Zeppo, p.17
Zeppo, page 17
Affairs have all been too methodical. Miss Compson had just returned home from a party; Miss West had a display of jewelry which she seldom wore; Raft’s home was without any occupants on the night it was burglarized and Von Brincken’s wife had taken her jewelry out of a vault the day before she was held up.
Coppers believe that someone connected with the picture business or some former picture personality who has had a tough break is working with the mobsters, getting a split on what is taken from the victims.
If the thieves had an inside man helping arrange their victims, it wouldn’t have necessarily been someone who’d had a tough break. It could have just been someone raising money to buy into a business.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
What Makes Herbie Run?
“We operate like any business partnership. Only three of us vote so far. Zeppo hasn’t graduated yet. We pay him a salary.”—Chico Marx,
—CHICO MARX, COLLIER’S, JULY 10, 1926
EIGHT YEARS AFTER COLLIER’S QUOTED CHICO, THE YOUNGEST OF THE Four Marx Brothers was still an undergraduate. But by all outward appearances Zeppo Marx seemed to be a very wealthy man in 1934. He enjoyed a luxurious lifestyle and lived as well as any movie star with a much higher salary. But delivering straight lines in Marx Brothers movies didn’t pay well enough for Zeppo to live the way he did. He was a prolific gambler, and most accounts point to him usually coming out ahead. But how did he suddenly come up with $75,000 in cash and notes to buy a piece of a thriving talent agency?
In 1973 Zeppo told Richard J. Anobile, “I was busted and didn’t have a quarter, but I decided I had to do something.” He probably wasn’t exaggerating. In August 1932 Zeppo earned a few unflattering local headlines when the Sunset Laurel Market sued him over an unpaid $52 grocery bill. Ultimately it didn’t matter to Frank Orsatti where Zeppo’s money came from. He had his own criminal past and a brother doing time in San Quentin. Milton Bren, on the other hand, was less comfortable about his hard-core gambler bridge buddy joining the firm.
Corporate documents show Bren as president, Orsatti as vice president, and Zeppo as secretary, so Bren presumably had a lot of influence on major decisions. Bren, Orsatti & Marx was short-lived. The partners formally dissolved the agency on June 25 after having officially formed it on April 20. On June 12, 1934, Daily Variety reported,
When the Bren-Orsatti-Marx Agency split takes place this week it is understood that Zeppo Marx, who joined the firm recently, will be returned $25,000 cash and his notes for $50,000 (which he was to redeem out of profits) for his interest in the agency. Both Milton Bren and Frank Orsatti are to agree on a division of the clients within the next day or two and each will continue in the business on his own. Marx, it is understood, may join the ranks of one of the larger agencies as an associate, not wanting at this time to go in on his own.
On June 18, the Hollywood Reporter disclosed more details of the split: “Milton Bren has taken over more than 50 of the Bren, Orsatti & Marx office clients, and Frank Orsatti will handle 27. Marx has taken five personal clients that he brought into the concern and has been paid back his investment.” Groucho, Harpo, and Chico made no secret of the fact that they were helping Zeppo find clients. Marx Brothers’ friends and associates Alexander Woollcott, George S. Kaufman, Morrie Ryskind and Moss Hart were among Zeppo’s first signings.
Another was writer Norman Krasna, a close friend of Harpo’s and an occasional writing partner of Groucho’s. Krasna had been one of the playwrights who submitted a manuscript to Zeppo during his brief time as the president of the Westwood Theatre Guild. Zeppo incessantly courted Krasna, who initially begged off, telling Zeppo he already was represented by Charlie Feldman and Ralph Blum. In an often-told Marx family tale, Zeppo was dining in a Hollywood restaurant with Krasna when a drunk began harassing the very unimposing Krasna. Zeppo flattened the guy with one punch and asked Krasna, “Does the Feldman-Blum Agency do that for you?” adding “All for the same ten percent, my friend.” Woollcott, Kaufman, Ryskind, Hart, and Krasna were the five clients Zeppo took with him when the Bren, Orsatti & Marx partnership was dissolved.
