Watching the first few scenes of The Cocoanuts, a 1929 film set in a well-appointed but down-on-its-luck Florida hotel, moviegoers settled in for what seemed to be a routine tale of star-crossed lovers and double-crossing crooks. Twenty minutes in, a curly-wigged fellow in a battered top hat and a tattered trenchcoat five sizes too large saunters into the hotel lobby, followed closely by a man wearing the kind of bowl-shaped hat that might suit an organ grinder’s monkey, a corduroy jacket five sizes too small, and the grin of a child who’s knows he’s about to get away with something. The grinning man speaks in an exaggerated Italian accent; the top-hatted fellow doesn’t speak at all, though he carries a walking stick topped with a rubber bulb that he honks as he scurries after every young woman who enters the lobby. Unusual guests, to be sure, but no stranger than the cigar-waggling hotel manager, who wears a swallowtail coat, wire-rimmed spectacles, and unnaturally rectangular eyebrows that, like his shiny black mustache, appear on closer inspection to be made of shoe polish. The only normal-looking man on the premises is the desk clerk, a stiff, well-groomed chap in a double-breasted suit who might have stepped from the pages of a men’s catalogue.
Spotting potential guests, the manager and the clerk, hands extended, stride across the lobby toward the new arrivals, who, hands extended, stride toward their hosts. The four men stride right past each other like proverbial ships in the night, setting off a cockeyed quadrille in which they chase each other around and over the sofa. When the chase subsides, the following things occur: the silent fellow eats the buttons off a bellboy’s jacket; the grinning man wrestles the bellboy for possession of the empty suitcase; the silent fellow begins hurling fountain pens into the wall as if they were darts; the manager and the grinning man swap nonsensical quips (“Would you like a suite on the third floor?” “No, I’ll take a Polack in the basement”) as matter-of-factly as if they were chatting about the weather; the silent fellow climbs over the front desk and rips up the letters in the pigeonholes; the manager helpfully hands the letters up to him for shredding; the silent fellow brushes some glue onto a wad of sealing wax, gobbles it up, and washes down his meal with a swig from the inkwell.
The four characters play off one another so instinctively—except, perhaps, for the handsome clerk, who, as if realizing he can’t keep up, disappears midway through the proceedings—that their nonsense appears to make perfect sense. Many moviegoers refused to believe that four such mismatched characters, who seemed almost to belong to four different species, could have been played by brothers.
One suspects they could have been played only by brothers. And even then, perhaps only by Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and Zeppo Marx.
* * *
When I was seven or eight years old, I was browsing the bookshelves in the playroom of my grandparents’ house when I came across a children’s book called The Five Chinese Brothers. Based on an ancient folktale, it tells the story of five lookalike brothers, each of whom possesses a unique power. One can swallow the sea, one has an iron neck, one can stretch his legs endlessly, one can survive fire, and one can hold his breath forever. The sea-swallowing brother is unjustly accused of a crime and sentenced to be beheaded. On the night before his execution, the brother with the iron neck secretly takes his place. The executioner swings his axe in vain. The judge sentences the brother to drown, but the brother with the stretchable legs steps in. One by one, each brother uses his singular gift to help the condemned man avoid execution. Finally, the judge gives up and pardons the prisoner.
I was fascinated by the book. The protagonists were as fantastic as comic book superheroes, and yet they happened to be brothers. What if my brothers and I had such powers? What would they be? Would we work well together? At that age it was hard to imagine us working together at all. Harry preferred doing things on his own, whereas Ned and I couldn’t operate a Kool-Aid stand for more than half an hour without squabbling and tearing it down.
Brothers who have been rivals since childhood, brothers who have painstakingly carved out their own fraternal niches, and even brothers who have always been close might find pursuing their careers in the company of a sibling or two a little claustrophobic. Yet ever since Aaron served as Moses’s spokesman, brothers have worked together. They have ruled kingdoms (Charlemagne and Carloman); owned department stores (the Strauses); manufactured soap (the Levers); made wine (the Gallos); operated circuses (the Ringlings); performed standup comedy (the Smotherses); made furniture (the Stickleys); founded advertising agencies (the Saatchis); started banks (the Lazards); robbed banks (the Barkers); run Mafia families (too many to count); overseen drug cartels (the Félixes); sold cars (the Renaults); performed on the flying trapeze (the Wallendas); made music (the Beach Boys); produced movies (the Warners); written musicals (the Shermans); organized labor unions (the Reuthers); led posses (the Earps); and starred in sideshows (Chang and Eng, the original Siamese Twins). Although the intimacy and complexity of the sibling bond can make such collaborations fraught and highly combustible, it can also make them rich and successful.
When I was a child, I often spent my allowance on Smith Brothers Cough Drops, whether I had a cough or not. I liked the grown-up taste, the tongue-stimulating sensation of the initials “SB” molded onto each lozenge, and the old-fashioned package, on which the heads of the bearded Smiths, looking like retired Civil War generals, faced each other over what I assumed to be their names, “Trade” and “Mark.” But I especially liked the sound of the word “Brothers” in the company title, which conjured intimacy, solidity, durability, trustworthiness—all the things I longed for in my own sibling relationships. I’m not sure I would have forked over my dime for Smith Cousins Cough Drops.
* * *
Left to their own devices, the Marx brothers might have turned out very differently. Chico wanted to be a professional gambler, Harpo a piano player, Groucho a doctor, Gummo an inventor, Zeppo a boxer. Their mother had other plans. Harpo, with an inordinate amount of help from a ghostwriter, famously described Minnie Marx as possessing “the stamina of a brewery horse, the drive of a salmon fighting his way up a waterfall, the cunning of a fox, and a devotion to her brood as fierce as any she-lion’s.” Born Minna Schoenberg in Dornum, Germany, she spent her childhood crisscrossing the country by wagon with her father, a traveling magician-cum-ventriloquist, and her mother, a yodeler-cum-harpist. In 1879, when she was fourteen, the family emigrated to New York, where Minna—now Minnie—worked five years in garment-industry sweatshops before marrying Samuel Marx, a tailor from Alsace chiefly remembered for the ineptitude of his sewing, the excellence of his cooking, and the endlessness of his pinochle games. The young couple settled in Yorkville, an immigrant neighborhood on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, where Minnie gave birth to five boys, and immediately began plotting to hoist them above their working-class origins.
Long after Minnie Marx was dead, Groucho liked to say, “Our mother treated us all equally—with contempt.” In fact, Minnie neither treated her sons with contempt—the intensity of her affection would leave lasting scars—nor did she treat them equally. From the beginning, she favored her eldest son, Leonard, who would one day be known as Chico. Perhaps it was because an earlier child had died of influenza at the age of seven months, and her grief intensified her attachment to the next. Perhaps it was because Leonard was a robust baby: fair-skinned, blue-eyed, and slightly chubby, like his mother. Or because he had a flirtatious, manipulative personality not unlike hers. Or because he was bright. When he chose to attend, Leo did well in school. His ability to solve complicated math problems in his head led teachers to assume he’d become a bookkeeper. But he preferred to apply his mathematical gifts elsewhere. By the time he was a teenager, Leo was running away from home, fighting in the streets, betting on boxing matches, hustling pool, and playing all-night crap games in the back room of a cigar store on Lexington Avenue. There would be a lifelong tendency among his brothers (and some biographers) to dismiss his excesses as the endearing, boys-will-be-boys antics of a congenital scamp, but there was ample evidence early on that the eldest Marx brother was a compulsive gambler. After he quit school at twelve to work in a lace factory in Brooklyn, he’d bet away his paycheck long before he got home. To cover his losses, he stole from his own family. His parents knew that if something went missing—his grandfather’s silver-headed cane, his father’s tailoring shears, the one-dollar gold Ingersoll watch his younger brother Adolph had been given for his bar mitzvah—it would likely turn up in the window of the pawn shop on East Ninety-Eighth Street. Yet Leo’s attitude was so confident, his lies so inventive, and his mother so doting that he got away with almost everything. Hoping to divert her beloved eldest son from juvenile delinquency, Minnie bought him an old upright piano and paid for weekly lessons. Leo demonstrated a distinct aversion to practicing, but he was a quick study and was soon performing in saloons and nickelodeons. For his finale, he played audience requests, blindfolded, with a bedsheet covering the keyboard.
Like his mother, Leo had chutzpah to spare, and occasionally double-booked jobs, in which case he recruited his brother Adolph—“Ahdie”—who looked so much like him that few people could tell the difference, to play one of the engagements. (When they were older, Chico would take advantage of their resemblance to cover up his affairs, insisting to outraged husbands that the culprit had been his brother, known by then as Harpo.) Younger by fifteen months, Ahdie was his brother’s temperamental opposite. Leo was his mother’s child, brash and determined, all restless forward motion; Ahdie was his father’s, mild and tolerant, content to let life take him where it may. Leo was facile and sharp; Ahdie was a slow learner, barely able to read and write before dropping out of school in second grade and turning to his older brother for instruction. “In a short time he taught me how to handle a pool cue, how to play cards and how to bet on the dice,” the younger brother recalled. Leo used his gift for accents to talk his way out of trouble in the German, Irish, and Italian neighborhoods that surrounded their Jewish enclave; Ahdie carried an apple or an old tennis ball to bribe his way past streetcorner bullies. Leo imitated the way people spoke; Ahdie, embarrassed by his high, squeaky voice, imitated the way people looked. Trailing after his older brother, Ahdie, too, seemed headed for a life of gambling and petty thievery, but he gradually drifted off to explore the world on his own. Between the ages of fourteen and nineteen, he worked as a pie sorter in a bakery, delivery boy for a grocer, apprentice to a butcher, bellhop at a theatrical hotel, janitor in a Bowery saloon, packer for a greeting card distributor, dogwalker for an actress, stockboy in a department store, pin setter at a bowling alley, cigarette boy at a German social club, ragpicker at a textile house, and piano player at a Long Island brothel, where he pounded out his two-song repertoire, “Waltz Me Around Again, Willie” and “Love Me and the World Is Mine,” over and over, varying the tempo and the octave. His mother worried that Ahdie lacked ambition, especially compared with his older brother, who walked the streets at a trot. Years later, he would recall, “It went without saying that I was the untalented member of the family.”
If Minnie found Leo the most irresistible of her children, she found Julius, who would be better known as Groucho, the least appealing. Julius had darker skin, coarser hair, a bigger nose, a frailer body, and a slight walleye. From an early age, Julius sensed his mother’s disappointment—which, to a sensitive, quick-to-take-offense boy, felt like contempt. Furthermore, by the time Julius came along, his lookalike older brothers had already paired off, developing their own in-jokes and secrets, leaving him to fend for himself. Nearsighted Julius wasn’t as good as Leo and Ahdie at stoop ball, and he disdained as childish the card games they spent every spare moment playing. He found something else to interest him, something his brothers cared nothing about: books. He devoured the Frank Merriwell stories and Horatio Alger’s rags-to-riches tales. He developed a rich vocabulary and a stinging wit to hide his loneliness and clear space for himself in a crowded household. But it seemed unfair to him that Leo, who stole from his own family, could do no wrong in his mother’s eyes, while he, the dutiful son who did well in school and turned over to his parents the dollar a week he earned singing in the boys’ choir at the Episcopal Church on Madison Avenue, received only indifference; that Leo, who rarely practiced, should get the only piano lessons the family could afford, while he, who had the best ear of the brothers, had to teach himself to play. Julius’s resentment of Leo, and his distrust of the world in general, was so evident that his mother called him Der Eifersüchtige—“The Jealous One.” That his mother spoiled his younger brothers—Milton (the future Gummo), a sickly child with a rheumatic heart, and Herbert (the future Zeppo), the baby of the family, born nine years after Milton—only reinforced Julius’s sense of neglect. As did the fact that, like Leo and Ahdie, the two youngest Marx brothers eventually paired off, too, leaving Julius, the middle child, odd man out. His peripheral status made him all the more determined to be noticed. “Groucho was the most serious, and he was the most ambitious,” a neighbor recalled. “He wanted to be somebody.”
In later years, the Marx Brothers would reminisce about their early days through the forgiving scrim of nostalgia: playing prisoner’s base and one o’ cat; stealing peaches from the orchard behind Jacob Ruppert’s Park Avenue mansion; wrestling in their cramped, three-bedroom apartment on East Ninety-Third Street, where the door was always unlocked and a parade of relatives and neighbors dropped by to drink coffee or play cards. But their childhood was shadowed by a sense of deprivation that fueled their desire to escape. The four older brothers shared a double bed, two at each end. “We never went hungry, at least not too hungry,” said Groucho. “But there was generally some kind of brawl at the dinner-table over who would get what.” (Years later, when the brothers started making good money in vaudeville, Harpo once ordered one of everything on a restaurant menu just because he could.) The brothers weren’t together much—Leo off gambling, Ahdie wandering the city, Julius in school, Milton sick at home, and Herbert too young to be part of things—but when they were, they were a five-person wrecking crew. “The boys were wild and [their father] couldn’t control them . . .” recalled a neighbor. “The place would be a shambles, especially if Mrs. Marx left them alone. They would tear down the draperies.” At a cousin’s wedding reception, Ahdie and Julius encountered a urinal for the first time. They jumped on it gleefully until the pipe ruptured, flooding the hall and bringing the festivities to a halt.
