Zeppo, p.39
Zeppo, page 39
This promotional film celebrating the twentieth anniversary of Paramount features clips from films made during the studio’s first twenty years, including some that were still in production at the time of the film being screened. The Four Marx Brothers had just arrived in Hollywood to film Monkey Business. Since production on the new film had not yet begun, they shot the “Theatrical Manager’s Office” sketch that they had done on the stage for many years. The footage is a rare example of the quartet as they interacted on the stage—with Zeppo an equally contributing member.
Monkey Business
Paramount—September 19, 1931
Directed by Norman McLeod
Screenplay by S. J. Perelman and Will B. Johnstone
Additional Dialogue by Arthur Sheekman
Photographed by Arthur L. Todd
The first Marx Brothers film not adapted from a Broadway show gives Zeppo his most significant role to date. The film is loosely based on the vaudeville show Home Again in which Zeppo had replaced Gummo. In Monkey Business Zeppo has far more to do than he or Gummo ever did in Home Again. Here Zeppo is the romantic lead and plays the hero in the climactic scene. He even gets a few laughs.
Horse Feathers
Paramount—August 10, 1932
Directed by Norman McLeod
Screenplay by Bert Kalmar, Harry Ruby, S. J. Perelman, and Will B. Johnstone
Music and Lyrics by Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby
Photographed by Ray June
Zeppo again has a significant role as Groucho’s son and the romantic lead. He even gets to sing a solo—as he had frequently on stage.
Duck Soup
Paramount—November 17, 1933
Directed by Leo McCarey
Screenplay by Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby
Additional Dialogue by Arthur Sheekman and Nat Perrin
Music and Lyrics by Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby
Photographed by Henry Sharp
As originally conceived, Duck Soup would have continued featuring Zeppo in the same manner as he had been in Monkey Business and Horse Feathers. He was to play Groucho’s son, be the romantic lead, and have a featured song. But the Marx Brothers walked out in a contract dispute as production was starting. By the time they ironed out their differences with Paramount, Zeppo was well on his way to leaving the Four Marx Brothers. The film was rewritten upon their return and Zeppo was again relegated to his earlier marginal status.
Hollywood on Parade (B-5)
Paramount—December 1933
Directed by Louis Lewyn
Zeppo is seen at a Hollywood costume party thrown by Marion Davies. He’s wearing the toupees of several stars on his jacket in what the narrator calls “toupee or not toupee.” Chico and Groucho are also seen, as is Zeppo’s friend and decorator Harold Grieve who accompanies his wife Jetta Goudal.
Screen Snapshots (Series 16, Number 11)
Columbia—June 25, 1937
Directed by Ralph Staub
The Screen Snapshots series celebrates its seventeenth anniversary with footage of a party at the home of columnist Harriet Parsons. Guests include Buddy Rogers, Wallace Reid, George Raft, and Marie Provost. The Four Marx Brothers are seen in unrelated newsreel footage.
Grand Opening of Del Mar Racetrack
Just about every studio and newsreel company covered the opening of Bing Crosby’s Del Mar racetrack near San Diego on July 3, 1937. Celebrities seen watching Reigh Count win the Del Mar Inaugural Handicap along with Crosby and sports-caster Clem McCarthy include Lee Tracy, Bob Burns, Pat O’Brien, Una Merkel, Oliver Hardy, Robert Taylor, and Barbara Stanwyck. If they were even recognized by the producers, Zeppo and Marion—seen in several of the newsreels seated in a box with Stanwyck and Taylor—were not mentioned by any of the newsreel narrators.
Screen Snapshots (Series 17, Number 1)
Columbia—September 17, 1937
Directed by Ralph Staub
A compilation of newsreel footage featuring Clara Bow, Gary Cooper, Marion Davies, Janet Gaynor, Myrna Loy, Jackie Cooper, Lew Cody, Joan Bennett, and Theda Bara, also includes footage of the Four Marx Brothers’ handprints and footprints being preserved in cement at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in 1933.
Screen Snapshots: Hollywood’s Famous Feet
Columbia—July 20,1950
Directed by Ralph Staub
In a compilation of newsreel footage showing various stars placing their hands and feet into cement at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, Sid Grauman is seen with the Four Marx Brothers, Al Jolson, Edgar Bergen, the Ritz Brothers, John Wayne, and Tom Mix. Jolson is the narrator.
RADIO
January 27, 1923
Pittsburgh, Pa.
WCAE
On their final day at the Aldine Theatre in The Twentieth Century Revue, the Four Marx Brothers make what is believed to be their radio debut from the studio of WCAE.
June 9, 1924
Newark, N.J.
WOR
A few weeks into the Broadway run of I’ll Say She Is, the Four Marx Brothers and the cast of the show make a radio broadcast from the WOR studio at Bamberger’s department store.
July 8, 1924
New York, N.Y.
WHN
A special late-night broadcast—starting at 11:30 p.m. after the evening performance of I’ll Say She Is concludes—features the Four Marx Brothers and other cast members performing selections from the show.
December 30, 1924
New York, N.Y.
WNYC
The Four Marx Brothers appear at the Newspaper Club Clubhouse before their performance in I’ll Say She Is that evening. The event is broadcast as Old Timers’ Night at the Newspaper Club.
February 25, 1925
Boston, Mass.
WBZ
A few weeks after I’ll Say She Is closes on Broadway, the show is back on tour and the Four Marx Brothers appear on a radio broadcast celebrating the first anniversary of the WBZ radio studio at the Hotel Brunswick Roof.
April 7, 1925
Springfield, Mass.
WBZ
The cast of I’ll Say She Is appears on a broadcast from the Kimball Studio at the Westinghouse Hotel.
Mar. 10, 1929
New York, N.Y.
WMCA
The Four Marx Brothers are among the many stars performing as the Jewish Theatrical Guild honors its vice president, Eddie Cantor.
Mar. 15, 1929
New York, N.Y.
WMSG
The Four Marx Brothers appear at the premiere of Texas Guinan’s Vitaphone film, Queen of the Nightclubs at the Strand Theatre. The event and the broadcast benefit the Theatrical Press Representatives of America.
October 4, 1930
Brooklyn, N.Y.
WBBC/WCGU
On the afternoon of their opening in The Schweinerei, the Four Marx Brothers appear on a broadcast over two stations from the RKO Albee Theatre.
April 17, 1932
Hollywood, Calif.
CBS network
Zeppo sings with the Raymond Paige Orchestra on California Melodies, a new nationally broadcast series.
September 1933
Hollywood, Calif.
Paramount Studio
Paramount creates a series of radio promotion discs for the upcoming release of Duck Soup. The shows, called The Paramount Movie Parade are distributed to radio stations around the country. Excerpts from the film included on the discs differ from the versions heard in the finished film. In the second disc, songs from the film are heard, but in versions that don’t feature the Four Marx Brothers. These unusual outtakes are probably from the period after the Marx Brothers walked out on the film in a contract dispute. Paramount had originally planned to continue the production with actors replacing the Four Marx Brothers. Other outtakes in the shows are from the early production when Zeppo was to play Groucho’s son. The voice over announcer says Zeppo is “the only one of the Four Marx Brothers cursed with common sense.”
Fall 1933
Hollywood, Calif.
Syndicated
Zeppo makes two appearances on the five-minute transcribed interview show, Kay Parker in Hollywood. In one he promotes Perry’s Brass Rail. The other is from the set of Duck Soup.
October 6, 1963
Palm Springs, Calif.
NBC
Zeppo provides a brief recorded message for the Monitor 63 birthday salute to Groucho.
TELEVISION
Feb. 18, 1957
Tonight: America after Dark
NBC
The Five Marx Brothers participate in a filmed interview when they gather at the Hollywood Civic Playhouse for Chico’s opening in a touring production of The Fifth Season. The film is broadcast later that evening and then promptly lost.
