Recently I dug up my old copy of Harpo Marx’s memoir. From the Marx Brothers’ early days of Broadway fame, Harpo recounts a summer he spent on the Riviera with a few friends from the Algonquin Round Table.
Reportedly, while in France, Harpo struck up an acquaintance with Peggy Hopkins Joyce, a famous actress of the era, though possibly more for her offscreen/offstage exploits and foibles than for her. She invited him over and said they’d be alone, so over he went with the expected – ah – expectations. But it turns out that the main event of the evening was that Harpo had to read comic books to PHJ–who didn’t know how to read. AFter that she opened a trunk full of reviews and publicity about her, and begged him to read those to her also. He made a hasty farewell.
So…could it have actually been true? I would think that any actor has to be able to read scripts, but then possibly blind actors sometimes have their scripts read to them, or listen on tape, if they can’t get Braille versions of what they need.
I’ve read articles about at least a couple of actors who are illiterate or functionally illiterate because of dyslexia. My daughter is dyslexic, and so I paid attention to the occasional article about this or that famous person who was dyslexic.
Being illiterate doesn’t necessarily mean that a person is stupid, or has a poor memory.
I’m surprised - my understanding was that with the correct special-education programs, dyslexia needn’t lead to illiteracy. One of my college friends is dyslexic, but still made it through a very challenging grad school program.
What you say may be true, but you are comparing modern education techniques and practices with those from around 1900. I don’t think this is a valid comparison. It is my understanding that, back then, the school authorities simply wouldn’t have recognized the problem or been able to address it in any meaningful manner.
My brother-in-law was born in the 1970s, and he has severe dyslexia that was not diagnosed until he was older. They just threw him in with the “slow kids”. He went to school in Nevada and California throughout the 1980s.
I recognized the signs of dyslexia in my daughter in the early 80s, but because it was a relatively new diagnosis, her school and its teachers thought that I was just jumping onto the the bandwagon of the disease/disorder of the month. I got the distinct impression that at least one person on the school staff didn’t believe that there was any such thing as dyslexia. I knew that Lisa was pretty darned smart, and I knew that she had an excellent memory. So I took her to a psychologist and had her tested and diagnosed…and, indeed, she was dyslexic. Then I kept taking her to the shrink (she was depressed because she wasn’t learning how to read with the rest of the class) and to a reading tutor.
Yesterday, I took her to Half Price Books, where I bought her over $75 worth of books, as a present. It’s something she requested, she’s an avid reader these days.
I think Lance Henriksen was actually illiterate at the early stages of his career and had people read scripts to him, so he could memorize his dialogue. As his acting career accelerated, he finally learned to read on his own in his 30s. I don’t believe he was ever dyslexic, he just grew up in a rough environment and schooling wasn’t a priority for him.
Another thing I admit I overlooked is that many people in preliterate cultures, like most aboriginal ones for example, can memorize vast amounts of verbal content as represented by their legends and other stories.
Exapno, I must admit I have my doubts. He seems to have been a sterling human being, but all the Marxes seem to have been hustlers of a sort, at least while they were growing up. Given the context of life in the ethnic ghettoes of early twentieth century New York, I can’t condemn them for this, but neither can I say with confidence that Harpo would never tell a lie.
I don’t know that Harpo was a liar, but he wasn’t a historian. Posters like Exapno Mapcase have explained in the past that there are plenty of errors in Harpo Speaks and that Marx historians don’t consider it a reliable source.
Harpo Speaks was written by Rowland V. Barber. I don’t think we have a good description of the process of writing it. Almost certainly, Harpo either dictated memories that Barber polished or Barber interviewed him and took notes. There’s no indication that Harpo ever kept a diary or journal or that either man consulted old newspapers for confirmation of facts.
As a result, the book is very good for atmosphere, of the feel for a vaudevillian’s life. It’s not very good for facts, dates, locations, names, or anything else that could easily slip through memory. Groucho has a joke that Harpo could never remember anyone’s name and so called everyone either Mr. Benson or Mrs. Benson. I’m not calling any of it an outright lie. I am saying that no fact is reliable unless it has been confirmed by an outside source.
Peggy Hopkins Joyce was as big a celebrity in her day as Paris Hilton is today, for much the same reasons. (People think that today’s celebrity world is different from the past. It ain’t. Period.) And yet there is nothing in the written record to indicate that she was illiterate except for an anecdote in Harpo Speaks. The anecdote doesn’t even really say what you think it says, although the OP renders it correctly.
Harpo thinks he is being seduced. It turns out that Joyce likes being read to. She has had her favorite comic strips cut from newspapers and bound into hardback books, which she knew by heart. Yes, Harpo says that she didn’t know how to read, but that’s not exactly what the anecdote as a whole says. It states that she likes to be read to. Not exactly the same thing.
This is a quarter century later. Joyce, forgotten today, was still a big enough name that her famous promiscuity warranted a three-page anecdote. Harpo apparently didn’t go to bed with her. But that certainly doesn’t mean that the incident took place exactly as written or that the reason was Joyce’s illiteracy and her foreplay of comic strip readings. It’s a story. It’s almost certainly a cleaned-up story. I’m sure Joyce had an education as minimal as Harpo’s. He wasn’t illiterate, though, and there’s no reason to believe she was either.
Jacques Demers, who coached a number of hockey teams and won a Stanley Cup in 1993 with the Montreal Canadiens admitted a few years ago that age age 61 he was illiterate.
Since we’re talking about sports figures, so was NFL All-Pro Defensive End Dexter Manley of the Washington Redskins despite spending four years in college at Ohio State.
I’ve mentioned romances de ciego before: in Spain one traditional occupation for blind men was as travelling minstrels. They memorized and recited poems for a living; those poems could be relatively-short ones telling some weird/tragical story (the time’s equivalent of “aliens ate my baby”) or they could be very long ones (think Beowulf). If they were also musicians, again forget about having anything written. The literacy levels were quite low in the general populace: other minstrels would also have been reciting and playing from memory.