Hello, I Must be Going

by Charlotte Chandler

  The last years of Lafe Schoenberg’s long life were spent traveling in the family troupe, just as he had done so many decades before in pre-Bismarck Germany. Groucho remembered his grandfather’s insistence on giving up his lower berth on the train to the boys, saying that they needed the rest between performances. After forty years in the United States, Grandfather Opie spoke only very limited English, but he could name all of the makes of automobiles. Of his family, Groucho said, “They came over on the Augustflower, having missed the Mayflower.”

  Why Sam Marx chose to support his family as a tailor was never clear, especially to those who ordered what were his usually unsuitable suits. He billed himself as “Samuel Marx, Custom Tailor to the Men’s Trade.” Minnie was supposed to make the measurements for him, but since she was always out trying to get theatrical bookings, Sam would size up his customers without resorting to a tape measure. According to Groucho, these calculations were “about as accurate as Chamberlain’s predictions about Hitler.”

  Ethel Wise recalled the way it was:

  “Their father had a little shop on Lexington Avenue. He was a nice man. But the boys were wild, and he couldn’t control them. For a while, he had Leonard [Chico] help him, but he took the trousers he was supposed to deliver and pawned them. He went to play craps, and didn’t show up all night.

  “I can still remember their father when he did come home. ‘Var vuz you?’ I can remember very often hearing him say, ‘Var vuz you?’ to the oldest boy. He was such a bad boy. The next one, Adolph [Harpo], was mischievous too. Those boys were really wild. They couldn’t be controlled.”

  Nevertheless, Ethel Wise remembered a happy Marx family:

  “There was always good food at the Marx house. Their father could really cook. We used to go there after school for cookies. It was always a lot of fun at their house. They were wild youngsters with a talent for having fun. The place would be a shambles, especially if Mrs. Marx left them alone. They would tear down the draperies. There was a woman across the way, a doctor’s wife, who used to send over notes that she was going to call the police, which probably made them do it even more.

  “The whole family was always kidding. They used to have a lot of fun and make good times, though they all had respect for their mother. Groucho was the most serious, and he was the most ambitious. He wanted to be somebody and make something of himself. He wanted to make it better for his whole family, like Mrs. Marx did. He was the most like her.”

  Groucho never completed the seventh grade in school. Harpo never even got through the second grade. Although Groucho always had intellectual interests, he admitted that he was something less than a standout student:

  GROUCHO

  We had a teacher who always had a bunch of keys in his hand, and he’d twirl ’em like that. If you did something bad, he’d throw the keys at you.

  I

  You value education so much now. At the time, did you like school?

  GROUCHO

  I wasn’t very good at it. Grammar mystified me.

  I

  But you write grammatically.

  GROUCHO

  I taught myself. I read everything. My education is self-inflicted.

  In spite of his limited formal education, Groucho was justifiably proud of his literary accomplishments. When I first met Groucho, he told me, “I didn’t get past 7B and I wrote five books.”

  Harpo dropped out of school after a year and a half in the second grade because he got tired of being dropped out of the classroom window by two burly Irish classmates. Gummo was a sickly child whose attendance at school was sporadic. With his phenomenal memory and genius for figures, Chico could have been an outstanding student, except that all he bothered to remember were betting odds, and the figures that interested him wore skirts. Zeppo didn’t do much better in school, not applying himself until later when he was successful as a manufacturer of precision instruments. His chief scholastic accomplishment was having beaten up every other kid in school.

  It was at home and in the tough Yorkville streets that the boys received their real education. Harpo developed the resourcefulness to carry something of value, like a dead tennis ball or an empty thread spool to ransom his way to freedom if cornered by a rival street gang. Chico prepared for life by becoming a master of dialects to avoid being the wrong “streeter.”

  Groucho’s earliest memory was his impression of riding on the back of a moving van:

  “Gummo and I were back there. We must have been pretty young, because we didn’t have our piano yet. And I remember playing stickball. We were surrounded by three breweries where we lived. When I went to school I could smell the malt. We used to go over to Park Avenue, where old man Ruppert lived in a big house with a fruit orchard, and we’d steal his apples and pears. There was a spiked fence about eight feet high, and dogs. We might have been dog meat, but we were very young, and we sure liked those apples and pears.

