’t know, Mr. Marx. What’s wrong?’

  “‘Some of the men are getting horny.’”

  Groucho never married a Jewish girl, nor did he even go out much with Jewish girls. He attributed this, not to chance, but to choice. Groucho’s answer as to why he was never married to, and scarcely ever romantically involved with, a Jewish girl was, “It just always seemed to me that making love to a Jewish girl would be like making love to your sister.”

  If people succeed, there is a tendency for them to feel that they did it all themselves, and, if they fail, to feel they were pushed. But Groucho neither took all the credit himself for his show business successes nor placed all the blame on his wives for his marital failures. He told me that his exaltation of physical beauty in a woman was a mistake. “If I had it to do all over again, I’d marry someone smart—like Erin. It’s true what you said, that while a man marries a wife, a woman marries the man’s way of life.” I had suggested to him that his three marriages were like that.

  When I asked Groucho if anyone had ever left him speechless, he answered, “My wives.” But he added, “They didn’t leave me speechless, they told me what they thought of me.”

  Groucho pretty much gave up on marriage or as he said, “It’s given up on me. Three strikes and you’re out! Who the hell wants an eighty-five-year-old man? There’s nothing funny about that.” He readily admitted that an active sex life is not one of the joys of old age. “I’m not interested in sex anymore,” he said frankly. “I like to see a good-looking woman—that’s about as far as it goes. Sex is a goddamn nuisance when you get older. Women still accost me, mostly elderly ones. Younger ones know there’s nothing going on.”

  Groucho was in many ways a young man forced to go around in an old man’s body—a body that incessantly admonished, “You can’t, you can’t.” But just because you can’t run around the block as fast as you used to doesn’t mean that you’re still not the same person. Just after his eighty-fifth birthday, a young man interviewing him for television asked him if he still liked to look at pretty women. Groucho responded with a look of disgust.

  “No. I close my eyes.”

  Groucho was a competitive person. Success did not come and find him. In each of his marriages, as in his career, he sought the gold ring—he chose someone who seemed at the time to be a prize. He was the first to question the value he placed on physical beauty, although he was also the first to admit that his appreciation of it had scarcely diminished. “There’s nothing lovelier than a pretty girl.” He also said, “Man is the only rat who’s always looking for cheesecake instead of cheese.”

  We enjoy being with people who see u
s the way we want to be seen. One of the problems in marriage is that sometime after the honeymoon, the view of one or both of the partners often comes to include an ever-increasing number of imperfections. Groucho felt that part of the problem was that “a wedding ring protects only one finger.”

  Groucho’s own image of himself was of the utmost importance to him. He saw himself as a person of responsibility and a good provider. An aspect of his image in which he took special pride was as the family father. Even his cats, Blackie and later Frankie and Johnny, became part of the family. He was the authority in his home and in his relationships with those close to him. As he expressed it frequently, “I’m master of my house.”

  Not being a person with 20-20 hindsight, Groucho was not one to indulge in much crying over spilled buttermilk. In the School of Experience, he said he would rather have had a “girlship” than a fellowship. He felt he had learned a lot from his mistakes, and could repeat them. “If I were to go back, I’d probably make the same mistakes over again,” he stated confidently.

  Groucho was a romantic. Trusting in intuition, with romantic hopes and dreams, he married three times in search of an ideal. “I was in love each time,” he told me. Norman Krasna felt Groucho had difficulty in reconciling his conception of the feminine ideal with reality. “Groucho was always a sap about women. He’s a romantic—he expects so much.”

  During the time that he was satisfied with his marriages, the satisfaction was based on limited expectations. He didn’t ask too much of the women in his life, little more than that they be beautiful objects, but the objects objected. One of the things they minded most was that he didn’t expect enough from them. He always had a tendency to put the women in his life on a pedestal, but they kept leaping off.

  “Women are a different breed entirely than the male,” he repeatedly told me. I asked him in what ways he found women so different, and he explained:

  “In every way. Their thinking is different. They can be a big help to a man because they think completely differently from men. Walk down the shopping district with a woman. The average man isn’t going to stand and look in window after window where there are clothes. A woman’ll do that, because it’s her business to look attractive. That’s how she captures the male. If a woman looks like a sludge or something, she won’t get anybody.

  “Women are brighter than men. If a woman is married to a guy, and she likes him and she loves him and he’s given her two or three kids, it’s most unlikely that she’s going to stray away from him. I think generally women are morally far superior to men. Man is a beast. He wants to get laid. Women maybe would like to be promiscuous. But don’t forget, if she’s a mother with children, she’s gonna defend those children. She wants those children. In those cases they are satisfied with what they have—the children and the husband.

  “Women are miles ahead of a man. They can outfox him from the time they’re born. From the moment a girl meets a man, she’s casing his bankroll, arranging the furniture, and picking out names for the children.

  “Men are fooled by women. I told you one of my favorite stories is about a married woman who picks up a fella, takes him to her apartment, and they get into the sack. After a couple of hours the man says, ‘I’ve never had a woman like you. You’re the most extraordinary woman in bed that I’ve ever heard of. You know, I’m not a religious man, but when I die, if there is such a thing as a hereafter, I’m going to come back and find you, no matter where you are in the whole world.’ And she says to him, ‘Well, if you do come back, try to come in the afternoon.’”

  If Groucho was with understanding friends (or what he termed his “overstanding friends”), he might have added with a gleam in his eye, “That’s true. It’s a true story. It happened to me.”

