Word: harpo
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...questions addressed to him. If a waiter asks "What are you going to eat today?" Burns is likely to reply "What am I going to eat today?" The character of George Burn's offstage conversation is better suggested by the fact that his best friends include Jack Benny, Harpo Marx, Lou Holtz and Bert Lahr. Though he travels in such fast company; Straight Man Burns has no trouble keeping ahead...
Burns is also curiously remembered by a foursome at Los Angeles' Hillcrest Country Club. An inconspicuous character and a wild-eyed man who somewhat resembled Harpo Marx asked to be allowed to play through. This proper request was granted. A few minutes later another duo made the same request. They bore a strange resemblance to the first pair except that they were heavily mustached. Shortly after they had disappeared ahead, the foursome was hailed by still another pair. This last couple was uncannily like the others save for caps and full beards...
...characters run from Lord Jeffrey Amherst and the late Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes to Harpo Marx and the only man in the world who ever persuaded a camel to walk backwards. There is a heroic, the-play-must-go-on story about Katharine Cornell, who once arrived late for her show in Seattle, found her audience patiently waiting, and between 1 and 4 o'clock in the morning presented The Barretts of Wimpole Street, sustained only by one egg rustled up for her at 2 a.m. by Producer Guthrie McClintic. There is a story about Editor Robert Quillen...
...expert Herbert Feis it was once said "he looks like Harpo and talks like Karl Marx." The Harpo crack is an exaggeration, the Karl part a misunderstanding. Feis, a Hoover holdover, loves fast conversation and the intellectual paradox, but, stripped of provocative verbiage, his opinions would be generally acceptable. Never a New Dealer, he belongs to none of Washington's "ideological" factions...
Thereafter Decker had plenty of sitters, collected plenty of fat fees. He also instituted a point system, rationing only one portrait to each subject. But the sitter was permitted to choose the famous painting he wished to be dubbed into. Harpo Marx was painted as Gainsborough's Blue Boy, Charlie McCarthy as Hals's Laughing Cavalier, W. C. Fields as Queen Victoria. Prices for these efforts sometimes ran up to $1,000. Says Decker (who suffers from ulcers and diabetes): "An artist doesn't earn a living until after he's dead. People buy his stuff...