Chico Marx

Leonard "Chico" Marx was born in Manhattan, New York City, on March 22, 1887, the second child of Samuel Marx, an Alsatian-born tailor from Mertzwiller, and Miene "Minnie" Marx, née Schoenberg, who had emigrated from Dornum in East Frisia around 1880. The couple married on January 18, 1885, and their first child, Manfred, died of tuberculosis in infancy. Leonard was followed by Arthur, Julius, Milton, and Herbert, the brothers who would collectively become known as the Marx Brothers. Minnie came from a family of performers — her mother was a yodeling harpist, her father a ventriloquist, and her brother was vaudeville comedian Al Shean, one half of the act Gallagher and Shean. Hoping to channel Leonard's energies productively, she purchased a secondhand upright piano and arranged lessons for him.

From an early age, Marx showed a pronounced appetite for gambling. By nine he was wagering regularly, and by eleven he was staying out all night playing pool. He lost his first job in 1899 for shooting craps on the premises, and in subsequent positions he routinely gambled away his earnings on payday. In his mid-teens, under family pressure to stop, he left home and supported himself playing piano in nickelodeons and other venues. He also briefly toured with a circus as a wrestler and later as a flyweight boxer.

By 1907, Marx was working at the music publishing firm Shapiro, Bernstein and Co. When founder Maurice Shapiro died in 1911, Marx quit and persuaded a young tenor named Aaron Gordon to join him in a vaudeville act. Taking inspiration from an existing act called The Two Funny Germans, and with Minnie's encouragement, Marx and Gordon adopted Italian accents — Marx's reputedly modeled on his barber's — and toured as Marx and Gordon. Gordon later said he never received a salary because Marx gambled away their earnings, and he left the act that fall. Marx then briefly partnered with his cousin Lou Shean, though that arrangement also ended after a series of personal and professional complications.

It was during his vaudeville years that Marx acquired his nickname. According to Groucho, the name originated during a card game and derived from the early twentieth-century slang term "chicken-chaser," meaning womanizer. Originally spelled "Chicko," the name lost its middle letter when a typesetter omitted the k. While the Marx family pronounced it "Chick-oh," others frequently said "Cheek-oh," a mispronunciation that persisted in radio broadcasts through the 1940s without correction from Marx himself.

Marx eventually joined his brothers Groucho, Harpo, and Gummo, who were touring in a production called Fun in High School. The first verified appearance of all of them together was in August 1912. Management of the act gradually shifted from Minnie, who relocated to Chicago to manage other performers, to Chico. At his instigation, the brothers expanded Fun in High School into a longer musical called Mr. Green's Reception, adding a second act and incorporating additional performers. Groucho later credited Marx with sustaining the group's ambition, recalling that Marx continually told them they were good when he and Harpo were uncertain. In 1914, Marx enlisted their uncle Al Shean to help write Home Again, a musical comedy about American tourists returning from Europe, which proved popular enough that the act began guaranteeing theater owners higher-than-average weekly receipts. That same year they moved from the Pantages theater chain to the larger circuit controlled by the United Booking Office.

Marx's Broadway career spanned two decades, from 1924 to 1944, and encompassed some of the Marx Brothers' most celebrated stage work. He appeared in the revue I'll Say She Is and starred in the musical The Cocoanuts. He also performed in the musical Animal Crackers and appeared in Take a Bow. These productions established the brothers as major figures in American theatrical comedy.

When the Marx Brothers transitioned to film, Marx took on a managerial role in addition to performing. He negotiated a deal with studios that gave the brothers a percentage of a film's gross receipts, the first arrangement of its kind in Hollywood. It was also his personal connection with Irving Thalberg, head of production at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, that led to Thalberg signing the brothers following a career slump after their 1933 Paramount film Duck Soup. During the 1930s and 1940s, Marx also led a big band, the Chico Marx Orchestra, with which crooner Mel Tormé began his professional career. His chronic gambling addiction compelled him to keep working long after his brothers had retired comfortably, and in the early 1940s he found himself performing in the same small venues where he had started three decades earlier. Chico Marx died on October 11, 1961.