Marx Brothers. - Monkey business: the lives and legends of the marx brothers

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Contents

PROLOGUE

ACT I

ACT II

ACT III

ACT IV

PROLOGUE

ACT V

EPILOGUE

Preface

No book about the Marx Brothers can be written without reference to the magnificent resource of Americas most notorious Marxist, Paul Wesolowski, Number One Fan, diligent Marx Brothers historian, and Editor of the Freedonia Gazette. Wesolowskis personal archive of over 40,000 clippings of Marxiana, collected over a twenty-five-year period, as well as his enthusiasm and generosity in sharing his research with others, has earned him the accolade of honorary membership of the Marx clan, under the nickname of Wesso. As such he will be often referred to anon. Researcher First Class mention also goes to genealogist David Rothman, zealous debunker of oral mythologies. Many others, Marx family members, archivists, fans and film buffs, have given generously of their time and sanity, and are fully acknowledged in the caboose of my rickety and inevitably old-fashioned vehicle. The reader is invited to take a seat, pull up a spittoon, and settle down to enjoy the ride.

PROLOGUE

Noxis on the Conoxis

It was a dark and stormy night in Columbus, Ohio, in the month of January 1915. This town was not the hub of the universe. A rail centre for the industrial heartlands of America, Columbus also produced coal, iron ore, steel castings, cement mixers and fire engines. It had, withal, an eccentric and concealed side which would, some years later, be chronicled by an awkward local youth named James Thurber who, in 1915, was experiencing some of the events he would record as The Night the Bed Fell and The Night the Ghost Got In. It was one of the Thurber family maids, Juanemma, who was so susceptible to hypnotism that, while in the audience, she was put under by a stage hypnotist at B. F. Keiths theatre, and joined the sucker on the stage in floundering about with loud cheeping noises, having been convinced she was a chicken.

A decade further on, this gawky Thurber will have a small role in our story, as a contributor to the one and only New Yorker magazine. But B. F. Keiths theatre in Columbus plays a more direct part in our tale.

On that night of 9 January, one of vaudevilles greatest luminaries, the juggler and Silent Humorist W. C. Fields, arrived at the Columbus railway station. Shaking the snow off his boots and coat and unfurling his already bulbous proboscis, he proceeded towards Keiths theatre to begin his engagement for the weeks vaudeville programme. Fields was, by this time, aged thirty-five, at the top of his profession, having completed a long tour of Australia the previous summer, but was impelled to return to the American stage by the outbreak of the Great War in Europe. He had, legendarily, travelled forty-nine days for a one-night stand in Syracuse, New York, where he was hoping to begin a long run with a legit stage musical, Watch Your Step. But Fieldss part of the show was axed after the opening night, and he returned for a while to his old vaudeville routine, pending his new career as a Ziegfeld Follies star, due to commence in June 1915.

W. C. Fields fully expected to star in Columbus. After all, he was a veteran headliner. His massive stage prop, the trick billiard table which had accompanied him around the world, was being readied for the Keith stage. The entire world had resounded with laughter at the Great Mans deft tricks. But when Fields arrived at the theatre, he was due for a disturbing surprise. Backstage, he faced more than the accustomed bedlam. An entire forty minutes of the two-hour show was to be taken up by one act. Stage hands were struggling with its three major sets, a disembarkation dock just off an arriving ocean liner, the garden of a New York mansion and a giant boat to be carried down a river scene in the finale. A dozen young girls, in the familiar flimsy chorus costumes, were dashing about, shrieking and laughing.

Orchestrating this mayhem, four young men, in their mid-twenties, talked and wisecracked wildly, as they donned their own costumes, in the intervals between chasing and goosing the girls.

Once the show got going things got even worse. The Great Man fumed in the wings as the extravaganza entitled Home Again unfolded. The four men, who were apparently brothers, and who seemed so interchangeable off-stage, took on absurdly differing characters. One, dressed as an old German paterfamilias, cracked a row of corny sea-voyage jokes: Next time I cross the ocean Ill take the train then Ill know when I eat something Ill never see it again Another played an Italian comic with a highly hostile relationship to the English language. The third brother worked entirely in pantomime, dressed in a tattered raincoat and a horrendous bright red wig, characteristic of old German comedians. His handshaking routine with a stock Irish policeman, which involved a load of dinnerware cascading from his coat, had the audience rolling in the aisles. The fourth brother played the love interest, the old Germans son, who has fallen for a flirtatious soubrette. The comic stuff proceeded at a breakneck pace, interspersed with songs and dances, piano solos by the comic Italian and a zany harp performance by the mute. By the time the Great Vaudevillian came on to do his billiard tricks, the patrons of Keiths were totally wrung out, unable to provide the customary acclaim for the star of the show.

The Great Man suffered through this humiliation for two nights, and then threw in the towel. Many years later, he was to write about this trauma: Never saw so much nepotism or such hilarious laughter in one act in my life. The only act I could never follow I told the manager I broke my wrist and quit.

Groucho Marx, the German father, confirmed this confession in his own later years: He said: You see this hand? I cant juggle any more because Ive got noxis on the conoxis and I have to see a specialist right away.

Within three months, the famous juggler had quit the vaudeville stage to clamber up the Ziegfeld ladder, leaving the Four Marx Brothers Leonard, Arthur, Julius and Milton, to hungrily survey their kingdom moving on, from Keith to Keith, from Bijou to Majestic, travelling with their wild caravan from town to town, city to city, pursuing their uphill struggle to conquer the variety stage. Switching brothers, as Milton dropped out and the youngest brother, Herbert, joined, the foursome proceeded to Broadway and then on to the creaky sound-stages of the early talkies, and the glamour of the Hollywood screen, to become the most well-known and, to many, the best-loved comedians of the twentieth century, their act disseminated by every modern medium: television, videotapes, and on into the digital age, and beyond

But let us rewind the reel, and start again:

What is your first number, Signor Bordello?

Nomber one!!

ACT I

Love Me and the World is Mine

Our Fathers Kugel

PROSECUTOR : Chicolini, when were you born?

CHICOLINI : I dont remember, I was only a little baby.

Duck Soup (1933)

The year is 1900. Dawn of a new century. New York City is in the midst of a new building boom, though more than one and a half million people in the city are estimated to be living in slums. Thirty-seven percent of the citys inhabitants are foreign-born. In the East Side of New York, the mass of migrants, attracted by the promise of a new life in a Golden Land, remain trapped in some of the most overcrowded districts in the industrialized world. Some migrants, though, have managed to squeeze north, in search of relative breathing space.