“GEORGE BURNS: Going into the Pantages Theatre, there’s Gracie and Susan, and Harpo and myself. And he loved black jellybeans. He couldn’t get any black jellybeans, and all of a sudden there’s a little candy store next to the theatre. It’s during the war. All of a sudden he sees this candy store, and in the window there’s black jellybeans. He went in and he says, ‘How many black jellybeans have you got?’ The guy says, ‘Well, I got an order today, I paid thirty dollars for the black jellybeans.’ Harpo says, ‘I’ll give you thirty-five dollars for all the black jellybeans.’ Have you any idea how many jellybeans you can buy for thirty-five dollars?

Well, Gracie carried a bag of jellybeans, and Susan carried a bag, ‘cause we’re going into the theatre, and the little candy store would be closed when we left. And we couldn’t walk down to where the car was or we’d have missed the beginning of the picture. So the four of us are carrying about twenty-five pounds of black jellybeans into the theatre. But . . . before we went out, he also bought some colored jellybeans—ten cents worth of white, red, and pink jellybeans. That is, if we wanted a jellybean, he’d give us the colored ones because he didn’t want anyone to touch the black ones!

GROUCHO: I don’t blame him.”

—from Hello, I Must be Going: Groucho and His Friends, by Charlotte Chandler, 1978.