Ritz Brothers — Love a la Ritz (1938) 🇺🇸
The Ritz Brothers aren’t ALWAYS funny! — two of of them are married...!! And to make it even more serious, the leftover one’s earnestly contemplating getting that way, too. And to the Messrs. Ritz, the state of matrimony is practically the one thing in life that is definitely NOT hilarious. They take it seriously, and if you just can’t believe that the Ritzes take anything in this world seriously, then you’d better ask Mrs. Ritz, Mrs. Ritz and Miss Hilliard about that.
by Dan Camp
They’ll tell you in chorus, those three, that while Hubby Ritz and Hubby Ritz and Boy-friend Ritz may and do clown anything from menjou to grand opera, they just “ain’t foolin’“ when it comes to their private love-lives. They don’t “gag” about it. They love their respective wives and sweetheart, and even in Hollywood, they refuse to believe that’s funny. Maybe it’s because they’re in Hollywood, rather than in spite of it. Or maybe it’s because, underneath all their 1938-style comicking, the Ritz trio are really old-fashioned enough to still take marriage straight, without a Hollywood hoss-laugh for a chaser.
And maybe it seems just as odd to you, dear reader, that I’m starting this story about the funniest three guys in Hollywood in such a serious vein as matrimony. Maybe, even, you think there’s a catch in it...? Well — there IS!! Because, even though they don’t realize it, it’s this very utter seriousness about their love-lives that is one of the funniest things about the Ritz Brothers. On account of they just can’t agree on what to do about their wives:
- Al, eldest of the Ritz Brothers, insists that his wife. Annette, stay home and keep house and cook and just be Missus Al.
- Harry, the other married one, insists just as vehemently that his wife, Charlotte, ought to go out and carve an acting career of her own, and that this business of being just a wife is the bunk.
- And poor Jimmy, the one that isn’t married yet, is “in the middle” and he doesn’t think it’s lucky. He can’t figure out whether Al is right, or Harry. He leans rather toward Al’s philosophy of how to treat your woman. But because Ruth Hilliard can’t make up her mind whether she wants to be a wife or an actress, he isn’t marrying her yet. If she decides to be just his wife he’ll marry her.
But he’s kind of worried about it — because after he does, it may turn out that Harry’s idea was the right one, and then where’ll he be...?
And, as I said right at the outset, what makes the situation really poignant — regardless of whether you think it’s serious or comic, it IS poignant! — is that to the Ritzes, it isn’t a gag. They really work at what they say.
Take Harry, for instance.
So positive is he that his wife’s theatrical career means his happiness, that he takes time out from work to take her to his own dramatic coach and prepare for her future. Harry will break up a three-way rehearsal of one of their songs for Kentucky Moonshine and leave Al and Jimmy flat. It’s in their bungalow, on the 20th Century-Fox lot, and right in the middle of their rehearsal, Harry yanks out his watch.
“It’s time,” he says, “for Charlotte to go see Florence Enright.” (Florence is the studio’s dramatic coach.) So Harry grabs his wife, who’s waiting, and off they go for wifie’s acting lessons. And Al stands and shakes his head and mutters tilings like “damfool” and “idiot!” And Jimmy just stands and wonders.
Harry’s wife was Charlotte Greenfield. She is a brunette and so lovely. She used to be a commercial artists’ model in New York. Harry married her right off the back cover of a magazine, and if you indicate to him that you think that’s funny, he’ll probably bop you one. He saw her picture advertising a cigarette. It didn’t sell the cigarette to him but he did hunt up the model and a couple of months later, she was Mrs. Harry Ritz.
“She wants her career,” Harry told me on the set of Kentucky Moonshine, the other day. “Whatever she wants, she can have. Anything she wants to do is all right by me. I have my career, haven’t I? — then why shouldn’t my wife have one, too? I believe in everyone and anyone doing what he or she wants most to do in life!”
Al’s wife, on the other hand, is the house-keeper-and-cook. Al didn’t marry her off a billboard or a magazine. He married her off the stage. Maybe that’s why she’d rather stay home now. She’s had her career! She used to be Annette Nelson, and even before she was Al’s wife, she was his partner. Soon as they came to Hollywood, Annette found a house and began cooking. “It took me a hell of a while to get used to it. I missed the ptomaine I used to get in hash-houses,” Al tells me. “But after a while, I got so I really liked Annette’s home-cooking. Now I couldn’t do without it. Any guy who thinks his wife can have a career and stay happy is crazy!”
That leaves Jimmy. Jimmy and Ruth Hilliard. They’re engaged — kind of. Ruth already has her career. Jimmy is waiting for her to make up her mind that she’s had enough of it.
“I want her to make a home for me,” he says, deadly serious. “I don’t believe we could work out a happy married life if we both have careers. It takes too. much out of both, to work every day. And it isn’t worth it.”
“But what,” I asked him, “if Ruth decides she wants to go on with her career, and love you too?”
“Then,” said Jimmy, “the engagement is off. I mean OFF!”
