Sunday, February 4, 2024

Annotated Update: The great Marx Brother doppelganger mystery

 [NOTE: This corrects and supersedes the equivalent passage in 'The Annotated Marx Brothers']


ANIMAL CRACKERS: 40:48/42:30 - The great Marx Brother doppelganger mystery

From the time the lights go out to the time they come back on again in this scene (in which Chico and Harpo noisily steal the painting while Groucho and Margaret Dumont comment from a nearby sofa) all three Marxes are doubled by other men. Though we never see Chico’s face clearly, the plainly inauthentic Harpo is briefly illuminated by a lightning flash (freeze-frame it), while ‘Groucho’ is visible throughout: thin and wiry, and with close-cropped hair entirely different from the fluffy, sharply centre-parted and v-shaped coiffure sported by the real man elsewhere.

Note also that they are plainly miming. Their physical gestures are forced and overt in order to match the dialogue, which they sometimes anticipate. When Groucho asks if anyone is there and Chico replies, ‘Groucho’ turns to Dumont (who is the real Dumont, by the way) and nods slowly for ages while he waits for the soundtrack to catch up with his actions. Look at big, bulky, slow ‘Harpo’ flapping his arms when he's hanging from the painting. ‘Chico’, too, makes a bunch of strange, slow gestures completely unlike his normal self.

Also, note the transitions in and out of the darkness. As the sequence begins, the lights go out on Chico and Harpo, and for less than a second we get to see them in the dark, as clearly defined as they need to be and as ‘they’ will be as the scene continues, moving with their usual pace and energy. Then, for no other reason than the one proposed, there’s a cut - but to what is essentially the exact same angle: it’s slightly off, but there’s no deliberate change. Why? And note how the pair are now suddenly doing that slow pantomime style that reveals the body language of two entirely different people. Even more strikingly, when the lights come back on at the end of the scene, they do not simply switch back on. The scene goes from twilight to pitch black - for no logical reason at all - before then cutting to full illumination - with the camera in a totally different position.

So, why should this be? Over the years I’ve considered a few possibilities. First, recall that this is the film in which director Victor Heerman supposedly had cells built and brought on the set so as to ensure the Marxes could not escape between takes. This popular story, stated as fact by Zeppo in his interview with Barry Norman, may have a kernel of truth but has surely been much exaggerated, first for publicity purposes and thereafter for legend-endurance purposes. (Heerman himself pooh-poohed it: “These were adult men, and they didn’t have to be locked in. There was a jail left over from another picture and we used it as a make-up room or for the actors to lie down in. It was never locked.”) But the point of the yarn - that it was genuinely difficult to get all four Marx Brothers on set and doing what they were supposed to be doing at the same time - is backed up by the testimony of just about everybody who worked with them. So perhaps the scene was shot on a day when they were AWOL, on the grounds that it was dark and nobody would be able to see them properly anyway? Or maybe it was planned that way from the first, as a scene that didn't need the real Brothers on set, thus relieving anybody of the need to find them all? Or did an original shoot prove unsatisfactory - maybe the light levels were wrong, and when a reshoot was ordered, it was decided not to bother recalling the Brothers themselves on the grounds that the soundtrack didn't need re-recording, and it doesn’t need to be them if the room is dark? Or could it be that the early sound recording techniques were still so cumbersome that no opportunity to get round them would be missed? So here we have a scene in the dark - why use live sound when you can't really see the lips move? Get the boys to record the dialogue, then they can mime to it without the sound department needing to get in on it at all. And from that realisation, came the decision not to use them physically at all...  

Another possibility is that it was shot while Harpo and Chico were ill. Both were indisposed during the filming, Chico with a kidney complaint that made physical business painful, and Harpo with an enlarged gland in his neck that required hospitalisation and surgery. Reports state that the latter did delay reshoots on the film, and clearly Harpo would have welcomed any chance to avoid the strenuous physical elements of the sequence in such a condition, even after his doctor confirmed he was capable of going back to work, some two weeks after close of principal photography. It may well be that this scene made an obvious choice for one that could be reshot without the need to recall the stars.

The likely (and very interesting) answer as to why a reshoot was needed in the first place showed up in a few newspapers when the film began its run:

 

Believe it or not – a real thunder-shower spoiled one of the ‘storm’ scenes, while Animal Crackers, the new Marx Brothers comedy feature, at the Strand today and tomorrow, was being recorded at the Paramount New York studio. A sequence shows Chico and Harpo Marx removing a painting from its frame during a storm which has put out the lights at the country house where they are guests. Arc-lamps were being switched on and off to simulate lightning and a property man was producing artificial thunder when a sudden spring storm burst over the studio. “Cut,” shouted director Victor Heerman, “we’ll finish the storm scene when the storm scene’s over.” (…) The New York studio is as completely sound-proofed as possible. Street noises do not filter through its thick walls, but no way has been found to keep electric discharges produced by lightning, and work has to be stopped whenever real thunder rolls over Long Island.

 

So if not the real Marxes, who are the people we see? A popular rumour among those who have only spotted the phony Groucho and not the phony Chico or Harpo, is that the Groucho stand-in is actually Zeppo! (One always has to be alert against the temptation to see whatever it is one wants to see. To test that hypothesis, I watched it again while pretending that I thought it was Claudette Colbert. Ironically, I now remain convinced that it is. ) Most likely, this is plain wishful thinking, plus a dash of confusion with the old story of Zeppo playing Groucho’s role on stage and nobody noticing. (It’s true that Zeppo stood in for Groucho when he had appendicitis, but not that nobody noticed: Variety called him “adept at the substitution” in a generally negative review.) But given that he’s hardly in the film even when his brothers are, it’s vanishingly unlikely that Zeppo would have been anywhere near the set if the other three were elsewhere. (Certainly the online chorus reveal something of the perils of magical thinking when they go on to speculate that Zeppo can be discerned impersonating Groucho's voice, when one of the most obvious giveaways that it is a double in the first place is the imprecise manner in which he is miming to a soundtrack - the voice is unquestionably Groucho's own.) And anyway: just look at that guy. He could no more pass for Zeppo than he could for Groucho.

The most likely explanation, if not the most exciting, is that what we are seeing are their stand-ins. Like any other stars, the Marxes had reasonably similar stand-ins, never normally seen on screen, to take their place on set while the scene is being set-up. Given that it is intended to be impenetrably dark, it would have seemed entirely sensible to use them here, especially in a costly reshoot. We can be sure that stand-ins were used on the film generally, because Film Daily saw them and told us about them: “Anyone visiting the Animal Crackers set at the Paramount New York studios might be led to believe that the Marx Brothers are twins, since an extra set of stand-ins dressed exactly like the famous comedy quartette are always in evidence.”

So if I am right, and the men we see on screen are the stand-ins, here - for the first time since 1930 - are their names. As Harpo: Jack Cooper. According to Film Daily, Cooper “gave up songwriting to become an actor” and “looks so much like the real Harpo that visitors frequently rush up and shake his hand, thinking that he is the original.” Is he the same Jack Cooper who appears in bit parts for Hal Roach and Mack Sennett? I don’t know, but thanks for asking. As Chico: Packey O’Gatty. Packey drifted into films from the boxing ring; it’s possible he wound up here via a personal acquaintance either with Chico or director Victor Heerman, apparently an obsessive fight fan. Unlike the man he was impersonating, Packey was a genuine Italian, having been born Pasquale Agati in Sicily, and that’s him stood directly behind Chico as he explains his rates for performing and rehearsing. And as Groucho: I don't know. In the book I nominated Henry Van Bousen, a former silent star who ended up a department store Santa. He is an extra in the film, but we've since identified him, and he's not the ersatz Groucho. (I only ever thought he was because of a slightly misleading newspaper account.) There is the slim possibility that it could be Arthur Sheekman, who has form when it comes to in-joke appearances and Groucho impersonation, but the overwhelming likelihood is that it's Groucho's regular Animal Crackers stand-in. Sadly, I don't have a name for this mysterious creature at present, but the hunt goes on, and as soon as I get it I'll let you know.

Extract from The Annotated Marx Brothers: The Casablanca Controversy

 

And speaking of legend-building, what are we to make at this distance of the epistolary spat between Groucho and Warner Brothers? It’s the thing everyone most remembers about the movie and most celebrates it for; you can find it in The Groucho Letters and just about every book ever written on the team and their movies. The story (as reported in the New York Times of May 20, 1945 and elsewhere) goes that Warner Brothers peevishly and absurdly lodged formal opposition to the use of the word ‘Casablanca’ in the film’s title. So Groucho sent them a hilarious letter spoofing their pretensions and questioning their right to call themselves Brothers, as the Marxes got there first. They replied even more officiously and without the smallest awareness they were being kidded, so Groucho replied even more sarcastically; they wrote again; he replied again.

All very funny. But is it true?

Clearly, the exchange was of enormous publicity value for the film, and was immediately utilised to that end: a larky announcement released to the trades claimed that the Brothers would shortly be seen in “Adventures in Casablanca, or The Night in Casablanca, or A Night in Casablanca, or One Night in Casablanca, or It Happened One Night in Casablanca, or anything the mayors of Casablanca (Warner Brothers) will permit!”. But if they were used as publicity, could they have been devised as publicity? Remember, the official story is that the objection from Warners came first, and that Groucho merely responded. What actually happened is that the idea there may be a possible copyright violation was planted in the Hollywood gossip columns in a deliberate effort to get Warners to take the bait.

