Word: harpo
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Israel's David, Greece's Orpheus and Hollywood's Harpo Marx are probably the three best-known harpists of all time. Nevertheless, in these effete times harp-playing is virtually a female monopoly, and 99% of America's 4,000 harpists are women...
...this continent." The story of Lizzie Borden, the ax-murderess, was "on the plane with Shakespeare and Sophocles" (later, Woollcott horrified the Borden Milk Co. by urging them to give the name Lizzie to an offspring of their prizewinning cow at the World's Fair). Woollcott believed that Harpo Marx had the makings of a great poet, and the silent Harpo obliged with one dry couplet...
...glamor. The Hollywood-for-Dewey Committee had nice legs, a pretty wit and good lungs : Ginger Rogers, Hedda Hopper, Rosalind Russell, Cecil B. de Mille, Anne Baxter, Leo Carrillo and Adolphe Menjou. So did the Hollywood Committee of New Dealers: Rita Hayworth, Olivia de Havilland, Katharine Hepburn, Orson Welles, Harpo Marx, Lana Turner, Walter Huston, Fanny Brice...
Holtz, who stutters offstage but not on, is equally funny in both places. His Thursday-night card games with Harpo Marx and George Burns are riots of unbowdlerized storytelling. Though Holtz can come up with cracks like "I hope your marriage lasts as long as mine seems," his forte is not quotable nifties, but lengthy yarns, (whose point scarcely matters) that he tenderly unrolls like priceless fabrics richly embroidered with dialect. Fall guy of some of the best of them is Sam Lapidus, whose name Holtz lifted from a building sign 20 years ago. Typical Lapidus yarn (one fourth actual...
...movie, In Which We Serve. "Courage is the only thing that makes me cry." After previewing Goodbye, Mr. Chips, he burst into "a great, astonishing sob" and fell down the projection-room stairs. "One of the characters in Of Mice and Men," he wrote to Harpo Marx, "is an amiable and gigantic idiot. . . . I tried to get [Heywood] Broun to take this part and he was very hurt." "Just a big dreamer," said Harpo of Woollcott, "with a good sense of double-entry bookkeeping...