I Stooged to Conquer

by Moe Howard

  For two seasons on the Sunflower, I got to play most of the parts I had seen in the theaters as a boy. The season usually ran from May 12 until about September 10. By the end of my first season my salary was sixty-five dollars a week; one hundred dollars a week in the second season.

  It was a joyous experience. I had launched my career on the Sunflower. There I was, doing what I loved best, making a good living, and helping support my family at the same time.

  * Although my given name was Harry Moses Horwitz, in school I was known as Moe; in the early days of the theater, Harry; and then with Ted Healy, I again was Moe.

  4

  BREAKING INTO VAUDEVILLE WITH SHEMP

  After a couple of summers with Captain Bryant on the Sunflower, I began my act with Shemp. I can recall our efforts to get started in show business, going from agent to agent. After weeks of doing the rounds, we felt pretty dejected. I had two seasons on the showboat under my belt and I’d done many films at Vitagraph Studio, and yet it was so tough to break in to vaudeville. Shemp was extremely discouraged. I begged him to hold on for another week or so, and if nothing came up by then, we would try films again. Two days later, we found an agent: a jovial black man with the two-bit Sheedy Agency. He asked me many questions regarding my show business background. I answered his questions, I ran down my own credits, and I did some important lying about Shemp. We told him that our stage name was Howard and Howard, which sounded better than Horwitz and Horwitz, and were hired for thirty dollars for three days—for the two of us. Mr. Sheedy gave us a contract for the Mystic Theater on 53rd Street near Third Avenue.

  We would open on the following Friday and close on Sunday, doing a blackface act with about twelve minutes of comedy. The day before the opening we went to see the theater. It held approximately three hundred and the audience entered through an alley. The contract failed to mention how many shows we were to do, but it didn’t matter to us; Shemp and I were in vaudeville.

  It was midwinter—and bitter cold. The first show was eleven in the morning, but we arrived at the theater at nine and introduced ourselves to the manager, who directed us to our dressing room in the basement. Fortunately it adjoined the furnace, which kept us from freezing to death. We put on our black makeup and sat with our feet up on the furnace, waiting to be called.

  We were the comedy relief—last on the bill of four acts. When it was our turn, the manager would yell down to us, “Howard and Howard—up and at ‘em.” The sign would go up on the side of the proscenium: HOWARD AND HOWARD—A STUDY IN BLACK, and we shuffled onto the stage to the tune of “Darktown Strutters’ Ball.” One fellow clapped on our entrance, and that was the extent of our applause. The dialogue of the act (as best I can remember it) was as follows:

  MOE: All they do is give you beans. Beans for breakfast, beans for lunch, and beans for dinner. Why, they even send you to war with a bean shooter.

  There was no audience reaction, so we slid into some material that we had stolen from a well-known act of the day, Moss and Frye:

  MOE: You think you’re pretty smart spouting those big words at Mrs. Lincoln’s party. SHEMP: Yes, I am smart.

  MOE: Okay, boy, what size is a gray suit? … Do you think it’s as warm in the summer as it is in the country? … If you went to the railroad station and bought a ticket for three dollars, where are you going? And by the way, if three dimes is thirty cents, how much is a bunch of nickels?

  SHEMP: Enough of that smart-aleck stuff, let’s sing a song that will put our friends in a good humor.

  At this point some people entered the theater from the alley door at the back of the stage, and with them a gust of wind and a bit of snow. The curtain, like a sail in the wind, pushed against our backs and nearly knocked us off the stage. We finished the song we were singing to a burst of silence, took three bows to the audience’s back as they were leaving. To make a very long and horrible nightmare longer, we did six shows on Friday, nine shows on Saturday, and eight on Sunday. We realized finally that we were the “clean-up” act. Every time the theater filled up, the manager would yell down, “Howard and Howard, up and at ‘em!” Whenever he wanted to clear everyone out, up and at ‘em we’d go, and the audience would leave the minute we came on. It was a heartbreaking experience, but it never fazed us, for I knew we were getting better, our material was better, theater conditions were better—but the salary was the same.