But I doubt like blazes that he means it! Me — I wouldn’t be surprised at all to pick up the paper any morning, and read where Jimmy and Ruth have gone and gotten married in a hurry — and that Ruth started immediately after the ceremony on a picture assignment. If Ruth wants Jimmy and her career too, she’ll get ‘em both... And that’s the story of one facet of the serious side of the Ritzes. There’s another facet — that is their big-heartedness, their anxiety to help those in distress.
Suffering is the other thing, besides matrimony, that isn’t funny to the three brothers. They’ll kid stuffed shirt pomposity to death with a ruthless ferocity. But show them a spot of need, and they’ll go as soft-hearted as a spoiled tomato, and work their heads and pocketbooks down to remedy the woe.
When Ted Healy died, saddest people in Hollywood were the brothers. Ted was one of their closest friends. Ted and the trio out-gagged each other furiously. There was no mercy in the tricks they played on each other. It was their way of showing how they loved each other. And then Ted died — and the Ritzes learned, with all the rest of Hollywood, that he left practically nothing.
Well, you know, of course, that Hollywood got together a big benefit show. A swell gesture. But you don’t know what the Ritz boys did, even before Hollywood thought of doing something! — the Ritzes first of all chipped in a sweet young fortune out of their own bank accounts. Then they hustled Hollywood, hitting the biggest executives and the biggest-salaried stars. They put the works on them; they did it all silently, but with tremendous power. And when they were done, they had gathered together a trust fund that will keep Ted’s widow and baby safe for the rest of their lives.
Another thing that isn’t generally known about them: when their mother died, three years ago, she left unfinished a work of love and charity — the maintenance and furtherance of the work of the Jewish Settlement House, in Brooklyn, N.Y. Ever since she passed on, the boys have maintained the most magnificent memorial of all to her memory — they are maintaining and always will maintain the work she started.
They’ve been taking some kicking around in the Hollywood gossip, verbal and printed, lately. There have been whisperings that they’ve gone high-hat. But the gang that works with them knows that the Ritzes are pretty swell guys. They dish out an awful lot of ribbing on the set.
I recall the day they “dumped” Director Norman Taurog, when they seated him on one end of a bench they occupied — and then stood up in unison, tipping the bench so that Taurog took a pratt-fall.
Taurog had prepared in advance for ribbing. His annyfay on the floor, he yelled, “Bring in the Ritz Brothers’ stand-ins!” A crew of grips entered — carrying three ludicrous dummies with cabbages for heads. The point was that the cabbages were oversized — swell-heads, mind you, but cabbage-heads nonetheless! The Ritzes got it. But they didn’t get mad.
Most extraordinary unhollywoodish trait is that they don’t even mind being compared with other comedians. That in Hollywood is amazing. Why, you can even mention the Marx Brothers to them, and they don’t get mad or patronizing. As a matter of fact, they realize that they and the Marxes have several things in common — first, that there’s a trio of ‘em; second, that like the Marxes, the Ritzes have a silent fourth brother — it’s George Joaquim (that’s the family name) who runs a men’s ready-to-wear clothes shop (shouldn’t it be!?) in New York... But most significantly, in their work, they agree utterly.
“Being funny is hard work,” the Marxes once told me in an interview on “How to be Funny.”
The other day, on the 20th-Fox lot, Harry said, precisely the same thing to me. “Being funny is hard work.”
Both teams agree on fundamental systems of that work: both agree that to poke fun at pompous people is one sure-fire gag. Both agree that — well, put it in Al Ritz’s words:
“The highbrow loves lowbrow comedy as well as the lowbrow does. But you’ve got to give him an excuse to praise it as ‘art,’ whatever that is. Not only does the excuse give the highbrow a chance to excuse himself for condescending to laugh at it, but it amuses the lowbrows, too.
The Marx Brothers use contrast with art — Chico’s magnificent piano playing, Harpo’s virtuosity with the harp.
“Our own excuse is music — we clown grand opera, and the lowbrows love it, and the highbrows think it’s art, so both laugh.
“But don’t forget that it’s work — hard work, to be funny. Except for papa...”
Papa is Max Ritz, whom the brothers blame for their insanity. He was always clowning around the house when they were kids, and they never got over it. “We used to think he was being funny on purpose,” one of the brothers told me, “but since the other day, we aren’t sure...
“You see, papa is living with us now. He loves to play pinochle, for a nickel a hundred points. The other day, one of our friends urged him to go out and play some golf instead of sitting in the house playing pinochle for a nickel a hundred points. The argument went on for hours it seemed. Papa finally capitulated —
“All right, all right, I’ll go and play golf with you,’ he finally said. ‘BUT — we’ve got to make the game interesting, hah? So — let’s play for a nickel a hundred points!’
“I ask you, can you blame us Ritz Brothers for being crazy?”
The irrepressible Ritzes eat up the candles from Sophie Tucker’s birthday cake
Don’t be surprised to see Jimmy Ritz, the unmarried brother, hitching up any day now with actress Ruth Hilliard as his light o’ love. Here they’re Clover Clubbing
“Ambrosia makes my skin look and feel so clean”, says Betty Grable, (appearing in Paramount’s College Swing) famous for her perfect complexion
Collection: Motion Picture Magazine, May 1938