Elementary, My Dear Groucho

One
It was shortly before Christmas of 1938 that Groucho Marx matched wits with Sherlock Holmes.
The whole business began as an ill-advised Hollywood publicity stunt, but before everything was over Groucho and I became a detective team again and found ourselves involved in trying to solve a couple of murders.
"This detective stuff is all well and good," Groucho had conceded, "but the next time you get me on a team, see if you can make it the Los Angeles Angels. I just know I'd make a delightful shortstop. I've already had several years experience as a doorstop, but that's not as good exercise."
We initially got tangled up with the case early on a Tuesday morning in December. It was one of those gray, blurry Los Angeles days, overcast and not quite warm enough. A few stray seagulls were circling up in the morning mist, intermittently visible, their mournful cries muffled.
I was driving and Groucho was sitting, slightly slouched, in the passenger seat of my new Ford sedan. He was quietly singing "Jeepers Creepers" in a very bad Swedish accent and keeping time on the dashboard with his unlit cigar. "This vehicle isa considerable improvement over your late Plymouth coupe," he observed, inserting the cigar between his teeth. "Though I really miss that raccoon tail you used to fly from your radio antenna, Franklin."
I'm Frank Denby, by the way, and I'd been writing Groucho's comedy detective show for radio. That, however, had been canceled back in October and right at the moment we were collaborating on a script for a screwball movie comedy. It was about a poor girl who inherits a bus line and the tentative title was Cinderella on Wheels. We were driving, on that overcast morning, out to the Mammoth Studios in the valley to talk to a producer about our idea.
And let me mention here, for those of you who've been following these accounts, that I'd been married since June to Jane Danner, America's best-looking cartoonist. Groucho had served as our best man and also volunteered to sing "Oh, Promise Me" at the ceremonies. We'd allowed him to do that only after he'd promised he wouldn't accompany himself on his guitar nor throw in the yodels he'd been inserting during the wedding rehearsals.
While my career was momentarily floundering, Jane was doing swell. She'd sold her Hollywood Molly comic strip in September and as the end of the year approached her syndicate had succeeded in placing it in just under 150 newspapers around the country. Her salary had climbed to seven hundred dollars a week. She'd already earned enough to buy us this new car in addition to a new bicycle for herself.
"I sure hope we sell this damn script,'' I said to Groucho as we neared the Mammoth Studios spread."I'm enlightened enough to be able to live off my wife's income for a short spell,but I'd feel a hell of a lot better if my own funds weren't hovering near zero.''
''Look on the bright side, Rollo,'' advised Groucho, fishing a book of Trocadero matches out of the pocket of his exuberantly plaid sports coat but making no effort to light his dead cigar. ''As long as you're a kept man, it's nice that you're being kept by such a bright, attractive young lady as Jane. Now, the last woman who kept me insisted on keeping me in a very cramped duffel bag. What with me, my salt and pepper shaker collection, and all those stray duffels in there, it was far from roomy. It was, in point of fact, nearly seventy-seven hot, weary miles from roomy and up hill all the way.''
A pair of workmen in coveralls were on a scaffold putting up a new billboard on the high white stucco wall that surrounded the fifteen acres that Mammoth covered. The headline of the big poster read: Miles Ravenshaw IS Sherlock Holmes in Mammoth Pictures' Production of THE VALLEY OF FEAR! The top third of Ravenshaw had already been slapped up and you could see his deerstalker cap, his meerschaum pipe, and a profile that suggested that he believed whoever it was who'd once told him that he looked a lot like John Barrymore.
"Miles Ravenshaw,'' muttered Groucho as I guided the car up to the gilded wrought-iron studio gates. ''I'd call him a ham, except that would be an insult to all the self-sacrificing pigs who donated their backsides so that the world could have ham on rye."
''They say that Ravenshaw was a Scotland Yard inspector before he became an actor.''
Groucho expressed his disbelief with a rude noise. ''Of course, for religious reasons I can't have anything to do with aham of any sort,'' he said. "I'm even forbidden to drop in on the Three Little Pigs, nor can I so much as huff and puff and blow any of their houses down." He waggled his unlit cigar. "I'm sorely tempted to mention an attractive miss I once encountered in a Baja California bordello who could not only huff and buff but ... but, no, some things are best left unsaid."
I stopped a few feet from the closed gates. "That'd make a good motto for you," I suggested.
"It would indeed, Rollo, and I may well use it in my forthcoming B movie, Think Fast, Mr. Motto."
