Groucho Marx

When producer John Guedel submitted a new concept for a radio quiz show to Julius Henry Marx (popularly known by his nickname "Groucho") in 1947, the comedian's reaction was immediate: He wasn't that desperate yet. But Groucho's second wife Kay thought he should do it, and Groucho soon found himself host of one of the most popular shows, not only on radio, but then on the infant medium of television.

"As a lad," Groucho once wrote, "I don't remember knocking anyone over with my wit." Born on October 2, 1890, in New York City, the third oldest of an unruly gang of boys, Julius was a serious, basically unhappy child, but a good student who harbored childhood aspirations to the medical profession. But the Marxes had no way to finance an extended education; both parents were German immigrants, and the boys' mother, Minnie Schönberg Marx, came from a show business family, so she naturally steered her offspring toward the stage.

This steering started with Julius, who had gotten far enough in his schooling to become a voracious reader for life, but was jockeyed out of school at age 12 and into solo gigs as a boy singer and actor in various acts and ensembles outside the family. By 1907, Minnie had teamed Julius and his younger brother Milton (aka "Gummo") with performers from outside the family to form a singing act for vaudeville. The act eventually grew to encompass more brothers and outside performers, until the Marx boys' predilection for joking onstage led to the creation of a comedy act that included music. "Fun in Hi Skule" was a comedy school act, and Julius was a natural for the required role of the teacher.

In 1914, a fellow vaudevillian gave the brothers the nicknames by which they would become famous; Julius would henceforth be called "Groucho," either because of his grouchy disposition or because he kept the team's money in what was called a grouch bag, but probably because the combination made the name inevitable.

The character finally known as "Groucho" came about through an evolution similar to the one the brothers' act went through: Late for one performance, Groucho didn't bother to apply his usual glued-on moustache and quickly slapped greasepaint on his upper lip and eyebrows. He also developed an exaggerated walk, in a parody of an obsolete fad. His love of reading, combined with a restless search for more and better material, enabled him to hone his skills as a wordsmith and punster, until his ability to improvise wisecracks on stage to match the horseplay of his brothers became a major feature of the act. "I have a hair-trigger mind," he later commented, "it works kind of semi-automatically," so that a rapid-fire timing was developed along with a ready spontaneity. If a horn-honking Adolph (who changed his name first to Arthur, then to Harpo) chased a girl across the stage without warning, Groucho might instantly pipe up, "First time I ever saw a taxi hail a passenger."

As one of the Marx Brothers, Groucho rose to big-time vaudeville, Broadway stardom, and then Hollywood movies—first at Paramount, then at MGM. Groucho's impression was that he was the unofficial "leader of this group of gypsies" (his decision to make no more than one Marx Brothers film per year, for example, went unchallenged by the other brothers), yet the control he exerted was very loose, as generally the brothers governed themselves by consensus.
In the early 1940s, the aging comedians decided to go their separate ways, allowing Groucho full time to pursue the individual career he had already initiated by doing summer stock, writing his first book (with his friend Arthur Sheekman), writing the screenplay to The King and the Chorus Girl (with another friend, Norman Krasna) and performing on radio (often teamed with older brother Leonard, now commonly known as Chico).
His twenty-year marriage to Ruth Johnson came unglued at about the same time. Groucho's insistence on looking for comedy everywhere, and if he couldn't find a joke simply carping about everything, wore out friends and relationships with the opposite sex about as fast as he could make them, but at the same time his ability to elicit laughs from friends and family tended to obliterate the bad feeling he sometimes created. Visiting the New York stock exchange, he might spontaneously burst into song and bring all activity to a standstill, claiming that he lost thousands of dollars there in 1929 and they owed him. In a hotel room he might order ice and then complain if skates weren't delivered with it ("I always get skates over at the Plaza").

According to his friend Norman Krasna, "In private life, he was a very dour man, a very intellectual man, a very sedate man. The only thing is, when he decided not to be sedate, or dour, the extreme was enormous – the originality, the invention, the boldness! you didn't know when he was going to be the normal, sedate, dour Groucho, or when he'd become the Groucho Marx the world associates with that name."

As a performer and writer, Groucho and his irreverent barbs continued to flourish, in print, on radio, and in the movies, without—and occasionally with—the support of his brothers.

You Bet Your Life made a national phenomenon out of his everyday habit of chatting with strangers and bouncing jokes off them. The great success of You Bet Your Life made Groucho one of the country's most prominent comedians, just when pre-1948 major-studio feature films were released to television in the 1950s, reminding older viewers of, and alerting younger ones to, the uproarious comedy he was able to create as part of a great ensemble family act. As the strait-laced 1950s gave way to the revolutionary 1960s, Chico and Harpo died, and You Bet Your Life went off the air, making Groucho the key survivor of the performing Marx Brothers and the eye of a hurricane of idolatry from the populous Baby Boom Generation.

Groucho's final years were filled with honors and public appearances, one-man shows at Carnegie Hall and other venues, as well as scandal when he became involved with the evidently half-mad Erin Fleming. He continued making people laugh, and getting under their skin in other ways, until he died at age 86, making him the longest-lived, as well as the most celebrated, of the Marx Brothers.