Zeppo, page 21
Johnny Rosselli’s FBI file contains an unusual connection to the Marx Brothers. A confidential informant “advised that about 1927, he first observed activities of various racketeers and recalled that Jack LaRue, motion picture actor, lost large sum of money to Harpo and Chico Marx of Marx Brothers entertainment team. LaRue would not pay and Rosselli interceded as collector of gambling debt.”3 Shortly after the IATSE trouble in 1937, Rosselli was questioned by police about the murder of Les Bruneman. Bruneman was the mobster-gambler who was gunned down in October that year with Chico’s almost certainly bad check in his pocket. A 1949 New York Daily News exposé on organized crime in Los Angeles connected a lot of the dots on the Bruneman story:
During the heyday of the Clover Club on the Sunset Strip, his face was well known to movie colony celebrities. In his safety deposit box at a Hollywood bank his widow found a bank draft signed by Chico Marx and filed a claim for $2,200 against the actor.4
Chico said he had never met Bruneman and did not recall executing the draft found by the gambler’s widow. He did admit, however, that he had lost a chunk of money gambling early in 1937 and had paid off $4,000 in $1,000 installments.
He didn’t say to whom he had lost the money and police didn’t seem anxious to ask the $64 question. But Chico, like almost every other celebrity in Hollywood, had been a frequenter of the Clover Club, where Bruneman had worked.
Bruneman’s murder wasn’t truly solved until mobster Aladena James Fratianno—better known as Jimmy “the Weasel” Fratianno—became a government informant. He explained in 1977 that, although someone was convicted and sent to prison for shooting Bruneman, that man was innocent and had been framed.5 Bruneman was involved in a dispute over gambling revenue with Rosselli and called people in Chicago to see about having Rosselli killed. The Chicago people immediately told Rosselli, who promptly had Bruneman killed. Without question, Johnny Rosselli was Zeppo’s most dangerous friend and the most powerful organized crime figure in his orbit. Rosselli’s influence with IATSE, and his studio connections were also very useful to the Zeppo Marx Agency. And if Rosselli should happen to kill the guy who was probably about to have Chico’s check bounce, it was an unexpected bonus.
Chico’s $4,000 gambling debt paled in comparison to the money thrown around in high stakes Hollywood poker games. Herman Mankiewicz, the producer of Monkey Business and Horse Feathers was an occasional player. His biographer, Richard Meryman wrote, “Herman sat at poker tables gambling $100 chips against the industry’s chieftains and its most feared players: Joe Schenck, Eddie Mannix, Irving Berlin, Zeppo Marx, Sam Goldwyn, Sid Grauman, Ben Bernie—taciturn circles of watchful men, no jokes, no amenities. Thousands of dollars routinely changed hands in the Malibu mansions.” One such game took place in September 1938 at 20th Century Fox executive Darryl F. Zanuck’s house. The game was run by longtime Fox producer Sol Wurtzel. Among the participants were Zeppo and several other major Hollywood figures including producers Sam Goldwyn, Jay Paley, and Hunt Stromberg, screenwriter Robert Riskin, director Robert Z. Leonard, 20th Century Fox chairman Joe Schenck, theater owner Sid Grauman, longtime MGM executive Eddie Mannix (better known as Louis B. Mayer’s “fixer”—the man who covered up the more salacious problems involving the studio’s stars), and Zeppo’s fellow Artists’ Managers Guild member, Myron Selznick.
Correspondence preserved in Sol Wurtzel’s papers provides a rare record of the game’s financial details: $62,625 changed hands in one evening of poker. The big loser was Myron Selznick who ended the night with debts totaling $53,400. Goldwyn, Leonard, and Grauman lost more modest amounts—a total of $9,225 between them—and covered their losses immediately. The big winner was Zeppo. By the end of the evening Selznick owed him $35,000. Selznick also owed smaller amounts to Wurtzel, Mannix, Paley, Stromberg, and Riskin.
Wurtzel wrote to Zeppo on November 3, 1938: “I got in touch with Myron Selznick about his loss in the poker game at Darryl’s house several months ago. Myron told me he had no money now and cannot pay, and he would like me to advise all of the winners in that game to get in touch with him direct and he would settle with them direct when he is in a position to do so.”
