The FBI spied on the Marx Brothers. What? the Karl Marx brothers?
by Margie Burns
from Smirking Chimp
Way back in the 1990s, it occurred to me that given the tendencies of late FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, the Bureau might well have been intrigued by the Marx Brothers’ last name. So I checked with the FBI, and sure enough, it had kept a file on that family comedy team, the Marx Brothers – Groucho, Harpo, Zeppo, Chico – which in due course I received. I still have the dossier.
The FBI kept a careful eye on these popular malefactors, malcontents or subversives from the 1930s into the 1960s. Julius Marx (Groucho), the most articulate and erudite member of the family and the one who most successfully handled the transition from movies to television, has a file of 186 pages. Herbert Marx (Zeppo) has a file of 48 pages, mostly a mimeographed copy of a comedy routine he and Groucho had been accused of stealing. Even Leonard (Chico), largely a musician, and Adolph Arthur (Harpo), who did a famous mirror routine with Lucille Ball on I Love Lucy, have 3-page files.
Checking out this hunch was of course a slow process. After the possible existence of an FBI file on the Marx Brothers occurred to me, I requested the file under FOIA, from Mr. J. Kevin O'Brien, Chief of the Freedom of Information - Privacy Acts Section, Information Resources Division. The FBI responded the same year that documents pertaining to my request had been located and were being processed. I finally received the ‘redacted’ files almost three years later. Of the 186 pages in Groucho's file, several are entirely or partly blacked out, and many more are unreadably poor copies.
(Continued here.)
from Smirking Chimp
Way back in the 1990s, it occurred to me that given the tendencies of late FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, the Bureau might well have been intrigued by the Marx Brothers’ last name. So I checked with the FBI, and sure enough, it had kept a file on that family comedy team, the Marx Brothers – Groucho, Harpo, Zeppo, Chico – which in due course I received. I still have the dossier.
The FBI kept a careful eye on these popular malefactors, malcontents or subversives from the 1930s into the 1960s. Julius Marx (Groucho), the most articulate and erudite member of the family and the one who most successfully handled the transition from movies to television, has a file of 186 pages. Herbert Marx (Zeppo) has a file of 48 pages, mostly a mimeographed copy of a comedy routine he and Groucho had been accused of stealing. Even Leonard (Chico), largely a musician, and Adolph Arthur (Harpo), who did a famous mirror routine with Lucille Ball on I Love Lucy, have 3-page files.
Checking out this hunch was of course a slow process. After the possible existence of an FBI file on the Marx Brothers occurred to me, I requested the file under FOIA, from Mr. J. Kevin O'Brien, Chief of the Freedom of Information - Privacy Acts Section, Information Resources Division. The FBI responded the same year that documents pertaining to my request had been located and were being processed. I finally received the ‘redacted’ files almost three years later. Of the 186 pages in Groucho's file, several are entirely or partly blacked out, and many more are unreadably poor copies.
(Continued here.)
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