How a UCLA Student in the 70s Saved the Marx Brothers

This is Lee Habib, and this is our American Stories. And we tell stories about everything here on this show. And our favorite stories are our listeners' stories. They're your stories. Our next story comes to us from Paul in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Paul moved our listeners with his story, Wilbur and the Empty Nester, and a baby boomers battle with insanity and fitness.

We asked him if he had any more. Here he is with a story simply titled Moose Prayer. Have you ever seen a moose? I have. They're big, strong, powerful, and athletic. Have you ever wanted to be a moose?

I did. I lived with a moose all throughout my childhood growing up in Bloomington, Minnesota, the middle child of a cluster of eight devout Catholic kids. I have three older brothers, one older sister, two younger brothers, and one younger sister. I grew up idolizing my older siblings, what I wouldn't have given to be as cool as them. Such was the thought of this impressionable little brother.

It was Tom, the firstborn, five years my senior, that I most wanted to emulate. His nickname? Moose. A three-sport star at Kennedy High School, larger than life in my 10 year old eyes. To a fifth grader, a 15 year old moose may as well have been Paul Bunyan.

He could do it all. What does this have to do with the moose prayer? Let me start by asking, have you ever wondered whether God is listening to your prayers?

I have wondered the same. As a high school sophomore, I remember praying that the cute, energetic cheerleader would fall head over heels for me. I was a shy, bashful, awkward teenager. It didn't happen. God didn't answer my prayer. Or did he?

It turned out the cheerleader and I had very little in common. I also remember another selfish prayer, a petition I made before my varsity hockey games. Please God, help us to win and help me to score a goal. A victory and a goal did not always happen. God didn't grant that prayer request either. Or did he?

Perhaps I scored more goals than I deserved. Or what about my prayer asking that God would give me over my fear of public speaking? He certainly didn't answer that one the way I had hoped.

After 58 years, I still shiver at the thought and stutter when attempting to speak in public settings. Or was it answered indeed? This leads me to the prayer that God answered for me without a doubt. My Moose Prayer.

Let's go back to the 10 year old fifth grader and his 15 year old oldest brother. One evening, Moose and I were in our basement in the middle of an all-star wrestling match and it happened. Bam! I could not believe my eyes. Moose, while performing a wrestling move, banged his head on the duct worked above us. While he was busy shaking off the cobwebs, I was standing there in awe.

How could he hit his head on something that high? My brother, Moose, was indeed larger than Paul Bunyan. He was a giant after all, confirmed in my mind right then and there. Thus, my Moose Prayer was born. From that night forward, I ended my bedtime prayers with, please Lord, help me to grow to be as big as Moose. Prayer after prayer, night after night, year after year, I was relentless. I wanted more than anything to be as big as my big brother. I kept up this prayer for a good five or six years, never letting up. While we don't have a lot of tall jeans in our family, my dad pushing six feet, my mama petite five feet five inches, my non-Moose brothers at 5'11", although most of them are still claiming to be six feet, but Moose topped out at six feet two inches.

Big, strong, powerful, and athletic, indeed. As for me, somehow I grew to be six feet six inches. How did that happen? I don't know for sure. Was it the peanut butter, my favorite food? I doubt it. Coincidence? Maybe.

In answer to my Moose Prayer, I think, quite possibly, yes. For God tells us, ask and you will receive, seek and you will find. Knock and it will be opened unto you. I certainly asked to be tall, with passion, over and over again. For me, I believe God chose to answer my prayer and then some. His way of telling me, do not doubt, have faith. I hear you and will answer your prayers. This knowledge he has given me, this faith, has served me well over the years. On days when my faith is tested and doubt creeps into my mind as to whether God cares and is listening, I need to look no further than my six foot six inch frame as a reminder that yes, God does listen and he does care and he does want me to talk to him. My prayers have changed since I was a teenager.

Instead of a laundry list of things to ask God for, I try to spend more time talking with God and listening to him. Quiet time together, one-on-one, conversing. As a father myself, I learned how precious time is with your sons and daughters. What father would not want to have a conversation with his child? After my kids moved out of our house and I became an empty nester, the days I would get a phone call from one of them became my best days.