Minnie was determined that her children do better than their feckless father. She had an alternative role model in mind: her younger brother, Adolph Schoenberg, who had quit his job as a pants presser, changed his name to Al Shean, and become one of the highest-paid entertainers in vaudeville. Once a month, Uncle Al came to visit, decked out in matching fedora and spats, twirling a gold-headed cane, and exuding a cologne-scented nimbus of prosperity as he regaled his nephews with tales of life on the stage. Minnie took them to the theater to see their uncle perform; at home, they imitated his routines, capably enough that she decided one of them should try show business. The logical candidate was her piano-playing eldest, but Leo was an irresponsible hell-raiser. Ahdie had no apparent talent, Milton stammered, and Herbert was too young. That left Julius, who, though homely and awkward, had a decent soprano. Though Julius was the best student among the brothers, Minnie pulled him from school in the sixth grade. Julius had dreamed of being a doctor but was eager to please the mother who never seemed pleased with him, and he went on the road as a female impersonator in a small-time vaudeville group that billed itself as the Leroy Trio. Though his first tour ended badly (the other two “Leroys” ran off with his earnings, stranding him in Cripple Creek, Colorado), and though he would forever resent having his education halted because his eldest brother wouldn’t pull his weight, Julius found, in the attention of strangers, something he’d never gotten at home. “For the first time in my life,” he recalled, “I felt like I wasn’t a nonentity.”
One by one, his brothers were conscripted into the act by maternal fiat. Milton didn’t stammer when he sang, so in 1907, Minnie dressed him and Julius in straw boaters and white duck suits, paired them with a sixteen-year-old girl, and dubbed them the Three Nightingales. The girl sang off-key, fell in unrequited love with Julius, and wasn’t cost-effective (she couldn’t share a hotel room with the male Nightingales), so Minnie replaced her with a boy. The trio met with a measure of success until its opening night at Henderson’s Coney Island, when Minnie learned that the theater had promised its customers a quartet. Hurrying to Manhattan, she strode down the aisle of the Thirty-Fourth Street nickelodeon in which nineteen-year-old Ahdie was plying his two-song repertoire, and ordered him to follow her. On the el train back to Coney Island, Ahdie changed into the white duck suit she’d brought, while Minnie screened him from fellow passengers with newspapers and taught him the words to “Darling Nelly Gray,” telling Ahdie to fake the bass part, where he could do the least damage. She marched him into the wings, and, as the band struck up the Nightingales’ cue, shoved him onstage. Looking across the footlights at what he later remembered as “a sea of hostile, mocking faces,” Ahdie was terrified. “With my first look at my first audience I reverted to being a boy again,” he recalled. “My reaction was instantaneous and overwhelming. I wet my pants.”
Minnie might have chosen Leo for the act had she been able to find him. While his brothers were touring, Leo worked a succession of jobs that took him far from Yorkville: pool hustler, lifeguard, circus wrestler, flyweight boxer, whorehouse pianist. In 1911, he was working in Pittsburgh as a song plugger when he formed a duet with a singer, adopted his barber’s Italian accent, and joined the vaudeville circuit as “Marx and Gordoni.” In 1912, while playing in Chicago, Leo attended a performance of the Three Marx Brothers, as they were now called, in nearby Waukegan. Leo hadn’t seen his brothers in several years, during which time they had evolved from a singing act peppered with a few jokes to a comedy act with a few songs thrown in. (Gummo would later say that the Marx Brothers, unable to sing or dance, ended up comedians by default.) For the past year they had been performing “Fun in Hi Skule,” a Julius-written version of a vaudeville comic staple, the school act. As the curtain went up, red-wigged Ahdie, playing a dim-witted student, entered the classroom with an orange for his crotchety old teacher, played by Julius. Glancing into the orchestra pit, Ahdie was shocked to see Leo at the piano. Ahdie reacted in typical Marx Brothers fashion: he let out a yell and threw the orange at his older brother. (It was not the first time a Marx Brother had ad-libbed, nor would it be the last.) Leo caught the orange and threw it back, triggering a free-for-all. “When Groucho and Gummo saw what was going on they started whooping too,” Harpo recalled. “We heaved everything we could get our hands on into the orchestra pit—hats, books, chalk, erasers, stilettos. The piano player surrendered. He climbed up onto the stage, sat at one of the school desks, and joined the act.” The Three Marx Brothers had become Four.
* * *
More than a century before Minnie Marx sent her sons out on the vaudeville circuit, Mayer Amschel Rothschild, a junk-dealer-turned-coin-trader-turned-banker in the Jewish ghetto of Frankfurt, sent his four younger sons to different European commercial capitals—London, Paris, Vienna, and Naples—to establish branches of the family business. (He kept his eldest son by his side.) The fraternal diaspora mimicked those traditional fairy tales in which brothers are dispatched into the world to seek their fortunes. In the Rothschild version, the brothers ended up controlling much of European finance and amassing the largest private fortune in the world. Their sibling bond would be enshrined in the family coat of arms. In addition to a menagerie’s worth of heraldic beasts, it contained a clenched fist holding five arrows, each symbolizing a brother.
Parental ambition is one spur to fraternal collaboration. Brotherly example is another. In 1844, twenty-two-year-old Heyum Lehmann, the second son of a Bavarian cattle dealer, emigrated to the United States. He worked for three years as a peddler in Alabama until he had enough money to send for his younger brother, Mendel. Henry and Emanuel, as they now called themselves, ran a dry goods and cotton trading business (“H. Lehman and Bro.”) for three more years before sending for their younger brother, Maier (soon to be known as Mayer) and repainting the sign over their store to read “Lehman Brothers”—a name it would keep long after its three founders died and the company had evolved into one of the world’s most respected banks, a name it would keep right up until the company itself died in 2008. Similarly, in Roaring Twenties Philadelphia, Fayard Nicholas taught his toddler brother, Harold, the dance steps he saw each night on the stage of the Standard Theater, where his parents played in the house band. By the time Fayard was eighteen and Harold was eleven, the tap-dancing Nicholas Brothers were the featured act at New York’s Cotton Club and the toast of the Harlem Renaissance.
It was hardly surprising that “the Mayo Boys,” as their neighbors in southeastern Minnesota knew them, went into medicine. Will and his younger brother, Charlie, were sons of a country doctor. As children in the 1870s, they swept and dusted their father’s office, drove him on his rounds, accompanied him on autopsies, and learned anatomy by playing with the bones of a Sioux warrior he kept in an iron kettle. As they grew older, the brothers served their father as ersatz nurses: rolling bandages, applying poultices, fitting plaster casts, heating surgical instruments, handling sponges during operations, and, occasionally, dressing wounds. Dr. Mayo discussed case histories with them, took them to medical society meetings and assigned them Gray’s Anatomy and Paget’s Lectures on Surgical Pathology. “We were reared in medicine as a farmer boy is reared in farming,” recalled Will, admitting on another occasion that “It never occurred to us that we could be anything but doctors.”
It also never occurred to the Mayo boys that they could be anything but partners. Both became surgeons, dividing their work according to their talents: Will operated below the neck (the abdomen and pelvis), while Charlie operated above the neck (eyes, ears, nose, throat, brain). For more than a decade, until their caseloads made it impossible, each assisted at the other’s surgeries. People from around the world came to the Mayo Clinic, either to be operated on by the brothers or to watch them operate. Visiting surgeons might observe Will as he resectioned a stomach, then go to a neighboring theater to see Charlie perform a thyroidectomy, then hurry back to watch Will remove a gallbladder. “Dr. Will” and “Dr. Charlie,” as they were known, remained as close as they had been in childhood. They shared a bank account and lived next door to each other. (Their plan to build a passageway leading to a communal study between their homes was vetoed by their wives, who pointed out that they already spent more than enough time together.) Will, the more polished public speaker, reaped the greater share of the glory, but Charlie seemed never to resent it, and Will always accepted honors and awards “on behalf of my brother and myself.” One of Will’s friends remarked, “I believe if Dr. Will were elected President of the United States he would accept the office in the name of his brother and himself.” After Charlie died in 1939 at the age of seventy-three, Will lived only two months without his brother.
None of their Dayton, Ohio, neighbors could have predicted what the two youngest Wright brothers would end up doing. But they could have guessed that whatever it was, they’d do it together. “From the time we were little children my brother Orville and myself lived together, worked together and, in fact, thought together,” wrote Wilbur, a month before his death. Their father, a bishop of the United Brethren Church, hoped that Wilbur, the older brother by four years, would follow him into the ministry, but he encouraged his children to pursue whatever sparked their interest. Their interest was sparked by anything that involved building. As children, the brothers made sleds, wagons, kites, chairs, a foot-powered lathe, and a paper-folding machine. After Orville dropped out of high school to construct his own printing press from scrap, they launched a weekly newspaper, with Wilbur as editor and Orville as publisher. A few years later, they opened a shop where they made, sold, and repaired bicycles. In 1896, twenty-nine-year-old Wilbur read in the newspaper that Otto Lilienthal, a German engineer known as “the Flying Man” for his predilection for strapping on willow-and-muslin wings and jumping from high places, had died in a gliding accident. Ever since their father had given them a toy helicopter made of cork, bamboo, and tissue paper when Wilbur was eleven, the brothers had been intrigued by flight. Now they read everything available on the subject. They spent each day constructing model kites and gliders in their workroom behind the bicycle shop, rigging up a bell system to warn them when a customer arrived and they were needed to change a tire or true a wheel. They spent each evening discussing wing warp, lift and drift, lateral control, and equilibrium. For a few years, they treated flight as just another engineering puzzle to be solved. But by the end of October 1900, after spending five weeks testing their first manned glider in the fickle winds above the dunes of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, the brothers had found their life’s work.
* * *
From 1912 to 1918, the Four Marx Brothers worked the vaudeville circuit, performing four shows a day, six days a week, forty weeks a year. Like animal species that evolve to fill separate niches within an ecosystem, they carved out increasingly distinct characters on stage, exaggerations of the off-stage roles they had carved out within their family. Leo, the manipulative charmer who had used his flair for dialect to survive the streets of Yorkville, became the crazy-like-a-fox “Eye-talian” sharpie always on the lookout for a score. Ahdie, the wide-eyed dreamer with the flexible features, became the puckish, rubber-faced, loose-limbed innocent. (When Minnie sent Ahdie his yodeling grandmother’s old harp, he taught himself how to play—resting it on the wrong shoulder for a year before realizing his mistake—and worked it into the act.) Julius, the bookworm, became the know-it-all purveyor of sardonic barbs and scattershot non sequiturs. Milton, tallest and blondest, played the ingenue, whose main job, as one reviewer put it, was “to look handsome.”
Those characters were refined in 1914, when, with bookings scarce, Minnie asked Al Shean for help. One night, after seeing his nephews’ show, Shean sat down at the kitchen table with a sheet of butcher paper and wrote a new act, accentuating the strengths of each brother and exaggerating their differences. He gave Julius all the monologues; made Leo’s immigrant con artist more of an amiable, wisecracking kibitzer; transformed Milton into a white-gloved, cane-carrying dandy; and gave Ahdie, who had been relatively garrulous in the school act, more physical bits and fewer words. When Ahdie protested, his uncle told him that his voice undercut his whimsical appearance and the act would be better if he didn’t talk at all. Not long afterward, a reviewer praised Ahdie’s pantomime but added: “Unfortunately the effect is spoiled when he speaks.” Ahdie swallowed his pride, relinquished his three lines, and never uttered another word onstage. (His performance would be so convincing that to the end of his career many people pitied him for being “a poor, deaf mute.”) Later that year, after a show in Galesburg, Illinois, the brothers were playing poker with Art Fisher, a monologuist on the bill, when Fisher, dealing the cards, also dealt the names that would forever define them. “This one’s for you, Harpo,” he said, tossing a card toward Ahdie. “This one’s for you, Chicko,” he said, tossing one to Leo, and so on, thus immortalizing Ahdie’s musical trademark, Leo’s prodigious appetite for the opposite sex (the k was later dropped by a careless typesetter), Julius/Groucho’s perpetual air of dissatisfaction, and Milton/Gummo’s hypochondriacal habit of wearing gumshoes, even when it wasn’t raining. Spur-of-the-moment inventions, the nicknames became their stage names and, eventually, the names by which almost everyone, including some of their children, would call them, names that would make it even more difficult for their audience—and for the brothers—to separate their onstage and offstage selves.
