Zeppo, p.5
Zeppo, page 5
The four brothers combined in an attack on Kelly, who was rescued by the police. Then the brothers, clad in bathing suits, were taken to the Hyde Park police station, where they remained until they were given bond.
It can’t be known more than a century after the fact if Minnie’s next move came because of Herbert’s latest brush with the law, but it is certainly not inconceivable. When the Four Marx Brothers opened the fall season at the Le Grand Theatre in Chicago on August 21, 1916, there was a new act on the bill with them. This act accompanied them to Indiana for three-day engagements in Elkhart and Richmond, and a one-night stand in Hammond, but was never heard from again. The act was “Buster Palmer,” a juvenile singer. Any resemblance to Herbert Marx was unavoidable. Minnie had combined her vaudeville surname with Herbert’s neighborhood nickname, and he was instantly on a vaudeville bill. But why not as Herbert, the fifth Marx Brother? It was all part of Minnie’s latest plan, which may have been necessitated by the Four Marx Brothers preferring not to take Herbert on the road with them for the fall season in 1916. Apart from Herbert’s occasionally criminal behavior, they likely had other reasons. While crisscrossing the country and visiting almost every theater along the way, the Four Marx Brothers also made a habit of visiting every poolroom and whorehouse along the way. Their fifteen-year-old brother joining them in these activities could land them in jail. Minnie’s solution was to send Herbert out on tour, but as part of another act. This would keep him out of his brothers’ hair, and he would earn a salary that did not come out of the Four Marx Brothers’ revenue.
Minnie Palmer and Minnie Marx were one and the same, but they also lived separate lives. By the time Herbert was singing on stage as Buster Palmer, Minnie Marx barely existed, having been completely overwhelmed by Minnie Palmer. One of the main reasons Herbert had hardly any parental supervision at home was that Minnie Palmer had set up her office in the Crilly Building at 35 South Dearborn Street. The building was the hub of vaudeville in Chicago. Practically every agent, manager and circuit had an office there. Thurman Dwight Pepple—known professionally as T. Dwight Pepple—was a vaudeville agent, producer, and one-time actor based in Ohio. When he came to Chicago in October 1913, he rented space in Minnie Palmer’s office. But Minnie would not rent office space to just anyone. There had to be something in it for Minnie besides rent money.
By the time T. Dwight Pepple arrived in Chicago, Minnie was enjoying great success with tabloid musicals. With the Four Marx Brothers leading the way, she sent several of these shows out on the road after the initial success of the Marx tab Mr. Green’s Reception in 1912. Maurice L. Greenwald, who had been the road manager of Minnie’s tabloid Running for Congress, went into the tabloid production business with T. Dwight Pepple. Minnie was not threatened by her friends and associates producing their own tab shows. They learned the business from her. She ran ads in the trade papers touting herself as “Minnie Palmer—Queen of Tabloids” and she really was for a while.
Tabloids were a great business for managers and agents who could stock the casts of these shows with three or four of their acts. But that could present a problem for independent small-time acts who had trouble finding work, as openings on bills became scarce during the tab craze. It was not uncommon for a tabloid to replace as many as five acts of an eight-act bill. Some—like Mr. Green’s Reception—could fill an entire bill. One of the many small-timers who lost job opportunities because of tabloids was Minnie’s nephew, Lou Shean. Lou’s brief partnership with his cousin Leonard as Shean and Marx in the 1911–1912 season had ended with Lou fearing for his safety as the occasional gunshot fired at Leonard by an angry husband or father got a little too close. Lou worked as a burlesque comic until Minnie put him in her tab show The Duke of Bull Durham. T. Dwight Pepple’s first order of business working out of Minnie’s office was to find a new job for Lou Shean. To this point, Pepple was known for putting together all-girl acts like the Colonial Minstrel Maids, which tended not to have openings for German dialect comedians like Lou Shean. More challenging was Lou’s health. He had to stop working for several months because of an eye ailment that left him unable to leave his room for six weeks. But before Pepple could put Lou Shean to work, he and Minnie created their first act together. The Five Rose Maids—a group of attractive young female singers and musicians—was more typical of the acts Pepple had been working with. Minnie’s efforts to “class up” the act included the placement of roses all over the stage.2
T. Dwight Pepple was cut from the same cloth as Minnie. Determination won out over every obstacle, and he was almost as optimistic in the face of failure as Minnie. They also shared a penchant for extreme nerve in advertising. Minnie would occasionally put phrases like “world famous songwriters” into an ad for the Four Marx Brothers when they were barely famous in the American Midwest and had not written any songs. Pepple would bill his mediocre All Girl Revue of 1916 as “the Ziegfeld Follies of Vaudeville.” This was a man Minnie could do business with. An early advertisement for the Five Rose Maids billed them as the “classiest act in vaudeville.”
A month after moving into Minnie’s office, Pepple and Lou Shean were the producers of the new tabloid musical, The Parisian Revue. The following spring, Pepple and Shean revamped Pepple’s old show A Night at Maxim’s, and when Lou’s health permitted, he joined the cast of both shows. Pepple also created several shows that didn’t require him to find jobs for Minnie’s relatives. In the fall of 1916, when Minnie needed to put Herbert into an act, she turned to T. Dwight Pepple, who by this time had become successful enough to get his own office a few doors down the hall from Minnie’s. Pepple first needed to see what the boy could do, so Minnie set up the showcase for “Buster Palmer” on the bill with the Four Marx Brothers.
Pepple and Greenwald had been casting all-girl shows like Southern Porch Party and the Song and Dance Revue when they met the three Kashner sisters from Cleveland, Ohio. Two of them, Fay, twenty-five, and Marvel, twenty-one, had been working in vaudeville as a singing act for several years. The youngest, Ida, eighteen, worked as a child actress and had recently joined her sisters in their singing act. The dancing Harris Brothers—George, twenty-five, and Victor, twenty-two, were well known to Minnie. They had spent two seasons with the Four Marx Brothers between 1912 and 1914. When Minnie put Buster Palmer on a couple of bills with the Four Marx Brothers for Pepple to see, she also had the Harris Brothers on those bills. Pepple and Greenwald—with some help from Minnie—created a new act for the fall season in 1916. Pepple and Greenwald supplied the Kashner Sisters, and Minnie supplied the Harris Brothers and Herbert Marx. They called the act the Juvenile Six, although Herbert was the only actual juvenile in the group. Having a pair of twenty-five-year-old “juveniles” in the act harkened back to Minnie’s early days as a producer. When the Three Marx Brothers were touring in their classroom sketch “Fun in Hi Skule” in 1911, twenty-two-year-old Arthur and Minnie’s forty-nine-year-old sister Hannah played school children.
The Juvenile Six, like the Marx Brothers before them, were not above stretching the truth. Lying was as important as talent in vaudeville. The Kashner sisters not only lied about their ages—claiming to be nineteen, eighteen, and sixteen—they also called themselves the Karlmer Sisters. The act ran fifteen minutes and afforded the three separate acts within it brief chances in the spotlight. After a song by the full sextet, the Harris Brothers danced. The Karlmer Sisters followed with a couple of songs before Herbert took a solo spot that would typically include a pair of popular current songs. “What Do You Want to Make Those Eyes at Me For (When They Don’t Mean What They Say)” had recently been introduced in the Broadway show Follow Me. “You’re a Dog-Gone Dangerous Girl” had been featured in Al Jolson’s show at the Winter Garden Theatre. Both were considered novelty songs and were presumably made more novel when sung by a fifteen-year-old.
The finale was again a sextet number, this time featuring the group doing a Scottish song in appropriate Scottish attire. The act’s reviews often remarked about the staging. They were sometimes billed as “a novelty in black and white,” which referred to the two-tone backdrop and the costumes designed to blend with it. The act also traveled with some advanced electrical lighting effects built into their scenery. This aspect of the Juvenile Six comes directly from the Minnie Palmer playbook. The Four Marx Brothers’ scenery for Home Again got a lot of attention from critics, mostly because the boat featured in the dock setting was on wheels surrounded by cardboard waves and would leave the dock at the end of the first act.
After opening in Chicago at the Lincoln Hippodrome on September 21, 1916, the Juvenile Six hit the road for a season in small-time vaudeville. They covered most of the country over the next nine months, starting in the Midwest and working their way east through Ohio and upstate New York before turning around and heading north for a grueling trip around the far-flung Ackerman and Harris circuit through North and South Dakota, Montana, and Idaho before heading down the West Coast. This infamous slice of vaudeville was known to performers as the “death trail” due to the long distances between cities on the circuit. The Juvenile Six also had the extra misfortune of working the “death trail” in December and January.
