THE THREE STOOGES Scrapbook
By Jeff Lenburg Joan Howard Maurer Greg Lenburg
Carol Publishing Group
Copyright © 1982 Jeff Lenburg, Joan Howard Maurer, Greg Lenburg. All rights reserved.
ISBN: 0-8065-0946-5
Chapter One
Historical Overview
FOR OVER FIVE DECADES, fans have been roaring with laughter at the wild, two-fisted, knockabout antics of the Three Stooges. It is their trademark blend of slaps in the face, bops in the head and pokes in the eye that continue to fracture audiences of all ages and all races and creeds throughout the world. Although success was not easily attained, the Stooges, like wine, have improved with age.
The winning formula that catapulted the Stooges into the limelight was first conceived in 1922 when Ted Healy, booked into the Brooklyn Prospect Theatre in New York, ran into trouble with his German acrobatic act. They walked out before their scheduled performance because of an argument with Healy. Now, minus the acrobats, Ted called on two boyhood friends--first Moe and then Shemp Howard--to come up from the audience and join him on stage. The Howards and Healy went on to fracture their audiences with their ad-libbed routines. From theatre circuit to theatre circuit, the crowd's reaction was always the same, instantaneous laughter.
According to an interview with Larry, Healy and his Stooges toured the vaudeville circuits for four years before Shemp decided he wanted to change. He had the opportunity to form a new act with an old friend and vaudeville comedian, Jack Waldron. Shemp broke the news to Healy during a visit to the Rainbow Gardens nightclub, in 1925, when the boys took a break from their scheduled performance to catch a new act on the bill: a song-and-dance team, "Haney Sisters and Fine." Loretta and Mabel Haney sang and danced while Larry Fine played the violin and did a Russian dance to the tune of "My Old Kentucky Home."
During Fine's performance, after Shemp had informed Ted of his decision to leave the act, Moe turned to Healy and suggested that Fine might make a perfect Stooge replacement for Shemp. Ted agreed, and after the show was over, Healy, Moe and Shemp went backstage to visit Larry. Inside Larry's dressing room, made him the offer to become a Stooge.
Even though the Haney act was breaking up, Larry reminisced, "I was hesitant about accepting Healy's offer. I had never done comedy before and was afraid of the outcome." Healy agreed to give Larry some time to think the offer over.
The following evening, Larry returned to the Rainbow Gardens, his mind preoccupied with whether or not to accept Healy's offer. That night, however, Larry's decision on Ted's contract offer was made for him. Since Prohibition was in effect, the serving of alcoholic beverages was against the law, and the nightclub had been shut down because of drinking on the premises. To compound matters, the nightclub manager, Fred Mann, feeling the incident had stained his image, committed suicide. As a result of the club's closure and Mann's death, Larry was released from his nightclub contract.
Immediately, Larry hailed a taxi to take him to the Cohan Theatre where Healy, Moe and Shemp were performing. Backstage, Fine dashed into the wings where he hoped to catch Healy's attention. Larry once recalled in an interview what happened when Ted saw him: "Ted was quick-witted and sharp. The moment he saw me, he signaled to Al Jolson, who was also in the show, to push me out on stage. To my surprise, there we were, ad-libbing the entire scene together. In the excitement I actually didn't know what Healy was saying. He would talk to me out loud and then whisper in my ear what I should answer. I can't remember what happened but the audience was laughing like hell. After the show, Shemp came up to Healy and said, `You don't need me anymore. You've got a great replacement in Larry.' And that's how I became a Stooge."
(Incidentally, it should be pointed out here that reports that Healy's original Stooges were comprised of Shemp Howard, Lou Warren and Dick Hakins are untrue. However, from 1922 to 1924 another performer, Kenneth Lackey, did on occasion replace Shemp. Lackey finally quit Healy to join Earl Carroll's Vanities and several years later returned to his home in Indiana to serve as a district court clerk.)
It took Fine several months to become comfortable with his new role as a Stooge and as a comedian. Soon Healy and his Stooges' raucous style of roughhouse shenanigans caught on and the team played to sell-out crowds in vaudeville theatres across the country.
Of one stage engagement at Loew's Rochester Theatre, a critic enthused: "There's a lot of what might be called `broad comedy' in Healy's contribution to the new combination screen (movie) and vaudeville. The majority know Healy as a good entertainer and he does not disappoint in his present offering. He is particularly fortunate in having such capable comedy assistants. They keep the fun moving, and while it is moving, the audience gets plenty of entertainment."
Healy's troupe continued to live up to the critic's praise, playing top vaudeville circuits throughout the nation. The team was usually billed as "Ted Healy and His Racketeers" (sometimes "Ted Healy and His Laugh Racketeers"), "Ted Healy and His Three Southern Gentlemen" and "Ted Healy and His Gang." But Healy's ensemble was never called "Ted Healy and the Three Stooges." (Larry Fine erroneously reported in his book, A Stroke of Luck, that he, Moe and Shemp were billed in vaudeville as the Three Stooges, which is completely false.)
In 1927, Healy, Shemp and a gang of funsters frolicked on Broadway in J.J. Shubert's musical revue, A Night in Spain, Moe left the act to be closer to his family, as his daughter was due to be born that year, while Fine married his former vaudeville partner, Mabel Haney. Healy and Shemp Howard, despite the loss of Moe and Larry, appeared in the Shubert revue, along with Betty Healy, Phil Baker, Sid Silvers and Helen Kane.
Larry and Moe returned to join Healy's act in time for the Broadway revue A Night in Venice, which opened at the Shubert Theatre in New York on May 21, 1929. Healy and his Stooges--Moe, Larry and Shemp--and a permanent place on the bill after a successful tryout engagement in New Haven, Atlantic City and Akron. The lavish revue, with 25 dazzling sketches, was directed and choreographed by Busby Berkeley. The New York Times reported that Healy's hilarious trio were "three of the frowziest numbskulls ever assembled." A Night in Venice closed, due to the onset of the Depression, after 175 performances.
Although it lacked longevity, A Night In Venice pointed up the Stooges' record-breaking performances, drove their careers to new heights and attracted interest from Hollywood talent scouts, who came en masse when Healy and his Stooges were booked at New York's Palace Theatre in 1930. Fox Studios, the forerunner to 20th Century-Fox, was among the film studios represented.
Fox scout, impressed with the team's performance, immediately signed Healy, Moe, Larry and Shemp to star in Rube Goldberg's comedy, Soup to Nuts. Xylophone player Freddie Sanborn, who was also at the Palace Theatre, was billed in the film as one of "Healy's Racketeers" along with Moe, Larry and Shemp. The Stooges' crazy antics were utilized in the film, which had them playing several roles: part-time firemen who aid Healy in crashing a society affair, and soldiers from the Mexican Revolution. Lou Breslow wrote the film's screenplay from Goldberg's original story and Benjamin Stoloff directed. (It is interesting to note that, several years later, Breslow worked with the Stooges at Columbia when he directed the team's second comedy, Punch Drunks (1934).)
While the feature was less than sensational, Fox was tremendously impressed with the Stooges and studio executives offered them a seven-year contract to star in features. Up until then, Moe, Larry and Shemp answered to Healy with respect to all contracts, since their working agreement with Ted was a verbal pact of faith. This was an unusual set-up, with Healy and not the studio or vaudeville theatre manager paying the Stooges their weekly salaries. Ted's salary to star in Soup to Nuts was a third less than his usual vaudeville salary, but was lucrative enough at $1250 per week. Out of this, Healy paid each Stooge $150 per week to star in the Fox film. When Healy learned of the studio's offer of an exclusive contract to the Stooges, he stormed into the office of Fox's studio head, Winnie Sheehan, arguing that the contract was invalid without his approval. In a rage, Ted took the contract from Sheehan's desk and tore it to shreds.
Moe, Larry and Shemp soon caught wind of Healy's latest double-dealing and left the act immediately to form one of their own under the name of Howard, Fine and Howard and billed as the "Three Lost Souls." The trio performed on the West Coast and worked their way back to New York. In 1931, the Stooges hired Jack Walsh as their straight man and together wreaked havoc on the stages of the RKO-Keith Theatre Circuit. On the same bill were such prominent vaudeville performers as Adelaide Hall ("The Crooning Blackbird"), magician Fred Keating and the Hazel Mangean Girls.
The Walsh-Stooges combination was making headlines. Critics reported that Walsh complemented the trio's broad, physical style of comedy to perfection. The Stooges' act with Walsh had many routines from the Healy days but an additional bit of nonsense had them constantly interrupting his singing of "Shine On, Harvest Moon." One theatre critic raved "Howard, Fine and Howard have one of the most amusing acts in show business. The way they punch each other (apparently) right in the eyes and slap each other around is nobody's business but we should make it ours if we were on the receiving end. They have a straight man, Jack Walsh, whose handsome presence and easy style make a strong contrast."
During this period Ted Healy, wanting to regroup the Stooges, tried to steal first one Stooge and then all three of them back, using a number of underhanded methods. First, he filed a legal suit against the team for promoting themselves in newspaper ads as "Howard, Fine and Howard--Former associates of Ted Healy in A Night in Venice." Healy claimed the use of his name, combined with the Stooges' use of his comedy material in their act, was illegal. But a U.S. District Court ruled in favor of the Stooges, claiming that Healy had no rights to the material.
The material that Healy filed suit over was skits taken from portions of the Stooge's performance in A Night in Venice. However, Moe Howard, always the team's manager, secured permission from the show's producer, J.J. Shubert, to use certain pieces of material from the show and incorporate it into their act. Healy's Irish temper was slow to cool and in frustration he resorted to threats in a vain attempt to stop the Stooges from continuing their use of any of his material.
Because of Healy's constant threats, Moe, Larry and Shemp became concerned for their own well-being and decided to change some of the material, hoping to pacify Ted. Before one engagement, working at fever pitch, the Stooges in one evening sketched out about a half-dozen new routines. As Larry Fine recalled: "We worked in between the first and second show, and did a complete turnabout. We worked out an old bit where we were musicians and faked a riot, breaking instruments over each others' beads and staging a fight. The audience just loved us, and so did the manager, who booked us for eight more weeks."
Even with their act revamped, Shemp continued to fear Healy and became so concerned over what action the comedian might take next that he stressed his desire to leave the act. Moe, trying to entice Shemp to stay, agreed that he and Larry would raise his salary and pay him more than they were making. According to Moe, Shemp took 36 percent of the team's salary while he and Larry retained 32 percent apiece. The trio then divided, using this new formula, the lucrative salary of $900 a week.
Somehow Shemp must have had a sixth sense about Healy, who, continuing with his threats, warned them to quit using their comedy material or he would actually sabotage one of their engagements with a bomb. Ted was the kind of person who, if he were mad enough, would carry out his threats. But as the comedian's temper began to cool, his threats also waned.
In the meantime, the Stooges continued to fracture audiences, young and old, and critics continued to acclaim the team's growing success as vaudeville comedians. Some critics went so far as to say that Moe, Larry and Shemp "remind us somehow of the Marx Brothers. Their humor is natural and unforced and they have good gags."
Watching Howard, Fine and Howard climb the ladder of success, Healy realized his act wasn't the same without them and kept begging them to come back. But the Stooges refused, since they had grown tired of Healy's shenanigans. In desperation, Ted hired three novice comics as his Stooges--Paul "Mousie" Garner, Dick Hakins and Jack Wolf, who with Healy floundered about in Billy Rose's new musical, Crazy Quilt. Critics reported that Healy's three new knockabout comics "don't equal the comedian's original Stooges in any professional way." Suddenly, Ted came to the realization that this new act was not working and begged Moe, Larry and Shemp to forgive and forget.
By now, Moe Howard had become the team's manager and the Stooges' driving force. He made the decisions when it came to theatre bookings and the team's salaries, so he also reviewed the matter of Healy's offer. Shemp was reticent but Larry was willing. So Moe gave Ted an ultimatum: If he wanted a deal, with all three of them returning as his Stooges, he had to stop drinking. Ted vowed never to take another drink, and in 1932 the Stooges made the deal official.
When the Stooges, Moe, Larry and Shemp, returned to Healy's act, the comedian let Garner, Wolf and Hakins go. Six years later in 1938, when Moe, Larry and Curly became the famous "Columbia's Three Stooges," Garner, Wolf and Hakins filed a law suit against the trio, claiming that they had stolen the name "Three Stooges" from them and kept them from achieving a like success. However, research and a legal document signed by Moe Howard, Larry Fine and Curly Howard has proven that the name "Three Stooges" was first conceived by the original Stooges, Moe, Larry and Curly. (It should also be noted that Mousie Garner has claimed that Wolf, Hakins and himself starred in Vitaphone comedies as Stooges before the Three Stooges were featured in their own series at Columbia. He has also maintained that he occasionally spelled Shemp Howard as a third Stooge during Shemps association with Ted Healy, Moe and Larry. Research has found these claims to be untrue.)
When Healy and his original Stooges got together again, J.J. Shubert immediately booked the team into his new Broadway show, The Passing Show of 1932. But after four weeks of rehearsal, an argument ensued between Healy and Shubert over a loophole in the comedian's contract. Evidently, Healy's personal manager, Paul Dempsey, noticed that Ted's contract didn't contain a closing date for the show, thus making it void. Healy broke his contract with Shubert to take an offer from the Balaban & Katz. Circuit for $6,000 a week (Shubert was only paying him $2800 a week). The Stooges, meanwhile, went back to their original salary of only $100 a week. Shemp did not want any part of Ted's deviousness and refused to leave the Shubert musical. (Also on the Shubert bill with Shemp was another comedian, who later became a Stooge himself, Joe Besser.) Not long after this, Shemp starred in Vitaphone comedies and later established himself in the role of Knobby Walsh in the Joe Palooka series.
Moe and Larry went along with Healy to work for Balaban & Katz, and as a temporary replacement for Shemp, Healy hired xylophonist Freddie Sanborn (who had worked with the Stooges before in Soup to Nuts) for the team's exclusive six-week engagement. Despite Shemp's departure, Ted and his Stooges drew packed houses every night and continued to leave the audiences in stitches. Once the engagement ended, Sanborn left the group and returned to his xylophone playing.
With Sanborn gone, Moe decided to recruit his brother Jerry, later nicknamed "Curly," to take over the cornerstone of third Stooge. Curly at that time sported long, wavy-brown hair and a waxed moustache. Legend has it that when Jerry joined the team, he shaved off both his hair and moustache, but photographs of the early team show that Curly shaved his head but kept his stubby moustache. He snipped off the moustache when the Stooges and Healy landed their contract to star in films at MGM. With Curly aboard, it should also be pointed out that the team's salary structure changed. Curly received $75 a week while Moe's salary climbed to $140 and Larry took home $125 a week. Curly's theatrical experience was limited to a brief stint as musical conductor for the Orville Knapp Band. Yet, inexperience did not inhibit him from becoming becoming a tremendous asset to the act. In his first stage appearance, Curly's nervousness caused him speak in a very high-pitched voice. That voice became his trademark as well as his silly grunts and squeals which he used to cover up his inability to remember his lines. Moe recalls that Ted was concerned about Curly's inexperience. "What Curly did for the first three weeks was just run across the stage in a bathing suit, carrying a little pail of water. That's all he did, run back and forth, until we gradually worked him into the act," Howard said.
It was during the team's performance at the New York Cafe, in 1933, that an MGM scout discovered and signed Ted Healy and His Stooges to a studio contract. As explained earlier, Healy signed the contracts for all of them.
Unlike the Stooges' previous journey to Hollywood for the Fox film, this time the team's trip west was for keeps. MGM executives had laid plans to star Healy and His Stooges in musical comedies and features. The madcap trio's first, joint feature appearance was in MGM's Turn Back the Clock (1933) with Lee Tracy and Mae Clark. They were next featured in Meet the Baron (1933) with Jimmy Durante, ZaSu Pitts and Edna May Oliver, followed by their roles in Dancing Lady (1933) starring Joan Crawford and Clark Gable. Also cast in the picture were Franchot Tone, Nelson Eddy, Robert Benchley and Fred Astaire. Metro next used the Stooges and Healy in Fugitive Lovers (1934) and then spotted them in a comedy feature, Hollywood Party (1934), along with Jimmy Durante, Mickey Mouse, Polly Moran and a comedy team in their own right, Laurel and Hardy.
Besides blockbuster feature-length movies, Healy and His Stooges also starred in five musical-comedy shorts which co-starred Ted's real-life girl friend, Bonnie Bonnell. Bonnell had also worked with Healy and His Stooges on stage during their vaudeville days. Of the team's five comedy two-reelers, two of them were filmed in two-strip experimental color--Nertsery Rhymes (1933), their first musical short, and Hello, Pop! (1933). Jack Cummings was the series' producer and director. The films were a combination of new comedy sketches starring Healy and the Stooges and stock footage of dance extravaganzas lifted from MGM musicals.
Curly Howard also made a cameo appearance in Roast Beef and Movies (1934), another experimental color short. Larry Fine recalls that Metro tried to reproduce the Stooges by pairing Curly with two other comedians, George Givot and Bobby Callahan. This didn't pan out, even though the film was a critical success. Curly also appeared in another MGM comedy, this one with Moe Howard, called Jailbirds of Paradise, which was released in color on March 10, 1934.
Just four months prior to the release of Jailbirds of Paradise, Universal Pictures' film producer Brian Foy signed Ted Healy, Moe, Larry and Curly to star in four feature-length films commencing with Myrt and Marge (1933). Research has found, contrary to previously published reports, that the Stooges do appear in this Universal film, portraying Ted Healy's bumbling stagehands. Al Boasberg, whom the trio worked under at MGM, directed the team in the film. For reasons unknown, however, the Stooges never fulfilled their contractual obligation with Universal by starring in the other three features. (Universal also tried to cast the Stooges in Gift of Gab (1934) during the trio's tenure at Columbia, but studio head Harry Cohn nixed the deal. Instead, producer Ryan James sought out three stooges of his own for the roles.)
In addition, the team had agreements to star, jointly or separately, in the following productions: The Gangs All Here (a working title for a film based on the popular Broadway show), a film version of Billy Rose's Crazy Quilt; Going Hollywood (1933) with Bing Crosby and Marion Davies; and Employment Agency for Stooges (written by Herman Timberg and planned first as a feature, then as a short). According to Hollywood trade paper reports, Employment Agency was meant to launch the team's career in features as "filmdom's successors to the Marx Brothers." Unfortunately, for reasons unclear, the Stooges never pursued any of these projects.