It made no difference to me the reason they called. Sometimes it was just to say hi and to tell me they loved me. Sometimes it was to discuss an issue they were having or to ask for some fatherly advice.

Sometimes they even called and questioned something I was doing. I cherished each and every one of these conversations. The precious time together is priceless. Fathers, I have learned, of course want what is best for their children and we do want them to ask. And I can surely imagine how the same goes with our Heavenly Father.

I also learned much of this from my own father. He asked me once, during one of our weekly Sunday night sessions, to define prayer. I struggled with an answer.

I thought I knew what it was, but I couldn't articulate it. He sent me to go look it up. I don't remember where I found the answer he was looking for, but when I came back and I said, prayer is talking to God with love, he said, that's correct.

I'll never forget it. But more than a definition, I learned from my dad how to pray. From the formal prayers and the rosary, I also learned to be unselfish in prayers, praying for others rather than myself, just as he did.

Our family has been blessed over and over, thanks in a large part, I'm sure, to his unending prayers. I'm pretty sure my dad's moose prayer had nothing to do with himself, but more to do with talking to God with love about helping others. So this all begs the question, who is your moose?

Who do you want to emulate? What is your moose prayer? Talk to God about it with love. I'm convinced he's looking forward very much to talking with you. And he will listen to you.

And he will answer your prayers. And a great job as always by Greg. And a special thanks to Paul in Minneapolis, Minnesota, here on Our American Stories. Folks, if you love the great American stories we tell and love America like we do, we're asking you to become a part of the Our American Stories family. If you agree that America is a good and great country, please make a donation. A monthly gift of $17.76 is fast becoming a favorite option for supporters. Go to our American stories.com now and go to the donate button and help us keep the great American stories coming. That's our American stories.com. Geico asks, how would you love a chance to save some money on insurance?

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Simply go to Geico.com or contact your local agent today. This is our American stories and we love telling you stories about our history because we think it's one of the most important things we can share. Because of this, we love people who love history. Today, one of our regular contributors tells us about the history of New York City in a way you've probably never heard. Manhattan, Manahatta, the Algonquins Island of Hills is 12 and a half miles long and two and a half miles wide at its broadest point. Every day, 1.5 million people ride its buses and 3.5 million in its subways.

Each fair was 275 when my wife and I left the city for New Hampshire. But 59,000 commuters now ride free on the Staten Island Ferry. Vince Sweeney, a Staten Island historian, defines a ferry as a function rather than a boat. Waterborne transportation regularly crossing some body of navigable water for the convenience of persons, vehicles, and animals. The first Staten Island Ferry of which we know started in 1708. It ran between Williams Street in Manhattan and the watering place, now Tompkinsville, on the east shore of Staten Island. Oarsmen powered the first ferries.

Later, someone devised a horse-driven treadmill to propel the boats. In 1810, Cornelius Vanderbilt, a handsome, profane Staten Islander, borrowed $100 from his mother to run a ferry from Stapleton, another east shore town, and the foot of White Hall Street. Seven years later, he launched the first steam ferry, the Nautilus, and charged an extortionate 25 cent fare, children half price. By contrast, the nickel fare was sacrosanct for most of the 20th century, rising to 25 cents and then 50 cents only under pressure of the city's fiscal crises. Then on July 4, 1997, Mayor Giuliani decreed there would be no more fare, just in time for that year's mayoral elections. For five years, five mornings a week, I walked to the ferry terminal in St. George, Staten Island, to catch a ferryboat.

From its bow, Manhattan's towers gleamed on the horizon like the fabled city of El Dorado, or like a vision of the city of God. The boat rumbled from its slip past the great bronze statue on Bellows Island. My paternal grandfather saw the same statue from an immigrant ship in 1906. He was then an 18-year-old adventurer who had escaped conscription into the armies of the Tsar by crossing the border into Austrian Poland beneath the load in a manure wagon.

