I
Did you ever have any regrets about not remaining with the Marx Brothers as a performer?
GUMMO
No. I didn’t have enough talent to ever be great, and I wasn’t happy just being what I could be. It didn’t come easy to me the way it did to the others, like for Chico and Groucho. When I had to get up on the stage, I was always afraid. I couldn’t live the rest of my life with a thing like that. I could never ad-lib my lines like Groucho. I was always afraid of forgetting my lines and being stuck up there. My friends think I’m a funny man, but you can’t go by your friends. I was goddamn lucky to get out and be something on my own by my own ability and my own work. I’ve never regretted leaving the act.
“Is it sad or high kickin’?”
“We were playing a small town in Ohio, and a man came to the box office and said, ‘Before I buy the ticket, I want to know one thing: is it sad or high kickin’?’
“That’s the best line I ever heard about show business. That’s all of show business.”
For Groucho the phrase “sad or high kickin’” said all there is to say not only about show business but about life as well. Groucho’s own life was mostly “high kickin’,” especially when he was before an audience.
“Groucho is really most on when he’s performing,” Morrie Ryskind observed. “And if it’s an appreciative audience…”
“There’s no business like show business,” Groucho interjected soberly. “I believe that.”
He never officially retired from show business, once telling me “I’d like to die right onstage.” After his second TV quiz program, Tell It to Groucho, ended in 1962, the number of Groucho’s professional appearances diminished. At the same time, paradoxically, the Marx Brothers were becoming more popular than ever before with a whole new generation of fans.
Seeing the Marx Brothers movies for the first time, college-age audiences began to feel about Groucho the same way they did about Humphrey Bogart, many of them not realizing that Groucho Marx was a living legend. Because he made so few personal appearances, many fans were unaware that he was still around. “I’m a square, but I’m still around.” There was a great demand for him as soon as it became known that “the kingpin of the Marx Brothers act,” as Woody Allen called him, was very much alive. Clearly the time was right for Groucho Marx Superstar, although Groucho, who had turned eighty in 1970, was not aware of it.
He was sitting there contemplating his navel when Erin came along, and his interest in show business and life was tremendously buoyed just by the thought of contemplating hers instead.
During those years, he was in the hospital more than once, and Erin shared credit with his doctors for the recovery of his spirit, if not for the recovery of his body. “When I met him,” Erin said, “sometimes he didn’t care if he even got up or not. Now he’s filled with plans.” Groucho frequently acknowledged his debt to Erin, repeating, “If she ever left me, I’d quit show business.” And for Groucho show business was life.
When Erin arrived on the scene as Groucho’s part-time secretary, among the thousands of unanswered letters that had piled up at his house was one inviting him to appear at Iowa State University. Erin urged him to accept and try out the one-man show they had been getting together. Ames, Iowa, where Iowa State University is located, was one of the few towns in America that the Marx Brothers hadn’t played, and Groucho, who placed a tremendous value on learning and formal education, was always sympathetic to schools.
He and Erin, with Marvin Hamlisch as Groucho’s accompanist, arrived in Des Moines in April 1972, and were met by a limousine from a funeral home. “Is this Death Moines?” asked Groucho. In Ames there was a sign on the marquee of the motel where they stayed that proudly proclaimed on one side, “Welcome to Ames, Groucho Marx!” The other side proclaimed with equal pride, “Midnight Buffet Friday and Saturday $1.75.” “Midnight Buffet, who’s he, a rock star?” Groucho asked. “Look, it says, ‘All You Can Eat for $1.75.’ Hey, this is the big time!”
Eric Lax, writing for Life, was part of the entourage. He remembered riding with Groucho past the theatre where he would be performing. Asked if he wanted to go inside and see it, Groucho declined. “No, that’s like asking Lincoln to go back to the box.”
Before the performance, Groucho was a little glum as he applied his makeup. “This is an old face,” he told Eric. “You wake up in the morning and look in the mirror, and there’s no help. It makes you want to go back to bed and stay there.”
