I Stooged to Conquer Page 5

  With two handsome German shepherds, while touring in Alabama.

  Moe on tour in 1923.

  An idea for a new sight gag struck me. I would jump straight up and grab Ted by the waistband of his pants. I tried it and pulled Ted’s pants clear off.

  Ted was elated. “That’s it,” he said. “We’ll do it that way for more laughs.” Ted explained that he did his regular act with his wife Betty and their dog Pete and also owned a dancing act, doing two turns on the bill and getting $950 for both. The next day several bookers and Ted’s agent were corning to the matinee to catch his act. First he would do his routine with Betty and Pete, then clown around in the dancing act, asking for a young man to volunteer assistance. I was to jump on the stage and hand him a note, then do the bit with him. It worked so well that he asked me to hang around a few days until he could get an acrobat. The two days lasted nine years. When we closed at the end of the first week, Ted had new contracts for five weeks on the Delmar circuit in the South and another five on the Interstate circuit in Texas.

  The act was a smash; before long Healy was getting $3,500 a week. He was giving me $100 a week.

  It was 1925. I was just making my stage entrance at the Orpheum in Brooklyn when I heard an unmistakable laugh coming from the audience. It was my brother Shemp. I turned to Ted and whispered that Shemp was somewhere out there. Ted walked to the footlights, peered into the darkened theater, and said, “I would like to have another young man come up, preferably one from Brooklyn.” Up came Shemp, munching on a pear, a pair of rubbers in his pocket—he always carried rubbers in case of rain. Grace Hayes was on the bill that day with her ten-year-old son, Peter Lind. One of the songs in their act was “Dirty Hands, Dirty Face.” When Ted saw Shemp coming, he had the orchestra play Grace’s music. Enjoying the whole thing, Shemp asked Ted if he’d like a bite of his pear. Ted refused, Shemp tried to force it on him, Ted smashed it over Shemp’s face, and the battle was on. This routine was to become part of the act—along with Shemp.

  A short time later, while we were waiting to open in a theater in Chicago, we decided to catch the stage show at the Marigold Gardens. Along with the usual singers and comedians, there was a young blond fellow in high silk hat and tails, playing the violin and doing a Russian dance. The effect was one of incongruity. I looked at Ted and asked, “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” and he said, “Yes, I’m thinking what you’re thinking!” At the end of the show, we went backstage to talk to this odd-looking character. He was wearing a robe, and his hair, which was wet after a shower, was drying in the wildest manner. Ted invited him to join our act, offering him ninety dollars a week—ten dollars more if he’d get rid of the violin. He accepted, and Larry Fine became the third Stooge in 1925. The act became Ted Healy and His Three Southern Gentlemen.

  Larry Fine had been Fineberg back in South Philadelphia—at least that’s the story I got from him. He had begun violin lessons almost before learning to walk. To help strengthen his arm muscles after a bad acid burn as an infant, his parents had started him on the classical violin. Larry had been a very slight child, and in his late teens, he weighed less than 115 pounds. A lightweight, he did quite well as an amateur boxer. This must have given him the strength to take all the punishment that I dished out through the years. He realized quite early that classical music wasn’t for him, so he decided to give popular music a go and started his show business career before becoming a teenager, doing a comedy singing routine in Jewish dialect. He auditioned his act for Gus Edwards’s brother, Ben, and got a spot in Ben’s version of the Newsboy Sextetette (the original starred Billy Gould, Herman Timberg, Georgie Price, George Jessel, Walter Winchell, and Eddie Cantor). He stayed with the group for a short time, got homesick, and quit.

  When World War I broke out, he put together an act with a girl named Nancy Decker and played army camps and hospitals around the United States. Shortly afterward, he did a vaudeville dance act with the Haney Sisters, Loretta and Mabel, and married Mabel in 1927. In the years before they were married, though, Mabel had “stolen” Nancy Decker from Larry and made her one of the Haney Sisters. Undeterred, Larry found himself a new partner, Winona Fine. They couldn’t bring themselves to call the act Fine and Fine, so they settled for Fine and Dandy—which didn’t work out too well either.

  For the next few years, Larry played violin with Howard Lanin’s Orchestra at the Roseland Dance Hall in Philadelphia and entered Amateur Night shows playing a makeshift violin (part cigar box, part broom handle with strings attached; it was played like a cello). Then his brother-in-law, agent Harry Romm (later the Stooges’ agent and a Columbia Pictures executive), got him a spot with Mel Klee, the blackface comedian. At this point, Larry joined the Haney Sisters again and with them played theaters throughout the Midwest. At the end of their tour, the Haney Sisters and Fine split up, and Larry was again doing a single as a blackface comedian. He opened at the Paramount Theater in Toronto. Not long afterward, Larry decided to join a theatrical club, figuring that it might help him meet producers and agents. He played cards with producer LeRoy Prinz and nightclub owner Fred Mann, who ran the Rainbo Gardens. One night, Ray Evans, who was emceeing at Mann’s club, quit in a billing dispute (Ruth Etting was the star of the show). Larry, who was at the right place at the right time—the card table with Mann and Prinz—was offered a tryout. Mann and Prinz were impressed, and Larry was given a seven-year contract to play Mann’s Chicago club and the jai alai fronton in Havana.

  When Ted made Larry the offer to join our act backstage at the Rainbo Gardens, one problem remained: Larry’s contract with Mann. A few nights later, fate stepped in when the police closed the Rainbo Gardens for violation of the Prohibition laws. Not only was the Garden shut down, but Fred Mann committed suicide. There now was no contract problem, and Larry was in the act.

  Ted Healy and His Three Southern Gentlemen did vaudeville all through 1926 into 1927, when Shemp left to do a Broadway revue, A Night in Spain, with Ted and Betty Healy, Phil Baker, Grace Hayes, Georgie Price, Sid Silvers, Helen Kane, and others. I remember how the New York Times spoke of Shemp in its review: “He whom the program describes as Shemp Howard made the most of an exceedingly comic face and a diffident manner.”

  Ted, Shemp, Larry, and I went back into vaudeville in 1928 with a new act, Ted Healy and the Racketeers, complete with a rigged cyclorama curtain cut in three breakaway sections. The routine we did went this way: the curtain opened with Ted hanging on a trapeze and Shemp and me standing beside a twelve-foot ladder just under Ted’s feet. As he started to make a speech, Shemp and I would jerk the ladder out from under him. “Hey, fellows, bring back the ladder.” We’d put it under his feet again and he would start once more: “Ladies and gentlemen, I am now going to do a little chinning.” We again would pull the ladder away while he tried to chin himself, and not being able to make it, he’d start yelling, “Moe, Shemp, get the ladder!” We’d rush toward him, but since the ladder was so unwieldy, we’d run right past him into the back curtain. A stagehand would then pull the sash line and the whole back curtain would fall, exposing a young couple kissing. Ted kept screaming, “The ladder! Get the ladder!” Again we would stagger toward him—and into the other side curtain. Down the left curtain would crash with Ted still yelling. Then we’d stagger to the right and that curtain would fall. Ted would still be screaming as the stage curtain came down, “Get the ladder!” Our going-off music would continue, and another act went on for about twelve minutes. Then the curtain would open again, and Ted was still hanging on the trapeze yelling for the ladder. Finally we got the ladder under his feet, he’d come down, give us a double slap, and we’d bow to ringing applause.

  Passover week of 1927 was particularly tough for the act. We were doubling between the Orpheum and the Bushwick theaters in Brooklyn when Ted got us an unexpected booking at the Hippodrome Theater in New York that weekend, filling in for Cantor Rosenblatt, who was singing there that week but would not work on Passover. Luckily, there were only tw
o performances a day in these topflight theaters. On Monday we went from the Orpheum to the Bushwick. We had breakaway scenery and both theaters were rigged for the breakaway curtains—all we had to do was to put the curtains in one cab and the four of us would follow in another. We were third on an eight-act bill in the Orpheum and seventh on the bill at the Bushwick; it was the same schedule, matinees and evenings.

  On Wednesday, Shemp and I promised our mother that we would have the Passover seder at her place, so Ted, Shemp, and I took a cab to my parents’ home in Bensonhurst. Dad purposely rushed the services so we could get back on time for our night show.

  During the seder, Shemp proceeded to get high on wine. Embarrassed for my mother and annoyed with Shemp, Ted said, “You know, Mom, that Shemp is an imbecile.” Whereupon my mother replied indignantly, “What’s the matter with my Moe?” It seems that she thought that Ted was paying Shemp a compliment, and since she never wished to show any partiality to any of her five sons, she wanted me to participate in the compliment. Now came Friday night and the 8:15 show at the Hippodrome and the matinee on Saturday in addition to the two shows at the Orpheum and the Bushwick. What a rat race! It took us three weeks to recuperate from that one week. Ted received $1,500 for the Hippodrome date and $3,000 each for the other two dates. We got our standard $100 each.

  We did vaudeville all over the South and Midwest and even got a big-time nightclub date on the outskirts of Chicago. In one place we were hired for a very swanky society dinner. We hired a piano player, put on rented tuxedos, and found ourselves at a posh dinner of the Black and White Society, so named because the men wore starched black dress shirts, white tuxedos, and white bow ties; the women wore white dresses with black scarves around their necks. They really looked grotesque. For high society, I never saw so much drinking in my life or heard so many off-color jokes. The woman who booked us had been concerned whether our slapstick-style routines would be offensive. She followed us around like a mother hen. When Larry started talking to one of the women guests, she whispered in his ear, “You performers are not to mingle with the guests.” Larry turned to go just as one of the Black and White women vomited all over him.

  After cleaning him up and paying one of the busboys five dollars for the loan of his jacket, we went on. Following a short fanfare our piano player introduced us as Ted Healy and His Gang. We started to go into our act when one of the charming young women threw a roll at us. More followed. Healy yelled, “Boys, let’s hold out for the roast beef.” It was a regular free-for-all. Finally Healy said, “Let’s get out of this high-class jungle!”

  Not long after our society episode, we were booked into a dinner for the Hay and Grain Association. We were to appear at seven and the dinner was to be at eight thirty. By seven the men were already feeling no pain and were whooping it up like wild men. Ted Healy and His Gang were introduced, and I’m sure no one heard the introduction. To get their attention, the piano player tried a chorus of “When the Saints Go Marching In”; nothing helped. Suddenly, one guest yelled “Let’s get the funny man” and then with his spoon flipped a pat of butter at Ted. It missed him but landed on my Adam’s apple. Then all hell broke loose, and butter pats were flying in every direction, and the men were laughing like hyenas. Healy screamed, “Cut the act,” and we walked off. The agent handed Ted the check and apologized profusely. Ted asked her if she could possibly book us at quiet dinners.

  7

  MY DAUGHTER IS BORN, AND A BRIEF LEAVE FROM SHOW BUSINESS

  In 1927, while Ted and Shemp were doing A Night in Spain on Broadway, Larry married Mabel Haney. It also was the year Helen gave birth to our daughter Joan. At this time, we were living on Avenue J near Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn. Helen had a rather easy pregnancy—the normal craving for strange foods and the kicking belly. The time of the delivery was when we had our difficulties. Helen’s pains started one night, so off we went to the hospital. Once there, her labor was endless. I would come into her hospital room to give her some encouragement, I’d hear a moan or a groan and, softy that I am, I’d run like hell out of the room into the waiting area. There I took to counting the call chimes that would ring out intermittently—two short chimes, then a space, then three chimes and a pause, and then one chime. This kept on constantly until I found myself pointing my finger, like a fight referee, trying to predict the exact moment a chime would ring out. I was doing this for some time, improving all the while as the minutes wore on. Then I looked up and realized that the seven or eight people in the waiting room with me had started leaving, until I found myself sitting there alone. It finally dawned on me that they must have thought I was nuts.

  Daddy Moe Howard with Joan in 1928.

  The labor went on and on and on. After what seemed an eternity, they wheeled Helen into the delivery room. As they pushed her past me, I remember saying, “Honey, never again! Never again, I just can’t take it.” It took over eight years for us to forget our pains and try again.

  Being on the road so much touring with Ted and the boys in vaudeville posed a problem which had to be worked out. At the time of my marriage to Helen two years before, her Aunt Fanny predicted that if she married an actor, she would never have a home. Ironically, several members of Helen’s family were in show business, including Harry Houdini, the world-famous magician. It was too bad that Aunt Fanny did not live to see the happy future in store for Helen and Moe Horwitz and the elegant English manor house we built in Toluca Lake, California, across the street from Bing Crosby.

  With these thoughts in mind, I let myself be prevailed upon to leave show business when Shemp went to Broadway with Ted. I went into real estate and was successful in buying some property at a very reasonable price. Then I proceeded to build a couple of one-family brick houses, using contractors who generally were old schoolmates of mine. When the buildings were completed, I realized that I had built them too well. They were just too expensive for the Brooklyn neighborhood and would not bring my price or anything near the cost of construction. The bank took over the properties and I was advised to file for bankruptcy. I felt I could not do this to all my friends, so I paid all of them except the brick man, who got his money from the bank when they sold the houses. I finally came out with $425 from an investment of $22,000. It was a shame that my folks were on a trip to Lithuania to visit their old hometown, for business-minded Mother could have been a great help to me.

  When everything was settled, I found myself with a couple hundred dollars, an understanding wife, and a beautiful eight-month-old daughter. Actually, I was discouraged but tried not to show my concern when Helen was around.

  Once again I was advised to go into business for myself, but what kind? All I was geared for was show business; I lived and breathed it. I was rated as a good dramatic actor and an excellent comic. Now a friend suggested that I open a shop and sell distressed merchandise, which I’d buy at auction. The deal sounded reasonable to me, so I rented a store for thirty dollars a month. My friend took me to various auctions and directed me when to buy and how much to pay. That day I invested all the money I had except four dollars. I bought umbrellas, ladies’ pure silk hosiery, tea sets in cartons, white silk gloves, bloomers, small bottle of beads, house-dresses, etc. This friend had a small truck in which we carted all my merchandise to the store. I was tired, upset, and scared, but I showed Helen a cheerful and confident Moe. I said, “Honey, it’s only one o’clock. We’ll have some lunch and I’ll drive you and the baby to the shop. We’ll separate the merchandise and put it out on display.”

  Anxious to show Helen my fantastic buys, I immediately untied the cord that held the four bundles of umbrellas, twenty-five in each bundle. As I opened the first umbrella, it fell into shreds, as did all the others. Helen laughed until she became hysterical, but I was so depressed that the tears ran down my face. I thought my heart would break. What kind of mess did I get myself into this time? Helen tried to comfort me. I couldn’t understand it; all the items they had shown me at the auction looked new.
Now I opened the bundles of silk hosiery, and they too fell apart. The white silk gloves were so small they wouldn’t fit a child, and most of them were for the left hand. The tea sets, as were some of the other things, were burned and smoked. Helen kissed me and said, “We’ll try to sell this junk, and if we can’t and you still want to go back into the theater, you should do it.”

  While “on the road” a loving, lonely Moe keeps in touch with baby Joanie with a creative letter scribbled on a magazine cutout. (The “Billy” Moe mentions is Joan’s cousin Bill Seiden, the son of Helen’s sister Clarice.)

  Things really looked bleak. Some days we hardly took in enough money to buy food for ourselves. We lived in a lovely apartment and our furnishings were the finest. I was too proud to ask my parents for help. We decided to wait it out. The only things that were in good condition were the bloomers, made of a sort of lacy mesh material. I remember being asked by a customer about this type of garment. Having no idea what they were, I told her, “They’re coozy ventilators,” whatever that meant. I sold all the coozy ventilators and made $62.50. I was now in the fifth week of that impossible dream. After settling with the landlord, Helen and I walked out of that store and we never mentioned it again. It was as though a weight had been lifted from my shoulders.

  8

  BACK WITH TED HEALY

  That night after leaving the store and putting a business career behind me, I realized that my resources were almost nil. I had to find a job and decided to phone Ted Healy. I inquired about his health and his family’s health, and he told me, “You know, Moe, I was going to phone you in the morning to ask if you, Shemp, and Larry would join me in the Shubert’s A Night in Venice on Broadway. We go into rehearsal in three weeks and open the second week in January. How about it, Moe?” I was speechless.