“Harpo was probably the sweetest man you would ever want to meet, but I couldn’t get him to talk on my TV show. He never would do it. He had this idea that once he talked he would ruin his character. I never believed that. I felt that when he did someone else’s show, he could be another character who talked. But he didn’t think my way, so that was it, and he didn’t talk.”
Groucho told me that the question most often asked him was: “Could Harpo talk?” Groucho always answered, “No.”
Home Again gave Minnie what she needed: a showcase for the Marx Brothers, and she was able to book them into the better houses. Encouraged by Home Again’s moderate success, she tried to put them into an original musical comedy, in hopes of attracting the attention of a visiting Broadway producer. The result was The Cinderella Girl, with book by Jo Swerling and music by Gus Kahn. An ill-prepared tryout company opened and closed in Battle Creek, Michigan, during the Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918. Even if the show had been good (which Groucho admitted it wasn’t), there was no chance whatever of merely breaking even at the box office, since local health regulations allowed them to sell only every other seat and every other row. At the beginning of the second act, Groucho stepped forward and said:
“Folks, that first act wasn’t so good. We’re gonna ad-lib from now on.”
Back in Chicago, they tried to salvage what they could from The Cinderella Girl, recycling the expensive scenery and costumes into a more sumptuous production of Home Again. This was during World War I, when good vaudeville acts were scarce. Minnie had no trouble at all booking the improved production into the Wilson Avenue Theatre, a house controlled by E. F. Albee, ruler of the Orpheum Circuit.
At the beginning of the entry of the United States into the war, the Marxes had bought a farm in La Grange, Illinois, a northwestern suburb of Chicago. As might be expected, the Marx Brothers on the farm were funny but not agriculturally fruitful. “After a while we had to buy eggs for our chickens to sit on, so as not to be embarrassed in front of visitors.” Groucho explained the problem with their farm: “We spent most of our time at Wrigley Field watching the Cubs.” He talked with me about those days:
GROUCHO
Did I tell you about the farm we had in La Grange, Illinois?
I
When you were farmers?
GROUCHO
We weren’t farmers. We had a farm. It was during the war.
I
The First World War?
GROUCHO
Yeah. My eyes were bad. They wouldn’t take me. Took Gummo. So we bought the farm.
I
You said that you started out with a lot of enthusiasm, getting up very early in the morning. And it got later and later, and finally you just got up and went straight to the baseball game without going to the farm.
GROUCHO
We finally wound up in Wrigley Field in Chicago. We had guinea pigs in the cellar, and we were all afraid to go down there. That was the way we used to get our water, out of a pump in the cellar.
I
How did guinea pigs get into your cellar?
GROUCHO
We thought if we raised guinea pigs, we could sell ’em to somebody like they sell rats. We had so many of them. We must have had three or four hundred guinea pigs. The chickens all died. We made some money because there was a golf course across the street from our farm, and if anybody lost a golf ball, we’d find it and they’d give us a quarter. There was a girl in that town that I used to be madly in love with. She worked in a bakery. If you wanted doughnuts or coffeecake or anything, she waited on you. She wouldn’t have anything to do with me. She was crazy about Chico.
When it finally became evident that at least one of the boys would have to go into the service, Gummo went into the Army. After World War I, he returned to show business, not as a performer but eventually as a theatrical agent. Even during his show business days, Gummo had liked helping Sam make ends meet during summer lulls by selling paraffin boxes to butchers in towns around Chicago.
The Marx Brothers returned to the stage with Home Again, and Zeppo, who was then seventeen, took Gummo’s place as dancer, singer, and straight man in the act. When it was possible to persuade Zeppo to talk about his show business days, which wasn’t often, he was far from nostalgic. Except for the chorus girls, being a straight man in the Marx Brothers act wasn’t fun for him. He wanted to be a comedian too, but there just wasn’t room for another funny Marx Brother, especially the youngest brother, who came in after the act had already taken form. Zeppo always knew he could be funny, and once he got his chance when Groucho had an emergency appendectomy in Chicago. Following the shows, Groucho’s friends would go backstage, fully confident that they were going to be able to talk with Groucho in his dressing room.