But he didn’t go back to bed. Instead, he regaled an audience of about 2,500 with stories and songs. Before the show even started, Groucho received a standing ovation for all the memories of his films evoked by his presence onstage. After the show he received a standing ovation for his performance.
Groucho reminisced about Iowa with Marvin Hamlisch, Mike Nichols, and Erin just after the 1974 Academy Award ceremonies:
GROUCHO
Remember that place in Iowa?
MARVIN HAMLISCH
Oh, Iowa’s the greatest place. We had so much fun there. Ames, Iowa.
GROUCHO
Catching girls.
MIKE NICHOLS
When was this?
GROUCHO
We did a show in Iowa.
MARVIN HAMLISCH
It was Groucho’s first concert. We broke the act in. Actually, it was this guy at Iowa State who had the whole idea for the concert anyway.
GROUCHO
(To Erin) What was the name of that guy that you were kind of stuck on?
ERIN
Oh, Tom Wilhite. You know the play The Butter and Egg Man? This guy was that part. It’s incredible. We got these letters from Iowa on letterhead stationery from Thomas L. Wilhite Productions, making this tremendous offer for Groucho and everything. We needed a place to try out, and we thought, “Well, we can go there, and if we’re terrible, we’ll just sneak away, and no one will know the difference.” He arranged for limousines and all this—talk about Thalberg, we thought he was the impresario of the Midwest! We arrived with Life magazine, a record company, and a couple of bigwigs—and here’s this child! I think he was about sixteen.
MARVIN HAMLISCH
And what an operator. He was sharp. There was this sign, “Ames Welcomes Groucho.” He had everything worked out. And they had a Groucho dinner for $3.99 at the Holiday Inn.
ERIN
The limousine was a hearse.
MARVIN HAMLISCH
Tell all about the kissing.
GROUCHO
Every time the bell rang, we kissed all the girls.
MARVIN HAMLISCH
You were allowed to kiss a girl—any girl—when the steeple bell rang. And there was this one girl, and her last name was—this is true—Kissinger. She hung around outside our room at the Holiday Inn waiting for a kiss. She was from Iowa State, and they had this thing where every time the bell would ring, you were allowed to kiss the girl you were near…
GROUCHO
You were allowed to kiss a girl, any girl. But Marvin—I didn’t want to have to say this—I really only wanted to kiss you.
MARVIN HAMLISCH
…Every time the bell would go off, you would say, “Where’s Kissinger?” ’cause you adored this girl. She was a cute little blonde, and she drove us crazy, so I had to corral Kissinger. I would look at my watch, and if it was fifteen minutes after the hour, I knew it was coming. I would say, “Kissinger, get over here quick, because it’s gonna happen,” and the bell would ring. I only scored on the rebound. I only got what was left over. Whoever couldn’t get to Groucho came to me.
GROUCHO
I didn’t miss any bells or belles.
MARVIN HAMLISCH
Groucho heard bells ringing even when no one else did.
Tom Wilhite, the youthful producer of the Ames show, was later brought to California to work for Rogers, Cowan & Brenner, the agency that represented Groucho. At dinner with Groucho and me, Tom recalled some of the circumstances that surrounde
d the Ames concert:
TOM WILHITE
Groucho, I wrote you so many letters that I started to sort of give up. I thought you weren’t ever going to answer. Then it happened so fast, and you and Erin were there. I’m going back soon, and I thought I might see what happened to Kissinger. Do you remember her?
GROUCHO
She was a pretty girl. I was a devil in those days. The bells rang, and I kissed all the pretty girls. Whoopeeee! So now you’re the assistant to the president at Rogers, Cowan and Brenner. What do you do?
TOM WILHITE
It’s a smorgasbord. I work with clients and do things for Mr. Cowan.
GROUCHO
You take his wife out? She’s a good-lookin’ dame.
TOM WILHITE
No, I don’t get to do that. I’m going back to Iowa for a visit. Do you want me to bring you back anything?
GROUCHO
Kissinger.
