Behind the Piano, Inside a Marx Family

Two weeks ago, my friend Bruce Sumner was married to my friend, Susan Wallen. It was a warm, informal wedding followed by a terrific reception at the Balboa Bay Club at which the bride and groom were upstaged by the piano player.

He was a slight, dark-haired man whose exuberance was carefully controlled during the ceremony but burst out all over at the reception.

I’ve never before seen people dancing to the music of a single piano, but he had the dance floor full and guests draped over his piano most of the evening. His enormous repertoire of standards even included a few to which I couldn’t bring up the lyrics.

The bridegroom had discovered the piano player in an upscale bar at the Century Plaza Tower in West Los Angeles and booked him on the spot for the wedding.

And because the newlyweds were much more interested in their guests having a good time than in being the center of attention, they were as delighted at their choice as we were.

I discovered early on that he could play and talk at the same time, so I sat down on the bench to find out more about him. He produced a card that said, “Wonderfingers Music, William Marx.” The name struck a chord, and I studied him.

“Are you possibly related . . . “ I began.

He nodded vigorously, anticipating the question.

“Harpo,” he said, “was my father.”

And so, on and off, for the rest of the evening, he talked to me about the Marx Brothers. It was pungent, mostly affectionate and uninhibited talk. And to one who grew up with the Marx Brothers in movie houses--long before Harpo’s oldest son was born--there were some fascinating tidbits of information.

The Marx Brothers stopped making movies--they made 13 in all--in 1948 when they were still enormously popular, which distressed me greatly at the time. Why, I asked Wonderfingers Bill, did they quit?

“Because,” he said simply, “they were old and tired. What most people who loved them don’t understand is that they had a long career in vaudeville and then on Broadway before they ever came to Hollywood.

“My father was in his mid-40s when the Marx Brothers made their first Hollywood movie. By the time they made their last movie in 1948, my dad and Chico were ready to retire and Groucho got this cush radio quiz show called ‘You Bet Your Life.’

“So they stopped working together, something they had done since they were teen-agers in vaudeville.”

Marx insisted that the often-heard notion that the brothers didn’t get along very well was nonsense.

“They were close right to the end,” he said. “They were very different, and their personal lives went in very different directions. But they always worked well together, and there was always affection between them.”

The most stable by far, according to Bill, was Harpo. Chico was an inveterate and frequently unsuccessful high-stakes gambler (“although Charles Goren, the bridge expert, called him one of the three best gin rummy players in the world”) and died deeply in debt. And Groucho became senile and extremely difficult in his last years.

“But my father,” Marx told me, “was this close”--and he held his thumb and forefinger a centimeter apart--”to being a saint. He was a kind and thoughtful and gentle man, and a wonderful father.”

The five Marx brothers died in the same order in which they were born, Chico first, then Harpo, Groucho, Gummo (who served as their business agent) and, finally, Zeppo.

According to Bill, Zeppo left the Marx Brothers act early in their movie career to become a high-powered agent with strong Las Vegas connections; his widow, Barbara, is now married to Frank Sinatra.

“For years,” Marx told me, “my father was the most eligible bachelor in Hollywood. He was 48 when he married my mother. She was a former Ziegfeld girl and Paramount actress who pursued him for four years, which she admits freely.”

There were four children, and the only daughter, Minnie, now lives in Orange County. She would prefer not to say where because “most of my friends and neighbors don’t know my background, not because I’m not proud of it but because you sometimes become a different person to people if you happen to come from a famous family, and I don’t want that.”

She’s married, has two grown sons and two grandchildren. She never knew her grandmother--for whom she was named--but she agrees with Bill that the family she did know was close and warm.

“Every holiday, every gathering was full of music and singing and fun, and all the brothers and their families would come,” Minnie says.

She, too, remembers her father’s gentleness. “Whenever my mother would find fault with someone, he’d say, ‘Now let’s look for the good.’

“He always used to tell me: ‘There’s something good in every person, and you should always look for it.’ ”

Harpo Marx never knew any of his eight grandchildren, but his widow, Susan, who--says Minnie--serves on the Palm Springs Unified School District board and lives in Rancho Mirage, is deeply involved with her family.

Bill is the only one of the couple’s four children to gravitate to show business and to the trademark of the Marx Brothers from their beginnings in vaudeville: music.

He is a graduate of the Juilliard School of music where he majored in composition, his main thrust today. He spends about half his time writing for a full symphony orchestra and scoring movies.

“But,” he says, “I’m half introvert and half extrovert. Scoring is a lonely business, and I need balance--which is why I love to perform.”

So he does several dozen concerts a year--a “book show of comedy and music”--with a classical harpist named Carrol McLaughlin. And he plays bar piano and entertains at functions like the wedding reception that brought him to Orange County.

He’s not only a fine musician but a good talker, too--as was his father when he was offstage. Both of his children to whom I talked assured me that the mute character he did on the screen was far from the real Harpo Marx.

“That all started back in their vaudeville days,” Bill told me, “when my father got a bad review one night and said if that’s what was going to happen, he just wouldn’t talk any more. So he didn’t, and it worked, and that became his stage character.”

Bill’s stage character--at least the night I met him--is making people happy. I think his father would be pleased.