GROUCHO
Very funny man. I was walking with him in Salt Lake City. He took off his coat and lay on the car tracks. In Night at the Opera he wanted me to take off my pants. And I said I never took off my pants on the stage. And I didn’t. I once went to a farm with him about sixty miles from here. He took some books with him and the minute we got there, he went in the bathtub and filled it with water. And he had a thing across the tub so he could read books. He’d sit there for five, six hours reading books. Boasberg was a very bright man.
GEORGE SEATON
A very bitter man, too.
GROUCHO
I was crazy about him.
GEORGE SEATON
Oh, I was, too. I learned an awful lot from him. I don’t know if you remember, Grouch, Al’s line, “Either he’s dead or my watch stopped.” The first time it was a question: “Is he dead, or has my watch stopped?” and it didn’t get anything. We were trying to figure it out, because it’s a funny idea, certainly. Groucho said, “It’s because it’s a question, and they’re expecting an answer. It should be a statement.” The next performance he said, “Either he’s dead or my watch has stopped,” and the roof went off the place. I learned right then that you don’t try to get a laugh on a question.
I
What were your impressions of the other Marx Brothers?
GEORGE SEATON
Harpo was a dear, dear, sweet man.
GROUCHO
A wonderful man.
GEORGE SEATON
Chico was very kind to us, to Bob Pirosh and myself. He was always trying to get us to do something on the side; write a script or he had an idea for something, and we would talk it over…
GROUCHO
Or borrow some money.
GEORGE SEATON
He knew he couldn’t borrow money from us. We only made seventy-five dollars a week. Chico was very kind, too. But Chico, in my opinion, never had even a modicum of the talent that Groucho or even Harpo had.
I
Were Chico’s ideas good?
GEORGE SEATON
Very bad. But I must say, and I don’t know why, that when Chico got on that stage and started doing his thing, the audience loved him.
GROUCHO
He was an important part of the act.
GEORGE SEATON
Oh yes.
GROUCHO
Do you remember Duck Soup? That was a funny picture.
GEORGE SEATON
That only came into its own very recently, I think.
I
(To George Seaton) Did you look much at the earlier Marx Brothers pictures when you found that you were going to be writing for them?
GEORGE SEATON
Yes, but Thalberg cautioned us, and I think Groucho will bear me out on this…
GROUCHO
I’ll be glad to.
GEORGE SEATON
…He said that his formula for the Marx Brothers was that they had to be helping somebody so you could really have sympathy for them. Groucho did these outrageous things with Dumont and whatever the boys did, but as long as they were trying to help the young lovers, let’s call them, the audience would forgive them and be on their side. I think it was a good formula. In the early pictures, Duck Soup for instance, there were a lot of just wonderful gags, but as Thalberg said, there was no drive to help anybody. He said, “It’s like a football game. You start here and you make ten yards, then they throw you back five, and you go twenty more, and they throw you back ten, and then you go thirty. But you have to keep going towards that goal line.” He kept insisting on this all the time.
GROUCHO
The first time we met Thalberg he said he’d like to do pictures with us. “But not lousy pictures like Duck Soup,” he said. I was annoyed by this. I thought Duck Soup was a very funny picture. “Yes,” he said, “but the audience doesn’t give a damn about you fellas. I can make a Marx Brothers picture that would have half as many laughs but will be more effective because the audience will be in sympathy with you.” He was right.
GEORGE SEATON
Groucho, let me ask you a question, because it’s been interesting for me working in the theatre again. Looking back, did you get more fun out of the theatre or out of the films? I’m not talking about money now.
GROUCHO
The stage.
GEORGE SEATON
Yeah. That’s the amazing thing. Of course the boys feel the same way, Matthau and Lemmon.
GROUCHO
You get an immediate response.