In May 1972 at New York’s sedate Carnegie Hall, the frenetic turnout proved Groucho to be an all-time “hot ticket,” according to Ron Delsener, the young producer of An Evening with Groucho, who was more accustomed to producing Elton John, Mick Jagger, David Bowie, and Bette Midler. Groucho said of the evening, “It was so hard to get in, I almost didn’t.” The program featured Marvin Hamlisch as all-time piano player and sometime straight man, and Erin, who sang a few of the songs with Groucho.
The record of the show has since become a collector’s item. Groucho said his nurse Donna would be able to auction off the records he gave her, “along with my teeth she’s been saving.”
Ron Delsener told me how the Carnegie Hall performance came about:
“We wanted to do something with Groucho, but we didn’t know how to reach him. So we just wrote to Groucho Marx, Beverly Hills, and got a response.
“We’d said something about how we’d supply dancing girls and we wanted to do a show with him at Carnegie Hall. The response said, ‘Forget about the dancing girls, but how much money you gonna pay me?’ The next thing I knew, his agent called me and said, ‘Groucho Marx wants $10,000.’ I said, ‘That’s a lot of money, but we’ll pay it—we’ll just charge more for the seats.’ Not that it was really a lot of money; it’s just that Carnegie Hall only holds 2,800 people.
“We made arrangements on the phone, and the dickering went back and forth as to who would provide what. I spoke to Erin Fleming about the program itself, and I suggested they send some pictures to use for the ad. I still hadn’t met the man himself.
“The agent said it was Reel 4 we should show from A Night at the Opera, the stateroom scene. We were told whom to contact for it in New Jersey, and everything was prepared for the Carnegie Hall engagement. Then it came time for my moment to meet the man, and I was told to go to the Regency Hotel.
“Erin opened the door, and right behind her was this man who looked a little different from the way I’d pictured him from the movies. The smile was there, and he was older than I expected, but he had that little twinkle in the eye. It was Groucho Marx. He said, ‘Who are you?’ and Erin said, ‘This is your producer, Ron Delsener.’ So he said, ‘Hello, how are you? You look kinda young to be a producer,’ and some other remark like that, and I hit him back with a one-liner, and right away we got along. We hit it off. He was my type of person.
“There were a lot of one-liners, and everything was a joke. Then he put on his beret, and he had a turtleneck and a blazer, and we went to lunch at the French restaurant on Sixty-third Street, Perigord Park. He ordered either eggs or chicken, something light, and we talked about the show. As we walked to the hotel, he said hello to everybody in the street.
“That afternoon, we decided to have a run-through. This was before Groucho came to do a sound check, and I decided to show the film scene. I thought it was Reel 4 of Night at the Opera, the stateroom scene. We’re showing the film and waiting and waiting for the stateroom scene, only it doesn’t happen. We watched the entire reel, and it’s not there. I panicked. I called up Erin and I said, ‘Wait a minute—this can’t be the right reel!’ Actually it was the right reel. We’d rented exactly what the agent had told us, but somebody had given us the wrong number, and it was a Saturday.
“I got my car and raced over the George Washington Bridge to Jersey, where we had picked up the reel. I pounded on the windows, tried to break in, but nobody was in there. I called the place up. Maybe they had an after-hours number. No answer. So I went back and said, ‘Look, we’re gonna have to do that concert without that scene,’ and Erin said, ‘No! No! No! I’ll find that reel somewhere in town.’
“As it turned out, we should have used that scene we had. It actually made no difference, because it was a funny reel. Erin found a film buff who had the reel we were looking for, only instead of being in 35 mm, it was a 16 mm, which meant that the 35 mm projector that I had rented was no good. We called up the head of the projectionists’ union at home and pleaded with him to come in with a 16 mm sound projector. He brought it in, the film arrived in time, and even though we hadn’t tested the film, the show was about to begin. The projectionist was still frantically trying to thread the 16 mm reel as the show went on.
