Groucho
Part 2
by Mark Evanier
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 6/11/99
Comics Buyer's Guide
REVISED SOMEWHAT 8/18/17
This is PART TWO of a two-part essay on my encounters with Groucho Marx both on-screen and in-person. If you haven't read PART ONE first, you may wish to do so but it's not mandatory.
I next saw Groucho in person on the evening of December 11, 1972 at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in downtown Los Angeles. It's part of the Music Center complex down there and that's where Groucho performed his one-man show (one man plus Erin Fleming and Marvin Hamlisch, it turned out). The gala event was scheduled for months earlier but Groucho took ill and the whole soiree was delayed.
In the interim, we Marx fans waited — anxious at the notion of perhaps our only chance to ever see him in person. We consoled ourselves by listening to the A&M recording of Groucho's show at Carnegie Hall in New York. On the record, Groucho sounded pretty good; coherent, though a bit hoarse. I later learned that Groucho actually sounded worse and a bit less coherent at Carnegie Hall. Most of what was on that record was recorded at a "warm-up" appearance he made at Iowa State University.
Finally, the rescheduled concert took place. I went to the theatre with my friend Robert Solomon, a soul of similar Grouchomania. I did not take my then-current girlfriend Karen, whom I had roped with much the same ploy used on Pauline. Karen was not pleased by my going with Robert.
The evening was a success and then it wasn't. Groucho received an endless cascade of ovations, usually standing. But the audience, outwardly applauding, was inwardly cringing. Groucho was very old and his show consisted of him standing at a podium. Why he wasn't sitting, I don't know, but his promoters sprang for exactly no scenery or props. He seemed to have aged twenty years since when I'd seen him at Hillcrest Country Club.
He stood there and read card after card of anecdotes, sometimes breezing from one to the next with no notice that a laugh was supposed to come between stories. At one point, he read a card introducing a film clip, then continued right on into a story about something else. His secretary-manager-companion Erin Fleming hustled out from the wings to force him into a chair, saying, "We're going to show A Night at the Opera."
Groucho muttered, "But I've already seen it," triggering an immense laugh at the one and only ad-lib of the evening.
Later, he stopped in mid-anecdote to request that his piano player (a then-unknown Marvin Hamlisch) do his Johnny Mathis impression. Hamlisch was startled, but, realizing it was Groucho's way of asking for a break, he launched into the imitation. When Mr. Marx tried to perform "Lydia, the Tattooed Lady," Hamlisch had to prompt him on many of the lines, helping him along the way a third-grade teacher might coach a pupil who had blanked on the poem he was supposed to memorize and recite.
Since this song had been in Groucho's repertoire for more than thirty years, the audience couldn't help but feel cold chills at the lapse. I think, if there had been a tactful way of stopping the show and polling those present on whether they wanted Groucho to continue or to be taken home and put to bed, the vote would have been unanimous for bed.
Instead, we all pretended that nothing was amiss and applauded Groucho long and loud. It was the greatest bit of acting I have ever seen performed by an audience.
During the show, movie cameras positioned throughout the star-packed house filmed Groucho's attempts and the audience reverberations. The film was supposed to wind up as a special for television, we heard. But it never did and it's not hard to guess why.
On the way out, Robert and I glimpsed George Burns getting into a limousine. We noted that — and could understand why — he was not lingering about, going backstage to congratulate the star. Years later, when I met Mr. Burns, I mentioned that evening to him.
"I'm known as a great liar," he said. "Everyone in show business knows it. I can see the worst show in the world and go backstage and say, 'You killed 'em! You were terrific!'"
He paused and added, "But even I couldn't pull it off that night."
We next find Mark and Groucho together on the evening of October 26, 1976. It was my second day as Story Editor of a TV show called Welcome Back, Kotter and it had already been an amazing thirty-six hours. In the midst of much hyper-activity, one of the secretaries mentioned off-handedly that Groucho Marx might be coming to that evening's taping. Like I really needed more excitement in my life that day.
There was a back-story to it all. The star of the show, Gabe Kaplan, often did Groucho impressions on the show. Nothing new there. Everyone does Groucho impressions, usually bad ones. It says something about Groucho's masterful timing that folks will recognize an imitation that is light years from his vocal pitch so long as it approximates his rhythm and includes a pantomime cigar.
Groucho saw Gabe do his impression and announced he was going to sue. This, also, was nothing new. Groucho threatened to sue everyone. In his later years, every time anyone had any sort of project that treaded even vaguely on the reputations of the Brothers Marx, there was at least a 50-50 chance that Groucho would take financial umbrage and threaten to have his barristers barrist. He once threatened to sue his son Arthur over an altogether-flattering, unauthorized biography.