GEORGE SEATON
Walter Matthau said to me, “Making films is like pulling hairs out of your nose with a pair of tweezers, one by one. You know, you do that little thing. Here you’re on for the whole evening, and you’ve gotta be part of the ensemble, you’ve gotta carry the show. There’s nobody who says, ‘Cut! Let’s do it over again.’ And if you muff a line, if you forget a line, you better be smart enough to protect it and figure out how to get out of your spot.”
GROUCHO
I’m getting a big kick out of You Bet Your Life. It’s on every night.
GEORGE SEATON
Yes, I know. I see it.
GROUCHO
It’s in New York and Philadelphia and Chicago. It’s a big hit. It’s killing the news. People don’t want the news at eleven o’clock.
GEORGE SEATON
I don’t want it at six o’clock, I don’t want it at five o’clock. It’s pretty depressing.
GROUCHO
The news is usually bad. Somebody once said, “Nobody should read a newspaper more than once a month.” There used to be a show called People Are Funny, and that describes people. There’s all kinds of people, but collectively they’re the audience.
GEORGE SEATON
But the amazing thing, Grouch, is that the matinees downtown are the best audience. We were trying to figure out why, because usually the matinees are…
GROUCHO
I hated the matinee audiences. They were mostly women with hats eating candy.
GEORGE SEATON
But Walter and I were talking, and we finally came to one conclusion, and I think we’re right. In the evening people run down there, and they have a big dinner…
GROUCHO
They’re sleepy.
GEORGE SEATON
Now they have a bar—you know, they have a couple of drinks before dinner in the theatre bar. And between acts, too. They’re just that much slower. They’re a beat off all the time. At the matinee nobody has a drink; they just maybe had a sandwich for lunch. They’re so sharp.
GROUCHO
You didn’t know Sam Harris.
GEORGE SEATON
Yes. ’Cause he optioned a play of mine once. I was only nineteen or twenty.
GROUCHO
We worked with him.
GEORGE SEATON
What’s your favorite Marx Brothers picture, Grouch?
GROUCHO
I don’t know. I like Night at the Opera the best. The heavy [Sig Rumann] in that was wonderful.
GEORGE SEATON
Well, that’s my favorite Marx Brothers picture.
GROUCHO
And I like Duck Soup.
GEORGE SEATON
But Night at the Opera had form. I think it had more discipline. Duck Soup was very wild, and tremendously funny.
GROUCHO
Didn’t we have a horse in the Day at the Races tryouts?
GEORGE SEATON
Yeah, for about two performances, and then we sent him home.
GROUCHO
You weren’t at the opening of Animal Crackers in New York. I went with her. (Indicating me) The opening of Animal Crackers in New York was so crowded, I was surrounded by policemen to keep the crowds away. And they were on horseback, some of them. One of the horses asked me for my autograph.
GEORGE SEATON
So you probably gave him your footprint?
GROUCHO
In the sands of time. Well, do you think we’ve had it?
GEORGE SEATON
I can’t think of anything else we haven’t covered, Grouch. Except, how are you?
GROUCHO
I’m in the pink.
GEORGE SEATON
I’m in the red. Doing a show downtown for love.
GROUCHO
Well, God’ll thank you for that. But he won’t pay the rent.
ROBERT PIROSH
Robert Pirosh is a screenwriter who numbers among his credits not only the Marx Brothers’ A Day at the Races but also I Married a Witch, which was directed by his friend René Clair, and Battleground, for which he won an Oscar. He has also directed films and has written and produced for television.
Eating breakfast with me at the Beverly Hills Hotel, he talked about his days with Groucho and the Marx Brothers:
ROBERT PIROSH
Did George [Seaton] tell you about our first meeting with Groucho? I’m sure he did…
I
Yes. But I’d like to have you tell it, too.
ROBERT PIROSH
My memory won’t be as good as George’s, but I do remember one thing which he may or may not remember. We had been at M-G-M as junior writers, and we had an option coming up. I had started at thirty-five dollars a week at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer at the height of their glory, as a junior writer. And I was very glad to get it, but that was after having worked and made much more in New York in the advertising business. At any rate, they didn’t lift my option for twenty-five dollars, so George and I, we quit in a huff, then got more money elsewhere.
