Happy Birthday, Peter Lorre

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A letter from Groucho Marx to Peter Lorre (included in the wonderful The Groucho Letters: Letters from and to Groucho Marx), that pleases me no end.

October 5, 1961

Dear Peter:

It was very thoughtful of you to send me a book explaining James Joyce’s “Ulysses”. All I need now is another book explaining this study by Stuart Gilbert who, if memory serves, painted the celebrated picture of George Washington which hangs in the Metropolitan Museum. I realize that there is some two hundred years’ difference in their ages, but any man who can explain Joyce must be very old and very wise.

You disappeared rather mysteriously the other night, but I attribute this to your life of crime in the movies.

Best to you both.

Regards,
Groucho

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8 Responses to Happy Birthday, Peter Lorre

  1. tracey says:

    Hahahahahahaha. Brilliant.

  2. Billy Fisher says:

    A Groucho letter! I love the book containing them, and your variations are invariably intriguing, too. Thanks!

  3. red says:

    Billy – I love the book, too! I love picking it up and opening a page at random – it’s always something cool.

    His correspondence with TS Eliot is my particular favorite because … they both just seem so DIFFERENT to me – like: TS Eliot and GROUCHO??? But I just love those letters!!

  4. phil says:

    Groucho’s book of letters is the only book I go to bed with.
    Geez, I just realized Margaret Dumont would get all flustered if she only knew.

  5. I’m guessing Groucho “Stuart Gilbert” Marx didn’t spend a lot of time in Saunderstown. Now I’m wondering if he ever made it to Rhode Island. His loss! (I love the Marx letters.)

    • sheila says:

      Ha! You know, I was thinking the same thing – I grew up right down the street from Gilbert Stuart’s birthplace and we went there on field trips so many times that it was a school bus full of disgruntled grade-schoolers: “Gilbert Stuart AGAIN???”

      I did like the clock he made with paint-brushes as the hands. I haven’t been there in years.

      I love the Marx letters too! I wonder if Providence or somewhere else was a pit-stop on any vaudeville tours – I’m sure it must have been! So it’s possible!

  6. Melanie says:

    I love Peter Lorre in “Arsenic and Old Lace” best of all. I love it when an actor can spoof his own work. (And of course… Cary!) I read on imbd that he and his friends coined the term ‘creep’ for a creepy, scary person, but it has obviously morphed into a different connotation. He was the best at those ‘creep’ roles…

    • sheila says:

      Oh, he was SUCH a creep! :) The way he hisses “Rick … Rick …” in Casablanca, hurrying after Humphrey Bogart – he was this little annoying presence, always underfoot.

      And then of course M – kind of a prototype for the blank-faced anti-social sociopath. Just amazing!

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