February 17, 1975
The American Film Institute Salute to Orson Welles
CBS
Groucho and Zeppo are briefly seen in the audience at the event taped on February 9 at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles.
August 9, 1979
Hollywood Greats: Groucho Marx
BBC
Zeppo’s interview with Barry Norman, filmed outside his Desert Island condominium in Rancho Mirage, is featured in an hour-long documentary about Groucho.
NOTES
CHAPTER 1
1. Minnie’s sister was at Blackwell’s Island at around the same time New York World reporter Nellie Bly famously got herself committed to the institution as part of an undercover assignment to expose the horrific and squalid conditions there. Her newspaper reports describing patients tied together with ropes, ice cold baths in filthy water, beatings, rancid food, and rat infestation were compiled in 1887 as the book Ten Days in a Mad-House.
2. The illnesses associated with the deaths in Minnie’s family were particularly horrific in an era without the benefit of antibiotics and future advances in medicine. Julius LeFevre suffered from articular rheumatism, which led to double hypostatic pneumonia. He died within three weeks of the diagnosis. Pauline LeFevre died from an epileptic seizure after five months in the asylum with dementia.
3. Minnie’s sister Celine—known in America under her Americanized married name, Selena Walker—died of nephritis on August 31, 1893. She is erroneously listed in immigration and census records as the daughter of Minnie’s sister Pauline and her husband Julius LeFevre.
4. Although Groucho would claim to have been named for Hannah’s third husband, Julius Schickler, he was in fact named for Julius LeFevre, Minnie’s sister Pauline’s husband who had died in 1886. Hannah married Julius Schickler well after Groucho’s birth.
5. Al Shean entered vaudeville at age sixteen in 1884 when he formed the Gotham City Quartet. In 1890 he formed the Manhattan Quartet, later renamed the Manhattan Comedy Four when they started to add comedy bits in between songs. In 1900 Shean left the Manhattan Comedy Four and started working with Charles Warren as the team of Shean and Warren. They become a great success in vaudeville with two classic sketches, “Quo Vadis Upside Down” and “Kidding the Captain.” They split up a few times before permanently ending their partnership in 1910 and paving the way for Al Shean’s greatest success as half of the team Gallagher and Shean with Ed Gallagher.
6. Harry would have another child, Harry Shean, Jr., in 1916 with his second wife.
7. The twins were born prematurely on July 28, 1900. Marie Julia Schoenberg died the same day. Selma Ruby Schoenberg died on August 22, 1901.
8. After Harry and Marie divorced, Marie and the widowed Sara Heyman lived together in their later years.
CHAPTER 2
1. Adolph changed his name to avoid confusion with Adolph Marks, a Chicago attorney notorious for bringing legal action against vaudevillians on behalf of circuit and theater managers.
2. Previous hired hand Lou Levy had been replaced in the Four Nightingales by Manuel Frank prior to the Marx family moving to Chicago. Frank not relocating with them resulted in the hiring of Fred Klute.
3. Grand Boulevard has been renamed South King Drive, but the Marx house still stands at 4512 South King Drive.
4. Minnie’s choice of the name Palmer was occasionally explained as being taken from the Palmer House Hotel, but Minnie promoted the confusion of herself with actress and musical comedy star Minnie Palmer (1857–1936).
CHAPTER 3
1. In the 1950 Federal Census, Zeppo noted that he had completed the eighth grade.
2. One of the Five Rose Maids, Mary Orth, had previously appeared in T. Dwight Pepple’s Follies of the Cabaret. She would continue working for Minnie for several years. She joined the Four Marx Brothers company in the fall of 1914––and remained with them until January 1921. She appeared in Home Again, The Cinderella Girl, ‘N’ Everything, and The Winter Garden Revue.
CHAPTER 4
1. There were 350,000 casualties at Argonne. The forty-seven-day battle ended with the signing of the Armistice on November 11, 1918. Sergeant Alvin York’s heroic exploits at Argonne were depicted in the 1941 film Sergeant York, for which Gary Cooper won an Academy Award as Best Actor in 1942.
