Hello, I Must be Going

by Charlotte Chandler

  During a 1973 visit to New York, Groucho had dinner at Lutèce after the theatre with Goddard Lieberson, Ron and Ellie Delsener, Erin, and me. Just before the theatre, Groucho became very upset when he noticed that his Standing Room Only lighter, his gift from producer Ron Delsener on the occasion of Groucho’s “hot ticket” Carnegie Hall concert, was missing. His suite at the Pierre Hotel was searched meticulously but to no avail. Groucho was visibly distraught, a rare occurrence.

  There was a small overtone of panic as Groucho, Erin, and I retraced his steps of that day. In Goddard’s limousine on the way to the theatre, we continued to search unsuccessfully. Goddard had the chauffeur stop at Sardi’s, and we waited while Erin rushed in to look for the lighter. Having checked futilely for it, she returned.

  GROUCHO

  Did you see the way she looked for the lighter? See how she loves me?

  ERIN

  You mean how I love the lighter.

  Groucho was too distracted to enjoy the play. By the time we met Ron and Ellie at Lutèce, it was all too apparent that Groucho was not himself, though he insisted on going on with dinner. Ron commented later that if he had not known better he would have thought Groucho was “inebriated.”

  Seated downstairs on the platform at the number one table at Lutèce, Groucho summoned his reserves and carried on. Chef-owner André Soltner greeted Groucho.

  GROUCHO

  (Indicating me) She tells me you’re from Alsace. My father came from Strasbourg, so I’m half from Alsace, once removed. It’s pretty crowded here tonight. Are they (Indicating all the filled tables) all Alsatians?

  ANDRÉ SOLTNER

  No, but we did have Charles Münch coming here. He always came when he was in New York, and he always started with tarte à l’oignon.

  GROUCHO

  I used to know a tart, but her name wasn’t Onion.

  Coincidentally, when Henri, the maître d’, came over to take our orders, the first thing he offered Groucho was a tarte à l’oignon:

  GROUCHO

  That’s a real tearjerker.

  HENRI

  We have an excellent soupe de poisson…

  GROUCHO

  First base, second base, and bouillabaisse. How about some blueprint oysters?

  HENRI

  Perhaps you would like poulet en croûte, Mr. Marx? It’s a whole baby chicken in a pastry shell with black truffles.

  GROUCHO

  All right, but I’ll not be truffled with. The truffle, the whole truffle, and nothing but the truffle.

  HENRI

  Or perhaps the canard à l’orange.

  GROUCHO

  Is that the Duck of Wellington? For dessert do you have any Barbarian Cream Pie in the house?

  All through dinner, diners at neighboring tables stole discreet and sometimes indiscreet glances at Groucho. During the entree, Ron Delsener put on his Groucho nose, glasses, and fake mustache and wore this through the rest of dinner, which amused and bemused the usually serious waiters, as well as everyone else. When Groucho got up to go to the men’s room, he exited to a round of applause. On his return from the men’s room, there was an even grander round of applause, and he was only just spared a standing ovation. He rarely, if ever, had the luxury of doing anything inconspicuously.

  Groucho was obviously not feeling well, however, and the next time he said, “I’m going to retire to the can,” Goddard went with him. When they came back, Goddard said that Groucho was shaky and had difficulty zipping up his fly, so Goddard assisted him. Just at that moment, two men entered the washroom, took one look at Goddard zipping up Groucho’s fly, and turned to rush out. “It’s all right,” Groucho called after the retreating figures. “We only just met.”

  Ron Delsener, who wasn’t told at dinner about the loss of the lighter, was horrified to learn about its effect on Groucho. “I would have bought him another lighter. I could have bought him a couple of them.” But for Groucho only that one SRO lighter was the real one.

  The next day, the lighter was found in a drawer at the hotel, overlooked during the panicky search. But the damage had been done. Groucho had suffered another stroke.

  Back in California, Groucho and I were having lunch. The pumpernickel bread that I had again brought from New York was prominently placed on the table in front of us. He looked wistfully at it and then at me.

  GROUCHO

  I don’t eat pumpernickel anymore.