In a syndicated piece by Earl Wilson, published on June 3, 1945, Groucho uncannily anticipates, as if with second sight, the future course of events: “Groucho said that inasmuch as Humphrey Bogart has already made a picture about Casablanca, he felt he should call himself Humphrey Bogus in his film. But maybe, he said, Warner Brothers will refuse to permit that. In that case, the Marx Brothers would have to ask the Warners not to call themselves Warner Brothers any more, as they would be usurping the word Brothers.” ‘Maybe’, indeed. Exactly one week later it was, apparently, speculation no longer, as the Montreal Gazette and others announced: ‘Battle Over Name Casablanca Causes Flurry in Film Capital.’ Now, it was claimed, the “latest developments” in the affair “were being watched by the entire motion picture industry,” and Loew is quoted as saying, “There is no logical reason why Warners can claim for all time the exclusive use of Casablanca, just because it was fortunate in having a picture by that title at the time the Allies staged a conference in that city.”
Another piece syndicated in November claims that “an arbitration board” (nice and specific!) has ruled in Loew’s favour, and here again is what it generously calls a ‘facetious crack’ from Groucho (already facetiously cracked and published at least once earlier in the year, and, says the legend, already the signed and delivered text of a facetious letter): “I’ll sue Warners and demand that they desist from calling themselves brothers on the grounds that the Marxes established prior rights to that title.” (The Motion Picture Daily of November 15, 1945, likewise reporting the victory, has it decided by “an arbitration board sitting in New York”. Don’t these boards have names?)


But the sharp-eyed might spot that these reports all have one striking thing in common: none contains so much as a breath of a statement, or even acknowledgement, from Warners themselves. As Groucho confessed in a letter to his friend Dr Samuel Salinger, who had remarked upon one such story around this time: “We spread the story that Warners objected to this story purely for publicity reasons. They may eventually actually object to it, although I don’t think so… At any rate, the publicity has been wonderful on it and it was a happy idea. I wish they would sue, but as it is, we’ve had reams in the papers.”
So instead of an out-of-the-blue communication from a humourless Warners stooge, what we may actually have is a studio carefully targeted and goaded into response. And if they did, this could well have been after the first Groucho letter. The first need not be read as a response to a prior communication: it might just as easily have been sent unprompted, in spurious response to these reports of Warners’ displeasure that the Marxes and Loew had themselves cooked up and planted in the papers. Whereupon Groucho could have proceeded as planned, firing off a series of facetious letters to which Warners responded uncomprehendingly.

This much I insist upon, as minimum. But what if even that sober reduction of the legend is too generous? What if those uncomprehending Warner replies never did arrive as hoped for, and claimed? What if there was, at most, one perfectly reasonable request for clarification – or even none at all? (The third Groucho letter certainly reads as if there had been no response to the previous one, beginning, “Since I last wrote you…”)

Note that all the books that quote Groucho’s supposed responses at considerable length only ever paraphrase the replies from Warners, and incredibly vaguely at that. The source of the information they all rely upon seems to be The Groucho Letters itself, where they are also paraphrased. So where are these letters now? Who signed them? Do Warners not still have copies in their files? Why aren’t they reproduced, even in extract, alongside Groucho’s contributions to the debate in The Groucho Letters? Or anywhere? Ever? (And the only reason why I’m consenting to ambivalence about the possibility of there having been even one letter from Warners is because although the fact that it, too, is never quoted is most likely because it too never existed, I suppose it might also be that the quoting of the one would make it even more obvious that nobody was then quoting the non-existent others.) Do we even know if Groucho’s letters were sent to Warners, rather than just to the papers on that pretext? They are, you’ll notice, the only missives in the entirety of The Groucho Letters not to be dated. Why, it’s almost as if they were never really sent

 

I have one other reason for not believing a single damned word of this saga, and as hinted earlier it concerns the mystery man of our story, producer David Loew. I don’t know if Loew was a genuine rogue or not, but the more I have looked into his career the more I am convinced of this: he was a showman prankster worthy of comparison with Kroger Babb, William Castle or P.T. Barnum himself.

Those familiar with the background to A Night in Casablanca will recall the popular story that Harpo was offered $55,000 to say the word “Murder!” in the film, but with admirable professional integrity turned down the whopping sum. Though taken seriously in most accounts of the film, this was a wheeze entirely typical of its author. Loew’s outrĂ© publicity schemes were many and inspired, but perhaps by virtue of his MGM royal blood, nobody seemed to connect the dots between them, and he appears never to have acquired any personal reputation as a flimflam man.

I’ve added a few general examples of his inventive publicity stunts to the notes section at the end of the book, but the important thing to note as far as Casablanca is concerned is just how many of them involve Loew seemingly being compelled to respond to complaints, petitions, and threats of legal proceedings.

The all all-time classic in this regard must be the ‘strip picket’ affair, which unfolded before a rapt Hollywood in November of 1940. On the afternoon of November 25, a little-known actress called Gerta Rozan, who had been hired to appear in one scene of a Loew epic called So Ends Our Night and had supposedly discovered at a preview the weekend before that her scene had been cut, startled passers-by outside the office of Loew and his then-partner Albert Lewin by calmly removing her blouse. She returned the following day, before a loitering crowd and several lanes of stalled traffic, and removed her skirt. “Today, her slip is scheduled to go,” hyperventilated the Victoria Advocate on the 27th. A placard that she carried with her read: “DON’T SEE ‘SO ENDS OUR NIGHT’ – LOEW-LEWIN UNFAIR TO GERTA ROZAN”. “She intends to remove an extra layer of clothing every day until her part is restored,” explained Frederick Othman, with great beads of perspiration forming on his forehead and dripping on to his notepad, in the Milwaukee Journal. “And if this doesn’t take my face off the cutting room floor then I’ll just take off some more tomorrow,” added Rozan (in “her flimsiest chiffon brassiere and laciest panties”). Quite coincidentally, of course, “it was the sexiest love scene in the picture.” What were the odds! Loew carefully fanned the flames, somehow keeping a straight face as he complained she was “heaping ridicule upon the producers of a serious and profound motion picture.” On the third day, supposedly unable to take any more provocation (“We’re not getting our work done,” Loew complained to the credulous pencil-chewers), Loew and Lewin put a coat over her and took her inside, promising to either restore the scene or give her a part in their next picture, or both. For three days, Loew had achieved saturation coverage, got the name of his forthcoming film seen in every paper, and spread the word that it would now include for definite a hot love scene featuring a girl the nation had just seen parading up and down in her underwear. A pretty girl holding a banner saying ‘See So Ends Our Night’ might have secured a little coverage on a slow news day. Loew had the banner say ‘Don’t see So Ends Our Night’ - and owned the papers for three days running.

The publicity value of creating a phony complaint and then defiantly addressing it seems suddenly to have become a preoccupation of Loew’s in 1945, beginning in June with the staging of Warner Brothers’ objection to A Night in Casablanca.

To be the victim of one legal challenge against a seemingly innocuous Marx Brothers film may be unfortunate, to incur a second looks like carelessness – or contrivance - but that’s what Loew would have you believe happened. At one point in the film, Groucho and Lisette Verea blow smoke at each other (in what future generations may need convincing is only a slight exaggeration of a once genuine human courtship ritual), and the result, Groucho opines, is “like living in Pittsburgh.” According to the Gettysburg Times, William B. McFall, president of the Pittsburgh Chamber of Commerce, and F. E. Schuchman, president of the Civic Club of Allegheny County, officially petitioned Loew to have the line removed. United Artists released a fatuous statement (“If they feel that Pittsburgh is a smoky city, it’s not only their right but their bounden duty to say so”), and to nobody’s surprise the newspaper’s headline was: ‘WISECRACK WILL REMAIN IN FILM’. A pattern seems to be forming here…
Then we have Loew and Albert Lewin’s production of The Private Affairs of Bel Ami. This one attracted the supposed wrath of America’s womanhood in December, on account that it threatened to be the third George Sanders film (after The Moon and Sixpence, also from Loew and Lewin, and The Picture of Dorian Gray, also from Lewin) to feature the actor dispensing a stream of misogynistic bon mots. Loew’s would-be nemesis this time: Mrs J. D. Cahn, president of the New York City Associated Women’s Clubs. “We have all intentions of boycotting the film,” she wrote, “should the original plan of slander upon women be continued,” but Loew, as ever, bravely held firm… Actually he and Lewin had already used the ‘annoying women’ tactic on The Moon and Sixpence in 1942 (‘Moon and Sixpence Angers Women But They’ll Like Film, Say Authors’ was the headline in the Miami News), but that time they hadn’t gone so far as to goad (or load) some likely dupe into making an actual complaint. As always, the headlines did the job.
The odd one out among these is Loew’s apparent battle over the partial banning of his production of Jean Renoir’s The Southerner, because it’s almost impossible to believe it wasn’t genuine. Lloyd T. Binford, head of the Memphis censors board, had long enjoyed a reputation – without any help from Loew – for banning outright or drastically cutting Hollywood movies so as to protect the delicate sensibilities of the South. (“Mostly,” as The Age noted in 1953, when the now 86 year old Binford was still very much at it, “he cracks down on pictures that attempt to show racial equality.”) The Southerner was just one of many to have incurred his displeasure, this time because it “pictures the Southern farmer as squalid, ignorant white trash,” and he declared it banned in August. Loew issued his usual challenge, and Binford seemingly backed down. It’s hard to believe this one was set up, given Binford’s uncompromising nature, though the coincidence in that case - given that it occurred after Casablanca and before Bel Ami – would be extraordinary. Somehow, I wouldn’t put it past him (and I’ve tentatively developed one possible argument for concluding that this was indeed another scam in the notes section).

