Arthur Marx | Son of Groucho, 89

Arthur Marx, 89, who wrote screenplays for film and television and a best-selling book about his father,

Life With Groucho,

died Thursday at his home in Los Angeles.

As a child Mr. Marx spent several years on the road with Groucho Marx and the rest of the Marx Brothers' vaudeville act - Chico, Harpo, Gummo, and later Zeppo - before enjoying a celebrity-filled youth in Los Angeles as the brothers rose to stardom. His own show-business career was varied and long, writing Hollywood screenplays and scripts for some of television's most popular sitcoms. But his father's life and career provided Mr. Marx with his richest source of material.

Life With Groucho, published in 1954, captivated readers with its sharp but affectionate portrait of Groucho and its shrewd account of the show-business milieu in which he thrived. A sequel, Son of Groucho, was published in 1972.

Mr. Marx and Robert Fisher, a former writer for Groucho, also wrote the book for a 1970 Broadway musical about the Marx Brothers, Minnie's Boys, with Shelley Winters in the lead role of Minnie Marx, and Groucho: A Life in Revue, produced Off-Broadway in 1986.

Arthur Marx's two books about his father offered a bittersweet picture of life in the Marx home. He described himself as desperate both to escape from his father's shadow and to please him, an impossible task. The comic genius who kept millions in stitches was, in his private life, miserly and emotionally distant, his son wrote.

In his early years, Arthur Marx gained renown as a tennis player in Los Angeles, achieving national ranking in high school and playing on the junior Davis Cup team in 1939. He later teamed with Fisher to write the screenplays for the Bob Hope films Eight on the Lam, A Global Affair, and I'll Take Sweden.

The two went on to write for sitcoms, including McHale's Navy, My Three Sons, All in the Family, The Jeffersons, and Maude. They wrote 41 episodes of Alice from 1977 to 1981.

Mr. Marx also wrote several show-business biographies, including The Nine Lives of Mickey Rooney and The Secret Life of Bob Hope. A joint biography of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime (Especially Himself), published in 1974, was made into a television movie, Martin and Lewis, in 2002.