Groucho Marx

As the Marx Brothers, Groucho, Harpo, and Chico (with a Zeppo here and a Gummo there) would rise to the top in vaudeville and conquer Broadway with three musical comedy smashes in a row, I’ll Say She Is!, Cocoanuts, and Animal Crackers.

Then they became the most acclaimed and popular comedians in the new talking pictures, a medium made for their warp-speed wisecracks and wordplay seasoned with music and old-school slapstick. In time, the act got old and the brothers went cold, and only Groucho rose again to star in television, as the host of the long-running quiz show, You Bet Your Life.

Whatever the medium, the Marx Brothers were big box office. But their mob appeal was matched by their snob appeal in a way that has few parallels in the history of American comedy. Some of the greatest names in American humor were Marx Brothers gagmen. After declaring, “I’d rather write for the Barbary apes,” the legendary playwright George S. Kaufman — author of Dinner at Eight, Stage Door, and You Can’t Take It with You — conceived and co-wrote the stage plays for Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers (though apes might have shown greater respect for his scripts than the Marx Brothers ever managed: Pacing the back of the theater during a Cocoanuts rehearsal, Kaufman remarked, “I may be wrong, but I think I just heard one of the original lines”).

One of the century’s great literary humorists, S. J. Perelman, co-wrote two early Marx Brothers classics, Monkey Business and Horse Feathers. Harpo Marx, who could barely spell, became a regular at the Algonquin Round Table, under the aegis of Alexander Woolcott. T. S. Eliot particularly admired Groucho. Other fans included Graham Greene, Somerset Maugham, George Bernard Shaw, Antonin Artaud, Salvador Dali, and Winston Churchill. What other American comedians enjoyed this kind of dual appeal to mass public and intelligentsia alike? Charlie Chaplin, certainly. And maybe Woody Allen for a short time in the 1970s.

Beginning in 1929, the Marx Brothers made five films for Paramount, the relaxed studio that was home to the best comedy talent, including W. C. Fields and Mae West. Starting in 1929 with the first feature-length musical shot in America (with songs by Irving Berlin), the Marxes made four hits in a row: Cocoanuts (1929), Animal Crackers (1930), Monkey Business (1931), and Horse Feathers (1932). So successful were their first two features that after Animal Crackers (adapted from their stage show), they negotiated the first “participation” contract in Hollywood history.

Under its terms, the brothers (Zeppo was still part of the act) received $ 200,000 per picture plus 50 percent of the profits — and this in the teeth of the Depression. “Everything’s coming up grosses,” Groucho cracked. With the opening of Horse Feathers in the summer of 1932, they landed on the cover of Time magazine.

Duck Soup, released in 1933, was directed by the gifted comedy director Leo McCarey, a pioneer of silent comedy and later of the screwball genre. Now widely regarded as one of their best movies, the political farce (in which Groucho is installed by perennial foil Margaret Dumont as the president of mythical Freedonia) flopped badly on release. Exhibitors and trade papers began pronouncing the Marx Brothers “washed up.”

An incongruous white knight arrived in the person of Irving Thalberg, MGM’s whiz-kid producer, famed for such prestige dramas and literary adaptations as Ben-Hur, Anna Christie, The Good Earth, and The Barretts of Wimpole Street. After being approached by his bridge partner Chico Marx (an inveterate gambler and one of the best bridge players in the country), Thalberg told the brothers he wanted to make movies with them — his way. Their previous films, he explained, “weren’t movies, they weren’t about anything.” Harpo protested that Duck Soup was as funny as any comedy ever filmed. “That’s true . . . but you don’t need that many laughs in a movie,” Thalberg replied. “I’ll make a picture with you fellows with half as many laughs — but I’ll put a legitimate story in it, and I’ll bet it will gross twice as much as Duck Soup.”

Part of the reason for the Marx Brothers’ box-office success was repeat business. Because their jokes came so fast (more than a hundred in Monkey Business), many were drowned in the spillover laughter from preceding jokes and moviegoers would see each movie several times, to catch what they had previously missed. But when the repeat business tailed off with Duck Soup, a big weakness in their appeal was exposed: Women found them “grotesque” and “unsympathetic.”

In an attempt to restore their box-office appeal, Thalberg slowed them down and sweetened them up in A Night at the Opera, their first MGM comedy. Here, the jokes are given breathing room, lavish musical production numbers are added, and the brothers are enlisted as romantic enablers who try to bring together thwarted lovers played by Allan Jones and a young Kitty Carlisle in a romantic subplot to which much screen time is devoted.

