I Stooged to Conquer Page 7

  When Larry got zapped, I later found out, he looked up. The Mangines’ dressing room window was open, and Larry, hearing loud laughter coming from the room, rushed in to find the dirty tray with the remaining pieces of blueberry pie. Then he saw Anderson laughing, although Larry didn’t realize it had nothing to do with him. Larry simply grabbed a hunk of pie from the top of his head and combed a little out of his hair with his fingers, jammed part in Anderson’s mouth, and wiped some on his suit and some on the dressing room walls. The girls screamed at him, and Anderson swore. As I reached the landing outside the door, I heard Larry yell, “I wonder where Dead Shot Moe is.” When Larry saw me come around the corner, he said, “Okay, Dead Shot, how come the blue on your hand matches the blue on my head?” I told him, “I couldn’t help it, Larry. I saw your head shining up at me, and since it made such a nice target, I just couldn’t resist testing my marksmanship.”

  In spite of the glamour onstage—the beauty of the chandeliers hanging over the audience, the heavily upholstered seats, the plush carpeting throughout the theater, the elaborate gold-leaf encrustations decorating the walls, elaborate box offices, and smart display cases for posters and photographs of the performers—the backstage area in the majority of the theaters, we found, was most unappealing.

  The dressing rooms were unclean, unheated, unventilated, and rat-infested. In some of the theaters, the manager used the dressing room as a storeroom, often filled with bags of unpopped corn, sometimes up to the ceiling. The bottom bags usually had holes where the rats were nibbling. In other dressing rooms, they’d store the machines used to pop the corn. The few dressing rooms available to the performers were generally inadequate for the number of those appearing on the bill. The average room had a metal shelf for makeup, a sink with cold water (some performers would use it as a urinal rather than walk the vast distances to the toilets), a large mirror usually hung over the makeup shelf, if you were lucky, a few chairs and a cot, and a bare white bulb on the ceiling to add to the dismal atmosphere.

  The team of Howard, Fine, and Howard—Three Lost Souls—in 1931.

  One day our wives decided to surprise us and dress up our dressing room, so they bought some brightly colored flowered chintz and made covers for the chairs, a scarf for the makeup shelf, and a curtain to place in front of the bare rod that held our clothes. When we came offstage, we thought we were in the wrong room. Then we saw our wives giggling among themselves and knew we’d been redecorated. Unfortunately, the joy didn’t last long, for we had to gather up our decorations when we moved to the next theater, and somehow we never took the trouble to put them up again.

  There were always exceptions to the rule, and the Cleveland Palace in the RKO circuit was one of them. This theater was built without missing a thought for the actors’ comfort. The Palace was beautiful not only outside and in the auditorium, but also backstage. Most impressive was the second floor of the theater, which sported a regulation-size pool table, chess tables, comfortable chairs, an ice machine and soft drinks, playing cards, cigars—it had all the facilities of a private club. In the basement was a laundry room complete with washing machines—no dryers in those days—while on the third floor were lines to spread and dry clothes, and warm air was piped in. There was even a nursery for youngsters. Best of all were the dressing rooms, heavily carpeted with mirrored walls and makeup tables. They had everything in them, right down to padded coat hangers.

  It was during 1931 that we hired as our straight man Jack Walsh, a handsome Irishman with black hair, baby blue eyes, and thick, sensuous lips. Jack had a fair singing voice as well as a more fantastic technique as a liar than Baron Munchausen.

  Once, while sitting with Shemp in a coffee shop near the Oriental Theater in Chicago, I overheard Jack talking to a young lady in the booth behind us. He was trying to entice her up to his room with an extraordinary line about how his family had cornered the market on Coca-Cola bottle caps and had machinery that could make old caps as good as new. Jack got her up to his room to talk over some secretarial work that he had for her—with Coca-Cola, of course. She stayed in his room with him for a week, and when we left town, he gave her a gift and told her that when he returned to Chicago he wanted to talk marriage with her—that is, if his parents would let him. Right now, he explained, they needed him at work—at the company they owned that made the straps that people hold on to in the subway cars; they rented these straps out to the subway company for six dollars a month. They had fifteen thousand of them in all, and his parents wanted him to take over the company.

