Zeppo Marx: FAQ

Zeppo Marx

In comupterspeak, FAQ is an acronym for "Frequently Asked Questions." This clever diversionary device was created by tech support people to trip up unsuspecting consumers seeking help with computer problems. Let's say your computer freezes up any time you press the tilde key. A more plausible example may be that you don't know what the tilde key is. You go to the tech support page of the computer manufacturer, as you were too cheap to buy a service contract which would permit you to talk to a nice Indian person whose real name is Paramvir, but who identifies himself as "Larry" at work in an effort to put American callers at ease. Arriving at the tech support page, you click on "FAQ," only to find a list of questions and answers that have nothing to do with your problem. Giving up in disgust, you vow never to use the tilde key again--a goal which is surprisingly easy to achieve.

By the way, this is the tilde: &#126. If instead of a wavy line, you see the characters &#-126, you may be using the HTML-4 standard. Please go to our tech support page and click on "FAQ."

In keeping with the spirit of Marx Brothers comedy, this post is based on the absurd premise that questions about Zeppo Marx are frequent. Zeppo is the third most obscure of the Marx Brothers. The most obscure is Manfred, who didn't live long enough to acquire a nickname; he died in infancy. Second would be Milton (Gummo), who left the stage act when he was drafted into the army during WWI, and never returned to performing.

Since interest in Zeppo isn't sufficient to generate frequent questions, we might adjust the acronym "FAQ" to stand for "Fairly Asinine Questions," or "Far Afield Queries," or any number of phrases unsuitable for a PG rated site such as this blog.

Without further ado, let us proceed to the questions.

Where and when was Zeppo born?
The youngest of the Marx Brothers, he was born in New York City on February 25, 1901.

What was Zeppo's real name?
Herbert.

Why did he change his name?
Research has shown that Herbert is one of the least humorous names in the English language. With the exception of Herb Shriner, nobody with the name has had a successful career in comedy.

When did he start performing with his brothers?
Herbert briefly joined the act in 1915, when Julius (Groucho), Arthur (Harpo), Leonard (Chico), and Milton (Gummo) were performing the show written by their Uncle Al Shean, Home Again. Thus Home Again is the only show featuring all five Marx Brothers at once. When Gummo left to join the service in 1918, Zeppo became a permanent member of the act.

How did he get the name Zeppo?
The answer to this is uncertain. Groucho, in his old age, claimed it had to do with the fact that the zeppelin was introduced around the time Zeppo was born. This isn't totally impossible, since the first zeppelin was built in 1898 and Zeppo was born in 1901. It seems unlikely, however. Harpo, in his autobiography, claimed that Herbert was originally called Zippo, after Mr. Zippo, the star of a famous chimpanzee act, because Herbie was "always chinning himself and practicing acrobatics." He didn't like being named after a chimp, and insisted on being called Zeppo. However it happened, he became Zeppo for good. Occasionally, one finds on eBay cancelled checks from his account signed "Zeppo Marx."

In how many movies did he appear?
Five Marx Brothers movies --The Cocoanuts, Animal Crackers, Monkey Business, Horse Feathers, and Duck Soup. Joe Adamson, Marx expert extraordinaire, has reminded me that Zeppo was in two other movies--A Kiss in the Dark (1925) and The House That Shadows Built, a promotional film released by Paramount in 1931. And he was in the long-lost Marx Brothers film Humor Risk, which was never released.

Why did he stop performing?
His stated reason was that he did not enjoy acting. His acting ability has been called into question, although some critics believe his wooden style was intended as a parody of the junevile romantic leads of the day. He proved his acting ability in the stage version of Animal Crackers, when Groucho has hospitalized with appendicitis and Zeppo stepped into the role of Captain Spaulding. Although he played the role at least as well as Groucho, smoking cigars in five shows a day made Zeppo sick.

What did he do after he stopped performing?
He started a talent agency, which was very successful. In 1941, he founded the Marman Products Company, Inc., which produced clamping devices and straps. Marman clamps were used to secure the atomic bombs on the Enola Gay during WWII. The company also built a motorized bicycle, the Marman Twin. Zeppo was also an inventor, and held three patents:
-Vapor Delivery Pad for Delivering Moist Heat
-Method and Watch Mechanism for Actuation by Cardiac Pulse
-Cardiac Pulse Rate Monitor

Was he married?
Twice. First to Marian Benda in 1927. They adopted two boys and divorced in 1954. In 1959 he married Barbara Blakeley. She had a son by a previous marriage, who took the last name of Marx, but was not formally adopted by Zeppo. Zeppo and Barbara divorced in 1972 or 1973, and Barbara then married Frank Sinatra in 1976. They remained married till Ol' Blue Eyes died in 1998.