He then made his way through Austria, Germany, and Belgium, where he quickly picked up a sound idiomatic French, which he could speak well into his ninth decade, and then to England, whence he sailed from Southampton. Within a century of his arrival, his experience of a long sea passage, closing with the vision of a mighty woman, her lamp, the imprisoned lightning, has become uncommon, if not unknown. Men and women no longer come here in steerage. They land from airplanes, something of which my grandfather probably had no knowledge in 1906, a practical technology even now barely a century old. So too we have changed how we carry freight across the seas. Now the great container ships glide past St. George to Elizabeth Port and the Bay of Newark, where the containers stand stacked for transfer to train and truck. Of the hundreds of ships that once daily lined Manhattan's shores with the forest of masts, only a few cruise liners now swing at anchor. At Whitehall in lower Manhattan, swift currents and contrary winds bumped my boat into its slip. Nearby, a piledriver alternated puffs of steam with hammer blows as it drives a wooden pile into the harbor floor. It was probably the last working steam-powered machine in Manhattan, if not the city. Nothing more surely measures progress than the obsolescence of steam, the driving force of the Industrial Revolution. The city's last steam locomotives, the Brooklyn Eastern District Terminal's oil burning switchers, serving the waterfront north of the Navy Yard, dropped their fires in 1962.

The last steam ferryboat, the Verrazano, stopped all engines in 1981. New York is older than Philadelphia or Boston, yet only a handful of pre-revolutionary buildings have survived. St. Paul's Chapel on lower Broadway is the only one in Manhattan. Walking uptown, I often unfairly contrasted the city with John D. Rockefeller's colonial Williamsburg. Manhattan's past exists side by side with the present and, though fragmented, often remains oddly alive. Williamsburg was barely a ghost town when Rockefeller began restoring what had been Virginia's colonial capital.

Today, the hamlet is beautifully restored and maintained. It presents a careful corporate and inoffensive vision of colonial history. Downtown's tortuous, irregular streets are those laid out by the Dutch and the English, except Broadway, which was an Indian trail running north from the Battery before the white men came. Some street names have changed, usually for political reasons. Crown Street was renamed Liberty, but most remain the same. The indispensable AIA guide to New York City notes that Pearl Street was once the edge of the island where Mother of Pearl oyster shells littered the beach. Wall Street, the most famous, was the site of the northern boundary of New Amsterdam, where a wall was erected against the English and the Indians.

Of course, there have been no beavers on Beaver Street for nearly 300 years. In 1771, the royal government erected a gilt bronze equestrian statue of King George III and a black iron fence with ornamental crowns. After the first reading of the Declaration of Independence on July 9, 1776, up at the Commons, just south of today's City Hall, a mob of patriots came downtown, toppled the statue, and broke off the crowns. The statue was broken up and carried away and melted for shot. A fountain has taken its place.

The fence remains. Downtown's tangled streets contrast with the grid of right angles and straight lines imposed on most of Manhattan by a board of street commissioners in 1807. Their plan was memorialized on the Randall map, named after John Randall Jr., the engineer and surveyor who created it and drew it by hand. Nearly 25 years ago, Harry Kleiderman pulled me into the Manhattan Borough President's Topographical Bureau. Harry worked there. He was tough, profane, and worldly, and I liked him a lot. His romanticism escaped only in kindness to his friends, love of history, and fidelity to the memory of Tammany Hall. The Hall had gotten him his jobs. He had been a pick and shovel man for the Borough Department of Works, now part of the Department of Transportation, a confidential secretary to a Municipal Court justice, and then a clerk in the Topographical Bureau.

We gossiped about politics. Then Harry asked whether I wanted to see the Randall map. He opened the cabinet with the reverence one might reserve for the Ark of the Covenant. The map had been made in several parts and was mounted on rollers so cracks wouldn't form along fold lines.

Harry unrolled part of it. Randall had drawn and named the streets with India ink and watercolored the landforms. There was the Collect Pond and Minetta Brook and Kipp's Bay and the rolling hills of Chelsea that would all soon vanish beneath the pavements and landfills of the city. The map was perfect and exquisite. The Topographical Bureau and its predecessors maintained it as if it were the Holy of Holies because in a worldly way it is.

It's the root of all land use in Manhattan. I lightly touched its edge for a moment. It's made of a heavy parchment to endure for the ages. The Randall map is one of the few objects I've touched that is so rare and unusual as to be literally priceless.

Then Harry rolled it up again and closed the drawer. And you've been listening to Bill Bright give a short history lesson of New York, his own personal history lesson of New York, and it is a city with many bridges, many tunnels, and a whole lot of interesting dimensions. And we want your stories about your town and send them to OurAmericanStories.com. Bill Bright short history lesson of New York City here on Our American Story. This is Our American Stories and up next we bring you a story of how one devoted Marx Brothers fan went on to uncover a long-lost Marx Brothers movie.

Here's Steve Stolier to tell us his story. I'm currently a screenwriter and author and also do voiceover work, but I was not always in the business, although I was always interested in show business. When I was a but a small child in St. Louis, which is where I was born, I would see I Love Lucy episodes where wherever Lucy and Desi would go they seemed to run into famous celebrities, so I assumed that's what Los Angeles or Hollywood was like. Our family moved to LA when I was pushing eight years old and on the airplane that we took, Andy Griffith was sitting several rows in front of us and Red Skelton was sitting in the road directly in front of us. And so I thought wow it really is like I Love Lucy. There's celebrities everywhere.

We haven't even landed in Hollywood and there's two stars who I know who they are and I watch their shows. This is cool and Red Skelton was very cool. He kept entertaining my sisters and me the whole flight. For me he kept one of those little those pop guns where you push the back and a cork on a string comes out. He had that tucked into his suit jacket and every now and again he would just turn around and shoot me with his pop gun. This was of course before there were any airline safety restrictions.

I don't know that you could bring a pop gun onto a plane now but in 1962 there was no problem with it. So I had already met two famous people by the time our our plane touched down. As I say I've always had a fascination with famous people and specifically the Marx Brothers and then within that subset is Groucho, my favorite of the Marx Brothers. I'm not sure exactly when I became aware of him slash them but I did have an Uncle Joe in St. Louis who was balding, wore glasses, had a mustache, smoked a cigar and wiggled his eyebrows. So that when I did discover the real Groucho I thought he's he's just like Uncle Joe, that's interesting. And my parents used to quote lines from Marx Brothers movies like being vaccinated with a phonograph needle.

So when I finally discovered their films and and became aware that I am watching the Marx Brothers in this movie, that was probably around early high school. And I wondered where they'd been hiding all my life and I wanted to see all their movies. And this is perhaps difficult to grasp for the Gen X and Millennial generations but we could not simply view what we wanted to view by punching it up on a device or even watching Turner Classic movies or even having the DVD or videotape. I had to, we would get the TV guide each week and I would go through it with a pencil and I would circle the movies I wanted to see which invariably were old movies that they put on in the wee twilight hours of the middle of the night, early morning after Johnny Carson and after Tom Snyder's Tomorrow Show into that strange nether world of local car commercials. And I would just sort of will myself to stay awake.

