Just like it says.
Check this for all I ever found.
Calling Exapno! Calling Mr. Mapcase!
Thanks for that link. I’ve also always wanted to see and hear Harpo talk.
Wow, he sounds exactly like my great-uncle Sol!
I always figured he would have that New York-y Alte Kocker Voice, but damn, he sounds like he could be from anywhere.
In fact, he sounds a lot like MY great-uncle Al, a bluecollar gentile bohunk who spent his entire life in and around Cleveland.
FYI, Harpo Speaks is a great book if you’re interested hearing his story straight from the horses mouth.
So to speak.
Interesting link; thanks. I’d heard a different story about why he never spoke on stage/film, though; it was in the book Harpo Speaks! that beowulf573 mentions (which is also the source of Exapno Mapcase’s username). Harpo said in the book that he never spoke because his accent was so thick that it would turn off audiences.
It doesn’t sound so bad now that I’m hearing it, though. I guess either the clip isn’t really representative of his accent, or the story in the book was a fabrication, or I’m misremembering the book. (These all strike me as equally probable.)
I’m pretty sure you’re misremembering the book. I read it a few months ago and I remember the scene where he tells their mother that he’s not going to speak onstage again. He describes her looking sorry that his feelings have been hurt, but not disagreeing with his idea.
Yeah, that web page has everything known to be public about Harpo’s voice.
He performed in a play at the Bucks County Playhouse in a straight speaking role, but there are no known recordings of it.
jackelope, you believe something that was included in Harpo Speaks?That’s hilarious. Even the page numbers probably never happened. :o
I ask in all seriousness: Is most of the book not true?
Let’s just say that very few of the stories in that book are repeated by serious writers in their own histories of the brothers, except when they’re saying, “however, Harpo writes that…”
You mean to say he only made up that three-way with Martha Graham and Pearl S. Buck in the Presidential Suite of the Fairmont Hotel on San Francisco’s Nob Hill? With the two-gallon can of Cretan cold-pressed olive oil and the cockatoo?
Well, he made up the cockatoo part.
I don’t know; I heard Martha Graham enjoyed a cockatoo in her day . . .
Best joke I’ve ever read on the SDMB.
True, but what’s really key is the straightman’s delivery.