![]() ![]() Groucho was in London with his wife, Eden, and Eliot and his wife, Valerie, invited them to drop by for dinner. The two pen pals finally met in June 1964. Not surprisingly, the Nobel laureate never sent a steamy letter detailing his erotic fantasies to the guy with the greasepaint moustache. ![]() Though admittedly unreliable, I can be trusted with matters as important as that.” “I would be interested in reading your views on sex, so don’t hesitate,” he wrote. Then he suggested that Eliot should write about sex. In November 1963, Groucho informed Eliot that he’d just finished writing a book on love and sex, Memoirs of a Mangy Lover, and he recommended it as an aphrodisiac: “If you are in a sexy mood the night you read it, it may stimulate you beyond recognition and rekindle memories that you haven’t recalled in years.”Īfter plugging his sex book, Groucho grumbled that contemporary authors wrote too much about sex. Marx.” In his letters, Groucho called Eliot “Tom” and then launched into a long, goofy riff on the various Toms of history, from tomcats to Thomas Jefferson. In his letters, Eliot was reticent, bashful and so buttoned-down that he apologized for addressing Groucho as “Groucho” instead of “Mr. For the next three years, the two men repeatedly planned to get together, but something always kept them apart.įirst, Eliot got sick. “Should I come to London I will certainly take advantage of your kind invitation,” Groucho graciously replied, “and if you come to California, I hope you will allow me to do the same.” That was in June 1961. Marx are in London, my wife and I hope you will dine with us.” Yeats and Paul Valery,” Eliot wrote to Groucho. “Your portrait has arrived and has given me great joy and will soon appear in its frame on my wall with other famous friends such as W.B. Both were avid readers, both loved to play with words and both were highly skeptical about the perfectibility of their fellow man. Eliot once summed up his worldview by describing himself as a “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion.” Groucho summed up his worldview by singing, “Whatever it is, I’m against it.”īut the two men did share certain traits. ![]() Bradley.”Born to an impoverished Jewish family in New York in 1890, Julius Henry Marx dropped out of school in his early teens and traveled the low end of the vaudeville circuit performing with his brothers Harpo, Chico, Zeppo and Gummo in a show called Fun in Hi Skule. Louis in 1888, Thomas Stearns Eliot studied philosophy at Harvard, Oxford and the Sorbonne and wrote a doctoral dissertation titled“Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F.H. Born to a prosperous Christian family in St. How unlikely? Consider their backgrounds. Groucho obliged, and an unlikely friendship began. Eliot wrote back, explaining that what he really wanted was a picture of the classic cinematic Groucho-the guy with the greasepaint moustache, the huge cigar and the cynical smirk. Eliot, one of the 20th century’s greatest poets, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature and author of “The Waste Land,”along, gloomy poem so difficult to decipher that it was published with footnotes that translated the passages Eliot wrote in Latin, Greek, German and Sanskrit.įlattered to find that he had such an intellectual admirer, Groucho sent a photograph of himself looking like a dapper, semi-retired 70-year-old man, which is what he was. The request didn’t surprise him but the source did. One day in 1961, Groucho Marx received a letter from a fan requesting an autographed picture. ![]()
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