Hello, I Must be Going

by Charlotte Chandler

  Two weeks later she died at sixty-four. When Groucho received his special Oscar in 1974, he said, “I’d like to thank my mother, without whom we would have been a failure.” Frenchie outlived her by four years, reaching the age of seventy-two before he, too, died in Hollywood in 1933.

  By 1929 the Marx Brothers were a huge success, both onstage and on the screen, but the ensuing stock market crash hit them hard. “I was wiped out,” Groucho told me. “I had $250,000, which I’d saved up over a period of many years playing small-time vaudeville, and I lost it in two days when the market crashed.” Harpo managed to meet his margin calls and sell before he was wiped out, while Chico had already lost everything he had ever earned gambling. Zeppo, being only a salaried member of the cast, had little to lose. The Marx Brothers were, however, in great demand, so the market crash and the Depression did not stop them from earning good livings. Even after the crash, Animal Crackers was sold out every performance, and tickets were selling then for ten dollars a seat.

  After a tour of Animal Crackers, they returned to New York in 1930 to film it on Long Island, beginning the zoological tetralogy that was completed in 1933 with Duck Soup.

  The director for the Animal Crackers film was Victor Heerman, a veteran of silent films. Apparently, he feared the worst, for he immediately assigned assistant directors to watch over each brother, and even had four small cubicles built to contain them between takes. But he still couldn’t get them to the studio on time. Lillian Roth, who played the ingenue in the film, described how Zeppo might arrive at nine-thirty, then someone would have to give Groucho a wake-up call at ten. Later, Chico would stroll in, while Harpo was getting so bored by the delay that he would go off somewhere else where he couldn’t be found. After a whole morning of this, Chico would bound back in, cheerfully asking, “Anybody for lunch?” She characterized it as “one step removed from a circus.”

  To complete their Paramount contract, the Marx Brothers and their families moved to California in 1931, where Monkey Business was shot that year, followed by Horse Feathers in 1932 and Duck Soup in 1933. Groucho fell in love at first sight with Southern California. Gummo, having turned to the garment business when he was discharged from the Army, remained in New York. Later, he joined his brothers in Hollywood as a successful agent; but first he established a branch of Zeppo’s theatrical agency in New York after Zeppo himself had left the team upon completion of the Paramount contract. Harpo, meanwhile, was touring Russian music halls between films.

  Although devoted fans revere the Marx Brothers’ Paramount pictures as classics, Groucho, on occasion, irreverently referred to them as “those five turkeys.” But whenever he was asked which of his films he liked best, it was always the “the war picture” (Duck Soup) and “the college picture” (Horse Feathers) right after the Thalberg pictures.

  During the time that Groucho was getting established in films, he was also writing. In 1930 his first book, Beds, was published after having been serialized in College Humor magazine a year earlier. He had been published before, but never as the author of a book, even if he later described Beds as “a thin book.”

  Groucho was always especially proud of his early writings for The New Yorker magazine. As Julius H. Marx, Groucho appeared in The New Yorker as early as 1925. His writing ranged from dialogues between Vaude and Vill (Vaude: “Didn’t you have a wife the last I saw you?” Vill: “Yes, but her husband asked me to give her up.”) to satirical comments on Boston, Chicago, and press agents. In 1929, he wrote a letter “To the Editors of The New Yorker” very much along the lines of his later published correspondence. He complained:

  Three-fourths of my brothers called my attention to the fact that the last issue of your esteemed gazette stated that Governor Alfred E. Smith had seen but four shows to date, namely, “Whoopee,” “Scandals,” “Three Cheers,” and “Street Scene.” I’ll give you just twenty-four hours to retract that statement before I call on you and horse-whip you within four or five inches of your life.

  Stack your Bibles, bring on your notary public! I can prove that Governor Smith attended a performance of “Animal Crackers.” I know because I saw him smile at Zeppo, snicker at Chico, chuckle at Harpo, and roar at me. When he wasn’t roaring at me, he was guffawing; when he wasn’t guffawing, he was helpless with mirth; when he wasn’t—I could keep this up for hours, but I won’t.

  Twelve years later his next book, Many Happy Returns, appeared, and then in 1959, Groucho and Me, followed in 1965 and 1967 by Memoirs of a Mangy Lover and The Groucho Letters. Always having aspired to be a writer, even before he wanted to become an actor, he was prouder of his literary output than of anything else he ever did.

  In 1934 he and Chico went on radio with a program called Flywheel, Shyster and Flywheel, a modest beginning that many years later would culminate in the enormously popular You Bet Your Life on both radio and television. Until You Bet Your Life in 1947, the kind of success that Groucho, the great talker, seemed to deserve on radio always eluded him. He told me more than once with obvious pride, “Chaplin said to me, ‘I wish I could talk like you.’” But Groucho’s appeal seems to have been as much visual as aural, as the pantomime mirror sequence in Duck Soup reveals.

  This scene was the inspiration of Leo McCarey, director of Duck Soup and, according to Groucho, “the only great director we ever worked with. Working with him was a lot of fun.” Groucho told me that the three directors with whom the Marx Brothers would have most liked to work were René Clair, Ernst Lubitsch, and Rouben Mamoulian. All three also admired the Marx Brothers.

  Often Groucho said how much he wished the Marx Brothers could have had René Clair as a director: “There was nobody better than him.”

  At lunch in Paris at Grand Véfour restaurant, René Clair talked with me about the Marx Brothers:

  “I knew Harpo much better than Groucho. There was a great difference between their humor. Groucho’s humor was aggressive; Harpo’s was sentimental. Harpo would have been the easier character for me to direct because I find it easier to write for characters who are sympathetic for me.

  “An unrealized dream of mine would have been to do a Marx Brothers film. That was something I wanted to do when I went to Hollywood. Then, much later, I met Groucho, and he said that was just what he wanted, to do a picture with me. He said to be directed by René Clair was exactly what the Marx Brothers had wanted. It was a case of par hazard, just like the title of my book.”

  I asked him which films of the Marx Brothers would he have liked to direct.

  “All of the great ones. I liked the early ones. Leo McCarey was a fine director. But the important thing would have been the writing. I think of myself as a writer. Being a director doesn’t mean much. You don’t have to go out and create with a studio of people. You can do it on paper. Anyone of some intelligence can get a picture from a detailed, good script.”

  Groucho told me about Ernst Lubitsch’s enthusiasm for writing and directing a Marx Brothers film:

  “Lubitsch was one of the best directors, I guess, in this country. He wanted to do a movie with us, but we were tied up with Paramount. I remember Lubitsch had an opening line that he tried out on me one day. It went like this: ‘Ya haf a girl in her betroom, and she iss married. And her husband comes home unexpectedly just as a streetcar iss going through the betroom.’ And I said, ‘What’s the joke?’ My next line, he said, was, ‘Believe it or not, I was waiting for a streetcar.’ That was an expression then. And I was supposed to step out of the closet and onto the streetcar. He was a genius.”

  One night in Beverly Hills, talking with Rouben Mamoulian at dinner at the Beverly Wilshire’s El Padrino restaurant about the Marx Brothers, I asked him whether he would have liked to direct them.

  “No, I don’t think I would have liked doing a Marx Brothers picture. I admired them greatly, but I thought what they did was just right. I wouldn’t have wanted to change them, so it would not have been a creative experience for me. It would have been like doing a quarter o
f a play.”

  He remembered going backstage to the Marx Brothers’ dressing room between acts of The Cocoanuts:

  “Sam Harris was there, and the Marx Brothers started putting on a show for us, ad-libbing. They were very funny, and when people came into the dressing room to tell them to go onstage, they made those people part of the act, and then they put the people out and continued doing the show just for us. Of course, eventually they got back onstage to finish the performance.”

  The Marx Brothers enjoyed performing for the audience of Sam Harris and Rouben Mamoulian, which, though small, so commanded their respect. Also, the Marx Brothers were entertaining themselves. Their extemporizing provided the essential spontaneity without which they themselves became bored. As Groucho told me, “First I had to entertain myself.”

  Not everyone enjoyed Groucho’s predilection for having fun with their names. Rouben Mamoulian was one who did.

