Breaking the Silence

TRY TO RECALL a dinner or other social event at which you felt entranced, uplifted. You either were falling in love or listening to a fascinating party guest, the kind who has captivating stories to tell and knows how to deliver a punch line.

Susan Fleming Marx was clearly that kind of party guest. She quit a mediocre but promising movie career to wed Harpo Marx, and they had one of those marriages that defies statistics (and the matrimonial track records of Harpo’s brothers).

“To my mother’s lasting mortification, I was born in Brooklyn, New York. That was not classy,” is how she begins her well-told tale. She was born in 1908. As a teenager, she enrolled in Ned Wayburn’s School of Dance where she and her new friend Paulette Goddard were the favorites. Both were tapped to be in the chorus of a Ziegfeld unit that opened in Florida in January 1926, and by June of hat year, she was in a Broadway edition of the revue titled “No Foolin’” (which ran in a theater just down the street from “The Cocoanuts,” starring the Marx Brothers).

Just as quickly, she entered the movies. “There had to be at least a half-dozen girls in that chorus with a burning ambition to act. I was not one of them.” Nevertheless, she was selected by Adolph Menjou to star with him in his movie “The Ace of Cads.” “I’ve since learned that (it) is now a lot film. Well, thank heaven for small miracles! I’d shudder to think of anyone actually seeing me in this thing.”

In all, she would appear in three Broadway shows and 28 movies. She was briefly under contract to Columbia Pictures, culminating in 1931's John Wayne vehicle “The Range Feud.” Fleming suspects that Columbia chief Harry Cohn failed to renew her contract because she always had her mother by her side, thwarting Cohn’s relentless push to bed her.

Even while despairing about her next paycheck, especially as she was now supporting her parents, she attended to party given by Samuel Goldwyn, where she was seated beside Harpo Marx. “Prettiness had never attracted Harpo but whatever I said made him laugh. It should have been etched in stone, but neither of us could ever recall exactly what I said to him. It must have been good. We became inseparable.”

Here begins the heart of her story. Through Harpo she met Herman Mankiewicz, best known as co-author of “Citizen Kane” but still, in the 1930s, producing and writing films of varying quality. He got her a one-picture deal with Paramount so that she could play female lead in “Million Dollar Legs,” which he was producing, with a script co-written by his brother Joseph. Starring alongside Fleming was a parade of Paramount funnymen, including W.C. Fields, Hugh Herbert, Jack Oakie, Ben Turpin, Billy Gilbert, Teddy Hart, and Andy Clyde, and the film remains a delightfully surreal and timeless comedy, an appropriate (nearly) goodbye to her film career.

Meanwhile, she was absorbed into Harpo’s goofy world of unusual celebrities, including writer Charlie Lederer, pianist Oscar Levant, critic and radio personality Alexander Woollcott, and screenplay wizard Ben Hecht. There were annual trips to Neshobe, Woollcott’s vacation island in Vermont, where this mix of writers and actors and other artists indulged in games and badinage. Through it all, Harpo remained terrified about getting married, despite the obvious-to-everyone fact that his relationship with Fleming might as well have been matrimonial.

That changed in 1936. “Harpo was almost forty-eight and a hypochondriac. Maybe the bachelor life didn’t seem so appealing any more.” They were married in secret – for a while, at any rate. But even when word got out, “It wasn’t hard to enjoy this new life. Transferring my own modest celebrity to that of wife of a great movie star was not as heady as might be expected. Harpo was a simple gentleman who avoided sham, chose his own friends, and didn’t care whether his socks matched.”

Life with Harpo seems to have been fairly tranquil, even after the couple adopted four children. But Fleming (now Marx) doesn’t mind sharing a tidbit or two about the likes of Joan Crawford (pretentious), Marlene Dietrich (delightful), and Marion Davies (generous and helpful). Harpo’s movie career was winding down, so the story becomes more and more about the challenges of raising children in Beverly Hills during wartime. And then Harpo’s solo career, which included stage appearances around the world and guest spots on many television shows – especially after his autobiography, Harpo Speaks!, was published in 1961.

Harpo died three years later, but his widow kept busy with community and artistic pursuits. In the early 1980s, she started writing her own memoirs, eventually deciding it was a waste of time. “Why would anyone care about my epic masterpiece anyway?” she said, as reported by her son Bill in his preface to this book. A Marx Brothers fan named Robert Bader had published Groucho Marx and Other Short Stories and Tall Tales, which Susan said she liked more than she liked Groucho himself, so she showed him her own manuscript and they fell into a deal in which he would collaborate, fleshing out the story with her. But she died in 2002, without giving Bader formal approval to finish and publish the book. Bader went on to write the voluminous, authoritative Four of the Three Musketeers: The Marx Brothers on Stage, which puts into perspective the amount of time and dedication the brothers (and their mother) put into refining their characters and their acts.

That approval eventually came from Bill Marx, and Bader polished the manuscript and got it into print. Once again, fans of the Marx Brothers are in his debt, because this is a delightful story of the happiest member of the brother act and the quirky life he and his wife were able to pursue in Hollywood, a place not known for being nice. I will forever wish that I could have attended a dinner party where Susan Marx was sharing her well-honed stories – but this book is the next best thing.

Speaking of Harpo
by Susan Fleming Marx with Robert S. Bader
Applause Theater & Cinema Books