Zeppo from A to Zed

You don’t know with what pleasure I rode through New York on buses and trains this past Tuesday (April 1), conspicuously reading Zeppo: The Reluctant Marx Brother in hopes that some stranger would call me out on an elaborate April Fool’s prank. It’s no prank, but it seems like one, doesn’t it? Writing a biography of Zeppo Marx has the ring of something someone would do on a dare. I was so delighted when I heard that Robert Bader had the book in the works that I have already written about it three times: when I heard about it at Marxfest, then when the book was released, and when I attended the launch event on Zeppo’s birthday. And now I’ve read the book, so here’s a fourth.

Marxian dilletantes should know that most Marx Brothers fans wind up becoming Marx family fans. Many members of the comedy team’s extended family were also in show business, and many of those who weren’t were nonetheless entertaining, semi-legendary characters easily incorporated into the lore. Fans of “the three funny brothers” are also fans of the two ostensibly lesser brothers, but also their parents, their grandparents, certain uncles, aunts and cousins, as well as wives, children, and grandchildren. Of course we only know about most of these entertaining people through biographies, since most of them, including one of the actual Marx Brothers (Gummo) were never in movies. And Zeppo has always been intriguing to those in the know, because though he did appear in films, his light was hidden, through no fault of his own, under a bushel. Now the full man emerges into the harsh glare of the sunlight.

As with Bader’s previous book Four of the Three Musketeers, one’s overriding impression is that all the previous books about the Marx Brothers will need to be rewritten. We’re in the habit of giving short shrift to the two “straight” Marx Brothers, even when we suspect, and have been told, that they deserved more than that. Zeppo is even reputed to be the funniest of the brothers, socially at any rate, as reported by many who knew them. But still his role in all previous books about the team has been underwritten. The reason is that the books naturally focus on the stage and screen careers of the brothers as a team. And Zeppo’s life didn’t truly begin until he broke away from the act. When he did, he was arguably of more significance in Hollywood than any of his brothers. That’s one of this book’s surprising but convincing revelations.

But there were many others. Among them:

• Zeppo was every bit the vaudevillian that his brothers were. We are accustomed to the idea of him having been drafted into the act cold to replace Gummo in the Four Marx Brothers in 1918. In reality, he had been performing professionally since 1914, with his four brothers, as a solo act, and with an act called The Juvenile Six. He had been onstage since he was 13, and was thus a professional performer for a full 20 years. Granted, he was pushed into it by his mother, but that’s true of most of his brothers as well.

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• The Zip the Pinhead explanation for Zeppo’s nickname emerges to be almost certainly the true one.

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• In addition to having appeared in a movie once without his brothers, we learn that Zeppo also sang on the radio, and tried his hand at screenwriting. Bader describes several of the scenarios Zeppo cooked up, and most of them sound pretty solid!

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• Most fans know that Zeppo became an agent after leaving the team, but few know anymore that he was an IMPORTANT agent. By his own estimation, at one point his was the third leading agency in Hollywood. That may or not be true, but I bet it’s close to accurate, and that at certain points it was literally true for a minute. His most important client, and a close friend, was Barbara Stanwyck. Stanwyck and Zeppo’s first wife Marion (who was in the Eddie Cantor movie Palmy Days) were best friends; Stanwyck and Zeppo went into business together on various ventures, including real estate deals and a horse ranch. Stanwyck’s first husband Frank Fay was also a friend from the vaudeville and Broadway days, but the Zeppo Marxes were also the witnesses (the only two) at Stanwyck’s wedding to Robert Taylor. Other major clients included Lana Turner,Jack Benny,Clark Gable, Mickey Rooney, Fred MacMurray, and most of the major writers of the Algonquin Roundtable. At his peak Zeppo had a couple of hundred acts on his roster. When Gummo was an agent, he was essentially under Zeppo’s employ, though he later became a partner. Zeppo only represented his brothers on the Room Service deal, and he hated it. After that, he handed them off to Gummo.

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• One of Zeppo’s first agency partners was Frank Orsatti, uncle of Ernie Orsatti. This is a second factoid linking my favorite comedy team to one of my favorite movies, The Poseidon Adventure. (The other of course is that Irwin Allen also produced The Story of Mankind and was a friend of Groucho).

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• Zeppo was mobbed up. One had a vague sense of that before, but Bader’s got all the receipts. As a kid in Chicago Zeppo ran with street gangs, much as Chico and Harpo had done as kids in New York many years before him. And of course, Chico’s gambling problem (and borrowing problem) kept him in shady company throughout his life. But Zeppo appears to have gone much farther than that. He seems to have had mob backing for several of his projects. He got in on the ground floor of Las Vegas, owning part of a casino for a time. He remained a high roller in Vegas once the town was established, which is how he met his second wife showgirl Barbara Marx, who was later in turn stolen away by Frank Sinatra. Zeppo was in trouble with the law many times for street fights, and had to testify in court a couple of times with respect to his mob associations.

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• Zeppo was fiercely entrepreneurial. Like his brothers, he was extremely creative, he just learned to channel it a different way. In addition to the talent agency and other ventures we’ve mentioned (and many we haven’t), he also owned a war production plant (lucrative business especially during World War Two) that employed hundreds of workers. He had loved cars since boyhood. This grew into a love of metal working. He actually had his own machine shop at his home, simply as a hobby. And this grew into him taking contracts, and finally expansion. Once that got going, he actually lost interest in the talent agency. Bader suggests convincingly that not only was Zeppo the richest of the Marx Brothers at his peak, he was as rich as all the others put together.

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• Bader suggests that Zeppo brought more to the act than Gummo had. One clue is that for a time, the period from the tab musicals of the team’s late vaudeville years through I’ll Say She Is, and to a lesser extent, in the Broadway versions of The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers, the straight brother role was much expanded. One advantage Zeppo had over Gummo is that the former could understudy his brothers; he was that kind of performer. Gummo seems to have been restricted to his own distinctive identity, which we will always have to wonder about. As I’ve argued in the past, Gummo’s status as one of the original four may have given him a certain status that Zeppo lacked. This may be debatable, though, and will certainly always be academic.

In the debit column, Zeppo was terrible at being a family man, a bad husband and even worse father, though I can’t bring myself to condemn him for it as much as Bader does, or as my friends of the Marx Brothers Council podcast do. In my profiling of Hollywood stars I’ve come across so many who were roughly as awful as Zeppo was, right down to cruelty and neglect of adopted children, which his good friend Stanwyck was also guilty of, not to mention Joan Crawford! To varying degrees, his brothers were better at domesticity. But as Bader himself points out, Zeppo himself had been neglected as a child. It seems logical, though certainly not admirable, that he grew up to be a selfish adult. And, well, Hollywood and Las Vegas are not towns famous for shunning the wicked. What’s one more charming S.O.B. in a sea of charming S.O.B.s?

Anyway, these are just the key takeaways. The book is full of much more juicy detail, countless anecdotes, and hundreds more bold-faced names, all sewn together by the man who may know more about the Marx Brothers than any other person living. It’s written with humor, humanity, and historicity — and that’s just the Hs. Case in point: the book has a “Zepilogue” at the end. How I curse myself for not coming up with that!

More on Robert Bader’s Zeppo: The Reluctant Marx Brotherhere.