As large parts of the country experienced the coldest winter in thirty-seven years, there was also a coal shortage to make it worse. Adding to their general misfortune, snow delayed their train and the Juvenile Six failed to arrive in Lewistown, Montana, in time for a scheduled one-night stand on December 26, 1916. Herbert and his costars rang in 1917 with a New Year’s Eve show in frigid and windy Butte, Montana. Even in their leanest years, the Marx Brothers never played the dreaded Ackerman & Harris circuit. Herbert was paying his dues. The Juvenile Six made it out of the cold and got to enjoy several weeks of mild weather on the West Coast with dates in San Francisco, San Diego, and Los Angeles before working their way back to Chicago through Colorado, Missouri, Arkansas, and Iowa.
Reviews for the Juvenile Six were generally positive. But occasionally a critic aired his grievances with the act. A review in The Sacramento Bee from February 1, 1917, said, “The Juvenile Six are effectively staged as far as costumes and setting are concerned and the young performers are fairly clever, but their immaturity is responsible for a conspicuous lack of stability, smoothness and finish in the act.” That same day The Sacramento Star reviewed the same performance: “A novel black and white impressionistic setting is used by the Juvenile Six. They open with a clever sextet number, followed by some of the best soft shoe dancing seen in many a month. Clever song numbers are given, and the act closes with a rousing Scotch chorus and solo in costume. It’s a neat act.” One man’s hit is another man’s flop.
Reviews generally appeared in local papers the day after an act opened. The summary of the show that appeared in advance of the opening was supplied by the theater—which received it from the circuit that booked the act. This basically meant that the acts supplied their own advance press notices. Minnie Palmer was a notorious self-promoter and specialized in outrageous lies and effusive praise when it came to selling her acts. Before the Juvenile Six even got off the train in East Liverpool, Ohio, this item ran in the Evening Review on November 4, 1916:
This is a very clever act composed of three boys and three girls who are real artists presenting their incomparable style of songs and dances. The act is enhanced with beautiful scenery and electrical effects and the ability of these child performers is said to be wonderful, in fact it is considered the best juvenile act on the American stage. No one can well afford to miss this great big treat.
Minnie’s incessant hyping of her sons and her other acts added to her legend. The stories of her throwing her allegedly untalented sons into show business may have had a tinge of truth in the cases of Harpo and Gummo, but in a rare moment of candor on the subject, Groucho was quoted in Arthur Marx’s book Son of Groucho: “That’s a lot of horseshit. Sure, Mom gave us a little push. But we did all the work. We were the ones with the talent.” Harpo was more of a company man when he was quoted in the Columbus Sunday Dispatch on October 1, 1916: “We are Minnie Palmer’s sons. Our mother expected us to make good—so we had to do it.” Herbert was now officially part of his mother’s expectations. He’d given Minnie’s dream a try and did quite well at it, garnering favorable reviews and sending home his salary as his brothers had in their early vaudeville travels.
On January 12, 1917, while Herbert was in Walla Walla, Washington with the Juvenile Six on the so-called death trail, there was an eruption of gang violence and real death in his Chicago neighborhood. Likely, Herbert would have been in the middle of it had Minnie not sent him on the road. Two rival gangs got into a brawl in front of Schaeffer’s Ice Cream Shop at the corner of St. Lawrence Avenue and 43rd Street. Louis Bass got knocked down and beaten up in the brawl. He ran home, came back with his gun, and shot and wounded twenty-two-year-old Joseph M. Mahoney, who died a week later. Louis fled, but Joey Bass was held as a witness. Louis was eventually found hiding at his aunt’s house and taken into custody. Louis claimed he shot Mahoney in self-defense—failing to explain why he ran home to get his gun before defending himself. Somehow, the charge was reduced to manslaughter, and Judge Joseph H. Fitch of the Cook County Superior Court acquitted Louis on May 3, 1917. Louis Bass ran out of luck with the court system after that. He was in and out of trouble and prison for the rest of his life.
