Groucho Marx

Trivia

• He is best known for playing characters who were wisecracking sharpies who always sported a cigar, a mustache made of dark greasepaint and walked with a half crouch.
• In Marx Brothers movies, he almost always played characters with unusual first names, a middle initial and unlikely last names; i.e.: Rufus T. Firefly, Hugo Z. Hackenbush and Otis B. Driftwood.
• Was told by studio executive Walter Wanger to lose the greasepaint moustache as it was an "obvious fake". (Source: Joseph Adamson III in his book Groucho, Harpo, Chico and sometimes Zeppo (1973)
• He was to have played the title role in a TV movie of L. Frank Baum's "The Magical Monarch of Mo" with a teleplay by Gore Vidal, which was never produced.
• When talking about Margaret Dumont, the actress who frequently played the dowager who acted as a punching bag for Groucho's verbal insults, he claimed the secret to their chemistry is that she never understood what he was saying.
• Once during the run of "I'll Say She Is" (the brothers' first Broadway play), his brother Harpo Marx tried to play a practical joke on him by chasing a chorus girl onto the stage while Groucho was in the middle of his act. Not to be outdone, he simply pulled out his watch and said "The Five Fifteen is right on schedule".
• He suffered from insomnia, which he claimed was due to a financial loss in the stock market. When he suffered from insomnia, he used to call people up in the middle of the night and insult them.
• The FBI had a file on him after he made some jokes about communism.
• A famous gag toy was modeled after his face - the dark black glasses with big orange nose and mustache "disguise" toy (known as the "Beagle-Puss" in the gag shop market.).
• There are at least two versions of how Julius Henry Marx got his more famous nickname. One is that it came from his general disposition. The other, that, during the Marx Brothers' early days in vaudeville, he was the keeper of the act's "grouch bag" or money purse. Groucho, himself, said, on one occasion, "my own name, I never did understand."

Quotes

• " The only way a Republican will get into the White House now is to marry Margaret Truman."
• "There has never been a good comedian that didn't have a good straight man. Audiences don't *think* the straight man means anything, but it's very important."
• " The greatest compliment I ever got was from Chaplin. He came up to me and said, "I wish I could talk like you on the screen". I said, "I think you're doing alright". He had made $50 million by that point. He was the best comedian we ever had."
• "Jerry Lewis hasn't made me laugh since he left Dean Martin."
• "She was a wonderful woman. She was the same off the stage as she was on it -- always the stuffy, dignified matron. And the funny thing about her was she never understood the jokes. At the end of Duck Soup (1933) Margaret says to me, "What are you doing. Rufus?". And I say, "I am fighting for your honor, which is more than you ever did." Later she asked me what I meant by that."
• "Hope? Hope is not a comedian. He just translates what others write for him."
• "I'd have liked to have gone to bed with Jean Harlow. She was a beautiful broad. The fellow who married her was impotent and he killed himself. I would have done the same thing."
• "He [Groucho's father] had absolutely no training, and if you had ever seen one of his suits, you'd realize what an accurate statement that is. You see, Pop never used a tape measure. He didn't believe in it. He said he could just look at a man and tell his size, with the result that frequently he'd make a pair of pants with one trouser leg seven or eight inches longer than the other."
• "A woman is an occasional pleasure, but a cigar is always a smoke."
• "Alimony is like buying hay for a dead horse."