You’ll notice that in most of the above cases, real people with real names are cited, and their co-operation presumably secured. But it was much harder – and riskier – to play a presumably one-handed game against a mighty behemoth like Warner Brothers. If he was making allegations of belligerence that were not true, that would surely be to risk serious repercussions if they decided to call his bluff.

And why, for that matter, didn’t they? I don’t know. All I know is that another of those odd little coincidences happened next.

With A Night in Casablanca in the final stages and Loma Vista ready for dissolution, Loew turned his attention to the forming of his next fly-by-night outfit. Announced to the press in March of 1946, Enterprise Productions was still another collaboration of disparate types, including David Lewis, former personal assistant to Irving Thalberg, and the usual surprise name from in front of the cameras (in this case actor John Garfield). By August they were announcing the coup of having lured Norma Shearer from retirement (presumably at the inducement of Lewis). As usual, that was the last anybody heard of that. Their big premier release, Arch of Triumph (1948) was released through United Artists, who declared it “probably the greatest commercial failure in the history of motion pictures,” despite some typical Loew moonshine before release about the studio having to fight off efforts to tone down the sizzling love scenes. By August of 1948 (according to the Montreal Gazette) Enterprise had dropped their lease on the studio space they had been renting, and released a statement announcing that they would not be releasing statements announcing anything much for the time being. And by November, Hedda Hopper is speaking enigmatically but somehow tellingly of “the late, unlamented Enterprise Studios.” Why ‘unlamented’? Was the Hollywood grapevine getting wise to the ways of its head honcho and tiring of being played like the proverbial flute? Just as intriguingly, David Loew, she tells us, “has one plan for the future – to lie Loew.” The short life and quick death of a typical David Loew production outfit.
But what has this to do with A Night in Casablanca? Well, back when Enterprise was new and the reports positive, much of the press interest had surrounded the fourth main player in the outfit after Loew, Lewis and Garfield. According to Loew’s carefully managed reports, he got talking to one Charles Einfeld at a party, and they hit it off. “Why don’t we go into business together?” asked Loew. “Why not?” replied Einfeld. And it all happened as simply as that, if the Spokane Daily Chronicle et al are to be believed. Well, maybe it did. But remember, Night in Casablanca fans, this is all happening in the early months of 1946. What had Charles Einfeld been doing hitherto? What secure position was he willing to throw away, just to enter into uncertain partnership with Loew, so impressed with him had he been after an evening’s chat at a Hollywood party? Turns out he was Vice President in charge of advertising and publicity at Warner Brothers...
Might he have been the source of that one possible communication from the studio asking for clarification over copyright? Or might Loew even have courted him from the first, tempting him to go along with his publicity caper, and not spoil it all with counter-claims and calls for retraction, even if annoying the studio with whom he would in any event soon part company, only to magically reappear as a key player in Loew’s latest enterprise? It’s all credit to David Loew that even after I’ve chased him around the historical record everywhere I could find him, following this project here, that company there, down each and every rabbit hole of distraction and obfuscation… I still wouldn’t like to say for sure.

 

Before we leave this slippery web, one final bit of wild conjecture that for once does not directly involve the mischievous Mr Loew. Could there have been a secondary motive to all this on the Marxes’ part, besides publicity? Note first the curious coincidence that within the year Chico would be suing Warner Brothers for real, claiming that he had been “deeply humiliated” by having his name used without permission in the film Rhapsody In Blue. According to which report you want to go with, he was particularly hurt either because “he was quoted in the picture as endorsing certain piano-playing techniques which he did not approve”, or because “the film gave the impression that he once played piano in a theatre in a cheap neighbourhood.” (The very idea!) According to the Independent Exhibitors Film Bulletin of March 18, 1946, he was also claiming Warners owed him $100,000 for “services rendered”, something of which the studio had “no recollection”. Either way, he was intent on sticking it to them for 200,000 big ones. In February of ’48 a court duly awarded him $10,000, which was likely on Sun Up’s nose by the following morning, but by April some pesky Sig Rumann of a judge ruled the evidence insufficient and ordered a retrial. When the Bulletin pondered if the suit might be “a return” for Warners’ unhelpfulness over Casablanca it made the mistake of not realising just how beneficial that episode had been (the key to understanding its true nature) but in raising the general issue of revenge, it may not have been barking up the wrong tree after all. Note this revelation from an interview with Bob Thomas in the Reading Eagle and elsewhere of April 5, 1946:

 

Harpo tells me that two or three years ago Chico was playing a Warner Brothers theatre in Pittsburgh when he fell ill. Harpo flew from Hollywood to fill out the engagement. Nevertheless, says Harpo, Chico was fined $2000 by the theater for not filling the date. So when Harpo heard Chico mentioned in Rhapsody in Blue he persuaded his brother to sue for damages because Warners did not get permission to use the name.

 

So, given all that, might the phony Casablanca war too have been, partially at least, another front in the same campaign, its purpose primarily to keep the gossip columns singing the Marxes’ tune, but also to annoy Warners, make them look foolish and, if possible, goad them into wasting money on a futile breach of copyright suit?

Whatever the truth of the matter, the last laugh was ultimately on everyone: copyright being a fickle limpet, the film is now issued on DVD by – yes, madam, you guessed it – Warner Brothers.

Wednesday, January 31, 2024

Appendix from "That's Me, Groucho!": I SAW IT WITH MY OWN EARS

 

I saw it with my own ears

GARY WESTIN

 

 

 

GROUCHO (to the mother of 19 children): Why do you have so many children?

MRS. STORY: I love my husband!

GROUCHO: I love my cigar, too, but I take it out of my mouth once in a while.

 

If you know anything about Groucho - which presumably you do, considering the book you've just finished reading - you've certainly heard this brilliantly funny line from You Bet Your Life quoted before many times.  It's perhaps the single best known Groucho joke outside of the Marx Brothers’ films proper, a pitch-perfect one liner: short, unexpected, very witty.  While it deftly avoids overt lewdness, the sexual implication is undeniable, the line very clearly more than a little too blue for audiences of the time. 

It certainly does sound like a line Groucho would say, a whole lot more than many of the widely accepted but false quotes attributed to him over the years do. (Attributing random quotes to Groucho has become something of an internet cottage industry.) 

There's just one problem.  He probably didn't say it.  Not even just probably not, but I'd say almost if not quite entirely definitely not.  But that won't stop people from swearing on their respective Aunt Minnies' graves that they remember having seen it personally.

 

I run several YouTube channels featuring vintage entertainment.  It's pity enough to see the degree to which so many truly brilliant, highly influential performers have been forgotten by large sections of the public, including Groucho.  But it's something more again when all that people think that they remember about these performers are things that aren't true.

I can personally attest that if you post a video featuring Jack Benny, sooner or later someone will leave a comment citing the "your money or your life" gag as the longest laugh in the history of the Benny show (it wasn't).  If you post a video featuring Burns and Allen, sooner or later someone will leave a comment "quoting" Gracie answering George's "Say goodnight, Gracie" with "Goodnight, Gracie" (it never happened).  And if you post a video featuring Groucho, sooner or later someone will leave a comment claiming to have personally seen the cigar line in a video recording of the show (no one ever has).

It's easy enough to shoot down the "Goodnight, Gracie" line, and even easier to shoot down the claim that "Your money or your life" was the longest laugh Jack Benny ever got, because we still have the vital evidence: the actual shows.  The problem with disproving Groucho's cigar line, however, is a generalized logical problem, that you can't ever prove a negative in the absence of a key piece of evidence: in this case, an unedited, pre-broadcast recording of the show in which the moment would have taken place.

You Bet Your Life was produced in a highly unusual way: in order to maximize the laugh quotient for what was largely a spontaneous and ad libbed program, an hour's worth of material was recorded every week and meticulously edited down to the best 25 minutes for broadcast.  This freed Groucho up from worrying about lines falling flat or saying something inadvertently naughty (his mouth tended to operate ahead of his brain). So because it was pre-recorded and edited, if the cigar line had ever happened there is absolutely no question that it would have been cut out of the broadcast version, solely on the basis of how far beyond acceptable broadcast standards of the time it would have gone.

This would be as certain as certain gets even if the episode in question was unavailable.  But it turns out that the broadcast version of the episode that this line is claimed to have taken place in is, in fact, available.  And, no surprise, the line isn't there. (1)

"Of course it wasn't in the broadcast version," you say.  "I saw it as an outtake!" No, you didn't, I say, unless you have your own reel of hitherto unknown outtakes in your attic, presumably lying beside a slowly decaying copy of Humor Risk. Let's face it: if this line had occurred after the debut of the series on television - a line so great it became a classic and an indelible public memory despite the fact that no one has seen it - then it surely would have been preserved by the show's editors as part of those precious outtake reels they compiled for the staff holiday parties. All manner of other naughty Groucho lines snipped from broadcast were saved in those reels - but no cigar. 

 

As for the Mrs. Story episode, well, that was on radio only, aired on January 11, 1950, before the TV series even debuted.  So we can dismiss completely anyone's claim to have personally seen the Mrs. Story episode, because it was never filmed, or heard an outtake from this show, because the unedited version has never surfaced, or seen the line in the outtake reels from the TV years, because it simply isn't in there. (2) Unless you were physically in the studio the very day the show was recorded, or are sitting on a previously unknown copy of a never-broadcast recording containing the line, it’s literally impossible for you to have heard it.

