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The Lives and Legends of the Marx Brothers.
Faber & Faber, London, 1999.
St Martins Press, New York, 2000, paperback 2001.
When scriptwriter S.J. Perelman was first assigned to work with the Marx Brothers in 1928, he set up a meeting and found them in characteristically chaotic mood: ‘Groucho expatiated at legnth on his stock market losses. Chico kept jumping up to place telephone bets and Harpo table-hopped all over the dining room, discomposing any attractive lady who gave him a second glance.'
The miracle of the Marx Brothers was that, in their best pictures, this anarchy was effectively captured on screen. Their public personalities had been carved out during years of experience on the Vaudeville circuit. The three principal brothers, Chico, Harpo and Groucho, were stage veterans of some 30 years by the time their first major Hollywood film, Monkey Business, was released in 1931.
The strength of Simon Louvish's biography - the first major biography of all five Marx Brothers, Chico, Harpo, Groucho, Gummo and Zeppo - lies in the detail he has amassed. There isn't a provincial newspaper, census return, immigration record or street directory that has not been ransacked to document the brothers' progress.
Their grandfather was variously a ventriloquist, a magician and an umbrella-maker. Their grandmother was a harpist. Emigrating from Germany to America, they were unable to find work As Groucho wryly observed: 'There seemed to be practically no demand for a German ventriloquist and a woman harpist who yodelled in a foreign language.'
The brothers' mother, Minnie, was 'an expert in the denial of bad news . . the hype, the building of castles in the sky'. However, her greatest ambition - to make her five sons a monument to her vision - succeeded beyond her most extravagant imaginings. Groucho began as a boy soprano in a drag act, toured in a double act with a Yorkshire 'cosier singer' and, after the singer ran away with a lion-tamer in Texas, joined Gus Edwards's Postal Telegraph Boys.
By 1910, Minnie had manoeuvred her sons into an act under her own management - The Mascots. The five brothers were all 'Minnie's boys' and their energy came from her side of the family; their father, Samuel 'Frenchy' Marx, was 'the world's worst tailor', and 'no workaholic'.
Louvish explodes the legend that the Marx Brothers' brand of mayhem was born in Nagadoches, Texas, in reaction to audience antipathy, and finds it unproven that George Kaufman said to his collaborator, Morrie Ryskind, at a Marx Brothers Revue they had written: 'Hush! I think I just heard a line from the script.' However, there is little new to be learned in this account regarding the Marx Brothers' films (though there is generous quotation of the texts).
The later years make sad reading. Groucho enjoyed solo success on radio and television, but was sued for divorce by his three wives. Chico never broke his gambling habit. Only Harpo died rich, loved and happy. Zeppo, the man who got the girl but not the laugh, lost his wife, Barbara, to Frank Sinatra at the age of 72. Like Gummo he had become an agent.
One night, the brothers were in a nightclub with director Norman Krasna, whom Zeppo was wooing for his agency. Krasna was not buying the pitch when a drunk came to the table and started pestering him. Zeppo laid the drunk out with a punch, turned to Krasna and asked: 'Does any other agency give you that sort of service?'
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