As Long As They're Laughing: Groucho Marx and You Bet Your Life

Preface

On the eighth day, God laughed.

Groucho Marx

Groucho Marx had reached a point of crisis when I met him in 1947. After 40 years in show business, having conquered Vaudeville, Broad-way and motion pictures, he found his career at a standstill. He reacted with a series of bold moves that some show business experts thought were foolhardy. He gave notice to Harpo and Chico that he would make no more movies with them, thereby closing the door on the antic world of the Marx Brothers. With that, he deliberately abandoned his unique and long famous theatrical and movie characters, variously named Dr. Hackenbush, Captain Geoffrey T. Spaulding, Rufus T. Firefly, etc., and embraced a new character with a new image to begin a fresh career in an unfamiliar medium.

The unlikely vehicle he chose was a radio quiz show, You Bet Your Life. In it he appeared, not in any version of Dr. Hackenbush, not in his private persona of Julius Marx, but as a character combining something of both of them and using the name Groucho.

You Bet Your Life began as a radio program in 1947 on the young and struggling ABC network. In 1949, it was switched to CBS radio, immediately jumped into the ranks of the top 10 programs, and simultaneously received the Peabody award for outstanding achievement in radio. In 1950, the program moved to NBC to begin broadcasting on television while continuing as a simulcast on radio, and Groucho won the Emmy from the TV Academy for Outstanding TV Personality of 1950. Thereafter, You Bet Your Life was consistently among the first two or three programs in the national ratings, and was never out of the top 10. In 1955, almost half of the television sets in America were tuned to Groucho Marx and You Bet Your Life each week.

Five hundred and twenty-five programs were produced in 14 years for radio and television, in which Groucho encountered 2,500 contestants. The last original program was broadcast on television in June 1961, but You Bet Your Life did not die. For four years, there were reruns on NBC-TV. Then, 10 years later, the show was released to syndication and cable and was still being seen as late as 1992.

I was the director of You Bet Your Life for its entire run, from its beginning on radio in 1947, through the transition to television, to the close in 1961. John Guedel was the creator and producer of the program, Bernie Smith the head writer. Under Guedel’s supervision, Smith and I divided the production responsibilities. Bernie, with a staff of five or six, selected the contestants, prepared the script, and brought the show to the studio. I took it from there, staged the performance, and supervised the editing for broadcast. I did not direct Groucho in any traditional sense. No time limit was placed on the performance of the show. Rather than impose restraints on Groucho, we allowed the performance to run as long as seemed productive. Usually, we filmed about an hour for each half-hour broadcast. It was then my job to edit that 60 minutes, selecting the best material for a 30-minute program.

You Bet Your Life was unique in two respects. Its comedy was based not on actors performing sketch material, but on the personalities and experiences of real people, drawing on their normal lives and occupations. The program’s distinction and quality, however, resulted primarily from its giving Groucho Marx an opportunity to exercise his unique skills without the restraints that broadcasting at that time otherwise imposed. Groucho’s principal resource was his talent as an improviser of verbal comedy. You Bet Your Life was specifically designed to allow him free rein to follow his comic muse, or demon, wherever it led him.

As one of the incidental rewards of working on the show, I had the privilege of participating in a 14-year seminar on comedy with a grand master of the art. Bernie Smith and I had weekly sessions with Groucho as he reviewed the original script, re-wording, approving, rejecting and creating. During the performance, I stood alongside him, just off-camera, as he used the prepared material, re-working it to suit the unpredictable responses of the contestants, adding his own on-the-spot thoughts, inventions and improvisations. He never had to stop and consider whether a remark was beyond the pale of the censorship standards of the time, in bad taste, or just what we called a dirty joke. I did that for him later as his surrogate at the editing stage, exercising the judgment on whether a joke was funny or offensive or worth fighting for with the censor.

In preparing this chronicle, I have been able to draw on some resources not available to anyone else. Through the generosity of John Guedel, I have 20 volumes of the original scripts. As a complement, I have a collection of acetate recordings of the unedited performances and tapes of the edited broadcasts.

A third precious resource is a collection which I inherited from our film editor, Norman Colbert. He bequeathed to me four reels of 16mm film which he had assembled during the 11 years he was the film editor on the program. They consist of the funniest and most audacious of the sequences which we were required to delete from the broadcasts as being unsuitable for viewing in the 1950s. Most of the passages could be broadcast today, and the only eyebrows raised would be Groucho’s. But they furnish documentation of the way standards have changed, not only in American humor, but in other social practices.

Finally, I have drawn on my recollection of our private conversations over a period of almost 20 years. Many of the Groucho remarks that I have reported here have never appeared anywhere else because no one else was present when he said them.

This memoir does not pretend to present an unbiased portrait of Groucho Marx. Obviously, I was an affectionate admirer and devoted disciple. In turn, he respected my position and trusted my judgment. I treasure the remark he made to me, more than once:

I have nothing but confidence in you. And very little of that.

Quintessential Groucho. Perfect construction, perfect timing, an apparently gratuitous compliment, and an immediate retreat from sentimentality. But he meant it, both parts. The confidence, I believe, was real, but so was the implied warning that I’d better deserve it.

In writing this recollection, I have tried to honor Groucho’s trust. I have reported what he said to me, what I heard him say to others, what I saw him do.

He did not reveal intimate personal details to me, and I do not pretend to know them. This is an account of a professional relationship through which I propose to give some insight into how Groucho Marx created comedy, and how, for a brief time in his long career, we were able to help him do it.

This photo was taken in 1948 after a radio show. I think the man on the right was somebody important, at least he could make Groucho smile. Courtesy Paul Wesolowski

Groucho, Zeppo, Chico, Harpo and their father, Sam Frenchie Marx c. 1932 Courtesy Paul Wesolowski

Chapter 1: The Roaches of Nacogdoches

Groucho Marx had been preparing for You Bet Your Life all his life, on stage and off. The technique that he perfected during 40 years of constant experimentation involved working within a formal structure — a Vaudeville sketch, a musical comedy script, a motion picture screenplay — and, in performance, creating new material, embellishing, expanding, making changes, substitutions, often improving or at least giving new life to the original material. He had profound respect for the written word, but his basic instinct was to improve any sample of it that fell under his control. He finally became a grand master of the craft of improvisation, a virtuoso practitioner of the art of thinking on his feet.

It began very early, this practice of ad-libbing around a core structure. It started in the early Vaudeville act and reached full flower in the 1920s in the Broadway musicals. Finally, in You Bet Your Life a vehicle was created especially for Groucho, giving him a scripted structure as a base, with supporting characters as foils, but with complete freedom to ad lib and improvise without restriction.

In the beginning, the Marx Brothers were a musical act, The Three Nightingales, a vocal trio with Groucho, Gummo, and a girl. Harpo joined, the girl was replaced by a boy who sang bass, and they were The Four Nightingales. Inevitably, they tried some comedy. Groucho described one of the early efforts in his book, Groucho And Me:

I got a blonde wig. It was an old one my mother had discarded. With this, plus a market basket with some fake frankfurters hanging over the side, I pretended I was a German comedian…The plot consisted of me as a butcher boy delivering wieners, asking Harpo and Gummo (who were dressed as yachtsmen) how to get to Mrs. Schmidt’s house. While Gummo pointed me in one direction, Harpo stole the wieners…This brief, homemade dialogue gave the audience a chance to forget the fact that we had just sung. [1]

In 1907, when they were playing Coney Island, a critic from Variety, the holy writ of show business, caught the act, praised the music, but panned the comedy. Minnie Marx, redoubtable mother-manager, forbade any further fooling around between numbers. Comedy was out. You couldn’t argue with Variety. Or with Minnie.

They were still a musical act two years later as they embarked on a long series of one-night stands on the small-time Vaudeville circuits of the deep South. They were now billed as The Marx Brothers and Company, Harpo, age 20, Groucho, 18, Gummo, 16, and the Company, a friend Groucho’s age. (Chico, then 21, was temporarily working as a song-plugger, and Zeppo, age 7, was still at home.) They sang their way through Louisiana and into east Texas. In Nacogdoches, Texas, they were appearing in a vacant storefront that qualified as a theater because it had a makeshift platform and some benches. As the boys were singing to a listless audience, a commotion was heard through the front door. In the street outside, a crowd was trying to capture a runaway mule. The entire audience trouped out of the theater to join the chase. The brothers were furious. When the customers returned, the boys let them know how they felt with some pointed remarks about the town and its inhabitants.

Nacogdoches is full of roaches! Groucho remembered that line 50 years later.

The audience was caught off guard. There was an ominous silence. Then somebody laughed, and Groucho tried again. There was laughter and applause and a yell for more. The suddenly appreciated performers obliged, threw in a few more songs, and made their exit to the sound of cheers.

In the next town there was no obliging mule, but the troupe looked for chances for comedy in whatever was at hand, before, during and after the songs. It worked. Word spread among the theater managers to watch for a bunch of fresh kids with a funny musical act. A few towns down the road, a manager was waiting. He offered them an extra booking if they would do something special for an audience of teachers in town for a convention. Groucho, recalling a familiar Vaudeville format, put together a school act, Fun in Hi Skule. Groucho cast himself as Herr Professor, dressed in a frock coat and speaking with a comic German accent. Harpo played Patsy Brannigan, the traditional stupid boy.

PROFESSOR: Vot is the shape of the world?

PATSY: I don’t know.

PROFESSOR: Vell, vot shape are my cuff links?

PATSY: Square.

PROFESSOR: Not my veekday cuff links! The vuns I vear on Sundays.

PATSY: Oh, round.

PROFESSOR: All right, vot is the shape of the world

PATSY: Square on weekdays, round on Sunday!

The teachers of east Texas were delighted, and the Marx Brothers had a new act. Not long after, Chico gave up song plugging and joined his brothers on the road as the irrepressible Italian kid.

The school act was one of the basic Vaudeville formulas. Variety counted 62 Kid Acts on the Vaudeville circuits as late as 1913. The roots of the form reach deep, even to the classic tradition of the 16th and 17th century Italian comedy troupes, the commedia dell’arte, although Groucho would scoff at such pretension. The essential elements of the ancient form were there, however: stock characters, a basic situation or plot and, especially, the freedom to improvise and extemporize within the structure. The Marx Brothers’ school act established the basic nature of Groucho’s often imitated but essentially inimitable character for the rest of his career. There is a trace of that eccentric authority figure, Herr Professor, in all of his later manifestations, in Professor Quincy Adams Wagstaff, President of Huxley College in Horse Feathers; in Rufus T. Firefly, President of the State of Freedonia in Duck Soup; in Otis B. Driftwood, the phony impresario in A Night at the Opera; and all the others, including even the quizmaster at his lectern in You Bet Your Life.

The school act was the beginning of Groucho’s career as an improviser. He continued his relentless pursuit of perfection, in the wording of a line, in the timing of a joke, in the definition of his character, as long as he faced an audience.

He describes the process in Groucho And Me:

…in the old days of Vaudeville…the comedian would steal a few jokes from other acts and find a few in the newspapers and comic magazines…If the comic was inventive, he would gradually discard the stolen jokes and the ones that died and try out some of his own. In time, if he was any good, he would emerge from the routine character he started with and evolve into a distinct personality of his own. This has been my experience and also that of my brothers… [2]

The six years following Nacogdoches, from 1909 to 1915, were spent on the road, on Vaudeville circuits all over the country, traveling on trains, battling to improve bookings and billing, working stubbornly to perfect the act. They were hard times. Groucho told me about being stranded without railroad fare in hostile Southern towns and of walking with suitcase in hand to the next one-night stand.

I think I was in show business 10 years before I had a room with a bath, he said. And in a 1957 interview he said:

There was nothing romantic about it. It was satisfying, but not enormously so. A Vaudeville actor spent his time in bad hotels and waiting for trains. [3]

He often told me about the sign backstage which carried two admonitions:

Any act mentioning damn, hell, or God will be canceled without notice. Do not send your laundry out until we have seen your act.

By 1914, the family team was playing bigger towns, with bigger, better theaters. Minnie Marx’s brother, Al Shean, of the famous Vaudeville team, Gallagher and Shean, had written a new act for them. Home Again was developed from the original school act, incorporating the best of the new material they had developed on the road.

A major change in the Groucho role came on the evening of May 7, 1915, when the news reached a theater in Toronto that a German submarine had sunk the Lusitania. Herr Professor’s German dialect suddenly disappeared, and Groucho became The Teacher, retaining, however, the attitude of eccentric authority.

Now all the elements of the Marx Brothers’ act were in place. Harpo had his red wig, and had become a mime. Chico had developed his shoot-the-keys piano technique and his position as a kind of fulcrum, a foil and partner for both Groucho and Harpo. Uncle Al Shean, in writing Home Again, discovered early what every Marx Brothers’ writer found out later. In any dialogue involving Chico, the feed lines had to be just as funny as the responses. That stylistic trick was an essential ingredient in the Marx Brothers formula. The standard Vaudeville comedy team consisted of a straight man and a comic, with feed lines from the straight man, payoffs from the comic. With the Marx Brothers, the roles were not rigidly drawn or even clearly defined. When the going was good, every line got a laugh, Chico’s as well as Groucho’s. In addition, there were the laughs which sprang from what were not lines at all, but that magical extra ingredient, the pervasive counterpoint of Harpo’s pantomime. There were many sequences in which there was no pause between laughs. Theatergoers returned again and again to Marx Brothers shows for two reasons. First, …the audience was laughing so hard, I couldn’t hear the jokes. Second, no two performances were ever exactly alike.

Out of the constant experimentation, out of the ad libbing and fooling around, the flouting of convention and outrageous behavior on and offstage, an identity emerged. In spite of the eccentricity, the act achieved a remarkable level of comic consistency. Groucho said it concisely: We learned how to get laughs. Finally, eight years after their apprenticeship had started in Coney Island, six years after the epiphany in Nacogdoches, they made it to the top. In 1915, they played the Palace in New York for the first time, and then played it again and again as late as 1930. They were, beyond a doubt, in the big time.

Nevertheless, the next step took eight more years on the road. In 1924, Chico finally found a producer to take them to Broadway. The vehicle was a converted Vaudeville revue called, for no reason, I’ll Say She Is. The show was greeted with surprised delight by the New York critics and with enthusiastic joy by Broadway audiences. Now, as the quadruple toast of the town, the Marx Brothers were playing in a different league. No need now to ferret out a sugar-daddy producer with an ambitious girlfriend. For their next Broadway show, The Cocoanuts, the producer would be Sam Harris, ex-partner of George M. Cohan. No more secondhand music. This time, it was music by Irving Berlin. And, for this show, there would be no more cobbling together of old Vaudeville routines. The Cocoanuts would have an actual book, a real plot, and a definable target for its comedy. It would be written by George S. Kaufman, and it would be a satire on the great Florida real estate boom of the 1920s.

Groucho, especially, was delighted. He had the greatest respect for Kaufman as a writer, and the two