It Simply Isn’t Done: Margaret Dumont
How much did Margaret Dumont understand the jokes leveled at her by Groucho Marx? In seven movies as Groucho’s straight woman, the well-upholstered Dumont would stand at attention and have various reactions to Groucho’s fusillade of insults. She often rolled her eyes indulgently but sometimes looked perplexed and agitated. Usually, though, the insults would seem to roll right off of her, as if nothing could pierce her sweet imperturbability, her thick front of graciousness, her social poise. The characters she played with Groucho were invariably wealthy widows possessed of millions of dollars, social snobs with ropes of pearls and necklaces and lorgnettes dripping down their 1890s figures. They were stuffy and pompous women, but Dumont also gave them suggestions of shyness and vulnerability.
Being interviewed by Dick Cavett, Groucho perpetuated the story that Dumont had no idea what he was going on about, remembering the time they were filming Duck Soup (1933) and she had to ask him what he meant when he said of her character, “We’re fighting for this woman’s honor, which is more than she ever did.” There were times like that when she didn’t get a specific joke and needed to have it explained to her afterward. “That was her charm, I think, that she was so deadly serious all the time,” Groucho told Cavett. But if we look closely at the way she behaves with Groucho, Chico and Harpo on screen, Dumont often makes clear choices about how she wants to react, especially in Animal Crackers (1930), perhaps her best and most well rounded performance.
Maureen O’Sullivan claimed that Dumont “had no idea why A Day at the Races (1937) was funny or even that it was funny. When we started, she told me, ‘It’s not going to be one of those things. I’m having a very serious part this time.’” Is it really possible that Dumont thought A Day at the Races was going to feature a serious study of the hypochondria of her character Mrs. Upjohn?! Surely she was disabused of that notion by the time Groucho, Harpo and Chico had her feet way up in the air in a dental chair and were dabbing shaving cream on her face. They pull at her coiffure, too, while Dumont wrings her hands helplessly and looks genuinely miserable; she always wore wigs to disguise her thinning hair, and so pulling at her wig makes her seem too exposed for laughs. It’s all too much, too physical, just as firing Dumont out of cannon is too much at the end of At the Circus (1939), the kind of rough knockabout humor that might have been funny with a more obvious kind of battleaxe character actress, someone like Esther Dale or Kathleen Howard.
But in Animal Crackers, Dumont is able to wrestle with Harpo and even take a series of punches to the stomach and still retain her physical and emotional dignity, mainly because she’s younger in that movie and more imperiously sure of herself. It’s wrong to think that Dumont’s characters in the Marx movies were always the same; there were subtle differences. Mrs. Claypool in A Night at the Opera (1935) is a rather ill-tempered, stony dowager, given to wincing at Groucho’s ever-shifting tactics with her, whereas Mrs. Rittenhouse in Animal Crackers is a more bohemian hostess who is used to the company of artists. There are even times when Mrs. Rittenhouse displays a genteel kind of roguishness, a very rare flavor of behavior. In fact, there are moments in Animal Crackers where it is possible to imagine Dumont playing a gentler Mae West type of role in a foundation garment that pushes her figure up instead of down. Groucho notices her modest sexual avidity here: “A big cluck like you turning cute on me,” he sneers, but then he thinks it over and rolls his eyes upward into a lustful look. When Groucho seems to be suggesting a three-way with another woman, Mrs. Rittenhouse is shocked but intrigued: “Are you suggesting…companionate marriage?” she flutes provocatively.
At one point in Animal Crackers, Groucho gestures to a large chest and says, “This magnificent chest,” before looking at Mrs. Rittenhouse’s bosom and repeating, “This magnificent chest!” and Mrs. R. (and Dumont herself?) is very tickled by his free associative compliment. She’s a one-man woman, not to be taken in by Harpo; in The Cocoanuts (1929), when Harpo throws himself on her bed and beckons to her, she cries, “Why, I never! I should say not!” At one point in At the Circus, a llama leans in and starts to lick her neck, which she mistakes for attentions from Groucho, and Dumont’s face suddenly becomes radiantly pretty, a glimpse of what she must have looked like as a young woman with a beauty mark under her left eye.