The other winners received similar letters and Eddie Mannix advised Wurtzel to maintain the customary practice of the person running the game collecting the money from Selznick and distributing it to the winners. Selznick agreed and Wurtzel again wrote to Zeppo on November 14: “Enclosed herewith find my check for $5,156.80 which represents your proportion of the amount won against the losses paid in the poker game at Darryl’s house. There is still due you from Myron $29,843.20.” In a letter to Selznick dated February 23, 1939, Wurtzel acknowledged that Selznick had made a separate arrangement with Zeppo for the balance due.
Selznick, who was one of the most successful agents in Hollywood, was desperate for cash. He was involved in a legal dispute with his fourteen-year-old client Freddie Bartholomew over $39,600. The child star’s legal guardian, his aunt, fired Selznick in November 1937 and with other representation was able to get his $100,000 MGM salary raised to $396,000. Selznick claimed he was entitled to 10 percent of Bartholomew’s new salary and assured his gambling buddies that he would prevail in court, but the suit was eventually dismissed. Zeppo’s arrangement with Myron Selznick likely resulted in some of Selznick’s agency clients finding their contracts suddenly under the auspices of the Zeppo Marx Agency.
There had been some unusual situations concerning Zeppo, Selznick, and their clients in the past. In May 1938 Warner Bros. screenwriter Jerry Wald went to court to clarify his contract status because three different agents were all claiming commissions from him. Zeppo, who probably become acquainted with Wald at the time his story about a singing waiter at Perry’s Brass Rail restaurant was made into the film Twenty Million Sweethearts, got him his Warner Bros. contract in October 1934. But Leland Hayward and Myron Selznick were also billing Wald for commissions. It appears some agents occasionally traded or moved clients around—perhaps even as payment for gambling debts. For Zeppo the timing of Selznick’s run of bad luck was perfect. The construction of Marwyck was getting expensive.
Myron Selznick and Zeppo were also both active in the thoroughbred horse racing business. Selznick’s horse Can’t Wait finished third in the 1938 Kentucky Derby. On February 9, 1939, the Los Angeles Times reported the earnings of the various celebrity owned racing concerns at the halfway point of the season at Santa Anita. Stables owned by Louis B. Mayer, Howard Hawks, and Bing Crosby topped the list. Selznick was ranked sixth with earnings of $2,000 and two first place finishes. Marwyck was at the bottom of the list with earnings of $50 and one fourth-place finish. Between his agency and his stable, Myron Selznick certainly had things to offer Zeppo in lieu of cash.
As Zeppo and Barbara Stanwyck were building Marwyck, Groucho got involved in a construction project of his own. The original Beverly Hills Tennis Club was founded in 1929 by International Tennis Hall of Fame member Fred B. Alexander and two avid tennis players with Hollywood connections, Larry Bachmann and Milton Holmes.
Bachmann was a novelist and screenwriter who would later become a producer at MGM. Holmes, briefly an actor, had appeared in minor roles in a handful of films in the late 1920s. In addition to tennis, Holmes had another passion: gambling at the Clover Club, where he met numerous Hollywood celebrities and befriended Eddy Nealis and Milton “Farmer” Page. It was rumored that between the Clover and his own operations, Nealis handled $10 million in bets a year. Groucho did not frequent the Clover Club, and he didn’t know people like Nealis and Page. It was Zeppo who introduced him to Milton Holmes when Holmes proposed an expansion of the Beverly Hills Tennis Club that would make it a full-service country club catering to Hollywood’s large Jewish population. With many of the town’s high-class country clubs preferring not to welcome Jews, this idea appealed to Groucho—especially since his teenaged son Arthur was showing signs of becoming a tennis champion.
Zeppo’s client, actress Helen Vinson, had recently married British tennis champion Fred Perry. Perry had a prior Hollywood connection, having dated Marlene Dietrich. After a brief time in England, Vinson and Perry moved to Hollywood, and Perry joined Groucho as one of the principal backers of the new Beverly Hills Tennis Club. A December 1936 luncheon announcing plans for the new club featured Groucho as toastmaster and Fred Perry acting as head waiter with Barbara Stanwyck serving as a waitress. The club formally opened on July 11, 1937, with a celebrity doubles match pitting Britain’s Fred Perry and Charlie Chaplin against America’s Ellsworth Vines and Groucho Marx. The star-studded membership of the club included all the Marx Brothers as well as an array of movie stars, writers, and producers. Marion quickly became the best female tennis player at the club.