  I

  Is that because you’re “too rich to eat bread”?

  GROUCHO

  (Nodding) People wouldn’t eat caviar if it were cheap.

  I

  I would. But why are you giving up pumpernickel?

  GROUCHO

  When I was a young man and I went into a restaurant, I used to look first at the prices. (Slicing the bread) Now I’m an old man, and I look first at how fattening it is. (Buttering the bread) But one swallow does not a supper make.

  “He never kissed an ugly girl”

  Talking with Jack Nicholson about Jack Benny, Groucho said, “He was a nice man and a great comedian. You can’t have a better epitaph than that.” He added, “I’ve got a good one for myself. Do you want to know my epitaph?” Without waiting for Jack Nicholson’s reply, Groucho proclaimed:

  “Here lies Groucho Marx and lies and lies and lies. He never kissed an ugly girl.”

  Women were extremely important in his life, and he was extremely important in the lives of a number of women. “Man does not control his own fate,” Groucho said. “The women in his life do that for him.” Summing up his eighty-five years of experience with women, Groucho admitted, “I haven’t learned anything.” I asked him if he felt women understood him. “Yeah, they do. But I don’t.”

  Groucho came into the world on October 2, 1890, and wasn’t at all embarrassed to find himself in bed with a woman. Minnie Marx was the first woman in his life, chronologically speaking, and in importance she has never been surpassed. Groucho affirmed, “Without her, we wouldn’t have been anything.”

  Although Minnie died before the boys became Hollywood stars, she did live to see them become stars on Broadway, and to see their first film shortly before her death in 1929. The review Groucho prized most was the four words his mother said to him after the opening of the film version of The Cocoanuts.

  “My mother saw Cocoanuts, and I said, ‘Mom, how was the picture?’ And she said, ‘They laughed a lot!’”

  When Groucho received the Oscar from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1974, in his acceptance speech he paid special tribute to his mother. Without Minnie’s dedicated managing and constant guidance, the natural talent of her zany sons might well otherwise have been dissipated by their often conflicting pursuits of survival and pleasure.

  “My mother came from Germany, my father came from France,” Groucho recalled. “When he first met my mother, neither one could understand a word the other was saying, so they got married. And my father learned German. My father wasn’t formally educated. Neither was my mother, but she was the stronger.”

  Groucho’s parents were far ahead of their time in role-sharing. Initially, Minnie tried to keep house and to cook, but her heart just wasn’t in it. Sam, who had decided to become a tailor since assuming his new role as head of a household, didn’t have enough money to rent a shop, so he opened shop in their flat. This meant that Sam was around all day to supplement his wife’s halfhearted housekeeping efforts and to do the cooking, which he loved to do as much as she disliked it.

  Freed, Minnie applied her talents and energies to launching her younger brother and sons on show business careers. She herself came from a show business family—her mother and father had toured Germany in a wagon, drumming up a show “wherever the peasants outnumbered the pheasants.” The feature attraction was Minnie’s father, Lafe Schoenberg, who was a magician and a ventriloquist. His wife, Fannie, yodeled and played the harp for dancing. Minnie, who was then Minna, was born in 1864 in Dornum, Germany, where the family rec
uperated between tours. Life in Dornum was no bowl of cherries. “It wasn’t even a barrel of pickles,” Groucho said. The family members took those odd jobs for which strolling players could qualify while repairing and preparing for their next arduous tour. It was a hard life even for the hardy. Minnie had some vivid recollections of this precarious existence, but after the success of her younger brother, Al Shean, she recognized the opportunities offered by show business in the New World. As she told her sons, “Where else can people who don’t know anything make so much money?”

  Minnie came to America in 1880, when she was fifteen years old. Since the demand for German-speaking ventriloquists and yodelers was limited in New York City, she and her brothers and sisters became the family breadwinners, although as Groucho observed, it was “pretty crummy breadwinning.” While working as a submenial in a straw-hat factory, Minnie met Sam Marx, a dapper young Alsatian who taught dancing in a Lower East Side dancing school. Sam (then Simon) had arrived from Alsace-Lorraine in 1878 at the age of seventeen, and in a very short time firmly established himself as an impecunious immigrant. Naturally, they got together or, as Groucho put it, “They got together naturally.”