It’s quite possible that Harry Weber had left the partnership so quickly due to the company Frank Orsatti kept. Weber may not have been the most popular agent in town, but he didn’t have mobsters, bootleggers, and narcotics dealers hanging around his office. The clean-living and law-abiding Milton Bren also had second thoughts—possibly even exacerbated by the sudden arrival in his office of the totally inexperienced Zeppo Marx, who seemed perfectly comfortable with Orsatti’s underworld friends. Bren’s resume looked nothing like Orsatti’s.
After coming up through the ranks at MGM, and his time as an agent, Bren would go on to become a respected and successful producer for the Hal Roach Studios, MGM, and Columbia. During World War II he would serve as a lieutenant commander in the Coast Guard and then as a destroyer captain in the Pacific Theatre. Orsatti’s background and friends probably kept Milton Bren perpetually nervous.
Whatever the reason, Bren, Orsatti & Marx was not to be. Zeppo briefly considered joining the Small & Landau agency but ultimately decided to go it alone. His primary motivation for leaving the Four Marx Brothers was a burning desire to be his own boss, and now he would be. In July of 1934, Zeppo Marx, Inc. was formed with the help of Loyd Wright—the same attorney who would later tell the FBI that Louis B. Mayer was immoral and unprincipled for associating with the Orsattis.1
On October 1, 1934, an item in Variety seemed to have been planted to shift the onus of the partnership’s failure away from Zeppo, noting that “Zeppo’s affiliation had nothing to do with the split. After the three-way division, there were three new agencies, where only one existed before, all three partners going into business for themselves.” Maybe someone thought placing this in Variety was important as a face-saving gesture because Orsatti and Bren, while officially separating into two agencies, remained in the same Beverly Hills office that had been occupied by Bren, Orsatti & Marx. It certainly seemed by appearances that Zeppo was pushed out. Columnist Leonard Lyons got a different version of the breakup from Zeppo in 1952: “‘The first thing to remember is that an agent has to be friendly with everybody,’ his new partners told him at their first business session. Zeppo then arranged to get his $100,000 back immediately—for he discovered that Orsatti and Bren weren’t on speaking terms.” If Zeppo paid $100,000—as he frequently claimed years later—the source of the additional $25,000 could have had numerous explanations, but none of them would have been a business loan from a bank. None of the Hollywood trade papers had anything to say about Zeppo’s financing. Maybe Zeppo’s links to Jesse Orsatti’s criminal activities in the period leading up to the deal are all just coincidental. But maybe they’re not. It’s possible that the whole thing was a setup in which Frank Orsatti agreed to get Zeppo started in the agency business, never really intending to be his partner.
Some people had trouble taking Zeppo’s new venture seriously. In his New York Daily News column Sidney Skolsky wrote, “The talk about the movie city is that Zeppo Marx became an agent to learn how it feels for an actor to go to work.” In the August 26, 1934, Screen and Radio Weekly, Grace Wilcox shared a tale from Zeppo’s early days as an agent that suggests even Zeppo wasn’t taking his new job seriously:
Recently he called up Jack Warner and asked him if he could bring out a “find” for a test. Jack Warner set an hour and a day and told him he would be glad to look the would-be actor over. At the appointed time, Zeppo and his “find” appeared. The “find” went through the necessary routine for a test and when it was finished, Zeppo leaned back, sighed deeply and said: “Isn’t he wonderful? Isn’t he colossal? Isn’t he marvelous?” “Not bad at all—Not bad at all,” agreed Jack Warner, in the level voice of a producer who is wondering what he will have to pay. “Who is he, Zeppo?”
“I don’t know. I’m just practicing with him!” replied Zeppo, innocently.
That curious announcement about the Bren, Orsatti & Marx breakup not being Zeppo’s fault came just as the Marx Brothers signed an MGM contract as a trio. But they did not actually sign with MGM. They signed with Irving Thalberg, who was powerful enough at the studio to have his own production unit and the discretion to offer contracts to people that Louis B. Mayer did not want at MGM. It’s impossible to discern what level of power Mayer wielded over Frank Orsatti and his business, but he certainly had some influence considering what they knew about each other, and the fact that Mayer bankrolled Orsatti in the first place.
