margaret dumont pt 3: if you want something done right...

This image taken from this website is ostensibly of Margaret Dumont I suppose in the early 20th century. 

So I finally finished this book and yes it took some time (considering it is quite slender) as it was not a riveting read. A lot of the time I read a book and I think 'I could have done better' and usually I'm kidding myself (and anyway, I didn't do anything better). Once you've read a book it has no novelty so you quickly forget all the things it introduced you to. Nevertheless, aside from some information about Margaret Dumont's earliest years and the marriage which made her retire, as it turns out temporarily, from the stage the bulk of this book is a rehash of material not even necessarily that germane to Margaret Dumont's film career, let alone her actual life. We come away from this book not knowing anything about Dumont's personal life after the death of her husband (and by personal life I mean, sure, she may not have written letters to friends about her life and career or if she did they may not exist anymore, but where did she live? Did she communicate with agents, studios, etc?) Her voice in this book, such as it is, is entirely based on her public pronouncements which, as I said in my previous post, are as likely to have been manufactured by publicists as actually coming from her own mouth (and could be both). 

Spoiler, but she's dead and her death is dealt with in this book almost as offhandedly as her life - it's an afterthought during discussion of a remake she and Groucho did of 'Hooray for Captain Spalding' for television. 

So as mentioned in earlier posts I was so intrigued by MD that I had a vague, unrealisable (particularly now as I doubt I will ever go to the USA again) idea that perhaps somehow I could write her biography, of course I had no idea what exists of her in archives, etc. Having looked at the sources here I still don't know what exists of her in archives, really. There is a section on 'Historical Archives/Journals' in the bibliography of this book, which contains details of two archives consulted: 'Brooklyn Historical Society Library, Vital Records, Daisy Juliette Baker' (MD's real name) and 'Westchester County Historical Society, Daisy Juliet Baker Papers'. I had a quick look at the second of these and could find nothing at all while searching on various permutations of Daisy, Juliette and Baker in various places (I then searched on every 'Baker'). Those papers might be there, but they're not easily found (if they are there, then good work to these authors in locating them but not good work in using them, as the references to them in the text are paltry). There is one more item in 'Historical Archives/Journals' which is, ludicrously, an issue of the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television from 1994 (the issue is from 1994, but the citation ends in '2015' for some reason). This entry does not detail at all what article it relates to, but it is presumably one of two (!) articles about RKO box office performance - as we used to say, 'big whoop!' Clearly this is a secondary source and it does not belong in these primary sources but the exact nature of the primary sources is very obscure anyway. 

And that is it for primary sources. So, when I angsted about wanting to research MD and thought no, it needs a good focused American-based researcher to do it and I couldn't possibly do it with my mean resources, I will now say yes, I most definitely could have done this better from my spare room, with a computer and a newspapers.com subscription and access to the fifteen books these authors used (and a whole lot more they didn't). Because firstly, I could have accessed all the information they accessed without too much effort and secondly I could have given this material a bit less of the extensive-description-of-the-Marx-Brothers'-lives and also extensive-description-of-the-Marx-Brothers'-films-without-Margaret-Dumont-in-them, and a bit more of the description of some of the other films (assuming they're accessible in some form), and a bit more discussion of her legacy because FFS, she dies and as far as the authors of this book are concerned they can walk away at that point and barely even talk about how the Marx Brothers' films enjoyed extensive revival in the 70s/80s let alone talk about any later discussion of MD. 

They didn't need to write this book, at all, and I can well imagine it would have been difficult to even convince a publisher that it had a market (I wonder if it did/does). So why do it so halfheartedly and without the most basic checking and most importantly (?) in a manner that suggests they really had no interest in their central subject? 

The other question is whether the book was written by AI. AI has come a long way in two years and maybe AI two years ago wouldn't have been capable of this but I have to say there is a lot that reads that way, errors AI might make but also a kind of weird alien-ness of the whole thing that makes it seem like it might well be a robot in charge. 

Anyway, I clearly muddled my way through their muddling through of the story of MD and yes, I could have done a lot better at least in terms of tone and engagement, but I didn't and neither did anyone else, so this is what the world gets. This is not even a hack job it's a... why-did-they-bother job.

Just thought I'd throw this in for no good purpose: a picture being sold on eBay for US$76 described as 'At the Circus 8 X 10 Still 1939 The Marx Brothers, Margaret Dumont'. At least MD was in At the Circus but ffs. 

I'm not even joking, this one is being sold for about half as much but has exactly the same description.