Athletes - Arthur Marx

Home > Listing Index > Athletes > Arthur Marx (writer, tennis)

	Athletes - Arthur Marx

Arthur Marx (born July 21, 1921, New York, New York), is an accomplished author, a former outstanding amateur tennis player, and son of famed entertainer Groucho Marx.

Writer

Marx is the author of a number of show business biographies, such as "Life With Groucho" and "The Secret Life of Bob Hope", several Broadway hit comedies including "The Impossible Years" and "Groucho: A Life In Revue", four Bob Hope films and more than a hundred teleplays.

Marx spent his early years accompanying his father Groucho around vaudeville circuits in the United States and abroad. When he was ten, he moved to Southern California, where the Marx Brothers began their legendary film careers.

Tennis Career

Marx made a name for himself on the tennis court and was a nationally ranked tennis player before he was eighteen. While he was attending the University of Southern California, he won the National Freshman Intercollegiate Tennis title at Montclair, New Jersey.

At the historic tennis tournament in Cincinnati, Marx reached the singles final in 1940 before falling to the legendary Bobby Riggs. To reach the final, Marx knocked off future International Tennis Hall of Fame enshrinee John Doeg in the round of 16, Frank Froehling in the quarterfinals, and Gardner Larned in the semifinals. Riggs had blown through his competition to reach the final, and Marx gave him his toughest test of the tournament, stretching the future Hall of Famer to five sets before falling 9-11, 2-6, 6-4, 8-6, 1-6.

Life After Tennis

After his brief career as a tournament tennis player and four years in the U.S. Coast Guard during World War II, sixteen months of which were spent in the South Pacific, he worked as an advertising copy writer, a radio gag man for Milton Berle, and a writer of Hollywood movies, Broadway plays and TV scripts for such hit shows as "All in the Family," and "Alice," where he and his collaborator, Robert Fisher, were head writers as well as authors of forty Alice episodes.

With Robert Fisher, he has co-authored, "The Impossible Years," which ran for three seasons on Broadway starring Alan King: "Minnie's Boys," the musical hit starring Shelley Winters; "My Daughter's Rated X," which won the Straw Hat award for the best new comedy on the summer stock circuit; and "Groucho: A Life in Revue," which opened to unanimous rave reviews and was nominated for a New York Outer Critics Circle award for best play and London's Laurence Olivier Award for Comedy Production of the Year.

By himself, Marx has authored twelve successful books: THE ORDEAL OF WILLIE BROWN; LIFE WITH GROUCHO; NOT AS A CROCODILE; SON OF GROUCHO; EVERYBODY LOVES SOMEBODY SOMETIME (especially himself) -- the story of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, which just this year CBS made into a successful TV movie of the week; GOLDWYN; RED SKELTON; THE NINE LIVES OF MICKEY ROONEY; SET TO KILL (a murder mystery with a tennis club background); and last but not least, THE SECRET LIFE OF BOB HOPE.

At the moment Marx is in the throes of writing a play that is somewhat autobiographical, about the difficulties of growing up and starting a career in Hollywood when you have a living legend for a father.

Mr. Marx lives in Southern California with his wife Lois, a talented interior decorator and painter, and two Yorkshire terriers.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Arthur Marx (writer, tennis) ]

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article Arthur Marx (writer, tennis); it is used under the GNU Free Documentation License. You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the GFDL.

Searches on eBay