We were not what you would call a howling success, but we did start building up a little. We had no big pictures at all. We had done one or two little pictures at M-G-M, and our agent got us a job at Republic Studios, which was the absolute bargain basement. We didn’t know what the hell we were doing there, because what we had known—the little bit we knew—had been working on great big M-G-M pictures, or great big compared to Republic. They were all shoestring things then. I’ll go on to something else if this rambles…
I
It’s fine.
ROBERT PIROSH
You’re used to rambling people, aren’t you? Well, we were working for a man named Nat Levine, who was, I guess, a big executive producer at Republic. Then we got a call to go over and see Irving Thalberg, who was going to produce this Marx Brothers picture. We got the job and went back, and had the laugh on M-G-M, because we got much more money than when they had dropped us! The point is that Nat Levine was, as I said, not a quality producer, and Irving Thalberg was God. Our agent then said, “Isn’t this fantastic? From Nat Levine to Irving Thalberg! From the sublime to the ridiculous!” This I loved, because it made Nat Levine the sublime.
At any rate, I don’t know what our first contact at M-G-M was. I think it was probably Herman Mankiewicz, who was a very colorful, witty, wonderful man. He sort of sponsored us. I had gotten to know Herman, and I was trying very hard to get a job, writing originals with nothing but rejections. And he helped. Anyway, we were given a script written by a team of writers which Thalberg and Groucho had decided they didn’t like. We read the script, and then drove out to Groucho’s house, very nervous, because we were going to meet Groucho. We had really terrible credits.
It was a drizzly day, and Groucho met us, then we went inside. He said, “Have you read the script?” And we said, “Yeah.” He said, “Where is it?” and one of us said, “Oh, we left it out in the car!” He said, “Well, that’s a good place for it, especially if it’s an open car.” George told you all these little things, didn’t he?
I
Yes.
ROBERT PIROSH
Then what’s the point of repeating it?
I Because it’s different when each person tells it.
ROBERT PIROSH
Okay. So, we not only had the script with us, but there had been an interval of time in which we had done an entirely new story for what eventually became A Night at the Opera. This was not the one that was used. Groucho loved it, though, and that’s what really got us the assignment. And Thalberg liked it very much, too, but said, “I don’t want to do it. But,” he said, “I like those boys, and the work shows promise, so let them work on it.” Then we wrote for about a year and a half.
Incidentally, though this has no bearing on Groucho, the idea was a story that eventually was done very effectively by Mel Brooks, as The Producers. This was the story of a man who oversold a show, expecting it to be a flop, and it turned out to be a success. So that was our original idea for A Night at the Opera. Groucho would get this great idea of producing the rottenest opera ever. He hires the good-looking guy, Allan Jones, and this pretty young girl, who’s not too good a singer, expecting to have a big flop, and it turns out to be a huge success. So now he owes a hundred percent of the profits to about ten people.
At any rate, Thalberg turned it down. He liked the idea, but said, “You can’t build insanity on insanity.” He said, “I want a different kind of Marx Brothers film. That’s why their pictures haven’t been doing so well. Their stories are so nutty, that when they come on and do nutty things, it doesn’t work.”
So, we worked on A Night at the Opera, and then they brought in George Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind. They did a script, and that was the script that was used. But Thalberg kind of liked us, and we’d do a little scene here and there, and they’d use some of it. And then A Night at the Opera was a smash hit. When they did the next picture, A Day at the Races, that’s the one we were working on for a year and a half.
I keep mentioning Groucho not just because you’re writing about him, but because that’s the way our relationship was. But we also had a relationship with Chico, and we liked him, but it was on a different basis. We saw quite a bit of him. He wanted to be a writer. He wanted us to write a story with him, and we’d have crazy conferences where he was on the phone with bookmakers and dames. I mean, it was impossible.
Harpo was a lovely, sweet person. But it was Groucho, for us anyway, who was fun to be with. It was our big experience, or at least mine. George has seen more of him in recent years, I suppose because of Hillcrest. Our big experience with him, the one that was the most exciting and that meant a lot to our careers, was when we went on the road, when we took A Day at the Races on tour. I guess it was Thalberg’s idea. It may have been Groucho’s, but Thalberg went along with it.
It was treated as if it were a Broadway show. We were going to make a comedy, and we were going to make a Marx Brothers picture. But they remembered very well that when they had their early plays, The Cocoanuts and all the others, they went on the road a couple of weeks, and finally when they got to Broadway, they knew where the laughs were. And they felt, whether it was Thalberg or it was the Marx Brothers, that comedy pictures were tough to time because they didn’t know in advance where the laughs were, except with the pictures they had made from plays.
So, after months and months of work, we got a script, and they said, “Okay, let’s go.” And we had a regular rehearsal period at the Biltmore Theatre downtown. They rehearsed as if for a stage play for, I think, a couple of weeks. They rehearsed the comedy scenes, made changes, and so forth. This became an hour show. They called it a tab show, as in tabloid. Then, the great big movie palaces had stage shows. So this was taken out to be shown in various towns on the road in between the movies. They’d have the feature, and then they’d have an hour of this. It was three or four performances a day, in the Midwest mostly. We opened in Duluth, and then went to Minneapolis, Chicago, and various cities. Eventually, it kept changing and changing, with the comedy routines being concentrated on. We took a whole troupe. Margaret Dumont was along.
She was really quite a nice old lady with, I think, no sense of humor at all. And she was the butt of their jokes. They were always hiding her wig, which she desperately needed. That would be Groucho’s idea of a joke. But I think it sounds more like Chico’s idea of a joke. And then Harpo would be the only one who would think, “Poor old lady. That was a dirty trick.
She was so embarrassed.”
I remember in one of the towns on the road, we were changing and changing, and not succeeding in getting what everybody wanted: a scene in which there was a character particularly prominent in the newspapers then, some kind of gangster’s girl or something, called a “Cokey Flo.” So this was the scene that everybody called the “Cokey Flo scene.” This was the scene that eventually became in A Day at the Races, where Esther Muir came in and Groucho went on the make for her, and it winds up with Chico and Harpo coming in and putting up wallpaper. A crazy scene. But it was called the Cokey Flo scene, and we were stuck on it.
After having worked for an hour or two at a restaurant where we went to have something to eat after the show, we went to the hotel, where the lobby was deserted. There was a poor old cleaning woman down on her hands and knees scrubbing the floor, and Groucho went up to her and said, “You don’t happen to have a Cokey Flo scene in your pocket, do you?” And she just looked. She knew they were celebrities, and what could she do? She was so confused. And I saw, quite unostentatiously—the others had gone on up ahead—I saw Harpo slip her a bill, say a dollar or five dollars, because he felt bad and embarrassed. He didn’t have the sadistic streak that I guess most comics have—or comedy writers. Harpo was different.
So the trip went on, and, like any show or picture, we became a family group. Everybody knew everybody, and it’s great fun, and we’re gonna be pals for the rest of our life. Then you go back and on to the next project, and you see each other once in a while. For a year and a half—it might even have been longer—we saw a great deal of Groucho. And then after that, I really didn’t see Groucho an awful lot.
I
George Seaton told me you wrote Day at the Races eighteen times.
ROBERT PIROSH
Yeah. But you wouldn’t have recognized it. It wouldn’t have been called Day at the Races in many of the versions, because it didn’t start out about racing at all. As I remember, we had a number of ideas that Thalberg or Groucho or somebody always tossed out. But probably the first eight were about the Marx Brothers in a sanitarium.
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