I Love Lucy
1951
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Aug 7, 2019 · These intimate photos captured versatile Harpo Marx at home. He is now enjoying a vacation after completing his latest starring role in A Day at the Races, new Marx Brothers' Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer comedy, directed by Sam Wood.
- He Had A Horrible Childhood
- His Mother Shoved Him Into Performing
- He Had A Haunting Embarrassing Moment
- He Was Bullied Horribly
- He Had A Second-Grade Education
- He Was A Mobster
- The Marx Brothers Have A Strange Origin Story
- He Had A Film First
- He Was Eerily Silent
- He Was An Infamous Bachelor
As a child, Harpo lived through a nightmare. Although his enormous family—including his brothers Groucho and Chico—were loving, they were also dirt poor in turn-of-the-century New York. Indeed, his domineering mother Minnie forced them to start scraping together pennies from almost the moment they could talk. The thing is, she did this in a VERY st...
While we now know that child stardom is a curse, Minnie Marx sure didn’t think so. She organized a singing quartet act with the rest of her sons...but they were missing their fourth singer. Desperate, Minnie recruited the young Harpo to come up on stage at the eleventh hour, pushing the shy boy into the spotlight. This went more horribly than anyon...
When Harpo hit the stage that day, he immediately realized he had made a mortifying mistake. Still unused to performing, he was so nervous that, in front of his family and the entire crowd, he wet his pants in the middle of the performance. Unfortunately, Harpo soon discovered that this was only the beginning of his ordeals. Getty Images
Harpo’s school life was somehow worse than his stage debut. When he was in the second grade, he faced relentless bullying due to his Jewish ethnicity—and things took a dangerous turn. According to Harpo, his tormentors loved throwing him out the window of their second-story classroom whenever their teacher left. This would have devastating conseque...
When his classroom woes became more and more frequent, Harpo eventually had enough. After yet another time where his enemies threw him out the window, the young boy simply walked home rather than returning to class. In fact, he never returned, and Harpo had no formal education whatsoever past the second grade. Yeah, this wasn’t a good thing. Getty ...
After quitting school,Marx began a harrowing chapter in his life.He became a juvenile delinquent, roaming the streets of New York for hours a day, swiping whatever odds and ends he could get his hands on, and making both friends and enemies with members of various street gangs. He even played piano in a brothel during this time. But one way or anot...
Around this time, the Marx Brothers’ act started to evolve into what we know it as today—but few people know its strange origins. See, they never actually set out to be a comedy act. Their mother, Minnie, was still obsessed with making them a vaudeville singing group, and whenever the brothers started kidding around in the act, she chastised them a...
In the early 1910s, the Marx Brothers began developing their stage act in earnest, and this led to their first collaborative film, 1929’s The Cocoanuts, which starred the brothers Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and Zeppo Marx in all their glory and various stage names. Not only was The Cocoanuts a newfangled talkie, but it was also one of the first films t...
Early on, Harpo developed one distinguishing feature in the sibling act: He never talked. For the most part, his film career relied on sight gags, especially Harpo pulling extremely unlikely objects from his nearly ever-present overcoat. As we’ll see, there was a particular reason for his silence, but it sure worked. Within a few years, the Marx Br...
With the Marx Brothers’ comedy routine taking off, Harpo became one of the most notorious bachelors in 1930s Hollywood. One story from this time is legendary: He ended up busting into a costume party at Marion Davies’ house, while the starlet was still the mistress of tycoon William Randolph Hearst. And before long, Harpo’s reputation went from nau...
Harpo's trademark outfit consisted of a trench coat with over-large pockets, red wig (he switched to a blond one for every film after The Cocoanuts because the red wig photographed dark in black-and-white), top hat, the comical horn heard in his movies, and his ever-present harp.
Mar 13, 2013 · Above: Harpo Marx's signature wig pairs nicely with his Mozartean get-up in these performance of famous minuets by Mozart and Boccherini - with a jazzy…
- Hair wasn’t really his thing. Harpo: au natural. When you think Harpo, you think: harp, top hat, long trench coat and curly blonde hair. Well, much like Groucho’s insanely fake mustache, Harpo’s hair was also fake: in reality he was as bald as his brother!
- Art, however, was this thing. This looks like my kind of party… Harpo was a huge art lover and had an extensive collection that included pieces by Joseph Hirsch, George Grosz, and LeRoy Nieman.
- He was all about adoption. They take after their father, I see… Harpo and his wife, Susan Fleming, adopted four children: Bill, Alex, Jimmy, and Minnie.
- There’s a reason he didn’t speak. Harpo and the bros. As most of you probably guessed, Harpo wasn’t actually mute: he just played one on TV (or, really, the movies).
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