Tag: Chico Marx

Celebrating the silent Marx

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One of the first places we went upon receiving our driver’s license (and the mobility that came with it) some—gulp!—36 years ago was the miniscule (and long since defunct) Mini-Mall Theatre in north Oklahoma City. They featured old movies there, mostly comedies, and we wanted to see a Marx Brothers movie. We had become intrigued somehow with the Marxes—Groucho, especially—but had never seen one of their pictures.

The bill that evening was Horse Feathers (1932), followed by Duck Soup (1933). As Horse Feathers opens, Groucho is being inducted as President of Huxley College. Following his introduction by the outgoing president, Groucho begins his speech this way:

“Members of the faculty and faculty members, students of Huxley and Huxley students—I guess that covers everyone. I thought my razor was dull until I heard his speech, and that reminds me of a story that’s so dirty I’m ashamed to think of it myself. I came to this college for one reason: to get my son out of it. I remember the day he left for school, a mere boy and a beardless youth. I kissed them both goodbye.”

Groucho was off and running, and so were we. From that night on, we couldn’t get enough of Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and sometimes Zeppo. The Marxes quickly became our avocation, and an avid one at that. We were initially drawn most strongly to Groucho, who was cracking the jokes we would had made if we were clever enough.

But we also loved Chico’s puns and crazy piano stylings and, even more, Harpo’s innocently mischievous ways. Over the years, our affection for Groucho has not faded, but we’ve grown ever fonder of Harpo. Our appreciation for the second eldest Marx may have been fueled by our increasing knowledge of—and appreciation for—the great silent comics such as Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, and Charlie Chaplin. We’re convinced that, had Harpo not been part of a family act that very much relied on dialogue and wordplay, he could have been right up there with those comic greats in the silent era.

By all reports, it wasn’t hard to love Harpo. Everything we’ve read (and we’ve read just about everything there is to read on the Marxes) suggests that he was as lovely a fellow as you’d ever want to meet, kind and gentle and fun-loving (the term that so often gets used to describe him is “childlike”).

Harpo’s autobiography, Harpo Speaks!, is still (or, perhaps, again) in print, and we highly recommend it to you. We have enjoyed it more every time we’ve read it, and Ms. Cladrite, who has to date viewed only a couple of Marx Brothers movies, found it an engaging and charming read.

But we also want to recommend a delightful web site of which a pal made us aware recently. It’s called Harpo’s Place, and is described on the home page as The Official Arthur Harpo Marx Family Online Collection. It’s a lovingly crafted tribute to Harpo—the man, the actor, and the father—and it has no other agenda than to celebrate and commemmorate his life and career. There’s nothing for sale on the site (heck, we almost wish there were), and it’s loaded with material even the most devoted Marxist might never have seen before. Harpo’s Place is clearly a labor of love, and that labor has paid off in a delightful site that we heartily recommend to you.

Check it out, and tell ’em Cladrite Radio sent you.

In Your Hat, pt. 11

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In Chapter 11 of In Your Hat, the 1933 tell-all memoir by Hat Check Girl to the Stars Renee Carroll, she shares tales of various characters she knew, including Jack Oakie, The Four Marx Brothers, Wilson Mizner, George Jessel, Harry Richman, Clara Bow, and Lilyan Tashman.

SARDI’S may be the place where the celebrities gather, but I get more slugs and buttons in my tip box than I can use in a year’s mending. Figure it out for yourself—the most highly paid performers and theatrical executives slip me slugs I wouldn’t even try on my molars to find out if they’re real or not.
And speaking of tipping and the things I find in my box at the end of the day, one of the most common phenomena are the little slips of paper upon which telephone numbers have been scribbled. I’ve got, or rather, I could have collected a private phone list than the Manhattan police department, not to mention the Broolynites and Bronxites who have been date-hungry.
Maybe I’m wrong, and that’s only one way of kidding me. Another way is the method Jack Oakie used, to make me feel like the butt of a bad joke.
Jack came into the restaurant one day and asked me in his really-not-obnoxious breezy manner how things were going. Just for the fun of it, I told him that I was going to get married the next day. I had no more idea of getting married, then, than the girl in the swing on the big Pepsodent sign. As some wit once said, marriage is an institution, and hwo wants to live in an institution?

But that clown of clowns, that zanie Oakie, set to work and circulated among Sardi’s guests, telling all his friends that I was an expectant mother. When people started to leave the place, I noticed that no one was looking me directly in the eyes, but instead were looking down at me and at the same time talking in a sort of reverentially hushed tone—the kind I gather that people assume when they accost young mothers-to-be.
I didn’t suspect then what was happening, but the next morning when packages began to arrive by every means of transportation except the pony express, I began to smell a good-sized rodent in Mr. Oakie’s direction. For people were sending me baby clothes—dresses, bibs, caps, towels, and all the other accessories necessary to have babies. The pay-off came when Oakie’s package arrived. It contained a dozen towels, stolen from a Pullman, three napkins from three different hotels and a couple of table cloths from a club. All of the Oakie presents were cut into reminiscent triangular shapes—with the names of the places from which they were filched neatly embroidered in the corner of each pseudo-diaper.
But the height of pure nuttiness was achieved by the Four Marx Brothers when they were making Animal Crackers and The Cocoanuts at the Astoria studio for Paramount.

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Una Merkel slept here

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It’s not hard, if you’re enough of a movie buff to want to get a peek at some stars’ homes when you’re sojourning in Southern California, to track down former addresses of some of the best-remembered names from the Golden Age of Hollywood. When we last traveled to Los Angeles, over Thanksgiving in 2006, we were, with some simple Googling, able to quickly track down a dozen or more former addresses for Judy Garland, Ms. Cladrite’s favorite.

But what if you aren’t satisfied with driving by the homes in which Bogie and Bacall, Jimmy Stewart, and Bette Davis resided? What if you’re more interested in viewing the former residences of the likes of Ted Healy, Una Merkel, or Gummo Marx—not Groucho, Chico, Harpo, or Zeppo, but Gummo Marx?

Then you need only dial up The Movieland Directory, a very impressive online resource, indeed.

The Movieland Directory is downright hard to stump, and don’t think we didn’t try. It gave us addresses for Ned Sparks, for Jack Pickford (Mary’s prodigal brother, don’t you know), for Zasu Pitts, for Billy Gilbert—it even had addresses for El Brendel, for Pete’s sake.

The site also does reverse look-ups. You can enter an address, and if someone related to the movie industry ever lived there, there’s a pretty good chance they’ll turn up.

For instance, our friend Pat used to live on Alta Vista Boulevard, between Sunset and Fountain Avenues. By looking up her block (we’ve forgotten her exact address), we learned that Billy Wayne, who appeared in more than 250 pictures between 1931 and 1958 (but apparently starred in none of them—he’s listed as “uncredited” at IMDB.com in the overwhelming majority of them), used to live just a few doors south of Pat. That’s not terribly exciting, perhaps, but what if it had been Joan Crawford or Buster Keaton or Raymond Chandler? (Considering how often the peripatetic Chandler moved, it well could have been.)

John Ince, brother to motion picture pioneer Thomas Ince and a silent-movie actor and director in his own right, who would became a full-time character actor with the advent of talkies, also lived on what would later be Pat’s block.

And Peter Ostberg, a cabinet maker who was a Universal Studios employee in 1917 (and perhaps before and after that year, who knows?), lived right next to where Pat would live, though his residence has since been replaced by a contemporary apartment building that sits beside the similar one in which Pat resided.

Now, we don’t know Peter Ostberg from Adam, but it’s intriguing to have his name and these tidbits of info turn up in a search like this. (It is to us, anyway—perhaps we’re too easily fascinated.)

You’ll find former addresses of contemporary stars listed in the database, too, and it’s fun to see what those stars have in common with the stars of years gone by.

For instance, in the 1990s, Julia Roberts lived in the Colonial House Apartments at 1416 Havenhurst Drive. And so, at some point in their lives, did Fred Allen, Joan Blondell, Eddie Cantor, Marion Davies, Bette Davis, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Clark Gable, Myrna Loy, William Powell, and Norma Talmadge, not to mention a slew of more contemporary stars.

We managed to stump the Movieland Directory database only twice. It returned no addresses when we submitted the name of author Ursula Parrott, a once bestselling author of scandalous fiction that might be considered an arguably more sensational precursor to today’s chick lit—but then, though many of her novels were made into movies, we’re not sure Parrott ever resided in L.A., which would take the site off the hook. And the Movieland Directory has no info on Ed Wood, Jr., everyone’s favorite famously inept movie director, which came as something of a surprise to us.

But that’s nitpicking. Give the site a try, and you’ll no doubt find 95% or more of the names you’re looking for. And you might learn just a little bit of Hollywood history