Recalling the incident, Groucho said, “Zeppo was so good, I got better faster.”
Groucho remembered Zeppo as a nervous actor and a confident fighter:
“He didn’t want to be an actor. The first chance he got, he quit and became an agent. But offstage he was the funniest one of us. He always tried to get Norman Krasna as a client, but Krasna was handled through another agency. So one night we’re at the Clover Club in Hollywood, and some drunk comes after Krasna and makes all kinds of remarks, and Zeppo’s a good fighter. He leaned over and hit this guy on the chin. And knocked him under the table, then turned to Krasna and asked, ‘Does Mike Levy give you this kind of service?’ Zeppo was a good fighter. He used to fight anybody.”
On the strength of Home Again’s successful reception at the Wilson Avenue Theatre, the Marx Brothers were signed to a thirty-week contract on the big-time Orpheum Circuit. On the bill with them on the Western swing was a young monologist named Ben K. Benny, later Jack Benny.
The Orpheum Circuit’s New York Palace Theatre truthfully billed itself as “the topmost rung” and boasted “Here Genius not Birth your Rank insures.” Naturally, it was the ambition of the Marx Brothers to play the Palace. Success at the Palace would truly mean “Home Again” for the expatriate New Yorkers. Once her boys began to do well on the Orpheum Circuit, Minnie started pushing for a Palace Theatre booking.
The honey-snacking prime minister of E. F. Albee’s powerful stage empire, J. J. Murdock, famed for the ever-present jar of honey on his desk, agreed to let the Marx Brothers try out at the Boston Palace. If they were successful there, they would be booked into New York’s Royal and Palace theatres. The last time the Marxes played Boston, it had been far from a triumphant appearance.
Home Again was a much better act than The Four Nightingales, and the Boston Palace’s audience more appreciative (and genteel) than the old Howard’s. The run was successful beyond even Minnie’s wildest expectations. But at the Royal in New York, “We fell flatter than yesterday’s soufflé.” The New York audience was cool toward what had convulsed the audience in New England. So was J. J. Murdock, who immediately canceled the Palace engagement. But Minnie wasn’t going to let one bad showing under adverse conditions keep them from their destiny. In the face of Minnie’s intrepid persistence, Murdock agreed to let them play the Palace but only if they went on first—the toughest spot on the bill. In spite of latecomers and a traditional apathy toward first acts, the Marx Brothers soon won the audiences and became a mainstay at the Palace, where, Groucho said, “We became known as ‘The Palace Stock Company.’”
By 1919 the Marx Brothers were at the apogee of vaudevillian success. There was apparently no place to go from there, so Minnie retired and Chico more or less took over management of the act. Chico, who never made enough money to finance his gambling losses, couldn’t afford to believe that they had reached the peak of their potential. Even when they were down and out, Groucho remembered Chico saying, “We won’t always be playing these dumps.” From then until the Thalberg years, Chico’s influence offstage was important in catapulting them from vaudeville to Broadway to Hollywood and to world fame.
During the successful run of Home Again, Groucho married Zeppo�
��s dancing partner, nineteen-year-old Ruth Johnson. This indirectly led to Groucho’s famous greasepaint mustache. Since it was concurrent with another important event in his life, Groucho remembered the circumstances well:
“We were playing at Keith’s Flushing. My wife was having a baby at the time, and I used to spend a lot of time in the hospital with her. One night I stayed too long, and by the time I got to the theatre, it was too late to paste on my mustache, so I just smeared on some greasepaint. The audience didn’t seem to mind, so I stuck with it.”
Many of Groucho’s celebrated performing characteristics were acquired in a similar fashion:
“I would try a line. If it didn’t get a laugh, I’d take it out and write another line. Pretty soon I had a character.”
The inimitable Groucho walk evolved that way:
“I was just kidding around one day, and I started to walk funny. The audience liked it, so I kept it in.” Oscar Levant, who sometimes played the piano at Groucho’s house, said about the walk, “I wouldn’t stoop so high.”
In the early twenties the Marx Brothers decided that they would like to be in the movies. They had observed friend Charlie Chaplin’s success. So they arranged to shoot a film themselves. Groucho told me about Humorisk:
“I never saw it. Jo Swerling wrote it. We were playing at the Palace Theatre, but we used to run over to Weehawken. We made two reels which didn’t make any sense at all. But it wasn’t trying to make sense, it was just trying to be funny. Nobody directed it. There was nothing to direct. We put up the money ourselves. We wanted to be movie actors.”
Tiring of Home Again, the Marx Brothers opened in a new act called On the Mezzanine Floor in 1921. The backer for this show was world lightweight boxing champion Benny Leonard, who was also an ardent Marx Brothers fan. Since Benny Leonard also wanted to be an actor, he bought a vehicle in which he could appear as himself with his idols, the Marx Brothers. The result was On the Mezzanine Floor, which was important in the Marx Brothers’ professional climb because some of the material from this show was incorporated into I’ll Say She Is, the big turning point in their careers. Hattie Darling, who starred in the show, reminisced with me:
“Benny Leonard was in love with me, and he wanted me to marry him. My brother, Herman Timberg, was a great writer, and he wrote On the Mezzanine, and Benny Leonard put up the money for the show. I managed the act and collected the salary at the box office, which Chico couldn’t stand. The four Marx Brothers were only getting a thousand dollars a week, and Chico was quite a gambler. He loved to gamble and was always losing, so he had to come to me for advances, and this would irk him so much. Groucho loved it because he didn’t want Chico to gamble.
“The Marx Brothers were wonderful to me. Of course, I was the kind of girl who never ran around, and they knew it and they took me out for dinner. They took me all over. The best notice I ever received was with the Marx Brothers in On the Mezzanine.
“I had about four or five changes in the act, but the Marx Brothers were the stars, so they had the star dressing room. I went up to them once and said, ‘Look, I make all the changes and you four boys don’t even make any changes at all. Why can’t I get the star dressing room?’ They said, ‘All right.’ But when we played in, I think, Brooklyn, they put the star on a dressing room way upstairs, so I could barely make it onstage in time. They were such pranksters! So I took Harpo’s red wig, and I wiped the whole floor with it. But they were wonderful to me. And Groucho had a sense of humor I have never seen in anybody else.”
One evening Groucho talked with Erin and me about On the Mezzanine Floor:
ERIN
What was On the Mezzanine about?
GROUCHO
It was about forty minutes.
ERIN
And what happened?
GROUCHO
Well, there were supposed to be two sets, an upstairs and a downstairs. I remember the last line. “This is the last time I cross the ocean. Next time I’ll take the train.”
ERIN
Then there’s another one right away. “The garbage man is here.”
GROUCHO
“Tell him we don’t want any.”
ERIN
And then what happened?
GROUCHO
And then Chico says, “I’d like to say goodbye to your wife.” And I said, “Who wouldn’t?”
ERIN
And there were a lot of doors on the upstairs and downstairs of the set.
GROUCHO
I used to dance up those steps.
When On the Mezzanine Floor was finishing its tour in Cleveland, Chico got “a notion to cross the ocean,” so their agent arranged an English tour starting at the Coliseum in London. There, audiences didn’t understand the Marx Brothers’ American humor, and responded by throwing pennies onto the stage. “In those days it was the custom when audiences didn’t like an act—a pretty dangerous custom, too, since the English penny was as large as a silver dollar.” Groucho waded into the shower of coppers and addressed the unfriendly British audience:
“We came all the way from America to entertain you, so you might at least throw some shillings.”
Groucho’s ad-lib almost helped to make the London audience more receptive, but the boys decided to play it safe on their tour of the provinces, and resurrected the less sophisticated Home Again, which was received enthusiastically even on their return to the London Coliseum. Such was not the case when the Marx Brothers returned to New York.
