Boiling ducks alive, unplucked and swimming, is an impractical approach to soup making. And after these four in the pot (I don’t want to dwell on this, but how did they keep them in there? Are they tied by the feet?), no ducks appear in Duck Soup. Why, then, the title? Groucho offered this explanation: “Take two turkeys, one goose, four cabbages, but no duck, and mix them together. After one taste, you’ll duck soup for the rest of your life.” That seems less than dispositive. “Duck soup” is an old American slang phrase meaning something that’s as easy as pie, or someone who’s a pushover. According to Duck Soup, taking over the helm of a bankrupt nation, if you go about it cynically and irresponsibly enough, is a breeze. Everyone is a pushover for the Marxes, and they, to varying degrees, are pushovers for one another.
What kind of statement was this for a movie to make in the depths of the Depression? By contrast, when Barack Obama became leader, more recently, of a nation in danger of going bottoms-up, he said, “Our American story has never been about things coming easy.”
Easy, no. Dreamy, yes.
“The Four Marx Brothers,” the screen reads next. In a moment we will see duck-bodied caricatures of them popping onscreen in this order: Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and Zeppo. As far as I know, they never had any arguments about billing. It seems natural now for Groucho to come first and then Harpo, but Chico was the eldest, born Leonard in 1887; then Harpo, born Adolph, 1888; Groucho, born Julius, 1890; and Zeppo, born Herbert, 1901. Someone once said Groucho was ego, Harpo superego, Chico id. Or maybe Harpo id, Groucho superego … To me, they overlap. But each of them, except for Zeppo, was essential, in life and in art: Groucho the brains, Harpo the heart and soul, Chico the operator.
Everybody, including the brothers themselves, dropped the legal names for the o-ones. Chico’s, as we have seen, was inspired by his knack with the opposite sex. Harpo (who did the literal chick-chasing onscreen) played the harp, except in Duck Soup. Groucho was grouchy, and in the old vaudeville days he carried around his neck what was known in those circles as the “grouch bag,” which held valuable articles that might otherwise have been stolen. His name is sometimes said to have been influenced by a comic-strip character named Groucho, but that, like many other possible facts concerning the Marxes, is something of which we cannot pretend to be certain. The origin of Zeppo’s name is especially obscure. He was named for the Zeppelin goes one story, for a popular trained chimp named Zippo (he insisted on the vowel change) is another. The one that seems most likely to me is that one morning when the brothers were chicken farmers (as indeed they were, for reasons not unconnected to Duck Soup), Herbert called out to Chico, “Hi, Zeke,” and Chico replied, “Hi, Zep.” A more likely hick name would have been “Zeb,” but Z was a good initial for Zeppo, the last of the Marxes and the one most likely to put people to sleep.
Backstage Gummo, who would always be the least famous brother, walked quietly, as if wearing gumshoes. He was born Milton in 1892. As a boy, he was part of the vaudeville act only because Minnie dragooned him. He stuttered, but not when he sang, and he was billed as “the world’s slowest whirlwind dancer.” After his military service, Gummo happily went into the dress business in New York. A. J. Liebling, then reporting for the New York World-Telegram, once asked him whether the Marxes were always funny: “I don’t know,” he replied. “We never gave me a laugh.” (What did Liebling expect? “Oh yes, we keep me in stitches”?) When the Depression killed Gummo’s dress business, he went out west to handle the brothers’ managerial details.
Chico and Harpo (under Chico’s tutelage) had survived on the streets as juvenile delinquents, but they were too little to rely upon their fists. If Chico found himself confronted by an Irish gang, he could sound Irish; an Italian gang, Italian. Zeppo was a tough guy who dreamed of being a boxer. Some people said he was the wittiest brother offstage. Once when Groucho got sick Zeppo replaced him in the vaudeville act, and nobody noticed the difference. Zeppo as Zeppo was, as David Steinberg says, “a lox. But there was a spirit there with the four Marx brothers that wasn’t there with the three of them.” Duck Soup is Zeppo’s last movie.
McCarey and Harpo. On the whole, they saw eye-to-eye.
The next thing on your screen is “Directed by Leo McCarey.” Directed by, yes. Remembered with pleasure by, no. McCarey had turned down the assignment, in fact, and was about to leave Paramount to make sure he wouldn’t have to take on the brothers, but then they left Paramount, so he signed back up with that studio, and then they returned, “and I found myself in the process of directing the Marx Brothers. The most surprising thing about this film was that I succeeded in not going crazy, for I really did not want to work with them: they were completely mad. It was nearly impossible to get all four of them together at the same time.”
McCarey is not often ranked among comedy auteurs like his contemporaries Frank Capra, Howard Hawks, Ernst Lubitsch, and Preston Sturges. But when Capra was breaking into movies at the Hal Roach Studios, “the man I watched the most,” he said, “was that handsome, black-haired Irish director, Leo McCarey. The ease and speed with which this young genius cooked up laughs on the spot for Laurel and Hardy made my mouth water.”
Stan Laurel was an inspired creator of comic business himself, but he idolized McCarey, who brought Laurel and Hardy together and directed—or “supervised,” a term of the silent era that entailed various aspects of conceiving, writing, directing, editing, and producing—most of their great silent films. (One of them was called Duck Soup, but no resemblance.) McCarey directed, and largely wrote, movies starring an extraordinary variety of comedians: Charlie Chase in many silent shorts, Eddie Cantor in The Kid from Spain, W. C. Fields and George Burns and Gracie Allen in Six of a Kind, Mae West in Belle of the Nineties, Harold Lloyd in The Milky Way. He directed Cary Grant and Irene Dunne in one of the best of all screwball comedies, The Awful Truth, and Charles Boyer and Dunne in Love Affair, which Michael Sragow has called “the apex of the ‘you’ll-laugh-you’ll-cry’ kind of movie.” McCarey did the remake too, An Affair to Remember, with Grant and Deborah Kerr, and the Oscar-winning churchy-weepy comedy Going My Way with Bing Crosby and Barry Fitzgerald. And as I mentioned, McCarey directed Ruggles of Red Gap.
I say he “largely wrote” those movies, but he was not a writer, he was a talker, “and in a time and place where there was a paucity of readers and a plethora of listeners, talkers were more effective (and more successful) than writers,” writes Garson Kanin. In his memoir, Hollywood, Kanin recounts a pitch McCarey made to Samuel Goldwyn and staff.
Goldwyn was desperate for someone to come up with a project for Gary Cooper and Merle Oberon. Without letting on that he was aware of this, McCarey mentioned that he had a story idea. Goldwyn summoned all his people to his office to hear McCarey tell it. To those people’s astonishment, McCarey streteched out on Goldwyn’s sofa, paused for effect, and began to talk.
The male lead, McCarey said, “is a cowboy … the manliest, sexiest, bravest, ballsiest son of a bitch you could ever imagine …
“Now, wham! Cut to Saturday night.” A dance hall. McCarey vocalized what the band was playing. “Cowboys dancing with cowboys … That’s what I used to do when I worked the ranch. And I don’t think anybody ever expected me …”
Indeed, McCarey was a well-known ladies’ man. As Elsa Lanchester puts it in her memoir, Elsa Lanchester Herself:
McCarey … had a weakness for pretty women and always fell in love with them. He told Charles [Laughton, her husband,] he deeply regretted this, as he had a wife and daughter and didn’t want to hurt them. “But,” as he said to Charles, “here I am sitting opposite a girl in the commissary and I find myself saying to her, ‘You eat your lettuce so pretty.’ I’m in love and I can’t help it.”
Back to McCarey’s pitch. The main cowboy is “maybe—well, I don’t know … as I think about the story, the image I get in my mind, is somebody like say—well, say—Gary Cooper.”
Goldwyn, Kanin writes, “nodded gravely.”
/> Then another wham, and McCarey cuts—humming his own new, higher-toned musical accompaniment—to the ballroom of a la-ti-da eastern finishing school, “uppercrusty girls” dancing with each other. And we close on an especially beautiful dancer. “Somebody beautifully spoken. This is for the contrast … Maybe somebody English? I don’t know. Maybe there isn’t anybody. Maybe this whole idea stinks. Wait a minute! I’ll tell you who could do it. Merle Oberon! …
“Oh, by the way, did I tell you the title? No? Get this. Gary Cooper and Merle Oberon in … The Cowboy and the Lady.”
Goldwyn is hooked, and McCarey proceeds, recalls Kanin, “to recite routines, not necessarily in dramatic or chronological order. Some of them could be visualized and were, indeed, entertaining. Others were unclear. All were finally punctuated by McCarey shouting, ‘They’ll piss! I tell you, they’ll piss!’”
The next day Goldwyn bought the story for $50,000 (the equivalent today of a quarter million). That meant McCarey had to write it down, and all he could remember were a few flashes. He talked Kanin into putting on paper as much of it as he could remember, for $500. The resultant outline was not impressive. But Goldwyn forged ahead with the project. When he called McCarey to ask if he would direct the picture, McCarey said, “What makes you think I would want to spend my valuable time on a piece of crap like The Cowboy and the Lady?”
When he did commit to a movie, McCarey would rework the script and then gather his cast around a piano and spend most of the day noodling on the keyboard and working out how to improvise the next scene. This procedure made Cary Grant feel so insecure on the set of The Awful Truth he tried to get out of the picture. But Grant derived some of his movie-persona coolness from mannerisms of McCarey.
So why didn’t McCarey do any acting himself? Elsa Lanchester:
Leo McCarey was very much in demand after Ruggles of Red Gap. He even appeared in person on the Kraft Cheese Radio Show to plug the film. He was to just say hello and a few words about the picture. Charles and I had been on the Kraft Show and were delighted to get the big basket of mixed cheeses that they gave all guests. Well, Leo was an extremely shy man but full of charm, with an apologetic smile that would melt an agent’s gut. But he was terrified into absolute silence when he got to the Kraft microphone. He tried to talk and stuttered, then very rapidly blurted out on the air, “For Christ’s sake, give me my cheese and let me go home!”
According to Bob Thomas’s biography of Harry Cohn, King Cohn, this is how McCarey made The Awful Truth. McCarey was unemployed because his sad movie about old age, Make Way for Tomorrow, which he always regarded as his best and about which Orson Welles said, “It would make a stone cry,” had not made money.
Harry Cohn was the despotic head of Columbia Pictures. He called McCarey up and offered him a property he owned, a script developed from a play called The Awful Truth. McCarey read it and went to Cohn’s office with his agent. McCarey said he didn’t like it but would direct it. His agent asked for $100,000. Cohn said absolutely not.
On his way out of Cohn’s office, McCarey noticed a piano. He sat down and played “Down Among the Sheltering Palms.” In his youth, as a song plugger, Cohn had gone around to music stores singing and playing that song. Cohn sang along with McCarey and agreed to McCarey’s fee.
McCarey threw away the script and sat with a writer named Vina Delmar in a car parked on Hollywood Boulevard, working up scenes.
Actors had already been engaged: Irene Dunne, Ralph Bellamy, Cary Grant. They couldn’t make heads or tails of their characters from the bits of script that came to them from McCarey. When Dunne and Bellamy showed up for the first day of shooting, Mc-Carey asked Dunne, “Can you play the piano?”
“Not very well,” she said.
He asked Bellamy, “Can you sing?”
“Not a note,” said Bellamy.
“Good,” said McCarey. He told Dunne to play “Home on the Range” and Bellamy to sing it. And he turned on the camera.
That scene in The Awful Truth establishes without a word of exposition that the two of them mean well but are not made for each other. Other scenes were filmed in pretty much the same way. The actors weren’t sure what they were doing. Cohn showed up on the set and raised hell. McCarey went home and demanded that Cohn apologize.
Cohn never apologized. Once he described his infallible sensitivity to a movie’s quality as follows: “If a picture is great, see, I don’t move at all. If a picture is good, I just move a little. If a picture stinks, my ass wiggles all over the chair.”
Herman Mankiewicz, who had just taken a much-needed job at Cohn’s studio, couldn’t resist: “What makes you think your ass is wired to a hundred and forty million other American asses? Where is it written that you’ve got the monitor ass of the world?” Cohn went apoplectic and fired Mankiewicz. But he was too deeply invested in The Awful Truth to fire McCarey, so he returned to the set and tendered an apology.
On the thirty-seventh day of shooting, Cohn returned to the set once again. McCarey was passing drinks around to cast and crew. Cohn exploded.
McCarey told him to calm down: “We’re finished.” Ahead of time and well under budget. McCarey won an Oscar for The Awful Truth. Dunne and Bellamy were nominated. Grant wasn’t, but this is the movie in which he came into his own. And McCarey told Cohn to kiss off thenceforward. That was how McCarey thought a movie should be made. “And what also pleases me,” he told Cahiers du Cinéma, “is that it told, somewhat, the story of my life (don’t repeat it: my wife will want to kill me …). But the few scenes turning on the question of unfaithfulness, I should hasten to say, were not at all autobiographical: my imagination alone is responsible.” Right.
McCarey and the Marxes misbehaved in different ways. Mc-Carey, whose father had been a boxing promoter and whose drinking buddies included John Barrymore and W. C. Fields, was a two-fisted carouser. According to a story that sounds like something from a John Ford movie, McCarey and three friends—the writer Gene Fowler and the directors Gregory La Cava and Raoul Walsh—once stood back-to-back-to-back-to-back in a gambling hall and handily trounced a dozen rough customers who objected to their cavalier attitude toward roulette. The Marxes, for their part, were no pushovers. Once when a theater owner refused to pay up (it had been as Minnie warned—they had improvised too merrily) and pulled a blackjack on them, they pulled their own blackjacks and faced him down. But the Marxes drank scarcely at all and did not get into barroom brawls. What they would do—well, Groucho once interrupted a charity tennis match between himself and Charlie Chaplin by spreading out a picnic lunch on the court and eating it as Chaplin fumed. Harpo would pick the pocket of another guest at a garden party, count the money, slip the wallet back into the guest’s pocket, and then bet the guest a hundred dollars he could tell him exactly how much money he was carrying. Chico had to go on the lam sometimes when he owed too much money to the wrong people.
The Marxes were laws unto themselves. They were glad to be working with a director they considered classy, but they were not to be gathered around a piano for long—unless as a family, in which case they would be whooping, not musing. An extemporaneous director is not likely to be charmed by actors whose notion of duck soup makes his look like pulling teeth. And yet, they made this wanton soup together.
Jewish-Irish soup, we might say. In the first half of the twentieth century, hyphenated Americans were far more distinctly, even blatantly, ethnic than today, in society and in popular culture. On Broadway the comedy Abie’s Irish Rose, in which a Jewish boy’s marriage to an Irish girl causes repercussions on both sides of the family, ran from l922 to l927. It made sophisticates shudder. As drama critic for the old humor magazine Life, Robert Benchley came up with a new terse dismissal of the play in every issue.
“America’s favorite comedy, which accounts for the number of shaved necks on the streets.”
“Contest for best line closes at midnight … At present, Mr. Arthur Marx [that would be Harpo] is leading with ‘No worse than a bad co
ld.’”
“See Hebrews 13:8.” (If you don’t have a Bible handy, the text is “Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and today, and forever.”)*
But Jews and Harps together resonated—as potentially attractive opposites perhaps—in a country of immigrants. Abie’s Irish Rose became a successful movie in 1928 and a radio show and a movie remake in the forties. “For years,” recalled the screenwriter-director-producer Nunnally Johnson, “there were more Goddamned Jewish-Irish romances” being written for the stage. “Everybody thinking it’s going to have another five-year run. It must have broken a hundred angels.” In 1972–73 the Abie-and-Rosemary story was revived in the TV series Bridget Loves Bernie. But ethnic assumptions had become less popular. Bridget Loves Bernie generated so much controversy and hate mail that CBS pulled the plug on it, making it the highest-rated TV show ever to be canceled. Meanwhile, All in the Family, which first appeared in 1971, was thriving and continued to do so until 1979, perhaps because the ethnicities of Archie Bunker and his liberal-opponent son-in-law were unspecific. But those parts, played by Carroll O’Connor and Rob Reiner, respectively, owed a great deal to Irish and Jewish stereotypes. Archie lived in lace-curtain Queens, and the show was created by Norman Lear.
Crudely stereotypical as it is, the meme of Irish and Jewish polarity lingers. “The Jews have guilt, the Irish shame.” “Ireland sober would be Ireland free, or at least much more Jewish.” In political entertainment in recent years we have had Al Franken and Jon Stewart, on the one hand, and Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, on the other. But except for Mel Brooks and Tom Meehan (The Producers, Hairspray) in the theater and Ben Stiller (son of the comedy team Stiller, Jewish, and Meara, Irish) in movies, we don’t have the creative Hebrew-Hibernian hybrids that used to abound in popular culture. Besides the aforementioned Gallagher and Shean (the latter originally Schoenberg), we once had the marriage—on vaudeville, radio, and TV and in real life—of George Burns and Gracie Allen; the mock radio feuds (“Benny couldn’t ad-lib a belch at a Hungarian banquet”) between Fred Allen (born John Florence Sullivan) and Jack Benny (Benny Kubelsky); and the byplay among Benny and his sidekicks Phil Harris and Dennis Day. In the theater, George M. Cohan and Sam H. Harris were longtime partners. John O’Hara and Gene Kelly got together with Richard Rodgers and Moss Hart to create Pal Joey, and Kelly and Stanley Donen did Singin’ in the Rain. Then there were the three Jews, Yip Harburg, Fred Saidy, and Burton Lane, who celebrated Irish mythology in Finian’s Rainbow.
Hail, Hail, Euphoria!: Presenting the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup, the Greatest War Movie Ever Made Page 3