Over time, the brothers also acquired their visual trademarks. Harpo was always on the lookout for new props with which to communicate wordlessly. He purloined a rubber-bulbed klaxon from a taxi, stuck it under his belt, and learned to honk it as expressively as most actors use their voice. During a rainstorm in San Francisco, he ducked into a pawnshop and bought a baggy old trenchcoat; he wore it on stage the next day and, over time, added pockets and panels out of which maps could be extracted and silverware could pour. Groucho, who had started smoking cigars in his teens to look “manly,” found they were useful onstage, giving him time to think of snappy comebacks as he puffed. During one performance, Groucho began scooting across the stage in a stooped, bent-kneed, hurry-up lope not unlike that of a father running alongside his child’s bicycle as he teaches him to ride. The audience loved it. In 1921, the brothers were appearing at Keith’s Flushing in Queens when Groucho’s wife gave birth to their first child at Lenox Hill Hospital on the Upper East Side. Groucho spent every spare moment at the hospital with his new family. One night he stayed so long that by the time he got to the theater it was too late to glue on his horsehair mustache, which needed several minutes to dry, so he smeared some greasepaint across his upper lip.
Combined, the brothers sparked a kind of spontaneous comic combustion, transforming their drapery-pulling, urinal-stomping youth from dross into art. Although their act had a script, the brothers deviated from it at the slightest whim, trying to top one another, trying to throw each other off stride, trying to keep from getting bored. (The brothers were forerunners of the improv groups that would flourish a half-century later.) They’d play leapfrog, sit on ladies’ laps, climb the backdrop, guzzle water out of a goldfish bowl, and swallow the goldfish. “We always played to ourselves, never the audience,” recalled Groucho. “Sometimes we got to laughing so hard at ourselves we couldn’t finish.” During a performance in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Groucho was singing a mock aria (“La Donna è Mobile”) in “double-talk Italian,” accompanied by Chico on the piano, when Harpo ran onstage, bumped Chico off the piano stool, and began to play a quickstep-march version of “The Holy City.” Whereupon Groucho knocked Harpo off, Chico knocked Groucho off, and Harpo knocked Chico off. The round robin of brotherly one-upmanship continued until Chico was on the piano stool, Harpo was on Chico’s shoulders, and Groucho was crouching behind them, his arms reaching around Chico, all three singing and playing a six-hand, three-key, three-voice version of “Waltz Me Around Again, Willie.”
Although the brothers had gone their separate ways in Yorkville, their decade on the vaudeville circuit—a survival-of-the-fittest procession of interminable train trips, one-dollar hotel rooms, and indigestible boardinghouse food—brought them closer, as they teamed up to defend themselves against unscrupulous producers, crooked theater managers, and spitball-throwing audiences. To save money on trains, the brothers often bunked in a single berth, as they had in childhood. In each new town, their first stop was the pool hall, where Chico offered to play anyone in the house for five dollars, while his brothers made side bets with the onlookers. On southern swings, they carried blackjacks in their back pockets as they left the theater each night, in case any local bullies insisted on mixing it up with the city slickers. Years later, Harpo would tell his son, “If I didn’t have four brothers to help me fight my way through what we all had to go through, I’d never have made it.”
The brothers applied their all-for-one, one-for-all philosophy to the opposite sex. In later years, many of the stories they told of their vaudeville days centered on their carnal exploits: making group expeditions to “hookshops”; posing next to their billboards after the show in hopes of attracting local girls; being chased by the husbands or fathers of the girls they’d attracted. Minnie encouraged her sons to pursue loose women. She didn’t want them trapped into marriage, which not only might break up the act she’d worked so hard to assemble but would require her to share her boys. Her favorite son, with his crooked smile and key-shooting piano turn, was the most promiscuous. Chico’s pick-up technique was straightforward. “He’d walk up to a girl and say, ‘Do you fuck?’” recalled Groucho. “And many times they said yes. By the time any show opened he’d fucked half the chorus.” (All his life, Groucho would envy Chico’s prowess with women.) Chico often recruited dates for his brothers. Other times, they inherited his hand-me-downs. In one of numerous incidents whose casual misogyny makes the skin crawl, Chico, after having sex with a girl at their boardinghouse, turned the gaslight low, told his brothers to wear their matching silk shirts, and invited them to take a turn. (The lookalike ruse would be recalled in the film Duck Soup, when Chico and Harpo dress up like Groucho in an attempt to bed the gullible Margaret Dumont.) Small wonder that when thirty-one-year-old Chico, to Minnie’s dismay, married a nineteen-year-old secretarial student and installed her in the chorus, Harpo, Groucho, and Gummo saw nothing wrong in pinching their sister-in-law’s fanny as she passed in the hallway, or trying to steal a kiss whenever Chico wasn’t around. Betty complained to her husband, who laughed it off and explained that the brothers had always shared their girls. But he agreed to talk to them. “You don’t do that to wives,” Chico explained.
The Marx Brothers’ all-for-one ethos went only so far: some brothers were more valuable than others. In 1918, as World War I dragged on, Minnie took Gummo aside and pointed out that while Chico was married and Zeppo was too young for the service, if Groucho or Harpo were drafted, the act couldn’t survive. If Gummo was willing to serve, however, she believed the others might be spared. Gummo was relieved. To him, the prospect of battle seemed less terrifying than being onstage. Gummo hated performing, because whenever he got nervous he stammered. (To compensate, he searched the dictionary for synonyms to each word that gave him trouble.) After eleven years in the act, the sacrificial lamb went eagerly to his fate, which turned out to be rather pleasant. Made an “acting corporal” by someone who recognized him as a Marx Brother, Gummo was stationed in Chicago, where his chief contribution to the war effort seems to have been procuring chorus girls for his senior officers. Meanwhile, Minnie, wanting to keep the name “The Four Marx Brothers,” ordered seventeen-year-old Zeppo to join the act. When Minnie called, Zeppo (as he had been dubbed for doing chin-ups as avidly as Mr. Zippo, a trained chimpanzee of some renown) was working as a garage mechanic, lifting weights, chasing girls, getting in fights, carrying a gun, and stealing the occasional automobile. Tall, blond, muscular, and stammer-free, Zeppo slid easily into Gummo’s straight-man role. He slid less easily into the fraternal quartet offstage. When Zeppo developed a crush on an eighteen-year-old named Ruth and hired her to be his dancing partner, Groucho stole her away and married her. Zeppo’s resentment would outlast the marriage.
* * *
In 1924, the Marx Brothers made the improbable leap from vaudeville—“the slums of entertainment,” in Ben Hecht’s words—to Broadway. They remained untamed. Asked by a nervous producer what kind of show the brothers planned, Groucho once replied, “I don’t know. We’ll stick four Jews up against the wall and see what happens.” Groucho was only partly kidding. On the first out-of-town tryout of The Cocoanuts, there was so much ad-libbing that the show ran long by forty minutes. Director George S. Kaufman, who also co-wrote the book, worked through the night, cutting choruses and dance numbers. The next night, the show ran even longer. The Cocoanuts would have 377 performances on Broadway, each unique. One night Groucho, following Margaret Dumont offstage, began leaping from one side of her long-trained evening dress to the other as if he were playing hopscotch; another night he landed on the train itself, stranding Dumont in her whalebone corset. (Dumont chose to go trainless thereafter.) Another night, during a quiet scene between Groucho and Dumont, Harpo persuaded a blond chorus girl to scamper across the stage, shrieking, with a horn-tooting Harpo in hot pursuit. Groucho wasn’t fazed. “First time I ever saw a taxi hail a passenger,” he observed. When Harpo chased the girl back across the stage in the opposite direction, Groucho was undaunted. “The nine-twenty’s right on time,” he said, checking his watch. “You can always set your clocks by the Lehigh Valley.” The brothers had such difficulty recalling all their ad libs (“Do you remember what I said when I tripped you?” Groucho would ask Dumont) that a stenographer was hired to take notes at each performance. Theatergoers, never knowing what might happen, returned again and again. The golfer Bobby Jones saw The Cocoanuts twelve times, the columnist Heywood Broun twenty-one.
Offstage, the Marx brothers ran no less amok, engaging in an incessant stream of what child psychologists would, decades later, refer to as “testing behavior.” At a party thrown by the Animal Crackers songwriters Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby, the brothers began tossing food, silverware, dinner plates, and coffee cups out the hotel window onto the roof of the garage. Harpo and Chico had the piano teetering on the sill before their hosts managed to stop them. When Irving Thalberg, the brilliant young MGM producer known as “The Boy Wonder,” kept the brothers waiting for their first appointment, they blew cigar smoke through the cracks in his closed door until Thalberg emerged to see whether there was a fire. Kept waiting a second time, they dragged his steel file cabinets over to the door and trapped Thalberg in his own office. During yet another meeting, Thalberg abandoned them for a story conference elsewhere and returned to find them sitting naked in front of a roaring fire, roasting potatoes they’d ordered up from the studio commissary. “He never walked out on us again,” boasted Groucho.
A disproportionate number of the Marx Brothers’ pranks involved humiliating women. At the theater, the brothers hid beneath the makeup table in the ladies’ dressing room, mercilessly commenting on the physical attributes of female cast members as they made quick changes during the show. Although they considered every woman fair game for pinches, kisses, and lascivious remarks, the brothers’ favorite target was Dumont, the majestic, grand dame of an actress who, as J. B. Priestley noted, could be shot out of a cannon without disturbing her dignity. Onstage, the brothers subjected her to constant physical assault, clutching, grabbing, and pawing at her with the determination of piglets rooting for position at their mother’s flank. Offstage, the brothers were no less determined to upset her equilibrium. On the train for the road tour of Animal Crackers, after Dumont had retired to her berth, the brothers ganged up on the conductor, pulled off his pants, and threw him on the sleeping Dumont, who woke up screaming. In Indianapolis, Groucho convinced the hotel detective that Dumont was a notorious prostitute. When the unsuspecting actress took the detective to her rooms to demonstrate that nothing could be further from the truth, Groucho emerged carrying a douche bag (“You sneak,” he hissed at Dumont, eyeing her companion, “I don’t know why I put up with this”); whereupon Dumont and the detective walked into her room to find Chico lying on the bed in his underwear reading the Daily Racing Form (“Oh, you got another guy—well, I’ll be back in half an hour”); whereupon bare-chested Zeppo emerged from the closet, a hotel towel around his waist (“Just because I’m the youngest, you take my money, but you never get around to me”); whereupon Dumont, in tears, entered the bathroom to find a naked, grinning Harpo in the tub, a four-in-hand Windsor knot around his penis.
Part of their behavior—behavior that today would be recognized as sexual harassment or even assault—was an act, an extension of their ribald onstage characters. Part was a continuation of the casual objectification of women, not unusual for the times, that had been encouraged by their mother during their vaudeville days. Part of it was having been raised in an all-male environment—Minnie being considered “one of the boys”—and never outgrowing it. (Which might also explain why so many Marx brothers’ pranks involved nudity—their own or someone else’s. Indeed, their habit of summarily stripping male visitors of their clothes came to seem an unofficial Marx Brothers greeting ceremony.)
Many people—men and women alike—found the brothers difficult to work with. The beleaguered Dumont threatened to quit on an almost daily basis. When Paramount executives wanted to punish the temperamental young actress Lillian Roth, they made her appear in Animal Crackers. “It was one step removed from the circus,” recalled Roth of the atmosphere on the set. The brothers were habitually late, and even after they finally assembled, it was hard to keep them corralled. Harpo would drift off to play his harp, Chico would disappear to call his bookie, Groucho would find a corner in which to read the Wall Street Journal, Zeppo would be off somewhere doing deep knee-bends. After working on the scripts for Monkey Business and Horse Feathers, S. J. Perelman, who described the brothers as “capricious, tricky beyond endurance, altogether unreliable, and treacherous to a degree that would make Machiavelli absolutely kneel at their feet,” decided he’d had enough. “I’d rather be chained to a galley oar and lashed at ten-minute intervals than work for those sons-of-bitches again.”
Although the Marx Brothers combined seamlessly onstage, they did most of their offstage preparation alone. “How can you write for Harpo?” Kaufman observed. “What do you put down on paper? All you can say is, ‘Harpo enters,’ and then he’s on his own.” Harpo worked backstage and at home, testing potential props, practicing his pickpocketing, adding pouches to his capacious raincoat, playing his harp, and dreaming up sofa-jumping, chandelier-swinging, curtain-riding gags. Chico, who considered rehearsal an intrusion on his card-playing, prepared very little. “I don’t think Chico ever knew what the plot was about,” observed the screenwriter Nat Perrin. “I don’t think Chico ever looked at any of the lines but his, and hardly those.” He’d show up at the theater at the last minute, stroll onstage without makeup, and—though his memory for numbers was so prodigious that after a brief look at a dollar bill he could recite its eight-digit serial number backwards and forwards—forget his lines.
