Zeppo, p.2
Zeppo, page 2
With a small handful of exceptions, most people who knew Zeppo Marx are gone. Telling his story in anything more than a cursory manner is difficult. And he would be perfectly happy with that because to him none of it was anyone’s business. Once he got out of the Four Marx Brothers, he felt no obligation to participate in any form of publicity and gave very few interviews. He told a friend late in his life that he wouldn’t put any of his stories down on paper or on tape because he was sure he’d be sued. But his story—and all its deviations from the traditional story of the Marx Brothers—is well worth investigating. If the story of the Marx Brothers is a triumphant show business tale, Zeppo’s is a dimly lit film noir based on a gritty crime novel.
Robert S. Bader
Los Angeles, California
April 2024
INTRODUCTION
BEING AROUND ZEPPO MARX WAS OFTEN DIFFICULT FOR PEOPLE CLOSE to him—even going back to his childhood. Once he was able to live on his own terms and by his own rules, life was never difficult for Zeppo—although being close to him never got any easier for other people. Being in charge meant everything to him. Being successful was the icing on the cake, but success had been just out of his reach until he took matters into his own hands and refused to rely on anyone but himself. He’d certainly been a part of something very successful, but it wasn’t his success.
Being the fourth of the Four Marx Brothers was never especially interesting to Zeppo. The sixth Marx brother by birth and the fifth to survive infancy, he had big dreams; but pressure to go along with plans that did not coincide with his own controlled him for many years. When he finally broke free it was as if he had to make up for lost time. Zeppo’s restless and peripatetic nature took him from juvenile delinquency to a variety of careers that would seem impossible for one man. Automobile mechanic, vaudevillian, Broadway and movie star, real estate salesman, screenwriter, talent agent, horse breeder, manufacturer, inventor, builder, professional gambler, citrus rancher, and commercial fisherman. And he succeeded at almost all of them, making and losing a couple of fortunes. Nat Perrin, a Marx Brothers’ writer and friend told author Charlotte Chandler, “Zeppo was a gambler and a very smart guy in business. Highly underrated, a success in most of everything he did except the Marx Brothers. . . . He’s a man of many varied abilities, but people just don’t seem to realize it. . . . [H]e probably was the unhappiest with the Marx Brothers because he was the low man on the totem pole.”
It’s a commonly accepted theory that the arrival of talking pictures not only destroyed many silent film careers but also countless vaudeville stage careers. Vaudeville had been struggling for several years courtesy of the rise of the movie industry. Films began emerging as popular entertainment on vaudeville bills during the silent era, with the initial effect being the replacement of a couple of acts on a bill by a film. Eventually vaudeville theaters stopped booking live acts in favor of the more affordable option of booking only films. The combined effect of talkies and the growing popularity of legitimate stage musicals sealed vaudeville’s fate by the late 1920s. Although it survived in other forms for several more years, vaudeville essentially ground to a halt with the premiere of The Jazz Singer in October 1927.
Vaudevillians able to make the transition to Broadway and talking films were few and far between. Numerous headliners were forced to find other ways to make a living. Acrobats, comedians, singers, magicians, and dancers suddenly found work in factories or as salesmen. Some could not cope with their sudden loss of stardom, and there was a high suicide rate among former vaudevillians. Had the Four Marx Brothers ended with the death of vaudeville, Zeppo would have been fine. The same would not have been true for his brothers, who by that point were ill-equipped for anything other than show business.
The small group of vaudevillians who had found some success on Broadway soon found themselves in talking pictures. Among this select group were the Four Marx Brothers, who had survived a sometimes-tumultuous vaudeville career to become the stars of three Broadway hits. But within the Four Marx Brothers was an even more select group of vaudeville and Broadway survivors. It wasn’t even a group. It was one man. The sole survivor of vaudeville and Broadway who went on to success in talking pictures but didn’t want any part of it was Zeppo Marx. Drafted into the act at age seventeen to replace his brother Gummo—another reluctant vaudevillian—Zeppo was with the act for its greatest period of success, as the team made the leap from vaudeville to Broadway, eventually relocating to Hollywood for movie stardom.
