George S. Kaufman, who found Dumont for the Marxes, wrote of her in his autobiography:
I strongly suspect that she was convinced that great ladies weren’t expected to have great intellects, and she responded accordingly … No one could have been a showgirl for as many years as she was without acquiring at least a modicum of street savvy. If my theory is correct, then she should be lauded for the longest running performance in show business history, for she never slipped from her character until her death.
In l972 Groucho’s controversial young late-life companion, Erin Fleming, interviewed him for Vogue. “You never use the word ‘lady,’” she observed.
“You’re damn right,” he replied. “I hate that word. What is a ‘lady’ supposed to be anyway? Some broad with white gloves on that you can’t even approach?”
Let us stipulate right away that Groucho in real life was no boon to women. Zeppo said Groucho tended to go for women who weren’t very smart and then to make cruel fun of them for not being very smart. But Groucho, and American culture in general, had reason to resist the concept of lady, especially with white gloves on. Marcia Davenport, novelist and daughter of the classical vocalist Alma Gluck, wrote in her memoir, Too Strong for Fantasy, of taking her mother to see The Cocoanuts on stage in Philadelphia:
In the lobby amongst the incoming crowd were several of my grande dame friends who were plainly very pleased to meet my mother. Some of them sat in the row behind us and we chatted until the show began. It was a riot—and Philadelphia sat on its hands. We were fuming. The boys worked hard. The audience was a dud. Groucho in desperation came down to the footlights and began a wild, zany soliloquy which elsewhere would have had the audience howling. Nothing here. He scanned the house, looking for something, anything, to which he could pin a gag. Suddenly his face lit up, he went down on one knee like Al Jolson, arms outstretched, and shouted, “Oy! Alma Gluck!”
We could feel the freeze from the ladies behind us.
After Dumont announced her retirement, Chico’s daughter, Maxine, who remembered her fondly, called her up, and they met for lunch. (You can get a sense of Chico’s charm from the fact that his daughter seems to be the sort of person who remembers everyone fondly. She says “Uncle Groucho” gave her “unconditional love.”) Dumont showed up in long gloves and with a lorgnette. “The boys,” she said in that voice, “ruined my career.” Nobody would take her seriously as an actress. “People always thought they saw Groucho peering from behind my skirt.”
As proof that Dumont was not in on the jokes,* Groucho often cited her reaction to a line in the Duck Soup finale: “We’re alone in a small cottage and there’s a war going on outside and Margaret says to me, ‘What are you doing, Rufus?’ And I say, ‘I’m fighting for your honor, which is probably more than you ever did.’ Later she asked me what I meant by that.”
It’s neither a foolish nor necessarily a humorless question. When Dumont was out of work, Groucho tried to get friends to hire her—stressing, in his letters to them, her need and abject availability rather than her talent. Two weeks before she died of a stroke in l965, at eighty-three, she appeared as a special guest on the television variety show Hollywood Palace, hosted that week by Groucho. They did the “Hurray for Captain Spaulding” number. “After the show,” Groucho recalled, “she stood by the stage door with a bouquet of roses, which she probably sent herself. She was waiting to be picked up. A few minutes later some guy came along in a crummy car and took her away. She was always a lady, a wonderful person. Died without any money.”
Among the young people dancing attendance on Groucho in the Hollywood Palace number (see YouTube), Dumont looks game but a little bit lost. Groucho says, “Sing it, Margie!” at one point, but he’s not connecting. He steps on a couple of her lines while accusing her of stepping on his. Couldn’t he have sent her some roses?
Back to Freedonia. Enter Trentino. Mrs. T introduces him to Firefly, who tries to borrow $20 million from him, okay, then, how about twelve dollars till payday, insults him, drives him away. Next introduction is to Vera Marcal. Firefly lurches right past her (a quick flash of his signature upper-body-forward walk, which caused Oscar Levant to say, “I wouldn’t stoop so high”),* looking for someone who answers, to his satisfaction, the description of “a very charming lady.” Even when Mrs. T directs his attention to Vera, he hardly looks at her, but instead tries to impress her with dance moves. These moves are somewhat less supple and droll than the ones he shows off at a similar moment in Animal Crackers, but they are more than supple and droll enough for the stiffs at this reception.
