The Broken Heart of Moses Horwitz

It may feel strange at first, but if I can persuade you to humor me just for the length of an article (this one), my request is that you drop all contrary notions that have developed over the years, and consider the Three Stooges as human beings. They were, after all.

Like the Ritz Brothers they began in Vaudeville, and like the Marx Brothers they played Broadway (yes, believe it). Only the presence of non-blood relation Larry Fine – the fuzzy-haired middle Stooge – prevented the movie-going public from ever knowing them as The Horwitz Brothers.

The Three Stooges were a semi-brother act.

Early in Vaudeville, Moe and Shemp*, performing as a duo (Sam & Harry), intentionally "Americanized" their sir-name to Howard. When they joined forces with fellow Vaudevillian – and Moe's boyhood buddy – Ted Healey, to become his "stooges," the name Horwitz would never surface again in connection with them.

Even so, the three actual "Howard" brothers, Moses, Jerome and Samuel (Moe, Curly** and Shemp), only appeared on-screen together once, in "Hold That Lion" (1947).

Moe, Larry & Shemp – the "official" Stooge roster at the time – encounter a man snoring ferociously with his derby hat pulled over his face. Moe lifts the derby to discover that the gent has a clothespin fastened to his nose. Removing the pin causes the snoring to erupt into a very "Curlyesque" yammer. It's too close to home for Moe, who wisely re-clips the pin and replaces the derby.

Despite Moe's role as the cruel, bossy Stooge, his soft center had a way of betraying him on-camera. The snoring man under the derby, with a full head of moppy auburn hair, was Curly, making a cameo in the very series where he once shared top billing. Had his head been shaved, he would have been instantly recognizable – but Jerome Howard decided that he was permanently retired, and kept his hair, and the scene remains an inside gag to all but the most observant audiences.

Larry delivers a Stooge-101 doubletake at his former partner. Shemp – the venerable trooper, and original Third Stooge in the group's formative years – stares somewhat emptily at his kid brother Jerome; a blankness that could easily have a comical twist read into it. But Moe cannot even manage that, though he tries awfully hard. His instinct is to get the scene over as soon as possible – before his tears can flow.

Just a year prior, on the set of "Halfwit's Holiday" (completed in 1946, but released in 1947), which was a remake of their 1935 short "Hoi Polloi," a satire of – sit down for it – a George Bernard Shaw play, there had occurred a dour turning point for the seemingly unstoppable Stooges.

Moe had grabbed Curly by his tux lapel and given him the standard Stooge-brand noggin whap, sending him packing out of the frame. Neither of them realized it was the last gag of Jerome's career as a Stooge. The director, Jules White, grunted "cut." Moe disengaged, and went to pat off his perspiration with a towel before the next scene.

Character actor Emil Sitka, coming on-set for what was his very first appearance in a Stooge comedy (he'd become their most ubiquitous regular), would write in his diary later about that suddenly terrible moment. "Got on just in time to see Curly fold."***

On "cut," Curly made it to director White's chair, and had a stroke. A massive one. Though not quite deadly, to his life as a comedian, assuredly fatal. When White called in his talent for the next shot, Curly could not move from the chair. Nor could he even speak. Moe raced over to him, and knew the horrible truth instantly. It was over.

Curly was rushed to the hospital, and big brother Moe reached deep within himself to pull out that old Vaudevillian's creed that he and his brothers had based their lives upon; "The show goes on." He and Larry completed the day's shoot, including the film's final fade-out, sans Curly.

Moe, the "tough" Stooge, held up production with copious weeping, but somehow sucked it up long enough to keep White's heartless shooting schedule.

It was, of all things, a pie fight, where the reactions – doubletakes and cartoony mugging – are what sell the laughs as much as the gooey explosions of whipped cream and custard.

And in the film, against that contrasting emotive backdrop, it became quite visibly obvious that Moe's heart had abandoned him.

He is not mentally present, even for that staple of the Stooge repertoire, a blueberry battle royale. He shares in the tart-tossing, but his mind is clearly elsewhere. His one line amid the creamy carnage, "C'mon now, you started this!" seems frosted with weariness – delivered with the same tone as perhaps "Please, no more, let me leave."

He sped to Curly's bedside at the hospital immediately, in full Stooge make-up, as soon as White yelled "wrap."

