Hello, I Must be Going

by Charlotte Chandler

  ERIN

  They used to do it in vaudeville all the time. You did Al Shean for a while. Each one would come in and do an imitation to start off. And it changed through the years. At this time it was Joe Frisco, then it was Maurice Chevalier in Monkey Business.

  GROUCHO

  The idea of the show was there were eight men…

  ERIN

  The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker, the lawyer, the doctor, the Indian chief…

  GROUCHO

  The butler says, “Isn’t she a beauty?” And we all say, “I’ll say she is!” And that was the title of the play.

  ERIN

  Then what happened?

  GROUCHO

  We left the theatre.

  ERIN

  No!

  GROUCHO

  The audience left.

  ERIN

  No, tell about the dancers and what they did. I wish Zeppo was here. He tells it great.

  GROUCHO

  They did “The Thrill of Wall Street.” Then after that, we came out…

  ERIN

  Who were the dancers?

  GROUCHO

  I don’t remember who they were. It was a man and a woman, both lesbians. Then we came out as tramps, and we did a ballet.

  ERIN

  They did the same dance as the very, very accomplished dancers had done…

  GROUCHO

  Dressed as tramps. And we danced better than they did.

  With the Philadelphia success of I’ll Say She Is, the Marx Brothers started to feel more secure about their future in show business. The show, which cost only $5,000 to produce, was now grossing $4,000 a week. Groucho celebrated by buying a car:

  “I had just bought a new car, first new car I ever had. It was a Studebaker. Paid a thousand dollars. So the guy brought the car around. He was a Frenchman, he called it “Stu-da-bak-care.” I was dying to take a ride in it. So, during intermission, I got the car, and there was one lane of cars in front of me, and one lane of cars in back of me. I was trapped in there and had to go on the stage in five minutes. So I started running toward the Walnut Street Theatre. Here I am dressed as Napoleon, running down the street. And a cop starts to chase me. He thought I was crazy. I got to the theatre just in time. I left the car in the single lane. The streets are very narrow. There’s room for a streetcar and an automobile. The traffic jam is probably still there.”

  When I’ll Say She Is ended its Philadelphia run the day after Thanksgiving, the show was taken on the road, where it played the rest of the year and into 1924. Gaites had wanted to open immediately on Broadway, but he was discouraged by New York producers, like Lee Shubert, who were unimpressed by the Philadelphia production. The reception accorded them outside Philadelphia almost convinced the Marx Brothers that they really weren’t ready for Broadway. Boston, where they opened the road tour, was cold, and Toronto was colder. “When we got to Toronto, it was ten below, and the audience was forty below,” Groucho recalled.

  Fortunately, Chicago received I’ll Say She Is warmly. After three SRO months there, they set out on the road again, ending their tour where they had begun it, in Boston. The show must have improved with age, for this time, Groucho said, “The audience was staid, but at least they stayed.” Now the Marx Brothers knew they were ready for Broadway. So, on May 19, 1924, I’ll Say She Is opened at the Shuberts’ Casino Theatre in New York.

  There’s an old stage superstition that forbids anyone to wish an actor good luck before an opening. Instead, one is supposed to say, “Break a leg.” It actually happened to Minnie just before the New York opening of I’ll Say She Is. While standing on a chair during a fitting for her gown, she fell and fractured her ankle, and had to be carried to her box in the Casino Theatre on opening night. Minnie was always a person with a strong sense of theatre, and her entrance on this memorable night was befittingly dramatic.

  Generally, the first-string critics would not have covered the opening of a show like I’ll Say She Is. Even the producers must have had doubts that it was of Broadway caliber, because “We were warned not to put our trunks into storage,” Groucho recounted. But another show that was supposed to open on the same night had been postponed, so critics like Alexander Woollcott and Franklin P. Adams, having no place better to go, appeared at the Casino Theatre. Woollcott is supposed to have been forced to attend because he forgot to tell his replacement to cover the opening until it was too late. Led by Woollcott, the critics raved unanimously.

  I’ll Say She Is ran for almost two years on Broadway. “We were the toast of the town,” Groucho said, “which is a lot better than being in a breadline.” Harpo spent most of his time outside the theatre at the famous Algonquin Hotel Round Table, where he judiciously maintained his silent role in the presence of some of the most celebrated wits of the time. It didn’t take Chico and Zeppo long to find out where the action was, and they went straight to it.

