Books take a look at Marx Brothers' offstage lives

Groucho: Now here is a little peninsula and here is a viaduct leading to the mainland.

Chico: Awright. Why a duck . . . why-a no chicken?

Groucho: I don't know. I guess they never thought of it that way. This happens to be a viaduct, that's all. I never heard of a Via Chicken. You try to cross over there on a chicken and you find out viaduct.

- From the first

Marx Brothers movie,

"The Cocoanuts"

Laying siege to the vaudeville circuit early in the last century, the young brothers Marx were not merely ha-ha funny. They were a four-man monsoon: loud, unruly, lusty, outrageous, and, as one peeved headliner noted, nearly impossible to follow.

That's why, after watching their helter-skelter act from the wings one 1915 evening in Columbus, Ohio, the top comic W.C. Fields didn't even bother going on.

"Never saw so much nepotism and laughter in one act in my life," recalled Fields. "The only act I could never follow."

As several new books attest, the audacious freres Marx often struck terror into the hearts of colleagues and puritanical studio censors - while merrily demolishing the composure of their audiences.

Simon Louvash's "Monkey Business: The Lives and Legends of the Marx Brothers" (St. Martin's Press, $25.95) and two books by Stefan Kanfer (the biography "Groucho: The Life and Time of Julius Henry Marx" (Alfred A. Knopf, $30) and the compilation "The Essential Groucho: Writings by, for and about Grouch Marx," (Vintage; $12) ) chronicle the rise and passage into legend of these genies - whose long-running brother act was the first great merger of Dada absurdity with vaudeville high jinks.

Why three new books now on the Marx phenomenon, which had its heydey in the 1930s and '40s with such immortal screen romps as "A Night at the Opera" and "Duck Soup"?

Well, to quote Chico, why a duck? Let's just say that if the books whip up renewed interest in the Marx Brothers films, they'll have done a real public service.

Both biographies rely mostly on a well-trod paper trail of reviews, reminiscences, analyses and memoirs to capture the Marx saga.

The Louvash book is more concise and skeptical (especially of Groucho's fanciful versions of events), while Kanfer adopts a denser narrative, with a big dollop of armchair psychologizing and a fuller account of Groucho in his active "twilight" years.

Either way: For any Marx Brothers fan, learning in gag-studded detail about the antic transformation of Leo, Julius, Adolph and Milton Marx into their comic alter egos, Chico, Groucho, Harpo and Gummo is great monkey business. (A fifth, non-stagestruck brother, Herbert, briefly joined the act as Zeppo.)

Their humor certainly got a boost from their parentage. Samuel ("Frenchy") and Minnie Marx were European-Jewish New Yorkers whose home, notes Kanfer, was like a Bronx "version of the German wayside inn," full of noisy relations sitting down to boisterous dinners.

Frenchy was an inept tailor and ineffectual breadwinner, but a dapper gent with a flair for unintended malapropisms. No wonder his sons become inveterate punsters.

And the indefatigable Minnie, for better and worse, was a determined, tart-tongued stage mama who pushed her talented sons out of the chaotic nest early on to a grueling life on the road.

Briefly the boys' manager, Minnie had chutzpah and schemes to burn. At the advent of World War I, for instance, she bought an Illinois farm - just so her vaudevillian sons could be classified "farm hands" and evade the draft.

Another early influence on the boys was their uncle Al Shean. A master of ethnic humor in the leading vaudeville team of Gallagher and Shean, he helped hone his nephews' messy, fledgling act into something more palatable.

Later, as the Marxes graduated from the vaudeville grind to Broadway and screen glory, they profited from the comedy craftmanship of George S. Kaufman, who understood their uniqueness, and co-authored three winning vehicles for them: "Cocoanuts," "Animal Crackers" and "A Night at the Opera."

A battalion of writers actually helped out the brothers with gags and dialogue - material quoted at length by Louvash and Kanfer.

But the Marxes were nobody's puppets.

Genius ad-libbers and improvisers, they perfected their frisky irreverence and indelible characters the hard way - through years of jeers and cheers before demanding audiences.

But let's get to the big question, the main reason we read books like these: Did the famous stage personas of the brothers match the psyches under their masks? Yes, and no: Offstage, they both fit and contradicted their zany images.

The cone-hatted, piano-playing Chico, Minnie's eldest boy and her favorite, was the family ne'er-do-well.

A good-natured but irresponsible gambler and womanizer, he squandered his fortune on long shots, destroyed his first marriage and barely stayed one step ahead of the loan sharks.

Harpo emerges as the most lovable, tranquil Marx - an "elemental democrat," according to Louvash, who "treated kings, commoners, millionaires, paupers, the famous and the obscure with the same wide-eyed curiosity - and often made them the butt of the same practical jokes."

Harpo was more voluble than the mute, horn-honking, out-of-control imp he perfected onscreen. But he really was part pixie, too, and delighted in becoming the mascot of such razor-wit intellectuals as Kaufman and Dorothy Parker.

Poor Zeppo and Gummo. Both thrashed around before settling on "civilian" careers.

Mere mortals, they couldn't compete with Chico and Harpo's comedic flamboyance. And they were no match for Groucho in the wit department.

But who was? The brothers' dominant verbalizer, Groucho had the longest career (branching into radio and TV with his quiz show, "You Bet Your Life") and he remains one of the most quotable men of the 20th century.

But unlike the lecherous, eye-brow-wiggling con artists he played onscreen (under such monikers as Waldorf P. Flywheel, and Rufus T. Firefly), Groucho was too insecure to be a real playboy.

And unlike his extroverted alter ego, he was a cerebral fellow whose favorite treat was curling up with a cigar and a copy of The New Yorker.

Many great clowns have been discontented brooders away from the limelight, and Groucho was reportedly no exception.

His parsimony and nasty put-downs drove three wives to drink, distraction and divorce. He heaped affection on his young children but grew hypercritical as they matured. And his creative leadership came at the price of chronic anxiety and insommnia.

In Kanfer's analysis, Groucho felt inadequate and veered between "adoration and derision" because his mama loved Chico best.

Kanfer also concludes that Groucho took out his repressed hostility toward Minnie on all the other women in his life - including Margaret Dumont, the butt of many a verbal and physical Marx prank.

Louvash's take on Dumont, and the Marx-family dynamic, is breezier and less freighted with quasi-Freudian speculation. Especially in the early chapters, his book is a swifter, funnier, jazzier read.

But Kanfer's volume splices in a wider range of source material. And if it's the whole Groucho saga you're after, including the low-down on Erin Fleming, the grasping devotee-caretaker of his final years, "Groucho" delivers.

For true essence of Marx Brothers, however, do yourself a favor: Catch them on screen at their raucous best in "Horsefeathers" or "Duck Soup."

As Groucho put it, "I'll hold your seat till you get there. After you get there, you're on your own."