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 outré 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.

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.