Zeppo was the accidental Marx brother when he joined the family. He became the accidental Marx Brother in a completely different sense seventeen years later when he joined the act. In both cases this was through circumstances he was unable to control. The poor timing of his birth would later be useful—not for him, but for his mother. She didn’t need a fifth son in 1901, but she desperately needed a fourth Marx Brother in 1918.
In the early days of the Depression, Zeppo Marx had it made. He was famous and the money was rolling in—even though his share of it was considerably less than those of his brothers Groucho, Harpo, and Chico, who employed him. Any number of vaudevillians forced into a mundane existence in America’s dwindling Depression-era workforce would have given anything to be in Zeppo’s comparatively underpaid shoes. He may have been easily mocked as the least important Marx Brother, but he did a fine job with what little he was given to do in the act. And Zeppo was paid a handsome salary by the standards of the day. Who would throw that away? Perhaps a man who had gone through his life without ever having the opportunity to decide anything for himself. Or maybe a man who resented working for his brothers at a salary he considered unfair in comparison to their earnings as owners of the act. Zeppo could have made a good argument for either case.
Zeppo’s repudiation of a life in which his mother and brothers controlled him was long overdue by the time he quit the Marx Brothers. But Zeppo wouldn’t be happy with just his independence. He would need complete autonomy in control of his future destiny. Perhaps it was overcompensation for the years he spent without any control. He was thirty-three years old when he quit the act. He had been the fourth Marx Brother for roughly half of his life—and his brothers never made him an equal partner in the business, keeping him on salary for sixteen years as they were one of the highest paid acts in vaudeville, on Broadway, and in movies. Leaving the act, Zeppo had a lot to prove—to his brothers and to himself. While some out-of-work vaudevillians were forced into factory work, Zeppo Marx would eventually own a factory. After his departure made the Four Marx Brothers a trio, Zeppo never spent a single day in the employ of anyone but himself. He needed to have absolute control, but he also needed to make more money. A lot more money than he made as a Marx Brother. And a lot more money than the other Marx Brothers made. He’d spent enough of his life being controlled. Zeppo Marx ultimately became uncontrollable.
CHAPTER ONE
The Accidental Brother
MINNIE MARX, THE FORMER MIENE SCHOENBERG, CELEBRATED HER thirty-sixth birthday a few months before Herbert Manfred Marx’s birth. She was already the mother of four boys, ages eight, ten, twelve, and thirteen. Another son had died in infancy, so Herbert represented Minnie’s sixth pregnancy. Herbert’s middle name was given to honor the dead child.
Herbert was born on February 25, 1901, around a month before Minnie’s eldest child Leonard’s fourteenth birthday. Leo, as he was commonly known, had by this time already discovered the joys of women and gambling. He would acquire the name Chico from “chasing chicks.” Leonard started life with an advantage his brothers didn’t enjoy. He arrived following a series of tragedies that took a toll on his mother in the summer of 1886. The death of six-month-old Manfred on July 17 was preceded by Minnie’s sister Pauline LeFevre being committed on March 16 to what was then indelicately called the Lunatic Asylum at Blackwell’s Island.1 She would die there on August 25. Pauline’s husband Julius had died on July 26.2 But during that awful summer of death, Minnie also learned she was pregnant. All this child would need to do to be her favorite was stay alive, which Leonard, born in March 1887, managed to do—sometimes against all odds, as later in life his gambling and womanizing would result in plenty of people thinking about killing him. The tragedy continued for Minnie when her sister Jenny Zimmerman became ill with an abscess and died of septicemia on November 26, 1888—three days after the birth of Minnie’s next son, Adolph, who grew up to become Harpo and ran a close second to Leonard for his mother’s affection.
Minnie did not lose any loved ones around the times her next two sons were born.3 Julius, born in October 1890, and Milton, born in October 1892, never overcame the feeling of not being their mother’s favorite. Neither of them got the piano lessons or the favorable treatment Minnie reserved for Leonard. Adolph was sweet and never jealous and was doted on by Minnie. The formerly youngest member of the family, Milton—later known as Gummo—celebrated his eighth birthday four months before Herbert’s arrival and spent a good deal of his childhood suffering from various illnesses. When Minnie became obsessed with the idea of putting her sons on the vaudeville stage—mostly possible through the talents of her son Julius, later Groucho—Herbert was around three years old. His lack of show business potential at that point resulted in his mother not paying very much attention to him. Adolph also failed to display any noticeable talent and Minnie’s interest in him was limited to whatever she could muster for a kid the entire neighborhood considered an idiot. But Herbert grew up with a large and loving family, crowded into an East 93rd Street apartment in Manhattan’s Yorkville neighborhood. The apartment could barely hold the assemblage of Marxes, Schoenbergs, and other relatives Minnie and her husband, Sam “Frenchy” Marx, stuffed into it. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins all doted on little Herbie as, one by one, his older brothers left the apartment.
Minnie came from a large family with ten children—eight girls and two boys. Five of her sisters died young, which was not uncommon at the end of the nineteenth century, but the five siblings who survived would produce twenty-two children between 1877 and 1902. Their mother’s side of the family provided the Marx Brothers with sixteen Schoenberg cousins during that period—although, like Manfred, three died in infancy. Minnie’s sister Sara Heyman was seven years older and had seven children. The two youngest Heyman children, Louis and Adolph were close in age to Minnie’s older children. Adolph Heyman, a few years younger than his cousin Adolph Marx, began calling himself Arthur years before his cousin also took the name. (The point became moot when Minnie’s Adolph dropped Arthur in favor of Harpo.) Another sister, Hannah LeFevre, two years older than Minnie—and married to a cousin of sister Pauline’s husband—had two children, Lou, and Polly. They were a few years older than Leonard and Adolph, and particularly close to the Marx family due to occasionally living with their mother at the Marx apartment. (Hannah’s two early marriages were tempestuous and brief. She eventually remarried and Julius Schickler, her third husband, would become very close with his Marx nephews in the coming years.4
The youngest of Minnie’s siblings—Heinemann—became Henry, then Harry, in America. He married Marie Levy on March 15, 1896, and their son Joseph was born on November 22, suggesting either a premature birth or a hastily planned wedding for propriety’s sake. This was not an unusual situation in the Marx and Schoenberg families, or in society in general, at the time. What was unusual, and perhaps looked upon curiously, was the decision in 1899 to turn Henry Schoenberg into Harry Shean and send him out into the world of vaudeville after another of the Schoenberg children, Abraham Elieser Adolph, had found fame and success on stage as Al Shean.5 Minnie pushed Harry into show business hoping he would duplicate the success of his brother. He didn’t. A September 25, 1899, Detroit Free Press review of Harry’s performance as a Hebrew dialect comedian in On the Stroke of Twelve was not something Minnie could quote in trying to get Harry some bookings: “Harry Shean presented a colorless and amateurish caricature of the conventional money lender of stage literature.” By all accounts, Harry was an ordinary man who mostly worked at menial jobs. His ill-fated foray into vaudeville served as a test run for Minnie’s plan to turn her sons into vaudeville successes. All she’d need to do would be get them better reviews.
Harry and Marie had become parents again with the birth of their daughter Florence in 1898, and they welcomed their daughter Jennie into the family on October 3, 1900, the day after Julius’s tenth birthday. Their son Lawrence would follow in 1902. Marie and Harry’s two younger children would be the cousins with whom Herbert would play as a boy.6 The notion of Harry supporting his growing family with his limited show business skills seemed unlikely. Cooler heads prevailed and he listed his occupation as a “useful man” in the dry goods business in the 1900 census. Harry and Marie settled with their growing family in Queens where Harry operated a lunch wagon. The family of Harry and Marie Shean as young Herbert knew it during his childhood was very much like his own: four children, a housewife mother, and a hard-working father—Harry running his lunch wagon, Frenchy plying his trade as a tailor. These were two very typical immigrant families in turn of the century New York—one in Manhattan, one in Queens. Weekend family gatherings could be in either place, or with the even larger Heyman family, also in Manhattan. Herbert became accustomed to large family gatherings and his playmates were his cousins and neighbors close to his own age, not his brothers. Herbert’s aunts—Hannah, Sara, and Marie—played large roles in his early childhood. Minnie relied on these women a lot, and they were almost like mothers to Herbert when Minnie focused her energy and attention on show business.
Minnie’s parents, Fanny and Lafe Schoenberg, lived with the family. But only six weeks after Herbert’s birth, Fanny died at the age of seventy-two. Within a few years Leonard would head out on his own, and then came Minnie’s plan. Many vaudevillians came into the profession by necessity. What other options did they have? As the children of immigrants—in an environment barely concerned with child labor laws—most received little or no formal education once they were old enough to work. Talent was not a requirement for a career in turn-of-the-century vaudeville. Many came into it because it was the family business. Others because it just wasn’t all that difficult to get started in small-time vaudeville. And it was a much better option than manual labor. For the Marx Brothers it was a combination of all those factors. As each of the five boys came of age, he would dutifully have a bar mitzvah—largely in deference to their maternal grandfather, who appears to have been the last member of the family to pay much attention to Judaism. Asked in 1978 by BBC interviewer Barry Norman if being Jewish was important to the family, Zeppo replied, “No. . . . We didn’t go to church or things like that. But we were Jews and we stuck up for the Jews. . . . They were oppressed, and they had struggled for many years, and we took their side. That’s the only reason. We were not religious.”
Fanny and Lafe Schoenberg had been entertainers in Prussia before emigrating to the United States. He was a magician, ventriloquist, and circus strongman. She was a singing harpist. Four of their ten children attempted show business careers at various times. For their seventh child—daughter Minnie—success as a performer was not to be. But for Minnie Marx vaudeville became a religion. And her spiritual advisor was her younger brother Adolph, who had struck gold in show business as Al Shean. Al, his wife Johanna, and their son Larry lived in the northern suburb of Mount Vernon—only fourteen miles from the Marx family’s Yorkville apartment, but culturally it was much farther away. There would have been two more cousins close in age to Herbert had Al and Johanna’s twin girls Marie and Selma, born in 1900, survived infancy.7 Uncle Al was rich, successful, and lived in a mansion. His family frequently traveled with him on tour, so while Larry was only four years older than Herbert, they didn’t spend much time together in New York.
As the mother of four boys in various stages of juvenile delinquency and a new baby, Minnie was unable to pursue her own show business dream, but Al’s early success convinced her that her boys could be stars. This belief was based on very little evidence of talent. Her middle child, Julius, could sing and was earning some money on Sundays in a Protestant church choir by 1904. (Minnie didn’t let Judaism stand in the way of her son singing in a church.) Leonard was already out on his own when Minnie put her plan in motion, but he was a good piano player, and would play a part in the plan soon enough. Adolph was considered a lost cause by Minnie and a fool by almost everyone else.
As Al Shean’s star continued to rise Minnie saw his success as a gateway into show business for the rest of the family. Harry may not have made it as a Hebrew dialect comedian, but Minnie remained optimistic. Her next move was to pair Milton in an act—at around age seven—with his Uncle Harry. The story of Milton’s very brief vaudeville partnership with his uncle was the subject of an oft-told family legend. Harry attempted to follow in his father’s footsteps as a ventriloquist, but unable to learn the craft, he stuffed the undersized Milton into a hollow dummy. Disaster ensued when Harry poked a hatpin into the dummy’s leg to prove it was really a dummy and hit the wrong leg—the one with both of Milton’s legs in it. The scant evidence of this act suggests it may have only lasted a week or two. As good a story as it is, there is also the possibility that the concept of the act was that Harry was playing a fake ventriloquist and the deception was known to the audience by design. But that would just be a lousy act. The family legend is much better when the enraged audience is added to the mix.
Minnie had big plans for her sons and remained optimistic about her brother Harry. The fact that Harry had no discernible talent, paired with the fact that he was allegedly almost completely deaf did not stop Minnie. In the surprisingly open field of vaudeville, Harry Shean found work. To Minnie this was a sign. All her boys could hear perfectly well and at least one of them showed some signs of talent. Julius had some success singing in vaudeville as a teenager, and Minnie again drafted Milton into service. Milton showed no indication that he had any ability as a performer, but if Harry Shean could get bookings because his brother was Al Shean, Milton could ride on Julius’s coattails. This was common in vaudeville. Al Jolson’s brother Harry worked the circuits for years with an act that was generally considered terrible. (Harry Jolson started in show business before his younger brother Al but was quickly eclipsed by him and traded on his success for years.) Magician Harry Houdini’s younger brother took the name Hardeen and was often billed as Houdini’s brother, going so far as to perform much of Houdini’s act. Having a brother in the business was a major steppingstone in vaudeville.
