“The Honorable Secretary of Finance and Parking” is introduced, with due fanfare, and His Excellency Ambassador Trentino of Sylvania: Louis Calhern, every inch the crooked statesman. More gravitas. Trentino is the first person we’ve met who is as tall as Mrs. Teasdale. (Calhern will go on to portray the distinguished American jurist Oliver William Holmes Jr. in The Magnificent Yankee and Julius Caesar to Marlon Brando’s Mark Antony.) And Miss Vera Marcal, and the Honorable Pandu of Muftan …
Back up. At the risk of being borderline crass, let us get a load of Miss Vera Marcal. She is played by the Mexican-born Raquel Torres, age twenty-three, who earlier in 1933 appeared as “Leader of Amazon Women” (or “a passionate female Tarzan,” according to some lucky duck on imdb.com who apparently has actually seen the movie) in something called So This Is Africa.
For all the romance in most of Leo McCarey’s movies, there is no heavy breathing. I hope you have taken up my suggestion to check out, on YouTube, Leila Hyams’s drum-instruction scene (ditta-boom) with Roland Young in Ruggles of Red Gap. That to me is romance of a high, unmushy order. Two people, clearly but not blatantly attracted to each other, getting playfully and respectfully acquainted. That scene was improvised. We may well imagine that McCarey, musing at the piano, said, “Leila, why don’t you sit here, and Roland at the drums, and see what happens.” There’s another moment in Ruggles that grabs my heart. Charles Laughton is Ruggles, a valet whose employer loses him in a poker game to an amiable, rough-hewn character from Red Gap, Washington. So Ruggles must move to that place. The regular people there welcome him as an equal. The pretentious social set gets the notion, from his accent and manners, that he is nobility, so they fawn on him. A widow played by Zasu Pitts likes him for himself, but sort of assumes he is too aristocratic for her. Then there is a moment.
Neither Charles Laughton nor Zasu Pitts is a looker. She has a squeaky voice, and at one point in the filming McCarey said to Laughton, “Jesus, Charles, do you have to be so nancy?” and Laughton replied, “But, my dear fellow, after eight o’clock a bit of it is bound to show.” But they make an appealing potential couple. And the moment comes when his true station is revealed. “Oh, so you’re not—” she says, brightening, and the way he springs toward her, happy to be recognized as no more aristocratic than she … I guess you have to see it.
Romance in McCarey’s movies is all the more convincing for being cool. Miss Vera Marcal is hot. She is not only the sexiest woman in any Marx Brothers movie, including Thelma Todd in Horse Feathers (Chico gives her what I believe to be the only Marx Brother onscreen kiss,* a little ad-lib-looking peck after tickling the keys for her) and Monkey Business, and even Marilyn Monroe in the last-gasp, deeply unfortunate Love Happy (1949), she is also the sexiest woman in a Leo McCarey movie. (Ingrid Bergman, after all, plays a nun.) And see how Miss Vera Marcal is responded to! Poised as a temptress and fully qualified, she is appreciated by only one character.
Zeppo. Oh, Trentino kisses her hand and says he has seen her many times in the theater—and he is in cahoots with her. She is quite willing, for whatever reason, to help him bring Freedonia under Sylvanian control. (Which “may not be so ee-see,” she says—little does she know.) She may well be his lover. In the Kalmar-Ruby script, she is referred to as his niece, a term with a certain euphemistic force in that day. But Trentino gives no sign of desiring anything but power. As he strokes Miss Vera’s poufy pompon, or whatever it is, and tells her he is going to “place [Firefly] in your hands,” his hand is within an inch of her profoundly palpable-looking cleavage. But the gleam in his eye is his plan to win Freedonia by wooing Mrs. Teasdale. Louis Calhern as Trentino evinces no more feeling for Miss Vera here than he will later for Ingrid Bergman in Notorious.
Doesn’t faze Miss Vera. She’s a go-along girl. But look at the way Zeppo looks at her. Unlike his brothers, Zeppo was conventionally handsome, almost. But not really. Most people’s noses project. His nose line continued the slope of his forehead. If Bob Hope had a ski-jump nose, Zeppo’s was straight downhill. And his eyes, though they were closer together than his brothers’—closer than most people’s—had a certain freshness in them. Both of those eyes linger on Vera Marcal as he is introduced to her and he says, “We’ve met,” and she says, “Of course.” (Where have they met? In an earlier version of the script, Vera Marcal seduces Zeppo’s character. McCarey cut that part out.)
