Miriam Marx obit

Miriam Marx Allen, Daughter of Groucho Marx, Dies at 90

Letters that she received from her dad became a 1992 book that showed a different side of the fabled comedian.

 

She was not on the list.

Miriam Marx Allen, the eldest daughter of Groucho Marx who worked on his quiz show You Bet Your Life and turned letters that she received from her famous father into a revealing book, has died. She was 90.

Allen died June 29 in Capistrano Beach, Calif., according to friend Frank Ferrante, an actor who has made a career out of expertly portraying her dad on stage in such productions as the 1980s smash Groucho: A Life in Revue and the current An Evening With Groucho.

Miriam Ruth Marx was born in Manhattan on May 19, 1927, to actor Julius “Groucho” Marx and dancer Ruth Johnson as the Marx Brothers were doing a quick revival of their fabulously successful musical comedy The Cocoanuts on Broadway.

In 1930, she, her older brother, Arthur, and her parents moved to Hollywood when the Marx Brothers left New York to make their third feature, Paramount’s Monkey Business (1931).

Groucho “was a wonderful father, a very caring father, and very interested in both myself and my brother,” Allen said in a 1992 interview with the Los Angeles Times. “He chose our company over anybody else’s whenever possible. And he was a homebody. His idea of a perfect evening was to stay home and listen to music and read a book and be with his kids.”

After attending Bennington College in Vermont, Allen in the 1950s wrote for Mademoiselle magazine and was an editor alongside director Robert Dwan on You Bet Your Life, then airing on NBC television and hosted by her ad-libbing, stogie-smoking father.

In 1992, Allen published Love Groucho: Letters From Groucho Marx to His Daughter Miriam, a collection of her father’s letters sent from 1938 through 1967. She had saved more than 200 of them in a laundry bag.

One was from 1947, when Miriam was dating a man whom she had met on an elevator. “Was the elevator going up at the time, or down?” Groucho wrote. “This is very important, for going down in an elevator one always has that sinking feeling, and for all I know you may have this confused with love. If you were going up, it is clearly a case of love at first sight, and it also proves that he is a rising young man.”

Another was from 1953, when Allen was being treated for alcoholism at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas.