GROUCHO
When I saw him, he wasn’t in the ocean. He was in the Delaware River.
GEORGE JESSEL
Yeah. Wherever he was, he got out.
GROUCHO
He always broke free. He lived right across the street from me.
GEORGE JESSEL
He’s one of the few men who believed in people coming back to life.
GROUCHO
Yes, I know. He gave $50,000 if anybody could prove that anybody could come back alive. The money is still there.
GEORGE JESSEL
I played with Houdini.
GROUCHO
Harpo and Chico said that after they died they’d send out a message if they could.
GEORGE JESSEL
Have you heard anything from them?
GROUCHO
Not a goddamn word.
GEORGE JESSEL
Fred Allen’s been dead over twenty years now. Wasn’t Allen good?
GROUCHO
Great.
GEORGE JESSEL
Now, let me tell you something that every great comedian must have: you must have a staying quality, and part of that staying quality is sex appeal. People go for a Fred Allen or a George Gobel, who is a funny man and a charming man, and a lot of guys. This is not saying that women in the audience will get up and say, “I want to go to bed with him.” But you have to have a little tiny bit somewhere…
GROUCHO
Of sex.
GEORGE JESSEL
Of what attracts a woman. And I never heard anybody say, “I’d like to sleep with Fred Allen.” Or George Gobel or Bob Hope or Don Rickles or me. The Marx Brothers—all of them had a feeling of sex. There’s no question about it.
BILLY
Don Rickles has been too overexposed on television.
GEORGE JESSEL
My dear Billy: there is no question about overexposure. There’s no question of anything else except the client. I worked for a woman called Mrs. Clark, who had a thing called Tums. And I had to sing at every performance, and people didn’t want to hear that every night. Nobody knows why anyone is on or off television.
GROUCHO
I’m getting a big kick out of You Bet Your Life. It’s on every night.
GEORGE JESSEL
Yes, I know.
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 JESSEL
I’m usually in bed by then anyway.
GROUCHO
The news is usually bad. Somebody once said, “Nobody should read a newspaper more than once a month.” I read the Sunday Times.
GEORGE JESSEL
Did you know Amy Leslie? She was a newspaper dramatic critic. Remember her?
GROUCHO
Chicago Daily News.
GEORGE JESSEL
She had been the dramatic critic in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where Eddie Foy opened Mr. Blue Beard. It closed on Saturday night and opened Sunday at the Iroquois Theatre in Chicago. To show her new managing editor at the Chicago Daily News, she wrote the review that night because she knew the show, and brought it right in to the newspaper that morning. He said, “That was wonderful, Miss Leslie, wonderful how you wrote how Mr. Foy took all those encores. Except that the theatre burned to the ground last night and there was no show.”
GROUCHO
When we played downtown here, we had an act called Home Again. The Los Angeles critic came out and said, “The Marx Brothers in Home Again should be.”
GEORGE JESSEL
In Chicago there was a theatre on Halsted Street called the Grand. If the show was good, the manager would walk up and down the aisles with a cigarette in his mouth and a cap and say, “You see? These are the kind of acts that I’m booking here. See how good it is?” Otherwise, whatever you said to him, he said, “I’ll kick the shit out of anybody!” If you said, “How are you this evening?” he said, “I’ll kick the shit out of anybody!”
He got stuck on a big fat soprano. She came out and sang, and they hissed her and they booed her. He says, “Quiet! I’m hiring this woman from Italy, and she gets a lot of money. I don’t want to hear any more insults. I don’t want to hear any more hissing. Go ahead.” Then he looks down at a guy, and he says, “On account of this son of of a bitch I’ve gotta insult every bastard in the audience.” I was on the bill!
And when I played in London, they had a place called the London Shortage—tougher than the Bowery, the old Bowery of New York. Never was anything tougher. And you know, in England they say anything. Four-letter words don’t mean anything. There were seventeen acts on the bill, and we were fourteenth—Jessel and Edwards, Two Patches from the Crazy Quilt. That was our billing. We were awful. I said, “Fourteenth? Christ, it’ll be twelve o’clock!”
But the acts took about two minutes. The master of ceremonies would say, “And now, Sandy MacDonald from Glasgow,” and he would come onstage and sing, “I’m a laddie…” and they hollered, “Piss off! Go on, piss off!” Then this cockney Englishman came out with the derby over his head and sang. He was lousy. Then he put a bandana around his neck and he sang, “My name is Woppo, I own the barber shoppo. Oh, I takes a stiletto, and eats my spaghetto.” They hollered, “Piss off!” but he wouldn’t get off. He said, “Ladies and gentlemen, I was sent here to entertain you, and I’ll do the fuck what I was sent for with a bottle.”
Then I came on with my partner. We did some chatter, which was lousy, and I went into a song called “Nathan, Nathan, Tell Me for Vy You Are Vaitin’,” and they liked that. We started to talk again, and they yelled, “Never mind that, lad. Give us a bit more ‘Nathan.’” I sang about six choruses, and we were held over.
BILLY
I traveled with Chico and my dad through the vaudeville circuit of the British Islands. London Palladium, 1948.
GROUCHO
I was only a boy then.
BILLY
A mere lad. And I remember Chico and Mary. You remember Mary.
GROUCHO
It’s right near Christmas.
GEORGE JESSEL
She was Chico’s second wife. My first wife, you knew. Not as well as your brother Chico knew her. But you knew her.
GROUCHO
Chico was laying her.
GEORGE JESSEL
Not while I was married to her!
GROUCHO
Chico even tried to lay me.
GEORGE JESSEL
Oh, sure! Chico didn’t button his fly until he was over seventy.
GROUCHO
Chico had everybody’s wife.
BILLY
Chico, I have to tell you, I didn’t know anywhere as near as well as Groucho. He was “Uncle Chico.” But I always had the feeling that nobody could say anything bad about Chico. Nobody could.
GROUCHO
Except his wife.
BILLY
Except his wife. Chico was a loner, really. That’s the feeling I got. Was he a loner, Groucho?
GROUCHO
He always was. Even when we were kids. He never played with us. He went over to the next block, Ninety-fourth Street, and had a crap game.
BILLY
Did he have family ties? I mean, did he always come back to the family?
GROUCHO
Yes. In one show he was laying twelve chorus girls. There were twenty-four. He was very busy.
I
(To Billy) You made a trip with your father and Chico…
BILLY
Well, according to my dad, that’s kind of how vaudeville really was. We traveled up and down the British Isles in 1948, and we had the juggler, we had the roller-skating duos who were man and wife that would do all kinds of feats of magic on roller skates. We had the animal act. We had a magician.
GROUCHO
Swayne’s Rats and Cats was the best animal act I ever saw.
GEORGE JESSEL
I played with Swayne’s Ra
ts and Cats. They were a very hard act to get along with. They disliked Jews very much.
BILLY
We had one guy, which was not an animal act, who came out and sat in front of a set of drums and beat the hell out of the drums and would tell one-line jokes.
GROUCHO
Why? Was he angry?
BILLY
Apparently. He would tell one-line jokes, and that was his act. Dad would tell me that this was what vaudeville was all about, whether you got into Swayne’s Rats and Cats or Max Bacon. He was three hundred pounds and he would sit in front of a set of drums, and he would beat the hell out of the drums, then tell a one-line joke and hit the drums. I had a chance to travel with Dad and Chico, and see how life probably really was in the twenties.
I
What was their act like?
BILLY
They did the cutting of the cards, which Groucho recalls. It’s the card game from, I guess, Go West. They did an act where Dad paid Doc Rockwell royalties. Doc Rockwell was a comic…
GROUCHO
He was very funny.
GEORGE JESSEL
Doc Rockwell was the father of the fellow who was the head of the American Nazi party.
