GROUCHO
Unusual country. Windmills.
EDEN
Where we lost Melinda.
GROUCHO
Yeah, but we found her again. That wasn’t in Holland.
EDEN
One of the Scandinavian countries?
GROUCHO
In Denmark. That’s where I bought that rug.
EDEN
Oh yeah. I love that hanging. It’s supposed to be a rug, but I said it’s too beautiful to be a rug, so I hung it. Someone said that it’s the Marx Brothers, with the pointed hat like Chico. But you know what it is? It’s the United Nations. Look…yellow, white, brown, black. It’s all the races together. Do you know that?
GROUCHO
No, it never occurred to me.
EDEN
Oh, here’s Gloria’s [Gloria Stuart Sheekman] painting of the barn. And she’s giving her new show.
GROUCHO
She’s in show business now.
EDEN
She’s giving her new painting show in February in Palm Springs. Can you come down for it?
GROUCHO
I doubt it. I went down to see Zeppo and Gummo.
EDEN
When?
GROUCHO
Two weeks ago, and she (Indicating me) came with me. Zeppo’s stuck on her.
EDEN
Where did you stay?
GROUCHO
We didn’t. We came back that night. It only took us two hours.
EDEN
Oh, for heaven’s sake! What a drive! To go down and have dinner and come back. Oh, I wish you would have told me you were going. Remember our house in Palm Springs that I sold to Barbara Marx?
GROUCHO
She took care of Zeppo while he was sick.
EDEN
I wish you could have gone over to see our house.
GROUCHO
(Motioning to some photos on the wall) I had other pictures about this size on the walls there with different people who had been on the quiz show.
EDEN
I have those. Do you want them?
GROUCHO
Well, if you’re not doing anything with them, I’d put them up in this hall here.
EDEN
They’re in my mother’s garage.
GROUCHO
How is your mother’s garage?
EDEN
(Laughing) You know, they’re such marvelous pictures. Would you really like them?
GROUCHO
Is there a picture of Hitler? Do you think he’ll run again?
EDEN
In fact, those pictures would be kind of great here. They’re almost antiques…
GROUCHO
So am I.
EDEN
…Almost collector’s items. Would Erin want to put them up there?
GROUCHO
It’s my house…
EDEN
They’d really be divine here.
GROUCHO
…Not Erin’s house.
EDEN
They’d be divine here.
GROUCHO
I’ll sell them.
EDEN
Hey! I’ll trade you those for the hanging.
GROUCHO
No.
EDEN
Well, let’s see what other deal we could make. (Laughs) Do you remember when we were over in France, at the George V. It was fun then.
GROUCHO
I was over there last year.
EDEN
I know, and you said you didn’t like it very much.
GROUCHO
I didn’t say that at all. I was a big sensation. I remember when we lived in the hotel in New York.
EDEN
Overlooking the park. Eloise’s hotel, the Plaza.
GROUCHO
It was snowing, and you didn’t have any overshoes. And I went out one morning while you were sleeping to get you a pair of overshoes. I went from Fifty-ninth to Sixty-second Street and I couldn’t get a taxi. They were all going back to the barn, or something. A policeman stopped me and said, “I’ll get you a cab if you’ll answer one question.” So he got me the cab, and I said, “What’s the question you wanted to ask me?” He said, “Could Harpo really talk?”
EDEN
What did you say?
GROUCHO
I said no. You remember the couple that worked for us? At our house in…
EDEN
London. I sure do. They were delightful.
GROUCHO
She was the cook, and he cleaned the house. And you had the only good bedroom. Every Sunday they went off, and they bought a hundred condoms and went over to Ireland and sold them. He made more money selling the condoms than we were paying him.
EDEN
We rented a house for about three or four months, didn’t we?
GROUCHO
The man who owned it had been in love with Margaret Sullavan.
EDEN
He was married to Margaret Sullavan, he was her last husband. And when you say I had the only good bedroom, I almost felt I was in a room with a ghost, because there was a big portrait of Margaret Sullavan.
GROUCHO
And all the linen in the house had her initials on them.
EDEN
Yes, it was sort of like living with a ghost. Groucho was working, doing the You Bet Your Life show over there.
GROUCHO She was a fine actress. Gregory Peck lived next door.
EDEN
Oh, and Veronique and I used to shop all the time, and we became very good friends.
GROUCHO
Gregory had never smoked a pipe, and he was in a movie where he had to smoke a pipe. So he went to the famous pipe store in London, and he bought ten pipes. He never smoked them except in that movie. Somewhere there’s ten valuable British pipes. That’s where I met T. S. Eliot…
EDEN
Oh, wait a minute. We’ve got to finish this, just for fun. You took Gregory to a pipe store, and you’re not supposed to try the pipes. But you said Gregory Peck was just like a little boy in the store. He said you’re not supposed to try the pipes, but you said, “There’s no one looking. Try them.” So he went puff, puff, puff, puff, while no one was looking, because you told him to. You said, “Isn’t that like a little boy?”
GROUCHO
You can’t tell anything about a pipe until you smoke it.
EDEN
Right, right. That was fun. It was really fun in London, because some newsman from the Observer or some newspaper…
GROUCHO
That’s where I met T. S. Eliot.
EDEN
Oh, didn’t we have a lovely time there? But this was fun because the reporter knew I was an artist, so they took me out to the park, I guess Hyde Park, and had me sketching. And it was in the paper and all. I have the clippings. I drew one or two pictures, and we came back to our house, but couldn’t get in because I’d forgotten my key. I knew you were home. We buzzed and we knocked, and I yelled Grouch—which he thought was funny, but that’s what I called you, not Groucho, Grouch. And I said, “Let’s see if we can get through the Pecks’ place next door.” I was frantic. We had something to do that night, and here we were at the park, me drawing and everything. The maid let us in, no one was home at the Pecks’. So, we went up to the backyard of their place, and the reporter had to climb over the Pecks’ wall with his camera and everything, and break into our place, where he found you shaving. You couldn’t hear because of the electric shaver. It was in the paper. Anyway, it was fun in London.
GROUCHO
I was in London at the Savoy…
EDEN
Isn’t that a great hotel!
GROUCHO
…on New Year’s Eve…
EDEN
I love that hotel.
GROUCHO
…and Noel Coward was at the Savoy.
EDEN
I wish we could go back there.
GROUCHO
He danced on the table…
EDEN
We had a great time there.
GROUCHO
…and I got up on the table and danced with him. I danced with Noel Coward on the table at the Savoy.
EDEN
I loved that, living there for four months.
GROUCHO
We were young.
EDEN
(Laughing) Right. Let’s see, where else did we have fun? I think when we traveled we always had fun. We always took Melinda.
GROUCHO
On the Queen Mary she didn’t talk to us.
EDEN
No, because…
GROUCHO
She had her own gang.
EDEN
We were in first class, and she wanted to go second class because that’s where the fun was, and I didn’t blame her. You know, all the young boys and everything were in second class. They couldn’t afford to travel in first class, and she was bored to death. So she’d pick up boys and girls in the second class. Had her own gang. She was coming toward us on the first-class deck with them, and we said, “Hi!” and she’d go by. (Laughs) She didn’t want to recognize us because she wanted to be one of the gang. She did that in Hawaii, too. That’s growing up.
GROUCHO
That’s normal.
EDEN
It is very normal in growing up. But we were hurt.
GROUCHO
I remember when I went to Hawaii on the boat. You were with me.
EDEN
Sure, and Melinda was fifteen.
GROUCHO
The boat was still at anchor in the harbor, the crowd at the shore waving. We went to the side of the boat. I vomited.
EDEN
(Laughs) You’re not a very good sailor.
SIDNEY SHELDON
Sidney Sheldon and Groucho were longtime pun-pals. Novelist Sheldon, author of The Naked Face, The Other Side of Midnight, and The Stranger in the Mirror, at twenty-five had three hit plays running simultaneously on Broadway. In Hollywood, he wrote the Academy Award–winning screenplay for The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer and received Screen Writers Guild awards for the Best Musical of the Year for Easter Parade and Annie Get Your Gun. For the Broadway musical Redhead, he won a Tony. He has written scripts for twenty-five major motion pictures and over two hundred TV scripts. For the long-running TV series I Dream of Jeannie, he not only conceived the idea, but also wrote all the episodes himself.