That’s about it for their relationship in Duck Soup, but there’s something unnaturally natural going on with Zeppo. He has feelings for Vera that aren’t prepubescent. His big brothers here (all in their forties) are four-year-olds. He is acting fourteen. If all the brothers went gaga over Vera, this would be a different story.
Here’s an indelicate anecdote. In Bring in the Peacocks: Memoirs of a Hollywood Producer, Hank Moonjean tells of a celebrity-filled party in the fifties at the home of Burns and Allen. “Several people were gathered around Groucho Marx, who was holding court. The subject of Desilu Studios came up and how successful it had been for Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz.” Moonjean, as it happened, was a good friend of Lucy’s. “I asked Groucho how it was working with Lucy. Groucho said, without batting an eyelash, ‘It was Zeppo who fucked her.’”
Zeppo’s seduction by Miss Vera Marcal was cut—no wonder he left the act.
Groucho, please! Talk about iconoclasm! This is Lucy you’re bandying about, and at the height of American Lucy-philia. Maybe you didn’t mean it in the sexual sense. When, after Duck Soup, Zeppo was getting started as an agent, he agreed to semi-represent Lucy. If she heard of a part coming up that would be good for her, she should let him know and he’d see what he could do for her. Eventually Lucy concluded that when she told Zeppo about those parts, he got them for other actresses. (Of the Marxes, Lucy liked Harpo. At a dinner party he kindly explained how to eat the artichoke she had been on the verge of attacking with knife and fork. There’s a scene for you. For a Leo McCarey movie. In a Marx Brothers movie, Harpo would not have been kind. And it would have been a pumpkin.)
Zeppo’s character in Duck Soup is Bob Roland. He can’t even catch a funny name. In Kalmar and Ruby’s original treatment (entitled Firecrackers, later Cracked Ice), he was to play Bob Firestone. (Whoever changed Firestone to Firefly deserved to feel pretty good about it.) Bob’s in love with Mrs. Teasdale’s daughter, June, who is being pursued by the Trentino character (whose name at that stage was Frankenstein). Zeppo’s end of this romance is pretty sappy. He’s not even very intense about June: at one point he professes his patriotic willingness to give her up for the sake of Freedonia, but she refuses to be given up. His original backstory relationship with Vera Marcal, whatever it may have been, is lost.
Note that Zeppo is still beaming at Vera as he breaks into song about the punctuality of Firefly. “The Clock on the Wall Strikes Ten.” Thus is a note of momentousness sounded. The musical numbers that commence at this point are operetta-esque, evocative of Gilbert (Jewish) and Sullivan (Irish). Groucho was a big Gilbert and Sullivan fan, knew many of their songs by heart, and sang them obsessively. At the age of seventy, he was delighted to play Ko-Ko, the Lord High Executioner, in The Mikado on TV. (The critical consensus: more Groucho in kimono than Ko-Ko in Mikado.)
Okay, cue the clock. On the wall. Strikes ten. And here come the trumpeters, and the be-shako’ed swordsmen, and the toe dancers, scattering petals in the new leader’s expected path, and the soldiers draw their swords to form an arch over the petals, and the dancers are down on their knees and extending their arms toward the new leader’s expected entrance, and the distinguished guests bow in that same direction, and Freedonia, land of the brave and free, is hailed.
And hailed again.
And one more time.
Thus is the note of momentousness sustained, in the face of a creeping note of desperation. (In 2009 in England, a toddler who had been in a coma and was about to be taken off life support suddenly woke up singing the ABBA song “Mamma Mia.” If I ever snap out of a coma singing somet
hing, I trust it will be “Hail, Hail, Freedonia, laaand of the braaaave and freeeee.”)
Firefly strewing petals for himself was cut. Groucho is said to have freaked out the closest ballerina.
And Groucho slides down a pole to arrive at everyone’s rear. All this is pretty much from Kalmar and Ruby’s original treatment. In the eventual shooting script, Firefly was to direct the line, “You expecting somebody?” to one of the ballerinas. But, it is said, Groucho delivered the line so lecherously that she cried out, “No!”
If so, that would have been Firefly’s only lecherous moment in this movie. As it is, he directs the question to one of the troopers, who answers yes, and Groucho falls into place beside him, holding his cigar up in line with the swords. He is awaiting himself.
This—by no means the movie’s only Identity Issue moment—is as good a place as any for another indelicate anecdote from Groucho’s real life.
Over the years Harry Ruby was probably Groucho’s best friend. Garson Kanin (who heard it from Ruby) writes that Ruby came to Groucho once for erotic assistance. Owing to a mix-up, Ruby had arranged for not one but two agreeable women to meet him at the Beverly Hills bungalow he maintained for such appointments. For Ruby, like Firefly, a gal a day was all he could handle. He wanted Groucho to make it a foursome.
No, said Groucho. He was fifty-nine, and he had given up “that foolishness.” He didn’t have it in him anymore.
Don’t worry, said Ruby, he had a doctor who gave him regular shots that enabled him to “function.” He’d take Groucho to that doctor right away.
Groucho still resisted, but Ruby kept pressing. Finally, he got Groucho as far as the Wilshire Medical Building. Groucho still resisted. Ruby had him by the arm and dragged him inside to the elevator. There they were joined by newborns, old people in wheelchairs, and someone shaking with tremors.
“Floors, please,” said the elevator operator. “Speak up.”
Groucho spoke up. He shouted:
“I can’t get a hard-on! What floor is that?”
To me, two things stand out, so to speak, about that anecdote.
In the first place, fifty-nine is way too young. Don’t tell me that Harpo or Chico or Zeppo were willing to give up on functioning at fifty-nine. By that age, Harpo, after a long adventurous bachelorhood, was joyfully married for life. Chico’s compulsive womanizing had finally caused his wife to throw him out of the house, her heart broken (“After nineteen years of marriage,” she had told their daughter, “if I hear his footstep, my heart races”), and all indications were that he still had it going on. Zeppo got married at fifty-eight and stayed married until he was seventy-one, to the future wife of Frank Sinatra. Not that the following is by any means proof of potency, but Zeppo was sued by a reputed mobster’s estranged wife for roughing her up when he was seventy-seven. (And when he died, at seventy-eight, he left an automobile and a Safeway franchise to each of two women who were neither of his ex-wives.) At fifty-nine, Groucho was undoubtedly bummed by the recent failure of his second marriage, but still.
In the second place—talk about iconoclasm. I have known personally any number of men, and have read of many others, who were quick to put down sacred cows. Groucho is the only man I have ever heard of who, when presented with an opportunity—however apropos—to dismiss his own erectile capacity in a crowded elevator, before he was sixty even … Any other man, I’m saying, would have let that opportunity pass. While chuckling ruefully to himself maybe. When it comes to self-deprecation, most people would be satisfied with Groucho’s famous remark that he wouldn’t belong to any club that would accept him. But not Groucho, who wouldn’t have been caught dead giving the impression that he had any joie de vivre. Here was a peerless leader indeed, who combined self-absorption and detachment from himself in a way that was genuinely radical. This is another of Duck Soup’s sources of authority.
If Groucho arrived carrying a sword, or any conventionally empowering scepter, we would think less of him. He has the balls to carry that cigar. Sometimes, as Freud is supposed to have said, a cigar is only a cigar. For the Marx Brothers, it is a prop. See the insanely prolonged scene in At the Circus in which Chico keeps coming up with another one to give the strongman, when the point was to get the strongman to bring out one of his cigars because, for reasons unnecessary to go into here, it is needed as evidence. And see the scene coming up in Duck Soup in which Harpo and Chico play baseball with a cigar. As it happens, a major league pitcher, George Culver of the Cincinnati Reds, told me years ago that he gave up smoking because it detracted from the circulation in his fingertips and therefore from his feel for the ball. Conceivably, cigar smoking numbed Groucho’s member (see “wouldn’t belong to any club” above) in that unfortunate way. However that may be, it is clear that his johnson played second fiddle to his wisecrack jones.
On the set of A Day at the Races, in l937, Groucho had a crush on the female love interest, Maureen O’Sullivan. After his death, she reminisced that he was “very sexy. He had physical presence and a good build.” But when he took her to lunch, he wouldn’t quit with the jokes. “Groucho never knew how to talk normally,” she said. “His life was his jokes.” Graham Greene, in his review of A Day at the Races, wrote that he was quite taken by this winsome colleen himself, but “Miss O’Sullivan is a real person,” and therefore had no business in the Marxes’ world, for “real people do more than retard, they smash the Marx fantasy. When Groucho lopes into the inane, they smile at him incredulously (being real people they cannot take him for granted), and there was one dreadful moment when Miss O’Sullivan murmured the word ‘Silly.’ Silly—good God, we cannot help exclaiming since we are real people too, have we been deceived all along?”