The “till-the-cows-come-home” joke with which he drives Vera away is more confusing than insulting, but Firefly doesn’t care. He demands to know where his secretary is, and right on the beat there is Zeppo behind him, startling him into one of his patented, quick-as-a-hiccup, panicky scrambles. We think of Groucho as the verbal Marx, but within the range of his character he is as fine a physical comedian as Harpo.
The take-a-letter joke (in which some commentators have detected another Identity Issue), he’s playing air-hopscotch as Mrs. T tells him the eyes of the world are upon him, and from there we swing into the admirably fluid intricacy of the next musical number. Groucho plays “Dixie” on a flute while holding on to his cigar. He conducts with a flourish or two the chorus of absurdly caparisoned guests of all nations, among whom he weaves himself with aplomb. And he lays out the goals of his administration. This being the land of the free, he will oppose exhibitions of pleasure (shades of Woody Allen’s invocations of “anhedonia”), but primarily he will be corrupt. (There’s a nice frown-to-smile-of-relief reaction from a bulky, white-haired man wearing a sash as Firefly first comes out against graft and then makes it clear that he means graft he doesn’t get a taste of.) And he will be, avowedly, even more ruinous than his predecessor.
This sort of thing (let alone the forthcoming court scene, and the musical number that saved the Woody Allen character’s life) would not have been exhibitable one year later, when the Hollywood Production Code—drafted by a Jesuit priest and a Catholic layman—began to be strictly enforced by the Irish-American Joseph Breen. The Code forbade moral relativism and disrespect for social order. So much for the Marx Brothers at their most intense.
In Freedonia in 1933, however, amorality goes down well. You’ll notice the international crowd singing along heartily enough as Firefly winds up standing next to a footman in knee breeches, with his own pants up in solidarity. The Groucho walk was well suited to rolling up one’s pants in motion.*
There is a limit to Mrs. T’s tolerance: “Good heavens!”
May we pause just a moment to regret the loss to high comedy of expressions like “Good heavens!” and Trentino’s forthcoming “Gentlemen, please!” Contemporary substitutes like “Holy shit!” and “Stop acting like such assholes!” lack elegance.
“You cahn’t go” to meet with the House of Representatives (evidently a higher-toned one than the American one today) “with your trousahs up!” Mrs. T exclaims in horror.
Any of us could have written Groucho’s rejoinder. But who among us, with pants up or down, while singing “ah-a-a-a-ah,” and then, still, while being reproached for disorderly attire, could look so fetchingly like a cynical baby bird?
Enter Harpo, finally, after twelve and a half minutes. Not my favorite Harpo entrance.† Pinky is his character’s name, a change from Brownie and from Skippy. Note that he surreptitiously establishes himself as a spy by taking a snapshot of Firefly and scrawling some notes. When Firefly (back in the dark coat, with shirttail out) says, “Step on it,” they do the driving-off-and-leaving-the-sidecar bit, which is from the original treatment.
This is one of the few bits in Duck Soup that would have been hard to do, and probably ineffective, onstage. Horse Feathers has a canoe scene and a football game. Duck Soup is almost all indoors. Yet Duck Soup flows more cinematically than the previous Marx films. How did it get that way?
No one knows
how many drafts there were of the Kalmar-Ruby script. At www.marx-brothers.org/marxology/, you can find a scanned copy of their original treatment, dated December l932, with one of the tentative titles, “Firecrackers,” crossed out and replaced by “Cracked Ice.” You can also find online an expansion of that treatment in the form of the “Second Temporary Script” of “Cracked Ice,” dated January 18, 1933, and credited to Kalmar and Ruby and also to one Grover Jones, a veteran journeyman screenwriter who had contributed to Lubitsch’s great Trouble in Paradise, adapted from the stage, and in l936 would do some work for McCarey on The Milky Way. This is the last we hear, in connection with Duck Soup, of Grover Jones.
There’s something naked about a movie script. I have written a few of them, and every time I turned one of them in, the feeling came upon me that I had dug up one of those drawings of cool spaceships I did in grade school and presented it to NASA. Or that I had proposed to put into the mouth of a mother superior words of love that would never pass the lips of a common whore, or vice versa. At best, a great deal of reification remained to be done. S. J. Perelman has left us a chilling account of reading aloud the first draft of the script of Monkey Business to a roomful of Marxes and Marx-related persons whose reactions ranged from scowls to naps to derision. We don’t know how the Kalmar-Ruby efforts were received, but we ourselves, having seen the movie, can wince when we read some of what they wrote: why in the world would anybody want that to be in Duck Soup? Part of me, literary chap that I am, would like to believe that filming corrupts a script, but I know that is wrong—certainly in this case. Duck Soup is a great deal more refined than “Cracked Ice.”
McCarey brought the principals—presumably the brothers, Kalmar, Ruby, Mankiewicz, Perrin, and Sheekman—to his Malibu beach house for gag plotting and rehearsal. Groucho, Chico, Perrin, and Sheekman were just back from New York, where they had collaborated on a radio series, Flywheel, Shyster, and Flywheel, about an unscrupulous lawyer and his Chico-ic assistant. Fifteen bits and routines in Duck Soup—including the line “Go, and never darken my towels again,” and Chicolini’s account to Trentino of shadowing Firefly—were lifted directly from episodes of the radio show. We don’t know what went on in that beach house.
We do know that the brothers had comedy in their bones. Kalmar and Ruby had a fine high facility for comic song. Mankiewicz and the gagmen were fonts of crazy patter. And McCarey knew how to set up low and high comedy for capture on film. Duck Soup derives energies and strategies from European busking (the brothers’ maternal grandparents were on the road in Germany as ventriloquist and harpist), operetta, vaudeville, Broadway, silent films, written humor of the New Yorker school, network radio, and early talkies. Another 1933 comedy from Paramount, W. C. Fields in International House, comprises many of these elements, as well as others:
Barleycornism.
Cab Calloway and band rendering “that funny funny funny ‘Reefer Man.’”
In the role of herself (Fields calls her “my little fuzzy wishwash”), Peggy Hopkins Joyce. She was a notorious glamour gal and gold digger whose favors Harpo thought he was about to enjoy one night, but she just wanted him to sprawl with her on a divan and read to her from comic books, which he did for hours, and then … she wanted him to read to her some more, this time from news clippings about herself. So he went home.
Exploitation of pre-Code leeway to the point of out-and-out anatomical jokes. Squeezed into the front seat of a car, Ms. Joyce keeps complaining that she is “sitting on something” (“I lost mine in the market,” says Fields), which turns out to be a cat.
Franklin Pangborn, and all that he implies.
Furthermore, the McGuffin of International House, a “radio-scope,” invented by the Doctor Wong character played by our own Edmund Breese, is … television. But this is a movie in which Rudy Vallee croons “Thank Heaven for You” to, as opposed to through, his megaphone. Baby Rose Marie stands on a piano singing “My Bluebird’s Singing the Blues.” International House is a hodgepodge, a gallimaufry, a fuzzy mishmash. Duck Soup is a seamless blend of just about every form of American comedy up to its time. Never had the whole history of American comedy been brought to such a head, and never would it be again.
Sylvania, ho! Looks quite a bit like Freedonia, only rockier maybe, and as to its rooftops, less pointy. Can’t these two homey-looking countries live in peace? Certainly not.
Enter Leonid Kinskey, as the frustrated “Sylvanian agitator.” Note the pamphlets stuffed into his pocket. He has not been able to start what Trentino calls “the revolution as planned.” Pamphlets? Plans? What use are such bagatelles in this movie?
In real life, Kinskey was no Red, nor was he feckless. According to imdb.com, he was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, in l903. After the revolution he left the homeland and traveled through Europe and Latin America, picking up acting jobs along the way, before reaching the United States and, in l932, appearing as a bit-part radical in Trouble in Paradise. After Duck Soup he played a snake charmer in Lives of a Bengal Lancer, an Arab in The Garden of Allah, Pierre in That Night in Rio, Professor Quintana in Ball of Fire, and most notably Sascha, the engaging bartender, in Casablanca. When Rick enables the young couple to win at roulette so that they can pay for exit visas, Sascha kisses him on both cheeks and says, “You have done a beautiful thing!”
RICK: Get outa here, you crazy Russian.
Kinskey took that part away from Leo Mostovoy, another Russian émigré, as a result of becoming Bogart’s drinking buddy during filming. In Rhythm on the Range, he and Bing Crosby introduced the song “I’m an Old Cowhand (from the Rio Grande).” He could have had a steady TV gig in Hogan’s Heroes, but after appearing in the pilot as one of the heroes in the World War II prison camp, he withdrew from the series, saying, “The premise to me was both false and offensive. The Nazis were seldom dumb and never funny.” He did a lot of other TV work, and died at ninety-five in Arizona.
Harpo, by the way, went to Russia, alone, right after the filming of Duck Soup. His friend and fellow “ardent New Dealer,” the preposterous but influential New York Times drama critic Alexander Woollcott, had arranged the trip as a venture in cultural exchange: how could a Marx not be embraced by the Communists? On the way to Russia, Harpo had “planned to sort of mosey through Germany and see the sights. I did not mosey, however.”
Hitler had been in power for six months. Duck Soup, said Harpo, was his most difficult movie, and the only one in which he worried about his performance. Not because of the director or the script. “The trouble was Adolph Hitler.” American radio was broadcasting Hitler’s speeches, and “twice we suspended shooting to listen to him scream.”
In Hamburg, Harpo “saw the most frightening, most depressing sight I had ever seen—a row of stores with Stars of David and the word Jude painted on them, and inside, behind half-empty counters, people in a daze, cringing like they didn’t know what hit them and didn’t know where the next blow was coming from.” But then, Harpo was no great thinker. At about this same time the greatest philosopher of the age, Martin Heidegger, was reacting differently to the rise of Fascism: he joined the Nazi Party, became rector of Freiberg University, and saw to it that all Jewish professors were sacked.
Russia was also intimidating, but eventually Harpo wowed Russian audiences with evenings of shtick; when Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov came onstage one night and shook hands with Harpo, a stream of silverware poured from Litvinov’s sleeve. This was an old trick of Harpo’s, the point being that Harpo’s character had stolen everything he could get ahold of in some fancy mansion to which he had unaccountably been invited, so it is hard to say exactly why it played so well when Stalin’s number two pulled it in l933 Moscow, but it did—it killed.
Karl Marx, it must be said, had more in common with Harpo, or McCarey, than with the hangdog provocateur played by Kinskey in Duck Soup. According to Francis Wheen’s biography of him, Marx and his friends Edgar Bauer and Wilhelm Liebknecht once, after having a number of beers in a serie
s of London pubs, accosted a group of quiet diners and informed them that “snobbish, cant-ridden England was fit only for philistines.” And then ran, and started breaking streetlamps by throwing paving stones. They attracted the attention of police. “Marx,” recalled Liebknecht, “showed an agility I should not have attributed to him.” The three made several quick turns and came up behind the police who were pursuing them.
Edmund Wilson called Marx “the greatest ironist since Swift.” As a student, Marx wrote verse mocking Hegel’s opaqueness:
He understands what he thinks, freely invents what he feels. Thus, each may for himself suck wisdom’s nourishing nectar;
Now you know all, since I’ve said plenty of nothing to you!
If I knew more about Marxism, I might make an argument that the brothers in Duck Soup are a kind of flip-side Karl, seizing the means of counterproduction in order to make money. I don’t know much about capitalism either, but I’ll say this: the Marxes’ fine abandon diminished as Hollywood figured out how to capitalize on them financially. They played it safer, and their movies, at least after A Night at the Opera, became more lucrative and less free.
Hail, Hail, Euphoria!: Presenting the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup, the Greatest War Movie Ever Made Page 6
