For no visible reason, Vanity Fair has posted an article about the relationship between Groucho Marx and the controversial lady who largely controlled his life in his last years, Erin Fleming. I have no idea why they saw a need to dredge this story up again and it feels like — and I'm sure this is not the case — this piece was written a decade or two ago and someone at the office found it in the files, realized they never published it and threw it up on the website.
I visited Groucho at his home once during the Erin days and also was present when in her company, he visited the set of a TV show I was writing. Because of those limited interactions, people ask me for my view on the Groucho/Erin situation. My answer is simple: She did some good things for him, she did some bad things to him, and if you want to know more than that, read my pal Steve Stoliar's book. Steve was hired by Erin to assist Groucho and was on the premises for much of those final years. Even before I met him though, I knew he was in a better position than anyone to report on what transpired and had reported it accurately and without self-interest.
I will say that the mercurial Ms. Fleming struck me as one of those people unable to cope with the vagaries of a show business career. To have even a chance at one, you have to grasp and deal with how unpredictable it can be; how you can do everything right (you think) and still not get what you want while someone else doing everything wrong (you think) gets everything you want. The Vanity Fair article more or less charts Erin's slow but certain detachment from reality as she discovers that taking care of an aging comedy legend just might not have been a pathway to fame and/or fortune. Groucho could be pretty unpredictable too.
Somewhere in there, you have to ask yourself what he would have done without her and most speculations along those lines do not lead to better Golden Years for the man. So I dunno. If you want to pursue this line of thought, read Raised Eyebrows by Steve Stoliar. You can buy it on Amazon or save a few bucks and get it autographed by the author over on his webpage. Then you can weigh the good things against the bad and become as maddeningly ambivalent as everyone else is on this matter.