Copyright 2000 The Buffalo News
The Buffalo News
June 4, 2000, Sunday, FINAL EDITION
SECTION: BOOK REVIEWS, Pg. 6H
LENGTH: 1366 words
HEADLINE: FORGING CALLOUS CRUELTY INTO HILARIOUS COMEDY
BYLINE: STEFAN FLEISCHER; News Book Reviewer
BODY:
GROUCHO: The Life and Times of Julius Henry Marx By Stefan Kanfer
465 pages, $ 30
Then, as now, the standard conversational opener among show business types, in
this most insecure of professions, is the question: "You working?"
Throughout his long life, Groucho (born Julius Henry Marx, 1890-1977) worked and
worried enough for three careers.
He started early, working along with his brothers in vaudeville. In his 40s, it
was movies, and late in life, the long-running early television quiz show,
"You Bet Your Life." Finally, when very old, he worked as a sort of
utility celebrity on talk shows.
Stefan Kanfer's biography traces this complicated, volatile trajectory in
generous detail. Groucho's career did not follow the classic paradigm of quick
rise and an interminable decline into washed-up-ness. Instead, we get a story of
momentary blazing successes with tons of money gained and squandered, in a long
context of false moves, economic pratfalls, stink-bomb productions and the
never-ending hustle for the next opportunity.
Kanfer's subtitle indicates equal attention to Groucho's life and to the times.
The book is richer by far on the times. There's much fun here; interesting
reading about the immigrant-entertainment connection (Groucho was third
generation show business, first generation American), abundant detail on the
sociology of traveling road-shows, and the nature and tastes of the American
audience in the first 70 years of the 20th century.
The Marx Brothers (Groucho, Chico, and Harpo; Zeppo and Gummo hardly count) got
their stage names from a fellow trouper during a card game. He, in turn, was
inspired by "Sherlocko, the Monk," a comic strip (around 1910) by Gus
Mager. Show business involves a lot of sitting around; you play cards; you make
stuff up while you're waiting.
The ever nimble Brothers rapidly segued from a vaudeville act to hit Broadway
musical-comedy revues to Hollywood. It is striking how fast the changes came in
the late '20s and early '30s. With the advent of sound, movies simply swallowed
vaudeville in a couple of fast gulps. With luck and pluck (and lots of card
games, leading to what today would be called "networking"), the
Brothers became movie stars.
Regarding the Brothers deal making, negotiating with producers, quarreling with
directors, and wrangling most torturously with writers -- George S. Kaufman
notably and S.J. Perelman especially -- Kanfer makes clear that it's a wonder
that movies (then as now) are made at all.
Groucho was the responsible brother, avidly keeping after things, motivated by
ambition and, what amounts to the same thing, chronic fear of financial ruin.
The others, especially Chico, were feckless in business and much better at
enjoying themselves, with gambling and chasing women the chief forms of personal
amusement.
Groucho kept company with the great ones. Keaton and Chaplin watched from the
wings as the Brothers did their routines in two-a-day and five-a-day vaudeville
shows on the road in dozens of towns from Canada to Texas. Kanfer tells us that
Chaplin genuinely admired Groucho and, in a conversation during a card game in a
"well-appointed whorehouse" in Salt Lake City, Chaplin took Groucho's
advice to accept an offer from Hollywood and try his fortune in the movies. If
only there had existed a tape recorder.
In the '30s there are really only four or five Marx Brothers movies of any
consequence: "Animal Crackers" (1930), "Horse Feathers"
(1932), "Duck Soup" (1933), and "A Night at the Opera"
(1935). Others might argue for one or two more or less.
To my mind, it's the physical comedy that wears the best. One can watch it as a
kind of ballet. The Brothers' genius lay in translating the loosey-goosey
vitality of vaudeville directly to the Hollywood sound stage, capturing its
mongrel nature, formed out of elements of song-and-dance, pratfalls,
wise-cracks, minimally clothed pretty young things mincing around, geezers
ogling, a patchwork of shtick.
The brothers standing in the pantheon rests on a slim production of variations
on the formula. But how we do love the formula: Harpo honking his horn,
directing his erotomania toward any moving object, Chico's Italian-accented
fracturing of English ("there ain't no sanity clause"), Groucho's lope
and cigar waggle punctuating linguistic con-games and innuendo. One hilarious
anecdote in the book tells us a good deal of how Groucho was always
"on," working his shtick. During the war, movie opportunities for the
Marx Brothers' brand of tomfoolery disappeared and Groucho busied himself with
USO appearances, War Bond Drives and such. He was invited to visit the White
House, to be officially thanked for his patriotic, philanthropic efforts. Once
there, he complained loudly about the food and the bad music blaring from the
Marine Corps Band. But, best of all, alert to the general resemblance, he
treated Eleanor Roosevelt as if she were Margaret Dumont, with similar
effrontery and sarcasm.
The First Lady apparently didn't mind in this particular instance.
Unlike Chaplin or Keaton who were soloist virtuosi, Groucho always needed to
work with and against a stooge, Margaret Dumont chief among them. Mostly Dumont
responded to his insults with dignified imperturbability. The richness was in
the timing and the rhythm of linguistic play.
Groucho's celebrity revived in the late '60s and early '70s as a souvenir from
earlier times. He was perceived as a political icon because of his impudent puns
and absurdist innuendo. The student movements adopted him as their irreverent
Jewish uncle, dear old Julie hurling puns against the establishment.
In the early '70s the Brothers' films, especially "Duck Soup" and a
newly (out-of-copyright litigation) released version of "Animal
Crackers" played seemingly non-stop in student unions on college campuses
everywhere.
Kanfer's big topic might be called "Groucho, his women and the unhappiness
that befell all of them." He had a stage mother, Minnie, domineering, but
not a monster, three unhappy marriages, two miserable daughters with alcoholism
and rebellious nervous breakdowns, (also a son, Arthur, yet another unhappy
story.) And, when he was old and very frail, he had a young manager/companion,
Erin Fleming, who, depending on whom you believe, either exploited and abused
the old man, or kept him alive by engineering guest appearances, gala revival
concerts and finally, a lifetime Academy Award in 1974.
More than likely Erin Fleming did both. She was manipulative and needy, but
Groucho was even more so. After Groucho's death, with Erin as defendant,
litigation ensued over his estate and assumed "Bleak House"
dimensions, in length and bitterness.
Groucho wanted to be the bourgeois gentleman, a loving father, generous with
money and kind to friends. But, just as in his comedy, as soon as he was on the
verge of a positive or generous or even a pleasurable impulse, he managed to
subvert it with some callous cruelty, however funny.
Kanfer depicts Groucho as a man full of self-lacerating contradictions. He
covers the territory dutifully, but never quite clarifies that these
contradictions were the very fuel for Groucho's comedy. Kanfer organizes the
biography so as to pay simultaneous attention to Groucho's scrambling for
employment and the disorderly episodes of his domestic life, a "meanwhile
back at the ranch" narrative strategy that makes for too many awkward
transitional sentences, clunkers like, "In the seesaw relationship of
private and professional life, the Marx women plummeted as Groucho rose."
It's startling to realize that Groucho was younger than Chico and Harpo. In the
act, he was always the old man in the swallow-tail tuxedo, the lawyer, the
stage-manager, the diplomat, the theatrical agent, the College President
pretending to a reasonableness that was really a con-game.
Old men are especially funny when pretentious and full of illusions. As a
theatrical figure, an old man is the Senex of Plautine comedy and the King Lear
of tragedy. In his art, Groucho was the Senex, in his life, more like Lear.
Kanfer's telling of Groucho's story is sad, and also funny, to read.
GRAPHIC: A Buffalo Evening News file photo shows the Marx
Brothers arriving for a vaudeville engagement in 1931. Disguised as themselves
are, from left, Zeppo, Groucho, Chico and Harpo.