  Groucho, more of a homebody, spent most of his spare time at his new house in Great Neck with his wife and children. (Daughter Miriam was born in 1927.) From there, he wrote articles that were published in The New Yorker magazine under the name of Julius H. Marx, “As unlikely a pen name as I’ve ever heard,” Groucho told me, “unless it’s Charlotte Chandler.” Gradually Groucho became the spokesman, onstage and off, for the Marx Brothers. He explained to me how this happened:

  “I talked, and Harpo didn’t. He played the harp and stood on his head, and Chico played the piano. Zeppo was funny offstage, but onstage he was the straight man and didn’t have that much to say. I had some dialogue with Chico which he never remembered because he was always off chasing some dame. So I became the leader of this group of gypsies.”

  Toward the end of the two-year run of I’ll Say She Is, the Marx Brothers became acquainted with Sam Harris, a universally respected Broadway producer. Harris wanted to produce the next Marx Brothers show, engaging George S. Kaufman to write the book. This was a most appropriate choice, since the critics had already deemed the Marx Brothers’ comedy “worthy of George S. Kaufman,” which became a self-fulfilling prophecy. As collaborator, Kaufman chose young Morrie Ryskind. Irving Berlin did the musical score. The result was The Cocoanuts, the Marx Brothers’ next Broadway show.

  Sometimes, working with the Marx Brothers was too much even for so seasoned a man of the theatre as George S. Kaufman. Morrie Ryskind talked with Groucho and me about a time when Kaufman thought he could endure no more.

  “George Kaufman wanted to leave once. It was during The Cocoanuts. We’d been up all night working on a scene, and George had called a rehearsal at ten, and there wasn’t a Marx Brother in sight. And I swear to you, George wanted to leave me. At that time he was the big guy in the theatre, and he said, ‘I’m not going to put up with that stuff.’ I virtually had to grab him. I said, ‘Look, it’s all right for you to go, but what happens to me, George!’”

  The Cocoanuts opened at the Lyric Theatre on December 8, 1925. Opposite Groucho was an actress named Margaret Dumont—a Sam Harris discovery. Again the critics raved, although Percy Hammond found it “not so laughable as its predecessor, I’ll Say She Is.” (This was the same Percy Hammond who in Chicago several years earlier had described Home Again as “an elaborate disorder of amateur antics said to have been a riot in lesser vaudeville.”)

  There is a saying in the theatre that plays are rewritten, not written. As might be expected, the Marx Brothers carried this maxim to its maximum, rewriting the dialogue every performance, even after it was out of rehearsal. For Groucho, especially, ad-libbing was as essential as breathing. During its three-year run, so many changes were made that hardly anything remained of the original dialogue. Groucho remembered how George S. Kaufman became resigned to the Marx Brothers’ use of his and Morrie Ryskind’s lines as springboards for their zany extemporizations:

  “Kaufman was standing in the wings one night talking with Heywood Broun. Broun was in the middle of telling a story when Kaufman said, ‘Just a minute,’ and left
him. In a moment George returned to Broun, who was annoyed, and said, ‘Sorry I interrupted your story, but I thought I heard one of the original lines.’”

  Groucho’s penchant for adding new material as the inspiration struck him sometimes bewildered his fellow performers. The Brox Sisters—Lorayne, Patricia, and Bobbe—shared with me their reminiscences of Groucho’s extemporizing, on and off the stage, in The Cocoanuts:

  LORAYNE BROX

  On our exit, Groucho would love to join in. All of a sudden we would find the audience laughing at us when they weren’t supposed to be. It was because Groucho was trailing after us, and he’d start to sing a chorus. We never minded. We never had more fun than working with the Marx Brothers, especially Groucho. Groucho was particularly fun. Groucho used to sing, and he loved to play his guitar.

  PATRICIA BROX

  We would travel by train, and Groucho would bring his guitar. We’d sing all the way wherever we were going. In the trains we’d sing all the songs we knew, and that was quite a repertory. And then we’d find we’d arrived at our destination.

  BOBBE BROX

  We always had a lot of fun with him. I think he’s the most fabulous ad-libber in the whole world. He’s a naturally funny man. I always loved being with him because it was such a ball.