Moe would have to roll with an identical blow again, about eight years later. The oldest Horwitz brother, Sam/Shemp, went with some friends to the horseraces in the afternoon, and then to witness some prizefights that evening. On the way home, somewhere on Barham Avenue in Los Angeles, in the back seat of a cab, Shemp asked for a light for his cigar, grinned, placed his head upon the shoulder of the buddy next to him, and left this world.

Curly, after additional strokes, had passed away in a less melodramatic fashion, three years before Shemp's "Hollywood" ending.

Like Curly, Shemp departed with work unfinished.

Columbia Studios came up with a novel plan for filling the vacuum of Shemp's absence in the remaining two uncompleted Stooge films, in a way that chipped at Moe's twice-broken heart even more.

Shemp's remaining scenes were shot using a stand-in; actor Joe Palma, never allowing him to face the camera. With his similar build and hair-comb, it worked. Audiences saw only the back of Palma's head in close shots, or in distant longshots obscuring his face with say, a toolbox carried on his forward shoulder. To anyone not hep to the switcheroo, it was Shemp.

But like Curly, the real Shemp was gone, and with him his intangible magic that had made the team click, as Curly's had.

Shemp Howard was the only one of the Stooges who had a solo career apart from the team – co-starring along side the likes of W.C. Fields, the Andrews Sisters and Abbott & Costello, as well as starring in his own – now somewhat obscure – features and short subjects.

Curly was Shemp's replacement when the Stooges first signed with Columbia, after a nasty parting of ways with Ted Healey, that had left Shemp uneasy about continuing with the group. Years later when Shemp returned to the Stooges in the wake of Curly's illness, he'd been a separate entity for so long that most audiences had forgotten him, and believed Curly was the original "third stooge."

Shemp did not mimic his kid brother's style, but brought his own. Of the three Horwitz brothers, Shemp was the true "comedian." Curly had invented his own comedic science and was its master, but Shemp was a puristic cinema clown; he could improv, pantomime, throw down slapstick, and deliver a one-liner impeccably. In one poverty-row film, he'd even played a "rough" Moe-like character to a team of stooge-like partners. Both he and Curly had, in turn, been the team's real money-makers.

Now the funny business was left solely to Moe and Larry, who by themselves could not quite muster the ambient comic chaos that had once existed with Curly's or Shemp's help.

When they came to scenes that had originally called for Shemp's presence, in a way too involved for Palma's turned head to accomodate, the Third Stooge would simply become missing. In one such instance, Moe was given the line "Where IS that Shemp!"

Moe couldn't pull the line off without giving it a cryptic double meaning. Or a look as though tears were threatening to form.

The charade could not last long. Finally Moe and Larry welcomed aboard comic actor Joe Besser to help them run out the team's final commitments to Columbia. They had been with the studio for 24 years. The last 12-or-so shorts ranked as forgettable – and at least one of them was a tacky remake of a Curly film, with Jerome's longshots intact, but all the close-ups re-shot – with Besser.

In his posthumously published autobiography, "Moe Howard & The Three Stooges" (Citadel, 1979), Moe claimed that he could never quite get over seeing Curly or Shemp in his mind's eye, in later Stooge films, when he had to brutalize surrogate Stooges Besser and Curly-Joe DeRita.

It has been theorized that the cranial abuse that Curly and Larry endured during their careers as Stooges may have contributed to their demise. Both men died of strokes, after years of Moe's slaps, punches and faux eye-pokes. The eye shots were actually delivered to their foreheads, but "sold" by a quick flinch and scrunch of the eyes.

The medical connection can't be proven, of course. But it may have been on Moe's mind for years after – another layer to his melancholy.

Legend has it that before becoming a Stooge, Joe DeRita expressed that he was not crazy about such high-impact comedy – especially being on the receiving end. Allegedly Larry assured him that he would himself, from then on, be catching the brunt of Moe's attacks. Larry drove the point home by demonstrating that a portion of his face was basically a solid callus, from nearly three decades of back-handing and sucker punches.

The Stooges' roughhousing had been not-quite-fake in the beginning, during the Healey years, when the slaps and tweaks popped and snapped unaided by the zany cartoon sound effects that would be commonplace in their Columbia two-reelers.

For sheer survival's sake they worked out each patented assault into harmless technique – yet there were always bumps and bruises, and the many injuries the Stooges suffered simply by specializing in such extreme physical comedy.

On the shoot of one particularly long pie fight, when the pastry/ammo ran out, the stage crew scraped together a last batch of new pies from the gooey remains on the studio floor. The Stooges and their accompanying troop of character extras discovered the hard way, in mid-take, that the pies also contained wood shavings, floor grime, and a slew of random carpet nails. Still, the show went on.

Even professional wrestlers of that period didn't have such working conditions.

As the Stooges reached their forties, it all began to exact its toll. It should not have surprised Moe that Curly went first.

Jerome Howard had come to detest shaving his head, and would periodically go through a depression. In his younger days, Jerome had been – again, sit down for it – quite the ladies' man, with a full mop of hair and sometimes even a mustache. He and the screen's top pre-Bogart "hoodlum," George Raft, had a running unofficial competition as to whom was the better ballroom dancer. Jerome specialized in sweeping the young ladies off their feet, and wowing the crowd with an uncommon grace and agility on the dance floor, given his "padded" build. Shaving his head to play Curly had robbed him of all that.

Moe and Larry were both happily married all their lives, but Curly's marriage to his wife Elaine had crumbled during the Stooges' time at Columbia.

Moses Horwitz and Louis Feinberg could disengage from their screen characters merely with a comb. Jerome Horwitz was forced to look his part 24/7. His fame as the world's favorite Stooge came with a heavy price.

He turned to the drinking and partying that had dominated his twenties, prior to joining up with the Stooges. Toward his final films as Curly, beginning in the mid-1940s, one can spot a grim transformation taking shape. His speech is strained. His face seems puffier than normal, his gaze hollow and far-off, and his timing is slowed and unevenly metered.

They began giving Curly less to do, as he would tire easily. Moe would sometimes literally feed him his lines, one at a time, to get a decent take out of him. Moe's "violence" became choreographed differently as well, so that both Curly and Larry took more evenly dished out portions – to ease Curly's physical burden. In "Three Loan Wolves" (1946) Curly could not gather sufficient energy for his usual solo scene, and it was given to Larry, who pulled it off with only marginal success.

The stroke was building, several films before it finally struck.

During a television interview in the mid-1960s, Moe demonstrated on Curly-Joe DeRita how some of his "violent" shtick was actually done – for the benefit of parents who were rattled by their children mimicking the comedic warfare – Tai Kwon Moe – upon their smaller siblings to injurious effect.

DeRita's face spoke volumes. Obviously no more painful than pats with an angora mitten, Moe's nose tweaks and ear twists were considered by DeRita with near-homicidal disdain. Utterly refusing to "sell" the gags with any facial reaction, comedic or otherwise, a glowing slow burn did his talking for him. Joe DeRita – who'd grown up in show business, and whose career's finalé had been to serve the legacy of two of the early talkie era's most extreme physical comics, Curly and Shemp Howard – hated slapstick with a passion.

He did it grudgingly when needed. Only Moe, who signed his paycheck, was immune to his temper.

Joe DeRita and Moe Howard died more typical "old man" deaths – DeRita, the "Last Stooge," in his 80s. The argument that Moe indirectly hastened his brothers and Larry Fine to their graves just doesn't hold water, and is in fact somewhat of an insult. The Stooges were, each in turn, victimized by the ever-hungering Movie Machine. Their lives were ones of sacrifice, to an artform they loved, and served from its lowest dregs, despite all the heartbreak it caused them.

Moe Howard never referred to himself as a comedian, but an actor, period. An actor, he said, whose career just happened to consist of comedy work. But the meanest Stooge, behind the scenes, had the biggest, softest heart. Occasionally, he didn't hide it very well. Some actor.

Call him instead Pagliacci... with a bad haircut.

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*Sam's screen name "Shemp" was a gift from their mother, who spoke in Yiddish. It was how she pronounced "Sam."

**Jerome got the moniker "Curly" at the beginning of his Stoogedom, when he showed up with a shaved head to counter Moe's bowlcut and Larry's lion mane. It was like calling a tall guy "shorty," Moe explained. Those not familiar with the Stooges sometimes confuse Larry's and Curly's names because of Larry's wild skull mop.

***My memory of this quote is that it was attributable to Sitka, and was quoted in the documentary "The Three Stooges Story" by director Edward Bernds.