I don't know how I did it. I mean now I'll drift off on the couch at 10 30 but back then if they were showing monkey business starting at 248 I just made myself stay up and watch it and then I could knock that off my list of movies I had to see. So it was very difficult trying to see them and there was one, you know, I read whatever scant books there were and articles that came out about the March Brothers or Groucho and I quickly became aware of the fact that their second film Animal Crackers which had been a very successful stage play in the late 20s and then was their second film made at Paramount in 1930. I hadn't seen that and I wasn't able to see it because when Paramount sold their early films to MCA Universal in the late 50s it included Animal Crackers but because of basically a technological error they didn't renew the copyright on Animal Crackers so the rights had reverted back to the authors and composers of the stage play and for the longest time Universal didn't think it was worth spending money on an old black and white March Brothers movie to clear the rights and reissue it so it just became this phantom film they they owned it but they couldn't show it and in the meantime they redistributed all of their early Paramount films and syndicated those in television and you may have seen they would have that big shield at the beginning that would say uh MCA TV release and I used to want to go up to the TV with a Marx a lot and add an N after uh MCA TV because it just bothered me but Animal Crackers was not included in that in those packages so it was this great unseen March Brothers film and it was supposed to have been one of their best I mean Groucho played Captain Spaulding so his theme song hooray for Captain Spaulding came from that a lot of his quoted lines like I shot an elephant in my pajamas came from that and when I graduated high school I began to attend UCLA first as a history major because I really didn't think you could make any kind of living in entertainment unless you were just astonishingly talented and you were just amazingly talented and had endless perseverance and I didn't put myself in either of those categories so while I continue to love watching old movies and study up on all these people I figured I would be a history major and maybe teach history something like that and I saw that a print of Animal Crackers was going to be shown at a revival house theater in Orange County in December of 73 and I wasn't sure how they were able to show it but I didn't care and all of my friends piled into one car this was also during a gasoline crisis an oil crisis when gas was being rationed but we didn't mind blowing most of a tank of gas to be able to finally see this missing link in the March Brothers small cannon and you're listening to Steve Solier and he is telling the story of the lost Marx Brothers film and by the way it is a small cannon but if you do get a chance it is easy to see these movies now by the way there was a time when it was impossible you just had to wait for them to appear on tv and you did have to read that tv guide and I remember circling all my favorite things too and all of Americans did and that was it that was it and by the way Doug, you're going to be reading a lot of good news about all these things and you're going to find out what these things are all about and that's what I'm going to be doing and that's what the Americans did and that was it that was it and by the way Duck Soup Animal Crackers and Horse Feathers with a way to go and watch it with the kids it's the cleanest and yet most subversive comedy you'll ever see a lot like what they were doing with Wile E. Coyote and Bugs Bunny and just delightful about a missing Marx Brothers movie here at Our American Stories. And we're back with Our American Stories and Steve Stolier's story, and we've learned that due to a filing error, animal crackers had become unavailable to the public. When we last left off, Steve had found a bootleg copy that was being shown about 40 minutes away from his home, and he and his friends from college, well, they hopped in a car in the middle of a gas shortage to finally cross this film off their bucket list.

Let's return to Steve. Steve Stolier I mean, they only made 12 or 13 movies in all, so it was a substantial coup to be able to finally see animal crackers. It was a terrible print. It was a bootleg dupe of a dupe, and the images were murky and the sound was, oh, we couldn't hear it very clearly.

But the point was, oh my God, we're watching animal crackers. I figured that you couldn't find Groucho's name in the phone book and just call him up to tell him that it was playing, but from looking through the Beverly Hills phone book, I did know that Harry Ruby was in the Beverly Hills phone book. Harry Ruby had co-written the songs for Animal Crackers and had also worked as a writer on several of the early March Brothers films and was one of Groucho's closest friends. So I called him up and he didn't answer, but a nurse answered and took my name and phone number. And I think if he himself had answered, none of what transpired would have taken place because he wouldn't have had my name and number. It was just a matter of conveying to him to tell Groucho that it was playing at this, that Animal Crackers was playing in Orange County. But because she took my name and number, I got a call from Harry Ruby, which at the time was one of the most exciting things that ever happened to me because this was one step removed from Groucho himself. And I had a nice chat with him about several things. And he said, well, I'll tell Groucho about this. And I thought, oh my God, he's going to tell my hero about this.

And I called all my friends and told them. And then New Year's Day of 74, I got a phone call from a woman named Erin Fleming. And I'd kept up on articles about what Groucho was up to. And I knew she was very close to Groucho, she had sort of become his manager. And she had arranged a series of one-man shows in 1972, where Groucho would transfix the audience for 90 minutes or so and take home a bunch of money. I did attend the one in L.A. in December of 72 and was able to see Groucho at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. My friend and I were sitting towards the back.

Our tickets were $9.50, which was a fortune and would not even pay for parking now at the Dorothy Chandler. But be that as it may, and he was quite old and frail, which was it really took the wind out of me to see him that way because the press had led me to believe that good old Groucho at 80 something or other, just as sharp as ever. And instead, this old man shuffled out and said, I want to take a bow for Harpo and for Chico because without them I wouldn't be here tonight. And he read off cue cards, but it was still just electrifying realizing that I was in the same room as Groucho. And I clapped so hard, my hands stung the next morning. And then I heard the sound of the wind blowing.