When Groucho boasted about Arthur’s tennis skills to Zeppo and Marion, Zeppo was skeptical. In Son of Groucho Arthur wrote,
Zeppo allowed that “Art might be pretty good for a boy,” but then quickly added. “But he’s certainly not in Marion’s class.” “She can’t beat Arthur,” said Father confidently. “How much would you like to bet?” shot back Zeppo, always eager to risk his money. “A hundred dollars?” Not a betting man himself, Father’s complexion turned the color of our white tablecloth. “Put up or shut up!” said Marion as Father hesitated.
They made the bet, and a match was arranged at the club. Arthur described the action: “For the first couple of games I could hardly keep the ball in play. As I looked over at the veranda, I could see Zeppo smirking, and Father, paler than usual, and extremely silent, probably thinking about what he could have done with a hundred dollars if he hadn’t thrown it away on me.” But Arthur found weaknesses in Marion’s game and turned things around. He recalled winning the two-set match, 6–2 and 6–1.
Zeppo did not like to lose a bet, no matter how small, and his competitive nature took over. Arthur continued,
Zeppo suddenly turned away from Marion, whom he’d been consoling, and said in a loud voice, “Listen, Groucho. The kid may be able to beat my wife, but I’ll bet you he can’t beat me!” Zeppo was just a “B” player on the men’s ladder but being a man and naturally more athletic than the average woman, he figured he could make up in brawn for what he lacked in skill and orthodox strokes. “Okay, double or nothing” replied Father, who, in his euphoria over my victory, was turning into a regular Nick the Greek. Zeppo didn’t even bother to put on tennis clothes. He just stripped off the jacket of his Eddie Schmidt suit, loosened his tie, and slipped on a pair of tennis sneakers. He was tougher than Marion. I couldn’t bring him to the net and lob, because he had a strong overhead and volley from playing doubles with the “A” players. However, I did manage to outsteady him from the back court, and outlast him, too. His chain-smoking was finally catching up with him. By the time I won the first set, 6–4, and was leading 3–0 in the second, Zeppo had to default from sheer exhaustion. I got a big kick out of watching Zeppo pull a huge roll of bills from his pocket, count out two hundred dollars and hand them over to Father.
Arthur’s account may be perfectly accurate. If it isn’t the same match described by Groucho’s biographer Hector Arce, Arthur’s story occurred at another time. According to Arce,
Arthur, in his mid-teens, had developed into a fine tennis player. Zeppo was a touch better at the time. He bet Groucho that he could beat Arthur. The match went to set point several times with Arthur on the brink of victory, but Zeppo rallied and bested his nephew. [MGM executive] Sam Marx, sitting next to Groucho said, “I bet you beat the hell out of him when you get him home.” “No.” Groucho corrected. “Halfway home.”
Winning or losing two hundred dollars to Groucho meant nothing in Zeppo’s world of gambling. He threw that much around in tips on a night at the Clover Club. But his desire to beat Groucho won out over all logic. If Zeppo did beat Arthur at one point, there certainly came a time when Arthur was known to be an excellent tennis player and a nationally ranked member of the junior Davis Cup team, alongside players like Jack Kramer and Ted Schroeder, while still in his teens.
Zeppo didn’t usually make bad bets, leaving that sort of gambling to Chico. But betting against Arthur in a tennis match against a top-ranked amateur would have been risky by the time Arthur was around seventeen. Marion, not even at the level of an unranked amateur, was overmatched and Zeppo probably knew it. But just getting the frugal Groucho to wager on anything amused him. Zeppo’s competitiveness at tennis extended outside the family. Columnist Art Arthur reported in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, “Zeppo Marx and David Selznick . . . settled a bitter tennis feud by playing far into the night on an unlit tennis court. Zeppo lost but offered a perfect alibi: ‘It was too dark . . . and I just can’t play the Braille system. Why, I had to strike a match every time I served!’”
