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'El Rancho Harpo' Designated Historic

Rancho Mirage currently has 26 designated historic properties for future generations to enjoy. The designated homes represent designs by many famous architects such as William Cody, E. Stewart Williams, Val Powelson, Van Pelt & Lind, Wallace Neff & Kenneth Kellogg.

The Historic Preservation Program, initiated in 2003, provides a way to identify certain structures and sites which represent eras, events, or persons important in the City’s cultural, archaeological, social, economic, architectural and/or political history for the purpose of encouraging the preservation, improvement and promotion of our City’s treasured properties.

Last May, the owners of El Rancho Harpo, the former Harpo Marx estate, were successful in their bid to have the Historic Preservation Commission and the City Council designate the compound on La Paz Road historic.

In the annals of comedy, few acts can compare to the Marx Brothers, who stand out as the world’s prominent comedic tour-de-force. There was a time when four of the five brothers had homes in Rancho Mirage.

The five brothers, Leonard (Chico), Adolph/Arthur (Harpo), Milton (Gummo). Julius (Groucho) and Herbert (Zeppo), sons of German-Jewish immigrants, grew up in the tenements of turn-of-the-century New York City and played the vaudeville circuit throughout the country before gaining acclaim with their stage shows on Broadway. According to a Time magazine cover story about the brothers from 1932, the four older Marx brothers received their nicknames in 1915 in Galesburg, Illinois from Art Fischer, a vaudeville monologist, who was playing poker with them. Groucho was glum, Harpo played the harp, Chico liked chicken, and Gummo wore rubbers (galoshes). Zeppo’s nickname, selected by Groucho, means nothing.

Perhaps the boys were genetically inclined for a life in entertainment. Their maternal grandfather, Lafe Schoenberg, was a traveling magician and ventriloquist throughout Germany before immigrating to America. Their uncle, Al Shean, found great success as a comedian on the vaudeville circuit. Their mother, Minnie, had a master plan to get the boys into show business and worked tirelessly at it. Although poor, Minnie was able to buy a piano for five dollars down and a dollar a week. The Marxes only had enough money to pay for lessons for one of the boys, so Chico, as the oldest, got the lessons. Minnie told him that he had to teach Harpo everything he was learning in his lessons. Harpo relates in his book Harpo Speaks! that Chico was too lazy to teach him anything but two songs. Chico started getting jobs playing piano background at silent movie theaters. Because Chico and Harpo looked so much alike, Chico would sometimes have Harpo go and cover his gigs. Harpo, with only the two songs in his repertoire, learned to play the same song over and over in different styles to try to cover up his short playlist.

Groucho went on the road at age 13 working in an act as a boy soprano until his voice changed the next year, at which time he was sent back home to New York. Uncle Al wrote skits for the boys and Minnie got them into vaudeville. The boys honed their routines on the road and in time managed to get a break at a Broadway theater, gaining many positive reviews and larger audiences. That led to several shows that became the talk of Broadway. Gummo enlisted in the Army when the U.S. joined World War I in 1917. After the war, he chose not to continue with the act and was replaced by Zeppo, who had just finished high school.

There are several stories about how Harpo became the act’s madcap, non-speaking character. The popular story states that a reviewer once wrote of Harpo, “Adolph Marx performed beautiful pantomime which was ruined whenever he spoke.” It is said that he never spoke onstage again until the night of his final performance.

The Marx Brothers’ wildly successful Broadway shows became popular just as the motion picture studios were changing to “talkies.” They signed a contract with Paramount and embarked on their film career. Their first two released films were adaptations of Broadway shows: The Cocoanuts (1929) and Animal Crackers (1930). Both were written by George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind. Their third movie, Monkey Business (1931), was their first that was not based on a stage production. Horse Feathers (1932), in which the brothers satirized the American College system and Prohibition, was their most popular film yet and won them the cover of Time magazine. It included a running gag from their stage work, in which Harpo revealed having nearly everything but the kitchen sink in his coat. At various points in Horse Feathers Harpo pulls out of his coat a wooden mallet, a fish, a coiled rope, a tie, a poster of a woman in her underwear, a cup of hot coffee, a sword, and, just after Groucho warns him that he “can’t burn the candle at both ends,” a candle burning at both ends. In another famous sketch, from Animal Crackers, Harpo drops a full banquet’s worth of silverware out of his sleeve, followed by a coffeepot. In The Cocoanuts, he takes scissors and cuts off a singer’s dress, unhooking her bra and holding it up to show that it has three cups.

Their last Paramount film, Duck Soup (1933) is now considered by many to be their finest: it is the higher-rated of the two Marx Brothers films to make the American Film Institute’s “100 years ... 100 Movies” list (the other film being 1935’s A Night at the Opera). The Marx Brothers made 13 feature films, the last being Love Happy (1949). Except for Chico, the brothers had invested their earnings wisely and didn’t really need to work much. Chico enjoyed gambling, while Groucho and Harpo followed Gummo’s advice on investments. Zeppo, who always played the good-looking straight man, was said to be the funniest Marx Brother. He left the act after the first five films and went to work as an agent with Gummo’s talent agency. Somewhat of a mechanical whiz, Zeppo invented a wristwatch that would monitor the pulse rate of cardiac patients, and his company, Marman Products, produced clamping devices which were used in the first atomic bomb raids over Japan in 1945.

Harpo married actress Susan Fleming in 1936 and the couple went on to adopt four children. The oldest, William (Bill) Marx, is a musician and entertainer that still lives in Rancho Mirage. If Zeppo was the funniest brother and Groucho was the wittiest brother, Harpo was the smartest brother. He was a member of the famed literary Algonquin Roundtable with Robert Benchley, Alexander Woolcott, Dorothy Parker and Harold Ross among others. In Los Angeles he and his brothers were members of the unrestricted Hillcrest Country Club. In fact it was at Hillcrest that the idea of Tamarisk Country Club first came up, as there were no unrestricted country clubs in the Palm Springs Valley at the time.

Gummo had been coming to the desert for decades when the idea for Tamarisk Country Club came up in the card room of Hillcrest. The four Marx brothers were among the 65 founders of Tamarisk, along with other luminaries like Jack Benny, Frank Sinatra, George Burns and Danny Kaye. Harpo, Gummo and Groucho all lived in homes on DaVall Drive before building at Tamarisk.

Harpo commissioned famed Southern California architect Wallace Neff to design the hacienda on La Paz Road. Neff also designed homes for other Hollywood celebrities such as Cary Grant, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and Harpo’s brother, Groucho Marx. Several of the homes have been subsequently purchased by current mega celebrities such as Diane Keaton, Madonna and Brad Pitt.

Neff, a native of Pasadena, was the grandson of Andrew McNally, of the Rand-McNally Corporation. McNally, an Irish immigrant, co-founded the map and atlas company with William Rand in Chicago several years before the great Chicago fire. McNally enjoyed escaping cold Chicago and spent winters at his home in Pasadena with his family. His oldest daughter Nanny married Howard Neff, and the two decided to live in California, as Neff was beset with respiratory ailments. Wallace Neff was their second son and went to school to study architecture and design. He primarily drew from the architectural tradition of both Spain and the Mediterranean as a whole, and he is generally responsible for developing Southern California’s distinct architectural style.

Groucho Marx commissioned Neff to design a house for him and his third wife Eden, in Los Angeles. Harpo was impressed with Neff’s style and hired him as well to design his new desert home in Rancho Mirage.

El Rancho Harpo was completed in the spring of 1957. The 8,951-square-foot home sits on 2.25 acres of the Tamarisk Country Club golf course and has 8 bedrooms, 7.75 bathrooms, a regulation croquet course, a tennis court and a large swimming pool.

Harpo loved playing golf at Tamarisk, even in the summer. In his book, Son of Harpo Speaks, Bill Marx relates how his father would wear little if anything at all on the golf course in the dead of summer and would keep himself cool by jumping in the pools of the unoccupied homes along the greens.

Sadly, Harpo died on September 28, 1964, while undergoing heart surgery following a heart attack. He was 75 years old. He was cremated and it has long been rumored that his ashes were sprinkled in a sand trap at Tamarisk. Susan Marx lived in the house until 1972, when she had a smaller home built a few blocks away on Palm View Road. She lived at that house until her death in 2002 at age 94.