When did he die?
The last surviving Marx Brother, Zeppo died of lung cancer in 1979 at age 78.

S.J. Perelman

This post appeared originally at Lugubrious Drollery on February 9, 2009.

S.J. Perelman at his office in Greenwich Village
Date taken: October 26, 1961
Photographer: Carl Mydans
From the Google Life Magazine Image Archives

This morning I was listening to recent podcasts of Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac on the way to work. February 1 was the birthday of comic genius S.J. Perelman, who, among other things, wrote for the Marx Brothers. The sketch of Perelman which Keillor read on his birthday was so good, I'm quoting it here in its entirety:

It's the birthday of humorist S.J. Perelman, born Sidney Joseph Perelman in Brooklyn, New York (1904). His father was a Russian immigrant who tried to make a living as a poultry farmer. Perelman said his father believed "that if you had a few acres and a chicken farm there was no limit to your possible wealth. I grew up with and have since retained the keenest hatred of chickens."

At this point, alone in my truck, I laughed out loud. Having started life as a third-generation duck farmer, I loved Perelman's statement. Keillor goes on:

He worked as a cartoonist when he was in college, but he switched to writing humorous essays, which he published in The New Yorker. His first collection of essays, Dawn Ginsbergh's Revenge, came out in 1929. Groucho Marx wrote him a letter that said: "From the moment I picked up your book until I put it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it."

Groucho Marx persuaded Perelman to move to Hollywood to write screenplays. He worked on Marx Brothers movies such as Monkey Business (1931) and Horse Feathers (1932), but he hated Hollywood. So he went back to writing essays for The New Yorker. His many essay collections include The Ill-Tempered Clavichord (1952) and Chicken Inspector No. 23 (1966).

One of his essays begins: "I guess I'm just an old mad scientist at bottom. Give me an underground laboratory, half a dozen atom-smashers, and a beautiful girl in a diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, and I care not who writes the nation's laws."

George Seaton

George Seaton
Photo by Allan Grant, date unknown
From the Google Life Magazine Image Archives

Wondering if perhaps the Marx Brothers had played a local theater in their vaudeville days, I indulged in exhaustive research by typing "Marx Brothers" and "South Bend" into the Google search thingamabob. I didn't find any accounts of the boys playing here. If I put forth a little more effort, I wouldn't be surprised to find they performed here, as they did live in Chicago for a while, and Chicago is only about a hundred miles away.

What I found is that a South Bend native was responsible for some of the Marx Brothers comedy. George Seaton was born in South Bend, Indiana in 1911. After college, he moved to Detroit, where he was the second actor to portray the Lone Ranger on the radio. He claimed he originated the phrase, "Hi-yo, Silver" when he was unable to whistle for his horse as was called for in the script. Seaton signed on as a contract writer for MGM in 1933, and contributed uncredited material for the 1935 Marx movie A Night at the Opera, then was asked by Groucho to co-write A Day at the Races (1937), for which he received screen credit. Seaton went on to have a fairly successful career, including writing and directing the holiday classic, Miracle on 34th Street(1947), for which he won an Oscar for best screenplay. He won a second Oscar for the screenplay A Country Girl (1954). In later years, his success was limited, but he was nominated for an Oscar for 1970's Airport. Seaton died in Beverly Hills in 1979.

Under the Summer Moon

This is the oldest piece of Marx Brothers memorabilia in my small collection. It is the sheet music for the song "Under the Summer Moon," written for the vaudeville show "Home Again" by Leonard (Chico) Marx and Lem Trombley. At the time, Milton (Gummo) was performing with Julius (Groucho), Arthur (Harpo), and Leonard.

The boys began performing the show in 1914. The sheet music was copyrighted in 1916. I haven't been able to find documentation that the song was actually performed in the show. It may have been written for the show but not used, or maybe its use just isn't documented.

The photo shows, left to right, Harpo, Gummo, Chico, and Groucho

See the inside of the sheet music at the Archives of Michigan Digital Collection.

