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 successful 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.
In our first talks I learned that his family spent the summer in the exclusive Wawanda Cottages near the beach, which meant that they were well enough endowed with worldly goods. I told him my name was Moe Horwitz, and he told me to call him Lee Nash. I was Jewish, he Scotch-Irish.
Along with a glib tongue and a lively personality, Lee Nash had strong ambitions toward being a successful businessman in his native Texas. The days of the entertainment world and an international career under the name of Ted Healy seemed far away. We became inseparable friends and, later, joined forces for one of the most enduring acts in show business history. At the end of the summer, I went back to Bensonhurst and Lee to his folks’ Riverside Drive apartment in Manhattan.
In the summer of 1912, Ted’s ideas of entering the business world faded for the moment, and he, Rusty, Donald, and I became part of the Annette Kellerman Diving Girls; yes, girls. There were six girls and we four boys. We did a thirty-foot dive into a tank seven feet long, seven feet wide, and seven feet deep. We wore long bathing suits, the one-piece variety, with balls of crumpled newspaper stuffed in the breast area. After each dive, these paper falsies would drop down around our middles and we had to stay down in the water until we could push them back up where they belonged. Our careers with Annette Kellerman lasted only one season; we quit after one of the divers, a pretty young lady named Gladys Kelly, misjudged the tank and landed on the artificial waves made of papier-mâché and two-by-fours that decorated the side of the tank. She had broken her neck and was killed instantly.
Ted and I loved to play tennis at the Wawanda Cottages. He was tall and rangy and had a tremendous serve with which he continually beat the pants off me. The one sport in which I excelled was the hundred-yard dash. As tall as Ted was and as long as his legs were, there wasn’t a time that I didn’t beat him by at least a yard or more. He never got over this. He couldn’t understand how a guy that was so short could run so fast.
By now you must realize I thought of Ted Healy as a brother. We had such terrific times together—sheer joy. It makes me sad now remembering how he turned on me in later years. I want to believe it was the liquor and that he didn’t realize what he was doing.
One balmy summer’s night in 1913, Shemp, Bob Woodman, Willie O’Connor, and I walked out of the theater with our dates near the beach in Bensonhurst.
We strolled along the sandy beach trying to talk our dates into skinny-dipping. We had almost persuaded them when Shemp whispered, “Fellows, I have a terrible cramp, and if you don’t mind I’ll have to go under the boardwalk and relieve myself.” To get under the boardwalk you had to stoop down and keep your head low. Shemp ducked under, and that was the last we saw of him for forty-five minutes.
Only hours later did we learn what had happened. He had worked his way pretty far under the boardwalk searching for a place to drop his pants. Finally he saw what looked like a log and decided that this would be a perfect spot. After relieving himself, he looked about for a scrap of paper, and seeing a white object in the sand next to him, he reached for it. Pulling on it, he noticed that it was a handkerchief, and on the second pull, found that a hand was holding on to the other end. He became so rattled that he pulled up his pants and started to run. Forgetting to duck, he hit his head against one of the planks under the boardwalk and was knocked cold. And that is how we found him, lying on his stomach, his behind covered with sand and dung, and a lump on his head as big as a tennis ball.
Moe (second from left in top row) and the Brooklyn P.S. 128 baseball team in 1913.
We dragged Shemp out and into the water to clean him up. He later explained that what he thought was a log was really a pair of young lovers lying in the sand. Although the situation was very funny, it ruined our night with the girls.
At age sixteen, between playing vaudeville and playing hooky, I had the opportunity to buy my first car, an old auto of uncertain vintage. The price: ninety dollars. I had only fifty to my name.
This monstrous hulk of a car had a right-hand drive with four progressive speeds mounted on the outside within reach of the driver, a long-handled brake alongside the gearshift, headlights powered by an acetylene tank, a convertible top for a sporty look, and a large bulb horn—the last word in accessories. It was the longest car I had ever seen and everything was in perfect working order … well, almost everything. The brakes left a lot to be desired.
This car of my dreams was called a Pope-Hartford. The company made one other model: the Pope-Toledo. My only problem was how to buy a ninety-dollar car with just fifty dollars. I found the solution when I showed the car to Shemp.
“If you put up forty dollars, Shemp,” I said, “you can buy a half ownership in it and I’ll teach you how to drive.”
Thirty minutes later, Shemp and I were the proud co-owners of a Pope-Hartford with no linings on the brake drums. This problem was soon solved, too. If I wanted to stop the car I would apply the brake pedal about four hundred feet from my destination.
The car had what they called a cutout, which made a terrible racket, and the folks in the neighborhood asked us not to drive past their homes or the church on Sunday before 10:30 AM.
It was a Sunday morning—after 10:30—when Shemp asked me when he would get his first driving lesson. I said, “Right now.” I came to a stop, no easy task, and let Shemp slide into the driver’s seat. I showed him how to put the car in gear, feed it some spark and gas, and pull away from the curb. We then proceeded to motor along uneventfully, until we came to a quiet little business street. Suddenly Shemp spotted a little girl on roller skates about a block away and screamed, “Moe, what do I do?”
I told him I would let him know when to apply the brakes and when to blow the horn. Shemp kept yelling, “Now, Moe, now?”
I said, “Okay, put on the brakes.” He jammed down on them and slowed up some. Then I instructed, “Shemp, blow the horn.” With that he let go of the wheel to squeeze the bulb horn with both hands. Before a sound came from the horn, the car went through the front window of a barber shop and stopped when it hit the barber chair. Shemp almost passed out. Fortunately the shop was closed on Sunday. The car was hauled out of the shop and deposited in our backyard, and our family was out thirty-two dollars for the window, four dollars for repairing the bootblack stand we ran over, and six dollars for the tow. It took us about three years to pay our dad back. Shemp never drove a car from that day until the day he died in 1955. In many of our films when Shemp was supposed to be driving a car, it actually was being pulled along by one of the prop men.
At Coney Island in 1914, Moe behind the wheel, Jack behind him, Shemp on the right.
For two months, our car sat in the backyard. We finally found someone who seemed interested in purchasing it for eighty dollars, and we told him to bring the money and take the car. The next day, he inspected his purchase: he lifted the hood, looked in, and said, “Just a minute, there’s something missing—like the spark plugs, the carburetor, the generator …”
Shemp yelled, “Somebody picked it clean!” So we sold it to him—as is—for twenty dollars. When he left, I said to Shemp, “This deal cost us seventy dollars plus another forty-two for the accident. We’ll give Dad the twenty, right?”
“Right, Moe! But the next time you call me into a business deal, I’m letting you know now—nothing doing!”
