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.
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.