Groucho and the Guitar

In 1954, Groucho Marx and his daughter Melinda were featured on Edward R. Murrow's "Person to Person" TV show. The format of "Person to Person" consisted of Murrow smoking cigarettes in a studio in New York and interviewing celebrities in their homes through the magic of television. In those days before Sputnik and Telstar, there were no communication satellites, and the signals between New York and Hollywood had to travel on transcontinental cables. During the interview, Groucho picked up a guitar and did a nice job of accompanying himself and seven-and-a-half-year-old Melinda as they sang the Irving Berlin counterpoint song, "You're Just in Love."

This was one of the few recorded guitar performances by Groucho. The others occurred in the movies. In Monkey Business, Groucho strummed a few chords in Thelma Todd's stateroom. How Groucho wound up in her stateroom is another matter altogether. In Horse Feathers, Groucho accompanied himself on guitar as he serenaded the selfsame Thelma Todd with the song "Everyone Says I Love You." As the couple sat in a canoe, Groucho finished the song with the lyics:

Everything that ever grew
The gooose and the gander
And the gosling too
The duck upon the water
When he feels that way too
Says I love you

Except instead of Groucho singing "I love you," a duck which had been following the canoe finished the song with "Quack, quack, quack." To which Groucho responded, "That's a wise quack. You keep your bill out of this. How would you like it if I butted into your affairs and laid an egg?" and tosses his guitar into the lake.

At the conclusion of the scene, Thelma Todd falls in the lake as she and Groucho struggle over the Huxley College football signals she has just taken from his jacket pocket. When she begs him for a lifesaver, Groucho pulls a pack of Lifesaver candies from his pocket and throws her one.

In Go West, Harpo plays harmonica and Groucho provides guitar accompaniment for the song "Ridin the Range," sung by romantic lead John Carroll, Groucho, and Chico. The song included such forgettable lyrics as

Where men are men
And the life is free
And there's nothing breakin
The mo-not-o-ny
Of clippedy clop
Just clippedy clop clop clop clop clop clop

In real life, Groucho was a dedicated student of the guitar and owned two Gibsons. He would drive his family to distraction with his practicing. He once had the opportunity to meet the great classical guitarist Andres Segovia after a concert. Segovia agreed to come to Groucho's house for dinner on the condition that there would be no guitar playing by either party. However, after dinner, Groucho brought out his Gibson guitars and prevailed upon the master to accompany the comedian as he played Rachmaninoff’s “Prelude in C-Sharp Minor.” Groucho's performance of this piece had once prompted his wife to say, “Why don’t you go back to playing by ear? You used to be so much better before you knew what you were doing.” Segovia finally said he could play no more because the steel strings of Groucho's guitar hurt his fingers.

For more on Groucho the guitarist, see these articles:

The Surprisingly Serious Tale of Comedian Groucho Marx and His Lifelong Quest to Master Guitar by Jerry McCulley

Groucho Marx the musician? Screen legend, but...? by Stephen Murray

And also check out Everyone Says I Love You performed on YouTube by Fret Killer

Surrealism or Hello Dali

Harpo Marx Painting. Photo by Allan Grant, February 1948. From the Life Magazine Archives.

During the 1930s, the Marx Brothers were adored by the surrealists. Antonin Artaud, a surrealist writer and thinker had this to say about the Marx Brothers' film Animal Crackers:

If there is a definite characteristic, a distinct poetic state of mind that can be called surrealism, Animal Crackers participated in that state altogether.

Philippe Soupalt, who proved to the world he was a surrealist by doing things like walking into cafes and shouting "Everybody switch drinks," or stopping strangers on the street to ask them for the address of Philippe Soupalt, wrote after seeing Horse Feathers:

The comedy of the Marx Brothers lifts us out of reality by exaggerating our peculiarities and aggravating our habits. The real quality of the Marx Brothers and of this extravagant, excessive comedy remains human. They are exactly like ordinary people and act just as we should act if social regulations did not prevent us from behaving in that way. I believe that , though most films rapidly go out of style, this satiric comedy will make us laugh for a long time to come.