 

A new collection of hour long pre-broadcast You Bet Your Life episodes surfaced on the Internet Archive recently, a truly major addition to the publicly available material from the series.  It's aggravating, though, to find that this collection includes the unedited recording from the week before the Mrs. Story show and the one from the week after, but not the one we need in order to settle this question once and for all. 

In the absence of this pre-broadcast recording, and with incontrovertible evidence that the line never made it to air, there's very little left to support the notion that Groucho said it beyond the fact that it sounds like a genuine Groucho line.  Nothing but the confused testimony of Groucho and Robert Dwan decades later, after they had both long denied it ever happened. 

 

This poses quite a thorny logical problem for the believers: if the line had never been broadcast, and if everyone associated with the show who was on record about it denied that it ever happened until decades after the fact, how could this line ever possibly have reached the public consciousness in the first place?

The earliest reference I can find to it is in an Esquire magazine profile of Groucho from 1972, in which he said, "I get credit all the time for things I never said. You know that line in You Bet Your Life? The guy says he has seventeen kids and I say: 'I smoke a cigar, but I take it out of my mouth occasionally'? I never said that." 

Note that this was more than 20 years after the fact, in reference to the quote being offered by Reader's Digest. 

Now, just think about that for a moment: Who on earth could Reader's Digest have gotten this line from if not Groucho himself? Was the person who offered this quote in the audience that day in 1949?  Or was this just a very clever line misremembered or (even worse) dreamed up by a Reader's Digest staffer desperate to fill column inches? 

Here we have Groucho, still in good mental shape, unequivocally disowning the quote the first time I can find any public reference to it.  What reason do we have to doubt his word on the matter?  Producer John Guedel was also on record denying that the line ever happened, as was George Fenneman, and director Robert Dwan. 

For decades the only person associated with You Bet Your Life who believed the truth of the Story story, according to Dwan, was co-director Bernie Smith. Unfortunately, we have no way of understanding why Bernie Smith believed the line was authentic, or when he started to believe it, because we have only the maddeningly incomplete second hand testimony offered in Robert Dwan's book As Long as They’re Laughing!

As if only to muddy the waters further, Dwan reversed course after years of his vehemently denying it, claiming he had been convinced at long last by Bernie Smith that the line did in fact happen. Infuriatingly, Dwan declines to offer the barest scintilla of a reason for having been convinced out of his long-held firm conviction to the contrary.  He merely says that Bernie Smith convinced him otherwise and leaves it at that, a totally worthless statement without at least some kind of logical or evidence-based argument behind it.  "Cause Bernie said so" doesn't really cut it.

If Smith had played back an actual recording of the incident for Dwan, that would of course be a different matter, but I have to presume that if Dwan had access to a recording he would most certainly have said so, and put the issue to rest once and for all.  Since he declined to offer any support for his reversal, I tend to believe that Dwan was convinced solely on the basis of Smith having had a very strong contrary memory.  Casting no aspersions on Bernie Smith in particular, I simply don't consider human memory in general to be reliable enough to ever change my mind about something I consider illogical simply because someone else remembers it differently.

 

The only other direct confirmation, of a sort, is in the 1976 history of the show The Secret Word Is Groucho. Here Groucho himself apparently changes his mind and decides to take full and unabashed credit for the line, but there are major problems with taking this at face value. 

For one thing, it's important to understand that The Secret Word Is Groucho was really written by Hector Arce, with minimal participation from a then ailing, aged Groucho.  Groucho was about a year away from death when The Secret Word Is Groucho was written. As already noted, just a few years earlier he had firmly denied saying the line. I think it stands to reason that Arce attributed this confirmation to Groucho for the sake of including an irresistible anecdote in the book, perhaps unaware of Groucho's earlier denial, or possibly that Groucho's mental faculties were diminished enough by this late stage in his life that he actually came to believe he did say it after all. (Shades of the ‘Christmas card painting’ episode – see the introduction of this book for this and other examples of Groucho’s latterday unreliability.) He was by all accounts significantly impaired by the end of his life, and it must be conceded, was always quite an egotist, as so many great performers are.  As such, I can't see any rational reason why, just a few years prior, in more lucid but equally egotistical days, he would have denied it ever came out of his mouth (the joke, not the cigar).

 

There's an interesting parallel with George Burns's statements over the years about the "Goodnight Gracie" line.  George repeatedly denied that they'd ever used it, his explanation a typically modest one: "Because we never thought of it."  Only when he reached his mid-90s, when his razor sharp mind began to slip just a little, can you find a couple of examples of George reversing himself and suddenly, casually claiming credit for the line he'd spent 30 years denying he ever used.  Unlike Groucho's cigar line, we can definitively disprove the "Goodnight Gracie" line having been said by simply looking at all the closings of the TV shows.  Like Groucho, George reversed himself only in extremely advanced old age, and George was definitively wrong; in Groucho's case, we can't be quite so definitive, but the parallel is otherwise striking. 

 

I don't mean to rain on anyone's Groucho parade.  I'd honestly prefer to believe that Groucho said the line, and I readily concede the possibility, however unlikely.  I certainly believe Groucho capable of this level of spontaneous wit, and despite his almost Victorian aversion to blue material in mixed company, I don't think the line goes too far beyond the realm of other obviously sexual jokes preserved in the You Bet Your Life outtake reels to be out of character for Groucho.  There are far nuttier widespread Marxian legends.

But let's face it: there's just no credible direct evidence to support that the line happened, only weak and contradictory testimonials offered decades after the fact, and a lot of folks who run around claiming they've seen it when they couldn't possibly have. It can't be debunked definitely unless an unedited recording surfaces, so go ahead and believe it if you want to. Just don't believe you've seen (or even heard) the moment personally, because you quite simply haven't.

 

If that unedited recording ever surfaces, I'll gladly eat a bug as punishment for my transgression if I'm proven wrong.  But until that happens, I firmly contend that the prevailing belief in this incident relies on three things: the limitless fallibility of human memory, a general ignorance of the relevant facts, and wishful thinking.

As Sigmund Freud so famously said to his daughter Ana, “Sometimes a cigar is just an apocryphal story.”  But that's probably apocryphal, too. 

 NOTES:

1. A common mistake made even by those who know the basic facts is to assume that the only episode the cigar line could possibly have taken place in was the radio-only episode with Mrs. Story.  There's no real evidence to support this assumption, other than the Mrs. Story episode being cited in The Secret Word Is Groucho. Since the account offered in the book is highly dubious, we have no way of ruling out the possibility that the line could have happened (off-air, of course) in any of the several episodes that featured various overly fertile married couples. Co-director Bernie Smith is the only staff member who always maintained that Groucho said the line, and Smith was the guy in charge of keeping the production log on the contestants - so it’s highly likely that he was the one who identified the episode as having been the one with Mrs. Story when he was interviewed for Secret Word. There's no sense in my querying Smith's account of the line having happened at all while simultaneously taking his word for it that the line could only have taken place in this one radio-only episode. There were several contestants over the years who had far too many children for anyone's good; theoretically, the line could have taken place in any of these shows.

 

2. There’s a small chance that some overly trusting folks with poor hearing might have been misled by the witless ‘re-enactment’ perpetrated on LP record by Kermit Schafer (inventor of the term ‘bloopers’).  If you were convinced that was actually Groucho in the Schafer recording, you really need to get your glasses fixed.  It's also worth noting that Bernie Smith's daughter Lucinda has confirmed in interviews for the present book that her father never had a copy of the unedited, pre-broadcast recording of the Mrs. Story radio-only episode which has never surfaced (or of any episodes).  So that wraps things up with a nice, neat bow:  No one has seen or heard the line. People just remember it!  

GARY WESTIN is a lifelong collector and student of vintage entertainment. Among the many digital archiving projects he has worked on are a set of high quality mp3s of the entire Jack Benny radio series and a restoration of the Burns and Allen television series on DVD. In recent years, he's been running several popular YouTube channels which feature the most complete collections available online of programs such as You Bet Your Life, Your Show of Shows, Hollywood Palace and What's My Line.

Monday, October 15, 2018

When Herbert Met Zeppo: A Love Story Involving Chimps, Freaks and Airships


It's odd, isn't it, that nobody seems all that sure why Herbert called himself Zeppo when he joined the Marx Brothers?
We know the meaning and origins of the other four Brothers' names, more or less, but Zeppo's, for some reason, is mired in confusion, doubt and disagreement. Why?
The first mystery is the sheer multiplicity of offered possibilities. (This is a sentence for Arthur Sullivan to set to music if ever there was one.)
I am aware of at least six:

i) There were zeppelins flying overhead when he was born.
ii) It originated when they were pretending to be rustics during their brief experiment in farming. Herbert would say, "Hiya, Zeke", and Gummo would reply, "Hiya, Zeb."
iii) It was inspired by a performing chimp called Mr Zippo, who shared Herbert's penchant for acrobatics.
iv) It was inspired by a freak show pinhead called Zip, who shared Herbert's 45-degree forehead.
v) 'Zep' is Italian-American slang for 'baby'; Herbert was called this because he was the youngest. According to Wikipedia, this was Zeppo's own contribution to the seething whirlpool: I've not seen it cited anywhere else. (Or have I?)
vi) He took vitamins and had lots of 'zip'.
vii) I don't have the first clue what this one even means, but Noah Diamond recently unearthed it, so let's add it for completeness: when dealing cards he adopted a rapid spin that dropped the card in front of each player "like a golf ball falling dead to the pin." How we get from here to 'Zeppo' is up to you.