Mayer’s disdain for the Marx Brothers was often referenced by Groucho through the years. Having had no prior business with them, the possibility that Mayer didn’t want the Marxes at MGM could have had something to do with Zeppo’s intimate knowledge of Frank Orsatti’s business—and having knowledge of Mayer’s involvement in some of Orsatti’s less than legal activities. Film producer and journalist Peter Bart wrote in Variety on September 26, 2009, “In the studios’ halcyon days, the firings were more colorful than the movies. Frank Orsatti was fired by Louis B. Mayer for running the official studio brothel. The termination was not on moral grounds—Orsatti was siphoning off too much money.”
One of Zeppo’s first moves with his own agency was to place one of his five writer clients in a movie as an actor. On June 28, 1934, the Hollywood Reporter announced the deal: “Universal yesterday wired Alexander Woollcott a bona fide offer to try his hand at acting in pictures. The noted raconteur and critic made a sally at acting in Brief Moment on the stage. The studio has offered him a role in Gift of Gab. The offer went through Zeppo Marx.” Woollcott didn’t need to do much acting. In a comedy about a radio personality, he played radio personality Alexander Woollcott. Zeppo would revisit the idea of putting nonactors on the screen. In February 1937 he signed New Yorker magazine cartoonist Peter Arno and tried to sell him as an actor. Arno went before the cameras once before resuming his successful cartooning career. He appeared as himself in the Jack Benny film Artists and Models. Zeppo may have reminded Benny that he’d introduced him to his wife to get Arno the job.
In August 1934 Zeppo strengthened his agency with the hiring of the experienced agent Walter Kane away from Harry Weber. He also took in one of Milton Bren’s closest friends, the respected and experienced Louis Artigue. In September, Zeppo brokered a deal with 20th Century Fox for Norman Krasna to write the screenplay for The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo. Things started moving quickly as a totally inexperienced agent with a few respected agents in his office was suddenly attracting clients and making deals. A month after the Krasna deal Zeppo negotiated screenwriter Julius Epstein’s contract with Warner Bros., where eight years later Epstein would win an Academy Award for his work on Casablanca. Zeppo didn’t have much trouble picking up his uncle Al Shean as a client. The great vaudevillian who inspired his nephews was now in Hollywood as an aging character actor. In September 1934 Zeppo negotiated a deal for Uncle Al at Warner Bros.
Zeppo seemed to find a niche representing writers in the early days of his agency. He hired Leonard Spigelgass, a scenario editor and producer at Universal, to head the agency’s writers’ division. Among the first screenwriters signed to the agency was the team of John Bright and Robert Tasker, who were quickly placed with 20th Century Fox and Paramount for a pair of projects. Zeppo was also able to continue cashing in on some of his family connections. New York newspaper columnist Heywood Broun, a longtime friend of the Marx Brothers, arrived in Hollywood looking for film work and was quickly signed by the Zeppo Marx Agency. In July 1935 Zeppo sent Walter Kane, who he would soon promote to vice president, to New York to set up an East Coast office to be headed by Gummo, who was struggling to keep his various business ventures afloat.
Zeppo told Charlotte Chandler,
Gummo was in New York, and he was in the dress business or something and he wanted to go into the agency business. So, my brothers came to me and said, “Jeez, what about Gummo?” So, I said, “All right. We’ll open a New York office and let Gummo take over the New York office.” So, he opened an office, and he did very well. He got New York actors signed up to our agency, sending them out here and I’d sell them if I could.
Film Daily, on February 13, 1937, took note of the efficiency of the New York office.
Matching the speed of its coast office, the Zeppo Marx Agency in New York is delivering players, writers and other gilt-edged talent to producers. Gummo Marx, who gets around, is the head man for the office in Manhattanisle. The Gummo Marx service is taking on that certain distinguished quality that is inherent in the name of Marx.
A year after deciding to go it alone in the agency business, Zeppo was successful enough to break ground on a new office building on Sunset Boulevard. More significantly, he would now employ one of his brothers, which had to bring him a certain level of satisfaction. Gummo told Richard J. Anobile, “I had been away from show business for quite a number of years but nevertheless I did very well and managed to send out quite a few people.”
High-profile acting clients did not come easily at first. But Zeppo demonstrated creative thinking that caught people’s attention. He signed Patricia Ellis, a steadily working but undistinguished Warner Bros. contract player. He was aware of her background in musical theater and her desire to sing. She was in a rut at Warner Bros. and Zeppo booked her for a weeklong singing engagement in Detroit, near her hometown, in November 1936. If nothing else, this was a quick way to earn revenue on representing Patricia Ellis that would eclipse whatever she could earn under her film contract. In the early days of his agency, Zeppo became known as a champion of lost causes, taking on clients with the odds clearly stacked against them. While he did occasionally turn a lowly contract player into a star, the lost causes mostly remained lost.
