Word: harpo
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
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...
...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...