At least a few of Groucho's most fervent, young fans were crushed when they approached him with fan-type projects only to be rudely rebuffed and threatened with legal action, albeit unfounded. Usually, such threats were quickly made and forgotten.
Once this round of legal threats were made and forgotten, Groucho was invited to pick a Tuesday — any Tuesday we were taping — to drop by and do a cameo walk-on appearance. As fate would have it, he picked my first Tuesday there.
We quickly wrote a joke. Here it was my second day as a staff writer on a TV show and I was writing a joke for Groucho Marx to tell. Something, I couldn't help but think, was wrong with this picture.
Around three o'clock, a call came in to confirm that Groucho would be there, that he would do the cameo walk-on, but that he wouldn't speak. Groucho, we were told, had recently decided never to speak in public again, having decided he was too old. Folks on the staff were a bit baffled: Have Groucho Marx on a show and not have him speak? One of the producers asked, "Are you sure we have the right Marx Brother?"
Nevertheless, the offer had been tendered and couldn't, in all politeness, be withdrawn. We switched around the closing scene so that Gabe did the joke, then a crowd of extras would part to reveal Groucho standing there. His sudden appearance, wordless though it would be, would be the topper to Gabe's joke. We hoped.
As we got closer to tape time, the cameo appearance was continually rumored as on-again, off-again. Nevertheless, the set was abuzz with celebrities. Lee Grant was there since her daughter, Dinah Manoff, was in the show that evening. So was Valerie Harper's daughter, Wendy Schaal. They had about four lines between them but have since done pretty well for themselves.
The studio audience was in bleachers, being warmed-up by comedian Mike Preminger. Mike was unnerved by all the noise in the wings and by conflicting signals he was getting as to how much time he had to fill before we'd be ready to roll tape. No one had told him about Groucho.
At about 8:15, a call came up to the writers' dressing room that Groucho was downstairs. (The writers got a dressing room so that they could be close in case of emergency rewrites. Executive Producer James Komack had a dressing room just off the stage but he vacated his for the evening and Groucho's name was inserted in the slot on the door.) We all traipsed down to see Groucho.
Our esteemed cameo guest was not feeling well and it was decided that he would not do the walk-on but would, instead, have his photo taken with the cast on the set. I'm still not certain if that was his decision or ours but one look at the man and you could see he was in no shape to go on-camera.
The shortest route from Groucho's dressing room was directly across the front of the bleachers, past where Mike Preminger was filling time, and through the center flap of the goldenrod curtain between the audience and the Kotter classroom set. With several people guiding him, Groucho was led out in front of the studio audience while cast and crew hustled around the other way to meet him behind the curtain.
Out front, the audience did not, at first, recognize Groucho Marx.
Mike Preminger looked over and saw an elderly gent, shuffling slowly towards him, interrupting in mid-joke. In a second or two, he sized up the situation and blurted out a quick introduction. The audience, responding to the name, burst into loud cheering and applause. "Thunderous" is the word that came to mind.
Groucho, making his way through the curtain flap, didn't hear them.
Behind the drape, cast members and crew members alike were introducing themselves to Groucho. He shook everyone's hand and mumbled "Nice to meet you," oblivious to whom he was actually meeting. He didn't seem to know where he was and he certainly didn't know which of the people gently pumping his hand were actors and which ones moved scenery for a living. He was steered to Mr. Kotter's chair in the classroom and gently eased into it as Gabe and the Sweathogs (John Travolta, Ron Palillo, Larry Hilton-Jacobs and Robert Heyges) crowded around.
Recalling Dick Cavett's warning to the audience on the record of Groucho's Carnegie Hall show, I warned the photog that Groucho was made dizzy by flash bulbs. He replied that there was plenty of light on the set and, besides, the way Groucho looked, these pictures would probably never be released. He was almost correct. Days later, when I phoned up the appropriate P.R. folks to procure a copy, I was told that no such photos existed. For years, I thought they'd been destroyed but decades later, some turned up — as everything does eventually — on the Internet.
As they went through the motions of taking the pictures, Groucho remained unmoving, unsmiling and about as unlike the fellow in Duck Soup as it would be possible to imagine. I found myself mentally repeating, "This is Groucho Marx," trying to get the notion to sink in. The Groucho I met at Hillcrest was the one I knew — older perhaps, and slower, but nonetheless recognizable.
This Groucho was not. I couldn't help but wonder, "Why is he here? What is he out to prove?" And just as I was wondering that, I overheard Erin Fleming pitching herself to our producer as an actress whose presence would do Kotter proud. Okay: Question answered.
The pictures done, Groucho was helped off the stage. Several people had already left, almost or actually in tears. "I don't want to see him like that," I heard a few of them say, exiting as quickly as they had eagerly arrived. Bobby Heyges was walking around saying, "How can I go on after seeing that?" Bobby was in no mood for comedy.