Of all the brothers, Groucho was the most involved in the show. He worked with the writers, helping shape the story lines and polishing the gags. Although Groucho was an inspired ad libber (the only actor, it was said, that Kaufman ever allowed to improvise onstage—as if he had a choice), what sounded like stream-of-consciousness was often the product of meticulous experimentation. For the two Thalberg pictures, A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races, the brothers, harking back to their vaudeville days, tested key scenes on the road in front of live audiences—four shows a day, six days a week, for four weeks—before shooting the movie. After each show, Groucho and the writers huddled backstage, chewing over what had gone well and what hadn’t. Working by what he acknowledged was “trial and error,” Groucho would try a line every possible way: changing the order of the words, mispronouncing them, experimenting with tone and inflection, accenting different syllables. On the Races tour, when the line “Is he dead or has my watch stopped?” wasn’t getting much of a laugh, Groucho rephrased the question as a statement—“Either he’s dead or my watch has stopped”—and the house erupted. In the famous tutsi-frutsi scene, Chico, peddling a racing guide to Groucho, says, “One dollar and you remember me all your life,” whereupon Groucho replies, “That’s the most nauseating proposition I ever had.” Groucho wasn’t sure whether nauseating was the optimal word. Over 140 stage performances, he tried a variety of substitutes: obnoxious, revolting, disgusting, offensive, repulsive, disagreeable, and distasteful. “The last two of these words never got more than titters,” Teet Carle, a Marx Brothers publicist, recalls. “The others elicited various degrees of ha-has. But nauseating drew roars.” Carle asked Groucho why he thought nauseating was so much funnier, expecting his boss to propound an elaborate theory of comedy. “I don’t know,” Groucho replied. “I really don’t care. I only know the audiences told us it was funny.”
Groucho’s perfectionism was rooted in anxiety. By now, the outsider in the family was the acknowledged leader of the act (in part, no doubt, because it mattered the most to him). When Alexander Woollcott reviewed the Marx Brothers’ Broadway debut, he assumed, like most people, that Groucho was the eldest. By Duck Soup, Groucho was getting top billing. As in childhood, however, Groucho was sensitive to any slight. It peeved him that Woollcott’s review had been headlined “Harpo Marx and Some Brothers.” His insecurity was especially evident when it came to his brothers’ musical solos. In the middle of Harpo’s moment in the sun, he’d wander onstage and urge: “Play softer. We can still hear you.” The writer George Seaton recalled standing in the wings with Groucho during a tryout performance of A Day at the Races. “The audience was applauding Chico, who was doing an encore. Groucho walked right out on the stage and said jokingly, ‘If you come near a tune, play it.’ He thought he would get a big laugh, but the audience hissed him instead.” Groucho, who always believed that he had deserved the piano lessons, stomped offstage. Sometimes, when Chico was in the midst of his solo, Groucho would retreat to his dressing room and read.
Groucho may have felt excluded by his older brothers, who roomed together on the road, shared an apartment in London during the brothers’ English tour, had dressing rooms in the same complex at MGM, and usually went out together after the show while Groucho met with the writers. Groucho never blamed Harpo, the brother to whom he felt closest, and for whom he would name his son. But he never forgave Chico for being Minnie’s favorite.
Groucho had another reason for resenting Chico. When Chico joined the act, he had taken over from Minnie as manager, bringing the same head for numbers and devil-may-care approach to negotiations that he brought to the craps table. His congenital optimism served as a counterweight to Groucho’s expect-the-worst philosophy. When the brothers despaired of breaking out of vaudeville into the legitimate theater, it had been Chico who bucked them up, sweeping them along in his enthusiasm, telling them that their luck was about to change. “Harpo and I were always very timid,” admitted Groucho. “We didn’t think we would ever be successful. But Chico was a gambler and he felt differently . . . He gave us courage and confidence.” In 1919, when vaudeville was dying, it had been Chico who, over a game of pinochle, convinced a producer to sign them to a three-year theater contract. In 1928, when the talkies were taking the country by storm, it had been Chico who buttered up Paramount’s head, Adolph Zukor, into giving them $25,000 more than he’d planned to film The Cocoanuts. In 1934, when Paramount concluded that the brothers were no longer box office draws, it had been Chico who persuaded his bridge-playing buddy Thalberg to sign them for the pictures that turned out to be their biggest hits.
Chico could make deals for the brothers, but he couldn’t be trusted with the money. “We quickly learned never to let Chico hold the salary,” said Groucho. “He’d blow it on a card game or at the track.” To pay off gambling debts, Chico would hurry to the box office before his brothers so he could pocket their salaries in addition to his own. Other times, he’d forge their names on checks. Eventually, the brothers set up secret banking codes to safeguard their transactions. Groucho and Harpo fretted about the unsavory company Chico kept. According to Harpo, the brothers’ tour of England in 1922 had been hastily arranged by Chico because he worried that a hustler he’d hustled in Cleveland was out for revenge. In 1925, in Detroit on a post-Broadway tour, Chico walked off the stage in the middle of a scene, saying he needed some air. He never came back. Groucho, Harpo, and Zeppo had to finish the show alone, Groucho playing Chico’s part in addition to his own. The police theorized that a record-setting heat wave had disoriented Chico, but the truth was more prosaic. Before the show had left New York, Chico had lost $30,000 shooting craps and was worried that the mob was after him. The brothers feared that this time he might turn up at the bottom of the river. Three days later, Chico called. He was in Cleveland and planned to return to Detroit that night.
On the vaudeville circuit, Groucho always sent part of his paycheck home; Chico gambled his away. After the move to Broadway, Groucho visited their mother nearly every day; Chico, who lived much closer to her Queens apartment, had to be pushed to drop by. Groucho resented that no matter how irresponsible Chico was, onstage and off, he was still getting away with murder. So Groucho punished Chico with his caustic wit, berating him for his sloppy performances and profligate ways. When Chico gave Groucho a dog for his birthday, Groucho named it for his eldest brother and took particular delight in calling out, “Here, Chico!” when its namesake was around. Chico would chuckle, refusing to get upset. Beneath Groucho’s resentment lay envy and self-doubt. In a letter to a friend, Groucho described his eldest brother: “He is a diminutive, dynamic combination of Ponzi and Casanova, who disregards all the laws of life and constantly snaps his fingers in fate’s kisser—he gambled with everything—but who knows, maybe he has the right idea?”
No matter how much the brothers argued, they always swallowed their differences for the sake of the act, joining forces against anyone outside the fraternity. Long after Groucho had stolen Ruth away from Zeppo, Zeppo lost his grip on Ruth during a dance number, and she fell into the orchestra pit. Convinced that Zeppo had dropped her on purpose to get back at her for jilting him, Ruth insisted that Groucho fire his brother: “Either he goes or I go.” Groucho told Ruth she could go. (She didn’t.) Before shooting started on A Day at the Races, Betty convinced Chico that he deserved more camera time. Chico promised to bring it up with his brothers. He came home from the studio boiling mad. “Betty, don’t ever interfere with me and my brothers again! Just remember one thing: There’s only room for two prima donnas in the act. Not three. Groucho and Harpo need the limelight. I just need the act to be good.” A few years later, when Chico’s adolescent daughter, Maxine, made disparaging remarks to her friends about her father’s womanizing, Harpo asked to see her. She went to his dressing room. Harpo began to pace. Though he never raised his voice, he told her to keep her thoughts to herself. “I can’t stomach disloyalty,” he said. The eternally dyspeptic Groucho might grouse about Chico’s gambling, but when Chico ran up debts, he helped pay them off.
* * *
Like the Marx Brothers (or the Five Chinese Brothers), fraternal partners often divide the work according to talent or taste. Thus Aaron, the kinder, gentler, more articulate older brother, served as spokesman for his stern, uncompromising, tongue-tied younger brother, Moses, enabling the two of them to play an Old Testament version of good cop, bad cop. Thus General William Howe, commander of the British Army in North America during the Revolutionary War, coordinated the attack with his older brother Richard, an admiral in the Royal Navy. Thus, the seventeenth-century Dutch painters Jan and Andries Both combined their talents on a single canvas, Andries painting the figures into his brother’s landscapes. Like Jack Spratt and his wife, each brother contributed something the other lacked; together, they combined to make a whole.
If Joseph Montgolfier, a restless, easily distracted eighteenth-century Frenchman who dreamed of floating above the clouds, hadn’t had a more pragmatic brother, the hot-air balloon might never have gotten off the ground. After watching laundry dry over an open fire one day and noticing that the heated air rose and made the sheets billow, Joseph experimented with several rudimentary box-kite-like prototypes before recruiting his younger brother Étienne, a practical fellow who had taken over the family papermaking business. With Joseph as the idea man and Étienne as technical advisor, the Montgolfiers built ever-larger hot-air balloons. (Étienne also served as publicist for the team; having lived in Paris, he was more presentable than shy, unkempt Joseph.) On September 19, 1783, with Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette looking on at Versailles, the brothers launched the first aircraft to carry passengers—a sheep, a duck, and a rooster, all of whom seemed oblivious to the magnitude of the occasion as they floated over the French countryside for eight minutes and two miles at an altitude of 1,500 feet before descending safely to the earth. Two months later, another “Montgolfière,” as their invention was called, became the first aircraft to carry humans—but not the brothers, whose father had given them permission to forsake the papermaking business only if they promised never to go aloft themselves.
The fraternal division of labor at Walt Disney Productions was even more sharply defined. Walt, the younger brother, was the puckish, charismatic, creative genius who chose the subjects, outlined the stories, and worked with the animators. Roy, eight years older, was the cautious, sensible businessman responsible for financing his brother’s visions. When Walt caught Roy talking to people on the creative side, he’d order his brother back to his own office. The animator Dave Hand described a meeting in which Roy complained that Walt’s movies were costing too much. “There was complete silence,” Hand recalled. “Then Walt’s loose eyebrow shot up at an unusually sharp angle, and turning to Roy in an uncompromising matter-of-fact straight-from-the-shoulder answer, said quite simply, ‘Roy, we’ll make the pictures, you get the money.’ That was that.”
Like the Montgolfiers and the Disneys, collaborating brothers often have complementary personalities. Mayer and Emanuel Lehman, who ran the family cotton brokerage after their older brother Henry succumbed to yellow fever in 1855, made an effective team because Mayer, a sociable fellow who relished taking risks, was all “buy, buy,” while Emanuel, cautious and quiet, was all “sell, sell.” (As family tradition had it, Mayer made the money and Emanuel made sure they didn’t lose it.) The Mayos, too, fit together like yin and yang. Will was a dignified, austere, ambitious man to whom it seemed natural to take responsibility for the clinic’s administration. Charlie, mischievous, folksy, and droll, was better one-on-one with the patients. If a business plan needed fine-tuning, colleagues turned to Will; if a tense patient needed reassuring, they turned to Charlie. (“Everybody likes Charlie, don’t they?” Will once remarked to his sister-in-law. “They aren’t afraid of him. No one ever claps me on the back the way they all do him.” He thought a moment. “But I guess I wouldn’t like it if they did.”) When Mayer Rothschild sent his sons abroad, he matched each of them to the European country most suited to his personality. Amschel, the eldest, who stayed in Frankfurt, lived on a princely scale but was a cautious, deliberate, joyless prude. Salomon, the second son, used his talents for flattery and ingratiation to navigate the treacherous diplomatic shoals of anti-Semitic Vienna. Nathan, the London Rothschild, was a thrifty, truculent bull of a man who scorned frippery and acted swiftly and decisively. The geographical synchronicity faltered with Carl, a nervous, taciturn fellow who clung to his faith—his family nickname was “mezzuzah boy”—amid the hurly-burly of Naples. But it resumed with the youngest brother, James, a sophisticated dandy who collected art, bought the Lafite vineyards, and entertained lavishly at his palatial Paris home and his three châteaux.
It would be hard to find two brothers less alike than George and Ira Gershwin. As a child, George misbehaved in school, stole from neighborhood stores, and fought so frequently that his nose assumed a permanent crook. His older brother, Ira, excelled in school and spent his spare time reading Henry James, Gilbert and Sullivan, and the Elizabethan poets. After their parents bought a secondhand piano, twelve-year-old George traded the streets for the keyboard, and by fifteen, had become the youngest song plugger on Tin Pan Alley. Ira, for whom the piano had been intended, was a self-described “floating soul” who haunted libraries and movie houses, composed occasional light verse, and bounced from one dead-end job to another until, at the age of twenty-one, he tried putting some words to one of his younger brother’s songs. “I always felt that if George hadn’t been my brother and pushed me into lyric writing,” he recalled, “I’d have been contented to be a bookkeeper.” George was a slim, leonine man who looked like a Spanish noble. He lifted weights, did sit-ups and push-ups religiously, danced divinely, and was adept in every sport he attempted. Ira, a squat, portly fellow with glasses, looked like Hollywood’s idea of an accountant; he played an occasional round of golf but was “a hard man to get out of an easy chair,” as a friend observed, and preferred sedentary pursuits like poker and Scrabble. George was a restless night owl who loved parties and travel, brimmed with boyish exuberance, and exerted a magnetic pull in every room he entered. Ira was a contemplative homebody who retreated to the outskirts of parties. George was a sexually voracious man who never married. Ira married at twenty-nine and was a devoted husband until his death fifty-seven years later. George was a compulsive worker who could dash off four hummable tunes in an afternoon. Ira was a craftsman who would fuss over a single line for days. And yet these fraternal opposites produced hundreds of the most memorable songs in American history, in which words and music inhabit each other so thoroughly it is hard to believe they didn’t come from a single source.
