Fields, the relish he conveyed in the role of a churl had an accessible motive in youthful experience, though it is hard to agree with Stefan Kanfer that the result in his life and art was ‘to inter the adult and present a child persona to the public’. There can be no doubt that with Groucho, as with W.C. So, you get the feeling, Minnie sent them in one by one like a football coach alternating glances between the field and the bench. Chico stole casually from his father’s business and only realised how serious it was when Frenchy said he would kill him if he ever did it again. Many of the neighbourhood boys they used to hang out with were dead or in jail by then, and Minnie saw how little her children were doing besides chase women and arrange transactions with petty thieves. How, he wondered, did his mother pay his way back from Cripple Creek, Colorado? ‘Probably hocked one of my brothers.’ By the time the brothers were well launched in the early 1910s, Groucho and Minnie together had taken charge, and the loutish authority with which he brought order to the pack would have made anyone seem older. When he went on the road with the Leroy Trio, Leroy fell hard for the second boy, a ‘buck-dancer’ named Johnny Morris, and the two ran off with all the money Groucho had stuffed in his mattress. He was the first to succeed, at the age of 15, with a vestigial talent for singing, but a miasma of rotten luck trailed his early efforts. Leonard (Chico), Adolph (Harpo), Julius (Groucho), Herbert (Zeppo) and Milton (Gummo): Groucho was a middle child, if you want to make anything of it. I never smelt a smelt like that smelt smelt. Put him in the fire and the fire he felt. Went fishing last Sunday and caught a smelt. Uncle Al had given up trouser-pressing for vaudeville, and offered excellent advice once the boys got their start with the usual mix of banter, slapstick and melody hung on the barest pretence of lyrics: He devoted his spare time to pinochle, whereas Minnie – the name she preferred – was a born entrepreneur and had a successful brother in show business. With Sam, the nickname that finally stuck was Frenchy. Simon naturalised his name to Sam and set up business as a tailor out of the same three-room apartment on East 93rd Street that held Minna, her parents and the five boys but the couple always had an air of waiting for something riper, and improvisation would become the family mood. All of the Marxes appear to have been clever with words – Simon spoke French, German, Yiddish and English – and they were quick to absorb the cosmopolitan slang of the New York streets. His parents were Jewish immigrants: Simon Marrix, of a family of tailors from Alsace-Lorraine, and Minna Schoenberg, the daughter of a Dutch magician who emigrated when his work in Germany ran out in the 1870s. Julius was the original name, but one may as well call him Groucho, from the ‘grouch bag’ carried by travelling showmen.
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