“Then Groucho came out. It was really an extraordinary evening. People came dressed as Groucho Marx—young fans who had never seen the man before, only the films. He had a cult following. At the time, Lindsay was mayor, and he came, and so did Woody Allen, Simon and Garfunkel, Elliott Gould, and a lot of other celebrities. Dick Cavett was emcee that evening. Everybody in town was there. It was a hot ticket. The show had sold out, ten dollars top.
“Groucho came out to a standing ovation, brought on by Dick Cavett. And it started: he went from the year one, the day he was born, right up to the present time. Came time for the film clip, the screen was brought down, and Groucho went backstage as it started.
“You could see it was a very old film. It was on a very rickety reel, and it kept falling off the reel. The film had to be stopped repeatedly, and the audience was laughing, but it didn’t seem so funny to me. We decided to do away with it, just stop it and pull up the screen. As we pulled up the screen, there was Groucho looking almost half asleep sitting there, and that brought the house down. From then on it was complete hysteria, and he was sensational. Marvin Hamlisch backed him up on the piano, and Erin Fleming came out and did a few numbers with him.
“Afterwards he was stormed. Groucho just couldn’t get out of Carnegie Hall. He tried to get out one door, and we had to run him around to the front door. He was almost mauled in the ensuing chase. They lost me, but he insisted on circling around the block and finding me. Well, I finally caught up with them, and we dashed off to a place called Raffles in the basement of the Sherry Netherland to have something to eat. They stuck us in a little private room, and we just continued the concert. We were very happy.
“The show had been recorded, and the next day we heard the tapes. I was with Groucho at the hotel, and he was telling stories about Swayne’s Rats and Cats, about Coney Island, about the Marx family, and I was so impressed with this man’s memory. I can’t remember what I had for lunch later the same afternoon, but this man had a very, very vivid memory. His sentences seemed to flow so easily about what people wore, what they said, names, streets—the instant recall amazed me. And the punch lines! For the life of me, I can’t tell a joke. And here’s this man who was eighty at the time telling these fantastic stories.
“It was a very emotional evening and afternoon for me, and I think it was for Groucho, too. He was impressed at now being a recording artist. Something new was added to his career, and he was very excited about Carnegie Hall.
“I had presented him with the lighter that day. I bought the lighter at Dunhill—a gold lighter. It said ‘SRO Carnegie Hall’ and the date of the concert. I could see he was quite moved by it. He asked me if anybody else sold out the hall, and I said, ‘Well, I don’t think anybody else could.’”
Max Hamlisch, Marvin’s father, who was himself a professional musician, t
alked about the Carnegie Hall show:
“In his act, Groucho says he isn’t going to play the violin like Jack Benny, and to prove it he breaks a violin on the stage. On the day of the show, my son remembered he needed two violins to break: one for rehearsal and one for the show. So I went looking at a Carnegie Hall shop. I couldn’t get dummies, so I had to get two comparatively expensive violins. Groucho didn’t break one at rehearsal, and at the performance he couldn’t break the violin. Finally he had to step on it, which got a big laugh. Groucho gave the other violin to Marvin with a silver plaque on it.”
Marvin and his parents were with Groucho, Erin, and Ron and Ellie Delsener after the concert at Raffles, and Mr. Hamlisch told about it:
“We all went to the Sherry Netherland for dinner. But first, we went with the limousine around the block to see all of the crowd waiting at the stage door. When we got to the restaurant, the service was slower than usual, so all we had was some cold lox.”
In the overture to the Carnegie Hall concert Marvin opened with Beethoven’s “Waldstein” sonata, which then evolved into Captain Spaulding, followed by a medley of tunes from the Marx Brothers films, interspersed with quotations from Mozart and Gershwin. Everything was played in the appropriate style for its period, especially difficult with popular music.
Marvin told me how he became Groucho’s pianist and friend:
“Erin was looking for a pianist for Groucho, and I went over to his house and I started to play these tunes and songs. I always remember Groucho saying, ‘You’re the second George Gershwin.’ He really liked the way I played.
“He was very encouraging, very nice. It’s funny, I think, when you put two Jewish boys in a room together, a lot of Jewish jokes fall where they may, and I used to always want to try to make him very happy.
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