BILLY
Dad paid him for the rights to cut an opera singer’s skirt off. He did that for years. I think you’ll recall the act. He also dropped the knives. He did a whole bunch of stuff. And Chico played the piano and told some stories. They did about forty-five minutes of stuff that was pretty good. And my recollection was that I really knew something about vaudeville without having been in American vaudeville through that experience. I was really thrilled to be a part of that. I was fourteen years old. And, Groucho, I used to walk on the stage carrying Dad’s harp in an angel’s outfit. There was a sign on the back of my angel’s outfit saying “Eat at Joe’s” that lit up. That was my big fling with vaudeville.
GROUCHO
When Harpo died he willed his harp to Israel.
GEORGE JESSEL
Harpo was exactly what harp actually means: an angel.
GROUCHO
A nice man.
GEORGE JESSEL
I introduced him one time to someone, and I said, “You know, there’s a church in Brussels, and on top are all little cherubs. And they all look like Harpo Marx.” On the other hand, Al Jolson was not considered an angel. I buried him, without ever saying anything about him as a man—only about his accomplishments and his attack on audiences. A God-given thing, and something that he did unwittingly. He never realized that he changed the whole portrait of a Jew onstage. Before Jolson—you can ask Groucho—every guy who came on who looked like a Jew had a beard this long, an ill-fitting suit, and his opening line was something like, “We had a meeting of B’nai B’rith—three hundred of us—and one Irishman chased us out of the building.” And Jolson came, like a Georgian prince, on the stage and changed it all. All the beards came off, most of us blacked up…
BILLY
That may be his greatest contribution.
GEORGE JESSEL
He didn’t realize it. That reminds me of the funniest thing W. C. Fields ever said. We were in a saloon called the Seven Seas, and we had a group of guys who drank a great deal, including me—Spencer Tracy, Errol Flynn, Jack Barrymore, Bill Fields, and John Decker. We’d meet at about five-thirty every night. Fields was late, and when he came in growling, we asked, “Where you been?” “Ah, I was at Universal.” “You gonna make a picture there?” “No. Goddamn Jew Cliff Work. I can’t get along with him.” We said, “Cliff Work’s a Roman Catholic!” Fields said, “That’s the worst kind of Jew.”
GROUCHO
I was playing with W. C. Fields in Toledo, Ohio. He closed the show, and we were the added attraction. We had twenty-five people in our act, and he came out with boxes…
GEORGE JESSEL
Yeah, juggling.
GROUCHO
So, at the matinee, the audience was walking out of the theatre while he was on, because they had to get home to fix dinner for their husbands. He went to the manager and says, “I’m leaving. I’ve got rumpers on the carokers, and I can’t juggle anymore. So he left, took the train, and went to New York. I met him ten years later at a party he had for Ed Sullivan. And I said, “How are the rumpers on the carokers?” He says, “There wasn’t a goddamn thing wrong with me. I just didn’t want to follow you fellows.”
GEORGE JESSEL
Let me tell you about Fields. Fields was a complete phony. Fields was a juggler with cigar boxes. He juggled. Pool table business. And he played in Leeds, England, and his wife was with him. There were two English strong men acrobats on the bill, and one of them stole his wife.
GROUCHO
Did he bring her back?
GEORGE JESSEL
No, and after that he hated all Englishmen.
BILLY
I saw an act when I was working the London Palladium with Dad…
I
When you were an angel?
BILLY
When I was an angel, and the act was called Warren, Latona and Sparkes. It was the greatest acrobatic act I had ever seen in my life. I’d never seen anything like it. It was a comedy acrobatic act. Several years after, it played on Ed Sullivan’s show once or twice. But it opened with a guy in the box seats where the Queen would sit. I mean, way up in the air. And he would act as a drunk. He would stand up, and he would teeter on the edge, and he would fall onto the stage into the arms of the two guys he was heckling. It was one of my dad’s favorite acts.
