Gilbert Gottfried's Amazing Colossal Podcast - 155. Robert Bader

Episode Date: May 15, 2017

Gilbert and Frank talk with producer, archivist and fellow Marx Brothers fanatic Robert S. Bader about his lifelong obsession with the boys as well as his fascinating (and meticulously researched) new book, "Four of the Three Musketeers: The Marx Brothers On Stage." Also: Gummo goes to war, Harpo "courts" Amelia Earhart, Grouchocashes in on "Skidoo" and Gilbert hangs with Chico's daughter. PLUS: Swain's Rats & Cats! The real-life Sunshine Boys! BugsySiegel buys the farm! Dennis Hopper plays Napoleon! And the mystery of the disappearing Marx Brother! This episode is brought to you by Hello Fresh (www.hellofresh.com code: GOTTFRIED30) and ZipRecruiter (www.ziprecruiter.com/gilbert). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

That's the sound of unaged whiskey transforming into Jack Daniel's Tennessee whiskey in Lynchburg, Tennessee. Around 1860, Nearest Green taught Jack Daniel how to filter whiskey through charcoal for a smoother taste, one drop at a time. This is one of many sounds in Tennessee with a story to tell. To hear them in person, plan your trip at tnvacation.com. Tennessee sounds perfect. Introducing TD Insurance for Business with customized coverage options for your business. Because at TD Insurance, we understand that your business is unique, so your business insurance should be too. Contact a licensed TD insurance advisor to learn more. Hi, this is Gilbert Gottfried, and this is Gilbert Gottfried's amazing, colossal podcast with my co-host, Frank Santopadre.

Once again, we're recording at Nutmeg with our engineer, Frank Furtarosa. And our guest this week is a writer, editor, producer, archivist, and author with numerous television and documentary credits, including Dick Cavett's Vietnam, Dick Cavett's Watergate, the legendary Bing Crosby, You Bet Your Life, The Lost Episodes, and The Dawn of Sound, How Movies Learn to Talk. Recent DVD productions include The Honeymooners Lost Episodes, 1951 through 1957, and The Best of the Danny Kaye Show. At the tender age of eight, his grandmother served him a grilled cheese sandwich and sat him down in front of the TV during a broadcast of the movie Monkey Business, leading to a lifelong love affair with the four unforgettable individuals known as Groucho, Chico, Harpo, and Zeppo. His fascination with the Marxists led him to produce Marx Brothers TV collection and edit a collection of Groucho's writings called Groucho Marx and Other Short Stories and Tall Tales.

His latest book is the very first comprehensive history of the brothers' live performances, entitled Four of the Three Musketeers, the Marx Brothers on Stage. Here's the Marx Brothers on stage. Please welcome to the show a man of many talents and someone who was born to be a guest on this podcast, Robert S. Bader. Thank you. That's the best introduction ever. It's the best one you're ever going to get, buddy. I can't ever beat that.

Well, we try. That was about you, right? I hope so. If it wasn't, I've got to meet that guy. He sounds great. Gilbert stayed up writing that. Yes. He stayed up late. No, it just popped into my head. All off the top of his head. By the way, before we

talk about the Marxes, those Cavett docs are terrific. Yeah. So, bravo. Thank you. What a great archive to be able to work with. Basically, we were able to do those shows because of all the stuff that's in that archive. Well, the Watergate show alone. I mean, it's just horrific. Dick interviewed all of those guys while it was happening.

And Dick was supposed to be here with you. Yes, but you blew him off. Yeah, yes. Well, it was complicated. I think he's, like, stuck on a plane or something. Yeah, he wasn't going to be here until tomorrow. We needed to do this show today. So we will have Dick back.

He's been here twice already. Yeah. He was our first guest. We'll see if he's willing to come back after this indignity. Gilbert wants to know, did Harpo have a fling with Amelia Earhart? I believe this is true. Now, you've obviously read deep into the book. One of us did.

That suggestion comes up very far into this very heavy book, but the fictitious love affair he talks about in Harpo Speaks is a composite of several girlfriends, and because of his circumstances with his wife, he doctored up this fictitious character to eliminate the possibility that it could be Amelia Earhart by having her die in a crash in 1931. But there is some documentation of his knowing her.

Fascinating. So there is a chance that Harpo may have fucked Amelia Earhart. I'd say there's a damn good chance. Who are we going to ask? And Amelia Earhart was a lesbian was she not? I think she was a switch hitter she was married to a guy named George Putnam who was as in the Putnam and Sons publisher

George Putnam and he moved to Hollywood because she wanted to move to Hollywood and he got a job in the story department at Paramount so she had a studio pass and she was hobnobbing with all the movie stars there's photos of her on the lot with Cary Grant and Marlena Dietrich she just loved being around movie stars and was was it true that

when she was on the plane last she started masturbating thinking about harpo and that's why she crashed i think when they finally fight that a reporter that could very well be there. See, now, of all these showbiz stories that I love to tell, which generally involve Danny Kaye, Lawrence Olivier, Danny Thomas. He knows a thing or two about Danny Kaye. I know these stories. Yes. He knows a little bit. He's a Danny Kaye archivist. And, of course, Cesar Romero.

You left out Forrest Tucker. Oh, yes, Forrest Tucker. But that was just a giant dick. A guest left out Forrest Tucker. Oh, yes, Forrest Tucker. But that was just a giant dick. A guest who listens to the show. Oh, yes. We don't get too many of those. But Harpo fucking Amelia Earhart. That's a classic one.

I don't think there's any photographic documentation, so we're going to have to just go on faith. Now, Milton Burrell fucked, what was it, Amy Semple McPherson, I think. Wow. Probably a religious experience for someone. Yes. That's impressive. Where do you get this

information? Yes. And why aren't you writing a coffee table book? Because Danny Thomas would be lying underneath it distracting me this this book that you have written and i i didn't get my hands on the groucho book yet which i will the uh the book about groucho's writing but this one about the history of the marx brothers on stage is is exhaustively shall we say researched the d the level of detail and i was showing gilbert when we got here and set up shop tonight.

It's scary. This is what happens when somebody leaves me alone at the library. Was this eight years of your life? Well, eight years of writing it. I've been researching it since I was a little kid, but I didn't really have a plan. I just wanted to know everything I could find about the Marx Brothers. And as time went by, I said, you know, when people ask me, why are you collecting all this stuff? I would just have the stock answer. I'm working on a book, not really knowing that I was for a number

of years. Along the way in doing this, I collected enough of Groucho's sort of lost writings from various periodicals that no one knew about. And I got that published as a book and it did really well. I did a revised edition of it in 2011. added some stuff to it and by that point I knew I wanted to do this and I set out to do this around 2008 I stopped doing some other work and I wanted to really devote myself to this and I thought I could do it in a couple of years but having an actual career and really doing other stuff made it take eight years. I thought it was going to take two or three. It took about eight. Now, there's a story that I think is apocryphal, and for me

to say that... The apocryphal ones are often the best ones. Yes. We built a show around those. Yeah. It's not about Nat Pendleton shitting on Harpo or anything, in case you're wondering. Or Nat Perrin. Yes. And that's that you hear the story like,

well, the funniest Marx brother was Zeppo. This is what the Marx brothers themselves apparently thought. The thing about Zeppo that's amazing to people to learn, and I get a little bit of this through in the book, he was a pretty talented guy and he had a lot of ability as a performer, but they never really exploited it because he came into the act as a replacement for gummo who was by his own admission not very talented not very good didn't want to be on the stage had a very bad stammer as a kid and worked hard to overcome it so his role became a guy who sang and danced a little and fed groucho straight lines and he was sort of the minimalist Marx brother.

He was the guy who was the least important in the act. And yet one of the first ones on stage. Indeed. Yeah. And when Zeppo has to take his place, he's there to fill that role, regardless of that he could do much more. So I think he always resented that. And he always said he wanted to get out of the act. And they occasionally throw him a bone and do a little more. And a thing that's lost on a lot of people is when they turn those Broadway shows into movies, in the 20s, a Broadway musical would run two hours and 45 minutes, and a film would be turned into something that's around 90 minutes. The first thing they did was they knocked out all the musical numbers except for one or two.

And on Broadway, Zeppo's got three or four featured musical numbers. He's got a lot of other stuff to do. When they truncate these shows, Zeppo's got three or four featured musical numbers. He's got a lot of other stuff to do. When they truncate these shows, Zeppo's part pretty much goes out the window. He was a pretty talented guy. Yeah, because Zeppo was kind of looked upon as like, why was Zeppo in the movie? They needed a guy to wear a nice suit, apparently. That's what he does in some of these movies. Well, all of us purists, we prefer the four Marx Brothers to the three Marx Brothers.

Well, I certainly do. I mean, I certainly do. And you've been on record as saying that, you know, there's some dynamic that's lost without him. The Paramount films are their best films. Now, Groucho later in his life would say the best films we made are with Irving Thalberg at MGM. Yeah. I mean, by that point in his life, he's saying that because those are the ones where they got paid really well. Yes.

And I do mention this in the book. They had a bad deal with Paramount where they were being paid 50% of the net profits on the three films they made in Hollywood. That went so badly that they broke the contract and walked out and sued them and didn't get the money they were supposed to get until a settlement was made in 1962. So they learned what net profits in Hollywood meant. When they signed with MGM, they took 15% of the gross, and they actually made a very quick 600 grand on a night at the opera, and their families still get money on those pictures. So by the 60s, when Groucho's like, oh, the Thalberg films are our best films,

those are the ones where he got a check. Yeah. Yeah, well, also, he's probably remembering, too, that Thalberg had a genuine admiration for them and appreciation of them, so they were being treated better. And I think Thalberg's early death made everybody sort of worship him. You know, he was an incredibly talented guy and a brilliant producer. But Groucho's sort of canonization of Thalberg within the Marx Brothers story makes no sense if you watch the Paramount films. It's like he respected them and he was a brilliant man.

