Personality

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To some Americans, the name Marx summons up a bearded prophet of social doom, but to most it means a zany tumble of brothers. Groucho is the zaniest and most durable of the lot. In his long career as a comedian, he has met and mastered three mediums: movies, radio and now television.

Professionally, the other Marx Brothers haven't worn nearly so well. Harpo, once the rage of several continents, has just finished a series of television commercials for a milk company; Chico does his hoary piano routine and Eyetalian dialect around nightclubs; Gummo, who quit the act for good to become a World War I doughboy, is his brothers' agent Zeppo, now out of show business altogether, manufactures airplane parts.

The middle Marx brother in age, Groucho (whose real front names are Julius Henry), now 61, is at the height of his powers in both radio and television, with an annual income of $400,000 before taxes. Fairly dignified; bodies of medal pinners have voted him Best Comedian of the Year (1949), Outstanding Television Personality master, etc.

His quiz program (NBC, Wed. 9 p.m., 8 p.m.), You Bet Your Life, is now well into its fifth season. When one of the contestants, a pretty and shapely high-school math teacher, explained that geometry is -the study of lines, curves and surfaces, Groucho gave his celebrated leer and panted, "Kiss me, fool!" The audience reaction threatened to blow the back out of the broadcasting theater. Groucho's jokes sound far funnier than they read afterwards. But there are exceptions, such as the one when he asked a tree surgeon on his program, Tell me, Doctor, did you ever fall out of a patient?"

With Groucho, delivery is almost everything.; An old line of his, "The air is like wine tonight," used to make audiences choke with laughter a couple of decades ago. When he would simply say, "I think I'll go out and get a cold towel," then start for the wings with the queer, buzzardy shuffle he used for a walk, it would leave the audience strangling. Because nowadays he seldom moves from the high stool he sits on during broadcasts, the buzzardy shuffle is gone. But the rest of the delivery is still there, as good or better than ever: the perfectly timed twitch of the brows; the play of the luminous brown eyes--now rolling with naughty thoughts, now staring through the spectacles with only half-amused contempt; the acidulous, faint smile; the touch of fuming disgust in the voice ("That's as shifty an answer as I ever heard") ; above all, the effrontery.

UNSQUELCHABLE effrontery has always been Groucho's chief stock in trade. During his stage & screen career, he played a succession of brazen rascals: fraudulent attorney, flimflamming explorer, dissolute college president, amoral private eye, cozening operatic entrepreneur, horse doctor posing as a fashionable neurologist ("Either this man is dead or my watch has stopped"), bogus Emperor of France--using such aliases as J. Cheever Loophole, Captain Spaulding, Professor Wagstaff, Detective Sam Grunion, Otis. B. Driftwood, Wolf J. Flywheel and Napoleon. Whatever the alias or whatever the rascality, he was always the same rascal, the con man who made no bones about the disdain he felt for the suckers he was trimming.

A good deal of this disdainful effrontery Groucho employs in private life, at least in his casual dealings with his fellow men. At a function presided over by Governor Frank Merriam, one of the stuffiest governors the state of California was ever afflicted with, Groucho, summoned to the platform to be presented to His Excellency, dragged two friends up with him. "Governor," he said, in a voice for all to hear, "I want you to shake hands with a couple of degenerates."

There were countless times in his childhood, youth and early manhood when Groucho needed all the effrontery he could muster. Born in a tenement on Manhattan's upper East Side, he was the third son of an Alsatian immigrant tailor a attributes were loving kindness, great charm and a genius for failure. As a boy, Groucho loved reading and dreamed of being a doctor; but the family was always behind with the rent, and his mother, the celebrated Minnie, had him traveling with one of Gus Edwards' kid acts when he was four or five years away from long pants. Zeppo, the youngest, was the only Marx brother who ever reached high school.

THE BROTHERS' act finally attained vaudeville's Mecca, the Palace, but the way there for more than a dozen years was gritty and grisly. Billed variously as "The Four Night ingales" (" 'The Four Vultures' would have been more like it," Groucho says today), "The Six Musical Mascots" (when Minnie and Aunt Hannah joined the troupe), and "Fun in (a warmed-over kid act), they played whistle tank towns on the smallest-time circuits. They perform in sinkhole theaters and fetid saloons, dressed in alleys and rat-infested cellars, slugged it out with rustic hoodlums lying in wait for them at stage doors (Groucho carried a ck and brass knuckles), ate in coffee pots and greasy spoons, suffered baggage seizures by inexorable boardinghouse landladies, were fined incessantly by managers for and horseplay, and now & then literally walked the railroad ties.

Once when a harassed conductor informed Minnie that her half-fare "children" were smoking cigars, chasing girls and playing three-card stud in the coach ahead, she beamed at him and explained, "They grow so fast." After the Marx Brothers had gained fame &fortune from three musical comedies(I'll Say She Is, The Cocoanuts, and Animal Crackers), Groucho lost $240,000 in the crash of 1929. Anybody who could survive survive such a life would always have effrontery to burn.

Groucho's other superb professional asset is his lightning ability to ad-lib jokes. His mind is liks a panful of popcorn kernels with heat underneath: one ad lib panful bursts, and the air is filled with popcorn. You Bet Your Life, his current show, simultaneously tape-recorded for radio and filmed for television, is not exactly a simon-pure ad-lib performance. Contestants are chosen in advance, made to fill out questionnaires about themselves, and coached for an hour and a half before facing Groucho. But Groucho is still a better field shot than any other ad-libber, and shows it by shooting from the hip at these clay pigeons.

Married and divorced twice (two children by the first marriage, one by the second), he lives with a pair of servants in a 15-room Beverly Hills house. He does all the shopping. Afternoons, he works on the two dozen fruit trees that stand on his back lawn; he is a martyr to what Robert Benchley described as dendrophilism, which might be described as tree-tickling. Groucho takes excellent care of himself: he plays golf, never has more than two drinks at a party, and always leaves at midnight, even parties where he is the host. His only excess is cigars. One of his favorite occupations is sit ting for long hours in his den strumming Gilbert & Sullivan (at which he is an expert) on his guitar. He is also an expert on the novels of Henry James. Having had hardly any for mal education, Groucho, by dint of greedy reading, has made himself a well-read man. His friends are endlessly amazed at his mastery of the contents of magazines which they regard as highbrow (Atlantic, Harper's, Saturday Review of Literature, etc.).

THOSE WHO know Groucho best insist that beneath his brash exterior lies a shy, thoughtful and kindhearted man.

"The guy doesn't mean to be insulting," Songwriter Harry Ruby says. "It's an involuntary motion with him, like a compulsion neurosis." When Groucho won the Peabody Award for being Radio's Best Comedian of the Year, it turned out that he had never heard of the awards or of the late George Foster Peabody, in whose honor the award was named. "It's a good thing the guy died," Groucho ad-libbed: "otherwise we couldn't have won any prizes." From Bob Hope, Jack Benny, Fred Allen or Ed Wynn, such a crack might have seemed outrageous. From Groucho it was merely funny.

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