I got the idea to liberate the GROUCHO MARX sign from the dressing room door, an interesting memento. But, when I got there, someone else of like mind had beaten me to it. I arrived just in time to see Groucho and his entourage step slowly out the door to a waiting limousine.
In the months I worked on Kotter, I never heard anyone mention Groucho's visit again. You couldn't have found a person on the crew who would bet you a dime that the man who posed for photos with the cast would live another ten weeks, much less ten months. But he did.
I saw him one other time about two months later and he was even worse. The controversial Ms. Fleming was staging a series of carefully-planned spontaneous "drop-in" visits by everyone in Hollywood. A producer friend of mine had been invited and, figuring a Marxian authority might be of aid, he invited me along. On our way in, Jack Nicholson was coming out with the look of a man who has just been to pay his last respects to a dying aunt and, that unpleasantness over with, wanted to be anywhere else.
All the time we were there, Groucho just sat in a wheelchair next to his piano and muttered little wheezes of conversation, all — but for a short passage of Gilbert and Sullivan — inaudible. Everyone present took their lead from Erin, who, whenever Groucho would make any sort of noise, would nod and smile and pretend like she agreed wholeheartedly with whatever he had just said. Which is what we all did, chuckling with every reply, just in case what he said had been intended as funny.
Erin scurried about, talking long and loud about a scene she had done in a Woody Allen film. One day's acting work on a Woody Allen film apparently makes one an expert on all phases of comedy. We got out of there as fast as was even vaguely polite.
Eight months later, Groucho died in the literal sense. That mental leash, so concerned as it always is with propriety, stopped a lot of us from saying out loud, "Thank God!" But we all felt it — all of us who'd ever felt even remotely close to Hugo Z. Hackenbush.
I'm not quite certain why any of us loved him as we did. He was not, by anyone's accounts, a particularly nice man. Harpo, everyone agrees, was — but Groucho often seemed compelled to live up (or down) to his name. He so alienated everyone in his life that, near the end, the only one left to care for him was an aspiring actress who only seemed able to get acting work when she was shoving an aged Groucho out on stage in front of her.
Groucho's famed wit could account for what we felt about him — but much of it was, after all, the work of top writers. He'd had men like George Kaufman, Morrie Ryskind, S.J. Perelman, Irving Brecher and Harry Ruby concocting his stage and screen dialogue and later, when he did the You Bet Your Life game show, ostensibly ad-lib, a whole slew of closet writers constructing contestants' remarks and snappy Groucho comebacks. He was by no means helpless in this department, but he sure had enough help to tar up his fame as one of America's great wits.
No, I think what Groucho meant to any of us was irreverence. What the man was didn't matter. On screen, he lived with a healthy disrespect for all things serious and born of pretense. Small wonder that his greatest foil was Margaret Dumont, whose screen presence denoted High-Society affectation and not much else.
Groucho never took anything too seriously, his own image in particular…which is why it was so unnerving to see him, in his declining days, subsisting only on the respect that others felt for him. The Master of Irreverence had finally been reduced…to Reverence.
The happiness of film is that the best gets remembered and the worst, forgotten. That's why everyone always thinks that TV was better years ago: They remember only their favorite shows. Groucho left a legacy of very funny movies and TV shows, most of which are readily available. If they aren't all as popular as they deserve to be these days, it's only because everyone who could possibly care about them is sick of them. They're there, though, for future generations.
They'll be able to watch Animal Crackers and the like, never having to witness Groucho's declining years. Just as they'll be able to listen to Elvis Presley records without thinking of the later Elvis…the Elvis who died the same week as Groucho.
Elvis was grotesquely overweight in his final years of touring. He packed Las Vegas showrooms full of Elvis worshipers who paid ticket prices straight out of the ozone layer. On stage, The King performed his greatest hits, accompanied by a good band and a group of back-up singers who aided him with the notes he could no longer reach.
Even with this help, the "King" still delivered a show so short that, when he left the stage, everyone knew it was just a fake bow-off and he'd be coming back for ten more numbers. Only he wasn't coming back: Elvis exited directly to a waiting limousine. His fans would be standing and cheering in the showroom, waiting for him to return and finish the high-priced concert. Then, over the P.A. system, once they were sure the limo was away, the hotel would announce, "Elvis has left the building…thank you and good-night." The crowds were always, to say the least, stunned.
Having been raised with what I hope is a proper human reverence for life and the feelings of others, I can't help but say that the death of Elvis Presley at age 42 was a terrible tragedy and loss.
But deep within me, parts affected in many ways by my contacts with Groucho Marx, have to wonder if maybe Elvis, by dying when he did, didn't do himself and his fans a terrific favor.