Hello, I Must Be Going was Chandler’s first show biz book, apparently assembled and rushed to market in some haste in the wake of Groucho’s and Gummo’s deaths. I recommend reading all three for the most complete picture. The third great portrait, covering the same years, the early 1970s is of course Steve Stoliar’s Raised Eyebrows. The truth, one imagines, is probably somewhere in between.
For the same reason no doubt, Groucho himself (the main focus of the book) and his live-in paramour/manager/assistant Erin Fleming both also seem on their best behavior (in stark contrast to the snapshot we get of Groucho in the Anobile book as a foul mouthed, dirty old man. Logically, this was because Chandler was a classy, elegant lady, and Zeppo was a Marx Brother, which is to say, something of a wolf. In contrast with Richard Anobile’s Marx Brothers Scrapbook, for example, in which Zeppo is downright hostile and terse, Chandler got him to spill the beans on his whole post Marx Brothers career. There are copious anecdotes about them related by others (including countless references to Zeppo as the funniest of the brothers off screen) but there are also extended interviews, where both men opened up with a volubility I’d not encountered before. I don’t know of any other book that offers as full a portrait of these seeming shadow-Marxes, so much more elusive than their vastly more famous and public brothers. My main takeaway, as a major Gummo and Zeppo booster, is sheer delight in the wealth of material the book has on both brothers.
It proved to be such a trove I wanted to recommend it to the more devoted Marxians out there who haven’t yet read it, and conversely, assist readers of that book with information about the many obscure names that Groucho and his cronies drop over the course of their interviews (and about many of the cronies themselves, who by now have also become obscure). I’m pretty sure I’d not read it previously (at the very least I didn’t own it). Somehow, though, this one seems to have fallen through the cracks. As you can imagine, I have long since read just about every book about the Marx Brothers, singly and as a team. My friend Last-Up Larry kindly gave me some used books a few months back two were by author/journalist Charlotte Chandler (no apparent relation to Rosco W.), including 1978’s Hello I Must Be Going: Groucho and His Friends. Today something I almost never do: plug a book that’s decades old (as opposed to 150 years old or new).
0 kommentar(er)
