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Louis B. Mayer Goes to Hollywood — By Way of a Run-Down Burlesque Theater in Haverhill, Mass.

In 1907, 23-year-old Louis B. Mayer visited a run-down, dingy burlesque theater in Haverhill, Mass., and saw his fabulous future.

Then called the Gem, locals called the theater the Germ. Or they called it the Garlic Box because of its poor Italian customers. Respectable women, they said, wouldn’t go within a block of it. Whores performed on its stage.

Nevertheless, Louis B. Mayer scraped up the money for a six-month lease on the place, fixed it up and renamed it the Orpheum.

And if it hadn’t been for the Orpheum, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer would never have produced Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz Ben-Hur and The Philadelphia Story. Nor would it have launched such stars as Clark Gable, Joan Crawford, Cary Grant, Spencer Tracy, Elizabeth Taylor, Buster Keaton, Katharine Hepburn, Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney.

Louis B. Mayer

Young Louis B. Mayer

Lazar Meir was born July 12, 1884, near Minsk in Belarus. When he was two, his family fled the pogroms in Russia. They moved to St. John, New Brunswick, where his father worked as a scrap metal dealer and a peddler.

Louis foraged for junk metal in streets and garbage cans. From time to time his father sent him to Boston to sell the scrap metal. At 19, he decided to change his address to a room in the Jewish immigrant section of Boston’s South End.

“I hadn’t the price of a sandwich,” he later remembered.

He eventually changed his name to Louis Burt Mayer and his birthday to July 4.

He got a job scavenging metal from the bottom of Boston Harbor. Within six months he married Margaret Shenberg the daughter of the kosher butcher across the street. They moved in with her family. Soon after their first daughter was born a year later, they moved to Brooklyn. Things didn’t go well and Mayer, broke and depressed, moved his family back in with the in-laws two years later.

The Germ Theater

A Boston nickelodeon.

By then, a craze for nickelodeons swept America’s immigrant neighborhoods. They intrigued Mayer. He hung out at a South End nickelodeon, sometimes taking tickets and making friends with the owner, Joe Mack. One day Mack told him he saw a newspaper ad for a burlesque theater for rent in Haverhill, Mass.

In 1907, Louis B. Mayer took the train to Haverhill with Joe Mack and $50 in his pocket. They visited 8 Essex St., off Washington Square.

The place was a dump.

The theater had been built only seven years earlier, but it had already accumulated dirt and damp. It had 600 rickety seats and tobacco juice stains along the baseboards.

Legends grew up around the Gem during its short existence. According to one story, a show’s announcer once declared, proclaimed, “Miss Blanche Fernandez will now sing White Wings.”

“Blanche Fernandez is a whore,” yelled a man in the audience.

“Nevertheless, Miss Blanche Fernandez will now sing White Wings.”

Louis B. Mayer later said he didn’t see a dingy theater, but he saw what it could become.

Success

The small city of Haverhill, population 45,000, proved an excellent place to open a movie theater. Its shoe workers, small shopkeepers and tradesmen were an ideal demographic for cheap entertainment.

Washington Square, Haverhill, Mass.

Louis B. Mayer scraped and borrowed to come up with enough money for a six-month lease.

He and his wife and a handyman cleaned the Gem and put a fresh coat of paint on it. He converted the manager’s office into a small apartment and moved his family into the theater.

On Nov. 28, 1907, Thanksgiving Day, Louis B. Mayer opened the Orpheum, ‘Haverhill’s Home of Refined Amusement.’ A newspaper advertisement promised ‘clean, wholesome, healthy amusement, no waits, no delays.’ (For a picture of the Orpheum, since razed, click here.)

After a slow start, the Orpheum succeeded. Factory workers began to line up outside the theater after their shifts.

Up the Ladder

Louis B. Mayer enjoyed a growing reputation in Haverhill as he moved his family into better and better neighborhoods. Soon he owned all five theaters in the city. He branched out to Lynn, Brockton and Lowell.

In 1915, he bought the rights to distribute D.W. Griffith’s film, Birth of a Nation throughout New England. He made so much money on the deal he could set up his own production company.

On Dec. 29, 1918, Louis B. Mayer took a train to New York City for the premier of his first film, Virtuous Wives, starring Hedda Hopper.

The silent film was enough of a hit that Louis B. Mayer could devote the rest of his career to moviemaking. He had outgrown New England. Shortly after Virtuous Wives came out, Louis B. Mayer moved his family from his Brookline estate to Hollywood.

