RETAIL TRADE: The Little King

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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."