  There is some disagreement about where Sam and Minnie actually met. Groucho claimed that his mother and father met in the dancing school, while Groucho’s son, Arthur, heard the story that they met on a Sunday ferryboat excursion. To this Groucho responded, “There are no ferries in the Marx family.” Whichever account is true, they did meet in 1882 and were married in 1884, when Sam was twenty-three and Minnie nineteen. Although it didn’t turn out to be the conventional idyll, this marriage seemed truly to have been made in heaven.

  Minnie’s constant companion on East Ninety-third Street was her sister, Hannah Schickler, who for a time appeared in the act with the boys. Her picture, a gift from Zeppo, hung in Groucho’s dining room. It showed her with Zeppo, whose golden curls rivaled the later ones of Shirley Temple. Groucho remembered his aunt with affection:

  “When my Aunt Hannah wanted to smoke a cigarette, she had to go to the toilet. Now women smoke pipes and cigars. And marijuana.”

  “The two sisters were inseparable,” East Ninety-third Street neighbor Ethel Wise recalled.

  “They were so lovely. They always wore big hats, and they were poor, but they always looked so attractive in those hats and pretty dresses. Minnie Marx was a fascinating woman—good-looking and always jolly. That woman was really something. Those boys owed everything to Minnie Marx. Except Groucho. He would have made it on his own.

  “I can remember when Mrs. Marx learned that she was going to have another baby. They didn’t know I was there, but I heard her talking with my mother. They didn’t have much money. She said, ‘What am I going to do?’ And my mother said, ‘You’ll have another baby.’ And she did. That was Herbert [Zeppo].”

  Of all her children, Harpo perhaps most resembled her, especially with his curly blond wig. “My mother had blond hair like Harpo and like you,” Groucho told me. Above all, Minnie Marx was a strong woman who, once having set a goal, never wavered in her march toward it. In this respect, Groucho was much like her. When I asked him what he thought his mother’s feelings on women’s lib would have been, he answered without hesitation, “My mother would have been for women’s lib,” adding reverently, “She was a great woman.” (He always considered the use of the word “woman” a much greater compliment than “lady.”)

  Fortunately for her boys, Minnie set as her goal their success in show business. To achieve this, she not only drove herself hard, but she drove her sons hard. Morrie Ryskind reminisced about Minnie with Groucho and me:

  “I’ll never forget the time she came up and smacked Chico. We were in Philadelphia, and I’m not sure which show it was—I think it was Animal Crackers—and if you knew Chico like I knew Chico! He was fooling around and coming in late and missing cues and everything else, but they loved the show, thank God.

  “When the curtain came down, we were backstage. Minnie Marx came out and smacked Chico right across the jaw, right there in front of everybody. She said, ‘How dare you give a performance like that! Those people out there paid for that. You have no right to do this!’ Boy, she bawled the hell out of him that night. She had a determination!”

  Harpo had described Minnie as having “the stamina of a brewery horse, the drive of a salmon fighting his way up a waterfall, the cunning of a fox, and a devotion to her brood as fierce as any she-lion’s.”

  In Palm Springs, Gummo told me about his mother’s determination:

  “My mother and I were driving in from La Grange, Illinois, to Chicago—we had a farm in La Grange during the First World War—and my mother spoke to me. She said, ‘Gummo, I must talk to you. There are five Marx Brothers, but Zeppo is too young to be drafted, and Chico is married. If Groucho or Harpo had to go into the service, it would break up the act.’ I said, ‘What do you suggest?’ She said, ‘I want to go to the draft board, and if you are willing to go into the service, I can get the others out,’ which she could do, because she was very strong. I said I’d be glad to go into the service. So she went to the draft board, and they agreed that if one of the five went in the service that would be sufficient. So I went. But I never told the other boys—not to this day—what my mother said to me driving into Chicago, that I was expendable. And I was!”

  To this Zeppo added:

  “Honey, let me tell you, her whole life was wrapped up in us. Most of what she did was before I joined the act. When Gummo had to go into the Army, she called me and said, ‘Go to Rockford!’ It was exciting at the time. I had to learn the straight man’s part and to dance.