  I

  Has Groucho changed over the years?

  BOBBE BROX

  No. Not a bit. He was always like that.

  I

  Do you remember your first meeting with the Marx Brothers?

  BOBBE BROX

  I remember only that we were very young, and Irving Berlin, who was our sponsor and guardian, told us one thing: “Now, stay out of the way of those fellows.” But they couldn’t have been nicer to us! They were wonderful, ’cause we were kids, and they were really good to us. But that was our first meeting, so we were a little timid and shy. Finally one of the boys went to Berlin and said, “What’s the matter with those girls? They don’t speak to us, and they run when we come around.” And Berlin told them, “Well, I told them to.” It’s very funny, because they couldn’t have been nicer to us. But he frightened us by telling us that we’d better stay out of their way. Years later, I used to see Zeppo when he was married to Barbara. I’d see him at Sinatra’s, because we were at Sinatra’s house every night. Once Milton Berle said, “You know, the Brox Sisters were in every show that Berlin put on.” And Zeppo spoke up and said, “Yes, he made us take ’em!” I don’t know if that’s true or not. (Laughs)

  King Vidor told me about a night when the Marx Brothers threw away the script entirely at a Los Angeles performance when The Cocoanuts was touring:

  “Greta Garbo and John Gilbert and Eleanor Boardman and I went to see the Marx Brothers in Cocoanuts at the Biltmore in 1928. That afternoon I went to the makeup department and got four black beards and other funny things, and we took the things to the show. It was the closing night, and when the curtain went up for the second act, we all had our beards on, as well as funny hats. We thought we would break them up, but we didn’t. Groucho just started ad-libbing a lot of jokes about us. He looked down at us and said, ‘I thought that was Greta Garbo in the audience, but it was General Grant.’ We threw our black beards up onstage, and they started throwing costumes and props down at us.”

  Kaufman and Ryskind agreed to write the next Marx Brothers vehicle, which turned out to be Animal Crackers. Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby wrote the lyrics and music, notably the famous “Captain Spaulding,” which became Groucho’s theme song. None of the songs in The Cocoanuts had become hits, although Morrie Ryskind explained that it wasn’t Irving Berlin’s fault:

  “Berlin wrote some excellent music for our show, but nobody paid any attention, because these guys could ruin anything. They run around for fifteen minutes, and then the young lovers do a song. Nobody gives a damn if the boy loves the girl or not.”

  By the time Animal Crackers opened at the Forty-fourth Street Theatre on October 23, 1928, the Marx Brothers were becoming famous enough to interest Hollywood. Paramount signed them to a contract, and in the spring of 1929 they shot The Cocoanuts on newly built soundstages in Astoria, Long Island. Robert Florey was the director.

  When I was staying at Groucho’s house, he, Morrie Ryskind, and I were talking about The Cocoanuts and Robert Florey’s name was mentioned. I suggested that we invite him to lunch, and Groucho said, “Fine.” I called him, but, though he seemed pleased by the invitation, he declined, pleading ill health. Later I learned that Robert Florey had long been displeased, to say the least, by Groucho’s version of the filming of The Cocoanuts, which depicted him as a non-English-speaking director.

  In spite of a distinguished Hollywood career spanning five decades, Robert Florey is frequently best remembered as the director who brought the Marx Brothers’ stage play The Cocoanuts to the screen. Groucho often mentioned him when talking about the Broadway days and the early films he made at Paramount’s Astoria studios. These comments seemed pejorative to Robert Florey. In a 1976 letter to writer–film historian Herman G. Weinberg he told his side:

  Dear Herman:

  Thanks for the Groucho interview, by Joe Adamson. Just received it and cannot understand the reason for which, for the past forty-six years, Groucho keeps on telling that at the time Paramount produced Cocoanuts, I was a foreigner who didn’t understand English.

