margaret dumont pt 3: if you want something done right...

This image taken from this website is ostensibly of Margaret Dumont I suppose in the early 20th century. 

So I finally finished this book and yes it took some time (considering it is quite slender) as it was not a riveting read. A lot of the time I read a book and I think 'I could have done better' and usually I'm kidding myself (and anyway, I didn't do anything better). Once you've read a book it has no novelty so you quickly forget all the things it introduced you to. Nevertheless, aside from some information about Margaret Dumont's earliest years and the marriage which made her retire, as it turns out temporarily, from the stage the bulk of this book is a rehash of material not even necessarily that germane to Margaret Dumont's film career, let alone her actual life. We come away from this book not knowing anything about Dumont's personal life after the death of her husband (and by personal life I mean, sure, she may not have written letters to friends about her life and career or if she did they may not exist anymore, but where did she live? Did she communicate with agents, studios, etc?) Her voice in this book, such as it is, is entirely based on her public pronouncements which, as I said in my previous post, are as likely to have been manufactured by publicists as actually coming from her own mouth (and could be both). 

Spoiler, but she's dead and her death is dealt with in this book almost as offhandedly as her life - it's an afterthought during discussion of a remake she and Groucho did of 'Hooray for Captain Spalding' for television. 

So as mentioned in earlier posts I was so intrigued by MD that I had a vague, unrealisable (particularly now as I doubt I will ever go to the USA again) idea that perhaps somehow I could write her biography, of course I had no idea what exists of her in archives, etc. Having looked at the sources here I still don't know what exists of her in archives, really. There is a section on 'Historical Archives/Journals' in the bibliography of this book, which contains details of two archives consulted: 'Brooklyn Historical Society Library, Vital Records, Daisy Juliette Baker' (MD's real name) and 'Westchester County Historical Society, Daisy Juliet Baker Papers'. I had a quick look at the second of these and could find nothing at all while searching on various permutations of Daisy, Juliette and Baker in various places (I then searched on every 'Baker'). Those papers might be there, but they're not easily found (if they are there, then good work to these authors in locating them but not good work in using them, as the references to them in the text are paltry). There is one more item in 'Historical Archives/Journals' which is, ludicrously, an issue of the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television from 1994 (the issue is from 1994, but the citation ends in '2015' for some reason). This entry does not detail at all what article it relates to, but it is presumably one of two (!) articles about RKO box office performance - as we used to say, 'big whoop!' Clearly this is a secondary source and it does not belong in these primary sources but the exact nature of the primary sources is very obscure anyway. 

And that is it for primary sources. So, when I angsted about wanting to research MD and thought no, it needs a good focused American-based researcher to do it and I couldn't possibly do it with my mean resources, I will now say yes, I most definitely could have done this better from my spare room, with a computer and a newspapers.com subscription and access to the fifteen books these authors used (and a whole lot more they didn't). Because firstly, I could have accessed all the information they accessed without too much effort and secondly I could have given this material a bit less of the extensive-description-of-the-Marx-Brothers'-lives and also extensive-description-of-the-Marx-Brothers'-films-without-Margaret-Dumont-in-them, and a bit more of the description of some of the other films (assuming they're accessible in some form), and a bit more discussion of her legacy because FFS, she dies and as far as the authors of this book are concerned they can walk away at that point and barely even talk about how the Marx Brothers' films enjoyed extensive revival in the 70s/80s let alone talk about any later discussion of MD. 

They didn't need to write this book, at all, and I can well imagine it would have been difficult to even convince a publisher that it had a market (I wonder if it did/does). So why do it so halfheartedly and without the most basic checking and most importantly (?) in a manner that suggests they really had no interest in their central subject? 

The other question is whether the book was written by AI. AI has come a long way in two years and maybe AI two years ago wouldn't have been capable of this but I have to say there is a lot that reads that way, errors AI might make but also a kind of weird alien-ness of the whole thing that makes it seem like it might well be a robot in charge. 

Anyway, I clearly muddled my way through their muddling through of the story of MD and yes, I could have done a lot better at least in terms of tone and engagement, but I didn't and neither did anyone else, so this is what the world gets. This is not even a hack job it's a... why-did-they-bother job.

Just thought I'd throw this in for no good purpose: a picture being sold on eBay for US$76 described as 'At the Circus 8 X 10 Still 1939 The Marx Brothers, Margaret Dumont'. At least MD was in At the Circus but ffs. 

I'm not even joking, this one is being sold for about half as much but has exactly the same description. 

margaret dumont - still an unknown quantity

I mentioned a few weeks ago how excited I was that someone had finally written a biography of Margaret Dumont. I ordered it immediately at the beginning of January and it came quite soon afterwards. I started reading it, stopped about half way through, and came back to it yesterday. 

I admit, at the time of writing I'm coming up to possibly the most rewarding bit: the quarter-century of Dumont's career after she worked with the Marx Brothers. But people are always writing reviews of things when they've read the whole thing, completely avoiding the reality that to get to the end you also have to get half way through. Here are my thoughts so far:

If there are insights to be had into the mind and actions of Margaret Dumont that are not, magic-eye-like to be divined from unfocussing your eyes and imaginatively looking through decades of almost-hundred-year-old studio promo guff, to try and imagine whether Dumont actually said this stuff about herself and if so, whether she meant it, then the authors have not found it. Possibly they have not tried to find it. 

The authors are accomplished people, they didn't need to do this. Chris Enss writes about women in the old west (i.e. not character actors in mid-20th-century Hollywood) and has apparently written umpteen books on this topic, arcane but you can imagine why it would be popular. Howard Kazanjian is a very successful film producer, working on Star Wars and similar pablum. There's no special reason for him to be interested in writing about this person, much less in this cack-handed manner. I suppose it's possible that one employed the other to whip stuff into shape. 

If the non-Dumont Marx material (including for instance 1930s photographs of the Four Marx Brothers without Dumont, stuffed way into the section where Zeppo was long gone) was taken out, I don't think there'd be very much left. The authors may not have had the opportunity to see the films Dumont made outside the Marx orbit, and apparently she made many, reputedly usually playing the same kind of reserved, upper-class 'society lady' person but often in dramatic roles, etc, but you would have thought Howard Kazanjian for instance could have brought a bit of pressure, money, influence etc to bear to at least find copies of some of them to sit through and report on. Instead, I am going to say that they have not seen many Margaret Dumont films outside the ones she made with the Marx Brothers and indeed the ones they made without her get significant reportage too. When it comes to her non-Marx films, they just give a summary from, I assume, press reviews or reports from the period.*

Most of the text, as suggested above, is based on press reports of the films, their content, and things that were reported about Dumont and/or she reputedly said to the press. The authors do not for one second question any of this stuff, although Kazanjian surely, if not Enss, must understand that most of the material reported in the press as coming from the mouths of film stars was if not made up, then very processed (and sanitised). I have no problem with being given detail of what Dumont (or Groucho, or whoever) was reported as saying in the media in 1940, but I find the assumption in these pages that this is just what they said a bit weird. 

The Wall Street Journal's Jeanine Basinger calls this book 'prodigiously researched', which suggests to me that Jeanine Basinger has never done a newspapers.com search. I don't know for certain but there must surely be a huge amount of studio archives and so on which at very least would give some insight into how she was contracted to films and so on. Did she have a manager/agent? Did she have correspondence with publicists, etc? There must be some non-published sources that could have been consulted. There are even some things you could probably get to the bottom of online in half an hour - when MD's sister died in the early 1940s, what killed her? 

More soon... 

*It's quite possible that many of these films are lost. But then, they need to tell us that. But they won't, because they don't care if they're lost or not - they weren't going to watch them anyway (if they did, it's not at all obvious they did). 

sometimes your prayers are answered

All you have to do is believe and hope and, yes, pray.

For years I've wanted to know more about Margaret Dumont and I have always been distinctively unsatisfied with what I've been able to find, even in a fairly comprehensive wikipedia page. Only a few hours ago I was thinking maybe a retirement project might be deep archival work on her to get the full story, though I also wondered how much of a full story there might really be (after all, she seemed to play her cards pretty close to her chest and also, she had no children which does not mean anything in itself but it does mean there was unlikely to be anyone around after her death in 1965 to maintain her things and speak about her to others). 

All that is how come I was thrilled to discover that this book was published over a year ago:

Yes, of course I instantly ordered a copy. Can't wait to read it. I hope it is satisfying. Kind of annoying that even in this day and age (of course people were saying things of that nature in 1422) there was no way that I could have been told this book was coming out, so I could have read it in 2023, but that's OK really, I'm just pleased it exists. Unless it's terrible, in which case... but I won't waste time worrying about its potential terribleness. It will probably satisfy me.