Zeppo, p.6
Zeppo, page 6
The farm was around fifteen miles from the Grand Boulevard house, so Herbert split his time between the farm and house while working at Ford. Time at the farm was also useful in keeping Herbert away from his street gang buddies in the old neighborhood. Julius, Milton, and Arthur spent that summer at both locations as well. Around this time the family purchased a used Scripps-Booth automobile, which frequently required service. If Herbert needed the car, he would repeat the trick he used on Groucho and Gummo’s old Chalmers by disabling the engine and miraculously repairing it after his brothers found alternate transportation. This was impractical. Kyle Crichton wrote of Herbert’s solution to his transportation problem:
Zeppo gave up on the Scripps-Booth and began borrowing cars. These belonged to strangers and were taken without permission, but Zeppo made a point of returning them after a few hours with only such minor dents as might be acquired from a passing encounter with a truck. He was driving a Cadillac one day with the car loaded to the eaves with admiring young friends when a policeman hailed him at Randolph and State. The fat was in the fire.
They were hauled off to the jug and things looked bad. Minnie hurried down to find herself surrounded by an indignant mob of mothers and fathers. Each asserted vehemently that their sons had never in their lives considered an illegal action until brought under the influence of Herbert Marx.
It was during this period that Herbert acquired the name Zeppo. The Four Marx Brothers had been rechristened as Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and Gummo during a Galesburg, Illinois, poker game in May 1914 by an obscure vaudeville comedian named Art Fisher. The various explanations for Zeppo’s name over the years have ranged from plausible to improbable. But the version favored by at least a few of the Marx Brothers’ children involved Herbert’s resemblance to sideshow performer and circus freak William Henry Johnson, also known as Zip the Pinhead. Zip evolved into Zippo, and eventually Zeppo. Naturally this was not flattering to young Herbert, who would come up with some of the more implausible explanations for his name years later. Monkeys, acrobats, chimps, clowns, zeppelins—anything was better than a circus sideshow freak!
Having an older brother can be challenging. Having four of them left Herbert with a nickname derived from a man who could at best be considered as being outside of any form of polite society at the time for a variety of reasons—race, appearance, and mental capacity topping the list. William Henry Johnson, the son of African American slaves, was also sometimes billed as the Original ‘What-Is-It?’ and worked in circus sideshows for many years. He may have suffered from microcephaly, a condition in which the head and brain are underdeveloped, causing limited mental capacity and a misshaped head. But he also may have just had an odd-shaped head and acted the part.
Before the coverup began, the derivation of Zeppo’s nickname was openly discussed. At the point where the Four Marx Brothers began using their nicknames professionally, reporters naturally wanted to know how they were acquired. Beginning with the fall 1925 opening of their second Broadway show, The Cocoanuts, the Four Marx Brothers were shown in the cast listings of programs as Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and Zeppo. They’d only used the names causally, and mostly among themselves, prior to that.
On May 23, 1926, an item in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle asked, “Why are the Marx Brothers, the comedians in The Cocoanuts at the Lyric Theatre, using nicknames instead of their real names?” The paper went to the source for information. “‘The answer is simple,’ says Groucho, who always acts as spokesman for the group. ‘We want to be different and attract unusual attention.’” Asked specifically about Zeppo, Groucho provides a compelling piece of evidence that would soon disappear from the record. “Zeppo was named for a freak in a circus which visited a farm where we used to live as boys.” The Marx Brothers had an unusually long summer break in 1917 and didn’t work from late April until mid-August, spending most of that time at the farm in LaGrange. William Henry Johnson was with the Barnum & Bailey circus at this time and spent a large part of that summer performing in Illinois, with stops in Chicago, Danville, Rockford, and Aurora. This would be the point at which the Marx Brothers saw Zip the Pinhead and decided he looked like Herbert. If the circus or any of its performers visited the Marx farm, there’s no documentation of it, but Groucho told a reporter in 1926 that it happened.3
Herbert feebly denied this story in the coming years, and his brothers eventually played along and phased out the sideshow freak angle, but early on the truth kept coming out. In a March 1931 interview for Hubbard Keavy’s syndicated “Screen Life in Hollywood” column, Harpo added a disturbing detail. Herbert “got a new name when his playful brothers once shaved his head and decided that he resembled Zep, a sideshow freak.” (Clearly there’s more to Herbert’s later stated reluctance to join the act than just wanting to work as an auto mechanic.)
The coup de grâce in the Zip the Pinhead narrative came from Zeppo himself. An interview from the Boston tryout run of The Cocoanuts at the Tremont Theater finds a Boston Globe reporter in a dressing room shared by Harpo and Zeppo. The narrative is almost identical to the one Groucho shared in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. The Globe article states, “Zeppo was named for a freak in a circus who visited a farm where the four used to live as boys.” The article also quotes Harpo. “‘The freak’s name in the circus was Zippy,’ he explained, ‘but we changed it to Zeppo for Herbert here, and I swear the freak was insulted and didn’t like the idea one bit.’” Then, for perhaps the only time, Zeppo confirmed the tale. “Zeppo, at the moment in a discussion with Sam Harris, came out long enough to admit the truth of this.” After this one weak moment, the story—no matter who was telling it—evolved into one of the implausible variations. Anything but a circus freak. Older brothers could be cruel. In Herbert’s case, multiply that by four and add in a forcible shaving of the youngest brother’s head.
One of the more unusual versions of the nickname story came in a 1933 feature from the British magazine, Film Weekly. “It was left for Herbert, the last to join the little band, taking the place of another of his brothers, to choose a name for himself, and in doing so he set a pace in craziness which set the standard for the act. He once spotted a circus sideshow billed as ‘Zeppo—Half Monkey, Half Man.’ And he took his name from this.” It would be highly unlikely that this version of events was supplied by Zeppo.
By the time the Marx Brothers hired Kyle Crichton to write their 1950 authorized biography, they couldn’t agree on a single explanation for Zeppo’s name. Chico and Gummo ascribed it to their use of hick farmer names, saying it evolved from first calling him “Zeb.” Groucho went with the alleged popularity of the German Zeppelins being used in World War I. (Was this really a big deal in Chicago? And what possible connection could there be to Herbert?) Harpo took the sideshow freak theory to another level in the Crichton book, saying Zeppo was named after a sideshow freak named Zippo the Dog-Faced Boy.
In August the Four Marx Brothers began the 1917–1918 vaudeville season with Chico’s new wife Betty added to the cast. Herbert stayed in Chicago and continued to work at Ford. It seemed like he had become the first member of the family to overcome Minnie’s plan. After a full season on the road, Herbert had won his freedom from vaudeville and was hoping to work his way up to a better position at Ford. He had even outgrown the gang life of the Chicago streets, although he was still friendly with the Bass brothers and didn’t stay completely out of trouble. But the war raged on, and draft deferments were harder to come by with each successive draft. It became clear that at some point the Marx Brothers would run out of luck. Betty left the show before the start of a December Orpheum circuit tour and returned to Chicago to await the start of the next generation of the Marx family.
Minnie somehow had the idea that Betty would be a good person to keep Herbert in line when she wasn’t around. How she came to this conclusion—considering that Betty was only a few years older than Herbert—can only be attributed to Minnie’s endless supply of optimism. In Growing Up with Chico, a biography of her father, Maxine Marx wrote that Zeppo quickly become fed up with being bossed around by Betty and
decided to scare her a bit. One morning when they were driving back from a shopping expedition, Zeppo speeded along on an ice-slicked road. Betty pleaded with him to stop, sure that they would crash. Miraculously, nothing happened, but when Betty got back to the farm, she wrote Chico that Zeppo had almost caused her to lose the baby. Chico was the only one who could control the youngest of the Marx Brothers. Zeppo, shaken up by a letter he received from the irate Chico, nevertheless had the chutzpah to ask him for any of his old suits. This patched things up between them; Chico admired a hell-raiser anyway—and a brother, after all, was a brother.
Herbert stopped scaring Betty and Chico’s military deferment was secured on January 13, 1918, when Betty gave birth to Maxine. Groucho’s eyesight was still not to Uncle Sam’s liking, but farmers Gummo and Harpo were not raising sufficient chickens to impress the draft board. Something needed to be done.
As far back as his days as Milton in the Three Nightingales, Gummo was not very interested in being on stage. He’d developed a stammer and had trouble delivering his lines. He worked hard to overcome it but still never became comfortable on stage. But he was as loyal to Minnie’s plan as any of his more interested and talented brothers. Minnie’s dream of the act becoming the Five Marx Brothers had already taken a step backward when Zeppo went on the road with the Juvenile Six instead of the Four Marx Brothers. A quintet was looking unlikely, and the quartet’s survival was now in jeopardy thanks to World War I. When it became clear that one of the brothers needed to go into military service, Gummo either eagerly volunteered or accepted that his mother shipped him off to the army because he was the least important member of the act. Accounts differ. Minnie turned to Zeppo, who described being drafted into the act in an interview with Richard J. Anobile for The Marx Bros. Scrapbook:
I was then working as a mechanic for the Ford Motor Company. I never did care about show business. But my mother called me up to tell me that Gummo was leaving for the army and that she wanted to keep the name “the Four Marx Brothers” intact. She insisted I join the act and that’s what I did. I did have a bit of experience in that I had done a little singing and dancing as part of a cheap boy and girl act.
That fleeting reference to a cheap boy and girl act seems to be the only historical acknowledgment that Zeppo ever made of the Juvenile Six. In his BBC interview Zeppo elaborated on getting that fateful phone call from Minnie.
She says[,] . . . “this is important to me and to our whole family” so I acquiesced, and I joined the boys in Rockford, Illinois. I got right on, right on the stage, didn’t know what the hell to do, but Gummo danced and did some straight lines, so I ad-libbed some of the lines and they gave me some of the lines. . . . [T]he dancing I didn’t do because I didn’t know the routines.
The Rockford engagement began on June 6, 1918. It was half of a split-week and Gummo and Zeppo both appeared with the act for those three days and the three-day engagement in Madison, Wisconsin that followed. After breaking Zeppo in, Gummo spent the duration of the war as a supply sergeant in Chicago and was discharged in the fall when the Armistice was signed. He had wanted to get out of the act for years. The combination of World War I and Zeppo no longer being considered a child facilitated Gummo’s escape from vaudeville. The season ended and Zeppo returned to work at Ford for the summer, but his fate was sealed. He was now one of the Four Marx Brothers, and he would be heading out on the road as part of the act in September.
The fall vaudeville season in 1918 was like no other. The Spanish Influenza epidemic shut down most of vaudeville, but the Four Marx Brothers initially tried to carry on with a new show. It seemed to them that Home Again had been played in just about every vaudeville theater in the country for the last four years. With the creation of a new show, Zeppo had some hope that he could do more than simply take the place of Gummo, who filled a role created for a brother with skills that, by his own admission, were limited.
Several members of the Marx family have claimed that in private life Zeppo was the funniest brother. He would seem perfectly suited to joining a comedy team, but Zeppo was always the first to acknowledge that there was no room for a fourth comedian in the act. Chico’s daughter Maxine described Zeppo’s sense of humor as occasionally cruel. By way of example, she cited a story passed down by Chico. When it became clear that the new show, The Cinderella Girl, wasn’t very good and would be scuttled in favor of reviving Home Again, Zeppo’s frustrated comment to his brothers was this: “Do you want me to stammer Gummo’s lines?” Brothers could be cruel to one another, and they had no problem giving him a nickname based on his alleged resemblance to a sideshow freak, but Zeppo seems unnecessarily mean at the expense of the generally kindhearted Gummo.
With The Cinderella Girl (sometimes known as The Street Cinderella), the Four Marx Brothers attempted to make the leap from vaudeville to the legitimate stage with a self-produced musical show. They debuted it in Benton Harbor, Michigan, on September 26, 1918, and never went any further with the show. The combination of World War I, the flu epidemic, and a weak script doomed The Cinderella Girl. But the plot, as described in local Benton Harbor papers, indicated that a substantial role had been created for Zeppo.
A pretty street singer named Amoleta and her brother Harpo pass the hat to make ends meet. Harold Hammer (Zeppo) loves Amoleta and dreams of success in the stock market. Chico Saroni is also in love with Amoleta and dreams of owning a three-chair barber shop. Harold’s father (Groucho) disapproves of his son’s dreams and supports Saroni in his quest for Amoleta. But this only spurs Harold on. He achieves success and marries Amoleta.