And he knew business-wise what would sell. Like the Night at the Opera sold. And I think the early Marx, the great Marx brothers, didn't do incredible at box office. They did actually. Horse Feathers was the number one Paramount film of 1932. Yeah.

They made a lot of money and the reason they were so upset with the way the contract was going is they know their films are hits. And the number one star at Paramount was Maurice Chevalier. The Marx Brothers were pretty much number two at the time. And their films were doing very well, but they weren't seeing the return. And if you can do this, but I'll save you the trouble. If you go to the Motion Picture Academy and you look at the ledgers and the financing of these pictures, they're writing checks to people against the Marx Brothers checks to people against the

Marx Brothers' budgets to people who didn't work on the films. Paramount's using their films to pay off debts because the Marx Brothers have net profits, so they figure, write off a lot of stuff so we don't have to pay them. Because you hear so many stories about why it ended at Paramount. You hear in the Marx Brothers, I think it's in the Marx Brothers in a nutshell, you hear that because Duck Soup was such a flop that they weren't welcome back. It's actually a fallacy. Duck Soup was not a flop. It was not as successful as the picture before it, which was very successful.

The truth is people think the Marx Brothers left Paramount after Duck Soup. Actually, the Marx Brothers left Paramount before Duck Soup. They terminated the contract based on Paramount doing something the contract didn't allow. Paramount was going through a receivership and a near bankruptcy at the time, and they were transferring the contracts of a lot of their stars to a newly formed shell corporation. So the Marx Brothers were under contract to Paramount Publix, the studio, and they set up Paramount Productions, and they started transferring stars' contracts. And the Marx Brothers said, wait a minute, you're not allowed

to do that. It's a non-transferable contract. They walked off the lot as Duck Soup was about to go into production. They spent a few months setting up an independent company. They got the rights to film Of the I Sing. They were going to make that picture. They never did. Is that the Kaufman thing? Yeah. It was a Pulitzer Prize winning play. George S. Kaufman. Which 80 something years later still has never been turned into a movie. It must be a cursed property.

Interesting. But they were ready to leave and go anyway. And what happened was the financing for their independent venture was not going well. The guy, Sam Katz, whose name you might know from Balaban and Katz, the theater chain that Paramount bought, he couldn't come up with the money. The Marx Brothers tried a lot of places and they they finally signed a one-picture deal with Paramount to make duck soup. But instead, they got all their money up front and didn't do it on that profit split. They hadn't settled the money on monkey business and horse feathers yet. That kind of hung out in the wind for years. And there is a document from 1962.

It went on for so long that Chico was dead when they finished the deal and his two wives had a sign for his piece unreal because he was all these years anything I ever read or heard about the Marx brothers were that their paramount movies were all bombing and then it wasn't until Spielberg came along with Night at the Opera oh Thalberg Thal Spielberg. Thalberg came along with Night at the Opera that they actually were popular. But I guess it was like you're saying the success really was that they were making money. very popular. Coconuts was a huge smash as they were making it. The Marx Brothers became nervous about doing this film. And when they first saw it, they wanted to buy it back.

But by the time that happened, it was such a hit that they couldn't. It was going so well. They were a big deal at Paramount. And Coconuts and Animal Crackers were done on single picture deals where they had to purchase the rights to the play from Sam Harris, the Broadway producer. So when they signed the three picture deal to go to Hollywood and make those next three pictures, they got a phenomenal amount of money and all the perks you can get, including 50% of net profit, which was unheard of at the time. Nobody else had that.

And yet they were still being robbed. Well, yeah, I'll give you 90% of net, you know, I'll just tell you how much I spent on the picture because i had also heard that that you know duck soup was such a bomb yeah paramount it's in i think it's mark's brothers in a nutshell and they're talking about how wonderful it is even obviously today it's interesting too that under in in these chaotic in this chaotic environment and with all this resentment they turn out their best movie. Yeah, the thing about Duck Soup is that Groucho contributes to the legend by going on talk shows,

including The Cabot Show, and saying that it was a bomb and we got kicked out of Paramount and Thalberg resurrected us and saved us. The truth is, after they finished Duck Soup, it was making so much money and doing so well that Paramount, with the new

head of the studio at the time, Emanuel Cohen, negotiated to bring the Marx Brothers back to Paramount. So he was trying to bring them back. That's not getting fired. No. Interesting. Okay, just when the show was starting to get good, we're gonna throw a monkey wrench into

the works with this commercial word. Live from Nutmeg Post, we now return to Gilbert and Frank's amazing colossal podcast. Did the whole relationship with Thalberg happen because Chico had a relationship with him? Well, it helped. It certainly helped. They were trying to find a new home because they were pretty much done with Paramount even before Duck Soup was made. And at the time when they were looking for a new studio, they were also going through the loss of Zeppo, which you can make a lot of jokes. Groucho did. He said when someone offered him less money as a trio, he said, don't be silly.

We're worth more without Zeppo. The truth is there was a lot of reticence about not having it be called the four Marx brothers. So at one point, and this is a crazy thing that is in the book and Gummo's son was stunned to read this. His son, Bob has read the book. They said, if we can't get Zeppo, how about bringing Gummo back into the act? Gummo wanted no part of this, of course, but they were so afraid to sign them as the three Marx Brothers that they were desperately trying to get Zeppo back, even resorting to maybe Gummo. Three of them were an unproven commodity. Right.

And Immanuel Cohen at Paramount wanted them back, but he wanted them back as the four Marx Brothers, which must have made Groucho crazy because he spent all this time telling people that Zeppo didn't matter. And the two movies that, like, I mean, people will look upon Night at the Opera as a classic comedy, but to me, it always struck me as the beginning of the end. Oh, I agree with you. I agree, too. To me, the thing in Night at the Opera that shows me it's the beginning of the end is the character that Harpo is in every movie. I mean, basically, the way I describe Harpo is in Monkey Business, once the marksmen come out of the barrels, Harpo is in every movie. I mean, basically the way I describe Harpo is in

monkey business. Once the marksmen come out of the barrels, Harpo's in another movie. Harpo's doing what Harpo does. He's chasing frogs, all that crazy stuff he does. In a night at the opera, he does something insolent to Laspari and the guy beats the hell out of him. Well, we said it before. He goes from being an anarchist to a victim. Yeah. He's basically being abused. Right. And then Groucho, who's always getting away with being a complete fake in the Paramount films,

is kicked down a flight of stairs when he loses his job in A Night at the Opera. I mean, these are not Paramount's Marx Brothers anymore. Yeah. A lot was lost. When I would watch those two, Night at the Opera and Day at the Races, I would go like, after a funny bit or after a groucho line, I'd go, oh, I guess here's where they could put in a laugh track. There'd be a pause after each joke. That was the concept of taking the material on the road, which was a great idea because

they were able to time it. But if you take the Herman Mankiewicz theory, the producer at Paramount, they thought they made a lot of money on people laughing through the jokes and coming back to see the film to catch what they missed. And there's something to be said for that. Better strategy. Because the way I look at a night at the opera is there's a very different experience watching it at home on your Blu-ray player or your DVD player than there is watching it in a crowded theater. Because when you're watching it by yourself, which many people experience movies that way now because of things like TCM and DVDs, you're waiting.

You've got dead moments of silence in these pictures. You watch Monkey Business. It's like the most breakneck 77 minute movie there is. That movie feels like it's just getting rolling when it's ending. And it's like, I mean, Duck Soup, which I felt was their ultimate. And it's just so, everything about it's surreal. You know, the costumes keep changing.

I love everything. He's got his head in a picture with his face drawn on it. Oh, yes. It's totally... The dog comes out of the tattoo on Harpo's chest. This is what the element that is gone. This is why you could say they made their best pictures with Zeppo or they were

never the same without Zeppo. It just happens to be that everything else changed at that time too. But there's something about when there are four of them. I think it brings them back. Absolutely. It's evocative of what they did on stage. And there's stuff about those early films that's very stagey

because the first two were made almost like a Broadway show with a camera in front of it because they couldn't move the camera so well in 1929 and 30. But the notion of there being four of them and they're often in two pairs and when they come together, it's usually pretty chaotic. That element is lost in the MGM films.

It's usually Chico as some sort of fulcrum. He's the translator between Groucho and Harpo. But something is absolutely lost because also Groucho needs a straight man for his scenes, like Hunga Dunga and Hunga Dunga or even the college scenes in Horse Feathers. There's a nice chemistry between the two of them that's lost.

You're not going to fill with Alan Jones. Yeah, they changed the way the stuff was written when they didn't have Zeppo. I mean, something like the contract scene at night at the opera, you've got two comedians working there. If that was written for Groucho to talk to Zeppo, it's a completely different vibe. But the Hunga Dunga thing is a great example. It's a good example.

That's that kind of a scene written for a comedian. Hunga Dunga and McCormick. A comedian and a straight man, and a very good straight man. Yes. Zeppo does a hell of a good job with that stuff. Yeah, there's nobody to set Groucho up after that. Now he's just got villains like Trentino.

Yeah. And then he's forced to be kind of the straight man in his scenes with Chico. Yeah, I kind of miss, you know, when I watch A Night at the Opera or The Day of the Races, I miss what Zeppo brings to the table. I don't mean that facetiously. I really mean that. As their movie started going along, the Marx Brothers actually care about the love interests in the movie.

I can't understand why. It makes no sense to me. There are like insipid love plots in Cocon. I can't understand why. It makes no sense to me. There are like insipid love plots in Coconuts and Animal Crackers, and you kind of tolerate them because you know they're Broadway musicals brought to the screen. But why are we inventing them for these new pictures? I don't get it. Well, they're the skirt chasers in the Paramount movies, and then in the MGM films, they're facilitating romance.

They're helping the hero and the heroine get together, which is not what you want to see the Marx Brothers doing. No. And what happened with them and a lot of Abbott and Costello and a lot of people were like this, a lot of comics, that the Marx Brothers became supporting characters in their own movies. Yeah, that's a very interesting way to look at it. That's really true of the very last ones, like the MGMs that were made in the 40s. I don't see it as that much of a thing in A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races. But if you look at Could At the Circus Go West and The Big store, I mean, I almost wish they didn't make those pictures. So did they. Yeah.

Then they're a little too much in service to the love story. Had Thalberg not died, were things going so well at MGM that they would have stayed and cranked out a couple of more? Oh, I believe so. Because they may not have been the pictures we look at today as the great Marx Brothers pictures, but they were making a hell of a lot of money. And the thing that's very little known is the Marx Brothers weren't actually under contract to MGM. Louis B. Mayer didn't want the Marx Brothers. He wasn't interested in them.

Thalberg signed them to a personal services contract for his MGM unit that he operated. So the Marx Brothers were able to leave MGM after a day at the races because there was a termination clause in the contract that if Thalberg remained unavailable for a certain period of time, the Marx Brothers were able to opt out. He was dead. He was permanently unavailable. And as soon as they finished the day at the races, the Marx Brothers opted out of the contract,

made a huge deal to bring room service to the screen, and that was actually a very highly anticipated film. They got paid more money for that film than any other film they had made at that point. RKO paid a record amount of money for the film than any other film they'd made at that point. RKO paid a record amount of money for the rights to it and then it flopped. That was their first real surprisingly

disappointing box office film. For sure. And now the real reason you guys listen to this show, of course, the commercials. Hey Gil, let me ask you a question. Are you hiring? The last time you said that, I hired you as a co-host. So, no, I will not be hiring for quite some time.

Well, in the event that you change your mind, posting your job in one place isn't enough to find quality candidates. You should know that. And if you want to find the perfect hire, like me, or say Paul Rayburn, who's sitting here with us. Oh, is that what he's... Oh, he can sit successfully. I thought this was a job interview. He's sitting very erectly. No, no.

You need to post your job on all the top job sites, and now you can. You want to know how? Yeah, I might as well. Well, ZipRecruiter has nine million resumes you can search through in their database, Gil. Yes. And with ZipRecruiter... Don't call me Gil. Call me Mr. Godfrey.

Alright. Because I don't want any... I already have the job. Yes. With ZipRecruiter.com you can post your job to a hundred. I said a hundred plus job sites, including social media networks like Facebook and the Twitter, which I know you love. Yes.

Don't tell anyone that Dara tweets for you. Yeah, exactly. All with a single click. Twitter turns out to be a very expensive hobby for me. Yes, indeed it is. ZipRecruiter's handy website shows trending career

fields, cities, and searches, and you can find candidates in any city or industry nationwide. What do you think of that, Paul Rayburn? I think that's terrific, and I hope you gentlemen will hire me. I actually do very, very good research. I don't know whether anybody's aware of that. There's a slim chance of this happening. Yes, yes.

No juggling emails or calls to your office. That's how easy this interface is. The website is to use. You quickly screen candidates, you rate them, and you hire the right person fast. You find out today with ZipRecruiter. They have been featured on Forbes, Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, The New York Times, CBS, and find out why it's been used by over 1 million businesses. Paul, if you're ever hiring.

And right now, my listeners can post jobs on ZipRecruiter for free by going to ZipRecruiter.com slash Gilbert. Is it free, did you say? Yes, free! Is it free, did you say? Yes, free! That's ziprecruiter.com slash Gilbert. One more time to try it for free.

Go to ziprecruiter.com slash Gilbert. I'm not sure I got that. Gilbert and Frank, what's your game now? Can anybody play? And now back to more hilarity and trenchant insight, Gilbert Gottfried. I just recently was watching some of these clips of early TV with like Chico and Harpo and stuff that they did in early TV. And it is so I was watching it with my son, who's seven. And he said, is this supposed to be funny? It was horrible, truly horrible stuff.

Some of that stuff, it's a real mixed bag, actually. So a lot of that stuff, I don't know which stuff you're talking about, but some of it's in the March for This TV Collection DVD set that I put out. And some of it is great because they're doing some of their vaudeville stuff in the 50s. There's a wonderful clip of Harpo and Chico on the Colgate Comedy Hour doing the double piano solo. That's just a musically great number. There's a market for interesting footage of classic comedians.

Everybody knows the Marx Brothers weren't as good on television as they were at Paramount. But there's still a lot of people that want to see this stuff. And it's a real mixed bag. Some of it's terrific. So you'll have to tell me what you ended up seeing. real mixed bag some of it's terrific so you'll have to tell me what you ended up seeing now now i i also heard that at one point uh nat hyken wanted to write a marks brothers movie i think everybody wanted to write a march brothers movie at some point um you see a lot of unproduced treatments written for the march brothers floating around and some people consider these to be you

know rare artifacts of the career of the Marx Brothers. They're not. They're just, you know, hopeful writers who were working in these bungalows at MGM, churning them out. So there was no lost screenplay. I mean, and the ones in the book that you talk about, Cracked Ice and all those things, those were just other names for Duck Soup

before it was named Duck Soup. Yeah, there were variations of that. Duck Soup had about six different titles as it was being produced. But other than of The I Sing, there was no actual, hey, this is a Marx Brothers movie that's ready to go, but it didn't happen.

There's no actual approved screenplay. There are some treatments for things that never got made into screenplays. But again, you'll see something maybe comes up on eBay, some like lost Marx Brothers story. A writer wrote it under contract for MGM and somebody looked at it and said, this is crap, we're not doing it.

And maybe saying this is for the Marx Brothers, but the Marx Brothers never had any knowledge of it. I didn't know Zeppo was trying his hand at a screenwriting career until I read your book. I thought I knew everything about these guys. I learned a lot. That's one of the more interesting things that I learned. Did you know that, Gil? No.

Zeppo was trying to write screenplays. At first with a partner, if I have this right, and then solo? Yeah, a fellow named Gouverneur Morris, who was having a nice little successful beginning of a writing career for a few years, and then he hooked up with Zeppo and stopped selling treatments immediately. And he did a couple of things with Zeppo, then Zeppo did one on his own, and then Zeppo tried one with S.J. Perlman. Wow. Nothing he did got picked up, but they're interesting. I kind of wrote about them in the book because I found it to be such an interesting adjunct to what was going on at the time, because he desperately wanted to get out of the act. And there was this family loyalty thing.

While the mother was alive, while Minnie Marks was alive, nobody could leave the Marks brothers. Her biggest disappointment up until a certain point was that she couldn't get all five of her sons to be in the act and call it the five five Marx Brothers. She pulled that off for one month in 1915 when Zeppo was out of school. When he was 13 and she passed him off at 16? Boy, not only did Frank read the book, he memorized the book. I read a lot about the Marx Brothers, but your book filled in a lot of gaps. Well, thanks. But the thing with Zeppo is he was trying things. He was getting into the real estate business. He was trying to write screenplays. He became a restaurant owner.

He was just desperate to not be the fourth Marx brother. Now, I heard a story that when Bugsy Siegel was shot, they found a check from Chico. Not true. Different mobster. However, the mobster, the real mobster who had the check from Chico in his pocket when he got killed was a guy named Lester Frank Bruneman, I think is his name. And I actually didn't put this in the book. I have a photograph of the check. So I'll make sure I get that to you.

That's good trivia. So I think that story that I heard, which I kind of doubted because Groucho told it. I think he knew Bugsy. Yeah. He may have known him. He traveled and... Well, Harpo and Chico played Vegas when it was brand new and were definitely acquainted. But the incident where the mobster was gunned down in some L.A. bar, I think happened before

Bugsy Siegel was a major player. It was a little earlier. I think it changed so many times they wanted a more famous name. That happens a lot. You know, when Groucho tells a story, I'm sure you probably listened to An Evening with Groucho a couple of million times. I was there in the audience. So that record is what a lot of kids my age really memorized when we heard our Groucho stories. And he talks about being on a bill with Fanny Bryce at the Palace

and Swain's Rats and Cats are on the bill. Swain's Rats and Cats. Oh, yes. It's a pretty apocryphal story for a couple of reasons. They were never on a bill with Fanny Bryce. Animal acts like Swain's Rats and Cats were not playing the Palace. You know, he just put a famous name in there to make the story better. I'm sure the story happened.

That happens a lot. You know, the story that he tells on that the story happened. That happens a lot. You know, the story that he tells on that album about looking into WC Fields attic and seeing all the liquor and saying, we haven't had prohibition in years. That's a great story. It happened to Harpo. Interesting.

You know, Bill Marks, Harpo sunset. That was dad's story and Groucho adopted it. So ask Bill if it's true about Amelia Earhart and get back to us. He actually was stunned to read it in the book. So he didn't know about that until now. I met and about three times spoke to Maxine Marks.

She was a good friend of mine. I really had a great relationship with her. I'm sorry we lost Maxine. She was great. She would have been an ideal guest for this show. Well, she would have cursed more than you. Oh, my God, yes. Oh, yeah.

Is that possible? Maxine was proud to have the vocabulary of a longshoreman. Well, I'm sorry we missed out on her. Maxine, you know, for a while she had a mini acting career. She actually was a student of the legendary Maria Ouspenskaya. Love that. She did some radio acting in the 30s. You know, she traded on the fact that her dad was at MGM,

so they put her in bit roles in a couple of pictures. She's an extra here and there as a kid. You know, she wasn't really cut out for that. She was a pretty successful casting agent in commercials for many years. And I heard, too, that, and this is something I wish there was at least a photo of, that one time while she was, Maria Spinskaya was her teacher, Maria Spinskaya at Chico Marks invited Maria Spinskaya out to dinner. As seen in the puppet video of Gilbert and Frank.

Gilbert swings with the youth. And I thought, God, I would just like to see the two of them sitting together. Was he trying to make the moves on Maria? That would have been great. It would have been a slow day in the life of Chico Marx to go for that, but anything's possible. I think it was pathological with him. Speaking of Marx Brothers mysteries, why did Chico disappear for those couple of days? Was he shot?

Was he getting patched together? Well, no, that... The disappearance you're talking about is when they were doing Alsatius in Detroit. Yeah, during Alsatius. That seems to be gambling debt related. The guys who he owed money to... He vanished from the act. Oh, wow.

He walked out of the theater during the second act of Alsatius, went into a back alley, apparently went into a luggage store and bought a valise and disappeared in the middle of the show. And they had to ad-lib through the rest of the show without him and play for a few days as a trio. Incredible. Picking up his lines and figuring out where the hell he was. Incredible. And then, you know, he turns up. But to give away more would make you not buy the book.

And I heard Maxine told a story that, you know, she like any child of legendary people, they don't look at them as legend. They're their parents and they're bored being there at their job. And so one time the Marx Brothers were playing at some theater and she went outside to play because she was bored watching the Muggs brothers live and and then afterwards Chico said to her well did you how did you like that did you catch it and she goes oh uh yeah I caught it because she didn't want to say she wasn't there and she said and that night she found out that Chico played Harpo's part and Harpo played Chico's part. Yeah, the truth about that is pretty amazing because they all learned to understudy for each other during the vaudeville days. Because in those days, if you missed a performance, they would dock you and pay you as a trio.

There was a lot of strict rules involved in that. There was a lot of strict rules involved in that. And, for example, I found some things where Zeppo went on for Harpo one night in Kentucky because Harpo was so sick he couldn't go on. So somebody in the chorus would just fill in for Zeppo. They would work around these things. And Harpo and Chico looked so much alike out of makeup that they could easily do each other in terms of picking up the part. And Harpo played the piano.

So that was no problem. And Chico could probably do something rudimentary on the harp, you know, just to get through. So they on tour doing scenes from Go West prior to shooting it. And they would do about four or five shows a day. And the early show was usually, you know, drunks and prostitutes looking for some air conditioning. And there was never a good house for that. And she figured she had a chance to go get her hair done. So she went out and got her hair done and came back for the second show. And that's when they said, did you notice?

So she was crushed because they never did it for her again. But yeah, they were doing that. They did it every once in a while. And the fact that they could pass for each other, Chico and Harpo, they used that to their advantage in other ways, did they not? Yeah, there was a great story that they always told where Chico was quite an amazing and talented piano player very early. He apparently took piano lessons for about two or three months

and then just was a natural. And he would teach his lessons secondhand to the other kids and they would kind of peek in on his piano lessons. And Harpo was sort of a rudimentary pianist who could play a couple of tunes. So Chico would go audition to get a job at a Nickelodeon or a whorehouse or someplace and he would get the audition and then Harpo would show up to play his two songs at several different speeds until they realized he couldn't play and they'd fire him. I was referring more to, there's a brief allusion to it in the book. Oh, you're talking about the story from Groucho's Third Wife where she talks about the famous black silk nightshirt story. Well, I'm talking about where one of them was perceived to be a Superman.

Yes, that would be that story. Gil will like this. This is the only show where I will be able to tell this story. Yes, that would be that story. Gil will like this. This is the only show where I will be able to tell this story. Well, hit it, buddy. So the story is from an unpublished memoir by Groucho's third wife. And she and Harpo's wife

took a writing class together in the early 80s, shortly before Eden died. And they wrote some manuscripts of memoirs. And Eden's memoir has this passage where the March brothers would get together for dinners and reminisce and tell old vaudeville stories. And this story involved Harpo having this very unique black silk nightshirt. And you're in a boarding house, and he's got a girl in his bedroom,

and he does the deed with the girl and excuses himself to go down the hall to the bathroom and sees Gummo and says, hey, you want to get laid? And Gummo said, sure. He goes, here, put on my silk nightshirt and go back in my room. So Gummo goes in there, and then he comes out, and they give the nightshirt to Chico. So basically... Oh, my God, is that great.

Thus the woman thinking that she was dealing with a Superman. Yeah, and this will probably be the only interview I ever do to promote this book where that story will get aired. Well, we'll just hope that one's true, right, Gil? Oh, yes. And I'll be retelling that like I was there. Frank, you will take that copy of the book and flag that page for Gilbert. He will enjoy that. the book and flag that page for Gilbert.

He will enjoy that. And the Mox Brothers later films, after A Day at the Races, it was so deep into the Grand Canyon they fell. I like A Night in Casablanca. I think that's something of a callback.

I think that film was a bunch of older guys trying to recapture what they were best at and it kind of works. And they did take that on the road and do a little bit of touring to hone the scenes and stuff. And that's the last time they ever played live on stage as the three Marx Brothers when they toured for a night in Casablanca. I think that one sticks out as the best of the later films. Just for me, I can't even get through At the Circus. It pains me to watch At the Circus.

Except for Lydia. Yeah. I can't even get through at the circus. It pains me to watch at the circus. Except for Lydia. Yeah. Yeah, and even that's kind of, you know, just Groucho's wig in that film kind of makes me want to see something else. Oh, my God, yes. Yes.

But I remember then, and I would still have vague memories back then of You Bet Your Life. I've seen them a million times in reruns. of You Bet Your Life. I've seen them a million times in reruns. But I remember having both a weird fascination, both frightened, depressed, but also absolutely fascinated when Groucho came back as an old man, and he would go on like Dick Cavett, and all of a sudden, from this dancing rat-tat-tat, you know, machine gun groucho, was now talking like that. And it's like, I remember working in a theater, I remember working in a theater, and theaters back then were a place where you'd stand on a stage, and the audience would observe what the person on stage was saying and doing. Because in my day, people would observe what a performer was doing.

And occasionally, they would change seats. Pretty uncanny, huh, Robert? He even gets the regional New York accent. As a kid, having discovered them through the early films, the first time I saw him on TV as that old guy with the beret, I was stunned that this was that guy. And the beret would have like golf balls on it. Yeah, with little faces painted on it. They'd get sillier and sillier. But I just remember the first reaction, and I must have been no more than 10 years old when this happened.

I probably saw him on Cavett or Merv or one of those shows. Actually, I think it might have been the Bill Cosby show that he did. Oh, I remember that one. Sure. And I'm just stunned that that's him. But then you sort of listen to him, and he's still funny. He still had it together. He's still singing.

He's not dancing, but he's singing. In the early 60s, too. That's Groucho that's groucho he's he's still groucho yeah doing peasy-weezy with dinah shore oh yeah that's that's wonderful that's still in his prime early 60s he's still moving around later on there came a point where he probably should have stopped yeah and he of course and not made skidoo skidoo was apparently two days of very highly paid work for him. Uh-huh. Bless his heart, then. He probably never saw it. The wig that he wore in that film, apparently they let him keep it because he wears it on one of Cavett's morning shows.

Oh, jeez. This is good trivia. So something good came out of Skidoo. Well, something really bad. It's probably the worst toupee in the history of show business. You know, our friend Cliff Nesteroff was here a couple of times telling us horror stories about vaudeville, you know, corroborated in your book. By the way, we were talking about it before we turned the mics on. The terrible treatment, the rats, the bugs, the shady unions,

no guarantee that you were going to get paid for your work. I mean, reading this book and reading Groucho's, especially, before the rest of them got on board, but Groucho's Adventures in Vaudeville, it's fascinating and depressing. It was a very tough life to choose, but what you also need to take a look at when you look at the Marx Brothers' early days is that what options did they have? No, not a lot.

Their mother worked in a sweatshop. They were the children of immigrants. There weren't a lot of opportunities. They weren't especially good in school. They might have been bright, smart kids, but they didn't get much of an education. No, Chico had that ability with numbers. He had that mind for math. Yeah, Chico was apparently brilliant mathematical mind, but he used it for gambling. Now, I always say this. If he was that good with

numbers, why was he always losing? That's a good question. I mean, I think that's a bit of a trumped-up thing there where he maybe wasn't so good, but the mythology is that he was brilliant. He might have been smart with a contract, but I also take the position that he was the one who had the most to gain by taking a ridiculous chance. Yeah. So every time the Marx Brothers made that next step, and it seemed like the stupidest thing to do because why risk what we have,

what they had was Chico was broke, and they were making a living, and they were content. He could never be content. So when they were the highest paid act in vaudeville and there was a chance to go into the legitimate theater, Chico was all on board for that because even as the highest paid act in vaudeville, the guy was broke. Well, as I've said a million times on this show, which has become, which was just one

of those classic showbiz lines, whenever they would ask Groucho, well, why did the Marx Brothers do that? Because Chico needed the money. But, you know, they say the popular belief was that he needed the money for the later films. But apparently he needed the money all along. Yes. From day one. Chico was broke in 1911. It's just unbelievable when you consider how much money they made.

You know, there's a wonderful story that Maxine told, and she told in her book, but she also told it to me in more detail. When Chico was out on the road with his early partners before he joined the Marx Brothers, he had a guy named Aaron Gordon as his first vaudeville partner. They were Marx and Gordon. They were just a piano and singer act. And Chico would take all the money, and he would give the guy 25 cents a week to get a haircut and pay for his room and board. And he never gave him any salary. The guy just broke even going on the road

as a singer with Chico. Oh, geez. You know, 25 cents a week for the haircut was not even a guarantee because if he lost all the money, they were done. Yeah. They had scams where Chico would blow all their salary and they wouldn't have the train fare

to get to the next city. So he would have to go pull some kind of a gambling scam which I have documented in the book. Fascinating. He'd go into a saloon or someplace and he would take bets on that day's baseball game and he'd have Gordon pretend to be an innocent

bystander who was going to hold the money. They'd scam people in bars to get the money to get to the next station. Then they would take that money and buy their train ticket out of town. Yeah. Oh, holy shit. So, you know, there were probably always people on his trail. Or on his tail, I mean.

You know, the story that I was most amazed to uncover was the story of Chico most likely being shot for leaving one city and going to the next with a young girl from the town. And needless to say, her family did notice that she was missing. And they basically followed him, shotguns in hand, from one city to the next. They caught him in a hotel with the girl and they dragged her back. You get that sense reading the book that this guy is dodging bullets left and right. I don't mean literal bullets, but in some cases, yes, I mean literal bullets. So basically, it's amazing that Chico was never killed. Yeah, there was one point where I believe they thought he was going to die because in spring of 1913, they had to go on with the act without him for a few months.

spring of 1913, they had to go on with the act without him for a few months. And one of the guys in the act pretended to be Chico because at that time, the contract said that if you deliver fewer performers than you're advertising, you get docked some pay. And they wanted to keep it the four Marx brothers. So a fellow named George Lee, who was his partner before they joined the act, masqueraded as Chico for a few months until he came back. And they kept it very quiet in the vaudeville papers that he was gone. But when he came back, they said, Leonard Marx has returned to the act after missing a few months with an operation. The operation was to probably remove a bullet. And he traveled or he spent time with some really unsavory characters.

I mean, is it Maxine in the book who says that what may have saved his life is the fact that he wasn't courageous enough to carry a weapon? Yeah, Zeppo carried a gun when he was a kid, and Chico was afraid of guns. He didn't want to have one, probably because somebody would have used it on him. But Zeppo was apparently more of a kind of a gangster character than even Chico, because when they moved to Chicago, he was 10 years old, and they really weren't paying much attention to him. So he was roaming the streets as a juvenile delinquent. By the time he's 14 or 15, he's carrying a gun and stealing cars. Now, somebody said to me once, and it's one of those things where I like to pretend I know more about it than I ever actually did. That the Marx Brothers were, you know, however you pronounce it, Comedia dell'arte.

I pronounce it Comedia dell'arte, but that's good. Yeah, yeah. You may be right and I may be wrong. No, I have no idea. I think it's Comedia dell'arte. Yeah. Do I have it right? Pick one.

Comedia. Is it Comedia? I think so. Comedia. Comedia. She's good, too. Which they also had. I think it was gonorrhea.

They had that too. Read the book. Again, the only interview I'll ever do promoting book where that's going to come up. Well. And so the actual. They were young men. Comedy. What was that actually?

I would be willing to guarantee that the Marx Brothers never gave it a thought, had no idea about the great tradition of it. People always ask me about it and I would just answer saying they were just trying to make a living. They were just trying to be funny, trying to get an act together. It was never any kind of great plan to emulate some comic tradition they made it up they actually in their early days stole other acts to continue to survive there was a lot of that going on involved period and did you but you know anything about the actual comedian not much i mean i've read i mean in college they made you read things about it and i said associating this with comedy doesn't seem right because it just seemed to make – it's draining the humor out of comedy by analyzing it.

They also stole from themselves. And it's interesting to see how many of the things from the stage shows, like the ocean liner stuff. Sure. Is it from Home Again that turns up in monkey business? The high school skit turns up in horse feathers. There's little bits from shows all over the place. The knife-dropping bit in Animal Crackers came out of home again. Right.

The double piano thing. You know the bit where all the silverware is falling out of Harpo's coat? And he says, I can't imagine what's keeping that. What is it? Coffee pot. The coffee pot. The coffee pot. And I remember Maxine saying that when she was watching them, the thing that would get the tremendous explosion of laughs was the stuff falling out of Harpo's coat. Yep. And they started doing that.

When he first decided to not talk, these are the kind of gags that he was creating for himself. You know, this is all stuff that came out of Harpo's mind. They didn't write this stuff for him. And what I was going to say is the double piano solo that you see in the big store, they start doing that in 1912 in Mr. Green's reception. So they would occasionally yank something out of a show and put it in a movie. Why not? Because it was their material and nobody else was using it.

And it was good. And since you bring up Harpo going silent, and one of the things that you attempt to do in this book is put false rumors to rest and solve mysteries, which we appreciate. And there have been conflicting stories over the years about why Harpo stopped speaking in the act. Was it because Al Sheen stopped writing for him? I do believe that is 100% true, and I found as much documentation as can be found. There's different stories in other books. Yeah, but don't read those books. Okay.

We'll stick with you for now. Yeah, I'm the latest book, so there you go. You know Al Sheen, their uncle, was writing. Gallagher and Sheen. And when Gallagher and Sheen, do I have this right? When Gallagher and Sheen split up, he began writing for the act? No, no, no. Actually, there's a strange chronology there because Gallagher and Sheen, do I have this right? When Gallagher and Sheen split up, he began writing for the act? No, no, no. Actually, there's a strange chronology there because Gallagher and Sheen hated each other.

Okay. And they worked together. I got my chronology wrong. No, no. It's an easy mistake to make because there's a lot of stuff in the book, and this is a very small afterthought. They first teamed up around 1910 and didn't get along and didn't work again for a long time. In 1922, they reunited, had a huge success in the Ziegfeld Follies. But in between, Sheen worked on his own. He had a partner

named Charles Warren as Sheen and Warren. And there's a lot of the Gallagher and Sheen relationship in the Sunshine Boys. Yes, right. It's loosely based on Smith and Dale and a little bit of Gallagher and Sheen. So they couldn't stand each other. But the point where Al Sheen writes for the Marx Brothers, he was working on his own, and he was a big deal in vaudeville. There were rumors at the time that there was going to be a new show featuring Al Sheen and the Marx Brothers. But Al Sheen had gotten into some contract problems where he wasn't getting a good enough billing. He wouldn't be paid less than anybody else. getting a good enough billing. He wouldn't be paid less than anybody else. My theory on that is Al Sheen might've liked to work with his nephews, but he was going to get top billing and get paid more than the four of them, or he wasn't going to do it. So he wrote Home Again for them.

Which was a big deal. It was a very big deal because that's the show that put him over the top. And when he wrote it, he was really thinking of Groucho mostly because Groucho emulated Al Sheen. He was a German dialect comedian and he sang and danced very much like Al Sheen. Groucho completely based his stage persona on his uncle. And it developed to the point where it was better than Al Sheen. But Al Sheen wouldn't have been the guy to tell you that at the time. He wrote the play Home Again for them.

And Harpo ended up with like a few throwaway lines and he complained about it and the story goes that al sheen says well you didn't even deliver those few lines very well did you have a lisp too harpo it's alluded to it's he you know he had a there's a joke about that you know i don't know if he really did i don't think he did i've heard harpo's voice i don't think there's a list but that was true and there was also this sort of apocryphal thing that Harpo relates in Harpo Speaks saying that he read a review that said he was great as a silent comedian and the effect was destroyed when he spoke. Now, I looked for that review in the cities where it could have occurred. Interesting. And it didn't exist. So I think that was something Harpo fabricated. Now,

did Al Sheen have that whole walk and talk that Groucho had? Not the walk. Groucho developed that, but the style of speech that Groucho used before they ever made movies was very much like Al Sheen. A lot of German dialect with puns based on a German's mispronunciation of an American word. Which got dropped when the war broke out. Yeah. When the Huns took over. When the United States entered World War I, there was no more German dialect.

Right. As a matter of fact, there were certain people who wouldn't work theaters that had German stagehands. That's how pervasive the anti-German sentiment became. Now, the story Groucho tells is that when the Lusitania was sunk, he had to stop doing the German dialect. Well, that's because Canada was in the war from day one in 1914, and when they crossed the border to play Canada, he had to not do the German bit, but they continued doing it in the United States

until the U.S. entered the war in 1917. And I heard a story that Gallagher and Sheen, you know, very in demand act in vaudeville. And then they got offered something else like the Ziegfeld Follies. And they went to court because I think Ziegfeld said, I can't do this. Or whoever had them before said, I can't do this show without Gallagher and Sheen. They're invaluable to my show. And that Gallagher and Sheen actually went to court and brought in witnesses to testify that they were a terrible team.

There's actually a very true story there. That's wonderful. But it's not quite that they were terrible. The story is that there was this thing called Schubert-Vaudeville in 21 and 22 that the Marx Brothers even got involved in. When things dried up for them in conventional Vaudeville, they were blacklisted. And a lot of acts were going to take the money from Schubert-Vaudeville to compete with the big Vaudeville change, the Keith Circuit and the Orpheum Circuit. And Gallagher and Sheen were among the many acts that were getting screwed on their pay from the Schuberts. There wasn't enough money financing.

The whole thing went belly up in a couple of years. But they broke the contract and went to work for Ziegfeld, and Schubert sued. And Schubert was saying that they're unique and we can't do the show. Just exactly what you said. They brought in people like Will Rogers to court to say that they're not unique. Another comedy team could come in and do this. Yeah, I heard. But they didn't say they were terrible.

They said they were not unique. That was the case. People testifying. Interesting. No, they steal their bits. And there's a million acts much more talented. Yeah, I think the gist of it was there's no reason you can't do that show with two other schlubs. Gallagher and Sheen are not unique.

You can get someone else. Let's talk for a second, too, about the driving force, about Minnie. Because we just touched upon her. You read the book. I read Stefan Kanfer's book, too. Am I saying his name right about Groucho? Yeah. Was she what you alluded to before?

She was trying to keep them away from juvenile delinquency. She was trying to have them make something of themselves. But how much of it was her just being a good mom and how much of it was the fact that she longed to be a performer? Her brother was a star. How much of it was living vicariously through her sons? And how much of it was just being a good mom? It's certainly elements of both. But I think it would be hard to say that Minnie was a good mom in the conventional sense.

She wasn't. Because the truth is Groucho's early ambitions were to be a doctor. And they discouraged him from that because Al Sheen was making $200 a week. Incredible. And you kind of get the sense, too, that Groucho resented not having an education. He was embarrassed by it, and he overcompensated. Cavett's the guy that always says that he had read all the books that everybody else talked about pretending to have read.

And I think that's a really interesting observation. It's one of the sad things that you come away from, that he's got a great mind and he's teaching himself to read and he's hell-bent on an education, but he's being dragged into show business. Well, I think at the point where he was dragged into show business, he was enthusiastic because he worshipped his uncle. And when Groucho was looking for a job, this is something I really did a lot of research on to the point where you can research something that happened over 100 years ago. He was looking for a job at the end of the school year because kids were expected to go to work at the end of the school year. And you'd look in the classified ads, you'd see all these jobs for delivery boys and all kinds of manual labor and sweatshop work.

He finds a job as a singer wanted for a vaudeville trio. And that's the job he gets. Oh, the Leroy. The Leroy trio. So he's dying to go on the stage because his uncle is on the stage. He's imitating his uncle around the house. He's willing to sing and dance at any chance he gets. This kid wants to be in show business.

I misspoke a little bit. It's kind of Zeppo and Gummo that get dragged in. And a little bit of Harpo, too. Yeah. The rest of them pretty much got sh'd into show business by their mother because what she picked up on pretty quickly was once Groucho started making a buck and doing well and getting good reviews, she's saying, wow, if they're paying 50 bucks a week for one, I got a whole house full of these kids. You know, that's really where it came from. And they didn't have any other prospects. I mean,

these guys are going to make $2 a week doing deliveries. Well, I think she was too. She was worried. You get the sense that she was worried about the crowds they were hanging around in, that she was worried that they were going to end up in jail. Yeah. If not just, just nobody's. There was a certain criminal element to their childhood. These guys were hustlers and they were running around town, probably stealing things, getting into little bits of trouble. And Groucho likes to tell the story about getting busted for shoplifting at Bloomingdale's when he was a kid. It's a good story. You know, there's no real indication that she thought these kids were going to do anything academic. And maybe she was just an ultimate realist knowing that their only prospects were going to be things they could do without an education.

I remember an experience I had with Maxine, which just for me, it just gave me like the biggest thrill. Like I felt like I touched a spark in old showbiz. We'll remind our listeners, Chico's daughter. Yeah, Chico's daughter. And she looked like Chico. She sure did. Yeah, there was absolutely a facial resemblance there. And we were talking. We were sitting at a dinner table talking, and she mentioned Gallagher and Sheen.

And I immediately went, absolutely, Mr. Gallagher. And she grabs my hand, shakes it, and goes, positively, Mr. Sheen. That's nice. That must have been a nice moment for you. I thought, oh, my God, it's like I took a time machine into old Hollywood. What a great answer. Now, Frank was telling me that he saw something in your book. About the selective service? Yes.

Well, it's chilling that she, about her going to Gummo. Yeah. And basically telling him you're expendable. You asked me a minute ago if Minnie was a good mother. She asked one of her sons to enlist in World War I. Incredible. Yes. I mean, maybe we can assume that she knew he wouldn't, being a celebrity or being part of a celebrity family, he wouldn't see action.

Well, as it turns out. Let's give her the benefit of the doubt. He spent very little time in uniform and he spent it all in Chicago, not exactly the front lines, and his biggest job in the service was driving generals around Chicago introducing them to chorus girls,

many of whom he, of course, knew. But it was like kind of saving the other brothers who were more valuable to him. Minnie was pretty savvy. And by this point, she had figured out that if one of them was in service, she could get away with the others. That's incredible. You know, they did give Groucho a legitimate eyesight deferment.

He was very, very nearsighted. And that was good for the first craft. So Minnie basically thought, if one of my sons gets killed, he's still a makeover. Basically, the one who wasn't very good in the act and who stammered was expendable. Oh, yeah. Well, according to your book and the accounts I've read about it, he didn't seem to mind that much. He said he has that great line.

Yeah. He thought World War I would be much safer than being the fourth Marx brother. Yeah. He says, I went to war to get a little peace, which is just great. But how could a mother ask you? That's something you'd carry around for a while. That's the opposite of Sophie's choice.

Here's another psychological question I'm going to ask you to play armchair shrink about the Marx Brothers, that it's clear that Chico was her favorite, was Minnie's favorite. Yeah, he got away with anything he had to get away with. The firstborn. Yes, indeed.

Okay, so the picture that gets painted is that Groucho, being the middle son, that she did not encourage him, she did not, stop me if I'm wrong here, that she did not think he was terribly attractive. He grows up with some issues with women. Yeah, the thing, and this is also from Maxine, and her recollections are pretty good. She knew Minnie. She was around, she was born in 1918, so Maxine knew Minnie pretty well as a little kid. And she said that, and I don't speak German, and I don't remember how to say this in German, but Minnie had a nickname for Groucho. She had two nicknames for him.

And it was, however you say this in German, the jealous one. Yes. And the dark one. Yes. Because he had a slightly darker complexion than the other boys. And she called them those things, the jealous one and the dark one. And I think that's got to have an effect on a kid. Yeah, you get the sense that she was a little bit unkind to him and maybe, you know, I'm not trying to be Dr. Phil here.

They all worshipped her. What they did was they gave her so much credit that she probably didn't deserve some of. They created this legend of their mother where, in truth, and you get some of this out of the book, in the early days of her managing them, she was completely inept. Minnie Palmer. She just didn't know what she book, in the early days of her managing them, she was completely inept. Minnie Palmer. She just didn't know what she was doing in the beginning. She once ran an ad saying that they were booked on an extended tour and they were, you know,

unavailable to make another go-round on a certain circuit. But they weren't. It wasn't true. She made it up. So then she's basically advertising that this available act was unavailable. I also love that she takes her sister and joins the act. Yeah, tell me how this worked out. The three nightingales. Minnie had this great mathematical theory of vaudeville, which turns out to be quite true. If you keep adding people to the

act, you get paid more, whether they're talented or not. So if you're working as a trio and you're getting 75 bucks a week, you get 100 as a quartet. Well, Harpo can't sing, but let's put him in the act to get 100 a week. So let's do this right. There were the three Nightingales. Yes. Which was Groucho. Originally, it was Groucho, Gummo.

They didn't have those names then. But Julius, Milton, and there was a girl. Mabel O'Donnell. Mabel O'Donnell was a girl singer who sang off key. Allegedly. Okay. Then she drags Harpo in to be the fourth Nightingale. Well, not quite. They can Mabel O'Donnell, and they bring in Lou Levy and Harpo in to be the fourth Nightingale. Well, not quite.

They can Mabel O'Donnell, and they bring in Lou Levy and Harpo at the same time to be the four Nightingales. They get rid of the girl. They bring in a boy singer. Then she drags Harpo into the scenario. Now there's four Nightingales. Then she decides that she and her sister are going to join the act, and they become the six mascots. Do I have that right? You've got that exactly right.

And the crazy thing about that is you've got these two women in their mid-40s playing school girls. What can go wrong? It's hilarious. But they managed to pull it off. Groucho describes it as a terrible act at one point. It did okay for a short time, but what it did was it led them to the act that made them into the three Marx Brothers in Fun in High School.

Yeah. It's fun reading in the book, too, as you're going through it. It's fun waiting to see how the pieces are going to come together. You know, because Chico's off doing his thing. Chico's playing the piano in Whorehouses and Honky Tonks. Then he teams up with Lee. And it's more, was it Marx and Lee? Yeah, he had three partners in one season.

He teamed up with his cousin. He was Marx and, do I have this right? Sheen and Marx. Sheen and Lee. Yeah, he had three partners in one season. He teamed up with his cousin. He was Marks and, do I have this right? Sheen and Marks. Sheen and Marks. It was Marks and Gordon, Sheen and Marks, and Marks and Lee. And he played the piano blindfolded. That was part of the shtick. Yeah, that was one of the big parts of his act.

He would take requests from the audience with a sheet over the piano, and he's blindfolded. And, you know, I guess having the sheet over the piano and being blindfolded is sort of overkill it's wonderful but that was one of his big things in his act and and when did i i i'm having the same trouble with my phone i'm enjoying the vibration i told you to wear the front If that didn't happen a couple of times, I'd have no fun at all. Now, when did Chico invent that like gun move on the piano with the shooting the piano? The best you'll be able to figure out is if you read reviews of his early piano performances, he's getting incredible reviews for his style and his shtick at the piano in 1911 when he's first out in vaudeville so i want to say that that's probably something he always had on the stage he's getting reviews as part of sheen and marks for like piano acrobatics and things like that so you have to

believe that shooting the keys came around at that point he was playing ragtime piano and that was the style that was really popular and there was a legendary ragtime pianist named mike bernard who nobody remembers nobody's ever heard of he'd get reviews saying like he plays ragtime like a second mike bernard and he's got all this histrionic stuff in his style so i think a lot of that stuff was very very early for him so chico was a very talented musician yeah it pissed off groucho that the guy didn't have to practice. He just put his hands in a basin of water and said, I'm ready to play. Yeah, with a handful of piano lessons.

Yeah, he took piano lessons for a very, very short time. Chico's wife said that she thinks he took piano lessons for less than six months and was just a virtuoso right out of the box. That's incredible. They were so musical. I mean, we talk a lot on this show, Gil, about the importance of music and comedy. Oh, yeah. And comedians being musical. But they had it. I heard, like, Mel Brooks would audition actors for his movies by asking them to sing because he saw the importance.

So the Marx Brothers, all musically talented. Yeah, and, you know, people ask me about the appeal of the Marx Brothers all the time, and one of the things that got me as a kid was that they did so many different things. And if you just look at monkey business, when they're running around on the deck of the boat and they stop by the bandstand and Chico sits down and starts playing the piano and they grab saxophones, they're really playing. Harper playing the clarinet and coconuts, Groucho playing the guitar and horse feathers. Horse feathers. The music is so important to those films. And Harper, excuseuts. Groucho playing the guitar and horse feathers. The music

is so important to those films. And Harper, excuse me, Groucho could really sing. Oh yeah, and he could play the guitar. They all played a little piano. There were these reports in the press when they were on Broadway that Zeppo was studying the cello. I don't know if that was just something for the press. To my knowledge

he never played it on stage, but there was something very musical about all of them. I remember because he's not here to say it. But I remember Dick Cavett telling a story that Groucho, when he was old and sick and weak, he once had to travel somewhere by plane and the plane was delayed. The plane was delayed. And he was just, he said, like, you know, that Groucho had said, if I had a knife with me, I would have stabbed myself. And then some woman walks over excited, and she goes, you're Groucho Marx.

And he kind of nods his head disgustingly. And she goes, well, you weren't very funny on the plane and he goes hey lady why don't you go fuck yourself this happened yes i love that story i love dick's line in the uh in the marx visit and the marx brothers in a nutshell where he says uh he says the shame of it is that groucho was the only person that didn't get to have a Groucho Marx. Yes, that's fun to think about. What a sweet thing to say. And Chico, I saw something. I think it was an English interviewer.

And Chico was like he was old. And he was wearing the hat and jacket that didn't fit quite right anymore. And I remember thinking, I don't know if he wants to speak naturally, but he's slipping into Chico. Or if he's trying to do Chico, but he's just getting lazy with it. But you could see him turning into just like an old New York Jew at times. Exactly right. And that piece you're talking about is in that Marx Brothers TV collection. It's Chico on the BBC in 1959. And what I think is an interesting observation is if you look at their careers in the 1950s

when the Marx Brothers were no longer. Groucho created another life for himself. You bet your life that he refused to put on the grease paint mustache and the frock coat. He became a gracefully aging Groucho Marx. Harpo and Chico never shed the characters from literally that started in Home Again in 1914. They're wearing the costumes. They're doing the same shtick. Now, Harpo occasionally flirted with the idea of breaking out of Harpo. I mean, there are points where he did a stage play. He appeared in The Man Who Came to Dinner in Summerstock in 1941 in a speaking part. He did some very interesting things playing with symphony orchestras.

He agreed at one point to narrate a documentary film about Israel called Israel Makes Harpo Speak. It never got made, but he was at that point willing to shed the character. Chico never performed as anything but the guy in the hat and the coat from the Marx Brothers pictures. He just didn't do it. When he did the Chico Marx Orchestra, he came on stage in that costume and did that bit. Yeah, they both kind of look sad, Chick and Harper and Lady Gears. It's because those characters weren't really designed to be seen as old men. No.

Yeah. It's hard to watch Love Happy. Harpo looked like a homeless man. Yeah, and Groucho was probably smart enough to realize that the character that he created in those early movies wasn't going to work as an old man and i think the other brothers probably felt that they had less opportunity to branch out than groucho did and in that interview and the bbc what's so strange there are times you know when

he's talking like this you know the whole chico thing But then it's like he becomes like, you know, well, when we worked with the Marx Brothers, you know. Well, it's exactly like in the middle of the sentence, he forgets he's doing the Italian. Yeah, yeah. And he becomes like an old Jew, which what he was. And he's going, yeah, we started in Vaudville and then we started working on different productions.

Yeah, he did a couple of very rare things out of the Chico costume. He did a play called The Fifth Season in 1956 as a touring show. And he almost backed out of it. He couldn't remember his lines. He was just not good at it. And they had to bring in an actor at the last minute to replace him at the opening. He just wasn't equipped to do it. And he even did one other thing out of costume.

He did a Playhouse 90. I was just going to say that. I saw that at Maxine's house. I read your mind. Yeah. There's also the story of mankind. Yeah. Well, he's in a costume piece there.

Right. Right. That's probably the, you know, it's Chico in color though, which is kind of rare. Yeah. But he's not doing Chico. Gives, um, Skidoo a run for his money. I love the story of mankind because of how weird it is. Oh, it's a train wreck though.

And it's so bad that it's great. Yeah. It's fascinating. It's a derailed locomotive. It's worth the price of admission for Dennis Hopper as Napoleon. Two other quick questions before we, as we wind down. Jack Benny. Did Minnie ask Jack Benny to play?

According to Jack Benny, yes. That story comes from Jack Benny's memoirs. Do you know this, Gil? Yeah, that they wanted him to play in the opening act. No, they wanted to bring him on the road as part of the act. As part of the act. Because of his ability to sight read the music. He was very impressive as a violinist when he was a kid.

When they played Waukegan, Illinois, they met him as part of the orchestra, and they liked the shtick he did with the violin, and he could pick up the music so quickly. She wanted to add him to the act. What happened? His mother wouldn't let him go because he was a young kid, and she was afraid of his life, what it would be on the road with these pariahs, the Marx Brothers. You know, we touched on this earlier. We didn't really get to it, but the lifestyle in vaudeville

was such that when vaudevillians came to town, the parents of children didn't want their kids anywhere near the vaudevillians. The Marx Brothers had quite a reputation. I'm sure. And Jack Benny's mother wouldn't let the kid go out with him. Yeah, like actors and vaudevillians were like lock up your daughters. Exactly. And, you know, there's— Well, there were boarding houses that said no actors. Right.

There's a wonderful book you probably know by Fred Allen called Much Ado About Me, which is his memoir of being in vaudeville. And it's the most true and accurate depiction of some of this stuff that you can ever read. And I use it as a source in the book. It tells about how the actor was perceived and treated. And it also tells a lot about, for lack of a better explanation, the sex lives of vaudevillians. And, you know, Fred Allen is so honest about this. And it applies to the Marx Brothers. You know, the girls in local towns wouldn't mess around with any of the local boys because they'd be talked.

But these actors coming through for three days or a week were fair game. And the actors would tell other actors who you can go sleep with in Dubuque or something like that. And I'm sure that a lot of quickie marriages to the local sweethearts occurred as a result of some of these dalliances. result of some of these dalliances and i was talking about this with bill marks and we had a little laugh saying you know we should do dna testing around the country to see if chico has any grandchildren that we don't know about now i heard because i mean i heard about like jack benny's mother being worried about him going on the road with them but also that jack benny said he was afraid of the mox brothers i don't know how true that is, but only he would know. But I'll say that his mother did let him go on the road with a middle-aged woman named Cora Salisbury,

who I think was a widow. And legend is that 17-year-old Jack was consorting with 40-something-year-old Cora Salisbury in their first act. Doesn't Benny turn up on a bill with the Marxes later? He did a full tour with him in 1922. Okay. And he became quite close with Zeppo. In fact, I believe Zeppo introduced Jack to Mary Livingstone. That's good trivia.

And then I heard a story that, well, of course, Jack Benny was famous as being cheap as his character. But they said when they'd be at the Hillcrest Comedy Club. Country Club. Country Club, yeah. Yeah. No, Comedy Club. I've been working too long in comedy. Everything's.

Yeah. Yeah, Hillcrest Country Club. Yeah, Hillcrest Country Club, that, you know, Groucho is the one who would leave like a 10-cent tip or something. And Benny would sometimes feel bad for the waiter, and he'd slip him a few dollars. Yeah, I know that the Benny thing was more of a character than his real persona. Groucho was tight with the buck, no doubt. That's the sense you get from all the Marx documentaries. Did he carry an orange around with him in his pocket because he was afraid of the Depression coming back?

That's a story that I've heard. Of course, Marx Brothers in a nutshell. That he was afraid that he— No, actually, the story is he went on a camping trip to Yellowstone with some friends, and Irv Brecker, the writer, was a good friend of his, and there's some home movie footage of them. And Groucho was afraid they'd be without water. I see. So he heard the tomatoes had a lot of moisture. I see.

He's walking around with a bag of tomatoes, and in the home movies, he walks by the poolside of some hotel, and he's got the brown bag with the tomatoes in it. I heard he was terrified there was going to be another crash. Yeah, you know, the stock market crash is an important part of their history. It's a big part of the book, too. I spent a lot of time with the book on that. The truth is he didn't really lose $250,000. His portfolio at the inflated prices was valued at that, but everybody buying on margin, to get a $250,000 portfolio, he probably invested about $100,000, which is why the crash happened yeah and then i heard i guess cavett said or in some book that george s

kaufman said the only person he would allow to ad lib during one of his productions was groucho yeah i don't think he had much of a choice so that was something he probably said as a face saving gesture but there's there's um a great great story about Kaufman and the Marx Brothers where Groucho was trying to get in some of his own lines and Kaufman was shooting them all down. And Groucho says, well, they laughed at Fulton and the steamboat. And Kaufman said, yeah, but not at matinees. That's funny. You know, they turned out to be great collaborators. They turned out to be perfect for each other.

I think the best writers the Marx Brothers ever had were Kaufman and Perlman. Those are their best pictures. And then... And Anand Damori Riskin, too. Oh, yeah. As far as songwriters, Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby wrote all the classic... Yeah, and Harry Ruby was a great friend of Groucho's forever. I mean, they went back to the vaudeville days.

I think they met around 1917. He was part of an act called Ruby and Tierney, and they crossed paths in vaudeville. Now, was it Harry Ruby that Groucho was visiting? I think he was dying of cancer. Well, I don't think he died of cancer, but he died in 1974, I think, and he was in pretty rough shape.

I think he was in a facility, and Groucho visited him. It was pretty depressing for him. And I remember just one story popped into my head that uh one time some some reporter was talking to Groucho's wife about something and she said something in the interview and press that uh bad about Perry Como. And, you know, Perry Como started saying, oh, she just doesn't like Italians. And so the reporter asked Groucho about this,

and Groucho said, that's not true. She liked my brother Chico, and he's Italian. Fantastic. Fantastic. You know, Groucho loved Harry Ruby so much that he used to talk about him on talk shows. He would say, my friend Harry Ruby, who is a congenital idiot. Wonderful. Wonderful. You know, one of the sad things, we should wrap.

One of the sad things in the book, too, that I didn't know was that Minnie died in 29, and she really only got to see, and barely, coconuts. She died in September. I guess coconuts came out in March. So she didn't see. She saw them be the toast of Broadway. She saw her dream come true. It just didn't make it to the end of it.

But she got to live to see her dream come true, which is a pretty special thing. What a force of nature. She was pushing them all this time. They're a poverty stricken group. And that they would become a legendary, not just successful, but they symbolized comedy. Yeah. And she has a lot to do with that because part of the whole mythology of the Marx Brothers is where they came from. Of course.

And even if you look – and I don't want to ever be accused of overanalyzing comedy because I think it dies as soon as you do that. But the notion of Groucho's character being something of a shyster and being something of a fake in a lot of the pictures where is he really an African explorer? Is he really the professor or president of a college? The head of a country where is he really an African explorer? You know, is he really the professor or president of the country? You know, the whole, and he's the president, you know, these things are part of the whole character. And you look at where they came from these, you know, basically near to well kids from, you know, New York city who had nothing. This is in keeping with the whole idea that many told them they could be whatever they wanted to be. If you want to be the president of Huxley College, if you want to be the president of Fredonia,

if you want to be an African explorer, just go ahead and do it. It's fascinating how things lead to other things. I mean, if her brother hadn't been a vaudeville star, you know, if this hadn't happened, if that hadn't happened, so many dominoes have to fall to to make them what they are but but but the story that emerges what emerges is that she just is indomitable she just won't she will not stop powerful woman and she you know harpo says it in his book their parents had a very weird marriage. Well, Frenchie's another wonderful character. I mean, Minnie's the father figure, and Frenchie's the housewife.

He's altogether hilarious. Don't you see him in Night at the Opera? No, no. He turns up in Monkey Business. When they come down the gangplank, he's there waving with his white hat and smiling, and he's actually dead when they made Night at the Opera. Oh, jeez. Yeah, but I'll tell you, then that's the characters.

Just reading the book, I mean, it's like a movie in itself because Frenchie's such a character. Yeah. And all these people and Minnie's sister and the grandparents and all of them. You know, I didn't realize. Such oddballs. I didn't realize when I was writing it, but everybody's told me that it really turns out to be Minnie's story for a good half of the book.

Yeah, I haven't seen Minnie's Boys, but now I'm curious. It wasn't good. No? No. That's too bad. It's hard to capture a character like that and make it. Shelly Winters' player? Yeah, Groucho was not happy with that choice.

Okay. Oh, jeez. That's too bad. Let's plug the book because the book is fascinating. And to our listeners who love us talking about the Marx Brothers, you don't know the Marx Brothers if you haven't read this book. I learned so much. Four of the three musketeers, the Marx Brothers, on stage.

And I can't believe how much information is in this book and how much of your life you poured into it. It's sad and depressing and frightening. How much information you have in that book. It's like you look at how big a book that is and you go, you know, I'm scared of this guy. Honestly, I mean, you know, we talked about Cliff's book, too. The recreation of vaudeville. The recreation of vaudeville, I mean, you really managed to put the reader, you know, the mosquitoes and the rats in the backyard. And you put the, there's such.

It's something I wanted to know more about from the moment I saw the word vaudeville for the first time in my life, which was in Groucho and me. I just wanted to know everything I could find out about it. I'm not exactly sure why that was so fascinating to me, but it just was. You bring the world to life. You really do. It's so funny because in interviews, I get the question and every performer gets it like, oh, tell us about your nightmare gigs. And the worst nightmare gigs that you could have in the past couple of years is a vacation in Hawaii compared to what the Vaudevillians went.

That was hell. Just getting to and from was sometimes a nightmare. And, you know, I know we're kind of out of time. I'll just tell you this one more thing. Sure. For the Marx Brothers, when they got blacklisted in the early days in their career, they weren't booked on a circuit that arranged things for them. They had to figure it out for themselves. So sometimes they had to change trains twice in the middle of the night to get to their next gig.

They were really building their circuit themselves until they got off the blacklist with Home Again. And the lifestyle was terrible. And they were also, in the South, Jews not allowed in certain boarding houses. There was a network of Jewish families in the south that rented out rooms in their homes to Jewish vaudevillians because the boarding houses wouldn't take them. they would sleep at the train station and they'd be like basically on the platform in freezing weather. Yeah, that's sometimes, you know, taking a train in the middle of the night. A lot of times they do their last show in a city, get paid and have to go right to the train station to get to the next gig. And sometimes they're playing the next day. In vaudeville, Sunday was traditionally a travel day, but sometimes they could play in a place

that had a show opening on Sunday, and they'd travel all night on the train to get to this matinee on a Sunday somewhere. It was a really tough lifestyle. Hard, scrabble life. Just say nothing of the unsavory characters. I mean, they're stealing their money, and Groucho has to learn to block the door

because somebody's coming in and taking his money in the night. And as they became more successful, they became sort of unsavory. Right. Yeah. Okay, say the name of the book again. It's a wonderful read. I'm going to make you say it this time.

Oh, okay. You're the celebrity. Why do I have to do work around here? This is the book. the book, Rabbit S. Bader Presents Four of the Three Musketeers, The Mox Brothers on Stage. What do you say you take us out, Julius? Okay. Well, this has been

the Gilbert Gottfried podcast. It's called because back in my day, we would make a podcast and it would have the person's name in it because back then people had names. So this is Gilbert Gottfried's amazing colossal podcast. And he's got his co-host, who I always said he never should have hired in the first place. Hired? He just brings the show to a zazzle.

Just call me Baravelli. I'm going to start wearing the hat. Frank Sanzopadre. You're the only guy who does Groucho in the middle of one of his strokes. Yes. He's cornered the market on that. And it was once again recorded at Nutmeg. Groucho in the middle of one of his strokes. Yes! He's cornered the market on that question. And it was once again

recorded at Nutmeg with our engineer Frank Verderosa. Thank you, Frankie. And our guest today is Robert S. Bader. Because sometimes

a person would have a middle name, and instead of saying their middle name, they would put just the initial. That's the way it was in my day. They wouldn't use a full name. Thank you, Robert. This has been one of my favorite episodes. It's Robert S. Spader.

And back in my day, if someone was named Robert, you could also call them Bob, which was back then. And Bob was a time of affection. Fade out. Gilbert Groucho stroking out. Thanks, man. Next time you'll come back and tell us about why Danny Kaye was such a bastard. Oh, no, I could never do that. He was a wonderful human being.

Take care. We still rolling? No. Thanks, man. I don't know what they have to say. It makes no difference anyway. Whatever it is, I'm against it. No matter what it is or who commenced it, I'm against it. Your proposition may be good, but let's have one thing understood.

Whatever it is, I'm against it. And even when you've changed it or condensed it, I'm against it. I'm opposed to it. On general principles, I'm opposed to it. He's opposed to it. He's backed it. He's opposed to it. For months before my son was born, I used to yell from night to morn, whatever it is, I'm against it. And I've kept yelling since I first commenced it. I'm against it. Cry, baby, cry.

Hi, I'm Sarah Thayer. And I'm Susan Orlean. We're the hosts of Cry Babies, the show where great writers, comedians, musicians, and more tell us what makes them cry in a good way. The healthy kind of crying. Oh, crying is healthy, Susan. I agree. On Cry Babies, you'll hear Mara Wilson

explaining why she was so affected when Homer Simpson met his mom. Or Mike Doty playing his favorite Magnetic Fields tearjerker. Or comedian Kyle Kinane telling us about finding catharsis at an LCD sound system show. Listen to all these wonderful people and more on Crybabies,

an Apple podcast stitcher, or your favorite podcast app.