I
How do you remember your father?
BILLY
Well, the best frame of reference I can give you is from Maxine Marx, who is Chico’s daughter. She once said, “I’ve never seen a man change in his lifestyle like Uncle Harpo. For the first forty-eight years of his life, he was an absolute lunatic. A nice man, but one who had the gall of anyone who ever lived in Gaul. He would do anything. There wasn’t anything he wouldn’t do. He was a madman.” But Dad did an about-face, as far as Maxine was concerned.
After my mother nailed him, he wound up in a world of his own, like a dream that he never thought would be fulfilled. From the East Side of New York to Beverly Hills, to a nice house that he built. He just advanced into a dream and lived there for the rest of his life—not in Beverly Hills or Palm Springs, but in that dream.
His life was fulfilled at the time he got married, and all he wanted to do was have a family and revolve around that family. It was like he was a child reborn into another family. He was not a father—he was going through his second childhood. As I knew him, I became his father, and I suppose I project a lot of feelings for Groucho because of that. I wound up being his father and looking after him, sweating bullets for every performance, and working with him. I wound up doing all of his harp arrangements.
We had a very interesting life together. We played golf together, we’d go to the ball games together. And I always felt that he was a fragile man at that time. He needed reassurance and confidence because he’d had a couple of heart attacks, and he just wanted to know that there was a family and caring. He was fifty years older than I am. I was about fourteen or fifteen years old when I really recognized the meaning of the relationship to a human being like him, and I started looking after him. Even before that, when I was twelve, I started to.
He had his own world, and we all revolved around it. We all loved him. There was nothing to not like about him. He was a genuinely lovely man who was able to take a situation like George Wallace, states’ rights, and the federal government’s position, and say, while he was sitting in his sickbed, “George Wallace is right. The federal government is right. Which is more right for more of the people? The federal government!” He would strip everything of bullshit. That was his opinion, and it was based upon getting to the core of something, and not saying somebody’s wrong or they’re full of shit or any of that. He would recognize the right on everybody’s side, and say, “What will subsequently be better for more p
eople?” That was his great charm, his great feeling for humanity.
But he was a cynic, because he never really felt that anything would be accomplished by anything other than bloodshed, as he watched the Rochester riots from Mount Sinai Hospital. My dad did die a cynic. He did not really believe that mankind really had a bead on what was going on. But he was able to express himself and eliminate the clothes and get down to the naked body. That was the thing he kept.
Once he told me, “You know, I’m the luckiest man in the world. If I didn’t have four brothers to help me fight my way through what we all had to go through, I’d never have made it.” He said, “I have the greatest empathy for the stand-up comic that gets out there in front of an audience, all by himself, and the first joke he tells, nobody laughs. That’s tough.” Even a burlesque comic he would root for. As far as saying anything about his particular career, he said, “I’m a lucky man. I got other people to play off of, to fight my battles for me.” Chico fought his battles, and he fought Chico’s battles. They looked very much alike.
I
To which of his brothers do you think he was closest?
BILLY
Well, I would have to say in his early years Chico, because they looked so much alike, and they complemented each other. I don’t think he had any feeling that he was closer to any one of them, except maybe toward his later years I think he felt more empathy toward Gummo, only because of Gummo’s approach toward family. But I think Dad was probably closer to Groucho intellectually. I wouldn’t know exactly what to call it, maybe ego need. Dad did not appear on the surface to be an egoist. But in the final analysis, he loved performing. He would come out of retirement to play a benefit for the Riverside Symphony Orchestra.
I
What is your first memory of Groucho?
BILLY
My first memory of Groucho was where all five Marx Brothers were together at Dad’s, and Zeppo was telling some vaudeville stories. And my first recollection of Groucho, truthfully, was of him almost on the floor with laughter. (To Groucho) You were laughing, and tears were coming down your face. Zep was telling stories about how he was the other half of some kind of horse that fell into the orchestra pit. I remember this very well…
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