Groucho: The Life and Times of Julius Henry Marx
by Stefan KanferKnopf, 480 pp., $30
Stefan Kanfer’s (The Last Empire) new biography of Groucho Marx is a grim little book, chock-full o’ the nuts and bolts of a life badly spent in the thrall of the Bitch Goddess and her ilk. Groucho, as it turns out, was more true to his appellation than anyone could have guessed. Unsurprisingly, it was Harpo, that skirt-chasing dervish, who made the most of the vaudevillian quintet’s rocky road. In his late 40s, he fell in love, married, and proceeded to adopt children with wild abandon. His 1961 autobiography, Harpo Speaks! is Groucho‘s polar opposite, full of lusty anecdotes about showbiz and family and the Algonquin Round Table, to which he became an unofficial mascot of sorts. Harpo’s book remains as profoundly touching as Groucho is acerbic.
Raised by Minnie Marx, a stridently loving mother with vaudeville dreams of her own, Groucho, Harpo, and brothers Chico, Zeppo, and Gummo, along with father Frenchy (so-named because of his culinary wizardry) toughed it out on the Lower East Side until Minnie could shoehorn them into the biz (as the Four Nightingales) with an assist from Uncle Al Sheen, already a known quantity on the circuitous Midwest vaudeville circuit. Kanfer’s attention to detail in these early years is startling: The Marx’s Broadway debut in I’ll Say She Is is as detailed an account of what it must have been like to be right there, right then, on that particular stage, as I’ve ever read (the wealth of previous Groucho and Marx Brothers arcana is equally startling — 10 books from Groucho himself, with dozens more orbiting like biographical satellites). That Kanfer managed to dig up as much new material as he has is a delight. In the wake of a dismal closeout to their Hollywood career (ostensibly with 1949’s Love Happy, although Groucho continued all the way to Otto Preminger’s so-bad-it’s-good Skidoo in 1968), Groucho first snagged work on radio, and then as the host of You Bet Your Life in the Fifties. Neither job satisfied him, and he grew more curmudgeonly as time went by. Much of the latter part of Groucho focuses on the man and his family, or rather, his mistreatment of them. A series of wives came and went, and by the end, even his children hated him. It’s a pitiful story, all told (it usually is when Dick Cavett begins to grope toward center stage midway through), but the sheer abandon of Groucho’s comic zeal — he never trusted his instincts as far as he should have — is about a miracle in itself, all tears and heartbreak and tattered schemes. Laff, clown, laff.
This article appears in June 2 • 2000.