This is madness! There's only one explanation for Harpo's name. There's one for Gummo's. There's basically only one for Chico's. (Yes, there is that story in some press reports that he was noted for his love of eating chicken, but my guess is that this is not a genuine alternative but a deliberate bit of press agenty deception, to disguise a true meaning that was a tad risque. I can't help wondering if the supposedly accidental dropping of the 'k' in his name, with its resultant change in pronunciation, wasn't likewise deliberate, and for the same reason.)
Okay, we have two for Groucho - a grouchy demeanour and the possession of a grouch bag - but (a) that's still a far cry from six alternatives, and (b) the rules are slightly different for Groucho, because he was the first named. (How do we know he was the first named, and why is that important? Because the name 'Groucho' already existed, in various contexts, most notably in a popular comic strip. That's why Fisher used the -o suffix. It mightn't have just as easily been Grouchy or the Grouchster, or Grouchface, or Grouchadoodledandy: it had to be Groucho. He decided to give him a nickname, settled on 'grouch' as the defining theme, and then went for Groucho because that name formation already existed. So for all we know both could be right. He might have said 'You being so grouchy, it's no wonder you carry a grouch bag! Hey, I'll call you Groucho!" This is wild speculation of course, but fortunately irrelevant to the discussion. The point is that we have four brothers sharing five possible name explanations between them. Suddenly a fifth brother shows up and the tally jumps to tweve.)

Not only have all these solutions been offered, but there are also those people who have stated outright that they didn't know the answer, and most of the suggestions that were offered were offered tentatively, unsurely. We have to ask why! Why does everyone know for certainty that Milton wore gumshoes, but nobody can be certain whether Herbert was named after a chimp or an airship? Why the confusion? Why the profusion?

Let us free ourselves of one mistaken certainty: that it has to mean something. There's really no reason to think it should. The original nicknames were given spontaneously (by Art Fisher during a poker game) with no particular purpose in mind and certainly with no eye to longevity. The idea that eventually they would be known by the names he invented, and even use them in private life, for the rest of their lives, would have been unimaginable. But Zeppo's name was created differently. Art Fisher was not involved; it was not just a bit of fun, and the convention already existed.
Zeppo took an -o name because he was replacing Gummo in the act, and needed a snappy -o name of his own. Even then, they could never have dreamed that they would become principally known by these names, and therefore that they would be asked to explain them. So all Zeppo needed was a name that fitted: a light, fun, memorable comedy name. And 'Zeppo' certainly fits the bill: it's energy and pace, somehow; it's got zep and zip and zap and pow and whizz and fizz. It's a great name.
It should be noted that it was never part of the rules that the names should have an obvious meaning, even if they had one nonetheless. With the exception of Harpo, none of the names refer to anything they did professionally. Groucho was not a grouchy comic; Gummo didn't wear his rubbers on stage. Had they been called Harpo, Piano, Moustacho and Stand Around Not Doing All That Mucho then yes - the onus would have been on Zeppo to come up with something appropriate. But they weren't. Their names were to all intents and purposes meaningless, and they had no reason to anticipate a time when explanations would be demanded. Zeppo's could easily have been created in exactly this spirit - for how it sounds, not from a need to have something that, somewhere down the line, can be 'explained'.
But of course that time did come - the time when the names Julius, Arthur, Leonard and Herbert became forgotten from disuse, the time when fans did start writing to the movie magazines and saying, 'hey, what's the origin of those wacky names?' Imagine how disappointing it would then be to give out the answer: because he's grouchy, because he chases the chicks, because he plays the harp and... er... for no reason whatsoever. Imagine any press department allowing it. It's an impossibility. So it's here, after the fact, that meaning is demanded, and if it was here that meaning was invented, the strange confusion we have been left with is the logical outcome of the situation. In other words, the mass of alternatives and uncertainties are not merely consistent with there being no real meaning, it is actual evidence in favour of that hypothesis.

What it is not, however, is proof of it, and of course it remains possible that any of the suggested alternatives might be true. None can be comprehensively written off (except possibly the one about him dealing cards like a golf ball) and while none are strong enough to compel me to pick a side, most of them do have a unique, compelling point to commend them.

Let's start with the one I have traditionally always favoured: "Hiya Zeke, Hiya Zeb." The really strong point in favour of this one that the others lack is that, if true, it would be an adaptation of a pre-existing nickname, and thus a matter of seconds, and an obvious choice, to convert into standard Marxian form. In fact, it's perfect. Why, then, am I dubious? For the admittedly ironic reason that it's just too perfect. Look at it this way: if this were the true explanation, it would be so obvious, so certain, so charming, that we would have no possible explanation for the mass of conflicting alternatives, not least from Zeppo himself. It would be as solid and certain an explanation as Gummo's.
The same, presumably, applies to the Italian-American slang term, though that one doesn't really sound convincing from the get-go. Why on earth would Minnie give him an Italian-American nickname? And I can't find any mention of it online as a real Italian-American term anyway. (Perhaps a real Italian-American could let me know?) I smell post-hoc desperation here, emanating from a man with a famously short attention span who has been asked a question he doesn't know the answer to once too often.

So let's move on to our brace of Zips. Two things uniquely commend these, possibly three. The first is that these alone include in their explanations the only reason other than the complete absence of any true meaning to account for the variety and number of rival explanations.
Research has shown that there really was a Zip the pinhead who does, in the crudest degree, suggest something of Zeppo's distinctive physiognomy. Zippo the chimp comes from Harpo - I don't know if the research has been done here too, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if there was a Zippo the chimp: it's exactly the sort of name people give chimps. I wouldn't be surprised if there were dozens of them, without necessarily shrieking eureka at the discovery.
Now, it is entirely possible that what we are looking at here is not really two possible explanations but one, and that Harpo is slightly adapting the truth, turning a circus freak into a chimp to remove the slight aura of tastelessness it possesses. It is telling that both stories give the same reason for the transmutation from Zip to Zep, which is that Herbie found the connection offensive, and changed it.
Of course, if Harpo is doing that, this would in itself be evidence in favour, while Zeppo's distaste gives at least some kind of a reason why the true meaning was less forthcoming in later accounts than it should have been, and replaced at times with silly fake alternatives.
The trouble is that I just can't see it working out like this. Here is a young man who is confident, cocksure even, a noted fistfighter with a gun in his back pocket. He joins the family act, and not only is he not responsible for choosing his own name, he is obliged to accept one he finds repulsive, with the one crumb of compensation that he is allowed to arbitrarily change one letter, making it meaningless. This despite the fact, as I have shown, that the need for a specific meaning simply would not have been recognised at the time. And how odd that the other brothers, though adamant in insisting upon it, then allow it first to be changed and then rarely tell the truth about it when asked from then on. Finally, if it had such unpleasant connotations for its bearer, it is relevant to note that he retained it far longer than necessary. After decisively giving up the performing game, he could quite easily and sensibly have opened the Herbert Marx Agency. But he didn't: he opened the Zeppo Marx Agency. His previous job was no kind of asset in his becoming an agent - he obviously just liked the name.
Nonetheless, there is one other point in favour of Zippo the Chimp, which is that it came with the -o suffix already in situ, which might easily have pushed it to the front of the queue when ideas were being kicked around. But again, isn't that a bit too neat?

Finally, I want to look at the one I find most interesting, because it has traveled the longest road in the shortest time. When I was a kid getting into the team, the zeppelin explanation was by far the most common - almost ubiquitous. It was the default; if you know your Jack the Ripper suspects, it was the Montague Druitt. It's not nothing that it was the one chosen in the famous image of the brothers in canvas chairs with the nickname explanations represented pictorially next to their names. Nowadays, though, it is the one suggestion that is most comprehensively written off.
Why should that be? Well, you'll recall that the story was that there were zeppelins in the sky when Herbie was born. The matter has been looked into and it has been decided with certainty that alas, there most definitely were not. End of story?
Hold on a minute, there! All we've discredited is that 'when he was born' bit. And quite right, too! I ask you again to actually picture these guys, sitting in a room, trying to come up with a name, at a time when 'meaning' was not in any way a priority. Who the hell is going to say, "I know - there were zeppelins flying over the house when you were born! How about Zeppo!" Who would even let their mind wander down the road of 'let's think what was happening when you were born...'? It's just daft.
But while we can be certain wee Herbert took his first belch in a zeppelin-free sky, we can be equally sure of this: in 1915, when this naming business was actually happening, the little hydrogen-filled bastards were everywhere. In the movies, the newsreels, the newspapers and magazines and yes, indeed, in the skies, zeps was the tops.
Not too much of a stretch, then, for Herbert to be pondering what his new name should be as his eye alighted on a picture of a zeppelin on an open page of a magazine or something, and - his task being solely to choose a name that sounded good - remarking on the supreme fitness for the task of  'Zeppo'.
Why, then, the alternatives? Why the bit about it happening when he was born? Because it's an 'explanation' but not a 'meaning'. Hey, where did you guys get your crazy names? Because of grouchiness, chicken chasing, harp playing, and ... ... some completely irrelevant connection with zeppelins... 
It's not going to play in Peoria. The little white lie addition of it happening when he was born gives it instant 'meaning'. Everything else then falls neatly into place.

So here we are at the end of our quest, and how nearer the truth are we? Nowhere. We may even have gone backwards. (I'd certainly like to think so.) Personally, I still think the name meant nothing, just sounded good, and the various explanations were invented to meet a subsequent need for such things. But, on the terms above, I can see some kind of merit in at least three of the stated possibilities. If I had to plump for one, I think now I might stick with the zeppelins, in part perhaps because I always side with the underdog.
But the vital point is that while an explanation is possible, it is not necessary. That's my take-home message here. I will now cut the watermelon open.