Although Jeannie was an immediate popular success, not every critic took to it. Cleveland Amory, writing in TV Guide, said that the idea was terrible, the acting was terrible, the production was terrible, the directing was terrible, and the conception was terrible. Sidney Sheldon suffered in silence for a few days, then wrote to Cleveland Amory:
“I read your review, and if there’s one thing I don’t like, it’s a wishy-washy review. Couldn’t you just say whether you liked it or not?”
Sidney Sheldon waited in vain for a reply. At the end of the year, however, Amory devoted his entire article to the funniest letter of the year, Sidney Sheldon’s.
Though he was never intimidated by Groucho’s barbed wit, his wife, Jorja, admitted to having been. Sidney Sheldon told me how Jorja and Groucho established their détente:
“One of my earlier memories of Groucho, before I was married to Jorja, was when I would take her to Groucho’s house. She was terrified of him! He was always very nice to her, but she was afraid he would turn his acidulous wit on her, and she couldn’t cope with it. So she begged me never to leave her alone with him. He’d go up to her and say, ‘When are you getting pregnant?’ and it would just put her away because we weren’t married. She didn’t know how to respond to that.
“After Jorja and I were married, our first dinner guests were Groucho and Eden. It was a Saturday, and I was playing gin, and either because I was winning or losing, I was very late getting home. I got home after seven o’clock. I later learned that Jorja had heard the doorbell and thought that I’d forgotten my key. She opened the door and found herself face to face with Groucho and Eden. Jorja was panicky, because she felt I wasn’t there to protect her.
“Now, Jorja had never had a drink, I don’t think, let alone mixed a drink before we were married. She didn’t know how to make a drink. So, when Groucho said he would have a scotch and water, she went to the bar, filled the glass with scotch, and then added a little bit of water to it. That broke the ice! When I came home, they were all having a great time.”
Sidney Sheldon recognized that Jorja’s initial wariness was not unreasonable:
“Groucho, like most comics, has two sides to him: he can be very cruel and he can be very sweet. I remember once we were walking down the street, and a man came up to him and said, ‘Groucho, do you remember me?’ Now, there are a lot of answers to that question. Groucho’s answer was, ‘What have you ever done in your life that I should remember you?’ The man didn’t think it was funny, and I told Groucho that I thought that that kind of behavior was unnecessary.
“Years ago we went to a place called Billy Grey’s Bandbox, which used to be on Fairfax. That was Joel Grey’s father. We went to see My Fairfax Lady. That was the name of the show the comic was doing. They gave us a front table because Groucho was there. We were right in front of the comedian. He started doing the show, doing it mainly for Grouch. Now, during the whole performance, I don’t think Grouch even smiled once, let alone laughed. Jorja was so embarrassed by this that she was laughing uproariously trying to make up for Groucho not laughing; and she didn’t even understand any of the jokes, because most of them were rather ethnic.
“Unlike most comics, however, he can be very generous toward other comics, and most comics are not. I remember Groucho told me about Jackie Gleason when he was doing The Honeymooners. Groucho thought it was a marvelous show, and I didn’t like it very much. He said, ‘Well, look at it again,’ and I did, and I learned to enjoy it.
“The next time I remember him talking about someone was when he said Shecky Greene was a comedy talent. I’d never seen Shecky Greene. Because of Groucho’s enthusiasm, the next time I went to Las Vegas, I made it a point to see Shecky.
“He was really enthusiastic about Woody Allen. Just a few days ago, he said that he was in love with Buddy Hackett, whom he had met recently. So, he is very generous about the talent of other comedians. In a comedian this is an unusual trait.
“I think that Groucho is probably prouder of being a writer than he is of being a comedian. Most comedians are not that literate; they’re not that well read. Groucho is extremely well read. He’s written perhaps half a dozen books. He’s a member of the Screen Writers Guild of America. I produced a show for the Guild one year, and Groucho appeared on it, and he’s appeared many times since. The last time he was there, he got a standing ovation.
