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The Lives and Legends of the Marx Brothers.
Faber & Faber, London, 1999.
St Martins Press, New York, 2000, paperback 2001.
The cliche goes that biographies of comedians are deeply tragic, exploring the acute offstage pain that feeds into onstage hilarity. The novelist Simon Louvish has been down this road in a fine book on W. C. Fields and there are elements in this biography of the five (actually, six) Marx brothers of that oft' told tale, with stories of early poverty and later marital troubles, not to mention mixups with crime (you knew about Chico's gambling, but Louvish reveals that Zeppo nearly became an armed robber). However, this is a more complex family saga of an act that began in Alsace with a travelling hypnotist, whose daughter, Minnie, became the mother of the Marxes and the guiding force behind their careers on the stage and in other media.
Grouchy and Harpo left memoirs which mix fact and fiction and the brothers even supported a Broadway musical, MinnieY Boys, that embroidered the legend of their early years (and sometimes lied outright), but Louvish does a remarkable job of sorting out facts from nonsense, even while dealing with subjects who recognised that in the end, nonsense was more important.
The central threads of the book are the lives of Julius (Groucho), Leonard (Chico) and Adolph (Harpo), but Louvish also pays due attention to Herbert (Zeppo), the stooge who dropped out for a life of brokering deals and petty lawsuits, and Milton (Gummo), who was a stuttering straight man for a while, but never made a movie or left a recording. Also vital are the lives of Minnie and her husband Frenchy, Minnie's brother AI Shean - a vaudevillian who was the first of the clan to go into American showbiz - and even Margaret Dumont, the perennial dignified dame humiliated by Groucho and revealed here as a lot less blinkered than she and the brothers liked to pretend.
Thrown in are children, wives, writers, fans, enemies, business associates and that sad, missing Marx, sixth brother Manfred (who died aged three months).
Like the state room scene of A Night At The Opera (1935), it sometimes feels like too many people are clambering into this book for comfort, but Louvish gives a biography not of a single person but of an act that became an institution, of three or more disparate and perhaps irreconcilable styles of comedies that nevertheless meshed into something unique and irreplacable. Contemporary critics hailed Harpo's sublime pantomime as the heart of the act, with its innocence and viciousness, while modern followers prefer Groucho's quotable put-downs and irascible snarls. But the great Marx films need the bridge of Chico's Jewish-Italian patter and pistol-finger piano sobs to get these talents to work together, and Dumont added as much to the act as Zeppo or Gummo ever did.
Though he provides a detailed and persuasive account of the brothers' movie careers, with sidelines on their work in radio (except Harpo) and on television (especially Groucho), Louvish constantly reminds us that the brothers' act was already well-established and debatably past its peak when they made their first talkies in the early 30s. A real achievement of this book is that it does as good a job as anyone possibly could in conveying impressions of what Marx acts must have been like live. It rarely strays into the risky ground of what all this horn-honking, eyebrow-wiggling anarchy might mean, though Louvish is sharp about the specific prompts of Marxist humour (from anti-Semitism to the Depression) and the way their work was picked up, and probably misunderstood, by intellectuals and artists (Salvador Dali tried to write a screenplay for them). This is the real Living Marxism.
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