GROUCHO’S SON TO SPEAK AT ‘OPERA’

If you think it was rough being on the opposite end of Groucho Marx’s devastating insults in Marx Brothers films or on Groucho’s long-running “You Bet Your Life” television show in the 1950s, it was often even tougher being the only son of the legendary comedian.

“My father always wanted me to be a writer because he always wanted to be a writer. He didn’t want me to be an actor because he said it was a lousy life,” said Arthur Marx, 64, during a recent interview on the pool-side patio of his spacious Bel-Air home.

“But when I showed him my first novel, he didn’t like it at all. He recommended that I tear it up.”

Arthur Marx will be in Orange County tonight for a rare discussion about his father and uncles Harpo, Chico and Zeppo Marx in conjunction with a screening of the 1935 film “A Night at the Opera” at the Port Theatre in Corona del Mar.

The 7 p.m. show, billed as “An Evening with Groucho and Son,” will be preceded by a 2 p.m. book-signing session at the B. Dalton bookstore in Fashion Island.

“When I wrote ‘Life With Groucho’ (in 1954) about him, I didn’t show it to him until after the publisher accepted it and the Saturday Evening Post had bought it for an eight-part serial,” he said.

“Then I showed it to him and he was furious, claiming I libeled him, which I hadn’t. He was threatening to sue me and everything else, which I didn’t think he would. But he could be pretty serious in his threats. I got it (the book) through, but after that I never showed him anything again until it was published.”

Arthur Marx didn’t let the paternal hostility hinder his career, and he went on to write biographies of several Hollywood celebrities, including Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Red Skelton, film mogul Samuel Goldwyn and the latest, released in March, on his childhood friend Mickey Rooney.

Marx also wrote screenplays for several Bob Hope films in the 1960s and ‘70s, as well as the Broadway play “The Impossible Years,” which became a 1968 film with David Niven, and the one-man play “Groucho,” in which Gabe Kaplan starred during its Los Angeles run.

A new production of “Groucho,” which has been revised to include Chico and Harpo, is scheduled to open on Broadway in the fall, he said. Frank Ferrante, a young actor from UCLA chosen to play Groucho in New York, will accompany Marx to the Port tonight.

For the most part, Marx prefers talking about his own career to waxing nostalgic about the Marx Brothers--a trait he may have inherited from Groucho, who once said, “I’m allergic to nostalgia.”

Another reason Marx shies away from lengthy discussions about the Marxes and their films is his opinion that they “have been overanalyzed and overintellectualized.”

“A perfect example is ‘Duck Soup,’ which really wasn’t a very good picture, although it had some funny scenes,” he said.

“To them, it was made just because they had to find a premise and somebody said, ‘Let’s do a funny war picture.’ They didn’t have any thoughts of making some great statement that war is silly or war is evil. But students picked it up during the Vietnam era and thought there was some great statement being made. Maybe it was accidentally, but their main interest was making people laugh.”

“A Night at the Opera,” which followed “Duck Soup,” was something of a landmark film, Arthur said, because the Marx Brothers packaged the material into a stage show and, before filming, tested the jokes in front of live theater audiences.

“It was really the first time that was done in movies. That had been my father’s chief complaint about movies up till then--that you never got to try out a joke, and if it didn’t work in the movie, you were in trouble. That’s the great thing about the stage--if a joke doesn’t work, you replace it. But you don’t have that luxury in the movies.”

One luxury the Marx Brothers did have at their disposal was some of the best comic writers of the century, including S.J. Perelman and George S. Kaufman.

Marx believes that next to Perelman and Kaufman and such performers as Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Eddie Cantor and others from the 1920s and ‘30s, most contemporary writers and comedians falter--except for Woody Allen.

“He’s sort of a genius and in a class by himself,” Marx said, adding that Allen’s well-publicized admiration of Groucho was reciprocated. “Groucho liked Woody, too.”

Like his father, Arthur avoids delving too deeply into what works in the world of comedy and why. “Jokes are funny things. You never know what people are going to laugh at.

“My father was a fairly intellectual person, but he didn’t ever believe in analyzing comedy. There was a book out that he had when I was a kid . . . that was called ‘The Enjoyment of Laughter.’ It’s kind of a classic book in which (the author) analyzed humor. But my father . . . didn’t believe in any of that.”

Yet one of Arthur’s favorite anecdotes involves a debate at a party, just a few years before Groucho died in 1977, between Groucho and George Burns over who was the funniest person who ever lived.

“George Burns said he thought Charlie Chaplin was. My father said, with typical modesty, ‘I think I was.’ And George said, ‘Well if you think you are, Groucho, then I must be, because I know I’m funnier than you are.’ George said my father didn’t speak to him for months.

“But that’s typical of what happens to people when they get old. Actually, my father always thought that Chaplin was the greatest. . . .”