  “I also remember the iceman delivering ice. You’d holler out the window to tell him how much you wanted. We had no icebox; we were very poor.

  “We were so poor that when somebody knocked on the door, we all hid. We were paying twenty-seven dollars a month, and there were ten of us. The five brothers, my father and mother, my grandmother and grandfather, and an adopted sister. There were ten of us and one toilet. And no toilet paper.

  “Chico worked for a firm called Klauber-Horn and Company in Brooklyn. They were wholesale distributors of paper. They had a crap game going in the cellar, and Chico was getting three dollars a week. Every week he lost his salary. Finally my father said, ‘You come home one week again without your salary, I’ll kill you!’ Next week Chico was paid and immediately got into a crap game. Naturally he lost all his money, and he was afraid to come home. They had big bales, like cotton, except it was toilet paper. So he took that whole thing, and got on the elevated train, and came home with it. That was the first time we had toilet paper. Before that we always used The Morning World.”

  Groucho took me to visit the East Ninety-third Street apartment. According to him, surprisingly little change had taken place, but he added, “Everything looks smaller…or I’m bigger.” Some people who lived in the building told us, “The Marx Brothers used to live here, right there.” Groucho looked blank and said, “Who are they?” Then he was recognized.

  Ethel Wise described what the apartments were like:

  “Our apartment was directly above theirs, about eight rooms all in a row, with what was called an air shaft in the center to let in light and air.”

  The East Ninety-third Street neighborhood they lived in was not especially affluent, and the Marxes were not the neighborhood’s most prosperous inhabitants. “Everyone else’s garbage was richer than ours,” Groucho remembered. During his childhood, a room of his own was beyond his wildest dreams. A bed of his own was all he could hope for. “We slept four in a bed, two at each end.”

  Minnie spent her days making the rounds of theatrical booking agents while Sam cooked. An invitation to the Marx home for one of Sam’s culinary miracles often softened an otherwise obdurate agent, and a booking was thus obtained. Before the Marx brothers had embarked on show business careers, Minnie had concentrated her efforts on promoting her younger brother Al Shean. He was a pants presser who couldn’t keep a crease or a job, so he went into vaudeville.

  “I don’t think he was a very good pants presser,” recalled Groucho, “because as soon as he got a job as a presser, he formed a singing quartet, and the fellow who ran the factory threw all four of ’em out. He was always forming quartets and getting fired.”

  Groucho claimed that as a child he didn’t think about being an actor. “When I was very young, I thought about being a doctor, but then I really wanted to be a writer. I became an actor because I had an uncle in show business who was making $200 a week, and I wasn’t making anything, not even an occasional girl. My first job was sitting on a beer keg in Coney Island and singing. I got a dollar for it. That was my start in show b
usiness. Later I got a job in a Protestant church singing in a choir, until they found out what was the matter with me. That was my second job.”

  As the eldest son, Chico got the piano lessons. All of the boys were supposed to have received lessons in turn, but there was never enough money. Chico was a quick-study, no-practice artist who, as soon as he could play a few songs, turned his newly acquired skills to profit. Piano players were in great demand at nickelodeons, saloons, and bordellos, so Chico quickly found employment, often accepting more jobs than he could simultaneously hold. He solved this problem after a few days by substituting Harpo. Harpo had learned a couple of tunes of his own, and at that time looked enough like Chico to be his twin brother. Harpo’s even more limited repertory soon got both of them fired, but not until after he had collected a few days’ salary and was ready again to double as Chico on another job.

  Although they were quite different in temperament, Harpo and Chico were very close as children growing up. Harpo, being out of school all day, was either idle, getting in or out of mischief, or job hunting, so he naturally looked up to older brother Leonard, who, it seemed to him, was good at everything. Billy Marx told me, “They looked so much alike, and they really complemented each other.” Chico, as he would be named years later for his prowess with the “chicks,” has remained to this day an enigma. Much has been written about and by Groucho and about Harpo, but scarcely anything about Chico. “He was by far the most fantastic character that I have ever known,” Gummo told me.