He then built Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer into the country’s biggest and most powerful movie studio.

Louis B. Mayer died of kidney failure on Oct. 29, 1957.

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Sarah Josepha Hale, the Little Lady From NH Who Started Thanksgiving

Growing up in Newport, N.H., Sarah Josepha Hale hardly seemed likely to move a president, build a monument or influence a generation of American women.

Sarah Josepha Hale

Born into modest circumstances, she rose to the editorship of a popular women’s magazine. From that influential perch she promoted the Christmas tree, the white wedding dress and the Thanksgiving dinner of turkey, stuffing and pumpkin pie.

Sarah Josepha Hale wielded a powerful influence on domestic fashion and taste as a 19^th-century cross between Martha Stewart and Oprah Winfrey.

Sarah Josepha Hale

She was born Oct. 24, 1788 on a farm outside Newport, N.H., to Captain Gordon Buell and Martha Whittlesay Buell. Her parents believed in education for girls, and home-schooled Sarah.

Her father suffered from wounds inflicted during the American Revolution, which made farming difficult. In 1811, he bought a tavern on Main Street in Newport and called it The Rising Sun. Meanwhile, Sarah grew up and taught school.

The Rising Sun

She married David Hale, a lawyer, at the Rising Sun on the day before her 25th birthday. The couple had five children before David died nine years later. Sarah Josepha Hale wore black to mourn him for the rest of her life.

The year after her husband died, she published a book of poems with financial help from his Freemason Lodge. Four years later in 1827 she subsequently published a novel that dealt with slavery, called Northwood: Life North and South.

Thanksgiving

Back then, the United States had only two national holidays: Washington’s Birthday and Independence Day. Only New Englanders celebrated Thanksgiving, and each of the six states scheduled its own date to celebrate from October through January.

An 1859 fashion plate from Godey’s Lady’s Magazine

The success of Northwood: Life North and South got Sarah Josepha Hale the job as editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, the biggest women’s magazine before the Civil War.

She wrote editorial after editorial in her magazine urging Thanksgiving be celebrated as a national holiday. Finally President Abraham Lincoln acquiesced in 1863, thinking the holiday would help unify the nation after the Civil War. By then Sarah Josepha Hale was 74 years old.

But how to celebrate the new national holiday? Sarah Josepha Hale had the answer in one chapter of Northwood: Life North and South. It included a detailed description of a New England Thanksgiving dinner, which became a template for the rest of the country.

The Feast

She described a long table covered in a white damask tablecloth. Every child had a seat;”‘the more the better, it being considered an honor for a man to sit down to his Thanksgiving dinner surrounded by a large family.”

Roasted turkey, stuffed and basted, took center stage at the head of the table.

She then described an enormous amount of food: leg of pork, loin of mutton, sirloin of beef, vegetables, gravy, a goose, ducklings, pickles, preserves, a chicken pie – and the “celebrated’ pumpkin pie, an ‘indispensable part of a good and true Yankee Thanksgiving.” Every place had a wine glass and two tumblers, with a slice of wheat bread on top of an inverted tumbler. For desert they had plum pudding, custards, pie, cake, sweetmeats and fruits.

To drink, they had homemade mild spirits: currant wine, cider and ginger beer.

In deference to an English visitor, the family had coffee after the meal. Sarah Josepha Hale wrote approvingly of the innovation.

Sarah Josepha Hale subsequently lived for another 15 years after her great accomplishment.

She also wrote and edited children’s books. In 1850, Mary Had a Little Lamb appeared in Poems for Our Children.

Her many other achievements include dozens of other books. She helped with the founding of Vassar College, the restoration of Mount Vernon and the completion of the Bunker Hill Monument. She died on April 30, 1879.

Richards Free Library

Today, the Richards Free Library in Newport bestows the annual Sarah Josepha Hale Award on a New England writer. The first honoree was Robert Frost in 1956. Most recently, the 2021 award went to Sy Montgomery.

Need some new ideas for your Thanksgiving feast? How about trying something old — and authentic — from the New England Historical Society’. Available from Amazon (click here).

This story last updated in 2023. Image of the Richards Free Library by By User:Magicpiano – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=28959726.

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Five Historic Thanksgiving Foods . . . That You Won’t Be Eating

The best food historians can say is that turkey was probably served on Thanksgiving tables since the beginning. Since then, it’s been remarkably constant, evading any attempts to squeeze it off the menu. But many other historic Thanksgiving foods have come and gone from New England menus over the years as tastes change.

Historic Thanksgiving Foods

Here are just five examples of historic Thanksgiving foods. You may be glad some of them disappeared from the holiday feast:

Lobster, one of New England’s historic Thanksgiving foods. Illustration from Woman’s Favorite Cookbook, by Annie R. Gregory

Bear

All manner of game was served at early feasts. In 1714, the Rev. Laurence Conant of Danvers, Mass., recorded details of his Thanksgiving dinner with a neighbor, Mr. Epes. Bear was the centerpiece of the feast and was well enjoyed, though venison was also served.

The venison, it turned out, created controversy as the deer had been shot on the Sabbath. That required some consultation with Rev. Conant as to whether they could eat it. In the end, hungry stomachs topped religious prohibitions against hunting for food on the Sabbath. They gobbled up the venison.

Lobster

Records of the first Massachusetts Thanksgiving meal in 1621 mention only that the Pilgrims ate fowl and venison. But most likely they also ate the other traditional foods common to their diet, and those included seafood such as lobster and mussels. They had no butter, however, as their cows didn’t arrive until later.

Lobster and mussels have been mentioned as dishes at other early American Thanksgiving feasts. Of course today it’s the unusual home where someone brings out the pot to boil or steam up shellfish for Thanksgiving.

Pigeon Pasties

In 1779, Juliana Smith of Sharon, Conn., wrote to her cousin Betsey to describe the family’s Thanksgiving meal. She noted that her dour grandmother had argued that the American Revolution was depriving Connecticut citizens of their property. The day, therefore, should really be one of fasting and prayer, “due to the wickedness of our friends and the vileness of our enemies.” However, Juliana’s father persuaded the family to instead have a Thanksgiving feast.

Smith, who would go on to marry New York’s mayor Jacob Radcliff, outlined a sumptuous menu. She bemoaned the fact that beef was not on the menu, and hadn’t been for three years. The army needed it all. Nevertheless, the table groaned under the weight of turkey, goose, port, venison and a wide range of vegetables. The menu also featured suet pudding, a far less common dish today, and, “two big pigeon pasties.”

Pasties, for the uninformed, are also called hand pies. (Think of a pot pie without the pie tin.) Sounds like Julia’s were larger than today’s common pasties.

Puffball Soup

Sarah Royer (1849-1937) was the Martha Stewart of her day. A Pennsylvania native, her cookbooks and magazines, spread far and wide, guided households toward domestic perfection.

Her 1890 ideal Thanksgiving Dinner menu, published in Table Talk magazine, featured puffball soup. Puffballs belong to a family of mushrooms familiar to anyone who has spent much time walking the woods. Small ones provide a degree of entertainment when dry. If you crush them, they expel a small puff of smoke-like spores. But cooks can dice the larger ones and simmer them into a tasty mushroom soup.

Crackers in Pudding?

historic-thanksgiving-foods-fannie-farmer

Look here for recipes for historic Thanksgiving foods.

Fannie Farmer launched her career as a cookbook author in 1896 with The Boston Cooking School Cookbook, and what cookbook would be complete without a nod to Thanksgiving? Much of her sample Thanksgiving menu would be familiar to modern celebrants of the holiday. But one suggested dish has faded from memory. In addition to pies and other sweets, Farmer had a Thanksgiving Pudding in her cookbook.

Thanksgiving pudding consisted of crackers, milk, sugar, eggs, butter, nutmeg, salt and raisins. To top it off, she recommended a brandy sauce.

Need some new ideas for your Thanksgiving feast? How about trying something old — and authentic — from the New England Historical Society’s latest ebook. Available from Amazon (click here).
Thanks to the Food Timeline. This story about historic Thanksgiving foods was updated in 2022.

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Six Cranberry Bogs Throughout New England

Cranberry bogs, ubiquitous in Southeastern Massachusetts, can be found in every New England state.

They are enjoying something of a revival, as family farmers over the past decade have reclaimed and renovated old cranberry bogs—or built new ones –throughout New England.

Cranberry bogs are low shallow bowls of acidic peat soil near plentiful sand and water. They have four layers, starting with clay at the bottom, gravel, peat and sand.

Workers harvest cranberries during ‘Cranberry Time,’ which runs from late August through September in Southeastern New England.

A Massachusetts cranberry grower

History of Cranberry Bogs

If the Pilgrims served cranberries at the earliest Thanksgiving, they would have used them as a sweetener or a flavoring ingredient, not as a dish.

The first cranberry entrepreneur, Henry Hall of Dennis, Mass., noticed that his cranberry plants thrived when sand blew over them. He figured out how to transplant cranberry vines, fence them in, spread sand on them and flood the cranberry bogs at harvest time. That way, the cranberries floated to the top for easy picking.

Word spread about Henry Hall’s technique and cranberry bogs began flourishing in Southeastern Massachusetts. Some Massachusetts vines are more than 150 years old.

A vintage can of cranberry sauce

The cranberry industry advanced further when Marcus Libby Urann abandoned his profession as a lawyer to buy a cranberry bog. Urann made the first canned cranberry sauce .

In 1930, he joined with two other cranberry growers to found the cooperative that became Ocean Spray. Ocean Spray bottled and sold Cranberry Juice Cocktail starting in the mid-1930s. Urann is buried in Hanson, Mass., deep in cranberry country.

The Harwich Historical Society has an exhibit of cranberry culture (open in the summer) at its museum, at 80 Parallel St. in Harwich.

Here, then, are actual six cranberry bogs, one in each New England state.

Killingworth Cranberries

A 1940 cranberry picking machine.

In the late 19th century, Killingworth, Conn., had more than 20 acres under cranberry cultivation. Farmers eventually neglected their bogs, except for the Evarts family, which cared for the family bog for more than a century.

Sometimes they had help weeding and maintaining the bog from one of their biggest customers, Bishop’s Orchards, a Guilford, Conn., farm since 1871.

In 2016 Keith Bishop renovated the old Evarts family bog, planting 2.7 acres of the new hybrid Scarlet Knight cranberry vines.

Today it’s the only cranberry harvesting bog left in Connecticut.

The Killingworth Land Conservation Trust also bought two old cranberry bogs, now known as Pond Meadow Natural Area and Cranberry Hollow.

155 Pond Meadow Rd, Killingworth, Conn.

Sugar Hill Cranberry Co.

The Sugar Hill Cranberry Co. is a small family farm in the Down East town of Columbia Falls. John and Christine Alexander harvest three kinds of cranberries on 11 acres of cranberry bogs. They grow Pilgrims, a juice berry great for wine making; the popular Stevens and the heirloom variety Howes.

Christine grew up in Massachusetts cranberry country with relatives who harvested cranberries back in the 1940s.

256 Sacarap Road, Columbia, Maine

Flax Pond Farms

Picking cranberries on Cape Cad.

You may have once noticed a picture of Jack and Dot Angley on Ocean Spray Cranberry Juice labels (click here to see it and scroll to the bottom).

They bought their 100-acre farm in Carver, Mass., in 1967. It includes a 34-acre cranberry bog that farmers have harvested since the 1890s. Today the bog produces cranberries for Ocean Spray Cranberries.

As recently as 40 years ago, up to 30 farmworkers harvested the berries with hand-held scoops and hauled them to shore by wheelbarrow. Today harvesting machines pick the berries, which a helicopter then lifts to waiting trucks.

When the bogs freeze solidly enough, sanding machines apply 1/2 to one inch of sand on the ice. It settles on the vine, stimulating new vine growth and smothering some winter insect pests.

You can visit Flax Pond Farm starting Nov. 24 for fresh-cut Christmas trees and handmade wreaths.

Click here for four other Massachusetts cranberry bogs you can tour.

58 Pond St. Carver, Mass.

Cranberry Meadow Pond

New Hampshire doesn’t seem to have any commercial cranberry bogs left. But back in the late 19^th century, farmers harvested cranberries from bogs in Auburn, Manchester and Berlin, according to the Cow Hampshire blog.

Wild cranberries still grow in New Hampshire bogs, but you have to know how to look for them.

You might try the 4.5-mile Cranberry Meadow Pond Trail, which runs from downtown Peterborough to the summit of Pack Monadnock. The trail winds through some of the area’s most beautiful conservation land. For a map, click here.

Off Old Street Road near the intersection with Route 101, Peterborough, N.H.

Wild cranberries

The Greene Company

Cranberries in Rhode Island date to about 1855, when Abiel T. Sampson started planting his cranberry bog in Coventry. Eventually he expanded it to become the largest in the state. Sampson hired local families to pick the cranberries by hand for two cents a quart.

After Sampson died, the cranberry bog changed hands several times until Mr. and Mrs. Robert Leonard bought it in 1966. They ran it as the Coventry Cranberry Co. Today, The Greene Company, a 103-acre family farm in nearby Greene, harvests cranberries from the bog.

The company won a preservation award for restoring the antique cranberry processing barn on the property, built in 1890.

1065 Narrow Lane, Greene, R.I.

Vermont Cranberry Company

Bob Lesnikoski harvests cranberries from Vermont’s only commercial cranberry bog in Fletcher. He built the bog, or bed, himself and planted the cranberry vines. Lesnikoski dry harvests cranberries, but floods the bed after picking to clean it out. He told the St. Albans Messenger in 2014 that he sells about 25,000 pounds of cranberries annually to local distributors.

Doing business as the Vermont Cranberry Co., he also sells cranberries at the Burlington Farmers Market.

2563 North Rd., East Fairfield, Vt.

* * *

Need some new ideas for your Thanksgiving feast? How about trying something old — and authentic — from the New England Historical Society.. Available in paperback and as an ebook from Amazon (click here).

This story was updated in 2023.

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Did Thanksgiving Cost John Adams His Presidency? He Thought It Did

Today people will undoubtedly celebrate Thanksgiving in some fashion across America. But for President John Adams, Thanksgiving was very much an optional holiday.

Thanksgiving celebrations themselves date to the earliest days of New England’s colonies, and they were paired with Fast Days. (New Hampshire observed Fast Day until 1991.) But local and colonial governments issued proclamations of the day of Thanksgiving. When the United States came into existence, Thanksgiving proclamations were political hot potatoes. President George Washington issued the first Thanksgiving proclamation in 1789, but not without considerable debate in Congress about its appropriateness..

Some John Adams Thanksgiving advice

Roger Sherman, U.S. senator from Connecticut, played a key role in persuading the Congress to approve the proclamation. Washington then issued a second Thanksgiving proclamation in 1795.

Roger Sherman by Ralph Earl

John Adams Thanksgiving

John Adams, during his presidency, declared two days of fasting and thanks giving, in May of 1798 and April of 1799.

“I do hereby recommend accordingly, that Thursday, the 25th day of April next, be observed throughout the United States of America as a day of solemn humiliation, fasting, and prayer,” he wrote in his second proclamation. He ordered the citizens to abstain from their secular occupations and to “devote the time to the sacred duties o religion in public and private.” Citizens should think about their offenses against God and implore forgiveness, he wrote.

Adams hoped that “through the grace of His Holy Spirit we may be disposed and enabled to yield a more suitable obedience to His righteous requisitions in time to come.” And he recommended that thanksgiving for “the countless favors which He is still continuing to the people of the United States, and which render their condition as a nation eminently happy when compared with the lot of others.”

Church and State

Adams was a New England Puritan, born into the Congregationalist religion. He evolved into a Unitarian, and he felt a civilized society depended on religion.

But in 1800, Thomas Jefferson soundly thumped him when he ran for reelection. Jefferson firmly believed the Constitution prohibited the president from having any role in “intermeddling with religious institutions, their doctrines, discipline or exercises.” That included issuing a Thanksgiving proclamation, which Jefferson did not do.

President Thomas Jefferson by Rembrandt Peale

The election of 1800 turned on a number of issues, but later in life Adams concluded his beliefs about religion, and his Thanksgiving proclamation, helped topple him from office. In an 1812 letter to Pennsylvania’s Benjamin Rush he wrote that his Fast and Thanksgiving proclamations fueled rumors that he belonged to the Presbyterian Church.

Benjamin Rush by Charles Wilson Peale.

“The National Fast, recommended by me turned me out of Office,” he wrote to Rush. He argued people connected the holiday with the Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, which he had nothing to do with. Then he commented on the church’s unpopularity.

“That assembly has allarmed and alienated Quakers, Anabaptists, Mennonists, Moravians, Sweedenborgians, Methodist, Catholicks, Protestant Episcopalians, Arians Socinians, Arminians & &c.,” Adams told Rush. You could even add Deists and Atheists to the list, he wrote. Then he explained that “a general Suspicion prevailed that the Presbyterian Church …aimed at an Establishment as a National Church.”

Secret Whisper

His political enemies represented him as a Presbyterian who headed the effort to establish a national church. “The Secret Whisper ran through them all the Sects “Let Us have Jefferson Madison, Burr, any body, whether they be Philosophers, Deist or even Atheists, rather than a Presbyterian President,” he wrote.

“Nothing is more dreaded than the National Government meddling with Religion,” Adams concluded.” This wild Letter I very much fear, contains Seeds of an Ecclesiastical History of the U.S. for a Century to come.”

Read Adams’ complete letter here. Years later, President James Madison also issued a Thanksgiving proclamation. But then no president proclaimed the holiday until Abraham Lincoln did in 1863.

Need some new ideas for your Thanksgiving feast? How about trying something old — and authentic — from the New England Historical Society’s latest book. Now available in paperback. Order your copy from Amazon (click here).

This story about John Adams’ Thanksgiving was updated in 2022.

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Neshobe Island, The Algonquin Round Table Summer Home in Vermont

During the 1920s and 1930s, rumors about the crazy doings on Neshobe Island flew through the resort hotels along Vermont’s Lake Bomoseen.

The summer vacationers heard that famous people lived on the dinky island on the large lake in western Vermont.

They were right, but they could not confirm the rumors for themselves. Neshobe Island served as the private club of New York’s famous Algonquin Round Table and their even more famous guests.

Neshobe Island

Vivien Leigh visited Neshobe Island after winning an Oscar for Gone With the Wind. Charles MacArthur and Ben Hecht finished their screenplay for Wuthering Heights there. The landscaping was done by Gerald Murphy, the Mark Cross heir who inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald’s fictional character Dick Diver.

And Harpo Marx took off all his clothes and waved an ax at snooping tourists.

“The thing we cherished most about the island, along with its natural beauty, was its isolation,” Marx wrote in his autobiography, Harpo Speaks.

Lake Bomoseen

Old Vitriol and Violets

Lake Bomoseen, just north of Castleton, Vt., is the largest lake within Vermont’s borders. In 1924, drama critic Alexander Woollcott rented seven-acre Neshobe Island just a quarter mile from Lake Bomoseen’s shore. He loved the island so much he bought it and turned it into a private club for his closest friends.

Woollcott was born in Colt’s Neck, N.J., and grew up in his family’s ramshackle 85-room mansion. He had no use for his father, a Cockney ne’er-do-well. When his father came round the breakfast table to kiss his sons goodbye, ‘Aleck would slyly thrust an upright fork above his ear in the fond hope of puncturing the paternal jowl,’ wrote his biographer, Samuel Hopkins Adams.

Alexander Woollcott

Woollcott grew up to become a drama critic, radio personality, New Yorker columnist, author and member of the witty group known as the Algonquin Round Table. It was Woollcott who first said, “All the things I like to do are either immoral, illegal or fattening.”

He was bitchy, fastidious, bookish, flamboyant and so pudgy Harpo Marx called him an escapee from the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. He proposed marriage to five different women, but each laughed him off.

James Thurber called him Old Vitriol and Violets.

Neshobe Island Club

Woollcott socialized with the media celebrities of his day, and he invited some of them to be charter members of the Neshobe Island Club. They included such Algonquinites as writer Alice Duer Miller, playwright Beatrice Kaufman and illustrator Neysa McMein, along with New Yorker co-founder Raoul Fleischmann, songwriter Howard Dietz, actress Ruth Gordon and publisher Harold Guinzberg.

Alice Duer Miller

There were only 10 members at any one time, and memberships could be bought and sold. Each member paid $1,000 to spend the summer on Neshobe Island.

They worked a little in the rustic house, talked a lot and played a lot at sports and games. Not everyone enjoyed it.

Vincent Sheen and Dorothy Parker sat in a corner and drank. “Alec was simply furious,” wrote Sheen. “We were in disgrace. We were anathema. we ween’t paying any attention to his witticisms and his goddamned games.”

Harpo Marx

Harpo Marx, the goofy, silent, harp-playing Marx Brother, received an invitation to Neshobe Island in the summer of 1927 from Alexander Woollcott.

To Harpo, the invitation was more than a feather in his social cap.

“It meant you had been nominated for the Alexander Woollcott Roster of Who’s Who,” he wrote. Then Harpo received an invitation for a second visit, joining the company of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontaine, Ethel Barrymore, Noel Coward and Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. Finally Woollcott asked him to join as a member.

Years later he waxed nostalgic about, ‘the reading of plays around the fireplace, the wonderful voices of the Lunts, Ethel Barrymore, Ruth Gordon and her husband Gregory Kelly.’ He remembered,

The sound of music coming across the water on Saturday nights from the open-air dance on the mainland, tinny and gay, like a crazy, woodland honky-tonk (the only times we ever felt tolerant toward the tourists).

On his first visit to Neshobe Island, Woollcott met Marx at the boat landing. Harpo drove up in a dilapidated car.

“What do you call that?” Woollcott said.

“My town car,” Marx replied.

“What was the town?” said Woollcott. “Pompei?”

Neshobe Island Rules

Woollcott ruled the island like a benevolent despot, setting down rules and directing activities: cribbage, poker, or party games like anagrams and Murder.

Harpo Marx

Breakfast was at 7 a.m. Cocktails ended the day, but intoxication was forbidden. When they played the Murder game, Woollcott wouldn’t allow dinner to be served until the murderer was discovered.

Under the rules, the secretly chosen murderer was to catch a ‘victim’ alone and say, ‘You’re dead.’ The person chosen as the district attorney had to identify the murderer.

Harpo Marx was once the murderer. He knew the women guests sometimes used a bathroom at the back of the house, so he sneaked back and wrote the death message in lipstick on the toilet paper. Under the rules, the victim had to stay where he or she was. For the next five hours the islanders looked for the murder victim. They were all hungry, but Woollcott refused to serve dinner. Finally at 11 p.m. Alice Duer Miller was discovered in the john.

Woollcott, who played the district attorney, immediately fingered the lightly educated Marx because he had written “YOU ARE DED.” Then he stormed off to bed.

Tourists

Everyone had to take a morning dip no matter how cold the lake. Woollcott, with his protective layers of fat, seemed impervious to the cold water, and read books propped on his belly while floating on his back.

Marx once caught tourists on shore looking through binoculars at Woollcott swimming. To Marx’s delight, they mistook Woollcott for Marie Dressler, a homely, heavyweight comedienne.

The Neshobe Islanders fought for and protected their privacy. Though the Vermonters didn’t bother them, the tourists did.

Once Alice Miller took a walk and rushed back to report tourists picnicking on the beach. Marx tore off his clothes, put on a red wig, smeared himself with mud and war-danced down to the shore, brandishing an ax. No more snoopers appeared that summer.

Dorothy Parker also wore nothing but a hat for three days, which Woollcott tolerated, except she also got drunk on those days. He then asked her to leave.

5 members of the Algonquin Round Table: (standing l to r) Art Samuels, Harpo Marx (sitting) Charles MacArthur, Dorothy Parker and Alexander Woollcott.

Croquet Obsession

The Algonquin Round Table is credited with popularizing croquet in the United States, and Woollcott is enshrined in the Croquet Hall of Fame.

When Woollcott wanted to play croquet on Neshobe Island, everyone had to play. He got Harpo Marx hooked on the game. He also got Harpo into the Croquet Hall of Fame.

They competed ferociously for some very high stakes. Marx lost $900 to Woollcott in his first week of playing on Neshobe Island.

Once, when Woollcott drove Marx’s ball into the woods for the third time, Bea Kaufman found him sobbing his heart out against a tree, wrote Margaret Case Harriman in The Vicious Circle: The Story of the Algonquin Round Table.

Nothing – absolutely nothing – made Woollcott as happy as a good croquet shot.

“When Aleck sent an opponent’s ball crashing down through the maples of Neshobe Island, he would swing his mallet around his head like David’s slingshot and whoop, “Buckety, buckety! Buckety, buckety! Buck-ket-ty-buck-ket-ty-in-to-the-lake!,” wrote Marx.

Or, wrote Marx, “He would dance around the court on his toes, kicking his heels together (unaware that his shorts were falling down), and singing in the exuberant soprano of a cherub in a Sunday-school play:

I’m des a ‘itto wabbit in de sunshine!
I’m des a ‘itto bunny in de wain!”

End of the Club

The Neshobe Island Club ended abruptly on Jan. 23, 1943.

Woollcott was broadcasting his Town Crier radio show from New York when he got agitated defending Franklin Roosevelt’s war policy. He stopped in midsentence, wrote “I AM SICK” on a sheet of paper and collapsed of a heart attack. He died a few hours later.

Images: Lake Bomoseen, By Jc3s5h – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=44282020.

With thanks to Harpo Speaks, by Harpo Marx. This story about Neshobe Island was updated in 2023.

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