2. Chico and Betty claimed March 22 as their wedding date in the interest of promoting the idea that Betty became pregnant after the wedding. They picked March 22 because Chico was not likely to forget his fake wedding anniversary if it was also his birthday.
3. Groucho may not have known that William Henry Johnson had died at the age of sixty-nine only a few weeks before that Brooklyn Daily Eagle interview.
CHAPTER 5
1. No formal rule was implemented to prevent the married Chico from moving in on the girlfriends of his unmarried brothers—not that such a rule would have prevented this activity.
2. Note that Groucho created a comic version of the wedding for his December 30, 1930, Collier’s piece, “My Poor Wife,” that is not interrupted by any facts.
3. There’s nothing about Zeppo fixing up Jack Benny with a fourteen-year-old school-girl as a gag that doesn’t ring true, but this simple story came to include several fabricated details in memoirs by Benny’s longtime writer Milt Josefsberg, his manager Irving Fein, and even one cowritten by Mary Livingstone and her brother Hilliard Marks. In these books the various inaccuracies include varying ages for Mary, the placement of the event in 1922, and assertions that the Marx Brothers were distantly related to the Marcowitz family. The notion that the dinner was a Passover seder was introduced in the Josefsberg and Livingstone-Marks books, but the first night of Passover in 1920 was April 2. The Marx Brothers and Jack Benny celebrated the holiday during their two-week engagement in San Francisco.
4. A version of the “Theatrical Manager’s Office” sketch was filmed in 1931 for the Paramount promotional film The House That Shadows Built. It demonstrates unequivocally that Zeppo was better utilized on stage than he was on film.
CHAPTER 6
1. A Kiss in the Dark has long been considered a lost film, although in recent years two of its six reels have been discovered. The garden party sequence with Zeppo’s appearance is not contained in the two known surviving reels.
CHAPTER 7
1. Thomas Meighan starred in four films for Famous Players-Lasky that were shot at Paramount in 1925 and three of them are lost. Marion was not billed in any of these films.
2. In an interesting twist, Marion appeared with the show at the Lyric Theatre in Allentown, where nearly six months earlier, the Four Marx Brothers gave the debut performance of I’ll Say She Is.
3. Oddly, the other Marion Benda appeared in the Broadway production of Rio Rita, which featured Harpo’s future wife Susan Fleming in the cast.
4. Marion took the important role of Penelope Martin, one of the villains in the show. In the Broadway production Penelope had two featured musical numbers, “Minstrel Days” and “Tango Melody.” By the time Marion had assumed the role on tour, “Tango Melody” had been given to another character. Kay Francis played Penelope in the film version of The Cocoanuts. Penelope’s musical numbers were not included in the film.
CHAPTER 8
1. Minnie and Frenchy had lived just down the street at 217 East 78th Street around the time that Chico and Harpo were born.
CHAPTER 9
1. Harris sold his theater to the Shubert Organization in 1926 but it would bear his name until it closed in 1994.
CHAPTER 10
1. Upon his return to Boston, George S. Thomas sold Omar and Asra to the highly respected breeder, Q. A. Shaw McKean. Thomas kept Omar and Asra’s first litter and McKean began breeding Afghan Hounds. Asra lived to be fourteen and produced seventy puppies. Zeppo is frequently credited with bringing Afghan Hounds to North America, but it was Q. A. Shaw McKean who was principally responsible for popularizing the breed.
2. There’s no doubt that the “Mrs. Marx” in Sheilah Graham’s book is Marion, although Graham incorrectly states that Harpo was living at the Garden of Allah with his wife Susan, who never lived there and hadn’t yet married Harpo at the time he lived there.
CHAPTER 11
1. The dispute over the Marx Brothers’ financial participation in Monkey Business and Horse Feathers was finally settled on April 6, 1962, for $38,500—roughly $357,000 in the modern economy.
CHAPTER 12
1. Hard liquor remained prohibited until December, so speakeasies continued to operate after the passage of the Beer Act.