  “My mother was a very kind woman, a very good person. She’d take anybody in and did…

  “You want to know about my mother, honey? Well, one night a robber came into the house and went into my mother and father’s bedroom and took all the money out of my father’s pants. My mother woke up, but the robber said, ‘Shhhh!’ and she didn’t say anything. After the robber was gone, she woke up my father and said, ‘Sam, you’ve been robbed. He took the money right out of your pants.’ At first he didn’t believe it, but it was true.”

  I asked Zeppo if his mother was afraid the robber might injure his father, or was she so kind she didn’t want the robber to be caught. Zeppo answered me with a cryptic “No” and wouldn’t elaborate further. I asked Groucho to explain Zeppo’s relatively unclear answer. He unexplained:

  “It was because she didn’t want my father to get caught.”

  On the night that Groucho received his Oscar, he told me:

  “My mother was a great woman. She collected us, got us together. She gathered us together like you gather flowers. Can you imagine with all her struggles, she finally saw us become stars? Without her we would have been nothing.”

  Getting the Marx Brothers together was no easy task. The boys were as madcap in real life as they were onstage and in films, but the family shared a rare esprit de corps that held them together through thick and thicker. “We were the only act that never argued among themselves,” Groucho said proudly. But they weren’t always as sure as Minnie was that their destiny lay in the theatre.

  Hattie Darling, who starred with the Marx Brothers in On the Mezzanine Floor (later shortened to On the Mezzanine) in 1921, recalled that the boys didn’t call their mother “Mother,” but “Minnie.” They treated her as if she were one of the boys herself—at times even as if she were one of the pretty young chorus girls. “Mrs. Marx loved that. But they all had a lot of respect for their mother.”

  Widow and collaborator of songwriter Gus Kahn, Grace Kahn, who was for a time related to Groucho through the marriage of his son and her daughter, told me about the Minnie she remembered:

  “Minnie was determined that those boys were going to be a hit, and she made them a hit. She was, I suppose, what you would call an agent. Not only the agent, but she was the boss of everything. It’s funny how well I remember her, because I didn’t know her very wel
l.”

  Whatever was needed to further the boys’ careers in show business Minnie provided or found somebody else who could. Occasionally, she even took part in the act herself, until she and Hannah accidentally sat down on the same frail stage chair during a performance of the Six Mascots act in Atlantic City. This got a lot of laughs and Minnie briefly considered making their fall a permanent part of the act.

  Minnie, who was short and loved to eat Sam’s culinary chefs d’oeuvre, eventually resorted to a whalebone corset to turn the clock back to the days of her hourglass figure. She felt that she had to look as youthful as possible in order to convert an intractable male broker’s or theatre owner’s “No” into a “Yes.”

  “She used to book us herself,” Groucho told me. “She thought she ought to look young, so she wore a corset and a blond wig when she went to see agents. She was probably around fifty then, and everybody knew it was a wig.”

  Since the corset was uncomfortable, whenever Minnie stopped feeling the necessity of wearing it, “she would take it off—wherever she was.” Groucho remembered this happening at friends’ houses where Sam and Minnie had gone to play cards:

  “My mother used to be crazy about playing poker. They played what they called two-cent poker. And she wore a corset. My father used to put his foot up on the rear end of my mother, and tighten the squeeze of the corset. Then when she got to the place where they were playing cards, she’d get tired of wearing the corset and wrap it up in a newspaper with the strings always hanging out.”

  Minnie led her boys through years of tortuous one-night stands in small-time vaudeville before Home Again brought them to the attention of the major circuits. Sensing that they needed a more ambitious theatrical vehicle to impress the booking agents, Minnie asked her younger brother, Al Shean, to write them an extended comic skit that would utilize some grandiose staging effects she had in mind, as well as salvaging some of the scenery they had left over from a fiasco called The Cinderella Girl. The set Groucho remembered best was a flimsy steamship cutout that rolled away on wobbly wheels from a shaky pier. Whenever the wheels jammed, which was often, Harpo had to tow the ship out of the harbor in full view of the audience.