Hello, I Must be Going

by Charlotte Chandler

  I

  But why would you be afraid of jumping out of the window?

  GROUCHO

  I don’t know. I guess it was a kind of nervous point of my life, although we were pretty successful by this time. I’d seen some Boris Karloff movies. And I was scared. I was very young then. I saw one Boris Karloff picture, and I took sleeping pills for about a month after that, every night. It was the only way I could get to sleep.

  I

  But you knew they were just movies…

  GROUCHO

  I knew it, but they affected me. That sounds strange, I guess. I think a lot of people get scared when they go to a frightening movie. They frightened the hell out of me, those Boris Karloff movies. All I know is I couldn’t sleep at night. So I took the trunk and put it up against the window. I finally got to know Karloff, and he was one of the sweetest men I ever knew in my whole life. I almost sold him a house that I had. A very well-educated man. English education—he was from England.

  I

  Which Karloff films terrified you most?

  GROUCHO

  Every one.

  I

  What did he do that scared you?

  GROUCHO

  He looked like a monster! I think those pictures scared a lot of people. I think all people have periods in their life when they are a little nutty or think they are.

  I

  Do you feel, as many people do, that life is more serious and problem-filled today?

  GROUCHO

  Not for me. I’m very lucky. I’m eating good. I went to a movie, and it was pretty good.

  I

  What was the movie?

  GROUCHO

  You know. The one we saw with Andy. Paris in the nineties. The movie was as old as I am.

  I

  Have you any regrets?

  GROUCHO

  Not now. I regretted that my last marriage broke up. I guess it was partly my fault.

  I

  Would you get married again?

  GROUCHO

  No. I wouldn’t marry anybody. Too old. If I was gonna marry anybody, it would be Erin.

  I

  How did success and fame, and time and experience change you?

  GROUCHO

  I never did change.

  I

  What was the biggest change being famous and being a celebrity made in your life?

  GROUCHO

  I didn’t have to wait. Before, we used to have to wait. Before we were known, we waited for jobs. Then, when we had jobs, but we weren’t important yet, we had to wait around a lot. Then, we were a big hit. Then, other people wait for you. After that, we never had to wait.

  I

  What is the most valuable thing in life?

  GROUCHO

  This is very easy to answer. Screwing! You can’t top that!

  I

  There’s more than that…

  GROUCHO

  Well, there’s also giving each other pictures, candy and chocolates, and entertaining them on the piano. How many hours a day can you spend humping?

  I

  Do you think you’re different as a private person than as a public person?

  GROUCHO

  No. Not at all. But I do know this, that if I walk down Beverly tomorrow, there isn’t hardly anybody who won’t recognize me. And they’ll stop me and ask how I feel. There’s a lot of concern about me. A man came up and kissed me the other day. He was wearing a beard, and I don’t like to kiss a man with a beard. He came up to me, and threw his arms around me, and kissed me on the cheek and says, “Groucho, you’re the greatest!” Then, I was walking in the village, where the Bank of America building is going up. There were five men on the fifth floor of this building hollering down, “Groucho!”

  I

  I remember. I was there with you. Do you consider yourself a good judge of character?

  GROUCHO

  All I know is if I like somebody or I don’t like them, that’s all.

  I

  Do you have any favorite jokes or lines?

  GROUCHO

  The best lions are in the zoo. What’s the difference between a man giving a woman a dog and a man running up a hill?

  I

  I don’t know.

  GROUCHO

  I don’t know either. One is taking a gal a pup, and the other is taking a gallop up. It’s a small joke. There used to be a joke about crab legs. I said to a waitress in Dinty Moore’s restaurant, “You have crab legs?” And she said, “No, rheumatism makes me walk like that.”

  I

  I remember your telling that joke to one of the owners of “21” in New York. Only it was with frog legs. It was the night you took off your tie.

  GROUCHO

  I haven’t worn a tie in years. I think it’s silly to wear a tie. I’d like to go without pants.

  I

  Do you have any other favorite “small” jokes?

  GROUCHO

  (Reciting) “There was a little old lady who lived in a shoe. She didn’t have any children, she knew what to do. There was a little old lady who lived in a shoe. She had a lot of children, and she didn’t know what to do.” “Old Mother Hubbard went to the cupboard to get her poor daughter a bone. When she got there, her cupboard was bare, and so was her daughter.”

  I

  Do you ever feel that you’re being used or exploited?

  GROUCHO

  I don’t think about it.

  I

  You don’t mind occasionally being used or exploited, almost like a beautiful girl?

  GROUCHO

  No. I wish I had one. One of the most beautiful things in the world is a pretty young girl.

  I

  In the time that I’ve known you, you have rarely used a four-letter word…

  GROUCHO

  I’ve used them, but not with you. I’m prudish in many ways, and chivalrous.

  I

  How would you describe yourself?

  GROUCHO

  As an old jerk.

  I

  And if you were telling the truth, how would you describe yourself?

  GROUCHO

  I just did.

