What is IRDC?
Well, yeah, but…
Everything you say is true, but I note that it was his immediate family that bore the brunt of it. None of his children ever alleged physical abuse, by the way. Groucho was fundamentally insecure, and lashed out verbally at everyone close to him, especially his wives and his kids. He bickered constantly with Chico, but genuinely loved Harpo and Gummo. He had a more distant relationship with Zeppo, who was considerably younger.
Most of the nasty stuff happened when he was elderly. Erin is a controversial figure. She was mentally ill, and they seem to have had a relationship that veered from rather sweet to deeply dysfunctional and ugly. She at least precipitated a lot of unpleasant stuff he didn’t really need.
But Groucho’s colleagues and co-workers spoke well of him. He was the one Marx Brother who showed up on time, with his lines memorized. He went to the pre-production meetings, and spent time with the writers. He had sincere long-lasting friendships with many writers and songwriters in Hollywood. (Harry Ruby comes to mind. Groucho insisted on using Harry’s songs in his movies later on, because he know Harry needed the money.)
So Groucho wasn’t a happy, sunny man, but he wasn’t a total bitch, as described in the OP.
nitpicks - Steve Stoliar, not Stoliac. I also think that Hector Arce’s bio is much more reliable than Simon Louvich’s. And everyone should read Harpo Speaks.
Since the OP didn’t limit it to actors/actresses, I would like to nominate gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, with a supporting nomination for her henchwoman, Louella Parsons. Between the two of them, they spent years destroying careers, forcing studios to dumb-down films, and chasing actors they didn’t like out of the industry or even out of the country.
Even in the midst of their power, they were known as “Hollywood’s Wicked Witches” and “The Wicked Witches of the West”.
I have to think that since their power lasted for years, and they used it to force talented people out of the film industry, and damage the type of films that were made; this counts as worse than others who just treated their fellow actors or family members rudely & abominally.
Ellison may be an ass, but he has talent, and he has the ability to see The Truth, which gives him a lot of leeway in my book.
True, though they were together for about 10 years and had 3 kids (two adopted).
You’re right, I did screw some things up. The pictures Farrow found have always been described as of a teenaged Soon-Yi. So even if she was legally an adult (over 18), she was still about 40 years younger than Woody, who was dating her mother. I don’t get into this stuff normally, but that’s pretty bad in my book anyway.
I feel obliged to quote SF critic Dave Langford’s comment from here:
I do agree with what you say, but I emphasize that my original post here made it clear that I was just referring to his later life, not his professional career. He was always a proper professional. And the brothers were one of the closest families in show business, even if they had their well-known disputes.
However, the differences in the brothers’ personalities in real life are fascinating. Chico was an extremely charming and gregarious man, a seducer in every sense of the word. Zeppo had loads of personality, the best business head, and you can find any number of references claiming that he was the funniest offstage. Harpo is uniformly acclaimed as one of the nicest human beings ever to walk the earth. But Groucho is equally universally said to have lived up to his nickname. He was not a bitch, but he was an abrasive loner, a private man at home, close only to a tiny set of friends, and about as unlike his brothers as could possibly be. In the nature v. nurture dispute, they got their genes from a blender.
Sorry about the typo on Stoliar. You should have seen the first six versions. 
And Arce’s (pronounced Are-See’s, for those who might be wondering) bio just has less on Groucho’s later life than the others I mentioned.
Of course, anyone who calls himself Exapno Mapcase has no problem recommending Harpo Speaks.
“I didn’t remember correctly.” Originally I had written “IIRC” when I wrote about Liz’s Todd-AO demands, so I meant “nah, it’s not that she wasn’t very persuasive, but that I didn’t remember correctly.”
Of course in retrospect, even with the smiley, it looks like I invented some other form of film stock as a counter-argument, so I understand your confusion.
Carl Switzer, better known as “Alfalfa” in Our Gang/Little Rascals was supposed to be a viscious little spoiled brat. He’d bully his co-stars, throw tantrums on set and on one occassion, peed on the set lights, stinking up the studio.
He later was shot and killed in a dispute over fifty dollars.
I remember watching a PBS special on the Marx brothers where it was said that Groucho got his nickname because he was grouchy much of the time, and that the grouchiness was a result of the almost constant pain he was in (something about his foot or his spine, and I really wish I remembered what the source of pain was).
So we are in total agreement! I thought we might be, but I didn’t want people who don’t recognise the name “Exapno Mapcase” to get a wrong impression.
I read somewhere that Kaplan became very wealthy investing in the bond market (packaging bond issues, maybe) in the '80s and '90s.
Groucho’s own position seems to have been that he had no idea where his nickname came from.
Harpo Marx, in his book “Harpo Speaks!” writes that Groucho used a type of cheap luggage called a “grouch bag”. And the nicknames sprang up when a friend of Chico’s was dealing cards to the brothers during a poker game. He was trying for rhymes, & Groucho was the best he could do.
Sigh. Using Harpo Speaks for details about the early history of the Marx Brothers is a little like using The Texas Chainsaw Massacre for details about the biography of Ed Gein. You really want to find an independent source.
Let’s start with the first biography of the Brothers, Kyle Crichton’s The Marx Brothers, from way back in 1950. His is the first telling of what would become The Standard Version. Galesberg, Illinois, performing Fun in Hi Skule. Also on the bill, Art Fisher, monologist. Popular comic strip named “Knocko the Monk” about a family of chimps in which all the characters had names ending in “o”.
In this version, Fisher has been staking them to dinners and calling to them by nicknames patterned after the strip.
This is the ur-tale accepted by all later writers, who pretty much alternately opt for the “grouch bag” or “grouchy continence” theories.
Except for Harpo, who inexplicably places the event in “Rockford,” a place that evidently inhabits the same state the Simpson’s “Springfield” does.
Harpo does add the detail of the naming taking place at a specific poker game, what has become the Revised Standard Version. There is no evidence for this whatsoever.
One other slight detail: there is also no evidence whatsoever of a monologist named Art Fisher.
Simon Louvish is the first biographer to actually research the legends associated with Marx Brothers myth. In this he had the invaluable help of Paul Wesolowski, founder of the Marx Brotherhood and the world’s greatest authority on all things Marx. In Monkey Business, he writes:
Furthermore, no playbill lists them as using the any of these names until 1919 and they didn’t start using them full time until their first Broadway show, I’ll Say She Is in 1924.
Hey, don’t worry about it. Nothing in that other “Standard Version” is historically accurate either. 
Actually, his other children strongly dispute Gary’s version of their upbringing, and Gary himself admits that he suffers from alcoholic blackouts, and can remember neither some of the events in the book, nor telling his co-author some of the stuff in it.
This is another case where I don’t think the accusation fits the OP. Let’s assume, for a moment, that Gary’s version is true. Bing’s first wife, Dixie, was an alcoholic, and no help on the domestic front. His second wife was quite capable, and she and her children describe an almost idyllic family life. Throughout all of this, Bing’s professional life was exemplary. He showed up on time, he knew his lines and his songs, he treated his co-workers and production crews with respect. This is the picture of a man who is not perfect, but not of someone who deserves to be called a self-absorbed, obnoxious, miserable, thoroughly unlikeable person.
Maybe he’s confused his stops. Rockford is another city in Illinois, about 150 miles away.
Not that it makes the story any less of a myth, of course.
As someone from that area, i can tell you Rockford and Galesburg aren’t that much different, so it is understandable.
There are Rockfords in many states, just as there are Springfields in many states.
Yeah, I know, if you have to explain a joke…
I read the book that Tina Sinatra wrote about her father, and she described living near the Crosby’s and how the Crosby children would sometimes hide from Bing in Sinatra’s house because there was a lot of trouble in their household. I got the impression that it was a very abusive environment.