If you want to write the funniest book of the year you produce a biography of the Marx Brothers beginning each chapter with a quote from Groucho or Chico and punctuating the text with lengthy extracts from their stage and movie routines. Despite Simon Louvish's claim that 'reading a script of a Marx Brothers show is like making love through an industrial-strength condom' (an example of his wine-bar vulgarity at its worst), their act leaps off the page to delight us in a way that the most sensitive descriptions of Chaplin or Keaton fail to do.
Louvish's book is a detailed, carefully researched account of a journey taken by the sons of the German-Jewish immigrant tailor Sam 'Frenchie' Marx and his ambitious wife, Minnie, that has three stages - a long apprenticeship, a period on the high plateau, and a painful dispersal. The story begins with the birth of Leo (Chico), Arthur (Harpo) and Julius (Groucho) in the late 1880s, to be followed by Milton (Gummo) and, in 1901, (Herbert) Zeppo.
For all their colourful claims, Louvish demonstrates that they were never ghetto poor. Also that showbiz was in the family, most especially in the shape of a maternal uncle, vaudevillian Al Shean of Gallagher and Shean fame. The lads were cherished (an older brother had died at the age of six months) and their stage-struck mother pushed them in the direction their talents demanded, becoming their first manager. Only Gummo, who had a stammer, resisted. After joining one of the family's acts as 'the world's slowest whirlwind dancer' he took advantage of the First World War to join the army. He became a dressmaker, then a talent agent, representing some of Hollywood's leading names and gaining a reputation for honest dealing.
From their teens the brothers travelled the vaudeville circuit, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Toronto to the Rio Grande, singing, dancing, performing sketches, first severally, then together as the Four Nightingales and the Six Mascots, polishing the act and perfecting their timing.
Gradually they took on a complementary identity as they developed their stage personae - the silent puckish Harpo with his angelic harp; the woman-chasing Chico playing havoc with the language and the piano; Groucho the loping shyster with the wisecracks and twitching eyebrows; Zeppo the straight man. Only once, in 1915, did all five brothers appear together, but so distinctive were their characters that on an occasion when Groucho was ill Zeppo put on the greasepaint moustache and filled in for him.
Legend has it that the quartet received their nicknames during a backstage poker game in 1914 from a monologist called Al Fisher. But it wasn't until their greatest admirer, the theatre critic Alexander Woolcott, greeted them by these names after the triumphant Broadway opening of their first full-length show I'll Say She Is in 1923, that they adopted them officially.
The Marxes got out of vaudeville as it was going into decline, but brought its rambunctious ethnic fun, irreverence and ruthlessness to Broadway. In this they were assisted by other ex-vaudevillians, among them W.C. Fields, who back in 1915 had pretended to be ill and thrown in the towel in Columbus, Ohio because the Brothers, performing lower down the bill, were stealing his thunder.
After three successful New York shows that made them celebrities, they got off the stage and into the movies just as the Depression was beginning to dim the lights along Broadway. Their first two films, made in New York, were versions of their stage shows and rather stiff. The next three - Monkey Business, Horse Feathers and Duck Soup (the first two co-scripted by S.J. Perelman) - were produced at Paramount's Hollywood studio, and are among the most anarchic, inventive and funniest ever made.
Duck Soup was the peak, and after it Zeppo dropped out, inspiring Groucho's quip that 'the Marx Brothers without Zeppo are worth twice as much'. The move to make more polished, expensive pictures at MGM made them rich but tamed them, turning them into endearing zanies. Only the first MGM comedy, A Night at the Opera, is a masterpiece, and Louvish is fascinating on the 20-odd major re-writes the script went through. He is also judicious and honest in his appraisal of the individual films and the general decline in their work from the late Thirties on. Nevertheless, to have remained together for well over 30 years is an extraordinary achievement.
Like Chaplin, the Brothers were taken up by the intellectual world. Harpo was idolised by the Algonquin gang and Bernard Shaw, and entertained in the USSR by the Litvinovs; Groucho corresponded with T.S. Eliot; Dali wrote a screenplay for them. Churchill took his mind off the May Blitz of 1941 by watching Monkey Business. But unlike Chaplin, celebrity didn't affect their work or their behaviour. Groucho kept his politics to his letters. Harpo, who left his harp to an Israeli musical academy, assisted Zionist activists only by stealth through his friend Ben Hecht.
After the Second World War the semi-retired Harpo and Chico made occasional guest appearances on TV, the former living a quiet family life with his adopted children, the latter living a fast life and losing his fortune gambling. Zeppo was continually in trouble with bad debts, a tax scam that nearly put him in jail, brawls, and a conviction for beating a woman.
Groucho, however, through his weekly programme You Bet Your Life, became a TV star and one of the great wits of his age, the Oscar Wilde of the wisecrack. Yet at the end he was the saddest of all. He had spent a lifetime on and off stage humiliating women - Margaret Dumont, two wives driven to drink, a daughter whose brief marriage was greeted by the quip that 'the bride was given custody of the wedding cake'. But his last four years of dotage and anecdotage were made a living hell by a mentally disturbed actress 50 years his junior who took over his life. His last words, like Stan Laurel's, were a joke to a nurse, but the sharpest line of his final days was a birthday greeting to a friend: 'If you keep having birthdays you'll eventually die. Love Groucho.'
