![]() That same year, Fleming was appointed his guardian and temporary conservator of an estate worth between $2 million and $4 million. In his acceptance speech, after thanking Harpo and Chico, the actress Margaret Dumont, his long suffering foil who never understood his jokes, and his mother, Minnie, “because without her we never would have been anything,” Groucho thanked “Erin Fleming, who makes my life worth living and who understands all my jokes.” On the other hand, it was Fleming who waged a successful campaign for Groucho and his brothers to receive a special Academy Award in 1974. The problem was that many of Groucho’s friends felt Fleming was pushing him too hard to perform, evidenced by his advanced age and an inability to remember all of his lines. ![]() ![]() That same year, there were revivals of his films at movie houses and libraries across the nation. He played various colleges and eventually Carnegie Hall, a performance that resulted in the hit album, “An Evening With Groucho” (1972). Her most famous role, however, was as Groucho’s secretary-manager and she was responsible for his popular comeback in the early 1970s. She played some minor roles in films, including Woody Allen’s “Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask” (1972). How about if she only goes in up to her waist?”Īfter he divorced Eden Hartford - his third wife who was about 40 years younger than him - in 1969, Groucho met Erin Fleming in 1971. Groucho wrote the country club president, between puffs of his famous cigar: “She’s only half Jewish. Melinda often performed on her father’s television show, “You Bet Your Life,” and famously inspired a Groucho quip when he was told that she was forbidden from swimming in a country club pool because the family was Jewish. Groucho also had a complicated relationship with Melinda, his third daughter from his second marriage to Kay Mavis Gorcey. Arthur wrote several works based on life in the Marx family at one point, Groucho threatened to sue his son over his depiction in one of Arthur’s memoirs. Groucho’s “girlfriend” and consort, Erin Fleming, was accused of elder abuse and, to make matters worse, his relationships with his son Arthur and daughter Miriam (children from his first marriage, to Ruth Johnson, a dancer in the Marx Brothers’ vaudeville act) were strained for various reasons. 19, 1977, at age 86 of pneumonia, which is known as “the old man’s friend.” The turmoil of his last few years are all too familiar to adult children everywhere who are concerned with the welfare of their elderly parents and other relatives. The legal battles over Groucho’s money and possessions carried on long after he died. He suffered from elements of dementia, a heart attack and congestive heart failure, falls resulting in a broken hip, and after that hip was repaired, another fall and broken hip, urinary tract infections, strokes and hypertension. (There was a fifth brother, Gummo, who was not a performer preferring, instead, to earn his daily bread in the dress business and, after Zeppo opened a lucrative talent agency in Hollywood, representing movie stars for 10 percent of their earnings).īy the time Groucho was an old man, however, he experienced significant problems in his daily activities, medical decision-making and the management of his estate. With his zany brothers Harpo, Chico, and sometimes Zeppo, he conquered American vaudeville, the Broadway stage, motion pictures, radio and television. I still haven’t had the pluck to ever say such a thing in my clinic, but not a day goes by that I don’t think of something funny uttered by Julius Henry Marx, better known as Groucho. Hackenbush in the 1937 MGM film “A Day at the Races.” My initial inspiration to go into medicine was to someday take a patient’s pulse and declare, “Either this patient is dead, or my watch has stopped!” - just as the great Groucho Marx did when playing Dr.
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