Some collaborating brothers are remarkably similar. A century before George and Ira Gershwin worked side by side, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm wrote at facing desks almost every day for fifty years. Unlike the Gershwins, the Grimms had been inseparable from childhood. Born a year apart in Hanau, Germany, the eldest of six children, Jacob and Wilhelm played hide-and-seek together, walked hand-in-hand together, read together, were tutored together, collected books together, and slept in the same bed together throughout their youth. Although Jacob, the elder brother, was somewhat more introverted and ambitious, both were brilliant students who studied twelve hours a day, graduated at the head of their high school classes, and went into the law, determined to live up to the expectations of their father, a prosperous magistrate who died when Jacob was eleven. In 1805, when Jacob took a job in Paris and they were briefly apart for the first time, nineteen-year-old Wilhelm wrote, “When you left, I thought my heart would tear in two.”
A few years later, realizing that their hearts lay less in law than in philology, the brothers began studying German folklore. Over the following half-century, working opposite each other in their shared study, they co-authored volumes on German legends, German grammar, and ancient German law, as well as assembling the collections of fairy tales for which they would be remembered. Even after Wilhelm married and fathered three children, the brothers continued to live under the same roof and adhere to the same strict schedule. Wilhelm’s wife kept the house as quiet as possible, accepting that the brothers’ primary allegiance was to their work and to each other. “All you could hear was the scratching of their pens, and sometimes Jacob’s frequent little coughs. . . .” recalled Wilhelm’s son. “I cannot imagine that anyone would dare interrupt this sacred silence.”
The nineteenth-century French writers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt were separated by eight years, and their personalities were polar opposites. Edmond, the elder, was reserved, sincere, sentimental, deliberate, and responsible. Jules was witty, volatile, exuberant, mischievous, and spoiled. Yet their sensibilities were so similar that they were able to write in a single voice, co-authoring more than two dozen novels, plays, histories, and works of criticism. “The strange thing is that although we are absolutely different in temperament, taste, and character, we are absolutely identical in our ideas, our judgements, our likes and dislikes as regards other people, and our intellectual perspective,” they wrote. “Our minds see alike and see with the same eyes.” Following their mother’s death in 1848, they lived together for a quarter-century without spending more than a few hours apart, locked together by their distrust of the outside world as well as by their devotion to each other. “When we are parted, we each feel the lack of the other half of ourselves,” they wrote. “We are left with nothing but half-sensations, a half-life; we are incomplete like a book in two volumes of which the first has been lost.”
Fraternal co-authors were something of a fad in nineteenth-century France, but the Goncourts were the only literary brothers close enough (and, perhaps, neurotic enough) to keep a journal together. Each night for almost nineteen years—with Jules sitting at the table holding the pen, and Edmond standing behind him and looking over his shoulder, sometimes speaking, sometimes listening, in a process Edmond called “dual dictation”—they recorded their impressions of the day, employing, for the most part, the first person plural. Literary critics have never been able to attribute any particular passage to one brother or the other. Their novels and plays were deemed stuffy and old-fashioned, but their journals—a gossipy bouillabaisse of dinner parties, brothel visits, opening nights, mistresses, revolutions, literary backbiting, court intrigue, high-society scandal, and flagrant name-dropping (Flaubert, Zola, Verlaine, Baudelaire, Maupassant, Wilde, Turgenev)—provided a delicious portrait of Second Empire Paris. In 1870, when the thirty-nine-year-old Jules died of syphilis, a despondent Edmond abandoned the journal for several months before resuming. In 1886, he began publishing the Journal des Goncourt (underscoring their fraternal unity by using the singular surname). “This journal is our nightly confession,” he wrote in the preface, “the confession of two lives never separated in pleasure, in work or in pain, the confession of two twin spirits, two minds receiving from the contact of men and things impressions so alike, so identical, so homogeneous, that this single confession may be considered as the effusion of a single ego, of a single I.” The journal would come to an end in 1896 when Edmond died, thirteen days after making a final entry in which he described an amusing after-dinner anecdote told him by Montesquieu.
* * *
In 1931, the Marx Brothers moved to Hollywood, where they made the string of movies that cemented their fame. Off-screen, however, the brothers had gone their separate ways. Most had wives and children. When Chico was home, he could be an irresistibly charming husband and father. Reading the funny papers to his daughter, he performed each comic strip in a different accent. Visiting his wife in the hospital after an operation, he soft-shoed into her room in top hat, white tie, and tails. “He could display a quality which only the Yiddish word schmeikel can describe: a charm based on the need to be adored,” his daughter, Maxine, observed. Having been his mother’s favorite, Chico sought the adoration of women for the rest of his life. He was unfaithful on his honeymoon and as often as possible thereafter. “His trailer on the film set was used mainly for seducing purposes,” wrote the Marx biographer Joe Adamson, “and he would arrange for his girls to be hired as extras, just so they’d be handy.” The brothers joked publicly about Chico’s excesses (“There are three things that my brother Chico is always on—a phone, a horse, or a broad,” Groucho said) but worried that his philandering would jeopardize their success. When Chico began to juggle his one-night stands with a not-so-secret long-term affair with a teenage actress, they laid down the law: he could cheat on his wife, but he had to be discreet. Divorce, they told him, was out of the question.
They were even more concerned with his gambling. When Chico wasn’t playing high-stakes poker with studio executives, he was crossing the border to the Agua Caliente Jockey Club, a racetrack near Tijuana favored by the Hollywood crowd, where he might lose ten thousand dollars in an afternoon. Or he was betting on boxing matches and throwing lavish postfight parties in a double suite at the Ambassador Hotel for a slew of big-time gamblers and small-time starlets. People liked betting with Chico because he always gave them generous odds, and if his opponent was losing, he’d up the odds to make the bet more interesting. Whether he won or lost didn’t seem to matter. “If I lose today, I can look forward to winning tomorrow,” he explained. “And if I win today, I can expect to lose tomorrow. A sure thing is no fun. Groucho and Harpo like sure things, but there’s no fun in security.” One can only hope the story is apocryphal that during the filming of the climactic scene in A Day at the Races, Chico, betting with an extra, put his money on the horse that, according to the script, was destined to lose. Asked why, Chico said, “The odds were fifteen to one.”
In Growing Up with Chico, Maxine Marx painted a less-cavalier portrait of her father’s addiction. At family dinners, Chico was often on the phone to his bookie. On their cook’s nights off, he took his wife and daughter to the Clover Club, where he’d gulp down his food and head for the illegal gambling tables in the back. Just as the young Chico had pawned his father’s shears to pay a gambling debt, the middle-aged Chico sold off the family furniture. “Nothing was unhockable,” wrote Maxine. “For years, mother refused to let him buy a house because she was afraid he would sell it without telling her, and we would be out on the street.” They rented, moving, over the years, from opulent to less fancy to modest. Worried that mobsters were after him, Chico would disappear for a few days, telling his family he was taking a vacation.
Harpo, who also gambled, told Chico all he had to do was quit after he’d lost a preset amount. Groucho, who wouldn’t even roll dice for the lunch tab at the MGM commissary, told Chico gambling was a waste of time and money. Chico would promise to slow down but then go on a spree. In 1937, he was sued by the widow of a gambler who’d been shot dead with Chico’s check for $2,000 in his pocket. When she’d tried to cash it, the check had bounced. Groucho and Harpo issued Chico an ultimatum: either he let them take over his finances or they wouldn’t sign their new three-picture contract with MGM. Chico, who couldn’t afford to stop working, acquiesced. The brothers would save almost $300,000 for Chico over the next few years. But in 1940, when he ran up huge debts to some mobsters, Chico begged his brothers for the money. They refused. He hired an attorney and threatened to sue. Disgusted, they told him to take his money and go ahead and die broke. He went through it in a matter of weeks.
Harpo’s path had diverged sharply from Chico’s. After the brothers’ Broadway debut, Alexander Woollcott, the New Yorker writer whose review had made them stars, had adopted Harpo no less completely than if he were an orphan or a stray dog. (“He was in love with Harpo,” Groucho observed, “but in a nice way.”) Overnight, Harpo was transplanted from the raffish demimonde of cardsharps, bookies, and horseplayers to the hallowed literary precincts of the Algonquin Round Table, where he bore witness to the verbal jousting of Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, and Heywood Broun. He spent his summers at Woollcott’s private seven-acre island in Vermont, playing badminton, anagrams, and croquet, as blithe as a boy at summer camp. “I had begun to pay myself back with interest for everything I’d missed out on when I was a kid,” he wrote in Harpo Speaks! “I wasn’t having a second childhood. It was my first real childhood.” Under Woollcott’s auspices, Harpo become a Zelig of the twentieth-century literary world, meeting and beguiling Noel Coward, Somerset Maugham, and George Bernard Shaw. His trust in the essential benevolence of the world allowed him to adapt to almost any situation. In 1933, at Woollcott’s instigation, Harpo became the first American artist to perform in the Soviet Union. Although there was a ticklish moment at the Polish-Russian border when customs inspectors opened his trunk and found two revolvers, three stilettos, four hundred knives, half a dozen bottles marked poison, and a trove of red wigs, false beards, and rubber hands, Harpo’s solo act met with ovations wherever he appeared.
One of the great ironies was that Harpo, the second-grade dropout whose handwritten prop list included “sizzers,” “telliscoap,” and “karit,” was taken up by the Algonquinites, rather than Groucho, the hair-trigger wit who had actually read the books they had written. The few times he joined the Round Table for lunch, Groucho felt unwelcome. Where Harpo was content to listen, Groucho, an autodidact who felt lifelong embarrassment over his sixth-grade education, tried hard to impress. (One member found Groucho “arrogant and superior” and referred to him as “Harpo’s Bad Brother.”) Groucho may have been especially defensive because he had literary aspirations of his own. Backstage, while Chico and Harpo played cards and chased women, Groucho read The Atlantic or War and Peace. In 1925, he published a few squibs in The New Yorker. When a piece he wrote was reprinted in H. L. Mencken’s The American Language, he was over the moon: “Nothing I ever did as an actor thrilled me more.” In Hollywood, he helped start his own Round Table, a weekly lunch with Perelman, Benchley, Ben Hecht, and Charles MacArthur. They called themselves the West Side Writing and Asthma Club. At the MGM commissary, Groucho sat at the writers’ table rather than with his fellow stars. “I’m essentially a writer who unfortunately went into show business,” he liked to say.
Groucho’s literary aspirations became a sore point in his marriage. His wife wanted the proverbial Hollywood life of parties, premieres, and nightclubs. Groucho, whose idea of a good time was having his writer friends over for Gilbert and Sullivan sing-alongs, preferred to stay at home, monitoring his investments, strumming his guitar, and playing with his son and daughter. If Chico went through life seeking the attention he had gotten from Minnie, Groucho sought to give his children all the attention Minnie hadn’t given him. When they were babies, he’d rush home between shows to change their diapers, bathe them, and feed them. As they grew, he read aloud to them, told them Grouchified versions of Little Red Riding Hood and Jack and the Beanstalk, introduced them to classical music, took them to movies and baseball games, played pool and Ping-Pong with them, helped them with homework, and shot home movies of them on family vacations. Having been on the road since the age of fourteen, Groucho threw himself into domestic life: choosing the menus, doing the shopping, managing the household finances, being both breadwinner and homemaker. Groucho had forbidden his wife to work as an actress; now he usurped her role as a mother. The more useless Ruth felt, the more useless Groucho made her feel, belittling her opinions, chipping away at her self-confidence with withering remarks. Increasingly unhappy, Ruth spent more time out—at the parties Groucho refused to attend, at the nightclubs he detested. Groucho masked his insecurity with his aggressive wit; Ruth masked hers with alcohol.
