Neshobe Island wasn’t a place you visited without an invitation. That's what some tourists discovered one day, when they pulled their boat ashore and were greeted by a bizarre one-man un-welcoming committee.
It’s hard to say what was most frightening about the man – his incomprehensible screaming, the axe he carried or his strange attire. He wore a red wig, and that was it, unless you count the mud smeared across his body.
The visitors fled so quickly they didn’t realize the naked man was Harpo Marx.
In the mid-1920s, Harpo and other famous actors, writers and artists purchased most of the island, which lies in Castleton’s Lake Bomoseen , and formed the Neshobe Island Club. For two decades, the island was their sanctuary.
Harpo once wrote: “The thing we cherished (about the island) along with its natural beauty, was its isolation.”
Alexander Woollcott was an influential literary critic. He first hatched the idea of buying the island. Woollcott was a member of the Algonquin Round Table, a group of New York ’s entertainment and literary elites that met daily in the city for long lunches and wickedly witty conversation. Here’s a sample: author Dorothy Parker, informed that President Coolidge had died, had whispered: “How can they tell?”
Algonquin members formed the core of the Neshobe Island Club.
A single invitation to the island from Woollcott meant nomination to his “Who’s Who” list, quipped Harpo; a second invite meant you had made it. Famous visitors included Laurence Olivier, Helen Hayes, Thornton Wilder, Margaret Mitchell, Irving Berlin and Walt Disney.
Woollcott insisted guests swim before breakfast, no matter how cold the water was. Breakfasts lasted hours, Algonquin style, with animated conversation and Woollcott reading aloud his mail.
Island life was informal and rustic. The main amenities were outhouses, kerosene lamps and wood stoves. Members later brought plumbing and refrigeration to the island.
Some island visitors preferred to spend much of the day nude. Dorothy Parker sometimes wore only a gardening hat. And Harpo had greeted the invaders naked because he’d been skinny dipping at the time.
The Neshobe crowd was a competitive lot who enjoyed cutthroat games of croquet in which players gleefully knocked their opponents’ balls into the lake.
During one game, Harpo wanted to strike Woollcott’s ball, but a maple blocked the way. Undeterred, Harpo sawed an old tire in two and lay half around the tree. He then slammed his ball into the tire, around the tree and into Woollcott’s ball. Woollcott threw his mallet in disgust and stormed off.
Apart from Harpo’s wild-man act, relations with people on the mainland were mostly cordial. Local residents often worked for the club, ferrying guests, groceries and messages to the island. Woollcott even volunteered at the town library, serving as a trustee and donating many books. Neshobe had become his home.
When Woollcott died in 1943, Harpo said a fitting tribute would have been for his ashes to be “blown through the fifth wicket of the Neshobe Island croquet ground.”