Just outside the gates was a tile-roofed guard shack with a single palm tree rising up beside it. A plump uniformed guard in a dark gray uniform came shuffling out and walked over to the car, his hand resting casually on the holster at his right side. ''How can I help you, gents?'' he inquired, looking in at Groucho.
"I'm deeply hurt, Oscar," said Groucho. "After we served three years in the Foreign Legion together, I hoped you'd never forget me."
The heavyset Oscar chuckled, shaking his head. "Sorry, I didn't recognize you right off, Mr. Marx," he told him. "You know, because you don't have your mustache."
"I don't?" He touched his fingertips to his upper lip, then turned to scowl at me. "As soon as we send for a matron, Rollo, you'll be thoroughly searched. Mustache snatching is a serious thing and, if my vast knowledge of the law doesn't play me false, I am almost certain it's a capital crime. It may well also be the capital of North Dakota, but we won't be certain of that until the returns come in from the outlying provinces. Lord knows how long that'll take, since they've been out lying with ... but, enough. You get my point, I'm sure."
Oscar took off his visored cap to scratch at his thinning blond hair. "I hear your last movie was a flop, Mr. Marx."
"You hear? Didn't you have the nerve to go see Room Service?"
"Well, I'd like to see all your Marx Brothers pictures," he assured Groucho, "but my wife just can't stand you. In her opinion you never play anything but a sex-crazed lecher in any of your movies."
"That's because I am a sex-crazed lecher," he responded. "But I'm struggling to make a living despite such a handicap. Isn't that the American way? Yes, a man may work to overcome his handicaps and make a name for himself. The name I wanted to make for myself was Edgar Rice Burroughs, but they told me it was already taken. I then selected Tarzan and it turned out some nudist over at MGM had dibs on that. Groucho Marx was just about all that was left, except for the Marx of Zorro and I thought that sounded too foreign for an actor who specializes in playing ice-skating ingenue parts."
"We've got an appointment with Lew Marker," I told the chuckling guard.
''Lew Number Two, huh?" The guard shrugged and shook his head."Somebody of your stature, Mr. Marx, ought to be seeing Lew Number One."
Lew Goldstein, the head of the whole Mammoth operation, everybody called Lew Number One. Marker had the nickname Lew Number Two.
"I'm working my way up the ladder," Groucho assured Oscar. "Why only last year I wasn't able to see anybody higher than Lew Number Four-oh-six."
Chuckling once more, he said, ''Park in Visitors' Lot A, folks,'' and went trotting back to his hut.
A moment later the gates shivered and then rattled open inward.
Giving the guard a lazy salute, I drove onto the studio grounds.
"I don't think all that much of Lew Marker myself," admitted Groucho. "Yet my esteemed brother, Zeppo, assures me that the fellow is greatly interested in talking to us about Cinderella on Wheels."
The buildings were all of the popular cream-colored stucco and red tile roof school. There were several stretches of bright green lawn and rows of assorted kinds of palm trees. "Marker's produced a string of screwball comedies," I reminded him, stopping to let a starlet decked out as an aviatrix cross the street. "Crazy About You, This One's on Me, That Was My Wife. Irene Dunne came near getting an Academy Award nomination for one of them."
"The best of the bunch," said Groucho, lighting the cigar and exhaling smoke, "contained, and I'm quoting an exhaustive study conducted by the Greenwich Observatory, five laughs during its entire length. And the heartiest one came when the audience read the name of the musical director in the opening credits."
My Ford looked to be the least expensive car in the row I parked in, possibly the least expensive in the whole damn lot.
When I mentioned that to Groucho, he said, "True, but you have the curliest hair."
"My hair isn't curly at all."
"Well, gee, Penrod, you don't have to bite a guy's head off when he's only trying to cheer you up."
We were scheduled to meet Marker over at Soundstage 4,where he was going to be sitting in on the shooting of scenes for his latest comedy, She Married the Butler.
We never made the appointment.
As we were walking past Soundstage 2, the big metal door slid open with a clattering bang. A pretty blond young woman came running out, pale under her tennis court tan.
She was wearing white slacks and a dark blue cable-stitch pullover sweater. "In there," she called to us, waving her hand in the direction of the doorway she'd just come stumbling through. ''A dead man."
''We could, Rollo,'' suggested Groucho, "continue on our way and ignore this entirely."
"But we won't," I said, running toward the frightened girl.
ELEMENTARY, MY DEAR GROUCHO. Copyright © 1999 by Groucho Marx Productions, Inc., and Ron Goulart. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner what-soever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.