The Little King

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Through the swinging glass doors of Manhattan's "21" Club one night last week popped a roly-poly, melon-bald little man with the berry-bright eyes and beneficent smile of St. Nick touching down on a familiar rooftop. Louis Marx, America's toy king and cafe-society Santa, was arriving at his favorite workshop. With his beautiful blonde wife Idella, who looks the way sleigh bells sound, 59-year-old Lou Marx toddled regally toward a table in the center of the downstairs room. The table is always reserved for Millionaire Marx by the divine right of toy kings, and the fact that he has never been known to let anyone else pay the check.

While most celebrities go to "21" to play, Lou Marx also goes to ply. From the enlarged pockets of his $200 suits flows a tantalizing trickle of toys for his friends, who seem to include the entire world, and number such cronies as Baseballer Hank Greenberg (best man at his wedding), Comedian Edgar Bergen, Lieut. General Emmett ("Rosie") O'Donnell, Boxer Gene Tunney, and Netherlands Prince Bernhard. For them, there are walking penguins and tail-twirling Donald Ducks, statuettes of the Presidents and lightly clad miniature nymphs, tiny cars and pistol-shaped flashlights, lapel buttons urging "Sit Tight with Ike" or "I Like Lou."

While other toymakers spend millions of dollars each year to promote their wares, Toycoon Marx is his own walking ad agency; he spent only $312 for advertising in 1955. He collects the famed and the publicized as though he were following the slogan on all his toy boxes: "One of the many Marx toys, have you all of them?" Marx, who still has a few notables to go, scrupulously includes those he knows in his endless fund of anecdotes and puts their children's names on his Christmas list. Among the thousands of gifts going out this week from Marx's toy shop are a 20-in. convertible coupe and a remote-control walking puppy for President Eisenhower's grandchildren. Altogether, Marx is a real-life Santa to more than 100,000 children. To the children of cops and waiters and charwomen, boys and girls in orphanages and other institutions, he gives a million toys a year.

Synthetic Security. Marx considers toys one of the higher forms of human ingenuity, and thinks a lot of the world's problems can be solved through them. "Apart from being good business," he intones, "it's important to buy children a lot of toys. When you keep a child supplied with toys, it gives him security, like an Indian woman gives her child by carrying him on her back. Toys give children love and attention synthetically."

Lou Marx, whose toys spread synthetic love as well as old-fashioned fun from Hamburg to Hiroshima, can well afford his lavish standard of giving. This year he will gross more than $50 million (and net $5,000,000), produce some 10% of all toys sold in the U.S. Marx's output includes every type of plaything (except bicycles and dolls), from plastic baby beakers to $2.98 toy sports cars that can be assembled by a seven-year-old. More than 10% of the 5,000 items made by Marx are mechanical, e.g., a clockwork Bonny Braids, who ambles realistically across the floor, an electric bingo game, a xylophone- playing Mickey Mouse. His 1955 best-sellers include:

A battery-powered robot ($5.98) that clanks forward and backward, hurls a baby robot to the ground, grunts in Morse code, flashes defiance from light-bulb eyes.

A plastic-covered shooting arcade ($4.98) with moving ducks for targets.

A 7,500-piece kit ($9.98) from which skilled children and patient parents can make a 2-ft. clipper ship with bellying plastic sails. Assembly time: 100 hours.

Hot Dolls & Thunderbirds. This year, for the first time in history, more than $1 billion worth of toys will be sold in the U.S. Few industries have soared so high so fast. Until 1914, inexpensive German toys reigned unchallenged in the U.S. When World War I pinched off European imports, U.S. makers, who had specialized in expensive dolls and ingenious metal playthings, whirred ahead with a legion of low-priced toys. American production methods proved more than a match for postwar foreign competition. Since 1919, when 644 domestic toymakers produced goods with a retail value of $150 million, U.S. toydom has grown to include some 2,000 manufacturers.