Zeppo’s character was central to the plot in a way that Gummo’s never was. Gummo also played Groucho’s son in Home Again, but his primary function in the show was to give Groucho someone to bounce lines off. Apart from singing and dancing, Gummo’s main contribution to Home Again came in the form of lines like “But Father . . .” and “Yes, Father but what about . . .” Gummo was the prototypical vaudeville straight man. The Cinderella Girl was to be a new opportunity for the Four Marx Brothers—now featuring a fourth brother with a chance to display some real musical comedy skills. But it was not to be.
Several weeks of Midwestern bookings for the show in October and November were canceled and attempts to retool The Cinderella Girl were abandoned. Vaudeville was slowly recovering from the effects of the war and the flu epidemic as the Four Marx Brothers accepted their fate and gave up on their plans for the legitimate stage. Instead, they revised Home Again to take advantage of Zeppo’s presence and slightly expanded the role of the fourth brother. They renamed the show ‘N’ Everything, but it was still essentially Home Again. Zeppo was disappointed about going back to filling Gummo’s minimal slot after a brief chance in a substantial role. Travel was problematic as the waning days of the war and the flu epidemic severely compromised the railroads, so they played the show exclusively in the Midwest—staying in Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan—until February 1919, when they embarked on a lengthy tour that would take them across the United States and Canada.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Reluctant Vaudevillian
ON FEBRUARY 3, 1919, THE FOUR MARX BROTHERS OPENED AT THE Palace Theatre in Chicago with their not exactly new act. Variety summed up the situation in their February 7 review of the show: “The act is billed as ‘The Four Marx Brothers in Their New Revue.’ It is really not a new revue—it’s the old revue with new scenery, new gowns, new gags, new songs and a new Marx Brother, Herbert Marx, who replaced Milton Marx.”
The act worked through the summer of 1919, skipping the normal vacation vaudevillians customarily took for most of July and August, thereby cutting their losses from the Cinderella Girl debacle. In November Gene Maddox, a dancer who had been with the Marx Brothers since 1917, left to form a “boy and girl” act with dancer Al Gibbs. Maddox had been Gummo’s dancing partner in the show, and she continued being featured in a dance number with Zeppo after Gummo’s departure. She had also been Zeppo’s love interest in the ill-fated Cinderella Girl. There were several new faces with the act in 1919, but it wouldn’t be any of them who would replace Gene Maddox as Zeppo’s dance partner.
Ruth Johnson had no experience on the stage, but this was never an impediment for the Marx Brothers. Minnie had put inexperienced relatives and neighbors on stage in the past. Ruth had been living with her parents on Calumet Avenue around a mile from the Marx home on Grand Boulevard. Her parents divorced, and her mother remarried in 1919. Twenty-two-year-old Ruth briefly lived in a Chicago boarding house but was in New York when she met Zeppo around the time the Marx Brothers learned that Gene Maddox was leaving the act. He told BBC interviewer Barry Norman, “[T]here was quite a nice pool room, the ladies used to go there, and I saw this blonde, she was very pretty, and I really got stuck on her just by seeing her, and I said, ‘Jesus, I bet I could make a dancer out of her.’ So, I talked to her. I said, ‘Would you like to go in show business,’ and she said yes. I said, ‘Can you dance?’ She said no. I said, ‘Well, I’ll teach you.’ So, I got her the job.” Zeppo learned very quickly that when it came to chasing women, being one of the Four Marx Brothers had certain advantages.
Living on the road most of the time, the Marx Brothers had very few rules about women. One that was frequently broken involved avoiding stray bullets in small towns by staying away from the local girls. There were certainly plenty of pretty girls in the act and on the bill with them in every city. Girlfriends had always been fair game and that generally meant that sooner or later Chico would have a dalliance with a brother’s latest girlfriend. Chico’s daughter Maxine explained that the first serious and unbreakable rule they imposed was that wives were off limits. Apparently, this was necessary because shortly after Chico married Betty, one of his brothers made a move on her. But without a marriage license a Marx Brother could lose a girl to a brother if he took his eyes off her for a minute. So, it came as no surprise when, shortly after becoming Zeppo’s new dance partner, Ruth found herself another Marx Brother for offstage romance.1