Zeppo liked the perks of being a Marx Brother. He bought a yacht and a Rolls-Royce for himself, furs and jewelry and a pair of Afghan hounds for his wife, and a mansion to house their possessions. But he didn’t like being a Marx Brother. Like Gummo, Zeppo suffered from stage fright. “My career on the stage is practically ruined, because I am afraid of my brothers,” he confessed to an interviewer in 1929. “I’m the youngest, and from the moment I first went on I would look over at them, who had already been established as comedians, and if I caught them smiling, even good-naturedly, over what I was saying or doing, I would become self-conscious to the point of unhappiness. . . . It’s developed an inferiority complex in me.” Zeppo, who sought relief in psychoanalysis, had always felt on the edge of the fraternal group. Like Gummo, he had been relegated to playing the straight man, the secretary, the amanuensis, the one the others bossed around. Indeed, the name Zeppo would become a kind of joke, a synonym for bland superfluousness. That he was paid less than his brothers only underscored his lowly status. Offstage, his ideas were disparaged or ignored. Groucho used to say that the only sure way to test out a gag was to try it out on Zeppo—if he liked it, they threw it out. Yet even Groucho admitted that offstage, Zeppo was the funniest brother. By definition, however, the straight man wasn’t supposed to be a comedian. “I knew I could get laughs,” said Zeppo, “but I wasn’t allowed to with the Marx Brothers.” In 1930 he got his chance. When Groucho had an emergency appendectomy in Chicago, Zeppo, who understudied all three brothers, donned a swallowtail coat and a greasepaint mustache and performed Groucho’s part so faithfully that friends of Groucho’s were unaware of the switch till they came backstage. Zeppo’s triumph, however, was tempered by the fact that the audience didn’t seem to notice that nobody was playing Zeppo’s part.
In 1934, after sixteen years with the Marx Brothers, Zeppo quit the act to join a talent agency. “I’m sick and tired of being a stooge,” he wrote in his resignation letter to Groucho. “You know that anybody else would have done as well as I in the act. When the chance came for me to get into the business world I jumped at it. I have only stayed in the act until now because I knew that you, Chico and Harpo wanted me to.” If Zeppo hoped that his brothers would make at least a pro forma attempt to argue him out of it, he was disappointed. When Irving Thalberg wondered aloud whether three Brothers should get paid as much as four, Groucho replied, “Don’t be silly—without Zeppo we’re worth twice as much.”
Groucho wasn’t far off. Their next two pictures, A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races, in which Zeppo was replaced by a similarly insipid, good-looking young actor, grossed twice as much as their previous two. (The movies, however, lacked a certain frisson that came from knowing all four leads were real-life brothers.) But the Marx Brothers themselves were running out of steam. When they cavorted in Races, Chico was forty-nine, Harpo forty-eight, Groucho forty-six. They were, as one of their screenwriters uncharitably put it, “old men trying to be pixies.” After performing together for nearly thirty years, they were sick of the act, sick of their characters, and a little sick of one another. A line from Go West, a 1940 clunker, seemed inadvertently pertinent: “You love your brother, don’t you?” Groucho, eyeing a dilapidated Harpo, asks Chico. “No,” Chico responds, “but I’m used to him.”
In 1941, between takes for The Big Store, Groucho told a reporter that it would be their last picture. “Our stuff is simply growing stale,” he said, as his older brothers listened. “So are we. What happened to us is that we were defeated by our own specialty. The fake mustache, the dumb harp player, and the little guy who chased the ladies, all were funny at first. But it became successively harder with each picture to top the one before. We couldn’t get out of the groove, without getting out of the movies. So we decided to get all the way out.” Breaking up, Groucho acknowledged, “means a certain amount of sadness. But everything passes, sadness included. Anyhow, I prefer never to work again than to make another Marx Brothers picture.”
* * *
The Brothers Grimm are often characterized as a model of fraternal collaboration to which each brother contributed in equal measure. Yet in a 1822 letter, Wilhelm admitted to a friend that he had spent most of his life “submitting” to his brother’s will. Even in the most balanced partnerships, one brother usually takes the lead. As with the Grimms—and the Mayos, and the Wrights—it is often the elder brother, but occasionally, as with the Marxes and the Disneys, a younger brother, thanks to talent or personality, becomes the driving force. On his deathbed, Mayer Rothschild made his sons promise that they would remain united, cooperating in all their business decisions. Yet “the five Frankfurters,” as they were known, were co-equals only in theory. Third-born Nathan, the most ambitious, soon became “the commanding general,” as Salomon half-joked, who made his brother “marshals” do his bidding. Although they likened him to Napoleon and chafed at his bullying tactics (after one sneering communiqué from London, even the obsequious Salomon was emboldened to complain, “One just doesn’t write that way to one’s family, one’s brothers, one’s partners”), they acquiesced for the sake of the family business. Indeed, though all of the brothers quarreled, in the end there was no one else they trusted so much as one another.
There was no question that the name Gershwin meant, as the journalist Isaac Goldberg put it, “Principally George, Incidentally Ira.” Ira agreed. Saying that the word genius applied only to his younger brother, he did whatever he could to allow that genius to express itself. He took care of George’s business affairs by paying his bills and making his travel arrangements. “He was under the spell of his brother’s overwhelming personality, as the rest of us were,” observed the playwright S. N. Behrman. The director Rouben Mamoulian recalled being summoned to George’s apartment to hear the Porgy and Bess score for the first time. “George was the orchestra and sang half of the parts, Ira sang the other half,” he recalled. “Ira was also frequently the audience. It was touching to see how he, while singing, would become so overwhelmed with admiration for his brother that he would look from him to me with half-open eyes and pantomime with a soft gesture of his hand, as if saying, ‘He did it. Isn’t it wonderful? Isn’t he wonderful?’”
There were numerous reasons why it was Jesse and not Frank who emerged as the de facto leader of the James gang, the one the others called “Captain”—although Frank was four years older, a Confederate veteran, and had ridden with an embryonic version of the gang for a year before sixteen-year-old Jesse was allowed to join. Part of it was personality. Frank was a studious fellow who, before the Civil War, had wanted to be a teacher. (Partial to Shakespeare, he was said to have quoted the Bard during one robbery.) Jesse, who quit school at thirteen, was impetuous, cocky, mischievous, and unusually talkative—even as he held up trains and shot bank tellers. “Jesse laughs at everything—Frank at nothing at all,” wrote John Newman Edwards, a purple-prose journalist who burnished the James legend in a series of worshipful articles. “Jesse is light-hearted, reckless, devil-may-care—Frank sober, sedate, a dangerous man always in ambush in the midst of society.” Part of it was ambition. Frank shrank from the limelight. Jesse wrote letters to newspapers about the gang’s deeds, likening himself to Caesar, Napoleon, and Alexander the Great. Part of it was looks. Frank was slim, long-faced, and dark-haired. Jesse was stronger and handsomer, with sandy hair, blue eyes, broad shoulders, smooth skin, and a turned-up nose—a more memorable countenance for the wanted posters. Jesse’s name, too, was catchy, alliterative, easy on the tongue. Part of it was the division of labor. Frank was the detail man who studied the maps, planned the escape routes, counted the money, and handed out shares. Jesse was the big-picture man who exhorted the gang to ever-riskier exploits. In a profession in which the more violent a man was, the more his peers respected him—and the more his enemies feared him—Jesse took greater relish in his work. Small wonder that Jesse was the James people wrote ballads about.
Indeed, Frank’s heart may not have been fully in his work. In 1882, Bob and Charley Ford, the last remaining members of the gang, shot Jesse in the back for the $10,000 reward. (Old West gangs were a growth industry for brothers; at various times, the James gang had four fraternal subsets: the Jameses, the Youngers, the Millers, and the Fords.) Seeming almost relieved that his fate was no longer tied to his infamous brother’s, Frank turned himself in. Jesse’s death, however, had satisfied the state’s thirst for revenge, and after a sixteen-day trial, Frank was acquitted. Yet he seemed unable to settle down. Over the succeeding twenty-eight years he lived in St. Louis, New Orleans, and Dallas, among other places, and worked quietly but honestly as a horse-race starter, livestock trader, burlesque house doorman, racetrack commissioner, telegraph operator, shoe salesman, and, with his old gang-mate Cole Younger, reformed desperado in a traveling stage show celebrating the fading Wild West. After his mother’s death in 1911, Frank and his family moved into the house in which he and Jesse had grown up. In the four years that remained to him, he gave tours of the farm to curious tourists for twenty-five cents.
* * *
After twenty-two years as a quartet, and seven more as a trio, the Marx Brothers weren’t quite sure what to do on their own. Chico acted in a play and did a radio show, but found that whenever he tried moving beyond his Marxian character, audiences complained. So he donned his green Pinocchio hat, polished up his “Eye-talian” accent, formed his own orchestra (“Chico Marx and His Ravellis”), and toured the country, telling jokes, singing the old songs, waving a baton in front of the band for a few bars, performing his key-shooting piano solo, and gambling away his paychecks as quickly as he earned them.
Chico’s life was unraveling. His wife had put up with his philandering for decades, but in 1941, the year the brothers broke up, she learned that Chico had had a fling with a young friend of their daughter’s. She agreed not to divorce him, but from then on, they ate and slept separately. Although Chico treated his gambling losses with customary bravado—“The first crap game I played I lost $47,000 in one night,” he told a reporter. “But I learned as I went along. In time I was able to lose more than that”—he was, increasingly, whistling in the dark. In 1947, he had a heart attack at the Las Vegas nightspot where he was performing. Doctors told him he could no longer tour, and Chico announced his retirement. Two years later, after running up some gambling debts, he was back on the road. But there was less demand for his solo act, and he was forced to play a grueling schedule of one-night stands reminiscent of the old vaudeville days. Once or twice a year, he persuaded Harpo to join him, and they’d reprise their Marx Brothers antics. Chico could still wow people backstage with his serial-numbers-on-a-dollar-bill trick, but the impetuous, dashing gallant who had always taken the stairs two at time was a lonely, plodding, diminished old man who claimed to be fifty-five but was sixty and looked seventy. Chico, said Groucho, was the family’s “lost soul.”
If Chico was fading, his former partner in crime had been reborn. Well into middle age, Harpo had been a womanizer and gambler to rival his older brother, albeit less publicly. But in 1936, at the age of forty-nine, the man Walter Winchell called “Hollywood’s most reluctant bridegroom” married a former Ziegfeld Follies showgirl. Harpo and Susan would adopt four children in the next eight years. Having grown up in a big family, Harpo longed for a big family himself. “I wanted to have a child at every window,” Harpo explained, “waving to me when I came home.” He converted the dining room into a poolroom; installed a Ping-Pong table on the patio; hung the jacaranda with year-round Christmas lights; and filled the house with dogs, cats, hamsters, goldfish, a turtle, a monkey, and more than a hundred birds. He gave up smoking, gambling, and staying out late; he got home each evening in time to play with his children, who called him Harpo, not Dad. At bedtime he lulled them to sleep by playing “Annie Laurie,” the first solo he’d played in vaudeville, on the harp.
With Groucho’s help, Harpo had invested wisely in the stock market. He could afford to pick and choose his projects. He tried a few non-Marxian roles, including a summer stock production with his old friend Alexander Woollcott, who was godfather to Harpo’s eldest son. But when he tried to make a Harpo movie on his own, the studio refused to finance the film unless Groucho and Chico appeared in it, too. As the years went by, Harpo occasionally got out his wig and trenchcoat to perform at charity fund-raisers, or to perform with Chico, who was by then a charity in himself. But show business took second place to family. In the fifties, Harpo moved to Palm Springs, where he built a house on the edge of a golf course, not far from Zeppo and Gummo, and spent his days practicing the harp, playing golf and bridge, painting landscapes he donated to charities, and spending time with his wife and children. As a teenager, Harpo had been considered the least likely to succeed of the brothers; as a grown-up, he was the happiest.
Of all the brothers, Groucho was the most determined to leave the Marx Brothers behind. He performed in several plays, developed a few radio shows, and appeared in a movie with the Brazilian singer Carmen Miranda. (His best line came offscreen when he remarked, “I played second banana to the fruit on Carmen Miranda’s head.”) But the only role people wanted him to play was Groucho. In 1942, he joined a dozen other movie stars in a “Hollywood Victory Caravan” that crossed the country by train, selling war bonds along the way. At their final stop, in Washington, D.C., they were met by a huge crowd. As the stars disembarked, the crowd applauded each iconic face. Then a slender middle-aged man in a suit, looking more like a tax lawyer than a movie star, climbed down. He was met with silence. The man climbed back aboard the train, dabbed some greasepaint on his upper lip, stuck a cigar in his mouth, and reappeared, waggling his eyebrows and assuming a bent-knee walk. “Doesn’t anybody want little old Groucho’s autograph?” he called, as the crowd cheered the most recognizable mug in show business.
In 1947, Groucho agreed to host a new quiz show called You Bet Your Life. Newsweek observed that using Groucho as a quizmaster was like selling Citation to a glue factory. But the show was a hit on radio, and, three years later, an even bigger one on TV. There were Marxian elements: the show’s theme song was “Hooray for Captain Spaulding”; a young announcer named George Fenneman served, as Groucho put it, as “the male Margaret Dumont”; and Groucho was his famously acid self. But when the producers advised him to wear his swallowtail coat and greasepaint mustache, Groucho balked. “The hell I will,” he snapped. “That character’s dead.” (He did consent to grow a real mustache, a symbolic nod to his immortal character, and to wear a hairpiece, noting that “If the sponsor and the network want to see me with a full head of hair, there will be the devil toupée.”) While Chico and Harpo would be stuck playing their Marx Brothers characters into old age, You Bet Your Life allowed Groucho to evolve into at least a cousin of his stage self. In 1951, nineteen years after appearing on the cover with Chico, Harpo, and Zeppo, Groucho appeared solo on the cover of Time, in an article titled “Trademark Effrontery.” After forty years as a member of the Marx Brothers, Groucho, the middle child, stood alone in the spotlight.