Thursday, October 4, 2018

Did they always come out of a barrel? - The Marx Brothers and the Immigrant Experience


We were recently talking in our Facebook group, as we often do, about the extent to which we are entitled to view the Marx Brothers films as social commentary.
Specifically, on this occasion, the topic was whether or not Monkey Business can be viewed as any kind of a commentary on the immigrant experience in America. It's a complex question, with good arguments on both sides, and neither position can be said to have a lock on it. But my feeling is that it can’t, really, and not for the reason usually given – that such considerations are to be avoided because they a priori risk sucking the joy out of the films – but because I genuinely don’t believe that committee-devised entertainment films of this sort ever worked that way.
While they of course can (and to some degree must) be reflective of the society in which they are created, that is not the same thing as possessing a conscious level of engagement with any of its wider issues. It seems to me that for that you need a single presiding creative imagination, and I would certainly argue that the opening scenes of Chaplin’s The Immigrant, for example, most definitely do qualify as social commentary, in a way that Monkey Business, I feel fairly sure, does not.

Nonetheless, it prompted the following train of thought, which touches on the slightly wider question of how far we are entitled to view the Marx Brothers' screen personae as reflective of their own selves, backgrounds, and histories. And here I most definitely am not asking if they were as crrrrazy in real life as they appeared on screen, and hey, what about that time they nailed Thalberg to a tree and set light to his eyebrows, or anything like that. But purely and simply, are the Marx Brothers – by which I mean those characters we see on the screen – always immigrants?
Well, Chico, at least, most obviously is - or appears to be, which is only to say that he is adhering to the terms of a comic archetype. That much could be entirely irrelevant to the fabric of the films themselves, not least because it so massively predates them. But more deeply, can we see in their interrelationships and hierarchies anything directly reflective of the immigrant experience?

In our last podcast, co-host Bob Gassel made the very important point that Monkey Business differs from the other four Paramount films in two highly significant ways. First, it is the only Marx movie in which we meet all four Brothers, already fully bonded, at the same time. And second, it is the only one in which Groucho has no position of authority or superiority, either in relation to the brothers or the world in which they move.
And of course the reason for that is explicitly given in the very premise of the film: it's because they are immigrants, newly arrived, stowing away on a ship without passports. But in a way, the question really being begged here is not why this one film is different, but why the other four are the same. Why should films detailing the exploits of essentially absurd, impossible comic characters, in settings as widely divergent as a hotel, a society party, an American college and a mythical country, maintain exactly the same relationship and hierarchical structure between the characters, and, as a unit, between the characters and their wider context?
Now, obviously, this is in large measure because they are adhering to an established formula, but nonetheless, formulae have to come from somewhere. True, we should never forget that the Marx Brothers had a long, linear and incrementally developing career. But I think we can still fairly argue that the essential formulation we see in the early movies originates with George Kaufman and The Cocoanuts. It was Kaufman who was given the task of taking revue comedians and putting them into a coherent narrative, which inevitably means establishing concrete relationships and backgrounds for them, even if they remain unspecified in the work itself. And I think it is reasonable to propose that in so doing he would be influenced by the actual men he observed behind the greasepaint, and their histories, and, especially, what constitutes the outsider status that is their single most important defining comic element.

Imagine, therefore, that in The Cocoanuts and (by virtue of the conventions it establishes) in all the Paramount films, the Marx Brothers are immigrants. The difference is that Groucho, very much unlike the Groucho we see just once in Monkey Business, is not newly arrived. He’s already arrived, and he's already used his wit and his wiles, and his chutzpah, and his enormous capacity to manipulate language and manipulate people, to get somewhere. Now, once the formula is established, that somewhere can be as absurd as you like – it could even be the president of a college, or the president of a country. But going back to the original formulation, in The Cocoanuts, he’s managing a hotel, which seems like a pretty reasonable level of attainment, even in a straight comedy or drama.
Then, Harpo and Chico arrive. But unlike Groucho, they’re fresh out of the barrels, and looking for the loopholes and opportunities he’s already spotted and seized. Inevitably, they instantly recognise each other – not who they are but what they are – and that is why they instantly bond, team, and make mischief together, as if they had known each other all their lives.
At the same time, however, it is why Groucho, who has achieved a position, however fraudulently, that he wants to guard, retains a slight sense of superiority, of distance, and of difference (and even, in the duologues with Chico, of frustration and resentment) – because they remind him of what he has left behind, and he represents to them the goals upon which they are focused. (There's his argument: restrict immigration) In that sense Chico is as parasitic of Groucho as all the Brothers are of the wider society – and Groucho knows it.

There is one unique supporting character in these movies – Roscoe W. Chandler, played by Louis Sorin. He is a straight man, a blustering foil, but one who is given unique license to interact with Groucho in semi-comic ways. Everybody loves this character, and this performance, even more than the Sig Rumann heavies, because he’s multi-dimensional. But in what way is he multi-dimensional? Clearly, because he too is an immigrant, but unlike Groucho, he has got on not by exploiting the customs of the host nation but by capitulating to them, and in so doing by suppressing his true self. So they goad him not because he has achieved success – they want to do that, too – but because he has sold his soul for it.
To see what Chandler might just as easily have been, watch Sorin’s performance in the film Glorifying the American Girl. Here he takes a comic role, in a sketch with Eddie Cantor, as a Jewish tailor fleecing a customer. He's very funny, and very Grouchoesque. In that sense, both the greatness and the tragedy of Roscoe Chandler as a character is not just that he’s a fine straightman, but that he is a potential Marx Brother, deep in denial.

I've very consciously not mentioned Zeppo in the above discussion. Finally then, if one wishes to stretch this account as far as it’s possible to go, there is a case to be made that uniquely among the Brothers, Zeppo’s character is not an immigrant. I have noted in the past that there is no way Zeppo as a character would ever be admitted into the Marx gang in the way he is in the movies, unless it is for some very explicit reason that the writers, tellingly, always take care to give us. Usually he is an employee of Groucho, and as such there's no reason to suppose he is anything other than he appears: a good looking, clean cut, well-dressed young American man on the up. He's certainly no outsider. (In fact, this all-American persona is the same one he projects even in Monkey Business, opening up the possibility that he may not be an immigrant even there, merely someone who - for any number of possible reasons - is obliged to travel without a passport.)
The odd film out, of course, is Horse Feathers, where a blood relationship with Groucho is explicitly stated. But recall that line: "I married your mother because I wanted children..."  It could be extrapolated from that that Zeppo was born in America, and that Groucho, as part of his campaign of advancement, married into a non-immigrant family with the explicit aim of establishing a non-immigrant bloodline. And no wonder, therefore, the tag “Imagine my disappoint when you came along!" Because what he in fact sired – visually at least – is not Clark Gable, but another Marx Brother.
And note, too, that in Monkey Business, the only film in which we know for sure that Zeppo might be an immigrant - it is he who ends the film looking to be set on the course of social advancement, with his feet poised to land beneath the table of a wealthy, non-immigrant American family. Far from Freedonia or Huxley College, Groucho ends the movie with Chico and Harpo, still attacking reason in an old barn.

Thursday, October 5, 2017

Did Groucho believe in ghosts?


The website marxbrothers.net has a terrific article (here) on the vexed (and bizarrely vexatious) subject of Groucho and ghost writers.
As well as fascinating, it is in many respects heartening. The author at one point says of Julius: "Did he use (a ghostwriter) on occasion? Certainly."
Later on he adds, "a publicist or press agent may have written an occasional piece under his byline. (Groucho) may or may not have had input on these pieces."
This is all a welcome advance on the position adopted in the introduction to the anthology Groucho Marx and Other Short Stories and Tall Tales, which calls the whole idea of his using ghosts "an incorrect and unfair assumption."
As you read and enjoy the piece, however, I should point out that some parts run the doubtless inadvertent risk of seeming a little misleading. So it may be worth my briefly returning here to the subject discussed in pages 23 to 25 of That's Me, Groucho.

The post begins by discussing Groucho's intriguing working relationship with Arthur Sheekman. It is uncontested that Sheekman wrote a number of magazine articles in the 1940s that appeared under Groucho's byline. The author here repeats his assertion that this was done by Groucho altruistically, because Sheekman was at that time finding it hard to get published.
No question that this is basically what was happening here: the documentation exists detailing the arrangement and the reasoning behind it. Nonetheless, it remains odd that Groucho did not have them published as collaborations: a single sale would have been less useful to Sheekman in the long term than the regular appearance of his name in popular magazines.
What we seem to be seeing to my mind, therefore, is a mutually beneficial arrangement. A hard-up Sheekman is being well paid, and that is unquestionably the primary point of the enterprise. But at the same time, Groucho is getting something out of it too. Otherwise he could easily have shared the byline; it simply makes no sense to me that he did not, if his sole desire was to help out his friend. Other Short Stories rightly concludes that "The reasons for some of their collaborative efforts not being credited as such remains unexplained," and that is where the matter has long rested, and rests still.

