IT WAS ONLY AFTER I watched some Marx Brothers imitators at work that I realized there was a quality about the original quartet that’s impossible to reproduce: the sense of family that the brothers shared. They’re in character – they were always in character when in the public eye – they’re in situations that place them at odds with one another, yet you sense a special attachment, an easy familiarity. A bond that was set in place as their ambitious mother sent them, five brothers in various combinations, through the rough-and-tumble world of vaudeville, which would culminate in Broadway and Hollywood. Which makes the Zeppo paradox all the more poignant.
The original foursome acquired their nicknames in 1914 thanks to a fellow-vaudevillian named Art Fisher, who came up with the monikers during a poker game. When queried about their switch to these names, Groucho responded, “We want to be different and attract unusual attention.” Herbert acquired his nickname three years later, and the most plausible story behind it was his resemblance to a sideshow performer known as Zip the Pinhead, Zip, in Herbert’s case, soon morphing into Zeppo. He gave other origin stories through the years, suggesting that he wanted to dissociate himself from the freak-show aspect, yet he (along with all his brothers) never stopped using the memorable name.
In 1918, Gummo joined the army. With the threat of the draft hovering over all of the boys, it seems as if Minnie chose him as the sacrificial lamb. Whatever the case, Gummo was happy to go because he was especially happy to leave the act. He didn’t enjoy it. Zeppo, happily employed in an auto-repair shop, was pressed into being the substitute. The timing was propitious. So immediate was the need that Minnie persuaded to Zeppo to catch a train right away to join his brothers, causing Zeppo to cancel a date he had for that evening. A double date, in fact, alongside his thuggish buddy Louis Bass. He told several contrasting versions of the story over the years, the most colorful in a 1978 BBC interview:
The story of Zeppo essentially begins when he joins his brothers on the road, settling into an onstage identity as the juvenile, the straight man, which hardly described him in his offstage life. And this is the divergence celebrated in Robert S. Bader’s new biography Zeppo, the first book to celebrate, as Bader’s subtitle puts it, “the reluctant Marx Brother.”
Minnie’s wishes evidently were impossible to refuse, so Zeppo settled into life as the fourth wheel in the sketches that made up their vaudeville routines. Life on the road at least gave him access to one-night girlfriends, and he also indulged a passion for gambling. Unlike the compulsive Chico, who continually was scraping together funds to pay off gambling debts, Zeppo gambled to win, which he usually did.
When he worked with his three brothers, they divided the net but paid Zeppo a salary not at all commensurate with their own earnings. He apparently never saw fit to complain, yet Bader speculates that this is what set him on a lifelong pursuit of wealth that would enable him to prove his true worth. And this he did, through a succession of professions, until he could relax in the Palm Springs house he designed, surrounded by costly trappings and a current wife.
Although he never seemed to relax for very long. As Bader described in an earlier book, Four of the Three Musketeers: The Marx Brothers on Stage, the brothers had a punishing vaudeville schedule that included incessant touring, continual development of material, and any number of amorous liaisons. It must have been a bonding experience like no other, but even as they moved into Broadway success with “I’ll Say She Is” in 1924, Zeppo was entertaining the idea of leaving the act. He might have been persuaded to stay because he had more to do in this show than in previous outings, yet his contributions waned as they moved from that show to “The Cocoanuts” the following year, and “Animal Crackers” in 1928.
The last two shows became their first two movies, filming in Paramount’s Astoria studios during the day as they performed on Broadway at night. The films got better and better as technology improved and the Marxes sought scripts from writers like George S. Kaufman and S.J. Perelman. But after “Duck Soup” in 1933, the fifth of the Paramount movies, Zeppo escaped from the act.
He went into theatrical management, joining a firm that had Frank Orsatti as a partner, a man with reported mob ties and a strong loyalty to Louis B. Mayer, himself the studio equivalent of a mob figure. Zeppo seemed to thrive among such people, although he didn’t get along with Pat DiCicco, another mob-figure-turned-agent who worked in the same office, taking the opportunity while attending a prizefight in 1934 to brawl with DiCicco outside the ring. Bader quotes Bill Marx, Harpo’s son, writing in Son of Harpo Speaks!:
[Zeppo] was easily the most aggressive personality of the brothers. He had a very short fuse, and because of it, would often wind up duking it out with someone twice his size, and still make the fight quite interesting.
Soon after, Zeppo left the agency to start one of his own. It thrived, doing enough business that he was soon able to set up Gummo in a New York City branch. Zeppo’s agency fortunes peaked when he acquired Barbara Stanwyck as a client (and friend), but he had a restlessness that tugged him in other directions.
He loved to tinker and repair, especially mechanical engines and the like, and he always had some manner of machine shop alongside his house. He soon parlayed this into a full-fledged business when he co-founded Marman Products Co. in 1941. Soon he was contracting out to build warplane parts for Douglas Aircraft, and when the U.S. entered the war, his business boomed.
He took up production of what came to be known as the Marman Clamp, which revolutionized the joining of pipes under pressure. It increased his fortune, but hardly dimmed his restlessness. Inspired by Harpo’s success, with wife Susan, as a happy father of adoptees, Zeppo and first wife Marion adopted two boys. In contrast to his brother, Zeppo was a tyrant. He was successful at engineering inanimate things, but when emotions were involved, he lacked empathy. His second marriage, to the former Barbara Blakeley, seemed more successful at first, but ended with a public scandal when she decided to leave Zeppo to marry his friend and neighbor Frank Sinatra.
Bader’s book doesn’t stint on detail, sourced from a staggering number of memoirs, not all of them published, and contemporaneous newspaper and magazine accounts. I suspect he’d lined a lot of that up when working on Four of the Three Musketeers, and he more recently edited and completed Susan Marx’s memoir, Speaking of Harpo. This one is definitely a book for Marx Brothers completists, among whom I count myself, and the question always comes up, in conversation or just in my own busy mind: Why did Zeppo leave the act? Why wasn’t he given more challenging roles? Zeppo answers those questions, and then some.
Zeppo: The Reluctant Marx Brother
by Robert S. Bader
Applause Theatre & Cinema Books
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