Editing Groucho Marx (section)

== Career ==

=== Vaudeville ===
Marx started his career in [[vaudeville]] in 1905 when he joined up with an act called The Leroy Trio.<ref name=":0">{{Cite book|title=The New Humor in the Progressive Era|last=DesRochers|first=Rick|publisher=Palgrave Macmillan|year=2014|isbn=978-1-137-35742-7|location=New York, New York|pages=83, 84, 85}}</ref> He answered a newspaper [[classified advertising|want ad]] by a man named Robin Leroy who was looking for a boy to join his group as a singer. Marx was hired along with fellow vaudeville actor Johnny Morris. Through this act, Marx got his first taste of life as a vaudeville performer. In 1909, Marx and his brothers had become a group act, at first called The Three Nightingales and later The Four Nightingales.<ref name=":0" /> The brothers' mother, [[Minnie Marx]], was the group's manager, putting them together and booking their shows. The group had a rocky start, performing in less than adequate venues and rarely, if ever, being paid for their performances.<ref name=":0" /> Eventually brother [[Gummo Marx|Milton (Gummo)]] left the act to serve in World War I and was replaced by [[Zeppo Marx|Herbert (Zeppo)]], and the group became known as the [[Marx Brothers]].<ref name=":0" /> Their first successful show was ''Fun In Hi Skule'' (1910).<ref name=":0" />

=== Motion pictures ===
[[File:Marx Brothers 1931.jpg|upright|thumb|The Marx Brothers in 1931 (from top, Chico, Harpo, Groucho and Zeppo)]]
Marx made 26 movies, including 13 with his brothers Chico and Harpo.<ref name="bio">{{cite web|url=http://www.groucho-marx.com/bio.html|title=Groucho Marx Biography|access-date=June 25, 2008|website=Groucho-marx.com|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120119074319/http://internetserviceteam.com/|archive-date=January 19, 2012|url-status=dead}}</ref> Marx developed a routine as a wisecracking hustler with a distinctive chicken-walking lope, an exaggerated greasepaint mustache and eyebrows and an ever-present cigar, improvising insults to stuffy [[dowager]]s (frequently played by [[Margaret Dumont]]) and anyone else who stood in his way. As the Marx Brothers, he and his brothers starred in a series of popular stage shows and movies.

Their first movie was a silent film made in 1921 that was only shown once, in the Bronx,<ref name="bio"/> and is believed to have been destroyed shortly afterward. A decade later, the team made their last two Broadway shows—''[[The Cocoanuts]]'' and ''[[Animal Crackers (1930 film)|Animal Crackers]]''<ref name="bio"/>—into movies. Other successful films were ''[[Monkey Business (1931 film)|Monkey Business]]'', ''[[Horse Feathers]]'', ''[[Duck Soup (1933 film)|Duck Soup]]'' and ''[[A Night at the Opera (film)|A Night at the Opera]]''.<ref name="bio"/> One quip from Marx concerned his response to [[Sam Wood]], the director of ''A Night at the Opera''. Furious with the Marx Brothers' ad-libs and antics on the set, Wood yelled in disgust: "You can't make an actor out of clay." Marx responded, "Nor a director out of Wood."<ref>{{cite book|last1=Boller|first1=Paul F.|last2=Davis|first2=Ronald L.|title=Hollywood Anecdotes|edition=reprint|year=1988|publisher=Ballantine Books|isbn=0-345-35654-3|page=220}}</ref>

[[File:Groucho Marx in Duck Soup film still.jpg|thumb|left|Marx in ''[[Duck Soup (1933 film)|Duck Soup]]'' (1933)]]
Marx also worked as a radio comedian and show host. One of his earliest stints was a short-lived series in 1932, ''[[Flywheel, Shyster and Flywheel]],'' costarring Chico. Though most of the scripts and discs were thought to have been destroyed, all but one of the scripts were found in 1988 in the [[Library of Congress]].
In 1947, Marx was asked to host a radio quiz program ''[[You Bet Your Life]].'' It was broadcast by ABC and then CBS before moving to NBC. It moved from radio to television on October 5, 1950, and ran for eleven years. It was largely sponsored by [[DeSoto (automobile)|DeSoto]] automobiles and Marx sometimes appeared in the commercials. Filmed before an audience, the show consisted of Marx bantering with the contestants and ad-libbing jokes before briefly quizzing them. The announcer for the show was [[George Fenneman]]. The show was responsible for popularizing the phrases "Say the secret word and the duck will come down and give you fifty dollars", "Who's buried in [[Grant's Tomb]]?" and "What color is the [[White House]]?" (asked to reward a losing contestant a consolation prize).<ref>{{Cite book|last=Kanfer|first=Stefan|title=The Essential Groucho: Writings by, for and about Groucho Marx|publisher=Random House|year=2000|isbn=037570213X|location=New York|pages=209}}</ref>
[[File:Groucho and Chico Marx during A Day at the Races.jpg|thumb|left|Groucho and his older brother [[Chico Marx|Chico]], 1937]]
Throughout his career Marx introduced a number of memorable songs in films, including "[[Hooray for Captain Spaulding]]" and "[[Hello, I Must Be Going (song)|Hello, I Must Be Going]]", in ''Animal Crackers'', "[[Horse Feathers#Musical numbers|Whatever It Is, I'm Against It]]", "[[Horse Feathers#Musical numbers|Everyone Says I Love You]]" and "[[Lydia the Tattooed Lady]]". [[Frank Sinatra]], who once quipped that the only thing he could do better than Marx was sing, made a film with Marx and [[Jane Russell]] in 1951 entitled ''[[Double Dynamite]]''.

=== Mustache, eyebrows, and walk ===
{{See also|Groucho glasses}}
In public and off-camera, Harpo and Chico were hard to recognize without their wigs and costumes, and it was almost impossible for fans to recognize Groucho without his trademark eyeglasses, fake eyebrows, and mustache.

[[File:Groucho Marx-Eve Arden in At the Circus trailer.jpg|left|thumb|Groucho and [[Eve Arden]] in a scene from ''[[At the Circus]]'' (1939)]]
The greasepaint mustache and eyebrows originated spontaneously prior to a vaudeville performance in the early 1920s when he did not have time to apply the pasted-on mustache he had been using (or, according to his autobiography, simply did not enjoy the removal of the mustache because of the effects of tearing an adhesive bandage off the same patch of skin every night). After applying the greasepaint mustache, a quick glance in the mirror revealed his natural hair eyebrows were too undertoned and did not match the rest of his face, so Marx added the greasepaint to his eyebrows and headed for the stage. The absurdity of the greasepaint was never discussed on-screen, but in a famous scene in ''[[Duck Soup (1933 film)|Duck Soup]],'' where both Chicolini (Chico) and Pinky (Harpo) disguise themselves as Groucho, they are briefly seen applying the greasepaint, implicitly answering any question a viewer might have had about where he got his mustache and eyebrows.

Marx was asked to apply the greasepaint mustache once more for ''You Bet Your Life'' when it came to television, but he refused, opting instead to grow a real one, which he wore for the rest of his life. By this time, his eyesight had weakened enough for him to actually need corrective lenses; before then, his eyeglasses had merely been a stage prop. He debuted this new, and now much-older, appearance in the 1949 film ''[[Love Happy]],'' the Marx Brothers's last film as a comedy team.

Marx did paint the old character mustache over his real one on a few rare occasions, including a TV sketch with [[Jackie Gleason]] on the latter's variety show in the 1960s (in which they performed a variation on the song "[[Mister Gallagher and Mister Shean]]", co-written by Marx's uncle [[Al Shean]]) and the 1968 [[Otto Preminger]] film ''[[Skidoo (film)|Skidoo]]''. In his late 70s at the time, Marx remarked on his appearance: "I looked like I was embalmed." He played a mob boss called "God" and, according to Marx, "both my performance and the film were God-awful!"

The exaggerated walk, with one hand on the small of his back and his torso bent almost 90 degrees at the waist, was a parody of a fad from the 1880s and 1890s.{{citation needed|date=October 2017}} Fashionable young men of the upper classes would affect a walk with their right hand held fast to the base of their spines, and with a slight lean forward at the waist and a very slight twist toward the right with the left shoulder, allowing the left hand to swing free with the gait. Edmund Morris, in his 1979 biography ''[[The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt]]'', describes a young Roosevelt, newly elected to the State Assembly, walking into the House Chamber for the first time in this trendy, affected gait, somewhat to the amusement of the older and more rural members.<ref>{{cite book|last1=Morris|first1=Edmund|title=The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt|date=2001|publisher=Modern Library|location=New York|isbn=0-375-75678-7|pages=143–144|edition=Modern Library Paperback|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=u-R37GQsVfgC|access-date=August 9, 2016}}</ref> Marx exaggerated this fad to a marked degree, and the comedic effect was enhanced by how out of date the fashion was by the 1940s and 1950s.