No one can dispute that last statement, but the rest of Soupalt's dissertation leaves me a bit irritated, as I'm sure I would have been if I were sitting in a Parisian cafe when he burst in yelling for people to exchange drinks. Attempting to analyze humor tends to destroy humor, with the possible exception of Robert Benchley's essay, "Why We Laugh--Or Do We?" In this piece, Benchley lists the five cardinal points of a joke:

1. The joke must be in a language we understand.

2. It must be spoken loudly enough for us to hear it, or printed clearly enough for us to read it.

3. It must be about something. You can't just say, "Here's a good joke" and let it go at that. (You can, but don't wait for the laugh.)

4. It must deal with either frustration or accomplishment, inferiority or superiority, sense or nonsense, pleasantness or unpleasantness, or, at any rate, with some emotion that can be analyzed, otherwise how do we know when to laugh?

5. It must begin with the letter "W."

The adulation of the Marx Brothers by the surrealists reached its zenith with Salvador Dali in the late 1930s. Dali was especially fascinated with Harpo. As Groucho said, "Dali was in love with my brother--in a nice way." Dali visited Harpo in Hollwood in 1937, and Dali later wrote that when he arrrived in Harpo's garden,

(Harpo) was naked, crowned with roses, and in the centre of a veritable forest of harps (he was surrounded by at least 500 harps). He was caressing, like a new Leda, a dazzling white swan, and feeding it a statue of the Venus de Milo made of cheese, which he grated against the strings of the nearest harp.

Did it really happen? Who knows?

It does not appear that Harpo was quite as impressed with Dali, although he did pose for him. In his autobiography, Harpo Speaks, he included the resulting sketch, which shows Harpo sporting an apple and one of Dali's favorite crustaceans--a lobster--on his head, and a tongue hanging over the top of the harp.


Harpo noted in the caption that the sketch was a prize of his art collection, but makes no mention of Dali in the text of his book.

Dali had given Harpo, possibly for Christmas 1936, a harp with barbed-wire strings and festooned with spoons--perhaps a reference to Harpo's schtick where stolen silverware, and finally a coffee pot, fall from the sleeve of his coat as a policeman shakes his hand. The silverware which fell from Harpo's sleeve in Animal Crackers comprised some 400 knives and no spoons or forks, but maybe Dali missed that detail, or maybe the spoons had nothing to do with the scene in the movie.


Harpo responded by sending Dali a photo of himself with bandaged fingers. In 1937, Dali wrote a surreal screenplay, Giraffes on Horseback Salads, for the Marx Brothers. The film was never produced. The script included a 60-foot long bed, dwarves, a drowned ox, bicyclists balancing stones on their heads, burning giraffes, Chico wearing a diving suit while playing the piano, and so forth.

In the book Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and Sometimes Zeppo, Joe Adamson states that Harpo "got a big kick out of Dali" and "struck up a lasting friendship that lasted until Dali went home." Of a potential collaboration between Dali and Harpo, Groucho said, "It would have been a great combination. Dali didn't speak much English and neither did Harpo." Groucho also pointed out in his book The Groucho Phile that Dali's script wouldn't play and neither would the harp with barbed-wire strings. And speaking of the barbed-wire harp, Adamson writes that "Harpo and his wife...were so pleased that they stuck it in a remote corner of the house and finally threw it away."

Here are a few drawings which Dali did in connection with his script.

Dinner in the Desert Lighted by Giraffes on Fire

Groucho as Shiva of the Business World

Surrealist Gondola Above Burning Bicycles

In this, the movie's finale, note Chico at the piano in a diving suit, bicyclists balancing stones on their heads, and Harpo playing the harp.

In the unlikely event that the reader wants to learn more about Dali's script, thought to be lost until a copy was discovered among the artist's papers in the 1990s, here's a link to a synopsis published in Harper's in 1996.

Marxism

Karl Groucho Marx

Photo manipulation by Roberto Rizzato, 2008. Used under Creative Commons license. See the original at Flickr.com

Ah, those glorious days of McCarthyism! In its pursuit of citizens with ties, however tenuous, to the Communist Party, the FBI was hot on the trail of desperados like convicted criminal Julius H. Marx, AKA Graucho Marx. Yes, the comedian was "indicted and convicted" of copyright violation in 1937, according to the report, and yes, the brilliant agent filing the report in 1953 consistently misspelled the name one of the most famous entertainers in the world as "Graucho."

You can read a ten-page excerpt from
Groucho's FBI file at The Smoking Gun.