  Maxine Marx, Chico’s daughter, told me that she had tried for years to write a book about her father, but had found him “too ephemeral, and impossible to capture on paper.” Descriptions of Chico, including Harpo’s, portray him as someone who always liked the hunt better than the kill. “I always had the feeling that nobody could ever say anything really bad about Chico,” said Billy Marx, who had toured the British music halls with his father and his Uncle Chico. Billy also pointed out that Chico, though seemingly an extrovert, was really a loner. Groucho agreed:

  “He always was. Even when we were kids. He never played with us. He went over to the next block, Ninety-fourth Street, and had a crap game.”

  Hattie Darling described Chico as “nice and very bright. He was also always getting advances on his salary to pay gambling debts and trying to outmaneuver his wife, Betty, who was extremely jealous.” Groucho affirmed that Chico’s wife’s suspicions were not unfounded.

  With Al Shean’s success in vaudeville, Minnie became convinced that at least one of her sons could make it in show business too. The son selected was Groucho. Not only was he serious and intelligent, but he could also sing—a talent highly prized in the Marx family. Groucho was the possessor of an excellent boy-soprano voice. “Unfortunately, I grew up,” he said. Even in his eighties, Groucho still loved to sing and would do so “at the drop of a pimp.”

  Groucho’s first real job in show business was as a female impersonator in a small-time vaudeville group billed as “The Leroy Trio.” This was in 1905, a year after the Protestant choir had disowned him. A few months later, Mr. Leroy ran off with the other boy in the trio and Groucho’s salary, leaving him stranded in Cripple Greek, Colorado, where he managed to get a job as a wagon driver until Minnie could send him his train fare home. “I’d never even seen a horse before, and the horses knew it.”

  The same thing happened again when he was hired as a singer by an Englishwoman named Lily Saville. In Waco, Texas, she ran off with a married lion tamer who shared the bill, leaving Groucho with a return ticket to New York, but without his “grouch bag”—the small chamois bag actors wore around their necks to hold their savings. His next job was a distinct improvement: he got stranded in Chicago.

  “It was my first dramatic part, in The Man of My Choice. I was the boy hero. In the second act, the man tries to steal the important papers from the ingenue, who had them in her pillow in the hospital. I came onstage with a gun, and I said, ‘Stop! Move one step and I’ll blow you to smithereens!’ And the curtain came down.” When Groucho once told this story on television, he ended with, “Does anybody know what a ‘smithereen’ is?” He received hundreds of letters defining “smithereen.”

  When the show unexpectedly closed in Chicago, Groucho was again left penniless. He had sent home to his family half of his weekly salary of twenty-five dollars and had spent the rest on room and board. In the meantime, Harpo was working at whatever menial jobs a first-grade graduate could qualify for in those days, and Chico had become a professional pool hustler, and then a lifeguard until he had to be rescued by another lifeguard, and finally a song plugger. Eventually he went to work in that capacity for Shapiro-Bernstein in Pittsburgh, where he almost settled permanently. For a time, Groucho was also a song plugger for Jerome Remick, getting twenty-five dollars a week for singing one of their songs.

  Groucho knew that he wanted to stay in show business, but sometimes the closest he could come to it was cleaning actors’ wigs, a job he described as “a hair-raising experience.” In 1906, however, he did get to sing at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. He talked about it with Erin, Ted Mann, who is director of the Circle in the Square Theatre in New York City, and me:

  GROUCHO

  It was after the San Francisco earthquake. Thousands of people were killed. We volunteered to go on at the Metropolitan Opera House to raise money for the people who were injured. And I sang “Somebody’s Sweetheart.” I was in the Gus Edwards vaudeville act, where I played a German comedian, and I was fifteen years old.

  TED MANN

  You fellows were certainly not known at that time. So why did they let you on the Metropolitan stage?

