Zeppo Marx
Herbert Marx (
February 25,
1901 –
November 29,
1979) is best known as
Zeppo Marx, the name he used when he performed with his brothers,
The Marx Brothers.
There are different theories to where Zeppo got his stage name:
Groucho once said that the name was derived from the
Zeppelin, a new invention at the time of his birth. However, it is more commonly suggested that the name derived from that of another
vaudeville performer named Mr. Zippo, whom Herbert resembled. It is possible that both are true and that some was involved. (Another story tells of the time the Marxes were pretending to be gentleman farmers in order to avoid conscription into
World War I. The brothers would refer to each other by "hayseed" names like Zeke and Zeb; Zeb became Zeppo.)
Zeppo appeared in the first five Marx Brothers movies, as a
straight man and romantic lead, before leaving the team. According to a 1925 newspaper article, he also made a solo appearance in the
Adolphe Menjou comedy
A Kiss in the Dark, but no known copy of the film exists, and it is not clear if he actually appeared in the finished film. [
1] He had sufficient comic abilities to have stood in for Groucho when the brothers performed on stage, and he was reputed to be very funny offstage; but he never invented a comic persona of his own that could stand up against those of
Groucho,
Harpo and
Chico Marx, even though the role he formerly filled would continue to exist in the brothers' remaining films. He also had perhaps the best singing voice among the four brothers. The best example is probably in
Horse Feathers. Early in the film he sings a "straight" version of "
Everyone Says I Love You", while the three other brothers later perform versions of the song in the style of their normal "
schticks". The popular (and erroneous) assumption that his character was superfluous was fueled in part by Groucho, according to Groucho's own classic story: When the group became the Three Marx Brothers, the studio wanted to trim their collective salary, and Groucho argued, "We're twice as funny without Zeppo!"
Offstage, Zeppo had great mechanical skills and was largely responsible for keeping the Marx family car running. Zeppo later owned a company which machined parts for the war effort during
World War II including the
Marman clamps used to hold the
Hiroshima bomb inside the
Enola Gay. He also founded a large theatrical agency with his brother
Gummo Marx, and invented a wristwatch that would monitor the pulse rate of cardiac patients and give off an alarm if they went into cardiac arrest.
On
April 12,
1927, Zeppo married Marion Benda. The couple would adopt one child, Timothy, in
1944 and would later divorce on
May 12,
1954. On
September 18,
1959, Zeppo married
Barbara Blakeley, whose son, Bobby Oliver, he adopted and gave his surname. Zeppo and Blakely would divorce in 1972 or 1973. Blakely would later marry singer
Frank Sinatra.
The last surviving Marx Brother, Zeppo died of
lung cancer in 1979 at the age of 78.
In recent years, a surge of adamant Zeppo supporters have risen to challenge the notion that he did not develop a comic persona in his films.
James Agee considered Zeppo "a peerlessly cheesy improvement on the traditional straight man." Along similar lines, Gerald Mast, in his book
The Comic Mind: Comedy and Movies (University of Chicago Press: 1979), notes that Zeppo's comedic persona, while certainly more subtle than his brothers', is undeniably present: :"[He] added a fourth dimension as the cliché of the [romantic] juvenile, the bland wooden espouser of sentiments that seem to exist only in the world of the sound stage. [... He is] too schleppy, too nasal, and too wooden to be taken seriously" (282, 285).
Danél Griffin, film critic for the
University of Alaska Southeast, elaborates on Mast's theory::"Zeppo's parts were always intended to be a parody of the juvenile role often found in sappy musicals of the 1920s-30s era. Sometimes, he would just have a few lines, and he would otherwise be reduced to standing in the background with a big smile on his face. In these roles, he was a lampoon of the infamous extra, always grinning widely as a needless decoration, and always stiff and wooden. In other films, Zeppo would have a more significant role as the romantic lead, but he would still always be stiff, wooden, and, yes, with a big smile on his face. Either way, he could never be considered a
real straight man. He was a sappy distortion of the real thing, and sort of the gateway through which we connected with the other Brothers. We perceived him as the "normal, good-looking" one of the bunch, but was he really? Wasn't there something about that line from
The Cocoanuts, 'You can depend upon me, Mr. Hammer,' that was a little too ... happy? Roger Ebert called Zeppo 'superfluous,' and that is the point of his character in the six Paramount films. He was the straight man only in pure Marxian sense â€" while his Brothers spat on movie clichés, he imitated them, proving in his own way to be quite a brilliant comedian." (
Link)
In her book
Hello, I Must be Going: Groucho & His Friends,
Charlotte Chandler defends Zeppo as being "the Marx Brothers' interpreter in the worlds they invade. He is neither totally a straight man nor totally a comedian, but combines elements of both, as did
Margaret Dumont. Zeppo's importance to the Marx Brothers' initial success was as a Marx Brother who could 'pass' as a normal person. None of Zeppo's replacements (Allan Jones, Kenny Baker, and others) could assume this character as convincingly as Zeppo, because they were actors, and Zeppo was the real thing, cast to type" (562).
In his book
Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and Sometimes Zeppo,
Joe Adamson analyzes a scene in
Animal Crackers that reveals Zeppo's uncanny ability to one-up Groucho with simple, plain-English rebuttals - something no one else has ever done before or since in a Marx Brother movie. In the said scene, Zeppo is told to take a letter to Groucho's lawyer. Adamson notes,:"There is a common assumption that Zeppo = Zero, which this scene does its best to contradict. Groucho dictating a letter to anybody else would hardly be cause for rejoicing. We have to believe that someone will be there to accept all his absurdities and even respond somewhat in kind before things can progress free from conflict into this genial mishmash. Groucho clears his throat in the midst of his dictation, and Zeppo asks him if he wants that in the letter. Groucho says, 'No, put it in the envelope.' Zeppo nods. And only Zeppo could even try such a thing as taking down the heading and the salutation and leaving out the letter because it didn't sound important to him. It takes a Marx Brother to pull something like that on a Marx Brother and get away with it." (114)
Allen W. Ellis writes in his article
Yes, Sir: The Legacy of Zeppo Marx (
The Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 37, No. 1, 2003)::"Indeed, Zeppo is a link between the audience and Groucho, Harpo and Chico. In a sense, he
is us on the screen. He knows who those guys are and what they are capable of. As he ambles out of a scene, perhaps it is to watch them do their business, to come back in as necessary to move the film along, and again to join in the celebration of the finish. Further, Zeppo is crucial to the absurdity of the Paramount films. The humor is in his incongruity. Typically he dresses like a normal person, in stark contrast to Groucho's greasepaint and 'formal' attire, Harpo's rags, and Chico's immigrant hand-me-downs. By most accounts, he is the handsomest of the brothers, yet that handsomeness is distorted by his familial resemblance to the others â€" sure, he's handsome, but it is a decidedly peculiar, Marxian handsomeness. By making the group four, Zeppo adds symmetry, and in the surrealistic worlds of the Paramount films, this symmetry upsets rather than confirms balance: it is chaos born of symmetry. That he is a plank in a maelstrom, along with the very concept of 'this guy' who is there for no real reason, who joins in and is accepted by these other three wildmen while the narrative offers no explanation, are wonderful in their pure absurdity. 'To string things together in a seemingly purposeless way,' said
Mark Twain, 'and to be seemingly unaware that they are absurd, is the mark of American humor.' The 'sense' injected into the nonsense only compounds the nonsense" (21-22).
* The
Zeppo Network, Inc — Registered trademark owner
*
The Zeppo (Buffy episode)