Zeppo told BBC interviewer Barry Norman a slightly mixed-up version of the Louis Bass story in 1978, conflating the January 1917 shooting with an important incident in his life that would not take place until June 1918. He told a story about a double date he and Bass were to go on that Minnie made him break so he could join the Four Marx Brothers in Rockford, Illinois:
We were dating a couple of girls at that time, and we were dating about two or three times a week, in the evening, and we’d go take them out to the park, and go in the bushes. Well, what boys and girls do in the bushes. . . . We had no money to go to a motel or hotel. So, this particular night we had a date. . . . I couldn’t keep the date with my friend and so I called him and told him and he said “[A]lright, I’ll keep the date with the two girls,” which he did and the two girls had two boys there that were brothers and they found out about us, and they were over at the park waiting for us. . . . They got a hold of him and beat the hell out of him and they knocked him down, and they kicked him, kicked him in the face and everything, and he pulled out a gun and killed [one of them]. Now I would have been there too, and with my buddy, I’d have done the same thing and I’d have gotten into the same trouble.
The facts about the shooting of Joseph M. Mahoney as reported in the Chicago papers in January 1917 are reliable, and Herbert Marx was nowhere near Chicago at the time. Could Louis Bass have killed two neighborhood kids in separate incidents more than a year apart? Doubtful. The Mahoney shooting probably had nothing to do with Herbert and his friend getting intimate with a couple of girls in the bushes of a neighborhood park. But the Mahoney shooting was over two girls who were alleged to have snitched on some gang members. The Chicago Examiner reported on January 14, 1917, that the girls were seventeen-year-old Grace Shaw and nineteen-year-old Olive Van Valkenburg. These girls may be the two girls Louis Bass and Herbert had been to the bushes with. And Mahoney may have beaten up Louis Bass previously because of that. More will probably never be known, but Louis Bass killed someone in front of dozens of witnesses and was miraculously acquitted. Herbert Marx didn’t require an acquittal to be available when Minnie needed him in the spring of 1918. He knew he’d been lucky to be far from Chicago when the shooting occurred.
CHAPTER FOUR
What’s in a Name?
WHEN THE JUVENILE SIX RETURNED TO CHICAGO IN THE SUMMER of 1917, the first thing the now sixteen-year-old Herbert Marx did was get himself a job at the Ford Motor Company in the service department. The one season existence of the Juvenile Six would be quickly forgotten. Much had changed at home while Herbert was on the road. The United States was getting closer to entering World War I, and in the spring of 1917, the Selective Service Act put the Four Marx Brothers in a precarious situation. On June 5, while Herbert was in Detroit with the Juvenile Six, the Four Marx Brothers registered for the draft in Chicago. Herbert, now old enough to work at Ford, was still too young to be drafted.
The Juvenile Six had never been intended to be an ongoing venture. The fact that only one member of the sextet was really a juvenile finally became a problem with the June 1917 draft. George and Victor Harris registered for the draft in Detroit two days before the act opened there at the Miles Theatre. According to their draft cards, they had already secured new jobs for the upcoming fall season with producer Lew Canter. But by the summer of 1918, the Harris brothers had traded life on America’s vaudeville stages for life on the battlefields of France. Victor Harris was wounded in the Argonne Offensive, the deadliest battle in the history of the United States Army.1 After the war, Victor returned to show business but George did not. Minnie hoped deferments would keep her draft-aged sons from following the same path as the Harris Brothers.
The first Marx family draft deferment came in the form of a wife with a baby on the way. The Marx Brothers had gotten women pregnant before, but Minnie was eager to prevent her sons from getting married, so abortions were her favored solution. Wives could only minimize Minnie’s control of her sons and—more importantly—the act, which was slowly slipping away from her anyway. Betty Karp went on a date with Leonard in Brooklyn in March. When she contacted him to let him know he was going to be a father, Minnie had her take the train to Chicago, where they were married on August 3.2 As this was going on, Minnie heard about agricultural and farming deferments, so she bought a chicken farm in La Grange, just outside of Chicago in June. Leonard and Betty moved into the Grand Boulevard house and the rest of the family moved to the farm. Julius avoided the draft because of his poor eyesight, and Milton and Arthur registered as farmers. For the moment, none of the Marx Brothers were heading off to war.
