Zeppo

Today I read jack squat. I painted the side of my house, I drove into town for lunch, I staked out the ice cream man, I went to the gym and almost fell off the treadmill, and I went out into the ocean and tried to catch some fish barehand. But I didn't really read anything. And then, just before I went to bed, we decided to watch the Marx Brother's fourth movie, Horse Feathers. This was their penultimate movie for Paramount and, more critically, the penultimate movie to feature Zeppo Marx, in my opinion the best and greatest of the Four Brothers.

Zeppo's importance, I am told by wikipedia, has been of late the subject of some scholarly study. The revisionist history on him seems to be something like, he is a gateway figure, or our representative in the anarchic world of the three older, more obviously lunatic brothers. Charlotte Chandler, in a book I now really want to read called Hello, I Must Be Going: Groucho and His Friends, says this about Zeppo:

Zeppo's importance to the Marx Brothers' initial success was as a Marx Brother who could 'pass' as a normal person. None of Zeppo's replacements (Allan Jones, Kenny Baker, and others) could assume this character as convincingly as Zeppo, because they were actors, and Zeppo was the real thing, cast to type.

This is fascinating stuff, especially her suggestion that Allan Jones, whom I find to be loathsome, is some sort of Zeppo failure. However, I find Zeppo's allure to go beyond his likeness to us; it is not just his unavoidable Marxiness that connects him to his brothers in a way that we fail to. I don't read Zeppo as an entree into the world of the maniacal brothers; instead, I see him as a lesson in how to adapt their ways into the world of our own.

Now, plotwise, he often is such an entree. In Horse Feathers, as Groucho's son, he offers some insight, gleaned from the home, into the possible policies of Prof. Quincy Adams Wagstaff (yammering on about how Dad will hound them). As Horatio W. Jamison, the field secretary of Capt. Spaulding in Animal Crackers, Zeppo sings reverently about how the Captain is a moral man before retreating for the middle two thirds of the movie, and in Duck Soup, as a secretary this time called Bob Roland, he bounces in a little too quickly to announce that the boss is making an appearance just when the clock on the wall strikes ten. In all of these circumstances, his presence is one that, above all, reassures us as to Groucho's connection to a world outside of Groucho: that is, Zeppo knows this guy, and appears to be vouching for him. He lets us know what's coming, just before Groucho -- the ostensible star of the show -- arrives.

The problem with this is that he is, in each instance above, spectacularly wrong. Prof. Wagstaff's single coherent action in Horse Feathers is hounding out the wrong man (that is, his other brother Chico instead of the legitimate football ringers); Capt. Spaulding's first big scene after his introduction is a halfhearted attempt to commit bigamy; and, of course, Rufus T. Firefly does not show up at ten to be sworn in (or introduced or whatever) as the ruler of Freedonia. As our entryway into the world of the lunatic Marx Brothers, Zeppo as an explainer is useless or worse. Yet he never appears to be upset, or betrayed, by any of this; he doesn't really care. So why tell us these bizarre things? I think that one particular scene from the films illustrate what Zeppo is really all about. These is one of the scenes I most often point to when I have to defend my Zeppo above all policy to incredulous family and friends.

In Duck Soup, Zeppo has been silent since the first scene (he has had one scene, Groucho's meeting with his cabinet, in which he makes, to my way of thinking, several absolutely hilarious faces) when he pops into the boss's office after the latter has met with Harpo and Chico and got nothing done. He walks in purposefully, as always, and, as a good citizen, goes to take his hat off and place it on the hatrack in Groucho's office. There is no side to the hat on his head; he is wearing half of a hat. Briefly, Zeppo is nonplused, and this is important: Zeppo is almost never nonplused. That is a state for college professors, society doyennes, cabinet officials, that is, people who are wholly outside of the Marx dominion, and if Zeppo were to voice his confusion ("Your excellency, I've lost half a hat!"), he would stake himself as a similar outsider. But he does not; he just plunges in, throws his hat away, and gets down to telling Groucho, for reasons that I have never really been able to place, that Freedonia needs to goad Sylvania into war. At no other point that I know of in Marxdom does someone have such a moment of decision -- and opt in. Here, he is most like our guide into Marx Brothers lunacy: like us, he has decided for some reason that these are people who merit his time, such as it is.

But then he begins to push for war with Sylvania, and becomes, somehow, the only free man in the entire world of the Marx Brothers. To prove that Trentino, the Sylvanian ambassador, is sensitive enough to be goaded easily into war, Bob Roland tells Firefly that he once told Vera Marquel (the gorgeous dancer and apparent hanger-on at the Freedonian court) something -- I find it compelling to believe that this "something" is either a joke or a joke-like thing -- in Trentino's presence once, and that Trentino slapped his face. Firefly, when he hears this joke whispered to him, slaps Bob Roland's face as well (and, as he says, should've slapped Mrs. Teasdale's face when she told it to him). This moment is another remarkable moment in Zeppodom: I did not realize, until he makes reference to his having done it off screen, that Zeppo is a Marx Brother free of the manic compulsions that drive his brothers: the drive to joke, and the drive to chase pretty women. Chico and Groucho will solemnly sacrifice any bit of sense to jokes, even bad jokes -- look at the self-disgust in the exchange of sewer and manhole jokes in Animal Crackers -- and Harpo's distracting pursuit of women is evident. Harpo, Chico, and Groucho seem madcap and free, but theirs is only negative freedom, the freedom to reject the demands of normal persons. Zeppo can move exactly as he pleases. Zeppo alone, exists in and of all of this, and simultaneously in and for himself. He is not just a stand-in for us, who watch passively as these dramas play out, but he is a freer man than we are. Inscrutable, self-assured (all that striding into rooms!), perfectly possessed: our Zeppo, the most perfect agent of positive freedom in the most anarchically free movies of all time.