  “I keep the ones I want”

  At lunch with Goodman Ace in Groucho’s New York hotel suite, I referred to Groucho’s sleight-of-tongue style of insulting people. I asked Groucho, “Do you find you lose a lot of friends along the way?”

  “Yes, I do,” he answered. “But I prefer it that way. It’s good to lose a lot of people. I keep the ones I want.”

  “Do you agree with Oscar Wilde, who said, ‘A gentleman is never unintentionally rude’?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Groucho said. “I get away with saying some pretty insulting things. People think I’m joking. I’m not. I’m just saying what I think. I don’t tell jokes. I tell the truth. And that’s sometimes a joke.”

  Groucho accentuated the negative to achieve a positive reaction—“Whatever it is, I’m against it.” The classic iconoclast, Groucho uninhibitedly spoke what usually remains unspoken, articulating what others might only dare to think. For some, this meant he elevated the art of bad manners to new lows. A ranking member of the undiplomatic corps, he didn’t hesitate to give pomposity its come-downance.

  Once while walking with Groucho in Beverly Hills, I felt that his retort to a fan seemed excessively acerbic, so I asked him afterward if he didn’t think he had gone rather far. “No. Because all her life she’ll remember what I said to her,” he explained. “That’s what’s important. If I’d said something ordinary, she would have gone away disappointed.”

  Max Gordon told me that he once commented to Groucho that he thought Groucho’s telling of a joke at T. S. Eliot’s funeral might have been a mistake. “I’m a comedian,” Groucho had responded. He felt it was what Eliot would have wanted. Irene Atkins, who was married to Groucho’s son, summed it up when she told me, “You accept things from Groucho that perhaps you wouldn’t accept from other people.”

  His public
image (and to a great extent his private image) was that of a man so clever that to engage in any sort of verbal duel with him would have been tantamount to committing social suicide. His close friend Norman Krasna refused to appear as a guest on the You Bet Your Life show, explaining to me, “He would’ve killed me if I’d gone on.”

  Seemingly, a license very much like the one possessed by James Bond was issued to Groucho, except that he was empowered to kill with words. Just as nobody walked up to Muhammad Ali, fists raised, and said, “I’m the greatest,” few were daring enough to challenge Groucho’s rapier tongue. He was in the enviable position of being not only a superior combatant, but the referee as well. In a world that plays by the rules, others were stopped by an inhibition barrier that he didn’t observe.

  Of course, he didn’t always have the last word. Those who are exalted, and thus stand out, are also targets. No public figure escapes totally unscathed. A celebrity is someone people want to know things about that they wouldn’t even want to know about themselves. Groucho enjoyed his pedestal and what was mostly a life of laurels, but he, too, came in for his share of attempted public put-downs. “My way of talking,” he told me, “it’s how I defend myself.” Etched in his memory were some of the moments when his own verbal defenses were under siege:

  Some years ago when he was at Disneyland with daughter Melinda, a woman approached him and asked in a tone that was a virtual assault, “You’re Groucho Marx, aren’t you?” Groucho said that he made the mistake of telling her the truth. Her retort was “I wouldn’t watch your show for a thousand dollars a night.”

  Several years later, he was approached by another woman who wanted to put him down. Not giving him the chance to deny it, she said, “You’re Groucho Marx. Well, you ain’t funny.”

  Writer Harry Tugend tells the story of a little boy who stared at Groucho in an elevator. When Groucho looked back, the boy said, “Don’t worry. I know who you are.”

  But this is part of the price of being a celebrity, and Groucho paid it willingly.

  “There are people who will knock you down if they can. It makes them feel good. But if someone says to me, ‘You’re a lousy comedian,’ I say, ‘You’re no judge. You’re no Alexander Woollcott.’

  “When you get up before an audience, you’ve gotta go out there believing you’re better than they are, or you can’t do it. You make mistakes, but if you’re not making mistakes, you aren’t trying. You aren’t doing anything.

  “You can’t expect that everyone is going to like you. If there aren’t people who don’t like you, you’re nowhere. There are people you wouldn’t want to like you.”

  Groucho’s uses of abuse were meant to amuse. People didn’t expect him to say anything ordinary, and his sensitivity to their expectations exerted a pressure on him not to disappoint his audience.

  A man walked up to us on the street and asked Groucho for an autograph. “Would you please sign this for my son?”

  Groucho started to write, then paused after writing only “Gro.”

  “Hold old is he?”

  “Eleven months.”

  Groucho handed the piece of paper with half of his signature back to the man, saying, “He’s too young to read.”

  With strangers and sometimes even with friends, he felt he was being tested, so he had to be “on.” When he said something very commonplace, he was surprised at the extent to which his audience, even when it was made up of old friends, filled in, finding his comment hilarious beyond its due. The aura of the half century of mirth surrounding him carried with it a Pavlovian effect which frequently elicited anything from suppressed giggles to raucous laughter for what Groucho would call “a small joke.” Raising his eyebrows, he summed up his style this way: “I always have a ready answer.”