Dumont, who was born in 1882 in Brooklyn and raised in the south, began her career as a soubrette in the theater and retired in 1910 to marry a wealthy man, John Moller, Jr. For eight years she was a real society figure, but after Moller’s death in 1918, she returned to the stage, much to the chagrin of her in-laws. “She’d been a social lady, and her husband died, so she needed a job,” said writer Morrie Ryskind. She had several homes, however, so it seems more than likely that she enjoyed the work itself as well as its financial rewards. Dumont always kept her “stage” projection of voice in her films, but she used it strategically for laughs. At the end of Duck Soup, she sings, “Hail Freedonia!” in her heavy soprano and when the Marxes throw tomatoes at her, she just goes on singing regardless.
She first played with the Marxes on stage in 1925 in The Cocoanuts, and in the movie version, Dumont plays “confused” and “oblivious” very subtly, but it’s clear that there are quotation marks around these reactions, even if she didn’t always get the exact nature of Groucho’s barbs. Dumont’s reactions to Groucho can be fairly complex, a set of signals she chooses from and sometimes blends to get across her ambivalence to the brothers and her attraction to them, her disapproval of them and her hidden desire for a little fun. Her serene eyes would widen and she would seem to be thinking, “I’m amused, but is it socially acceptable to be amused by this?” In moments like that, perhaps Dumont herself was a bit like the women she played, not certain she should be acting these parts with these silly men, but always tickled enough and maybe just oblivious enough to take the plunge.
Groucho’s jokes wouldn’t work at all if we felt that Dumont’s society women or Dumont herself could be truly hurt by his insults, which must be partly why he always insisted she didn’t get his jokes in life, either. She needs to feel always in control and above it all for their act to click, indestructible, mysterious, impenetrable, armored by wealth, position and general cluelessness (this quality was funniest whenever Groucho inappropriately called her “babe” or “toots”). When all those people in the stateroom collapse on Mrs. Claypool in A Night at the Opera, there’s no question that she can ever be physically hurt by them or by anything. There’s a kind of existential cynicism in the way Groucho deals with her, as if nothing he says can ever really have any effect, so why not just go nuts? If some of his barbs against her age and appearance ever actually landed and hurt her feelings, Dumont learned to ignore them and take pride in her technique. “I’m a straight lady, the best in Hollywood,” she told an interviewer in 1937, just after filming A Day at the Races. “There is an art to playing the straight role. You must build up your man but never top him, never steal the laughs.”
In their last film together, The Big Store (1941), an aging Dumont worries that Groucho will leave her for a younger woman, but he reassures her: “Don’t be silly, I’ll write you twice a week,” he says, then gives her a cuddle, which seems to make her happy. She made other films, with Laurel and Hardy, W.C. Fields and Jack Benny, usually in small roles as society matrons but sometimes as lower class women with pretensions to gentility. Dumont seems a little anonymous in a lot of those movies, but sometimes her eyes would flash and she would smile as if reacting to phantom remarks from Groucho.
On February 26, 1965, Dumont recreated a scene from Animal Crackers on TV with Groucho. She died eight days later at the age of 82. On that broadcast, Dumont is as formidable as ever, clearly pleased when the audience applauds her, and nervously mirthful when Groucho ad-libs, “Don’t step on those few laughs I have.” Interestingly, she tries something new here, a delayed reaction to his dirty joke about native girls “developing,” as if she considers the joke for a moment and then thinks, “Ah, now I get that one!” Was this a choice, or was she finally getting this joke after thirty-five years?
It seems clear when he chastises her for stepping on his lines in that final teaming that Groucho was toughly in charge and she was under his thumb professionally. In his Cavett interview, Groucho ungenerously sneered at Dumont’s behavior back stage at that last taping, sitting in her dressing room “as if she was still a big star,” and holding roses “that she probably bought herself.” Practically any other show business figure would have said a few kind words about an indispensable partner on her very last legs, but Groucho chose to hurl a few more insults at her when she could no longer hear them. Maybe that was his way of showing that he loved her.
by Dan Callahan