Grossing $ 5 million, A Night at the Opera vindicated Thalberg’s commercial bet. His comedic instincts were less sure. While Groucho’s novelty numbers and Chico’s playful “shooting” of the piano keys had long been important ingredients in the brothers’ act, straight-faced sentimental songs were inevitably overwhelmed by the surrounding mayhem. Irving Berlin learned this on Cocoanuts and declined to participate in further Marx Brothers’ comedies, despite his admiration for them.

The spacing out of jokes and elaboration of the romantic story line only throttled the breakneck pacing central to the Marx Brothers’ comic style. One of the funniest things about them in their early comedies is that they seem unable to stop being funny even for a moment. And who watches a Marx Brothers movie for a love story? For all its high-kicking chorus lines and lustrous MGM production values, the movie’s best moments are provided by the famous crowded-stateroom scene.

In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon, the protagonist Monroe Stahr, modeled on Thalberg, is asked by a visitor how artistic unity is achieved in a system where relays of writers work on scripts and directors are excluded from dailies. “I am the unity,” he answers. A Day at the Races, the brothers’ next MGM film, was an attempt to duplicate Thalberg’s formula without Thalberg, who died before shooting began (he caught a cold after draping his jacket over the shoulders of Chico’s wife Betty one cool evening and the cold turned into pneumonia). Without his hand on the tiller, many of the faults previewed in the still stylish and witty A Night at the Opera were exacerbated. A Day at the Races was another big profit-maker, making $ 5 million back on a $ 1 million investment (W. C. Fields comedies of the time typically made $ 1.5 million on the same $ 1 million cost). But it represented a further decline from its predecessor.

After this, the Brothers went on loan to RKO for Room Service, which lost the studio a bundle, and then returned to an indifferent MGM to make a series of turkeys — At the Circus, Go West, The Big Store. Finally, in 1941, the Marx Brothers called it a day in the motion picture business.

Bumping through the dying years of vaudeville, taking flight on Broadway in its heyday, and reaching their zenith in Hollywood during the infancy of the talkies, Groucho and his brothers made a remarkable tour through American entertainment. And Stefan Kanfer’s new Groucho: The Life and Times of Julius Henry Marx is a richly detailed and mostly balanced account — when it stays inside its story. Unfortunately, Kanfer seems to lack conviction in mere narrative and tries to reach beyond it for embarrassingly clumsy historicist interpretations of the Marx Brothers’ fortunes.

Kanfer explains their early movie successes, for example, in terms of a national mood swing from the complacency of the 1920s to the pessimism of the 1930s. Arguing that “the Depression would be the making of [Groucho] . . . because it changed his audience,” Kanfer explains, “Despite the customary jeering of the avant-garde and the expatriate Lost Generation, the mass of Americans still respected their national institutions [in the 1920s]. . . . The government, the military, the university, society, commerce — all the national bulwarks commanded respect, however grudging, until late in the decade.”

But then came the crash — and “The Establishment on Pennsylvania Avenue, Wall Street, and Main Street was no longer to be trusted. Such sweet, soft-edged comedians as Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton would have a harder time in this era; aggressive, impertinent personalities like W. C. Fields, Mae West and the Marx Brothers — Groucho in particular — would flourish by assaulting the powerful, anytime, anywhere.”

Even in trained hands, social determinist criticism of this kind obscures more than it reveals, and Kanfer’s hands are not skilled. For starters, Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton disappeared from the screen in the 1930s mainly because they were physical comedians quite unprepared for the sudden rise of the talkies. Depression audiences hadn’t outgrown “sweet, soft-edged” performers — the era’s most popular screen attraction was Shirley Temple.

Moreover, if the Marx Brothers’ aggression and impertinence appealed to disillusioned 1930s audiences, it had also appealed to naively optimistic 1920s audiences. As Kanfer’s own narrative makes clear, the Marx Brothers were big stars before they ever appeared on screen. They so convulsed vaudeville audiences, according to Kanfer, that the biggest names in the business dreaded following them. “Never saw so much nepotism or such hilarious laughter in one act in my life,” W. C. Fields wrote in his memoirs. “The only act I could never follow.” The brothers’ first Broadway musical, I’ll Say She Is!, ran for 304 performances after its 1923 opening and made a 1,000 percent profit. And it wasn’t just Gotham sophisticates who liked the act: The touring show was very profitable, too.

The inexactness of Kanfer’s historical determinism is further exposed when one tries to explain the failure of Duck Soup. At least as aggressive and impertinent as its predecessors, it bombed in 1933. According to Kanfer, the movie industry decided that the film had failed because the brothers’ irreverent comic anarchy was out of step with the time’s grim collective stand against economic catastrophe. Kanfer can’t quite explain how the Marx Brothers’ impertinence could be both uniquely concordant and uniquely discordant with the national temper in the Depression.

There is something else left unexplained by the Depression argument: Why do the early Marx Brothers’ comedies remain so funny today, a life-time removed from the Great Depression? In the 1970s the Marx Brothers, especially Groucho, were dusted off and celebrated as the favorite comic anti-heroes of a new generation of anti-authoritarian young fans and socially conscious comics like Woody Allen, Dick Cavett, David Steinberg, and Robert Klein.

Young viewers of You Bet Your Life in syndication liked to think of Groucho “as the Don Quixote of comedians, a battered, honorable figure in perpetual opposition to the Establishment,” writes Kanfer.

Kanfer strains at times to justify the Marx Brothers’ comedy in terms of his own, much later time. “Alone among their peers, they had achieved their star status without compromise,” he writes. “From the palmy days of I’ll Say She Is! to . . . Monkey Business, their object was to scrawl graffiti on the walls of national institutions.”

Though this form of recognition may be well intentioned, it hardly adds to our sense of Groucho’s achievement to say, for example, that without Groucho, there would have been no Richard Belzer. While pious historians of pop culture hold that unbending iconoclasts of the type best exemplified by Lenny Bruce refused compromise with censors and commercial sponsors, the truth is that they refused compromise with their audiences. Bruce would batter audiences with unhinged and infrequently funny monologues about his legal troubles. Audiences, in a sense, auditioned. Comics sat in judgment.

That the Marx Brothers weren’t this type of comedians is shown by Kanfer’s own account of their long and grueling apprenticeship. For many years they performed thirty shows a week (four shows a day five days a week, five shows the other two days), testing their jokes, their comic personae, and their stage business against the standard of audience reaction and ceaselessly refining their act accordingly. From their earliest days as a team, the brothers proceeded by trial and error, keeping successful experiments and discarding unsuccessful ones.

As Kanfer records, the most characteristic features of the act often developed gradually. Like Groucho’s famous lope: “I was just kidding around one day and started to walk funny,” Groucho recalled. “The audience liked it, so I kept it in. I would try a line and leave it in too if it got a laugh. If it didn’t, I’d take it out and put in another. Pretty soon I had a character.”

Harpo’s speaking lines in the act had been reduced to three in a revamping of the act by their famous uncle, Al Shean. After a critic in the Champagne-Urbana paper complained that the effect of his pantomime “is spoiled when he speaks,” he dropped his remaining lines and never spoke again on stage.

Sometimes they compromised to a fault, as when they anglicized jokes for British audiences in London during an early 1920s tour. In its original version one joke went: “The garbageman’s outside.” “Tell him we don’t want any — who needs garbage?” In its unfortunate anglicized form it went: “The dustman’s outside.” “Tell him we don’t want any — who needs dust?”

They would go right on market-testing their material during their movie careers. Thalberg had them try out scenes from A Night at the Opera in front of live audiences, a practice they would continue off and on through later pictures. They would even have their parts performed by other actors, to make sure that it was the material getting the laughs.

Sometimes their obsessive attention to the fine details of what made audiences laugh was itself funny. A Marx Brothers publicist, Teet Carle, remembered the live tryouts of scenes from A Day at the Races. In the Tootsie-Frootsie ice cream sketch, Chico tries to sell Groucho a discounted book. “One dollar and you remember me all your life,” says Chico. “That’s the most nauseating proposition I ever had,” answers Groucho. “Among other words tried out were obnoxious, revolting, disgusting, offensive, repulsive, disagreeable, and distasteful,” according to Carle. “The last two of these words never got more than titters. The others elicited various degrees of ha-has. But nauseating drew roars.”

The Marx Brothers belonged to a time before comedy was good for you. They were blessed with talent, a driven mother, and an experienced mentor in the family. They worked hard, and they trusted their audiences. Although they had in Harpo one of America’s great comic mimes, they specialized in verbal comedy. In the silent era of cream pies and pratfalls, many of their more acrobatic peers from vaudeville made it in Hollywood, while the Marxes stayed in the theater. But when sound arrived, so did they.

The complicated causes for the rise of a successful popular entertainer are a tangle best apprehended by the microsurgical tools of biography. That’s why Stefan Kanfer’s biography of Groucho is a good one, and why it would have been better if it had avoided the super-imposition of unconvincing reductionist drivel on its marvelous backstage saga. Social forces don’t kill audiences. Good comedians do.

 

Groucho

The Life and Times of Julius Henry Marx

by Stefan Kanfer Knopf, 465 pp., $ 30

A writer in Washington, D.C., Daniel Wattenberg last wrote for THE WEEKLY STANDARD on the films of Billy Wilder.