  “Groucho and I were at Paramount at the same time. I’d walk into the commissary, and the four of them would be there together, and I’d hear them singing, ‘I’d walk a Mamoulian miles for one of your smiles…’ every time I came in.”

  He also appreciated Groucho’s ability to enjoy occasionally being on the receiving end of a well-turned insult.

  “There was a period of time, not too long ago, when I would run into Groucho wherever I was, and he would say to me, ‘Do I have to meet you wherever I go?’ Then, one day I saw Groucho sitting with some people at Nate ’n’ Al’s, and I walked up to him and said, ‘Do I have to meet you wherever I go?’ He smiled and didn’t say anything.”

  Salvador Dalí told me that he had wanted to work with the Marx Brothers. He told me that he once did a complete script “with full pictures” for the Marx Brothers, a script which apparently has been lost. In the bar of New York City’s St. Regis Hotel, Dalí told me about his friendship with Harpo:

  “Dalí wanted to meet Harpo. Dalí called Harpo. Harpo wanted to meet Dalí. Dalí went to Harpo and presented Harpo with a harp, a harp which had chords of barbed wire. Harpo went to the harp and played and his hands became covered with blood. After that day, Dalí and Harpo were always friends, and Dalí painted a picture of Harpo with a lobster on his head.”

  In Dalí’s own words, the script he did for the Marx Brothers was “very surrealistic,” and the whole idea of the film was symbolized by his painting which showed “gondolas riding on a sea of bicycles.”

  Groucho’s comment to me was, “It would’ve been a great combination. Dalí didn’t speak much English, and neither did Harpo.”

  During one of Groucho’s visits to New York, we met Salvador Dalí at the Russian Tea Room, and Groucho was warmly greeted with “Butterfly-eeee!” When Dalí had departed, Groucho, who was usually the one who did the perplexing, turned to me and said, “What did he say? You speak Spanish and French. It sounded like “Butterfly-eeee!” I was unable to translate. But at a later date, when I had tea with Dalí, he translated for me:

  “When Dalí first meets Harpo, we see a butterfly, and Dalí says, ‘Butterfly-eeee,’ the Spanish pronunciation of the word, not understanding how to say the y. Harpo explains, and it is our private word. I thought Groucho would understand it.”

  Although Duck Soup has since become a classic, in 1933 Paramount was hesitant about renewing the Marx Brothers’ contract. Groucho, as usual, was worried, Harpo was abroad, Zeppo was out of the act, and Chico was heavily in debt. Fortunately for Groucho and Harpo, Chico was in debt to Irving Thalberg, the executive producer in charge of production at M-G-M.

  Thalberg was the youngest man ever to hold such an important post in Hollywood, and had in fact been appointed while he was still in his twenties. When he wasn’t working, his favorite recreation was playing bridge. It was inevitable that he would meet Chico at a card table, and it was equally inevitable that Chico would soon owe him money.

  In his inimitable fashion, Chico managed to convince Thalberg that the Marx Brothers were still a valuable property. Since Paramount had expressed no interest in retaining their services, they had talked with Sam Goldwyn, who was mildly interested. Thalberg, who wasn’t getting along with M-G-M head Louis B. Mayer, wanted to start his own production company, featuring stars like the Marx Brothers. He didn’t care much for what they had done for Paramount, but thought that under his guidance they could make pictures that would have wider audience appeal. Happy to have found such a man, the Marx Brothers signed with M-G-M and made two films, A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races, for Thalberg before he died at the age of thirty-seven during the shooting of the latter film. Groucho greatly respected Thalberg, and considered A Night at the Opera his best movie. Whenever we talked about Thalberg, Groucho said, “He was a genius. He was the greatest producer. They named a building after him. Thalberg would come every day and look at the rushes. If he didn’t like it, [Sam] Wood would shoot the scenes over again. He [Thalberg] was really the director.”