More contentious are the portions of the article dealing with the suggestion that Sheekman wrote Groucho's first two published books, Beds and Many Happy Returns. This assertion, the post tells us, can be found in "at least a couple of good books, and a couple of bad ones".
That's Me, Groucho, we must assume, fits neither profile, since its position on this question is entirely undecided. All it does is note what's already been said: that Hector Arce claimed he was told this unequivocally by Groucho, that Steve Stoliar was convinced by it at the time, and that it is, on the face of it, odd for anyone, and Groucho especially, to have claimed that someone else wrote their books when they didn't. (Not impossible, but odd.) And that's as far as it sticks its neck out on the matter.
Then there is the additional matter of Gloria Stuart's autobiography, in which she also states it as fact. Noting that Stuart's book was ghosted by her daughter, the article wonders if she actually used Arce's book as a source. If so, "We’ve got ghostwriters quoting ghostwriters about who used a ghostwriter!" 
But Stuart's book is not ghosted in the extreme sense of being written by one person and spuriously attributed to another. It's an 'as told to' book, typical of showbiz memoirs (including Harpo Speaks), shaped by a writer based on conversations with the subject. It's possible additional sources were consulted for back-up and validation, of course, but the overwhelmingly likely source of the original claim is Gloria Stuart, even though (as the article notes) she married Sheekman after the writing of Beds (but not, as it doesn't, after the writing of Many Happy Returns).
As I note in the book, Stuart's memoir makes absolutely nothing of the claim, just states it and moves on, and seems to have no idea whatsoever that it is contributing anything to an extant and contentious debate. Its sheer matter-of-factness is compelling. That doesn't in any way mean it's true - Stuart could be exaggerating or mistaken - but one surely needs a vested interest to not see this as the most likely chain of events, as far as how it ended up in Stuart's book goes. (We'll come back to that vested interest later on.)

As the article makes clear, Groucho and Sheekman worked together on the books, with Sheekman honing and editing material sent to him by (or previously published by) Groucho. My own guess is that Groucho was simply being generous when he told Arce that Sheekman had written them, only meaning that Sheekman's input was decisive and vital, and that Sheekman himself, beavering away on a book for which he received no official credit, may have given his wife the incorrect impression that he was doing all the work and being exploited. This, again, presents no real point of quarrel I can see with the author of the article, who writes: "Should Many Happy Returns have been credited to both authors? Perhaps, but there’s also a good chance that the commercial value of the book might have been reduced by adding Sheekman’s name to it."
Absolutely. it does seem reasonable to consider Sheekman an uncredited co-writer on the books, it nonetheless makes sense that he was not credited, and it is not at all unreasonable to describe such a functionary as a ghostwriter. Arce could actually have meant simply this. It is a term with many shades of meaning.

In any event, I don't think Sheekman wrote the entirety of those books, and mine does not claim otherwise. But while its ambivalence on all matters Sheekman precludes That's Me, Groucho as a possible reference point thus far, the post then goes on to discuss the suggestion that Howard Benedict was hired to ghost for Groucho in 1929.
That's Me, Groucho notes a hitherto un-republished claim in Variety that Benedict had written several pieces on Groucho's behalf, and that they are lined up for publication in The New Yorker, Collier’s, The Saturday Evening Post and The New York Times. The book also notes that one of these pieces was called Press Agents I Have Known. So far, so uncontested. But the article then explains:

 Benedict actually was a press agent, and published his own humorous take on the profession. But the publication of humorous prose about press agents under his own byline does not indicate that Benedict wrote Groucho’s piece about press agents. In fact, Benedict’s press agent piece predates Groucho’s, which raises another question: Why would a famous Broadway star pay a completely unknown writer with no credentials for an essay similar to one that’s already been published? Apart from that, the pages of The New Yorker included at least eleven humorous pieces concerning press agents between the magazine’s 1925 inception and the publication of Groucho’s “Press Agents I Have Known.” It was a popular topic at the time.

Here the piece runs the risk of giving the impression to anyone who hasn't read That's Me, Groucho that this is the entirety of its justification for giving credence to Benedict's claims! In reality, of course, it does nothing so silly. I tracked down a number of Benedict's essays, letters and squibs, and noted several interesting points. One was that he wrote repeatedly about press agents as a source of humour, but another was that he had a recurring tic of presenting the same piece of information in different ways from different perspectives. It was this stylistic device, as much as the subject matter, that leaped out at me in Groucho's press agent piece. Then, of course, there was the matter of its authority, which makes a logical case for relevance that I can see no easy way out of (of which more anon).

The article is keen to create an impression of Benedict as a fringe figure, and something of a fantasist, who self-published a series of dodgy memoirs and lived off tall tales about people he vaguely knew. Benedict was indeed an unknown writer with no credentials when the Groucho association is claimed, but he was also a popular figure on the New York theatrical scene with a reputation as a wit and wordsmith. He hung out with many of Groucho's closest theatrical friends - an obvious point of entry were Groucho making it known among his confidantes that he was in the market for a ghost.
Benedict was also a Broadway press agent whose clients included the Shuberts, Gershwin and Noel Coward, and later a successful film publicist and producer at Universal and RKO. He was by no means a peripheral or inconsequential figure. "Benedict was a successful press agent and later became a producer," the article notes. "But he never worked with anyone else as famous as the Marx Brothers." Well, depends how you rank famousness I guess. It's true he was no Thalberg, but he produced scores of movies, including episodes of the Sherlock Holmes, Saint and Falcon series, and made films with the likes of the Ritz Brothers, Merle Oberon, Lucille Ball, Claude Rains, Franchot Tone, Donald O'Connor and Charles Laughton (as well as one pairing Allan Jones and Kitty Carlisle!)
But, like Groucho, he was also somebody who wanted to be known above all as a writer - maybe that shared frustrated goal brought them together? - and as my book notes, many of his published pieces are in essence self-adverts, notably Sincerest Flattery, which is basically a ghostwriter's request for work, disguised as a humorous essay.

Benedict is always looking out for himself, and for the opening that will get him launched as a writer. In a curious observation, the article notes: "In all three of (a series of Zeppo-related) press notices, Benedict gets his name in the paper by attaching himself to a Marx Brother. A press agent’s job is to get his client’s name in the paper, not his own." 
To which one can only add: Well exactly! Benedict wasn't Zeppo's press agent. He was a man who wanted to be cited in newspapers and magazines at the centre of high society making memorable quips with famous people. "But his books suggest he was an intimate of just about every famous Broadway figure of the 1920s," the author notes. "If his claims are true one wonders how Benedict managed to escape the notice of decades of researchers and writers who have covered this period. In truth, he was a young guy trying to break into the theatrical business, and he had some brushes with famous people."
Well, he was in the theatrical business, and trying to break into the writing business, but otherwise: yes. Yes, that's exactly who he was. That's who my Benedict was. That's who my Benedict would be. And he did know all these people, and appears frequently in their company in the public record at the time. But why on earth would we expect him to be of interest to researchers and writers covering the period? He didn't really do much of anything; he was just there. His absence from retrospective histories is no enigma at all: he left few traces.

There is no question that Benedict was someone who wanted to be a ghost writer, and who was very much in Groucho's orbit. So, given that his appointment is stated baldly in Variety, what are the reasons (other than the a priori desire to) for doubting it? Here the post seems to be a little unsure:
"Maybe Benedict was an editor. Maybe he was a liar. Or perhaps he just followed Groucho around with pencil and paper." 
This latter is a reference to a splendid quote the author has obtained from Benedict's granddaughter (yet another reason to be grateful for this fascinating article): "He said his job actually entailed following Groucho around taking down the jokes that spilled constantly from his mouth, then picking out the ones that were good. Many weren’t, he said. He said Groucho would crack jokes all the time, sort of manically." 
"If that’s the extent of the work Howard Benedict did for Groucho," the author concludes, "the ghostwriter claim is more than an exaggeration. It is simply false." Really? At the risk of being redundant, let me stress again that it could well be that "the ghostwriter claim is... simply false." But I cannot for the life of me see how this quote in any way points to that conclusion. This, rather, is exactly what I imagined Benedict to have done, before I even knew he had a granddaughter! Either independently or in collaboration with Groucho, he comes up with a humorous idea for a piece. He then goes away and writes a skeleton version. He then keeps company with Groucho, notebook either literally or more likely metaphorically in hand, discussing it and much else besides, truffling all the while for authentic bon mots to sprinkle in.
Far from pointing away from his story, it is an exact depiction of just what a ghostwriter of this sort does. The same objection meets this observation:

Specifically, in “Press Agents I Have Known” Groucho comments, “I’m still looking for a press agent who will get me some publicity without making me roller-skate down Broadway.” The 2011 edition of Groucho Marx and Other Short Stories and Tall Tales includes an October 1924 photograph of the Four Marx Brothers roller-skating down Broadway. Would it not be more plausible that the subject of the piece is likely to have come from the recollections of Groucho Marx than the pen of Howard Benedict?

Why on earth is it either/or? We've just been told that he claimed he copied down Groucho quotes for him to use! If he told him he had a piece he could use on press agents, this is exactly the kind of thing Groucho would have contributed. So more than conceivably, it could have come from the pen of Howard Benedict via the recollections of Groucho Marx. Even if that's wrong, even if Benedict was lying and uninvolved, this is how ghost writing of that sort works; this is exactly what we should expect to see if it were true.

