American Masters: "Groucho and Cavett" (Cavalier Films, Daphne Productions, American Masters Films, PBS, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After the “Rock the Boat” episode of Disco: Soundtrack of a Revolution, I then watched another PBS program, an American Masters show called “Groucho and Cavett.” Not surprisingly, previous episodes of American Masters had profiled the Marx Brothers as a group and Groucho Marx individually. The Marx Brothers had a fascinating virtual comeback in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, after two of the main three were dead (Chico died in 1961 and Harpo in 1964) but Groucho carried on the flame and made public appearances, including a nationwide tour in 1972 which my brother Chris and I got to see. Rebellious young people in the late 1960’s rediscovered the Marx Brothers in general and their masterpiece, Duck Soup (1933) – a brutal satire on war, politics and dictatorships at a time when Hitler had just taken power in Germany (in his autobiography Harpo recalled listening to Hitler’s speeches during breaks in filming Duck Soup; no doubt the Marxes understood Hitler’s German because it was close enough to Yiddish, which the Marxes had grown up speaking as the sons of Jewish immigrants, and Harpo was angry enough at Hitler he had his off-stage name legally changed from Adolph to Arthur) and a commercial flop that nearly sank the Marxes’ career – in particular. Groucho Marx and Dick Cavett first crossed paths in 1960, when Groucho was a frequent guest on Jack Paar’s The Tonight Show (Paar was the host between Steve Allen, who originated it, and Johnny Carson), and of course Groucho couldn’t resist making the obvious pun on Paar’s name: “Are you above Paar or below Paar?” – and Cavett was one of Paar’s writers. Later, when Paar abruptly quit the show in 1962 and NBC had to think of some way to keep the show going before Carson was free of his other commitments, they thought of having a rotating series of guest hosts – and Groucho was one of them.

Groucho and Cavett became friends over time, and when Cavett was hired by ABC to start his own talk show in 1968 to compete with Carson’s The Tonight Show on NBC, Groucho frequently appeared on his show as a guest. The earlier episodes of The Dick Cavett Show were “wiped” by ABC – that is, they erased the videotapes of them so they could reuse the tape – though clips of them survive via a fan who had a reel-to-reel home videotape recorder. Much of the one-man show Groucho did in 1972 was preserved in bits and pieces on the Cavett programs, including songs like “Show Me a Rose” and Irving Berlin’s anti-war song from 1914, “Stay Down Here Where You Belong,” in which the Devil exhorts his son not to ascend to Earth because all the young men are too busy killing each other to care about the difference between right and wrong. Groucho told Cavett that Irving Berlin had offered him $100 for every time he made a public appearance and didn’t perform the song. Groucho was full of oddball anecdotes, including one about his father, tailor Sam Marx. (In honor of their dad, the Marx Brothers inserted at least one joke about clothes or tailoring in all of their movies.) He said Sam Marx was the worst tailor ever; he wouldn’t bother to measure his clients, and if you ordered a Sam Marx suit you might get back something with radically different pants legs and without any buttons. Groucho also talked about Chico Marx’s gambling addiction; he recalled that one of Sam Marx’s clients had complained that the suit he got delivered hadn’t come with pants, and it turned out Chico had been assigned to deliver it, but had hocked the pants on the way to pay off a gambling debt. According to Groucho, the main reason the Marx Brothers kept making movies as long as they did (they made their first released movie, The Cocoanuts, in 1929 and their last as a team, Love Happy – featuring the young Marilyn Monroe in a bit role – in 1949) was to help Chico pay off his gambling debts. (It didn’t get told here, but one of the most famous Marx Brothers anecdotes was Chico making a side bet with one of the extras on the final horse race in the film A Day at the Races – and placing his money on the horse the script specifically said would lose.)

One point Cavett made about Groucho was that he was a huge fan of Gilbert and Sullivan, and frequently performed songs in the Gilbert and Sullivan patter style – and the show includes a tantalizing clip of Groucho actually performing in a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. It was The Mikado, produced for TV by NBC in 1960, and Groucho played the Lord High Executioner; there’s a great clip here of Groucho performing the song “I’ve Got a Little List” and that whets my appetite to see the whole program. The show featured interviews with two other long-lived comedy legends, George Burns and Woody Allen, as well as an archival clip featuring lyricist E. Y. “Yip” Harburg, who wrote songs with Harold Arlen for The Wizard of Oz and the Marx Brothers’ film At the Circus. Harburg and his collaborator, composer Harold Arlen, had had to sign a two-film deal with MGM to get to do The Wizard of Oz, and At the Circus was the other film. But as well as doing terrible romantic ballads like “Two Blind Loves” and “Step Up and Take a Bow” for the film’s romantic leads, Kenny Baker and Florence Rice, Arlen and Harburg yielded to Groucho’s demand for a Gilbert and Sullivan-style patter song and came up with “Lydia, the Tattooed Lady.” In Harburg’s clip he recalled that because of the Motion Picture Production Code Administration, they had to add a third chorus to the song in which they had Lydia marry an admiral so the movie censors wouldn’t object to lines like, “When her muscles start relaxin’/Up the hill comes Andrew Jackson.”

There’s also a great gag scene from a Cavett show between Groucho and Truman Capote – Capote complains that he’s under a heavy tax burden because he’s single and Groucho offers to marry him – which of course plays quite differently now that same-sex marriage is (at least for now) the law of the land and we know for sure that Capote was Gay (though that wasn’t exactly the world’s biggest secret during his lifetime). Groucho Marx remains one of America’s funniest and most legendary comedians, even though he came to a sad end; his family filed suit against him to break up his professional and possibly personal relationship with his 20-something secretary, Erin Fleming, and won. Erin Fleming warned the court that if she were forced to separate from Groucho, he would lose the will to live and would die – and he did on August 19, 1977 (a bad year for celebrity deaths: it was also the year Charlie Chaplin, Bing Crosby, Maria Callas and Elvis Presley died).