Because I wanted, I know this sounds weird, but I wanted vibrations from my applause to reach his eardrums because I knew that was as close as I was ever going to get to him. So anyway, getting back to January of 74, when I got this call from Erin Fleming, she had been on stage with Groucho at the Evening with Groucho and she had gotten the message from Animal Crackers. And what she wanted to know was, how could they show it? How was it legal for them to show it? What, how did they get the rights to it?

How did they, and of course I didn't know any of this. I was just this kid that was a Marx Brothers fan. And she wanted to take me with her to Universal Studios to go up to the office of Sidney J. Scheinberg, the president of Universal, as sort of an exhibit A of a kid who would drive all the way to Orange County to see Animal Crackers. And so she was hoping that that would make the difference and then Universal would clear the rights and re-release the movie.

I was skeptical, but I was flattered all to hell that she wanted to be in touch with me. And she and Groucho had to, they had to go because they were going to see Woody Allen's Sleeper. Also, while I was on that call, I said, while I have you here, I wanted to, something has been on my mind for a while. Some of the books I've seen say Groucho was born in 1895 and others say 1890 and I wondered which one was the real date. And she said, just a minute, Groucho, what year were you born? And in the distance I hear, 1890. And she said, did you hear? And I said, yes. And I thought, oh my God, he's in the room with her.

I can't handle this. I talked to friends and we thought it would be a better idea rather than just having this one kid try to argue the case to re-release the movie. I would form a committee at UCLA, a petition drive, and we would get hundreds or thousands of signatures from like-minded young people that we would want to see this movie and would pay to see it if it came out. So some friends and I formed the committee for the re-release of Animal Crackers. We set up a table on Brew and Walk, which is where all of the causes had tables for either gay rights ending the war in Vietnam. And then you had this group of kids trying to get an old March Brothers movie off the shelf. And people were so suspicious about signing the petition.

You know, this was right, right during Watergate. And someone said, you know, is the government going to get a copy of this? Does the FBI get a copy? No, no, it's just that you have to be a registered voter. Do I have to print and put together?

No, it's just to get this movie. Then I was staying in touch with Erin Fleming, and she arranged for Groucho to come to UCLA and alerted the press about our cause. And sure enough, in spring of 1974, Erin and Groucho came to UCLA. I said, Groucho, I am very happy to be meeting you after all this time. And he said, well, you should be. And Erin said, this is Steve Stolyar.

He's the one trying to get Animal Crackers re-released. And Groucho said, well, did you get it? And I said, not yet, but we're working on it. And he said, you better or I'll fire you. And I said, I didn't realize I was working for you. How much are you paying me? And he said, a little less than nothing. And it was just this most remarkable pinch me is this really happening.

We sat side by side answering reporters questions about the movie. And I remember one reporter said, Mr. Marks, what is the purpose of your appearance here today? And he said, I expect to get lunch.

And she said, but, but besides that, I may get dinner. So there was still a lot of, you know, I was so disheartened after seeing how frail and old and shaky he was at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in, in 72. But here he was still being Groucho with his silliness and twisting phrases.

And that was very heartening after having been disheartened. So we talked to the press and they ran their stories and sure enough, Universal relented and decided to reissue the film. They would show it in LA and New York and then be done with it.

It's like, here, here it is, go look at it, leave us alone. We have more important movies to worry about. It had a re-premiere at the UA Westwood and I went in a tuxedo and my family went and the other members of the committee. It was like our night and Aaron and Groucho were there and we watched Animal Crackers, a fresh print, clear, you could see what was going on.

And it ended up breaking the house record that had been set several years earlier by the French Connection. And it was very gratifying for me to be at a coffee shop in Westwood and look across the street and see a line of kids in t-shirts and blue jeans and tennis shoes waiting to pay money to see this Marx Brothers movie. What great storytelling and thanks to Robbie for bringing it to us. And a special thanks to Steve Stolier. And by the way, to find out more, order Steve's book, Raised Eyebrows, My Years Inside Groucho's House. And there are a whole bunch more stories like this one. You can find it at Amazon or all the usual suspects. The story of Steve Stolier, his effort to get Animal Crackers re-released. His story here on Our American Stories.