Hello, I Must Be Going: Groucho and His Friends [*SIGNED*]

Garden City NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc.. Near Fine in Very Good+ dj. 1978. First Edition. Hardcover. (price-clipped) [a very nice copy, solidly bound with no discernible shelfwear; the jacket has a couple of tiny nicks in the rear panel and an associated horizontal crease at the bottom edge]. (B&W photographs) SIGNED by the author (no inscription) at the top of the front endpaper. After interviewing Groucho Marx for Playboy magazine, the author subsequently found herself in the comedian's inner circle, and during the 4-5 years of his life she "spent some time as his houseguest, ate breakfasts, lunches, and dinners with him and his friends, shopped with him, attended the Academy Awards with him and Erin Fleming, watched his films and the reruns of 'You Bet Your Life' with him, drove with him to Palm Springs to visit Gummo and Zeppo, returned to his boyhood East Ninety-third Street home with him," and so on. The book is jam-packed with what appear to be verbatim accounts of conversations between the author and Groucho, and between Groucho and many of his friends -- testimony either to the author's prodigious memory and/or her note-taking ability (no mention is ever made of tape recordings, and given the mostly social/private contexts such activity was unlikely), or perhaps to her powers of after-the-fact embellishment. (The book was one of the first to appear after Groucho's death in 1977, so of course he was no longer around to contradict any of it. At least one Marx bibliographer has suggested that the book was fatally tainted by the author's having been under the sway of Erin Fleming, certainly the most controversial figure in Groucho's last years.) Signed by Author .