Groucho Marx
WATTENBERG, DANIEL
Groucho Marx The Hard Work of Making It Look Easy BY DANIEL WATTENBERG Growing up in Manhattan in the early years of the twentieth century, the bookish and introverted Julius Henry Marx dreamed...
...Bruce would batter audiences with unhinged and infrequently funny monologues about his legal troubles...
...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...
...They worked hard, and they trusted their audiences...
...Eliot particI ularly admired Groucho...
...But then came the crash—and "The Establishment on Pennsylvania Avenue, Wall Street, and Main Street was no longer to be trusted...
...Starting in 1929 with the first feature-^^^ length musical shot in ¦fc 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...
...Minnie Marx drove all five of her boys—Leonard, Adolph, Julius, Herbert, and Milton— into show business...
...to...
...Alone among their peers, they had achieved their star status without compromise," he writes...
...Without his hand on the tiller, many of the faults previewed in the still stylish and witty A Night at the Opera were exacerbated...
...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...
...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...
...And maybe ¦ Woody Allen for a short time in H the 1970s...
...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...
...Is it necessary to inquire any further into how he developed a sense of A humor...
...With the opening of Horse Feathers in the summer of 1932, they landed on the cover of Time magazine...
...His comedic instincts were less sure...
...Sometimes their obsessive attention to the fine details of what made audiences laugh was itself funny...
...And who watches a Marx Brothers movie for a love story...
...After declaring, "I'd rather write for the Barbary apes," the legendary playwright George S. Kauf-i man—author of Dinner at Eight, B^^ Stage Door, and You Can't Take It ^^^ with You—conceived and co-wrote the stage plays for B Cocoanuts and Animal Cracker ers (though apes might have ^^ shown greater respect for his scripts than the Marx Brothers V 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...
...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...
...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...
...But when the repeat business tailed off with Duck Soup, a big weakness in their appeal was exposed: Women found them "grotesque" and "unsympathetic...
...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...
...The audience liked it, so I kept it in...
...Although they had in Harpo one of America's great comic mimes, they specialized in verbal 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...
...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...
...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...
...Perelman, co-wrote two early Marx Brothers classics, Monkey Business and Horse Feathers...
...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...
...As Kanfer's own narrative makes clear, the Marx Brothers were big stars before they ever appeared on screen...
...One of the century's great literary humorists, S.J...
...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...
...The complicated causes for the rise of a successful popular entertainer are a tangle best apprehended by the micro-surgical 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 superimposition of unconvincing reductionist drivel on its marvelous backstage saga...
...Fields, Mae West and the Marx Brothers— Groucho in particular—would flourish by assaulting the powerful, anytime, anywhere...
...But when sound arrived, so did they...
...That the Marx Brothers weren't this type of comedians is shown by Kan-fer's own account of their long and grueling apprenticeship...
...And it wasn't just Gotham sophisticates who liked the act: The touring show was very profitable, too...
...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 person-ae, and their stage business against the standard of audience reaction and ceaselessly refining their act accordingly...
...Social forces don't kill audiences...
...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...
...Some of the greatest names in American humor were Marx Brothers gagmen...
...Depression audiences hadn't outgrown "sweet, soft-edged" performers—the era's most popular screen attraction was Shirley Temple...
...Everything's coming up grosses," Groucho cracked...
...Tell him we don't want any—who needs dust...
...Fields comedies of the time typically made $1.5 million on the same $1 million cost...
...From their earliest days as a team, the brothers proceeded by trial and error, keeping successful experiments and discarding unsuccessful ones...
...Irving Berlin learned this on Cocoanuts and declined to participate in further Marx Brothers' comedies, despite his admiration for them...
...The last two of these words never got more than titters...
...Good comedians do...
...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...
...But it represented a further decline from its predecessor...
...Charlie Chaplin, certainly...
...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...
...They would even have their parts performed by other actors, to make sure that it was the material getting the laughs...
...The spacing out of jokes and elaboration of the romantic story line only throttled the breakneck pacing central to the Marx Brothers' comic style...
...Such sweet, soft-edged comedians as Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton would have a harder time in this era...
...I would try a line and leave it in too if it got a laugh...
...The lure was her brother, A1 Shean, half of one of the most popular vaudeville musical comedy acts, Gallagher and Shean...
...What other American comedians enjoyed this kind of dual appeal to mass public and intelligentsia alike...
...They were blessed with talent, a driven mother, and an experienced mentor in the family...
...That's true . . . but you don't need that many laughs in a movie," Thalberg replied...
...Yes, to please his Jewish mother, Groucho Marx did not become a doctor...
...aggressive, impertinent personalities like W.C...
...Young viewers of You Bet Your Life in syndication liked to think of Grou-cho "as the Don Quixote of comedians, a battered, honorable figure in perpetual opposition to the Establishment," writes Kanfer...