Zeppo’s most challenging client was the celebrated novelist Upton Sinclair, well known as the author of The Jungle. In November 1934, after Sinclair’s unsuccessful campaign to be the governor of California, the future Pulitzer Prize winner received a wire from Zeppo, saying, “Would like to handle you for a job at a studio. What’s your salary?” The studio chiefs would normally have been throwing each other into traffic to get a writer as good as Sinclair, but he was considered poisonous to the industry because of what the fiercely conservative moguls considered his radical politics. While living in Monrovia—not very far from Hollywood—Sinclair had been the Socialist Party candidate for a seat in the House of Representatives in 1920 and the United States Senate in 1922. He also ran in the California gubernatorial races in 1926 and 1930 as a Socialist. He lost each time and was not considered much of a threat. But when he ran for governor in 1934 as a Democrat, he had a far more respectable showing even though he lost to the incumbent Republican, Frank Merriam.
In Hollywood the studios all vehemently opposed Sinclair, and pressured employees to vote for Merriam. At MGM Irving Thalberg produced anti-Sinclair propaganda films depicting hoboes heading to California to cash in on Sinclair’s proposed anti-poverty programs and branding him as a Communist. A legitimate case could be made that Irving Thalberg invented “fake news” and destroyed the Sinclair campaign. The purported documentary newsreel-style short films featured actors reading scripts with scenes staged on the MGM lot. Sinclair was going to be a tough sell, but Zeppo signed him up. In her December 17 column Louella Parsons wrote:
Upton Sinclair, who for months was the boogey-man of the movies when he was running for governor, wants to become one of us. Sinclair has movie ambitions and he’s engaged Zeppo Marx, of the Marx Brothers, to represent him in all negotiations. Sinclair will write, if he gets the chance, and I’m told that he had dinner with Samuel Goldwyn and has an appointment with Louis B. Mayer. So, all is going to be too beautiful. Why not? After all, Sinclair is an established writer, and he should be a much better scenarist than politician.
Zeppo’s plan wasn’t just to get Sinclair a writing job. His idea was to have him star in a film about his gubernatorial race based on his new book, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked. Variety reported that Sinclair “has good stage presence and voice is okay for sound.” Hollywood’s reaction was predictable. When Sinclair won the Democratic primary, the studios had threatened to relocate the entire industry to Florida if he became governor, rather than suffer under the proposed tax hikes that Sinclair planned to end poverty.
Politically, Zeppo was as liberal as Thalberg was conservative and had no problem representing Sinclair. But the studios had made their position very clear by taking payroll deductions from employees and donating the money to the Merriam campaign. Among the few in Hollywood who spoke up about the dirty political tricks were James Cagney, Fredric March, screenwriter Dorothy Parker, and talent agent Zeppo Marx, the only man in town willing to help Sinclair find work.
Not surprisingly, there were no jobs available at any studio for Upton Sinclair. But rather than harm Zeppo’s ability to attract clients, the Sinclair episode gained him the respect of the quietly growing liberal movement in the industry. If nothing else, potential clients learned that Zeppo was fearless.
Sinclair was but one example of Zeppo reaching out in many directions in search of clients. In New York, Broadway columnist Ed Sullivan noted, “Zeppo Marx, wiring local actors to let him handle their Coast business, has burned up Broadway agents.” One of Zeppo’s early success stories as an agent came from another seemingly lost cause. In September 1934 British actress Wendy Barrie came to Hollywood hoping to land a contract with a studio. She had experienced some early success in England and caught Hollywood’s attention with her performance in Alexander Korda’s 1933 film The Private Life of Henry VIII alongside Charles Laughton and Merle Oberon. But Barrie’s first months in Hollywood resulted in unsuccessful screen tests at every major studio other than Paramount. When she signed with the Zeppo Marx Agency, the situation looked hopeless, with Paramount looking like her last chance. Walter Kane and Zeppo went to work. Alva Johnston told the story in an August 15, 1942, Saturday Evening Post article, “Hollywood’s Ten Per Centers”:
