Hello, I Must be Going by Charlotte Chandler

Author:Charlotte Chandler
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2007-03-24T16:00:00+00:00

“I keep the ones I want”

At lunch with Goodman Ace in Groucho’s New York hotel suite, I referred to Groucho’s sleight-of-tongue style of insulting people. I asked Groucho, “Do you find you lose a lot of friends along the way?”

“Yes, I do,” he answered. “But I prefer it that way. It’s good to lose a lot of people. I keep the ones I want.”

“Do you agree with Oscar Wilde, who said, ‘A gentleman is never unintentionally rude’?” I asked.

“Yes,” Groucho said. “I get away with saying some pretty insulting things. People think I’m joking. I’m not. I’m just saying what I think. I don’t tell jokes. I tell the truth. And that’s sometimes a joke.”

Groucho accentuated the negative to achieve a positive reaction—“Whatever it is, I’m against it.” The classic iconoclast, Groucho uninhibitedly spoke what usually remains unspoken, articulating what others might only dare to think. For some, this meant he elevated the art of bad manners to new lows. A ranking member of the undiplomatic corps, he didn’t hesitate to give pomposity its come-downance.

Once while walking with Groucho in Beverly Hills, I felt that his retort to a fan seemed excessively acerbic, so I asked him afterward if he didn’t think he had gone rather far. “No. Because all her life she’ll remember what I said to her,” he explained. “That’s what’s important. If I’d said something ordinary, she would have gone away disappointed.”

Max Gordon told me that he once commented to Groucho that he thought Groucho’s telling of a joke at T. S. Eliot’s funeral might have been a mistake. “I’m a comedian,” Groucho had responded. He felt it was what Eliot would have wanted. Irene Atkins, who was married to Groucho’s son, summed it up when she told me, “You accept things from Groucho that perhaps you wouldn’t accept from other people.”

His public image (and to a great extent his private image) was that of a man so clever that to engage in any sort of verbal duel with him would have been tantamount to committing social suicide. His close friend Norman Krasna refused to appear as a guest on the You Bet Your Life show, explaining to me, “He would’ve killed me if I’d gone on.”

Seemingly, a license very much like the one possessed by James Bond was issued to Groucho, except that he was empowered to kill with words. Just as nobody walked up to Muhammad Ali, fists raised, and said, “I’m the greatest,” few were daring enough to challenge Groucho’s rapier tongue. He was in the enviable position of being not only a superior combatant, but the referee as well. In a world that plays by the rules, others were stopped by an inhibition barrier that he didn’t observe.

Of course, he didn’t always have the last word. Those who are exalted, and thus stand out, are also targets. No public figure escapes totally unscathed. A celebrity is someone people want to know things about that they wouldn’t even want to know about themselves. Groucho

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