The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 21 August 2013
by Groucho Marx
He was, and is, one of America's most recognizable icons, even 40 years after his death (just three days after Elvis). Groucho Marx was one of five brothers (with Gummo, Zeppo, Chico, Harpo) in the zany comedy team who blazed a comic trail through vaudeville and movies in the first half of the 20th century. In his sedate advancing years, he was famous for a long-running quiz show designed to highlight his good-natured humor, You Bet Your Life. But it has been the fame of his (and his brothers') few movies that cemented him in our culture as a wise-cracking iconoclastic every-man. Men today might still aspire to Groucho's free-wheeling intelligent zaniness and light cruise over social morés. Less known is that Groucho also aspired to be a writer, though he never graduated grammar school. His short pieces appeared under his given name, Julius, in The New Yorker in its early years. And so, in the late 1950s, he wrote this autobiography, he says, at the request of his agent.
We read of Groucho's youth, his parents, and their cramped life in a New York City tenement at the turn of the 20th century. The Marx brothers' parents were not well-off, and at very young ages, the brothers set out to make livings for themselves, performing music in bars and clubs, and eventually setting out on long vaudeville tours. On the stage, they honed their comedic skills, finally hit Broadway, and from there the movies. This is a highly anecdotal and episodic autobiography, light on details and statistics of Groucho's life. He focuses more on the curious nature of life on the vaudeville circuit, his and his brothers' youthful antics making a living and looking for fun, and on his own misadventures among perhaps less flighty society. Groucho was a pretty good writer, keeping his story moving fast, while not being as surrealistically funny as a reader might have expected. At the same time, the book is amusing and idiosyncratic. One does wonder the level of the embellishment of his tales. The reader is also left wondering how much we really know about the man at the end of the book. He says so little about his personal life, and there are chapters in which it seems he is just trying to fill pages. At the distance of a century, life on the vaudeville circuit seems so much on the edge, so unfamiliar in today's oversaturated entertainment world. This is the fascinating first half of this book. The second half is more in the realm of his Hollywood fame, though, again, the book is light on chatty details and heavy on wry episodes that seem to reflect an awkward, comic and somewhat curmudgeonly character. That isn't so unexpected. It's an engaging book, though, seemingly from another time. And it is, isn't it?