So, could he have been Groucho's appointed editor, shaping material Groucho had written first? It's possible. But he had no private reputation as an editor, only as a wit and would-be ghost. (In any event, I think Groucho would have trusted the New Yorker et al's own editors to do their jobs.)
So it would have been an unlikely appointment, and we might have expected Variety's suggestion of his being much more to have been followed with, at the very least, a retraction. Both Groucho and his prestigious employers would surely want to have that stressed without equivocation. If Benedict himself had been the source, the same applies - but also one imagines any association between the two would have been pretty swiftly severed. So how to account for the lack of follow-up? Maybe Groucho had no objection to its appearance in a trade journal, published at a time when the reading matter of industry insiders and that of the general public was far more rigidly separate than today. (It would have provided Benedict with the calling card advertisement that would have been his primary intention in doing the work to start with.) Another possibility is that Benedict overstepped the mark, and there was an altercation between them, that it would be in the interests of all to keep private. But that would only make sense if the claims were true.

So if Benedict the editor is out of the picture, and Benedict the ghost writer is temporarily outlawed, that just leaves Benedict the liar. This is clearly the post's preferred conclusion, even though it responsibly shies from endorsing it without qualification. But look at what the Variety piece actually claims. There's nothing vague or woolly about it. He doesn't say something like, 'Groucho has taken me on as his ghostwriter, and I'll be doing some pieces for him in the future sometime..." He lays claim to four specific commissions, all of which Groucho did honour, and some of which were published after the Variety announcement. This alone makes it hard to dismiss the piece as an outright fantasy.

We'll come back to that. The main problem I have with the article, however, is that it is a meticulous response to a complete straw man. The author's perceived target is someone who has an a priori desire to show that Groucho did not write all his own prose, because he wants that to be the case, because he believes Groucho was incapable of doing so (and was thus a bad writer). But this person is certainly not me. (As it happens I do find Groucho's prose somewhat dry and pedestrian, but that applies to the entirety of his written output, the vast majority of which neither I nor anyone believes to be anything but entirely his own work.)
When the Benedict notice was brought to my attention, I found it intriguing, and looked into it to see if it led anywhere. In my opinion it does. But if I were shown comprehensively tomorrow that it does not, I would not be any the less interested, and not even mildly reluctant to accept the fact. I have no dog in this race. I'm interested solely in where the evidence takes us, and if it takes us as far as proof I'll be delighted, whatever conclusion derives from it.
"While no explanation will convince everyone that Groucho was a capable writer," the author writes, "an examination of the facts should. But there are still people who believe that Hitler escaped to South America and that the moon landing was faked on a soundstage." Indeed there are, just as there may well be people who think Groucho was not a capable writer. But I don't know of any, nor of any means by which I could be confused with one myself. Nor do any of my arguments necessitate that he should be.

Yet the author's reluctance to accept Benedict's claims (along with the idea that Groucho's fronting for Sheekman might in part have been to keep himself supplied with a body of ghosted work), seems to be on the assumption that the only reason such arrangements could ever have been made would have to be because Groucho was incapable of doing it on his own.
If this were anyone's position on the matter, I would join him in rejecting it. But it is no part of my argument that any of the pieces under contention (or, for that matter, any written by Sheekman) are appreciably better than the stuff Groucho did on his own. It's much the same. (The article wants this fact to be evidence for the prosecution, but it's the job of a ghost to sound like his employer. Benedict prided himself on his abilities in this regard - read Sincerest Flattery.)
Yet the article's author writes: "But assuming there’s some smoke in Benedict’s fire, accept also that all four of the items in question are clearly similar in style and tone to the numerous Groucho pieces that had been published prior to the Benedict claim. Additionally, there is nothing extraordinary about these pieces that would suggest Groucho would have been unable to write them." To which the only response is: so they should be similar, and there is no need whatever to for them to be extraordinary, because there is no need to think that the reason Groucho might not have written them is because he couldn't write them.

Why it should be such a source of terror to suggest that not everything published under Groucho's name was his own work I cannot imagine. We all accept that his movie dialogue was written by other people. More pertinently, we accept that his conversation on You Bet Your Life was partly scripted and partly spontaneous. But for some reason the suggestion that his written work might be mainly his but occasionally other people's is to launch a savage attack on his talent and competence as a writer. Looked at more soberly, the fact is that there are any number of other reasons why Groucho might have appreciated assistance at some times and not others. The muse has a habit of visiting fitfully and departing for a while, after all, and deadlines are no respecter of artistic temperament. Less fancifully, Groucho could have simply been very busy at a time when he felt it very much in his interest to be represented in magazines - indeed, when Benedict showed up in 1929 he most definitely was. He might have simply not had time to devote to writing at that point - he never did find it easy - and so made a handshake arrangement with a precociously gifted mimicker of written styles for a half-dozen quick pieces, the first of which, Press Agents I Have Known, may well have already been written (and could even have been his audition piece).

Okay, I'm out of breath. That's quite enough guesswork for one paragraph. All wild supposition? Of course it is. But my point is that when the only evidence you have to interpret is the absence of evidence, plausible explanations are ten a penny - whatever position you want to adopt.
The problem with approaching speculative analysis with a preconceived desire as to the outcome (such as the need to believe that Groucho did write the humorous prose being tentatively attributed to Benedict) is that it can lead to confirmation bias. Here are two interesting examples from the article. At one point, the author writes:

Benedict’s name is not found in any of Groucho’s correspondence, particularly the correspondence between Groucho and his literary agent George T. Bye. Since Sheekman’s situation was clearly outlined in letters, one would think another person involved in Groucho’s writing would be similarly documented. Of course it is possible that Benedict may have had a hand in some of the work. But it is also possible that the Variety item is a lie or an exaggeration. The guy was a press agent, after all.

Now this (always assuming, as we of course should, that it's a fair point, that is to say that there is a good surviving selection of correspondence between Groucho and Bye on other matters from the relevant period) is unquestionably an interesting fact. But it's interesting whatever way we choose to slice the salami - it doesn't point us in any particular direction that I can see. Yes, if Benedict was telling the truth, we might have expected some sort of exchange between Bye and Groucho on the matter. And if it was an exaggeration of a much less significant professional alliance of some sort, we might have expected some sort of exchange between Bye and Groucho on the matter. And if it was indeed an outright lie, a foul and calumny libel... we might have expected some sort of exchange between Bye and Groucho on the matter. So yes, the absence of documentation is intriguing. But it is not suggestive of anything other than mystery. (Of course, if the arrangement with Benedict was made outside of  proper professional channels, it may well have bypassed his literary agent... but that would be me speculating again.)
Then, again, there is this:

There’s no mention in any of (Benedict's) three books of the ghostwriting claim. (Perhaps the job description his granddaughter recalls is accurate, and Benedict knew better than to make the ghostwriter claim in his memoirs.)

We've already highlighted the illogicality of thinking that "the job description his granddaughter recalls" points away from, rather than towards, a valid claim to being a ghostwriter, but how are we supposed to read meaning into the fact that he does not mention it in his books? Again, only if we have a pre-formed agenda. Otherwise it is, again, merely interesting. Yes, if he was Groucho's ghostwriter, we might have expected to see it there. But if he wasn't, we might have expected to see it there. (Especially given that he was wont to claim he was, including in print, seemingly without repercussion, in the most famous showbiz journal of record in the world.) So the fact that we don't is, again, worth our attention, but fairly points us to no conclusion whatsoever.

Of course, if the publication had caused a massive row, with perhaps a legal threat or two thrown in for good measure, that would certainly account for its absence (even when, according to his granddaughter, he continued to assert the claims privately). Certainly the one thing that does seem very, very likely to me is that the Variety piece - be it true, false or anywhere in the middle - was somebody's screw-up. Judging by his other appearances in press stories supposedly about other people, the obvious first assumption is that Benedict blabbed without permission, either naively or recklessly, about an arrangement that should have been kept secret. Groucho's lack of follow-up might have been from the desire to draw as little further attention to the faux pas as possible. Maybe he severed his relations with Benedict immediately after? Who knows? The piece does imply that the work is already written and placed. (This makes questionable the article's assertion: "It would be safe to dismiss the claim on a Collier’s piece, since “My Poor Wife” was not published until December 30, 1930. Presumably if Benedict had been Groucho’s ghostwriter he would have been fired well before that for blabbing about it in Variety a year-and-a-half earlier.")

At the moment, I do think Benedict wrote some of these pieces, and especially Press Agents I Have Known. Why do I think this? Not because I want it to be so, but because, to my mind, that is where the presently incomplete and confusing evidence cautiously points.
It is a vague and shadowy affair, certainly. But the following, at this point, seems to me logically inarguable: Benedict must have had insider knowledge of Groucho's forthcoming magazine pieces. Why? Because the predictions made in the Variety piece were correct. Groucho did immediately go on to publish in those magazines.
So where would he get this insider information? Absent paper trail between Groucho and his literary agent or not, he can only have obtained such detailed information from a professional association of some sort. However vague and insubstantial this seems as an argument - and I fully agree it seems very vague and insubstantial! - it seems obvious to me that this is vastly preferable as logic to the only possible alternative. Which is as follows. If Benedict was lying, then the following must be true:

Variety announces that Benedict is ghosting for Groucho, but this is not true. It lists the famous magazines and journals in which such work will appear. Groucho did publish in all of them, in some cases in the future: sheer guesswork if the source wasn't genuine. Despite it not being true, Benedict manages to claim otherwise without inciting the public response (let alone incurring the public wrath) of Groucho or any of the major magazines he has libeled. And then, on top of all this, one of the articles to which he lays claim is a spoof on press agents, like at least three actual Benedict pieces and with notable stylistic similarities to them. If Benedict's claims are bogus, we have to accept that every single bit of this is sheer coincidence.

Well, yes, it's possible, I suppose. Most things are. But strip away the pressing, passionate, a priori need to believe it didn't happen, and we are led, surely if temporarily, to the likelihood that it probably did.