  At times he was greeted so effusively by a stranger that he felt his privacy had been invaded. He had such an instantly perceived character and personality that people who met him for five minutes genuinely felt they knew him. Certainly, many more people knew Groucho than he himself knew. As we walked together, people not only loved to recognize him, but they loved to be recognized by him.

  His friends were all in agreement that his public image grew out of his real self. Ethel Wise, who knew him as a boy, and Hattie Darling, who knew him in his late twenties, confirmed that the Groucho of movies and television was essentially the same person that they had known and that he did not change. If anything, the tremendous acceptance received by the Groucho character had the effect of making Groucho even more like Groucho. Lee Strasberg, a master of character study, told me:

  “I remember meeting Groucho once a long time ago. I don’t remember exactly what he said, but I remember that what he said was funny, and so perfectly in character. The actor was the expression of the person.”

  Genuinely loving to perform, Groucho was fortunate enough to be able to spend his life being paid to do what he would have been willing to do free. Of course he preferred being paid, and he lived in a world where your fee is considered to be the measure of your value. He was at his happiest when he was performing, especially when it was for his fellow performers.

  When he was in New York for the re-premiere of Animal Crackers, Ron Delsener invited British satirists Peter Cook and Dudley Moore to visit Groucho in his suite at the Regency. They were funny, but Groucho was up to it all. “Nobody can upstage Groucho, even at eighty-three,” Ron told me that evening. “Groucho got a bigger kick out of the evening than any of us. He had the chance to perform, and that’s his life.” The evening ended on this note:

  GROUCHO

  I’ll see you at my house in California.

  DUDLEY MOORE

  That’ll be terrific!

  GROUCHO

  I don’t know about that.

  It’s possible that Groucho in his eighties was even more social than ever before. Irene Atkins remembered a sedate person, one not so inclined to romp and stomp. “When I was married to Arthur, we used to listen to records at Groucho’s—Gilbert and Sullivan.”

  Groucho continued to be in demand as a guest, both socially and professionally. Frequently he had to ruffle a lot of feelings because he could not possibly accept all of the invitations that came his way. He had to be possessive about his time or he wouldn’t have had any left for himself. He might accept an invitation to a party, saying, “I’ll come at eight, and I’ll leave at eight-thirty.”

  Although he was so much in demand as a guest, he was more often the host. He took great pride in not being a freeloader. Even at restaurants he preferred to and usually did pick up the check. “I used to like to go to Danny’s Hideaway,” he told me, referring to the New York restaurant. “But I had to stop going. He never let me pay.”

  Socially, one of the stresses for Groucho was that he brought out the desire in non–show business people to perform. They often told him jokes, mistakenly feeling that they had to entertain the entertainer. Plumbers, gardeners, and TV repairmen all had jokes for him. A typical reaction of his was, “Why did you have to tell me that terrible joke? It’ll take me three months to get over that.” They laughed.

  Because “civilians” treated him as too special a person, he preferred the more relaxing companionship of his fellow performers and writers. When he had company for dinner, he liked to invite show business people or family—his concept of family extending beyond blood and legal relationships to include anyone he chose to include. Although he would say some funny things at the dinner table, he liked to relax while eating and not talk much while chewing, and he felt less pressure to perform with his peers.

  He enjoyed some respite from being social, especially from professional sociability. Walking along Camden and Sunset with David Hixon and me, he was asked by David, “Groucho, why do you take this particular walk almost every day? Do you know a lot of people who live here?” Groucho answered, “No. It’s because I don’t.”

  Like all supercelebrities, he sometimes wearied of having to live up to the expectations of the g
eneral public, liking to be able to retreat into the protective cocoon of his own home, his private world peopled only by his intimates. One night I was riding to a public appearance with Groucho, who was terribly depressed by one of his regular visits to his sick friend Arthur Sheekman—visits which he continued to make even though they always depressed him.

  GROUCHO

  I told you how I met Sheekman…

  I He was writing for a Chicago newspaper…

  GROUCHO

  Chicago Times. And he had been to interview me, and I’m so tired of doing these interviews. I said, “I’ll do one for you. I’ll write it myself.” So I wrote it. Then we came to the Coast. I sent for him to come out as one of the writers. His wife was in a number of pictures. She was a good-looking dame. Gloria Stuart. And now he’s an old man and very sick. It’s not like when you saw him here. I went today to see him. I brought him chocolate and cookies, but he just wanted to sleep. There’s no more happiness. And Ruby’s dead. A part of me went with him when he died. I cried when he died. Two of my brothers are dead. There’s nothing you can do about it. Did I ever tell you what Kaufman told me? He said ‘I’m supposed to seem happy and be entertaining when I feel down and sad.’ I feel like that.”

  Groucho didn’t just seek shelter in a coterie of cronies. Even in his eighties—perhaps especially in his eighties—he was constantly adding new people. His friends spanned the whole gamut in age and background. With friends like George Jessel and George Burns, Groucho could share a frame of reference that included Swayne’s rats riding jockey-style on the backs of cats. With Groucho’s young friends, there was a rapport born of their sense of historic importance when they were with him. Terry Hamlisch expressed it when she described what it was like to watch Duck Soup with Groucho: