Groucho Marx

Groucho Marx: The Fastest Mouth in America

The director Sam Wood, losing patience on set, complained that you can't make an actor out of clay. Julius Henry Marx replied without a pause: "Nor a director out of Wood." It takes about two seconds to say, and in those two seconds it locates a common noun hiding inside a man's surname, inverts the insult and returns it. He had left school at twelve to help feed his family, and he spent the next seven decades demonstrating that English could be used as a weapon at conversational speed.

The Upper East Side

He was born on 2 October 1890 in Manhattan, into a Jewish family: his father Sam, known as Frenchie, came from Alsace; his mother Minnie Schonberg came from Dornum in northern Germany, and her brother was the vaudeville performer Al Shean of Gallagher and Shean. Julius was the middle of five brothers - Chico and Harpo older, Gummo and Zeppo younger. He wanted to be a doctor. He left school at twelve because the household needed money, and made up the deficit by reading obsessively, starting with Horatio Alger and Frank Merriwell.

The Accident of Comedy

His stage debut came on 16 July 1905, as a boy singer with the Gene Leroy Trio at the Ramona Theatre in Grand Rapids, Michigan. In 1909 he joined his brothers in The Four Nightingales, a singing act managed with ferocious energy by their mother. The turn came in Nacogdoches, Texas, in the mid-1910s: the audience did not want the singing, the brothers started clowning to fill the time, and the response taught them what they actually were. From 1915, having dropped the German ethnic accent after the sinking of the Lusitania, Groucho developed the fast-talking, faintly disreputable wise guy he would play for sixty years.

Thirteen Films

The brothers played the Palace Theatre in New York and mounted three successful Broadway shows before Hollywood took them. Thirteen features followed together, beginning with The Cocoanuts in 1929 and running through Animal Crackers in 1930, Monkey Business in 1931, Horse Feathers in 1932, Duck Soup in 1933, A Night at the Opera in 1935 and A Day at the Races in 1937, finishing with Love Happy in 1949. Groucho made twenty-six films in all. Against the anarchy of Harpo and Chico he supplied the verbal line, usually aimed at whichever dignitary was standing nearest, and above all at Margaret Dumont, whom he would later describe with real affection as "a great straight woman who never understood any of his jokes."

The Face

The costume was mostly improvised and then permanent. The stooped, crouching walk parodied a fashion of the 1880s and 1890s. The famous moustache and eyebrows were greasepaint, applied on the spur of the moment in the early 1920s because there was no time for anything better, and only replaced with a real moustache when he moved to television in 1950. The spectacles began as a stage prop and eventually became a genuine prescription. The cigar never left. The whole assembly became so recognisable that it survives today as a plastic novelty sold in every joke shop in the world.

Say the Secret Word

His second career was larger than his first. You Bet Your Life ran on radio from 1947 to 1950 and on television from 5 October 1950 for eleven seasons, with George Fenneman as announcer and straight man. It was prerecorded rather than live, and it was largely unscripted - a quiz show that existed as a pretext for letting Groucho improvise at ordinary members of the public. It gave American English "Say the secret word and the duck will come down," along with the mock-impossible consolation questions - who is buried in Grant's Tomb, what colour is the White House - and it made him a household presence for a generation who had never seen a Marx Brothers film. He introduced Johnny Carson as the new host of The Tonight Show on 1 October 1962.

The Writer

He published steadily and cared about it more than about anything else he did: Beds in 1930, a tax guide called Many Happy Returns in 1942, the autobiography Groucho and Me in 1959, Memoirs of a Mangy Lover in 1963, The Groucho Letters in 1967, The Marx Bros. Scrapbook in 1973, and two further volumes in 1976. He appeared in The New Yorker under his birth name, Julius Henry Marx, and counted Booth Tarkington, T. S. Eliot and Carl Sandburg among his correspondents. He told Dick Cavett in 1971 that the New Yorker credit meant more to him than all the plays he had ever appeared in, and told the BBC in 1975 that having a book selected for the Library of Congress was his most significant achievement.

Why Groucho Is Called a Genius

The faculty is real-time linguistic pattern recognition wired to comic timing: the ability to hear the ambiguity in a sentence somebody else is still speaking, and to invert it before they finish. "Nor a director out of Wood" is the compressed proof. You Bet Your Life is the sustained one, and it matters more, because eleven television seasons and three radio years of largely unscripted improvisation with untrained members of the public cannot be faked by a writers' room. That is thousands of hours of live verbal invention with no net. Woody Allen's verdict was unqualified: "Groucho Marx was the best comedian this country ever produced." The Academy's honorary Oscar citation in 1974 used the phrase "his brilliant creativity."

The counter-case starts with Groucho himself. "I get credit all the time for things I never said," he told Roger Ebert in 1972, and he was right - a substantial share of the quotations circulating under his name are apocryphal, which means the reputation for verbal genius is partly built on lines he did not write. Much of what made him famous was persona and speed rather than durable work: the greasepaint, the crouch, the cigar, none of which survive on the page. And his own sense of achievement pointed somewhere the public never followed him - he wanted to be judged as a writer, and the writing, while good, is not the thing anyone means. The claim that survives all of this is narrower and still substantial: he was, verifiably, the quickest improvising verbal comedian America produced in the twentieth century, and he did it in public, unscripted, for thirty years.

The Duck Comes Down

He married three times - Ruth Johnson, Kay Marvis Gorcey and Eden Hartford - and had three children. He was a lifelong liberal Democrat who broke ranks once, voting for Wendell Willkie in 1940 in opposition to third presidential terms, and a devoted Gilbert and Sullivan man who played Ko-Ko in a televised Mikado in 1960. Visiting Germany in 1958, he danced a Charleston on the rubble above Hitler's bunker and afterwards said: "Not much satisfaction after he killed six million Jews!" France made him a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres at Cannes in 1972, the year he played Carnegie Hall alone. Jack Lemmon handed him an honorary Academy Award on 2 April 1974 for the unequalled achievements of the Marx Brothers in film comedy, and he accepted it by wishing Harpo and Chico were there. Frailty and small strokes followed, along with an ugly public argument over the influence of his companion Erin Fleming on the estate. The jokes did not stop: to a nurse with a thermometer, "Don't be silly, everybody has a temperature." He died at Cedars-Sinai of pneumonia on 19 August 1977, aged eighty-six, three days after Elvis Presley took all the headlines. His own suggested epitaph: "Excuse me, I can't stand up."