Anyway, O’Sullivan was trying to keep her marriage to John Farrow together. This is the marriage that produced Mia Farrow. I’m way ahead of you. You’re thinking that if Groucho had taken O’Sullivan away, he could have become not only Woody Allen’s idol but his stepfather-in-law. But no. Mia Farrow was not born until eight years after the filming of A Day at the Races. All we can say about what would have happened if Groucho and Maureen O’Sullivan had had a daughter is that Groucho, given his track record with daughters, would have doted upon and then alienated her.
Let us pause for a moment to applaud the absence of real people in Duck Soup.
On noticing that the guest of honor has materialized from opposite the expected direction, Mrs. Teasdale welcomes him “with open arms.” We cut to a two-shot (in which, continuity nuts may notice, Firefly’s swallowtail coat has become a jacket of a lighter shade with black piping and a glove in the breast pocket). I will not quote all of the resultant dialogue here. Groucho once expressed resentment of authors who “do a new kind of writing. They rent our movies … and write down all the good jokes in their books. Quite a writing feat!” Suffice it to say that Firefly responds to the opening provided by his gracious hostess by accusing her of coming on to him, of being comparable to a large building (she is in fact quite a bit taller than he), and of murdering her husband. He tells her to leave the premises. Then he ascertains that she is very rich and says, “Can’t you see what I’m trying to tell you? I love you.”
This dialogue is not characteristic of McCarey. It was presumably laid down by layer upon layer of Kalmar, Ruby, Sheekman, Perrin, Mankiewicz, and Marx. I’d say its non-sequitur zippiness derives to some extent from the pre-talking-picture humor-writing tradition of Benchley, Ring Lardner (check out his nonsense plays and lines in his stories like “‘Shut up,’ he explained”), and S. J. Perelman, who helped write Monkey Business and Horse Feathers. But such alchemical progressions as these did not manifest themselves through anyone in American culture but Groucho. It is fine, bughouse stuff, and it leaves the widder Teasdale blushing with delight at his declaration of love. Then we get what is for my money a particularly inspired exchange (it comes straight from the Ruby-Kalmar treatment, but from much later in the plot):
“Oh, Your Excellency!”
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“You’re not so bad yourself,” he says, rolling his eyes in mock-modest gratification.
At this point let us address an enduring question: the extent to which Margaret Dumont, this pillar of Marx Brothers comedy, appreciated the humor in any of it. Groucho always maintained that she didn’t get any of the jokes, didn’t even realize they were jokes. Maureen O’Sullivan said that Dumont told her, when shooting of A Day at the Races was about to begin, “It’s not going to be one of those things. I’m having a very serious part this time.” In fact, she is much sillier in that movie than in Duck Soup. At one point she remarks that Groucho’s character (a veterinarian) “tells me I’m the only case in history: I have high blood pressure on my right side and low blood pressure on my left side.” And she must have been aware of how silly it was.
Who was Margaret Dumont? From the book Hello, I Must Be Going by Charlotte Chandler, I got the impression that she grew up in Atlanta in the home of her godfather, Joel Chandler Harris, author of the Uncle Remus stories. Even though a descendant of Harris assured me that this wasn’t true, I want to believe it, in part because I grew up in that area myself, in part because Harris adds another Irish-American element to the whole tapestry here, and in part because I like to imagine B’rer Rabbit and Margaret Dumont doing a scene together. Last time I looked, both the International Movie Data Base (the indispensable imdb.com) and a blog on the website of the Wren’s Nest, the preserved home of Joel Chandler Harris, were still putting Dumont forward as Harris’s goddaughter. And my researches turned up a young woman relative, Essie LaRose, who came to live in the Harris household. Essie was conceivably about the right age if Ms. Dumont had not been quite truthful about hers, and a photo of her resembled an early one of Ms. Dumont.
But no. Essie married a man named Kelly, had children, and lived out her life in Atlanta. In his biography of the Marx Brothers, Monkey Business, Simon Louvish establishes that Margaret Dumont was born Daisy Baker in Brooklyn, New York, in 1882 (so she was only six years younger than Essie). Her father was an Irish seaman, her mother a French vocalist. Daisy became a showgirl. In 1915 she married an heir to a sugar fortune. In 1918 he died. She was presumably not left as well off as Mrs. Teasdale because she went right back to work—changing her birth date to l889 and her name (marguerite, Louvish points out, is French for “daisy”) to something more aristocratic.
Hail, Hail, Euphoria!: Presenting the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup, the Greatest War Movie Ever Made Page 5