  At lunch at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, the British writer Richard Adams mentioned an attractive woman photographer who’d come to take his picture and whom Groucho also knew. Adams commented, “She’s a formidable woman.”

  “They all are,” Groucho said, adding, “Women, I’m nuts about them.”

  Talking with Walter Matthau backstage after a performance of Juno and the Paycock, Groucho spoke admiringly about the decorative attributes of a certain young actress Matthau had introduced him to that evening:

  WALTER MATTHAU

  Sure she’s good-looking, but she’s boring.

  GROUCHO

  All young girls are boring. You shouldn’t expect more.

  Groucho felt that most men are easily “fooled” by women, and he explained that by “fooled” he meant “being more concerned with the wrapping than with what was inside the package.”

  Discussing the poet T. S. Eliot with goddaughter Mary Sheldon, who was doing a school term paper about Eliot, Groucho told about his own visit to T. S. Eliot’s home:

  MARY SHELDON

  And what was T. S. Eliot’s wife like? Was she brilliant and complex?

  GROUCHO

  No.

  MARY SHELDON

  Then why do you think he married her?

  GROUCHO

  ’Cause she had blond hair. Men are easily fooled by women. And he served dinner for us that night.

  MARY SHELDONHe served the dinner?

  GROUCHO

  Yeah.

  A popular turn-of-the-century couplet (Groucho’s definition of a couplet was “a little man and a little woman”) described the masculine ideal “a lady in the drawing room, a cook in the kitchen, and a whore in the bedroom.” But Groucho never held his wives to either Escoffier or La Belle Otéro standards. In fact, he avoided women who knew too much or were too practiced in the bedroom, as well as in the kitchen. Although he might jest, “You can have more fun with a woman than a lady,” when it came down to brass bedposts, his ardor was dampened by anything in a woman that he felt was vulgar. Asked what he didn’t like in a woman, he answered without hesitation, “Vulgarity. I don’t like vulgarity.”

  I asked him what he meant by vulgarity.

  “Before I was married, I had a girl whose father was very rich in Portland. I could have married her, but I didn’t like her behavior in bed. She did everything. She was too sophisticated in bed. She knew too many tricks, and I didn’t want a girl like that. I wanted a girl that was more feminine. Oh, she liked me, but she always wanted to go to bed.”

  “Wouldn’t some men like that?” I asked.

  “A nymphomaniac? No. They want a nice feminine girl who they can go to bed with and who they can talk to.”

  Groucho discussed with Elliott Gould what a man finds attractive in a woman:

  ELLIOTT GOULD

  (Talking about his former wife, Barbra Streisand) It was fun eating with Barbra. She really appreciates food. The first real money we ever got together we bought this really great antique bed we’d been looking at, and that took all our money. We had just enough left to buy a bag of knishes, so we did, and we went home and sat in this great antique bed, eating knishes. Barbra was so vulnerable. I wanted to take care of her.

  GROUCHO

  A man wants a nice girl he can take care of.

  The rigors of three divorces did not dim Groucho’s romantic vision of matrimony or his enthusiasm for feminine charms. “I think everyone should get married,” he continued to say, “even if they get a divorce.” One night at dinner, Sidney Sheldon reminded Groucho that before he married Jorja, Groucho was always importuning him to get married.

  SIDNEY SHELDON

  Why was that, Grouch?

  GROUCHO

  I had no interest in either of you. I just wanted to get you married. Who was that other girl before Jorja, the one with the big knockers?

  SIDNEY SHELDON

  It was either Helen Twelvetrees or Zasu Pitts. So then, Grouch, if you had no interest in us, why were you so anxious to have us get married?

  GROUCHO

  Because I was married, and I thought everybody should get married—even if they get a divorce. Hook the schnook.

  This is certainly not to sa
y that Groucho believed in divorce. He merely accepted it as a possible negative side effect of marriage, which he believed in wholeheartedly. He was a responsible person who always took family ties seriously. Privately, he cared a great deal about the little children in his life: grandchildren Miles and Jade. Publicly he was more likely to fashion a semishocking unsentimental rejoinder, especially for a feminine audience. Composer Bronislaw Kaper remembered such a moment:

  “We were at La Scala Boutique restaurant, and there was a group of women with some very little children. They were all looking at Groucho, and Groucho waved back and made some gestures. They were all very thrilled and impressed. One of the women said, ‘Oh, you like children.’ And Groucho responded, ‘No, I like to make them.’”

  Whatever jokes Groucho made about parenthood, marriage, and divorce, what he respected most was the lasting marriage. Along with the marriage of his mother and father, the marriage that he most admired was that of brother Harpo and Susan Fleming Marx.

  Groucho’s wives pleased him by catering to his penchant for punctuality, order, and discipline. He liked to eat his lunch at one o’clock and his dinner at seven o’clock exactly. In marriage, the dining room was important to him, if not as important as the bedroom. Once when Charlotte Granet met him, she happened to mention some mutual friends who were getting a divorce. He commented, “Nobody knows what goes on in people’s bedrooms.” Talking with me about this, he added, “A man’s love life is his own affair. It isn’t politics that makes strange bedfellows; it’s matrimony.”

  Groucho generally preferred innocence to worldy-wise sophistication in women. At dinner with Arthur Whitelaw and me, he greatly enjoyed introducing his nurse, Linda, to her first vichyssoise, Malpeque oysters, and steak tartare. The private Groucho was frequently guilty of the chivalry the public Groucho character scorned. Taking Erin and me to a party or to the theatre, he would say:

  “I always take out two women. I hate to see a girl walk home alone.”