As this second edition of Curly goes to press, it has been nearly thirty years since I set out to tell my uncle’s life story. One of the frustrating aspects of my research back in the mid-1980s was finding information about Curly’s first wife. Answers given to me during my interviews with relatives and friends were like a comedy of errors. One day I heard that our mystery woman was Jewish, on another that she was “definitely not.” I heard that she was an older woman, then that she was young and pretty. During my interview with my cousin Margie Golden, she let out a scream: “Pauline—that’s her name, Pauline.”
Years after the first edition was published, out of the blue, I received a letter from a fan. Sadly, I can’t recall his name, but if he reads this, I hope he knows how much I appreciated his detective work.
There in glorious black and white was a marriage certificate: on August 5, 1930, the State of New York recorded the marriage of “Jerry Horowitz” to “Julia Rosenthal.” Note the incorrect spelling of “Horwitz”—that’s probably why I never found it.
It’s also worth noting that contrary to the family lore I relied on to flesh out Curly’s story, he and Julia were married not in 1929 but the following year. This means that their wedding took place after he got his first job in show business, as a guest conductor for Orville Knapp’s band, and after he joined his parents on their European vacation. Curly’s mother may still have hoped that the trip would distract him from his show business ambitions, and perhaps Curly got married shortly after their return as a way of pushing back against her influence.
While I was interviewing relatives for this book, I realized that my cousin Marilyn (Curly’s daughter by his second wife, Elaine) had never met her half-sister Janie Hanky (Curly’s daughter by his fourth wife, Valerie). They both said they would be interested, so as I wrote in chapter 6, “Come hell or high water, I would see to it that they would finally meet one another in a grand reunion.” I knew that arranging the get-together would be difficult, because Marilyn lived on the West Coast, in California, and Janie lived on the East Coast, in Maryland. Happily, that meeting took place at a Three Stooges convention in Philadelphia over the weekend of July 22-24, 1988.
It was a life-changing experience for the two sisters. Marilyn and Janie have since kept up a correspondence, and I’m so happy that I could be the catalyst that made this come to pass.
Janie (center) and Marilyn (right) on the day they met, with the author and her brother, Paul.