Under U.S. Christmas trees this year there will be such high-priced items as a 5-ft., battery powered Thunderbird ($395) that whisks two children along at 5 m.p.h.; a monkey ($250) that puffs cigarettes; a lion-sized lion ($300) with a man-eating roar; a 9-ft. giraffe ($250); an 8-ft. marionette ($300) that hangs from the ceiling and shimmies like sister Kate. Lionel Corp., No. 2 toymaker (1955 sales: $23 million), has a $100 model of the crack Congressional. A. C. Gilbert ($12.5 million sales) has a forklift truck and driver ($12.95) that swings oil drums from loading platform to flatcar. There are Teddy bears in storm coats ($24.95); a robot-driven bulldozer ($9.98) that backs up when it hits an obstacle; a mamma whale ($2.49) that swallows a baby whale; a remote-control Continental ($6.98); a Playskool lockup garage ($6); and aluminum armor for $125.

Ideal Toy Corp. ($20 million sales) has a "Magic Lips" doll ($15) that purses its mouth for kissing, and a 13-in.-long rocket car that blasts off at 20 m.p.h.; Lynn Pressman has a "Fever" doll ($5) that turns a sickly scarlet.

Ladder for Children. Toymaker Marx discovered early that children like to play with the things they see around them, and most of his toys are as realistic as he can make them, whether they are trains or cars, carpet sweepers, miniature stoves or boats. But he has little patience with psychologist-blessed "educational" toys that are sold not as playthings but as "combinations of coordination influences." Snorts Marx: "The ones who buy them are the spinster aunts and spinster uncles and hermetically sealed parents who wash their children 1,000 times a day."

There is an increasing demand, however, for build-it-yourself toys that develop a child's imagination and dexterity. Marx, for example, has a station wagon whose transparent-plastic V-8 engine comes in 64 colored parts for the child to assemble himself. To teach his own children about the human body, Marx this year imported from Japan life-size life-like male and female papier-mache figures that can be taken apart, organ by organ. Next year Marx plans to make smaller versions (probable price: $14.98).

Toydom's Ford. Even his competitors admit that Louis Marx is the Henry Ford of the toy industry. Like Ford, Marx has used mass production and mass distribution to turn out cheap toys, e.g., electric trains had seldom been sold for less than $10 before Marx brought out a sturdy $3.98 train in the early '30s. Today, some 75% of Marx's toys sell for less than $5.

In the highly competitive toy industry, where piracy is almost second nature, the race is to the swift, the daring and the shamelessly self-imitating. Marx is all three. "There is no such thing as a new toy," he says. "There are only old toys with new twists." With a new mechanical twist, last year's submarine becomes next year's rocket ship; a flop may be face-lifted to stardom. After a 25 truck had saturated the market in the mid-'30s, Marx loaded it with plastic ice cubes (then a new product), called it an ice truck and had a new hit. With a new twist on an old friction motor, Marx three years ago was able to redesign an old firehouse so that it catapulted a hook and ladder through closed doors. He used the same motor last year for a heliport that shoots a helicopter to the ceiling.

In 1928 Marx got the greatest idea in toydom's history. Rounding a corner in Los Angeles one day, he stopped to watch a Filipino whittle away at a circular block of wood, attach it to a string and then bounce the block up and down the string, as his fellow-countrymen had been doing for as long as anyone could remember. The Yo-Yo, transformed by Marx from a primitive, island plaything into a universal preoccupation, sold more than 100 million and is still going strong.

Since most toymakers "knock off" (i.e., copy) their competitors' products, new toys are as elaborately guarded, and as inevitably filched, as Detroit's new car designs. Doll manufacturers solemnly lead buyers to a vault and there show them a Betsy Wetsy or a Tiny Tears. At Manhattan's Toy Fair last March, one manufacturer chained his gun to a radiator so no one could make off with it. The Ideal Toy Corp. sequesters its 18 designers in a closely guarded room that can only be reached by a secret passageway.

Robot Knock-Off. The gentle art of toy piracy consists of changing a competitor's successful design just enough to evade paying royalties to its originator. "When they copy you, it's piracy," cracks Lou Marx, who pays no royalties in the the U.S. "When you copy them, it's competition." When Marx "competes," he often cuts the price, but he always makes small improvements, e.g., when he "knocked-off" Ideal's bestselling mechanical robot, he put in a battery motor.

With the best idea in the world, a toymaker still takes a tremendous gamble. To put a new narrow-gauge train under Christmas trees two years from now, Marx will invest $500,000 in dies and materials. Unlike most toymakers, Marx finances his operation out of capital, thus can push a toy into production faster than anyone in the industry.

Marx is out ahead in other ways. His production lines are among the smoothest and most fully automatic in the business. Marx constantly analyzes machine layouts to cut wasteful operations. "When we find a machine that will do a 30-second job in 25," he says, "we'll scrap the old one, even if it's new." Marx was one of the first U.S. toymakers to switch to plastic. Though the first plastic toys broke too easily, he now makes most small toys of polyethylene, a durable material that can be turned out up to 64 times faster than metal. Unlike most toy manufacturers, who virtually close down for six months when the Christmas lights go off, Marx sells 90% of his output to the big chains, e.g., Woolworth and Walgreen's, which do a brisk year-round toy business, and Sears, Roebuck and J. C. Penney, which order in huge quantities early in the year. Thus he cuts costs, keeps his plants humming and most of his work force busy three shifts a day all year.

From Toys to Toynbee. When Marx goes off the day shift at 5:30 p.m., he switches from manual output to intellectual intake. In 1942, after his first wife died, Marx enrolled in a night course on Western civilization at the New School for Social Research. "I'd get to feeling morose," he explains, "and hit the bottle." He and Idella now attend five or six classes a week at the New School and New York University in such courses as "American Political Parties" and "Psychology of Religion." He finds that being a night-school student at N.Y.U. gives him a formidable fund of information with which to confound his friends, many of whom are experts in their own lines.

He is also quick to convert night-school theory into practical business use. Two department-store buyers who were moaning about discount-house competition in Marx's office one day were flabbergasted when the toymaker interrupted them: "It's like this guy Toynbee says. It's a question of challenge and response. These discount houses are the challenge that is going to make department stores into merchants again."

Brass, Beauty, Brains. In addition to collecting culture, Marx is frequently accused by competitors of "collecting" generals. Actually, he has known most of his brasshat friends since they were young officers. His love affair with the military started in the early '30s, when he was able to give a hard-to-get toy-train switch to the late Air Force General H. H. ("Hap") Arnold, who was then a major at Bolling Field. Arnold introduced Marx to General Walter Bedell Smith, now vice chairman of the American Machine & Foundry board, who was then a captain. Said "Beedle" Smith recently: "If anyone had asked me then if I would trade my chance at making brigadier general for a quarter, I would have grabbed the money."

When Marx sent Beedle Smith some caviar, Smith, who had no taste for caviar, passed it on to his next-door neighbor at Fort Myer, Brigadier General Eisenhower. Later, Ike dropped in to thank Marx. The toymakers other military friends include NATO's General Alfred Gruenther, Strategic Air Command's General Curtis LeMay, General Omar Bradley, now a Bulova top executive, and General George Catlett Marshall. Even after they leaped into the headlines in wartime, Marx says, he was sure that the generals would be "forgotten like Bliss and Pershing," worried about the generals' financial future. In 1946, when he formed a cosmetic company called Charmore, Marx decided to help out some of his military friends by selling them shares in the profitable company at a nominal price.

Political Coca-Cola. About the same time that the generals were returning from the war, Idella Ruth Blackadder, then 21 and an RKO starlet, came back from an overseas stint with a U.S.O. troupe and met Marx at a party the next day. Idella, who is Ecdysiast Lili St. Cyr's half sister, married Marx. When Marx took Idella, who is two inches taller and 28 years younger, to meet General Gruenther on a European trip, Gruenther greeted Idella with: "What on earth did you marry him for?" Declared Marx: "I'm the one with the brains." Although some acquaintances had predicted that the marriage would not last two minutes, Lou and Idella are now the happy parents of four sons. Each son has two generals as godfathers. The "second shift," as Marx calls them (to distinguish Idella's offspring from the four children by his first wife), boasts a total of 35 sponsoring stars. The eldest boy, six-year-old Spencer Bedell (the only second-shift Marx with a nonmilitary first name) is a godchild of President Eisenhower and Bedell Smith. Ike volunteered again when Emmett Dwight, now five, came along; his other godfather is Rosie O'Donnell. The other sons: Bradley Marshall, 3, and Curtis (for Curtis LeMay) Gruenther, 1.

Marx says he has never received one good idea for a toy from the generals. But Marx was one of the many who kept telling Ike about his political future. "You're on pages one, two and three of every newspaper," Lou told Ike in 1946. "You're the political Coca-Cola." His proudest possessions: an oil painting of the West Point chapel-Ike's first picture-and a portrait of Marx in a frame inscribed "Dwight D. Eisenhower-American-Born."

The first-and second-shift Marxes occupy a rambling, white-pillared Georgian mansion on a 20-acre estate in suburban Scarsdale, just off the Hutchinson River Parkway. Marx bought the red brick house for his first wife during World War II, but before they could move in, Renee Freda Marx died of cancer. After that, says Rosie O'Donnell, "Lou was both father and mother" to his children: Barbara, now 26, wife of Artist-Writer Earl Hubbard; Louis Jr., 24, a Princeton graduate, now a Marine lieutenant; Jacqueline ("Jackie"), a pretty, dark-haired Vassar graduate who joins New Jersey Republican Senator Case's Washington staff next month; and Patricia ("Patty"), 17, a freshman at Stanford.

Says O'Donnell: "Lou did a wonderful job with the kids. I'd go to his place, and we'd be having breakfast and the six dogs would be running all over the place. And he'd be telling his daughter, right in the middle of it: 'White is the color of purity, so if you want to get married in white, be sure that you live morally. Otherwise, get married in Reno or something. Or don't wear white.' "

Bedtime Chillers. Roughhousing with the second shift, Lou Marx likes to pummel and chase them frantically up and down the three-story house, allows the boys to squirt water guns and smash toys to their hearts' content. (Idella feels the boys are working off their aggressive instincts.) Once a week the Marx brothers pile into their parents' 13-ft.-wide bed for the night. There they are treated to a bedtime-story session in which Marx spins chiller-dillers about such bad guys as a deformed villain who sautes children's eyeballs for supper. The "mean-man stories," as the children call them, are intended, says Marx, to "immunize them against fear." Like the first shift before them, the boys are also being treated to Idella's digests of the classics, bedtime concerts of Brahms, Beethoven, etc. piped into their rooms, French lessons and word-building.

Led by Lou and Idella, the family swoops down periodically on a new branch of learning, e.g., for months they smothered visitors with I.Q., vocabulary and personality tests. Although Marx is an agnostic, both shifts belong to the Episcopal Church. Marx stays at home when the family attends services, but ships argosies of toys to the annual bazaar of Scarsdale's Church of St. James the Less.

Marx, a fresh-air fiend as well as culture fan, likes to bask in the sun on winter days at the bottom of his swimming pool, which is drained in September. There he sits puffing six-inch cigars (Jack & Charlie's "21" Selection), dictating letters to his Audiograph or reading a dictionary and marking the words and phrases he wants to transfer to his vocabulary. These are later typed by a secretary in a series of black books that Marx carries everywhere, studies in idle moments. For an hour, three or four times a week, he dons sneakers, a grey sweat suit and a Mother Hubbard bonnet that ties under his chin. With a black book in hand, he trots briskly around his driveway or the roof of his office building on lower Fifth Avenue as he memorizes new words. "After a stiff workout," says a friend, "Lou's breath comes in polysyllables."

Marx has puffed his way through Webster in twelve years. Now, on the second time around, his favorite expression is Dum Vivimus, Vivamus, which can be freely translated as "Live It Up." He found the exhortation so appealing that he had it embroidered on a batch of silk neckties that he gives away. His newest favorite word is "charismatic," a theological adjective pertaining to one who has a divine endowment to carry on the work to which he was called. Understandably. Marx caused a sensation when he applied the word to Ike at a White House dinner before Ike's heart attack.

Perhaps one reason Marx is so anxious to expand his English vocabulary is that he spoke only German until the age of six. He was born (Aug. 11, 1896) in Brooklyn, where his Berlin-born parents, Jacob and Clara Lou, owned a small drygoods store and left most of the job of raising young Louis to a German maid. By the time Louis reached P.S. 11, he was known derisively as "The Dutchman." Marx still speaks with a guttural rasp and nurses a distrust for German. On annual toy trips to Germany, Marx hires an interpreter, although, as he admits, "I understand like mad."

How to Make $5,000. As a boy Marx excelled at baseball, basketball, ice-skating and shoplifting. "Everyone stole," he recalls complacently. "You weren't anyone if you couldn't steal." When he was nine, Lou proved he was someone by recruiting an accomplice and going to Brooklyn's Abraham & Straus department store. There they picked out a canoe, hefted it over their heads and walked out through the delivery exit unchallenged. The rest of that summer Louis and friends spent boating on Prospect Park Lake nearby.

The Marx parents shifted their little store from neighborhood to neighborhood with scant success, and there were few luxuries for Louis, his elder sister Rose and younger brother Dave. "But I don't remember feeling my life was tough," says Louis. "People in Brooklyn were warm and understanding, and I learned a lot about democracy. The class struggle? Someone sold that idea. We never felt it."

Lou studied hard to get ahead. He graduated from elementary school at twelve and finished Fort Hamilton High in three years. At nights he pored over books "on how to become a $5,000-a-year man." After a short-lived job with a druggists' syndicate, Marx stumbled "by sheer happenstance" into an office-boy's job with Ferdinand Strauss, whose Zippo the Climbing Monkey and Alabama Coon Jigger (a clockwork minstrel) were the first mechanical toys mass-manufactured in the U.S. Within four years, Marx had been promoted to manage the company's East Rutherford, NJ. plant, and soon afterward he had his first idea for a toy. One of Strauss's products was a toy horn that bleated "Mamma, Papa." Marx amplified the sound effects, redesigned the horn to resemble a carnation and brought it out as a paper lapel flower that doubled as a noisemaker at parties.

Zippo Climbs Back. The horn sold well, and Marx was made a Strauss director. One day the directors discussed whether the company should continue to manufacture and sell in its four retail stores in New York or give up selling. Marx alone urged Strauss to get out of the retail field. Instead of getting rid of the stores, Strauss got rid of Marx.

In his next job, as salesman for a Vermont wood-products company, Marx redesigned a line of wooden toys, and sales soared from 15,000 to 1,500,000 in two years. At the same time, Louis and brother Dave set themselves up as middlemen. Their specialty was to figure out how to cut costs on a 10 toy. Then they would land an order, farm out the manufacturing and pocket the profit. Before he was 21, Lou Marx had served a hitch in the Army, risen from private to sergeant, and, back in civilian clothes, realized his ambition of making $5,000 a year.

In 1921 brothers Louis and Dave started in to make toys themselves. They bought the dies for Zippo and the Coon Jigger after Strauss had gone bankrupt. The monkey and the minstrel had been on the market for more than 20 years, but Marx gave them bright new colors, brought out bigger models, and sold 8,000,000 of each. By the time he was 26, Marx was a millionaire and convinced that, in the toy industry, there is nothing new under the sun. To prove his point, he brought Zippo back this year, redesigned, rechristened (Jocko) and repriced.

Hard-driving Louis and easygoing brother Dave (known to friends as "Mako" and "Spendo") now have six U.S. factories, wholly owned British and Canadian subsidiaries, and toy-manufacturing interests in Germany, France, Mexico, South Africa, Japan, Australia, and Brazil. Peak U.S. employment: 8,000.

This year, while U.S. toymakers clamored for higher tariffs to keep out Japanese imports (current share of U.S. toy sales: about 6%), Marx-provided Tokyo toymakers with the cash and know-how to turn out toys that he contracted to sell in the U.S. as well as in foreign markets such as South Africa. This Christmas Japanese toys make up 5% of the Marx line and include many items, e.g., a $2.98 remote-control model auto that Japanese toymakers can turn out with 10-an-hour labor for less than half as much as it would cost to produce in the U.S. Marx bargained so closely with the crafty Japanese toymakers that Tokyo newspapers accused him of trying to ruin the industry. Marx was unabashed. "When in Rome," he shrugged, "shoot Roman candles."

As Christmas anticipation began to spread across the U.S. last week, Toy King Marx was busy wrapping up ideas for the presents that Santa Claus will be bringing two and three years from now. For Lou Marx, Christmas doesn't come just once a year, or even on Dec. 25. "When you come out with a real great hit," he says, "that's Christmas."

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