Letters From Padre : Nearly 200 pieces of Groucho Marx’s correspondence to daughter Miriam, who lives in San Clemente, make up a treasure trove of never-before-published missives.

“Dear Schmier,” Groucho Marx wrote to his daughter Miriam in 1946 when she was an 18-year-old student at Bennington College in Vermont:

“It was nice to hear your cast-iron voice on the phone Sunday and even nicer to hear that you were charging the whole thing to your mother’s hotel bill. That’s the right way to phone, and remember it in the future. . . .”

The lengthy letter, which is full of personal news about Groucho’s second wife, Kay, an upcoming party being thrown for Broadway playwright George Kaufman and a radio script he was writing, ends with:

“All my love to you. . . . Your padre, Dr. Hackenbush.”

The letter is one of nearly 200 in “Love, Groucho: Letters From Groucho Marx to His Daughter Miriam” (Faber and Faber; $21.95).

The book, which was edited by Miriam Marx Allen of San Clemente, is a treasure trove of never-before-published missives guaranteed to delight Groucho fans, who will gain new insight into the comedy legend.

“What I think they reveal is Groucho, the man, not the leering comedian with the mustache or even the television personality, but the man behind the mustache,” said Allen, 64. “The only other book of his letters (‘The Groucho Letters’) are those he wrote to famous people. This shows him as a father--as a family man and as a friend. He was both my friend and my parent.”

As Allen notes in her brief introduction, “Groucho wrote letters to everyone: famous people, not-so-famous people, to his family, to his friends, sometimes to his enemies. He was a first-rate and prolific letter writer.

“Groucho’s letters to me, however, are different from the others. Groucho tended to let his hair down quite a bit more in his letters to me. He told me things he would not tell even some of his best friends.”

Indeed, as Groucho’s friend and fan Dick Cavett says in his foreword, the comedian’s letters to his daughter show “a dimension of this complex genius that you won’t find anywhere else, and a side of him many people will find surprising.”

The letters were written to Allen over a 30-year period. She received the first one in 1938, while vacationing in Catalina, and he wrote to say he missed her. The final letter was a belated birthday letter, in 1967, a time when Allen was in and out of hospitals and clinics being treated for alcoholism: “Happy birthday!!! Sorry that I missed it, but you must realize that I have a case of galloping senility and can barely remember my name. If you have another one, let me know in advance.”

Most of the letters are signed “Padre,” the name Allen and her older brother, Arthur Marx, always called their father after Arthur learned the word for father in high school Spanish class.

The correspondence offers Groucho’s views on current events, films, books and politics. But they also reveal the doubts and insecurities of the comedy legend while at the same time showing the worries and concerns of a father, who offers his daughter advice on everything from her schoolwork and writing to friends and marriage.

Permeating many of the letters like the smoke of Groucho’s ever-present stogie is the famous Marx wit.

One 1947 letter ends with Groucho telling his college-student daughter that he is sending her a $50 check to help her pay some of the expenses involved in repairing her car:

“I hope this is of some help; if it isn’t, you can always get yourself a banana split with the cash, or hang it on the wall as evidence of your father’s generosity.”

In a 1948 letter, Groucho talks about his new hit radio show “You Bet Your Life,” which revived his career and led to his equally successful TV show of the same name:

“As you know, I was embarrassed about doing a quiz show, for it is considered the lowest form of radio life, but all of my friends, the ones who make big salaries and listen to ‘Information Please’ and other erudite programs, are nuts about this. I just don’t understand it, but apparently the quality of ad-libbing on the air is so slow that if anyone comes along with even a moderately fresh note he’s considered practically a genius. Don’t be surprised, but I think your old man has finally arrived in radio. You could knock me over with a microphone.”

In a 1953 letter, another side of Groucho, the father, emerges. At the time, Miriam was being treated for her alcoholism at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kan., where she met the man who would later become her husband:

“The reason you haven’t heard from me is because I have been too damned angry to write. The day I wrote a check for sixteen hundred and some dollars to Menninger’s, which I have been doing for six months, I also received word that you were drinking again. . . .”

Allen, a recovering alcoholic who had her last drink in 1977, the year her father died at age 86, said she kept his letters “because I loved him so much.

“I just felt I wanted to keep every part of him I could, and he wrote me so many letters, which was great. I held onto them even when I was drunk. I carried them around in a laundry bag.”

As a parent, Allen said, Groucho “was a wonderful father, a very caring father, and very interested in both myself and my brother. He chose our company over anybody else’s whenever possible. And he was a homebody. His idea of a perfect evening was to stay home and listen to music and read a book and be with his kids.”

Although her father didn’t like going out, Allen said, he would make an exception to go to the movies on one condition:

“He didn’t really care what was playing if he could smoke in the balcony.”