The most successful brother was, however, the least happy. Groucho would marry three times—all sweet, naive, would-be actresses many years younger, who, in the face of a hypercritical husband, ended up drinking heavily. In public, Groucho played the lecher: pinching fannies, making risqué remarks, and stealing kisses. Like an adolescent determined to prove his he-man bona fides, he larded his conversation with words like fuck and broad. But he harbored lifelong feelings of sexual inadequacy and was terrified of intimacy. His son theorized that Groucho felt threatened by strong, smart women who reminded him of his domineering mother, and so he married vulnerable, tractable gentile girls barely out of adolescence. Having spent most of his life in the company of his brothers, Groucho was truly comfortable only with men—the crowd of writers with whom he discussed books and politics, the flock of aging comedians with whom he traded quips over lunch at the Hillcrest Country Club, the brothers who constituted an impermeable five-member club of their own. Chico’s daughter believed that all the Marx brothers had “a basic contempt for women”; if so, Groucho’s contempt was rooted in self-loathing. “I don’t care to belong to any social organization that would accept me as a member,” Groucho famously remarked on resigning from the Friars Club. He could have been speaking about women.
As Groucho’s children grew older, he pushed them away, too. Surpassingly proud when his son became one of the top young tennis players in the country, Groucho rushed from the soundstage to attend his matches. But when Arthur, hoping to please his father, became a writer, Groucho, whose fondest dream was to be accepted as a literary man, treated him no less disdainfully than he had treated S. J. Perelman. When his nervous son showed him a few chapters of his first novel, Groucho read for an hour, then threw the pages aside, exclaiming, “Amateur Night!”—and recommended that he burn them. Groucho adored his older daughter, Miriam, a precocious tomboy with a wit almost as caustic as his, but he couldn’t help criticizing her. When Miriam was a homesick college freshman on the far side of the country, Groucho, in an otherwise affectionate letter, wrote, “Perhaps it’s the excess weight that you’ve put on that’s responsible for your pessimism. I’ve always been under the impression that fat people are happy—maybe you’re just an exception.” It was as if he were talking to Margaret Dumont onstage, not writing a letter to his insecure eighteen-year-old daughter. Like his wives, Miriam would turn to drink, spending decades in and out of hospitals for treatment of alcoholism. She would stop drinking at the age of fifty, as the father she had worshiped was dying.
The only brother able to move beyond his Marx Brothers role onstage, Groucho was the only one unable to move beyond it offstage. He had developed his character to keep the world at bay, and the character became indistinguishable from the man. “Groucho never knew how to talk normally,” said the actress Maureen O’Sullivan. “His life was his jokes.” At movies, he kept up an audible running commentary (“My God, she’s crying already!” Groucho exclaimed when Now, Voyager, starring the histrionic Bette Davis, opened with a scene of raindrops pelting a windowpane), which fellow moviegoers would shush angrily until they’d identified the source, at which point they’d ask for his autograph. Groucho grumbled about having to be “on,” but ever since his mother had pulled him out of sixth grade to put him on stage he’d been conditioned to give audiences what they wanted. So he pinched bottoms, pestered pretty girls for kisses, insulted strangers. He’d answer the phone or sign letters using the names of his old characters. When Groucho visited the hospital after his grandson was born, recalled his daughter-in-law, “He did the Hackenbush routine up and down the halls.” His life became a kind of nonstop performance. In 1961, an elderly T. S. Eliot wrote Groucho, saying he was a fan and asking for an autographed photo. Groucho sent him a studio portrait. The author of The Waste Land (which, it must be noted, has a certain Grouchoesque eclecticism) thanked him but said he would prefer one in full Groucho regalia. Groucho complied. The two men became pen pals. A few years later, when Groucho was in London, Eliot invited him to his home for dinner. In the week prior, Groucho, the would-be intellectual, boned up, reading Murder in the Cathedral twice, The Waste Land three times. At dinner, all Eliot wanted to talk about was the courtroom scene in Duck Soup.
The older Groucho got, the more venomous his jokes became. “Groucho feels he has to live up to the legend,” said the screenwriter Julius Epstein. “He has to be insulting to everybody; he feels they expect him to treat them like he treated Margaret Dumont.” Indeed, most of his victims went home thrilled that they had been insulted by the great Groucho; it was like being punched on the street by Jack Dempsey. But not everyone. Groucho was walking with a friend when a man approached them and told Groucho, “Everyone tells me I look like you when you were young.” Groucho looked at the man. “If I’d looked like you,” he said, “I would have killed myself.” The man, retreated, speechless. Shy and vulnerable as a child, Groucho scorned weakness in others and had learned to attack before others could attack him. He could be brutally judgmental, but he judged no one more harshly than himself. When a fan remarked how pleased he was to meet the famous Groucho, Groucho demurred. “I’ve known him for years,” he said, “and I can tell you it’s no pleasure.”
* * *
It seems something of a miracle that the Marx Brothers managed to perform together for more than three decades. Indeed, brothers don’t have to be “one soul placed in two bodies,” like the Goncourts, to collaborate successfully. For some, friction can be a motivating force. The identical twins Mike and Bob Bryan have been the best doubles tennis team in the world for much of the new millennium, their fraternal synchronicity enabling them to beat numerous opponents with more raw ability. Yet they fight each other almost as fiercely as they did when they were children. In one early-round match in 2009, Mike yelled at Bob, who jabbed the butt of his racket into Mike’s crotch. Mike doubled over and fell to the court. When he was capable of speech, he smiled up at his brother: “Got me, asshole.” Then Mike rose to his feet and the twins closed out the match as if nothing had happened. After they played poorly in an early-round victory at Wimbledon in 2006, the brothers had a fistfight in the backseat of the car en route to their rented house. Inside, the battle continued: Mike kicked Bob in the stomach, Bob smashed Mike’s guitar. Then they made up and went on to win the championship. “Neither of us will ever play with another partner,” says Mike. “So we never worry about offending the [other] guy . . . We’ll always get over it.”
Sometimes, however, the very familiarity that can make a fraternal collaboration so effective can end up destroying it. Much of the Everly Brothers’ appeal derived from their siblinghood. Their father, a coal miner turned musician who taught them how to sing and play guitar, encouraged their similarity. The brothers looked alike, dressed alike, wore their hair alike, and, though the younger brother, Phil, had a naturally higher voice, they sounded alike. On stage, they stood close to each other, heads together, sharing a microphone, their two voices blending into one seamless sound. In 1957, “Bye Bye Love” made them overnight stars.
From the beginning, though, Don, two years older, was the better guitar player, the more sophisticated musician, and the natural leader. He sang the solos, performed the introductions, wrote most of the original songs, and made most of the decisions. Phil, a more easygoing fellow, didn’t mind deferring. “I was always a younger brother and basically followed pretty much what went down,” he recalled. (When the brothers served in the same unit during a six-month hitch in the Marine Reserves, Don was named platoon leader.) As their fame grew, however, Phil began to chafe at his secondary role. The brothers had never been particularly close, but their early success had yoked their lives together. They had masked their differences for the sake of the act. Now they began asserting their individuality. They styled their hair differently. They bickered over their musical direction. In the mid-sixties, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were ascendent; the Everlys, though still in their twenties, seemed part of an earlier era. Phil was content to perform their old hits; Don, intent on being taken as a serious artist, wanted to experiment. Phil liked playing the lucrative, tuxedo-and-bright-lights casino dates of Las Vegas; Don preferred jeans-and-T-shirt rock clubs. On tour, they stayed in separate hotels, arrived independently to concerts, and prepared in separate dressing rooms. Their wives didn’t get along. Their friends had to choose sides, and to be in one brother’s camp meant you were excluded from the other. And yet moments after an offstage shouting match, they’d step onstage and deliver a flawless performance. Eventually, they kept their distance even onstage: from cozying up to one microphone, heads together, they moved to a double mike and, eventually, to separate microphones. But they were reluctant to split up; only as the Everly Brothers could they make that kind of money.
During a 1973 performance, Don, who had drunk several margaritas before the show, began going flat, missing words, singing the wrong verses, and making incomprehensible comments between numbers. At the end of one song, as Don took a bow, Phil smashed his guitar, walked into the wings, and announced, “I’ll never get on a stage with that man again.”
Over the next decade, the brothers met only once, to bury their father after he died of lung cancer. Each pursued a mildly successful solo career. For several years, Don refused to play their old Everly Brothers hits, Phil occasionally played one or two. Then in 1983, ten years after their split, they agreed to settle “the big southern feud” as they called it, by playing several concerts. “I don’t want to end my life on negative terms with my brother,” said Phil. When they met for their first rehearsal, not having seen each other in eight years, they bear-hugged. Then, recalled Don, “We just walked up to the microphone and said, ‘Right, it’s “Bye Bye Love” in the key of A.’ Everybody knew it and away we went.”
* * *
If conflict can rupture a fraternal partnership, it can also propel it to greatness. Although Wilbur and Orville Wright were the closest of brothers, their working relationship thrived on an almost childlike contrariness. “One of them would make a statement about something very important, and then there would be a long pause,” remembered their niece, Ivonette. “Then the other would say, ‘That’s not so.’ ‘’Tis too.’ ‘’Tisn’t either.’” Their assistant, Charlie Taylor recalled, “They’d shout at each other something terrible. I don’t think they really got mad, but they sure got awfully hot.” One morning after a particularly vehement argument the night before, Orville arrived at the shop and admitted to Charlie that he’d been wrong and they should do it Will’s way. Soon afterward, Will came in and said he’d been thinking it over and maybe Orville was right. Whereupon the argument began again, each brother defending the position the other had taken the night before. The brothers not only enjoyed their debates—“I love to scrap with Orv,” Will said—but found them essential to their work, a kind of Socratic dialogue that enabled them to home in on a solution. “Honest argument is merely a process of mutually picking the beams and motes out of each others’ eyes so both can see clearly,” Will explained to a friend.
Scholars argue over which Wright made the greater contribution to the invention of manned flight, but the brothers themselves gave no thought to the issue. They were sparring partners but never rivals. It didn’t matter which brother made a breakthrough as long as they moved closer to their common goal. “No matter what either one did, the other seemed sure to take the next needed step,” wrote their biographer Fred Kelly. “It was almost as if they were deliberately taking turns.”
In September 1902, the brothers made their third annual trip to Kitty Hawk to test their latest glider. That year’s model was more stable than its predecessors, but every so often it would slide sideways and crash to the ground no matter what the pilot did. The Wrights couldn’t figure out why. One night, Orville drank more coffee than usual and was unable to fall asleep. He lay awake in their tent, mulling over the problem. He realized that as the glider went into its sideways slide, the fixed vertical tail not only failed to keep the glider on its path, it also collided with stationary air, pushing the craft into what would one day be called a tailspin. Orville concluded that if the tail were able to move, the operator, by altering the tail’s angle, could exert pressure on the higher wing and might thus be able to control the turn. In the morning, Orville explained his idea to his brother. After a moment’s reflection, Wilbur agreed with Orville’s assessment. Then he suggested that the movement of the tail be coordinated with the movement of the wing, so that the operator, by shifting his hips, could tilt the wings and alter the tail’s angle at the same time. It was Orville’s turn to agree. Orville’s solution and Wilbur’s addendum constituted a Eureka moment in the invention of the airplane—a simple but elegant solution in which, like the wing and the tail, they acted in concert.
They would spend a year back in Dayton perfecting a motor before returning to Kitty Hawk. On the cold, blustery morning of December 17, 1903, a little more than three years after they had made their first glider, Orville climbed into the operator’s cradle. (The brothers took turns making their test flights, and it was Orville’s turn.) With Will jogging alongside, his hand on the right wingtip, the machine, with Orville at the controls, rose, dipped, and rose again.
* * *
By the 1950s, when people thought of the Marx Brothers, they thought of Groucho, Harpo, and Chico. The more famous the older brothers had become, the further Gummo and Zeppo had sunk into obscurity. People often got them confused. Discharged from the army, Gummo had returned to his first love: inventing. He tried to market a new kind of cardboard laundry box, but nobody bought it; he invented a skidless tire, but on a test drive, the car drove right out of its wheels. He opened a successful dress business, “Gummo Marx Inc.,” but the Depression intervened and the company went bankrupt. (It is unclear whether sales were helped or hurt when Gummo’s brothers dropped by the showroom, trying on the merchandise and chasing customers away.) The three older brothers persuaded Zeppo to take Gummo into his talent agency; once again, the two younger brothers paired off. Gummo, a soft-spoken, good-natured fellow, proved to be a highly successful agent, known for his honesty, often working on a handshake basis. (Zeppo took a more aggressive approach. At a nightclub, trying to persuade the writer Norman Krasna to become a client, he punched out a drunk who had been pestering Krasna. “Does the other agency give you that kind of service?” he asked the startled writer.) In the early 1950s, Gummo sold the agency and limited himself to representing his brothers. He moved to Palm Springs, where he bought a house on the golf course and lived quietly with his wife. Although he was still a hypochondriac, quick to give family and friends the details about his latest doctor’s appointment, he had the well-fed look and contented air of a country squire.