  On another occasion, we were invited to the home of a very prominent theater executive. At coffee time, Jack started talking about his “college days,” though I don’t believe he graduated from grade school. He explained that he was studying animal husbandry and told how his mother had urged him to rush home recently. There was something terribly wrong with their poodle, Hercules. Jack told how he took the next train home and arrived early in the morning to find Hercules turning in circles and grabbing frantically at his tail. After a thorough examination, Jack decided that it was imperative to operate immediately. He slit Hercules’s tail open and found the trouble. It seemed that Hercules had eaten some grass on which there were snake eggs, which then hatched and grew full size. Snakes were eating their way through the dog’s tail! At this point, Jack opened his jacket and displayed his snakeskin belt from “that” snake, and told how there was enough left for suspenders and a purse for his mother.

  Howard, Fine, and Howard in lights for the first time—at the RKO Orpheum in Seattle in 1931.

  These stories flowed out endlessly, but one in particular I shall never forget. We were playing Chicago, and after one show Shemp, Jack, and I went to dinner. At the restaurant, Jack ordered fried chicken. When they served it, he picked up a wing, spread it out, and sniffed. He pushed his plate away from him and said to the waiter, “You know, I remember the time I was helping my grandmother on the streetcar. I was on the step just below her when that car started with a jerk and my grandmother lurched backward. Her behind landed on my face, and you know, I never smelled anything like that until I smelled this chicken.”

  Embarrassed, Shemp and I quickly paid our check and left the restaurant without eating. So much for Jack Walsh. He was quite a straight man, and the whole world was his stooge.

  I experienced my first involvement with racism in the business when we played Jacksonville, Florida, in 1931. I knew there was segregation in the southern theaters but was not fully aware of the pain that it caused until then. After moving our trunks, scenery, and baggage into the vaudeville house in Jacksonville, I went backstage and looked the theater over. I asked the doorman to show me to my dressing room, and I put my attaché case containing our music on a chair in the room, closed the door, and went to find out the rehearsal schedule and when our scenery would be hung. I was told that we had plenty of time, so I decided to take a walk. Outside the stage door, four stagehands and the music conductor smiled at me as I passed. As I came to the corner, I saw a black man of about eighty coming toward me. When he reached me, he jumped out into the gutter. Thinking he’d seen a snake or something frightening, I jumped into the road with him, whereupon he jumped back onto the sidewalk, and so did I. We did this dance routine about three times before I finally grabbed his arm and said, “What the hell is going on, pop? Why are you leaping up and back like a jumping jack?” Frightened, he answered, “Sir, in this city a black man mustn’t walk on the same side of the street with a white man.” “Mister,” I told him, “this is not my city, but it’s my country and I can walk with any man I choose to.” I put my arm about his shoulder and forced him to walk with me around the corner. He said, “Man, you seem nice, but you’re liable to get us killed.” I tried to calm him and then let him go his way while I continued my walk.

  When I went back to the theater, I found the stagehands and music conductor still sitting by the stage door. When I spoke to them about getting our scenery up, they not only woul
dn’t talk to me but wouldn’t even look at me. Shemp and Larry came over from the hotel and I told them that it looked like trouble with the stagehands. By this time, the curtain was down and people were coming into the theater.

  We went around to the front of the theater and found that our pictures were taken out of the frames and our names were painted out. Puzzled, we asked the manager what the hell was wrong, why the stagehands wouldn’t move our scenery, why the conductor wouldn’t talk to us. He explained that the stagehands had seen me walking down the street with my arms around “a nigger” and then informed us, “Your baggage and trunks have gone back to the station; here is your music, and salary check. We don’t want any nigger lovers in our theater or in our city, so get movin’ before you get in big trouble.”

  We left Jacksonville in disbelief. When we arrived back in New York, we told the story to our agent and to the newspapers and that was that—until forty years later. I was coming out of the Safeway market in West Hollywood when a tall, heavyset man came up to me and said that the manager of the market told him that I was Moe Howard of the Three Stooges. He wanted to know if I was one of the three fellows who had played Jacksonville many years ago. When I told him I was, he said, “I’m so glad I ran into you. I’ve always wanted to apologize for playing you dirty in Jacksonville. I was one of the stagehands who wouldn’t hang your scenery for walking with the black man. I had to go along with them or lose my job. Please forgive me.” He walked away smiling after I gave him an autographed photo of the Three Stooges.

  We completed several weeks on the Coast and were booked into the Hippodrome in New York. At this point, I finally recognized Ted’s Jekyll and Hyde personality—his deceitful ways, the way he had subjugated us, the pittance he’d paid us. I had been his closest friend for years as well as his advisor and constant shadow. I’d tried to protect him while he was drinking heavily. In return, he threatened the Hippodrome Theater with a lawsuit if they let us appear onstage using “his” material—which, if it belonged to anyone, was the property of J. J. Shubert. After Ted’s threats, the management asked us if we had any other material we could use—we did—but I finally went to J. J. Shubert for help. I knew he was on our side, as Ted recently had tried to sue him.

  Mr. Shubert was a gentleman. He told me, “Moe, I’m drawing up a paper allowing you and the boys to use any jokes, scenes, or material that you wish to from the plays A Night in Venice and A Night in Spain.” Armed with that paper, I went to the manager of the Hippodrome, who made a photocopy of it. He also had me seat a stenographer in the audience and have her copy our dialogue word for word and describe the action in our routine. Then he had the papers notarized.

  The act had been put together hastily and didn’t go over too well in the early days of our engagement, but by the end of the week, after three shows a day, there was a vast improvement, and the continuation of our booking as Howard, Fine, and Howard told us we were being received quite well. Healy’s underhanded tricks to break us up continued. He hired some toughs from Chicago who threatened us with bodily injury and assorted broken limbs if we went on working. We ignored the threats, and luckily nothing happened. Maybe they liked our act.

  Then came a hiatus in Ted’s war against us. He was floundering with his three new men in Billy Rose’s new musical Crazy Quilt and was drinking more than he could handle—not showing up regularly for all his performances. He was suffering from a bad case of the DTs. When I heard of his troubles, I asked Larry to come with me to Ted’s hotel; Shemp couldn’t bring himself to go. We found Ted in his room, screaming. He insisted there were firemen coming through the walls of his room. It took us hours to straighten Ted out so he could do the evening performance, and after the show, we spent half the night in his room with him.

  We were appearing at the Oriental Theater in Chicago that month, and Healy begged us to go back with him, complaining that he had no act without us.

  “Ted,” I told him, “finish the run of your show for Billy Rose and then we’ll talk about rejoining you.”

  He replied, “But the show doesn’t close for another four months.”

  I said, “That’s the way it’ll have to be. Cut out the booze and we’ll get together in early January. Our contracts have about twelve weeks to run, and we’ll wait for you to finish the Rose show—if you’re still on the wagon.”

  Healy promised us he’d stay off the booze; it was one of the few promises he kept—for a while. But when we were to rejoin him, Shemp just wouldn’t go along.

  “Moe,” he said to me, “Ted is not the wonderful guy you think he is; he’s basically an alcoholic. He’s only one drink from going back to his terrifying benders. Besides, I have a chance to play the part of Knobby Walsh in a Joe Palooka film for Vitaphone on the Coast.”

  The next day when I told Ted about Shemp’s opportunity to do a film, Healy blew his top, shouting, “What the hell does Shemp mean by that! Is he trying to ruin my act? I need a drink!”

  Losing my patience, I said, “Ted, if you take a drink, it’ll be the last time you’ll ever see me again.”

  He calmed down, and then wanted to know what we were going to do about replacing Shemp. I explained that we’d send for my kid brother, Jerome.

  As a young man, Jerome (later Curly) was an accomplished ballroom dancer, spending much of his time at the Triangle Ballroom in Brooklyn breezing gracefully over the dance floor, sometimes rubbing shoulders with the future greats like George Raft. During his teens, Curly usually was the life of any party. He had a beautiful singing voice and was a very nice-looking young man with his wavy chestnut-brown hair. Being ten years younger than me, he was really considered the baby of the family, and we had gone our separate ways.

  In 1928, he joined Orville Knapp’s band as a comedy conductor. He had a full head of wavy hair and a wax-tipped mustache and wore tails which were made to break away piece by piece as he conducted the band. As he moved his arms, waving the baton gracefully, one sleeve and then the other would fall from his coat. After a few more motions of his baton, the coat would split in half down the back. Finally the pants would break away, and he would be left conducting in long underwear with a drop seat that was held up with a horse-blanket pin. At that moment the band would close with a roll of drums and a crash of cymbals, and he’d bow and leave the stage, always to a roar of laughter.

  He left Orville Knapp in 1932 to join Ted Healy, Larry, and me. In vaudeville days, after he finished the act for the evening, the nightclubs were his home. Curly always loved music, and a drumbeat or an old song would start his foot tapping. Many times at his favorite nightspot, when he was feeling no pain, he would take the tablecloth between his fingers and just tear it in two to the tempo of the music or take two spoons and click them together with an unbelievable beat. Sometimes he would jump up on the bandstand, grab the bass fiddle, and join the band—and do it well. I remember going around to the various clubs the day after, paying for the damage he’d done. I would worry whenever he was late coming home, staying awake in my room half the night waiting for him. When I heard his voice yelling “Swing it,” I knew he was back in the hotel and I could go to sleep.

  Curly had four unsuccessful marriages and two children, at least a dozen homes, and a new car every year, but his obsession was his love for dogs. In nearly every city we played, he would buy another one. An Irish setter, a boxer, a Kerry blue, a collie—you name it and Curly would buy it. He would keep the dog with him for a week or two, then ship it home to Los Angeles from wherever we were playing.

  Shortly after my brother joined our act, Ted called us together and said, “Larry, you have a head like a wild porcupine. You, Moe, have a spittoon haircut. But Jerome, with your wavy hair and wax-tipped mustache, you just don’t fit in.” He asked Ted to adjourn our meeting for twenty minutes. Exactly twenty minutes later, he was back—without his mustache and wearing a cap pulled down tightly over his ears. He looked and walked like a fat fairy. Then he whipped off the cap. I stared, astounded; he ha
d shaved his head to look like a dirty tennis ball.

  “You’re in,” Healy laughed.

  With tears rolling down his cheeks, my brother said, “If you want me, call me Curly.” He said this while rubbing his hand over his smooth dome. And Curly he was from that time on.

  In 1932, we were in New York to start another vaudeville tour. Ted was staying at the Park Crescent, a very posh hotel. He had booked us into the New Yorker Cafe in the basement of the old Christie Hotel in Hollywood. It was a new low for Ted. He had just been divorced and had no money to pay his hotel bill, let alone fare to Hollywood for six people. Our booking agency agreed to advance Ted for our fares, and he was to leave for the Coast in three days—a sixty-hour trip by train. The problem now was how to get his clothes and those of his girlfriend out of the hotel. And his tails and evening clothes were in a trunk in the hotel’s basement.

  Ted already owed the hotel $1,200 rent, and he knew that the management would never let him take his clothes out of the hotel. So I devised a scheme. Ted’s apartment was on the twenty-eighth floor, one floor below the roof. I got three of my friends to help us and had three cabs wait for us outside of the apartment. I went up to Ted’s place with a friend and stuffed all of Ted’s girlfriend’s lingerie under my belt and the waistband of my pants and put on two of Ted’s jackets. My friend did the same thing. We came out of the elevator and did an off-to-Buffalo shuffle through the lobby and into one of the cabs. We were followed by Larry and another friend repeating our act and depositing their things into a second cab. Next came Curly and one of his friends, loaded with more of Ted’s clothes. They did a cute dance out the door as the clerk waved to them. Several trips later, I was wearing Ted’s camel-hair coat. He was six foot two and I was five foot four. As I passed the clerk with Ted’s coat wrapped under my chin, I made a pretty weird picture.