  In the first place, I had become an American citizen during the ’20s and was no longer a “foreigner.” Before Cocoanuts, I worked for years in Hollywood. I had been a gagman with the Sunshine comedies, an assistant director to Al Santell, Louis Gasnier, and Bill Beaudine. I even was a first assistant director on important productions for Samuel Goldwyn and Joseph M. Schenck (motion pictures with such stars as Norma Talmadge, Ronald Colman, Vilma Banky, etc.), positions in which it was indispensable not only to understand but also to speak English. For two years at MGM, I worked with King Vidor, Robert Z. Leonard, John Stahl, Edmund Goulding, Phil Rosen, Von Sternberg, and others. I had to speak English when I directed silent features for Harry Cohn (Columbia), Phil Goldstone (Tiffany), Joe Rock, or second units. I had also worked with Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks for almost two years, and before meeting the Frères Marx, had directed at the Paramount Astoria studio three films and a dozen sound shorts during a year’s time. I had not just arrived from Paris as Groucho always implies.

  Once while I was directing a TV show for Four Star, Harpo came on the set and told me: “I always understood you clearly while making Cocoanuts. I do not know what is the matter with Groucho, persisting in saying that you spoke only French, and that Santley was your interpreter. Santley didn’t speak French, so how could he have translated what you were saying?”

  During the first year I directed at Astoria, Edward G. Robinson, Raymond Hitchcock, Fanny Brice, and dear Eddie Cantor didn’t complain about my English, nor even about my French accent. Later when I occasionally met him at Arrowhead, Palm Springs, or Musso-Franks, Groucho was always cordial, and I do not know what he has against me.

  I do not know Mr. Joe Adamson, author of the interview. If you are acquainted with Mr. Adamson, please do tell him that back in 1928 I did understand English, as we often spoke together. And, by the way, I did not choose to “direct” Cocoanuts. My understanding with Monta Bell was that I would mostly work on dramas, and I had been assigned to The Letter when this story was switched to Jean de Limur.

  Bell and Wanger were, as they said, “gambling” on the Marx Brothers. They wanted to shoot Cocoanuts quickly and inexpensively, if possible within three weeks, discounting the matinees, the boys then being on a show. Monta Bell suggested photographing Cocoanuts with four cameras as it was presented on the stage. My idea was to get some second unit stuff in Florida and more action and movement. This was rejected. I then told Monta Bell that he should let the Marx Brothers do Cocoanuts some morning on a theatre stage in New York, and have four or five cameras photograph the complete performance—like a live show—in ten-minute sections, just the time to
reload the magazines, and he could have a finished product in one day. Bell answered that the quality so obtained wouldn’t be good enough. He wanted me to photograph some “interesting angles”(?), particularly the musical numbers, dances, etc., and to let the boys do their routines as they had done them 1,000 times previously on the stage.

  In his memoirs [Harpo Speaks] Harpo wrote that during the takes I laughed so much at what they were doing that I spoiled them. Groucho says not only that I didn’t smile at his jokes, but I didn’t understand them. The chalk marks limiting his walking space, the position of the cumbersome microphones were a constant source of Groucho’s irritability. He would step over the chalk mark, his head going out of the shot, and I would stop the cameras, asking him to remain within the camera range and to speak directly into one of the mikes. It would make him angry.

  He didn’t understand photography and insisted on painting his mustache with a shiny black varnish. After having seen the first rushes, Monta Bell tried to explain to Groucho that it might be better to use some crepe instead of paint, as his closeups looked pretty bad with the light reflecting between his nose and his mouth, and Groucho got extremely offended and insulted. He was so angry that he wanted Bell to be fired. Bell called me, asking me to try to “do something about the varnished moustache.” Bell added, “As far as I am concerned, I am giving up, and I don’t care if the SOB wears a monkey suit in the picture or what he does…”

  In any case, I enjoyed the company of Zeppo, Harpo, Chico, and Mary Eaton. I often had dinner in New York with Harpo and Chico. But to work—or to be—with Groucho was no bed of roses. I did my best with the film, finished it in time, within the budget or less, got a few good angles, mostly while shooting the musical numbers, added a few gags for Harpo and Chico, and still hope to find out someday the reason for Groucho’s antagonism.

  Votre ami,

  Bob

  The Marx Brothers commuted between Astoria and Manhattan daily, shooting scenes for The Cocoanuts in the day and performing Animal Crackers onstage at night. They were, in fact, unable to attend the motion picture premiere of The Cocoanuts at Broadway’s Rialto Theatre because they were doing Animal Crackers onstage simultaneously at the Forty-fourth Street Theatre only two blocks away. Minnie attended for them.