Gummo never regretted leaving the act. He admired his brothers, but he was happier in the background. He joked gracefully about their fame. (“I attribute their success entirely to me,” he told A. J. Liebling. “I quit the act.”) Yet Gummo may have been more valuable to the Marx Brothers out of the act. He was their agent; he was also, in Harpo’s words, their “den mother.” (Many years earlier, when Gummo married, Minnie had given her new daughter-in-law the lowdown on her sons: “Groucho is the fairest man you will ever meet, but he is a little hard. Chico is the black sheep of the family. Harpo is my sweetheart and Gummo is my mother.”) Whenever a brother had a problem, he turned to Gummo, the family fixer. When Minnie stormed out of Arthur’s seventh birthday party, offended by something Ruth had done, Groucho asked Gummo to smooth things over. When Harpo got cold feet about marrying Susan, Gummo assured him she was the best thing that had ever happened to him. When Groucho worried that he might not be able to deliver a speech he’d written, he asked Gummo to pinch hit. (“And don’t forget,” Groucho warned, “Big Brother is always watching.”) When Harpo’s heart began to fail, he turned to Gummo, who seemed to know every doctor in Southern California, for advice. When Chico died, Gummo made the funeral arrangements. “I was the one who took care of these things,” he said. “Not because I wanted to, but because I was expected to.”
Zeppo, too, was happier out of the Marx Brothers. His talent agency, Zeppo Marx Inc., became the third largest in Hollywood, with a client list that included Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, and Lana Turner. For some time, however, there was one glaring omission: the Marx Brothers. “They probably didn’t think I was good enough,” Zeppo said later, adding, “But a lot of good writers and directors and actors and actresses thought I was good enough. I had 250 clients.” When the brothers finally signed on, only after dependable Gummo joined the agency, Zeppo found them as difficult to handle as their directors had. “Whatever kind of deal I would get them, they would want to change,” he said. In 1938, Zeppo negotiated a remarkably good contract for Room Service, but Groucho sniffed that he should have gotten them more. Feeling as unappreciated as he had on stage, Zeppo refused to work with them after that, turning them over to Gummo.
In 1949, Zeppo left the agency and started a series of business ventures: he bred racehorses with Barbara Stanwyck; he bought a grapefruit farm (and sold shares to his brothers); he ran a fishing business from a boat named The Marx Brothers. He retired to Palm Springs with his wife and two adopted children, where he bought a house near Gummo’s and spent his time lifting weights, puttering in his machine shop, playing high-stakes poker and golf, and getting into fights that occasionally landed his name in the police blotter. In 1959, Zeppo, now divorced, married a twenty-nine-year-old showgirl who, in turn, divorced him fourteen years later to marry his next-door-neighbor, Frank Sinatra. Not long after the divorce, seventy-two-year-old Zeppo was accused of beating his latest girlfriend “about the face and head and pulling her hair and attempting to break her nose,” in the words of the police report. Zeppo dismissed the incident, which took place in the driveway of the country club, as “just a little pushing and shoving” over a credit card, but was ordered by the court to pay $20,690 in damages to the woman, who went on to marry the Mafia boss Jimmy “The Weasel” Fratianno.
Zeppo never liked reminiscing about the glory years. In one of his rare interviews he said that he had “hated” being in the Marx Brothers. “The only fun I got out of it was the chorus girls,” he recalled. “And laying all of them, or as many as I could.”
* * *
Though Zeppo and Gummo saw each other every day for lunch, and Chico, Harpo, and Groucho rarely let more than a few days go by without phoning one another, Harpo’s son Bill could recall seeing all five Marx brothers together only once beyond the confines of the Hillcrest Country Club. And yet, as if they needed to be physically proximate, they never lived far from one another. In his late sixties, Groucho bought a weekend cottage in Palm Springs, where Harpo, Gummo, and Zeppo now lived. (Chico, who couldn’t afford a second home, was the only Marx Brother who didn’t have a place there.) At infrequent family gatherings, “the boys,” as they referred to one another, formed their own insular group, sharing a language that even their wives and children couldn’t speak. If there was no dish-throwing or drape-pulling, there was tall-tale-telling from their vaudeville days. They had shared women, they had shared roles, and now they shared stories—at different times, they’d tell the same tale about a different brother, as if when something happened to one Marx brother, it happened to all of them. At evening’s end, they’d sing verse after verse of “Peasie Weasie,” the patter song with which they’d always concluded their vaudeville act. “That the brothers loved each other more than they did any collection of wives, daughters, or sons is hard for me to admit,” recalled Chico’s daughter, Maxine, “but I think it was the case.”
More and more, what brought the brothers together was their worry over Chico. In 1956 Chico was forced to stop touring because of his heart condition. The following year, the IRS sued him for $77,564 in back taxes. His brothers put up the $25,000 the government accepted as an installment. To get by, Chico filed for Social Security. Gummo squirreled away $10,000 in his safe as an emergency fund for his eldest brother. “Most mornings I’d get a call from him. ‘Gummy,’ he’d say, and I knew what was coming. ‘I had some bad luck last night and I need three hundred dollars.’ So I’d give him that, and another three hundred, and then five hundred, and before I knew it the ten thousand was gone.” Every so often, Chico sold his membership in the Hillcrest Country Club to pay off a gambling debt, but his brothers always bought it back.
The brothers’ greatest sacrifice for Chico wasn’t financial but artistic. For decades, producers had been trying to get Groucho, Harpo, and Chico to reunite onscreen. For Chico, who was near bankruptcy, they did. In 1957, they appeared in what was, even for the Marx Brothers, a stretch: an adaptation of The Story of Mankind, Hendrik van Loon’s history of civilization. Harpo played a speechless Isaac Newton, Chico a fifteenth-century monk, Groucho the seventeenth-century Dutch settler who bought Manhattan from the Indians. It was advertised as the last Marx Brothers movie, but the brothers weren’t in a single frame together, which made sense historically if not dramatically. According to most reviews, their last film was also their worst. Two years later, the brothers, coming together again for Chico’s sake, began work on a situation comedy. Gaunt, exhausted, and hobbled by arteriosclerosis, Chico struggled to remember his lines, and his scenes had to be reshot again and again. No company was willing to insure the ailing actor, and the pilot was never completed. On October 10, 1960, Chico made his last television appearance, playing four-handed bridge. He lost.
For years Groucho had joked, with a mix of envy and spite, that Chico would die in bed, but the bed would belong to another man’s wife and the cause of death would be a bullet fired by an angry husband. In October 1961, five months after suffering another heart attack, Chico, aged seventy-four, died in his own bed in a modest bungalow in one of the less-expensive neighborhoods in Beverly Hills, where he was living with his second wife, an actress twenty-nine years younger. He was broke. “I wish I were Groucho so I could help you out,” he said to his daughter not long before he died. She told him she wouldn’t exchange him for anyone.
Chico’s alter ego wouldn’t last much longer. In his later years, Harpo was treated as a cherished national treasure. Even Groucho, who found fault with everyone, couldn’t help saying nice things about him. “He inherited all my mother’s good qualities—kindness, understanding, and friendliness,” Groucho said. “I got what was left.” In the years after his brother’s death, Harpo suffered a series of heart attacks himself, and though he still played his harp every morning, his stage appearances grew rare. In 1963, seventy-four-year-old Harpo appeared at the Pasadena Playhouse for a fund-raising concert. Wearing his customary raincoat, sneakers, and battered top hat, he performed some of his iconic routines without a word, as he had for fifty years. After he shuffled offstage, the emcee, Allan Sherman, told the crowd that they had witnessed Harpo’s final performance. Harpo wandered out from the wings. The audience cheered. Raising his hands to quiet them, Harpo said, in his soft voice, “Now, as I was about to say in 1907 . . .” The audience roared—and then listened raptly as Harpo poured forth a fifteen-minute string of stories. In September 1964, Harpo checked into the hospital for a coronary bypass. Two days later, he died. Groucho wept when he got the news. It was the only time his son ever saw him cry.
Groucho was alone. The two brothers to whom he had been closest were gone. Many of his writer friends were dead. Margaret Dumont died a year after Harpo. His third wife left him two years after that. He was largely estranged from his children. The fourteen-year run of You Bet Your Life had ended one month before Chico’s death, and, though Groucho made occasional TV appearances, prostate trouble, hearing problems, arthritis, depression, and a series of minor strokes kept him at home. His doctors forbade him to smoke cigars. He occasionally invited people to dinner, but shooed guests out the door before eleven, when he’d put on his polka-dot pajamas, get in bed, and watch the nightly rerun of You Bet Your Life, playing the game along with the contestants, preening when he got the right answer. Whenever an old Marx Brothers movie came on TV, he’d watch.
Groucho made the three-hour drive to Palm Springs less and less often. At infrequent dinners with Zep and Gum, as he called them, they’d talk about Minnie, about the old vaudeville days, about Chico’s escapades. Of his two surviving brothers, Gummo was the one to whom Groucho was closer. (In an unguarded interview, Groucho would call Zeppo “cold-blooded.”) But he couldn’t help needling his milder, more vulnerable brother, treating him, as he had onstage, as his stooge. With Chico gone, it seemed as if Groucho needed a brother to pick on, and Gummo was a safer target than short-tempered Zeppo. Indeed, the worst that Gummo, ever the diplomat, would say of Groucho was, “He should have been a Quaker. He was stern. I don’t quite understand what made him tick the way he did.”
Groucho would have a bizarre final act. In 1971, an ambitious young actress was hired to answer his mail. Depending on to whom one talked, Erin Fleming was either a caring, attentive companion who revitalized Groucho’s career and gave him a reason to live, or a controlling, abusive gold digger who exploited a dying man. Either way, she took charge of his life. She prodded him into giving a series of one-man concerts, in which Groucho, his lope slowed to a halting shuffle, his rat-a-tat delivery faded to a mumble, told jokes from Marx Brothers movies, showed a film clip or two, and sang a few old vaudeville songs—performances that audience members, some of them gotten up in greasepaint mustaches, false noses, and wire-rimmed glasses, tended to find either poignant or pitiful. (After seeing his brother’s show in Los Angeles, Zeppo pronounced the spectacle “sad.”) At times, Erin was solicitous and attentive; at times she’d scream at Groucho in front of guests, humiliating him as he had humiliated his three wives. Groucho’s children intervened, kindling a long, costly court battle for custody. In early 1977, Groucho was hospitalized with a broken hip, and his condition deteriorated rapidly. When Gummo, depressed since the death of his wife a year earlier, and distraught over Groucho’s situation, died on April 21, at the age of eighty-four, Groucho, not far from the end himself, wasn’t told.
In his final months, Groucho, surrounded by nurses he no longer had the strength to pinch, roused himself enough to crack an occasional joke. When George Fenneman visited, he helped a nurse transfer Groucho from his wheelchair to his bed, putting his arms around him and swiveling him onto the mattress. “You always were a lousy dancer,” growled Groucho, clinging to his old You Bet Your Life announcer. But age, illness, and painkillers had softened him. When his daughter-in-law, a woman he had always disliked, came to visit, Groucho kissed her—not the joking, lascivious smooch of yore but a flurry of affectionate, needy, apologetic pecks. “He kissed her about fifty times,” recalled Nat Perrin. “He would never have stopped if she hadn’t gotten tired of bending over.” When the screenwriters Norman Panama and Julius Epstein visited with their wives, Groucho mustered a ghost of his familiar leer for the women. “They both love me,” Groucho murmured. “Everyone loves you, Groucho,” Panama said. “Yes,” Groucho said faintly. “Everyone except me.”
Slipping in and out of consciousness, Groucho died on August 19, 1977. Zeppo, who had sided with Erin Fleming in the custody dispute, learned of his brother’s death from the evening news. The last Marx brother would die of lung cancer two years later at the age of seventy-eight.
* * *
A quarter-century earlier, on a summer evening in 1954, Harpo and Susan Marx hosted a party in their Beverly Hills home following Groucho’s wedding to his third wife, a former model forty years his junior. It was the first time the five brothers had been together in several years.
Groucho was standing by the piano, singing a mock love ballad to his new wife, when he suddenly nudged the accompanist off the piano bench and started playing a rollicking tune, “Ist das nicht ein Schnitzelbank?” It was their mother’s favorite song from the old “Fun in Hi Skule” act, a song they had sung hundreds of times in towns and cities across the country in their vaudeville days. Few of the guests knew it. But for his four brothers, it was a siren call. Sitting in different corners of the room, they took up their parts. For a few minutes the wedding was forgotten, the guests were forgotten, and the Marx Brothers were together again.