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.