  GROUCHO

  Because it was a whole group of us. Gus Edwards had an act, with about eight people in it, and Jessel was one of them. And we all entertained. At least, we thought we did. We didn’t get any money. I remember chasing Gus Edwards once to get our salary.

  Groucho’s experience with the famous Gus Edwards school act undoubtedly influenced the Marx Brothers’ later Fun in Hi Skule act, but for the moment Groucho remained a boy soprano and an actor, giving little thought to continuing as a comedian. “We tried comedy, but I wasn’t exactly hilarious,” Groucho told me. He and Harpo put on makeup and what they thought were funny costumes, and presented themselves at a Coney Island theatre one night. The manager took one look at them and told them, “Wash your dirty faces and get the hell out of here.” On another occasion, they actually did get a chance to do their comedy act down on Fourteenth Street. But the manager got them off the stage almost instantly because he considered their begged and borrowed material too risqué, though Groucho told me, “We always worked clean.” This is how some of it went:

  HARPO

  Yonder in the distance an island lays.

  GROUCHO

  Lays what? Eggs?

  HARPO

  No. Lays on the bosom of the ocean.

  GROUCHO

  Oh, what a fresh island!

  More successful was a vocal duet featuring Groucho and Gummo that Minnie organized in 1909. Gummo was thirteen and by the standards of that day more than old enough to go to work. Having a fair singing voice, he was paired with Groucho in an act which soon became The Three Nightingales when a cross-eyed girl named Mabel O’Donnell was recruited by Minnie. The girl was selected for her voice, looks, and dress size, which had to be the same as the costume Minnie had already bought on sale at Bloomingdale’s. She also had to be willing to work for practically nothing. Mabel O’Donnell filled the dress and the bill perfectly, except for the crossed eyes and the unfortunate tendency of her voice to crack on a certain note. The crossed eyes were remedied by a wig that covered one eye, and the crack in her voice was almost remedied by very loud singing on the part of Groucho and Gummo whenever that certain note was approached. She also had another fault, which Gummo described for me: “Mabel had a beautiful voice, but would start in one key and end in another.” Minnie soon joined the act herself and ea
sily lured Harpo away from an unpromising career as bellboy at the Seville Hotel, where he had contracted the measles and crabs simultaneously.

  Earlier Gummo had had a fling at show business that left him less than stagestruck. A certain Uncle Heimie, wishing to become a ventriloquist but having no aptitude for it, built a dummy that was hollow so that a midget or a small boy might be concealed inside. Gummo was pressed into service. To remove any doubts that he was working with a real dummy, Uncle Heimie planned to close his act by sticking a pin into one of its legs. To accomplish this with Gummo really inside, the dummy was constructed so that both of Gummo’s legs fit into one of the dummy’s legs, while the other leg was only dummy. During their debut in York, Pennsylvania, Uncle Heimie pierced the wrong leg, prematurely ending what promised to become “the second worst act in vaudeville next to the Whangdoodle Four.”

  That dubious accolade might have been awarded Minnie’s Nightingales, except that competition at the bottom was fierce. George Jessel recalled for Groucho and me an act called Osterman’s Oysters, and there actually were acts called Van Camp’s Goats and Pigs and The Musical Farm, featuring a farmer and his wife singing “The Blue Bells of Scotland” while they milked a real cow. It was that milieu into which Minnie waded with alacrity.

  One of the first lessons that Minnie learned was that in small-time vaudeville an act was paid according to the number of performers—the more participants, the higher the booking rate. Evidently, managers took comfort in a stage full of actors, even when the actors outnumbered the audience, as they not infrequently did. For that reason, The Three Nightingales soon hatched a fourth Nightingale—Harpo. Then, The Four Nightingales became The Six Mascots when Minnie and Aunt Hannah joined the act. The Marx Brothers were still not playing it completely for laughs, although Groucho donned a butcher boy’s smock and carried a basket with sausage dangling out while he sang in a comic German accent. Remembering this routine, Groucho said softly, “I went from bad to wurst.” He explained to me that in the days before World War I “This was considered a classy act.” After the sinking of the Lusitania, he switched to a safer Jewish accent. He recalled the moment: