Zeppo, p.32
Zeppo, page 32
The Bill Marx Trio was playing a long residency at the Etc. Club near the Sunset Strip. Marion and Tom dropped in one night to see Bill, who remembers getting some tapes from Marion: “He was playing very modern stuff—jazz-rock fusion, not at all the kind of music I was involved with. I just didn’t know what to do with it. Tom was quite good, but it just wasn’t my style, and I knew of no opportunities for a musician playing that stuff.”
Tom’s musical career was not going anywhere, and he recalls a soul-crushing experience in Boston that put an end to it for a while. “I sat in at one of the local clubs and the drummer came up and escorted me off the bandstand. At that point I just quit; didn’t play for several years. I got back into it later.” Marion remained committed to helping Tom and sent him money for several years, but he was still using drugs and dealing with ongoing mental and personal issues. He showed no signs of making a go of it in music. Tom says, “After a while she got really sick of me. She just said, ‘I give up on you’ and I just never heard from her for maybe the last ten years of her life. I had no contact with her at all.”
Another musical career seemed to be ending in the spring of 1971. On June 13, Zeppo and Barbara attended Frank Sinatra’s farewell concert. That Sinatra would perform hundreds of concerts after this did not change the fact that he had announced his retirement and was giving what he said would be his final show at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles. Around this time Barbara and the thrice-divorced Sinatra began having an affair. In her book she wrote,
I was as lost and lonely as he was. My marriage was all but dead. Bobby was grown and living abroad; I didn’t have to protect him anymore. Whatever happened next between Frank and me—and I knew then that something would—I wouldn’t try to stop it. I was happy again, for the first time in years, and it felt so good.
Bobby had moved to Switzerland to attend college, and Barbara planned to visit him and then see some friends in Monaco. Whether coincidental or deliberately planned, Sinatra would be in Monaco at the same time. In her book Barbara said, “Quite apart from what might happen in Monaco, I could only guess what Zeppo would get up to while I was away.”
As the tensions mounted, Zeppo and Barbara continued to appear at events looking like a happily married couple. Bobby recalled Zeppo telling him years later that the frequent dinners at Sinatra’s house caused him humiliation as it became obvious to others what he already knew. The dedication ceremony for the Eisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage on November 27, 1971, brought out big names from the world of politics like governor Ronald Reagan and vice president Spiro Agnew, as well as former first lady Mamie Eisenhower. From the entertainment world, celebrity fundraisers for the hospital included Jack Warner, Greer Garson, Red Skelton, Bob Hope, Gene Autry, Hal Wallis, Ray Bolger, and—to the insanely jealous Zeppo’s dismay—Frank Sinatra.
Sinatra biographer James Kaplan wrote of Frank’s blossoming relationship with Barbara:
And then there was forty-three-year-old Barbara Marx, ever less married to Zeppo and increasingly present in [Frank’s] life. Tina Sinatra, visiting the Riviera soon after Frank’s farewell performance at the Ahmanson Theatre, saw her father and Marx together in Monte Carlo, looking a lot like a couple.
Sinatra’s daughter wasn’t the only person to observe Frank and Barbara in Monaco. Either by virtue of an amazing coincidence or some astute planning by Zeppo, Barbara was met by Greg Bautzer, Zeppo’s attorney, as she slipped out of Sinatra’s suite at the Hotel de Paris one morning. Zeppo appeared to treat the deterioration of his marriage like anything else—business. Although if it was his intention to accuse her of adultery, she would have had no trouble citing dozens of Zeppo’s indiscretions.
Back in Palm Springs things were tense, and most of their friends knew what was going on. Barbara wrote,
Zeppo and I were still living in the same house, although not the same bedroom. We put up a good front and went out together as husband and wife, visiting our usual haunts. In spite of the fact that Frank and I weren’t seeing each other (or perhaps because we weren’t) there was still a constant frisson between us. Even sitting next to him made me jittery. When Zeppo began to pick up on that sexual tension, he became irrationally jealous even though he was far from faithful.
When they decided to separate, Barbara needed to move out of Zeppo’s house but had no money and no place to go other than her parents’ house in Long Beach. Groucho’s now former wife Eden wanted to sell the house she got from Groucho in their 1969 divorce. It was a small house near the golf course at Tamarisk.1 Sinatra bought it and put it in Barbara’s name. Problem solved. She filed for divorce on December 27, 1972, five weeks after moving out of Zeppo’s house.
Bobby says,
When Zeppo and my mom separated I kept up my relationship with him. And I was not exactly the kind of guy he wanted me to be. This was the age of hippies, rock and roll and long hair. But we had a good time. I remember going out to movies with him. My mom encouraged me to keep the relationship going. I remember her being worried about him being alone. As hurt as Zeppo was he would sometimes speak very highly of my mother to me, which I thought was odd. I always had a lot of sympathy for him because, at least with me there was no facade. He was clearly hurt and upset.
Barbara summed up her life with Zeppo in her book:
Although I’d loved Zeppo in the beginning and had truly wanted our marriage to work, I didn’t feel sad about leaving him at that point, because I knew it was his behavior, not mine, that was to blame. If he hadn’t been so unfaithful, if he’d been the stepfather Bobby deserved, if he’d been less tight with money and more generous with his attentions, then we might have remained married until the day he died.
After Barbara moved out, Zeppo could no longer bear being Frank Sinatra’s neighbor. Barbara had privately joked to friends that she wanted to build a tunnel under the fairway at Tamarisk so she could avoid detection when making late-night visits to Sinatra while Zeppo slept. For his part, Zeppo—not really joking—said there wasn’t a fence tall enough to keep his wife off the neighbor’s property.
Barbara wrote of Zeppo initially being difficult in the divorce proceedings: “One day I was having lunch at the Bistro in Beverly Hills with Sidney Korshak, the husband of my friend Bee, when Zeppo’s attorney Greg Bautzer leaned across from an adjacent table. ‘Barbara,’ he told me, ‘The only thing you’re going to get from Zeppo is the clap.’”
Barbara’s characterization of a casual lunch with her friend’s husband is—to be charitable—disingenuous. With Sinatra’s help, Barbara retained Korshak as her attorney. Sidney Korshak was about as well connected in both Hollywood and organized crime circles as a person could be. He and Zeppo numbered among their mutual friends Lew Wasserman, who had purchased Zeppo’s agency for MCA, and Moe Dalitz, a leading figure in the Las Vegas casino business. Zeppo respected Korshak and the divorce became yet another business deal for him. He agreed to pay Barbara $1,500 a month for ten years. And in a purely magnanimous gesture, allowed her to keep the 1969 Jaguar he had bought for her. There is no evidence to indicate one way or the other if he cared when Sinatra bought her a brand-new Jaguar when he heard about Zeppo’s gesture.
With no commitment about marriage from Sinatra, Barbara still had concerns about her financial future. While she didn’t see a big windfall from Zeppo in the divorce, she wasn’t overly concerned. Her sights were clearly set on Sinatra. She could look back on thirteen years of marriage to Zeppo as an investment that didn’t quite pan out. James Kaplan wrote that Frank’s younger daughter Tina came to see Barbara “with a certain grudging admiration, as a ‘relentless strategist, a professional survivor.’” She had a theory about Barbara regarding Frank’s occasional mistreatment of her while they were dating: “as for why she would tolerate his abuse: she would hold on tight for as long as it took, no matter how tough the ride, until the prize was hers.” While this could also be applied to her relationship with Zeppo, she ultimately saw a better prize in Zeppo’s neighbor.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The Lion in Winter
A BACHELOR ONCE AGAIN, ZEPPO ACCELERATED HIS RELENTLESS PURSUIT of attractive women decades younger. Today star Barbara Walters had written in a September 12, 1971, Family Weekly article,
My husband and I recently vacationed in Palm Springs, California, where Groucho’s brother, Zeppo, has a home. At lunch at the Racquet Club, we watched Zeppo Marx talk to various women he knew . . . wives of friends and friends of his own wife. In every case, he had a smile, a compliment, a sincere delight in seeing them again. I’ve never met Zeppo Marx, but I’d like to.
There had never been any doubt about Zeppo being charming. As his relationship with his wife deteriorated, he wasted no time looking for his next female companion.
Zeppo first met Roxann Ploss at a party he and Barbara attended at Frank Sinatra’s house in 1971. Ploss was an attractive twenty-three-year-old high school teacher who had recently arrived in Palm Springs. Recalling the period, Ploss says,
Palm Springs in those days was empty of single young females during the week. Busloads of them showed up for the weekends looking for rich potential husbands. Being college educated, young, and breathing made me a hot commodity. So, I was a regular at Sinatra’s dinner parties and I started dating him. After Zeppo and Barbara split up he called me and asked if I’d be interested in going out with him. He told someone at a party that he and Frank had switched partners and that he’d gotten the better of the deal.
Roxann saw through Zeppo’s jokes and felt he was quite broken up about losing Barbara. Roxann and Zeppo became very close despite their forty-seven-year difference in age. She got to know him as well as anyone could in his last years and recalls some of his quirks.
He had an enormous closet filled with nice clothes but rarely wore anything but very casual attire, which wasn’t really in style at that time. He had a Rolls-Royce but drove a little Honda around town. And he kept $5,000 cash in his safe out of force of habit dating back to when he and his brothers would have to bail Chico out of trouble late at night. I sometimes sorted his mail and found a charge from a Swiss bank. He told me he was storing some of his patents in a vault there.
She also remembers Barbara calling Zeppo to retrieve a very expensive Judith Leiber gold mesh handbag she had left behind at his house. “Zeppo fluffed her off, saying that it was in a safety deposit box in Los Angeles, and he’d let her know when he had a chance to get it. He turned to me and said, ‘I paid for it. Maybe I should let you have it.’” Zeppo also told Roxann that he’d “never met anyone more self-disciplined than Barbara. She could have a raging fever and would still get out of bed to do her exercise routine every morning.”
Zeppo turned down numerous interview requests as the Marx Brothers experienced a great revival in the early seventies. Groucho couldn’t get enough of it, but the last thing Zeppo wanted to do was go on television to talk about his career as part of the act. He was invited to appear on The Dick Cavett Show. Business always being on his mind, Zeppo told Cavett he would appear on his show for $5,000. Talk shows paid union scale, which was around $200, so Cavett had to decline Zeppo’s offer. In retrospect he says, “We should have paid it. He would have been a fascinating guest.”
On the other hand, Zeppo agreed to a pair of print interviews at Groucho’s behest without being paid. It was difficult for him to turn down requests from Groucho, who by this time was sending Zeppo a monthly check, believing him to be having money problems. With his health deteriorating, Groucho no longer visited Palm Springs, so he knew nothing about Zeppo’s opulent lifestyle. He also didn’t wonder how Zeppo was able to keep his penthouse in Beverly Hills while supposedly struggling to pay his bills.
Zeppo began making frequent visits to Beverly Hills to see Groucho. In 1971 Erin Fleming, an ambitious out-of-work actress, came into Groucho’s life and took charge of what remained of it. She became his manager and started booking him on television. With no one else showing much interest, Groucho welcomed Erin into his life. She set up a physically demanding concert tour for Groucho in 1972 and wasn’t shy about using his celebrity to enhance her own weak career prospects.1
Zeppo was among the many friends and relatives who objected to Groucho performing in his compromised state, but he stopped short of objecting to Erin because he would never risk alienating an attractive younger woman. Apart from that, he was still being paid by Groucho each month, and Erin had taken control of Groucho’s checkbook. Groucho was also still facile enough to express displeasure at the mention of anything negative about Erin.
The two interviews Zeppo agreed to were for book projects Groucho was involved with. Talking to Richard J. Anobile for The Marx Bros. Scrapbook, Zeppo was short with his answers and at times rude. Anobile recalled, “Zeppo was a tough interview. He only did it because Groucho wanted him to. Gummo also told him he should talk to me. He didn’t give me too much time. He kept looking over at the television and checking the stock market reports during the interview. It felt like he wanted to get through with it as quickly as possible.”
Interviewed by Lyn Ehrhard (who used the pen name Charlotte Chandler) for her book Hello, I Must Be Going: Groucho and His Friends, Zeppo was friendly and accommodating. The Ehrhard interview is peppered with valuable information and insights about his life with the Marx Brothers and beyond. The reason for Zeppo’s cooperation was simple. He wanted to date Lyn Ehrhard.2 She wrote in the book, “Although Zeppo was then in his seventies, he looked much younger. He had fair hair and his voice sounded as it did in the Paramount comedies. He told me he was always ‘a very shy person,’ but I didn’t know if I should completely believe him, because he had his hand on my knee at the time.”
In the spring of 1973, Groucho spoke freely to Richard J. Anobile in his interviews for The Marx Bros. Scrapbook and was not aware that Anobile would include what he assumed were off-the-record, and occasionally profane or embarrassing, comments in the book. Zeppo got off relatively easy. Comparing him to Chico, Groucho said, “Chico was sort of a rascal and Zeppo isn’t. He’s just cold-blooded.” At the last minute, Erin orchestrated a lawsuit in Groucho’s name to prevent the book from being published, but the suit was unsuccessful. Zeppo also spoke freely to Anobile and was surprised to see his brutally frank comments about Groucho in the book. With Erin’s by now familiar irrational behavior and quick temper, Zeppo’s monthly stipend was clearly at risk.
In the book Zeppo said, “I think it is just terrible that he is still working. It’s awful. Why the hell doesn’t he just hang them up. He’s 82 and going on 83, and he’s got all the money he needs. He can’t be that much of a ham that he wants to keep performing.” Zeppo doubled down and called out a recent television appearance that alarmed many of Groucho’s friends. “I don’t know if it’s the income he’s worried about. He was on the Bill Cosby Show a few weeks ago. I had to turn it off. He didn’t look like Groucho; he didn’t act like Groucho, and he didn’t talk like Groucho. He had this silly grin on his face, and he kept looking at Cosby, waiting for him to ask the next question.” Anobile had provided Groucho with an advance proof of the book, which Groucho approved—but clearly without reading it.
The Marx Bros. Scrapbook also includes Zeppo’s review of the final show of the Evening with Groucho concert tour at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles on December 11, 1972. It had been rescheduled after the original September date had to be postponed when Groucho suffered a stroke. Shows in Chicago and Detroit were canceled, but Erin insisted the Los Angeles show be played. She was not willing to give up her own opportunity in the spotlight in front of an audience filled with show business luminaries, since she had made herself part of Groucho’s show. Zeppo’s assessment of the performance was shared by many and borne out by the rarely shown film of the event, which was kept from release at the time due to Groucho’s frail appearance.
Appalled by what he saw that evening, Zeppo told Anobile,
I went to see his one man show. He couldn’t remember a goddamn thing. The piano player had to keep cueing him. After all, he had to do something for this man who couldn’t remember what the hell he was going to do next. And he was reading the stuff and he couldn’t do it well! Jesus, I think he’s spoiling a great image. He’s tearing down something it took years to build. Why does he have to do it?
If Groucho read Zeppo’s comments he didn’t hold a grudge. Zeppo met a teenaged Marx Brothers fan and collector named John Tefteller at the show and briefly corresponded with him. In a letter dated December 26, 1972, Zeppo wrote:
I was pleased to receive your letter at a time when I needed a little cheering up. My wife is divorcing me, and I was lonely this Christmas. It’s nice to realize that our pictures are bringing a ray of happiness to the now generation. Shows there is not a generation gap, just a lack of communication between the generations. Your collection sounds fabulous. I never saved anything. I will have my secretary answer your questions at a later date. That was she sitting with me the night of An Evening with Groucho when you saw me in the audience. Cute, huh?
The cute secretary didn’t write back to answer Tefteller’s questions. Zeppo did. In a December 28 letter, he said his favorite Marx Brothers movie was The Cocoanuts, and that “Humor Risk” was a piece of junk, and he didn’t know where it was. Zeppo closed the letter saying, “Well I’m practically single now and lovable, yes.”
