Chapter 16

Grumpy Stooge

Jerome Horwitz—Los Angeles

His family called him Babe, but he was known throughout the world as Curly, the most popular member of the legendary comedy group, The Three Stooges. The riotous man-child sang silly ditties, had arguments with inanimate objects, danced like he was on air, and could get hit in the head with a monkey wrench with no visible injury.

Born on October 22, 1903, in Brooklyn, New York, Jerome was the youngest of the five Horwitz boys. His parents, Solomon and Jenny, were Jewish immigrants from Lithuania, and they doted on all of their sons, hoping that they would achieve the American dream. Jenny was the engine of the family and became a successful real-estate agent, dealing in million- dollar investments in Brooklyn. She became the neighborhood advice-giver and charity worker, while her weak-willed, country bumpkin husband, Sol, was content to collect rent and make bank deposits. Jenny had high hopes for her children, and she put a lot of pressure on her sons to become doctors, lawyers, or bankers. Every one of her children, except Curly, left home as soon as he could. Two of them, Sam and Moses, entered vaudeville and, along with Larry Fine, joined comedian Ted Healy and toured the country under various names, ending up as Ted Healy and His Stooges. Sam changed his name to Shemp, which is how Jenny pronounced Sam, and Moses first went by Harry and then finally became Moe. Both Sam and Moses went by the last name Howard.

The world knew Curly only as the wisecracking inventor of break-dancing, but his real life was that of a sad and friendless loner. Growing up as the youngest member of the Horwitz family, Curly had no positive male role model in his life. His successful, domineering mother and submissive father confused Curly. His brothers were all much older than he was and he only saw them on special occasions. Jenny didn’t want Curly out of her sight, so she hired him to chauffeur her and Sol around on their daily errands. Curly learned about life from the guys he hung out with on the street corners of Brooklyn and boardwalks of Coney Island. He also was a regular at the Triangle Ballroom, where he first did his exaggeratedly spastic, yet graceful, dance moves that would be his future trademark—despite being in pain from accidentally shooting himself in the calf when he was an adolescent.

To Curly, females were something to pursue and conquer with a whistle and a hooting “Hi Toots!” He was never without a female dancing partner, yet whenever he started seeing one special female, Jenny would somehow step in and put an end to it. At the age of twenty-six, Curly secretly married a woman, but once Jenny caught wind of it, she had the marriage annulled and, using her political connections, made sure that no record of the marriage or annulment existed. Hoping to cheer up their son, Sol and Jenny took Curly on a trip to Europe, then left to visit family in Lithuania, leaving Curly on his own in Paris. He had the time of his life.

Curly idolized Moe and Shemp and wanted desperately to get into show business. In 1928, he joined Orville Knapp’s band as the comic conductor. He wore a breakaway tuxedo that gradually fell apart as he wildly conducted the orchestra until he was left only in his long underwear. He brought down the house every night.

By this time, Moe, Shemp, and Larry were making a name for themselves with and without Ted Healy, who was showing the effects of a lifetime of high-living and Prohibition booze. Shemp, always a cautious man, decided that he didn’t want to work with Healy anymore and took a lucrative acting role as Knobby Walsh in the Vitaphone shorts featuring the comic strip boxer Joe Palooka.

Healy exploded with rage when he found out that he had lost a Stooge, but Moe, who was The Three Stooges’ manager, saved the act by recommending that his little brother Curly join the group. Healy saw promise in Curly but demanded that he shave off his thick brown hair and waxed mustache to make his appearance more comical. Curly loved his hair and cried when he came back from the barber.

Moving to Hollywood only improved Curly’s social life, and he often jumped on stage at clubs to play the spoons, dance, or finger the upright bass with the orchestra. He was never without a young starlet or two on his arm. Big brother Moe would wait up in his hotel room until he could hear his brother loudly announce his presence. Larry Fine and the two Howards stayed with Healy for ten two-reel comedies shot between 1930 and 1933, before they had had enough of Healy’s bad behavior.

The Third Stooge

Larry Fine was the only Stooge who was a musician. A violinist, he was on his way to a European music conservatory, but the outbreak of World War I put an end to his dreams. Despite his prissy ways, Fine was also a boxer when he was a teenager, winning his first and only professional bout. His father threw the towel in on his boxing career. Larry was a gambler who lost money hand over fist, and like Shemp Howard, he was generous with what money he had. He and his wife, Mable, lived in the President Hotel in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and the Knickerbocker Hotel in Los Angeles for most of their lives and did not buy a home until the late 1940s.

Signing with Columbia Pictures, The Three Stooges exploded onto the movie screens all over the world with their clever two-reel film, Woman Haters, a musical in which the entire dialog rhymed. The Three Stooges churned out more than one hundred short films with Curly, many of them classics, like Punch Drunks, Three Little Pigskins, You Nazty Spy, What’s the Matador, Hoi Polloi, Disorder in the Court, and Violent is the Word for Curly. Their short, Men in Black, a parody of the 1934 Clark Gable/Myrna Loy social drama Men in White, was nominated for the 1935 Academy Award for Best Short Subject, Comedy.

Curly was living the life of a film star. He partied at all of the Hollywood hot spots and recklessly spent money on whatever he fancied at the moment: homes, fast cars, purebred dogs, and his biggest weakness, women. When Curly wasn’t intoxicated, he was a sullen, introverted man. He had no close personal friends and his bed was a revolving door of young Hollywood starlets. In 1937, he married Elaine Ackerman, and they had a daughter, Marilyn, but the marriage was loaded with fights and drama, and by 1940 they had divorced. From that point forward, Curly was on the downswing, drinking, carousing, and eating great quantities of restaurant food. He put on a lot of weight and was continuously paying off underage females not to talk to reporters.

Eventually, Curly informed his brother Moe that he was broke. Moe took over Curly’s financial affairs and put him on an allowance. Unlike his kid brother, Moe was a family man, with a house in the Toluca Lake district. Bing Crosby lived across the street. With Jenny now deceased, Moe took over her place as the guardian of Curly.

The budget that Moe put Curly on barely slowed him down. Always restless, Curly continued to overeat and party. Moe and Larry, as well as the production team, all noticed that Curly wasn’t as on as he usually was. Never one to memorize his lines, Curly always had to concentrate on every scene. His crazy antics, like his famous “n’yuk, n’yuk, n’yuk” and “woo woo woo” were usually ad-libbed when he couldn’t remember his lines. Moe persuaded Curly to see a doctor, but it had little effect on his lifestyle.

After a two-week courtship, Curly married wife number three, Marion Buxbaum. The marriage lasted three months before divorce papers were filed. Buxbaum took Curly for everything he had left.

On May 6, 1946, at age forty-two, Curly suffered a stroke on the set of Half-Wits Holiday. He was never the same. He married again, and this time he seemed to find his soul mate. His fourth wife, Valerie Newman, gave birth to their daughter, Janie, in 1948, and this time fatherhood latched onto Curly. He became a proud father and loving husband. He lost weight and tried to keep his blood pressure under control. But too much damage had already been done. Curly suffered at least two more strokes and spent his final years in and out of sanitariums and hospitals until he finally died on January 18, 1952, at forty-eight years of age.