A more significant loss around this time came in a court, not on one. Zeppo had signed sixteen-year-old French actress and dancer Olympe Bradna and got her a contract with Paramount. Her parents, Josef and Jeanna Bradna, went to superior court to get their daughter out of the contract with Zeppo, claiming it was invalid because she was a minor when it was signed. (They were perfectly fine with the Paramount contract, they just preferred to not pay the agent who got it for them.) Zeppo answered the suit with a counter claim, saying the girl’s parents were responsible for payment of 10 percent of the girl’s earnings.
The case went to trial in October 1937 and Zeppo’s lawyer claimed that even if the girl had the right to terminate the contract, her parents remained responsible for agent’s fees incurred before the termination. The decision came down in favor of the Bradnas on both points and there wasn’t much the Artists’ Managers Guild could do about it. Signing underage performers was risky. A law had been passed to protect the studios from this sort of thing. California Civil Code Section 36 provided that “a minor may not disaffirm a contract to render dramatic services where the contract has been submitted and approved by the Supreme Court in the county where the minor resides or is employed.” But this law made no provision for agents. And there was the added problem that California Civil Code Section 33 provided “that a minor cannot give a delegation of power.” This was considered an unsettled issue because if interpreted strictly, no minor could have an agent.
Daily Variety summed up the problem on October 24, 1938. “Many youthful actors and actresses employ agents and business representatives. Large sums of money are paid to these agents and representatives for services to such performers who are under 21. Can they arbitrarily drop an agent without cause even after the agent has procured for the minor a term contract? May the minor arbitrarily discharge the agent? And, without further payment under the contract? Broadly spoken, the answer apparently is in the affirmative.” But it was good business for an agent to work with underage actors. There were still plenty of them becoming stars and honoring their contracts.
Zeppo had taken a chance on another minor in December 1936. Hollywood Reporter publisher Billy Wilkerson asked him to see an attractive teenaged girl he had encountered in an ice cream parlor near Hollywood High School. (Why Wilkerson was ogling high school girls in an ice cream parlor is another matter.) Wilkerson had been a bootlegger, and the repeal of Prohibition moved him into the nightclub business. He owned several Hollywood clubs and restaurants including the Trocadero. One of his closest friends was Johnny Rosselli.
With permission from her mother, Wilkerson sent his malt shop girl to Zeppo’s office. Armed with a letter from Wilkerson, fifteen-year-old Julia Jean Turner—whose friends called her Judy—went to see Zeppo. He agreed with Wilkerson that Judy Turner—later better known as Lana Turner—was beautiful and could become a star if she could learn to act. In her autobiography, she described their first meeting. After reading Wilkerson’s letter, Zeppo
looked up and said, “Tell me Judy, how old are you?”
“Fifteen, Mr. Marx,” I said. He slapped his hand down sharply on the desk, and he barked, “Oh no, you’re not.”
“Yes, I really am. Honest.”
“Don’t ever say that again. As far as this industry goes, you’re eighteen.”
We didn’t know then why my age was so important, but later on I found out. Meanwhile Zeppo Marx agreed to represent me and assigned me to his agent Henry Willson. Henry took me around to meet the casting directors, but nobody offered me a job—not even as an extra. So, he turned me over to another young man named Solly Baiano.
Zeppo’s insistence on her saying she was eighteen suggests an unpleasant motive. The age of majority in California was twenty-one, so for the purpose of protecting himself in contractual matters, Turner being eighteen still made her a minor and was of no help to Zeppo as an agent. The fifteen-year-old girl was not likely to pass for twenty-one, but there was a reason to pass her off as being eighteen: the age of sexual consent in California was eighteen.
Zeppo told Shirley Eder of the Detroit Free Press a version of the Lana Turner story that took Wilkerson out of the ice cream parlor and made him a friend of the girl’s family. But the key points of the story were unchanged:
[S]he was beautiful. A beautiful figure, and she had no experience at all. Mervyn LeRoy, who was just starting his own unit at Warner Bros. calls me and says . . . “anything new in talent, please give me first chance at it because I need some talent.” I had a boy named Solly Baiano working for me, and I called Mervyn and said, “I got a girl here that I think has great possibilities as far as looks and a figure and everything. If you teach her how to act this girl could be a star.” He says, “I’ve got a small part in a picture.” I sent her over with Solly Baiano. She had a tight sweater on, and a tight skirt and he put her in the picture . . . and she immediately became known all over.