Because they had played abroad without the approval of Keith-Albee, they were put on the performers’ blacklist and banished to second-rate bookings. Even though it had been the end of the season, the Marx Brothers had been expected to remain on call in Cleveland after On the Mezzanine Floor closed. At the time, Albee’s United Booking Office controlled vaudeville.
The Shubert Brothers, who had successfully fought a similar monopoly in the legitimate theater, decided to take on United Booking. Signing up as many disaffected acts as they could coax away from the Orpheum Circuit, the Shuberts strung together their own vaudeville circuit, often having to accept inferior facilities in Keith-Albee strongholds. Now feeling that they had nothing to lose, the Marx Brothers left the Orpheum Circuit and joined the Shuberts, becoming one of their top attractions.
Despite an auspicious opening at the Winter Garden in New York, the Marx Brothers soon found out that the Shuberts were up against a formidable foe. Not only were Shubert theatres often substandard, but too few headline acts had been lured away from Keith-Albee, and many of these were now contritely returning to the fold. The boys, however, could not go back, so they stuck it out with the Shubert Brothers until their vaudeville circuit collapsed. At that point, they were on everyone’s blacklist, and the only way to go was up.
After some unsuccessful negotiations with Charles Dillingham and Flo Ziegfeld (Al Shean was now a big star in the Ziegfeld Follies), Chico chanced to meet another independent, if less illustrious, producer by the name of Joseph M. Gaites, who was looking for talent to put in front of some expensive scenery left over from several flops. His backer was James P. Beury, a millionaire Pennsylvania coal dealer who had just bought the Walnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia and needed something to play there during the summer of 1923.
The Marx Brothers hastily put together what amounted to a gigantic musical tabloid. It was based nominally on an unsuccessful musical comedy by Will and Tom Johnstone called variously Love for Sale and Gimme a Thrill. Some of the songs and the basic idea, that of a millionairess looking for thrills, were kept, while mostly new material, suitable for the Marx Brothers, was added. Some of it, like the audition scene later filmed by Paramount in 1931, came from On the Mezzanine Floor, while a lot of it was written by Groucho and Will B. Johnstone, who was more famous as a cartoonist for the New York World-Telegram. The celebrated Napoleon scene was such a collaboration.
Tryouts in Brooklyn and Allentown, Pennsylvania, gave no indication that a Broadway hit was gestating. Then, on June
1, 1923, I’ll Say She Is opened at the Walnut Street Theatre as “Philadelphia’s first annual summer revue.” Although the critics immediately recognized it as an elaboration of Gimme a Thrill, which had already played itself out over the Shubert circuit, they were impressed. So were audiences.
Groucho continued to be proud of the unexpectedly successful Philadelphia run of I’ll Say She Is. “We played the whole summer through Labor Day. No show had ever done that before. It was the most important thing that ever happened to me.”
At Erin’s urging, Groucho described the show for me:
GROUCHO
J. P. Beury was in the coal business. And he was laying one of the chorus girls. So was Harpo, but he didn’t know that. He put up the money. We had scenery that was from all the different shows in Kane’s warehouse. We didn’t have one piece of scenery that really belonged to us.
ERIN
They had to make up the play to match the scenery. It starred Lotta Miles, and Groucho played Napoleon. He had a costume that had a string in the back, and his epaulettes went up and down. Tell Charlotte what you said when you came onstage.
GROUCHO
“My name is Sammy Brown…”
ERIN
That’s it! Then what happens?
GROUCHO
Metcalf is onstage, and Zeppo comes in and sings, “My name is Sammy Brown, and I just came into town.” And the straight man says, “What’s your act?” “You can make a mint on me.” “What do you do?” “I dance and sing. I do imitations.” “Do a Joe Frisco imitation.” And he does it. The second one comes in, Chico, and he does the same thing. In the meantime, Harpo is sitting on Metcalf’s head.
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