  Thalberg was certainly one of Hollywood’s most esteemed producers, and he was willing to spend a great deal of extra time, effort, and money to achieve the results that he thought the Marx Brothers’ talents merited. At Groucho’s suggestion, he brought in Kaufman and Ryskind, and he allowed the Marx Brothers to tour a tabloid presentation of both scripts so that audience reaction could be gauged before the films were actually shot. He also understood mass taste, and introduced production elements into the films that gave them a much wider appeal than before. Today, film buffs may not care that much about some of the musical numbers and the plots that Thalberg considered so important, but Groucho felt that at that point Thalberg was vital to the Marx Brothers’ careers.

  Thalberg left his mark on the Marx Brothers’ films that followed. Groucho quoted him as saying, “The first five pictures weren’t real pictures because they weren’t about anything. Sure, they were funny, but you don’t need that many laughs in a movie. I’ll make a picture with you fellows with half as many laughs, but I’ll put a legitimate story in it, and I’ll bet it will gross twice as much as Duck Soup.” A Night at the Opera actually did double Duck Soup’s gross.

  Thalberg also had great personal charm, Groucho felt. George S. Kaufman, who had sworn he would never work in Hollywood, came to work for Thalberg and described him as “another Sam Harris.” George Seaton told me how Thalberg, who was always known as “Mr. Thalberg” to everyone at M-G-M, asked Kaufman to call him by his first name. “I’ll call you Irving if you call me Mr. Kaufman,” he answered.

  Goldie Arthur, Irving Thalberg’s personal secretary, shared with me her impressions of what it was like working with the Marx Brothers at M-G-M in the thirties.

  “I always enjoyed their comedy, and I really enjoyed working on A Night at the Opera, which I thought was a very funny picture. Apparently a lot of people thought so too, because it did a tremendous business—and this was at a time when their pictures did very poorly and they were thought to be washed up. I look on this as another proof of the talent of Mr. Thalberg, who produced the picture.

  “When I was told they were going to be doing a picture for Mr. Thalberg, I was personally very pleased, because I did think they were very funny men. They came on the lot and were assigned offices, and we had a few amusing phone calls from them. Chico called shortly after they moved in and said they had found some black widow spiders in the office and ‘somebody better send over some flies before they start eating us Jews.’

  “When they came in to see Mr. Thalberg they usually arrived with some gag or other—none of them were really very funny or I’d remember them—but it was never dull when they were around. I do remember one time they had to wait because Mr. Thalberg was not finished with a conference—and I think it was Chico who tried to blow some smoke under the door into Mr. Thalberg’s office, but it didn’t work because the door was insulated.

  “When they were shooting the scene where Groucho rides to his stateroom on top of his trunk, I remember that he didn’t want to do it because he thought it w
as ‘out of character’—but apparently Mr. Thalberg didn’t agree with him, and he did it, and it was a funny scene.

  “Chico was apparently a very good bridge player and played fairly frequently with Mr. Thalberg and some of his friends, and Mr. Thalberg was always after him to learn a new song. It seems he would rather play bridge than work up a new number on the piano—but he eventually did have one ready in time.

  “I remember Harpo as a very sweet, gentle man who really loved to play the harp. I was told that he would play—just for his own pleasure—until his fingertips were raw. He was self-taught, and a number of talented harpists who watched him play told him that it was not possible to play the harp with that technique (or lack of it)—but play he did and beautifully, too. It was always interesting to me to watch his face during his harp solo in the movies—you could always tell it was something he put his whole being into.

  “As far as I remember, the picture went along quite smoothly. The director, Sam Wood, was thoroughly experienced in comedy, and the Marx Brothers were professionals who were very much interested in helping to turn out a good picture. They were terribly pleased when it did turn out so well, and were grateful to Mr. Thalberg for resurrecting their careers.”

  Although the Marx Brothers’ films were always big, important Hollywood productions, not every actor was thrilled at the prospect of appearing in them. Lillian Roth considered her assignment to Animal Crackers a form of banishment, and Maureen O’Sullivan was initially unenthusiastic about A Day at the Races:

  “I hadn’t particularly wanted to do it,” she told me. “I was into more serious things—The Barretts of Wimpole Street and David Copperfield. It was such a long time ago, and I didn’t expect that I was ever going to be asked about it. We never know what posterity is going to remember and judge us for.