Visit Harpo’s Place

I want to encourage to visit a delightful web site: Harpo’s Place. Written by Bill Marx, one of Arthur “Harpo” Marx’s kids, it is dedicated to his father’s life and work:

Welcome to the Harpo Marx Website. My name is Bill Marx, and my dad is Harpo Marx. I created this site on behalf of The Harpo Marx Foundation and his family so that visitors who stop by can see a different perspective on Harpo… and learn sides of the man that might not be very obvious from that crazy fright-wigged character who chases girls in Marx Brothers movies. In other words – the complete man.

Dad always said there were two Harpos – the actor and the man. The actor was the one who horsed around with his brothers and pulled all sorts of junk from that bottomless pit of a trench coat. But it was also the man who sat down and played the harp.

And it was the man that I knew best. The man I just called – Dad.

When I was a kid Harpo was my favorite of the Marx Brothers for a simple reason: he wasn’t cruel.

I learned a few things in reading it, for example, that the original characters portrayed by the Marx Brothers were intended as stereotypical vaudeville characters: Groucho as the “stage Jew”, Chico as the “stage Italian”, and Harpo as the “stage Irishman”. Pretty obviously by the time their movies came around those characters had changed considerably and Harpo in particular had much more in common with Arthur Marx than he did with any Irishman who ever lived, onstage or off.

When you’ve got a few minutes to spare go and visit a gentle, loving place dedicated to a gentle, loving man. You’ll be glad you did.