I Stooged to Conquer Page 2

  Moe’s mother and father, Jennie and Solomon Horwitz.

  Irving was seven and entered P.S. 101 in Bath Beach. He always attended and was average at everything. Jack was quite bright and took his studies in stride. At that time there were no junior high schools. You spent eight years in grade school, and if you graduated you went directly on to high school. Both Irving and Jack graduated and went on. Shemp started school in 1901 at the age of six. In his first few years at school he barely squeezed his way through each level.

  My school career began in September 1903, when I was six. Whenever I attended school—which in later years wasn’t very often—I was constantly fighting. I fought on my way to school, in school, and on my way home. As I said before, my hair had grown very long, and every school day I would awaken a half hour before everyone else so my mother could wind finger curls through my hair; they reached almost to my shoulders. There were about twenty of them in all, and they resembled a bunch of cigars stuck on my head. Knowing that it was my mother’s greatest delight to spend that half hour arranging my curls, I didn’t complain. But soon it became the battle of my school career. (A short time later, my youngest brother Jerome, better known as “Curly,” was born—I called him “Babe”—another boy who was to have been a girl. I kept hoping he’d have curly hair so that much of my mother’s attention would fall on him. No such luck, though; he had long, straight brown hair.) From the first days of walking to school with Shemp, I would have to grit my teeth and take the teasing remarks from both boys and girls, but I believe that I started planning my revenge on the very first day. I remember the look on the face of Mrs. Lynch, the principal, when she first saw me. She called to her assistant and said smilingly—I’m certain they were both holding back hysterical laughter—”Meet Moses Horwitz, our new student with the beautiful hair.”

  As she played with one of my curls, she instructed her assistant to take me to the kindergarten to meet Mrs. Warner. I think she wanted to call me “girl” but chose “child” instead. If she had, I might never have gone to school at all. Even at my tender age I was a stubborn kid. Fortunately for me the schools were coeducational, and Mrs. Warner was kind and intelligent. She sat me in the first row of boys adjoining the last row of girls, right next to a girl who had curls longer than mine. I was grateful for her consideration, but my fighting began early in kindergarten, and I fought from then until I was eleven. I sported more black eyes and bloody noses than any youngster alive … anywhere. My mother never knew the real cause of my shiners and bloody noses, for I told her I had gotten them from accidents at play, and Mrs. Warner could never convince her that I should have a regular boy’s haircut. I knew I must give my mother her half hour of pleasure even if it meant that I had to throw punches at everyone, no matter what the result—and most of the time I gave a pretty good account of myself.

  Kindergarten was just not for me. I raised hell from the start. Sometimes I fought about my curls, sometimes I just raised hell. One of my worst offenses was dipping little spitballs into the inkwell and blowing them at different kids in the room. One time I put red ink in my mouth, laid my head on the desk, and let the blood-colored ink ooze out. I must have been convincing, for it really scared the teacher and the students. Finally the principal was called in—my parents, too. The kids and I had a good time of it, but I paid for it later.

  It seemed my school-days fighting career was endless. Finally the principal could stand it no longer and moved me from P.S. 101 to P.S. 128. The change made no difference except that there I met a freckle-faced redhead appropriately named Rusty. His red hair had eyebrows to match and his freckles were not at all like mine, which he called “gingersnaps.” I was the only boy, I think, who had black hair, black eyebrows, blue eyes, and a face full of freckles. Rusty and I became inseparable friends. He would wait for me after school and we would walk home together—he believed there was safety in numbers. Now when the other boys would call me sissy or “girly-girly,” he would feel sorry for me, and whenever my opponent was too big to handle, he’d join in. We would stand back to back fighting three boys at a time, and soon Rusty was getting his share of black eyes and bloody noses. When I got my boxing gloves, Rusty and I practiced together every day, preparing for our daily fights at school. Rusty liked me … curls and all.

  When I was ten, I began to notice girls and had finally figured out that the bumps under sweaters weren’t hidden grapefruit. Now they were something to be admired, at least at a distance. Shemp, with his freckles, good humor, and wiliness, was becoming increasingly popular and was finally emerging from his whimpering stage.

  I was still fighting my way through school when the principal sent for my father. My parents hadn’t yet realized that my long curls were causing most of the trouble. I realized they were very upset, so for the next semester I took all the jibes without return fire. Rusty thought there was something wrong with me. For the next couple of years I shied away from trouble; I went to school early, scurrying through the basement to class, and afterward I hid in the engineer’s room until everyone was gone, and then I would sneak home. My parents found out about my shortcuts and threatened to send me to another school. The thought of being chided by another group of kids who had never seen my crop of curls kept me in school—suffering. It wasn’t so much taking the ribbing as it was the possible loss of my chum Rusty.

  Another of our buddies was Donald McMann, who had recently moved to the neighborhood. We met on his first day at my school. He was walking to one side of me as we headed for school, and I could see he was appraising me from head to toe, perhaps trying to figure out what sort of freckle-faced freak I was. Don had just turned ten and was about an inch and a half taller than I and maybe seven or eight pounds heavier—and strong. He had black hair, black eyes, and a face as dark as a black man. He kept in step with me and eyed me all the way to the vacant lot which opened up to the entrance of the school.

  When we got to the center of the lot, there stood the guy everyone in school called “Ugly.” He was mean and ugly and caused me no end of trouble during the last semester. He saw me and shouted, “Hey! Millie, I’d like to screw you tonight, can I have a date? Hey, what happened to your tits?” Normally, I would have lit into him. Instead, I was more embarrassed at what this dark, handsome new boy would think than anything else, and thoughts of trouble in a new school turned in my mind.

  Then I heard Don speak for the first time, a low, distinct voice trembling with excitement. “Did you hear what that monkey said?”

  “Yes,” I nodded. To speak would have brought me to tears.

  “Aren’t you gonna do anything?” Words wouldn’t come; I shook my head no!

  Ugly spoke again. “Your whole family are Jew sissies.” Like a cannon blast, Don leaped at him and with one punch knocked him to the ground. He lay there silently. Donald opened his lunch box, took out a Thermos of cold milk, poured it on his handkerchief, and mopped Ugly’s brow until he came to. He pulled that ugly clown to his feet and then made him kneel and, in front of about eight boys and six girls, made him apologize to me. I wanted to run, and would have if Don hadn’t held me and whispered, “You meet me by the drinking fountain after school.” I wished I could tell him why I didn’t punch that ugly creep all over the lot, but I just couldn’t. Meanwhile word had spread all over school about how the handsome newcomer had flattened Ugly.

  After school, Don took Rusty and me to his house. In his room, the walls were covered with pictures of fighters: Billy Papke, Fighting Dick Nelson, Bob Fitzsimmons, Jeffries, Corbett, and others. There were all sizes of dumbbells spread out on the floor, and a pair of boxing gloves hung nearby.

  I gazed into Donald’s mirror and saw my curls hanging down, a good ten inches long. I glanced over at Donald and Rusty, two normal-looking young boys. I looked in the mirror again, and then something on Don’s dresser caught my eye. A shiny object with black enamel handles. I looked at myself again, trying to create one last impression.

  I grabbed the
scissors and, with my eyes closed, began to circle my head, clipping curls all the way around. I didn’t dare to look at the floor to see what had fallen. When I finished, I dropped the scissors, afraid to look at myself. Tears quietly flowed down my cheeks.

  When I finally opened my eyes, I found Rusty and Don pointing at me and laughing hysterically. I couldn’t resist looking into the mirror. I choked up. There wasn’t a laugh in me. There in the mirror I caught sight of the haircut that was to make me famous in the 1920s. I laughed, then I cried, and I shuddered seeing all those curls lying on the floor and realizing that I had destroyed one of my mother’s few pleasures.

  I turned and ran out of the house. I hid in a nearby barn, where I stayed until dark; then I moved underneath our porch. I lay in the dirt and shivered until midnight and, from outside, I could hear my mother sobbing and my father describing me to the police: long black curls … a mass of freckles …

  At about two in the morning, shaking with chills and saddened by the weeping of my mother on the porch above, I knew I had to give myself up. I coughed softly a couple of times, then I coughed a bit louder. “I think Moe is under the porch,” said my father, grabbing a candle and bringing it out to the lattice. He pulled it aside, peered in, and speaking softly so he wouldn’t frighten my mother, urged me to come out. Shemp knelt alongside my father. He wouldn’t dare go under the porch even in the daytime. My father finally crawled in while Shemp held the candle. I assured my dad that there was nothing wrong with me. He let me know I had scared my mother out of her wits, for which I was sorry, but he didn’t notice my shorn head in the dark. We all walked onto the porch and then into the lighted hallway.

  My brother Shemp spotted me first. He let out a war whoop. “Take a look at your son with the fright wig. He thinks it’s Halloween, and what do you know, it’s not a wig; it’s a brand-new haircut.” Then Mother, Irving, and Jack came in. They stared speechless for a moment. Then Mother looked at me. I looked at her and the tears welled up in my eyes, then the tears welled up in hers. She said softly, “Thank God you did it. I didn’t have the courage.”

  Moe’s mother, Jennie Horwitz.

  My grades in school were always excellent. I never had to take my books home to do my homework, as I had such a retentive memory that I could absorb everything right in class. But the grief I gave my teachers far outweighed the joy of my scholarship. On Friday afternoons, when we students would be taking our tests, I would finish long before the others. There was nothing to do but listen to those forty pens scratching on paper. I had to do something, so I would let out a war whoop like the bloodcurdling cry of some savage Indian. Almost automatically, the teacher would yell, “Moses, into the cloakroom!” One time, I remember, I peeked around the corner of the cloakroom and asked the teacher if I could go to the lavatory.

  “No! Get back in that cloakroom!” she yelled. I really had to go, so I peed in a flowerpot. I soon found out that flowerpots had drainage holes in them, and a clear yellow liquid ran out of the bottom, along the floor under the cloakroom door, and into the classroom.

  2

  SHOW BIZ VIA VITAGRAPH AND THE MELODRAMA

  It was 1908 and it was the year that I made up my mind that I was going to be an actor. I was eleven now and we had moved from Bath Beach.

  In early spring of that year I attended school only 40 days out of a possible 103. Absent cards were constantly being mailed to our house. I’d wait for them to come and take them as soon as the postman put them in the box. Then I would forge a note that Moses was attending school in his grandmother’s neighborhood. This routine worked for one entire semester and I’m sure my teachers didn’t miss me.

  During this period I had an awful time with the truant officers; fortunately in those days they had to ride in horse-drawn carriages, so they had a hard time keeping up with me. They were now beginning to question my mother. She wanted no trouble—she was having enough of her own—so she lied for me. She said I had an aunt in New York who was desperately ill and alone and that I was the only one who could care for her.

  While the truant officers were busy searching for me, I would be out catching frogs at a nearby pond and selling them to a local saloon at fifteen cents apiece or a dollar for ten. I’d give seventy cents to my mother and spend the other thirty cents to go to the theater—a dime for train fare, a dime for lunch, and a dime to sit in the upper gallery of the melodrama theater. (Thirty cents for the orchestra, twenty cents for the balcony, and ten cents to sit close to heaven.)

  My routine when I saw shows was to select an actor I liked best in the first act and follow him right through the play, disregarding all the other performers. I felt as if I was the performer. I lost myself completely. That night in bed I would recite the lines I remembered and I’d fall asleep dreaming I was playing the part. From 1908 to 1910 I probably saw sixty or seventy dramatic plays.

  It was a half hour’s ride from my home to the Brooklyn Vitagraph Studio on Avenue M and East 16 Street. Early in May 1909, I first approached the guard at the gate and asked if there were any actors who might want someone to run errands. One nice old gent, an Irish man with a brogue you could cut with a knife, spoke to me. “I’ll be doin’ the best I can for you, my buckaroo. Be patient and hang around with your book. God help us, there should be plenty for you to do around here.” Within an hour “Old Dennis” got me an order for two newspapers—the New York World and Billboard magazine—a ham and egg sandwich, and a cup of coffee to be poured into John Bunny’s own cup. I had completed my first mission and decided I would refuse any tips I was offered.

  “You’re daft,” Dennis would say.

  “Maybe,” I replied. It worked!

  Maurice Costello was one of the first to become curious. “Are you the lad that takes no money for his efforts?”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Because I’m looking for a job in films.”

  He stared at me a while and then said, “Come with me, I want you to meet someone … now, don’t be scared.”

  How could I be scared when everything was working out so perfectly?

  He took me to an office and introduced me to a man who looked like Foxy Grandpa in the old Sunday comic strip. “Van, I want you to meet a good friend of mine,” Mr. Costello said, and then turned back to me and asked, “Uh … lad, what is your name?” Van began to laugh.

  “Harry,” I said.

  Mr. Costello spoke again. “Van, I’m sure you can find a spot for my cousin Harry in your next film.”

  “I’m certain I can; even if he isn’t your cousin, he has a wonderful face and would look well alongside Ken.”

  This man was Van Dyke Brooke, director of the film We Must Do Our Best, starring teenage Kenneth Casey. I said that I would leave my salary up to Mr. Costello, who piped up, “You see, Van, I’m Harry’s agent.” I thanked Mr. Costello profusely and told him I would still run errands for him, still with “no tips.” We parted laughing, my head in the clouds.

  Usually I was typecast as a street urchin or ragamuffin. My first film role took place in an orphanage in Bath Beach. I was the “bad boy,” the typical bully type, pushing kids around, forcing my way into their games, and winding up in a fistfight with the star.

  I was soon appearing in films with John Bunny, Flora Finch, Earle Williams, Maurice Costello, Herbert Rawlinson, and Walter Johnstone, and when I wasn’t acting with them, I was running their errands. Everything was so much simpler in filmmaking then. The scripts could hardly be considered more than bare outlines. The prop man took care of nearly everything: special effects, set dressing, powder work; he was the painter, carpenter, and electrician. Even the director and actors would occasionally lend a hand. Everyone was part of the general effort. You seldom heard the word budget mentioned. When expenses were running high, an impromptu meeting was held and corners were cut: less lavish costumes, or fifty extras instead of a hundred.

  The team of Flora Finch and John Bunny made some very succe
ssful comedies. Flora was five foot nine and weighed 150 pounds. John was five four and 225. In three of their pictures, I played a street urchin, a very scholarly boy in another, and in one a hateful little snob. And because the directors found me versatile, I also had some interesting parts in three Maurice Costello films and played some nice bits with Earle Williams, a favorite juvenile of the day. Even Lillian Walker, a Vitagraph glamour girl, requested me for one of her films.

  At the time, I was reluctant about mentioning to anyone—especially my family—that I was working in pictures. I must have started living my film parts, though, and it wasn’t long before Irving, Jack, and Shemp began looking at me as if I was going nuts. Even my mother began to worry that there was something wrong with me.

  I first met Ted Healy in July 1909. Rusty Johnson, Donald McMann, and I were virtually living on the beach. My uniform for sand and surf was my bathing suit and my ukulele that I played not well but loud. My voice wasn’t too bad, the ukulele playing not too good; somehow, though, the combination worked. Everyone would gather around on the sand and join in singing. Even the older folks sitting some distance away would come in on the choruses. On the Saturday of the July 4 weekend, I heard a new voice among the singers on our beach—a loud, rich voice. I followed the direction of the voice, and it was my first meeting with Ted, then using his christened name of Charles Earnest Lee Nash. Ted was about twelve, tall for his age. We were both singing the same song, “Oh, You Beautiful Doll,” with me edging closer to him, hoping that his dynamic voice would drown out my poor ukulele efforts.