...Harpo Marx, who could barely spell, became a regular at the Algonquin Round Table, under the aegis of Alexander Woolcott...
...Groucho Marx The Hard Work of Making It Look Easy BY DANIEL WATTENBERG Growing up in Manhattan in the early years of the twentieth century, the bookish and introverted Julius Henry Marx dreamed of becoming a doctor...
...One of the funniest things about them in their early comedies is that they seem unable to stop being funny even for a moment...
...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...
...That's the most nauseating proposition I ever had," answers Groucho...
...The spur was her husband, Simon, whose small tailoring business teetered perpetually on the edge of failure...
...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, III Say She Is!, Cocoanuts, and Animal Crackers...
...They so convulsed vaudeville audiences, according to Kanfer, that the biggest names in the business dreaded following them...
...Grossing $5 million, A Night at the Opera vindicated Thalberg's commercial bet...
...They would go right on market-testing their material during their movie careers...
...A Day at the Races was another big profit-maker, making $5 million back on a $1 million investment (W.C...
...Sometimes they compromised to a fault, as when they anglicized jokes for British audiences in London during an early 1920s tour...
...The Marx Brothers belonged to a time before comedy was good for you...
...Fields wrote in his memoirs...
...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...
...The only act I could never follow...
...Comics sat in judgment...
...In the Tootsie-Frootsie ice cream sketch, Chico tries to sell Groucho a discounted book...
...Pretty soon I had a character...
...From the palmy days of Ill Say She Is...
...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...
...One dollar and you remember me all your life," says Chico...
...There is something else left unexplained by the Depression argument: Why do the early Marx Brothers' comedies remain so funny today, a lifetime removed from the Great Depression...
...Audiences, in a sense, auditioned...
...The others elicited various degrees of ha-has...
...In its original version one joke went: "The garbage-man's outside...
...But nauseating drew roars...
...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...
...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...
...Among other words tried out were obnoxious, revolting, disgusting, offensive, repulsive, disagreeable, and distasteful," according to Carle...
...A Marx Brothers publicist, Teet Carle, remembered the live tryouts of scenes from A Day at the Races...
...Their previous films, he explained, "weren't movies, they weren't about anything...
...Part of the reason for the Marx Brothers' box-office success was repeat business...
...I am the unity," he answers...
...Instead, he dropped out of school just before his bar mitzvah and went into show business, at the insistence of his mother...
...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...
...If it didn't, I'd take it out and put in another...
...Kanfer strains at times to justify the Marx Brothers' comedy in terms of his own, much later time...
...Even in trained hands, social determinist criticism of this kind obscures more than it reveals, and Kanfer's hands are not skilled...
...Tell him we don't want any—who needs garbage...
...their snob appeal in a way that has few parallels in the history of American comedy...
...Fields ^^ and Mae West...
...At least as aggressive and impertinent as its predecessors, it bombed in 1933...
...In its unfortunate anglicized form it went: "The dustman's outside...
...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 Grou-cho, there would have been no Richard Belzer...
...In an attempt to restore their boxoffice appeal, Thalberg slowed them down and sweetened them up in A Night at the Opera, their first MGM comedy...
...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...
...Harpo's speaking lines in the act had been reduced to three in a revamping of the act by their famous uncle, Al Shean...
...Whatever the medium, the Marx Brothers were big box office...
...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...
...Other fans included Graham Greene, Somerset B Maugham, George Bernard Shaw, Antonin Artaud, Salvador Dali, and Winston Churchill...
...But their mob appeal was matched by A writer in Washington, D.C., Daniel I Wattenberg last wrote for THE WEEKLY STANDARD on the films of Billy Wilder...
...Moreover, if the Marx Brothers' aggression and impertinence appealed to disillusioned 1930s audiences, it had also appealed to naively optimistic 1920s audiences...
...Finally, in 1941, the Marx Brothers called it a day in the motion picture business...
...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...
...The inexactness of Kanfer's historical determinism is further exposed when one tries to explain the failure of Duck Soup...
...The government, the military, the university, society, commerce—all the national bulwarks commanded respect, however grudging, until late in the decade...
...In the silent era of cream pies and pratfalls, many of their more acrobatic peers from vaudeville made it in Hollywood, while the Marx-es stayed in the theater...
...Never saw so much nepotism or such hilarious laughter in one act in my life," W.C...
...Like Groucho's famous lope: "I was just kidding around one day and started to walk funny," Groucho recalled...
...As Kanfer records, the most characteristic features of the act often developed gradually...
...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...
...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...
...Monkey Business, their object was to scrawl graffiti on the walls of national institutions...
...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...
...Exhibitors and trade papers began pronouncing the Marx Brothers "washed up...
...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...
...Harpo protested that Duck Soup was as funny as any comedy ever filmed...
...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...
...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...
Vol. 5 • May 2000 • No. 33