“Most of his friends have died, and I think he feels rather close to me, as I feel close to him. Groucho has a loyalty to his old friends, those who are still alive. He frequently goes to visit Arthur Sheekman and Nunnally Johnson. He’s really outlived most of his contemporaries. He was very badly hit by Jack Benny’s death. Up until about a year ago, Groucho never talked about that. He said he never went to funerals. He went to Benny’s funeral, and now he does talk about that. He doesn’t seem to mind it so much.
“A couple of days ago, he said, ‘When I’m helpless and really feeling lousy, then I don’t want them to keep me alive. I want to go.’ He’d never talked that way before.
“Another interesting facet of Groucho’s character—which again is very unlike most comedians—he takes pleasure in his friends’ successes. When I had a hit picture or a play, or when my book became successful, he would tell me how glad he was and he would talk to other people, and he really was genuinely pleased. That’s a rare trait for a comedian to exhibit.
“Groucho is well aware of the fact that he is indeed a living legend. He talks about all the film festivals of the Marx Brothers that are going on around the world. He came to a party at our house one evening we
aring his French Legion of Honor. Groucho was dressed in tails and the party wasn’t formal, so I asked him about it. I don’t know if he was being serious or not, but he said you were not allowed to wear the Legion of Honor unless you wore tails. So, he went to the trouble of putting tails on.
“Another story that involves Groucho’s clothes happened on an evening when the four of us had a date for dinner. As it turned out Jorja and Eden were unable to make it. I called Groucho and said it was just the two of us for dinner tonight, and he said, ‘Where are we going?’ I said, ‘I don’t know. We’ll go someplace nice.’ He said, ‘How should I dress?’ and I said, ‘Dress nicely, I don’t want to be ashamed of you.’
“I arrived at his house to pick him up. He opened the door and he was wearing Eden’s skirt and blouse, earrings, little cloche hat, high heel shoes, and smoking a cigar. He said, ‘You want to come in for a drink?’ and I said, ‘Fine.’ We went into the den and were having a drink when the doorbell rang, and Groucho went to answer it.
“What he had forgotten was that he had a date with some network executives who were coming over to talk to him about a new show. Well, Bill Dozier and two other men walked in, and I watched their faces. No one reacted to the way Groucho was dressed! Not a word was said. He didn’t say anything. They talked business for about an hour and a half, and they left, Groucho ushered them out the door, and then he said to me, ‘I’ll change.’ He got into his clothes and we went out to dinner. And nothing more was ever said about that episode.
“I ran into Bill Dozier a couple of years later, and I said, ‘Bill, what did you think when you came to Groucho’s house that night and found him dressed in women’s clothes?’ He said, ‘Well, I didn’t think anything of it. If it had been anyone but Groucho, I would have been very suspicious.’
“I think because of the financial insecurity of his earlier days, Groucho is very careful about his money. He was not known as a great spendthrift. Yet, when I was going to New York and I was staying at the Plaza, he called the manager, who was a friend of his, and I got a beautiful suite for half the price it ordinarily would have cost. I remember being surprised that Groucho had made that long-distance phone call for me.
“A number of years ago I talked to Grouch about doing a series, and he said he didn’t want to do another series. I was producing at Screen Gems then, and I gave him an idea that he liked about a host who was a kind of irascible character, not lovable at all, who went around telling people off and screwing up their lives, and Groucho loved it. I talked to Screen Gems, and they were all for it. I wrote the pilot script, and it was approved. At that time one of Groucho’s brothers died, and Screen Gems got nervous. Someone said, ‘Wait a minute…Groucho may be too old to make this series.’ I tried to talk them out of it, but I couldn’t. So I had to tell Groucho the series was off, and he said, ‘Why? Did they think I’m too old?’ I said, ‘No, of course not,’ but he kept bringing it up, and he was very hurt that they didn’t go ahead with the series. I think Screen Gems made a mistake, because if they had made it, I think it would have been a big hit. It would have been wonderful for them and wonderful for Groucho.
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