  Our blackface act was broken up briefly by World War I. Shemp was drafted into the army and went off to war. If they’d put him in the navy they might not have noticed that he was a bed wetter. He was discharged after a few months and came back to join me in vaudeville.

  In 1916, my parents exchanged some property in Bensonhurst for a 116-acre farm in Chatham, New York, 150 miles from New York City and 60 miles from Springfield, Massachusetts.

  I’d help on the farm with the planting in the spring and the harvesting in the fall. In between I’d work in vaudeville with Shemp. Our older brother Jack and a professional farmer worked on the farm full-time.

  The farm had fourteen cows, two Percheron horses, and their two-year-old offspring, Nancy. In addition there was a sorrel horse and a thirteen-year-old “cribber” called John who would cause me no end of embarrassment by stopping in the busiest part of the street to leave his droppings. A cribber is a horse who grinds his teeth on fences or any other hard objects and constantly sucks air, causing him to make the weirdest noises. On several occasions, I left him hitched to a wagon to find him sound asleep on the shafts.

  With the farm came a large, fat pig. My mother lost little time in throwing it off the farm, since pork did not at all fit into her Jewish lifestyle. The pig was sold and thirteen days later gave birth to a large litter of piglets.

  Among the many Rhode Island reds and Plymouth Rocks was a multicolored hen we called Henrietta. She followed me everywhere. At milking time I got a kick out of spraying her with milk. One day Henry, as I named her, fell into a mound of cow manure. I rushed for my water bucket, washed her off, dried her with a burlap bag, and then put her in a warm oven to dry. We almost had roast Henry when my brother Jack turned up the oven to cook something. I found her in the nick of time.

  I can remember that whenever I would feed the chickens, Henry would perch on my shoulder, and as I would scatter corn to the other chickens, I’d cup my hand and feed Henry. One day, just as I stepped out of the barn, a hen hawk grabbed Henry and started to fly away with her. I picked up a rock and let the hawk have it. Henry dropped with a thud. She lived, but minus a few feathers. Finally a rather large horse trod on Henry, causing her demise at the age of four and a half months.

  That summer, Curly, who was thirteen, joined us on the farm.

  He pitched in with the chores and was anxious to learn to do everything, from running the cream separator to churning butter to helping cultivate the truck garden. He could handle the horses quite well and fed the livestock at four thirty every morning while Shemp and I were milking the cows. Shemp didn’t care much for farm work. He’d much rather play cowboy—without a horse—in an unfenced field of corn. With a whip in his hand and an alarm clock tied to his belt, he’d let the cows feed in the pasture for a couple of hours and then would drive them back into the corral. Shemp’s outfit for these farm chores: a pair of red flannels, a Continental Army coat, and a cocked hat. Every time a neighbor would drive by in his horse and buggy, Shemp would strike a pose in the middle of the field. Often neighbors would stop by and comment on that fantastic scarecrow in the cornfield.

  One day Curly decided he wanted to do some mowing, so I put him on the machine and headed for the field of hay, and then walked along beside to see that he handled the mower properly. Curly was mowing for about an hour when he suddenly cut through a nest of yellow jackets. He jumped off the mower and we both raced for the nearby stream, followed closely by a swarm. Our necks and hands were covered with stings. It was days before the swellings went down.

  Curly as a teenager.

  We we
re always doing things just for laughs. I remember one time shaving only the right side of my face, and Shemp shaved the left side of his. When our half beards were really full and bushy, we went into town to watch the good folks hurriedly cross to the other side of the street. Then there was the time our mother sent us a wire that she was coming to Chatham for the weekend to look over the farm. Shemp and I dressed for her arrival: our red flannels, our Continental Army coats, our cocked hats. And our half beards gave us an added touch of insanity. We hitched up the team to our surrey with the fringe on top and drove into town to meet the train. Curly went along for the ride, for a little additional class, and warned us that Mother might be rather embarrassed seeing us look as we did, but we had too much of the theater in us to change our minds. We pulled the surrey up close to the station platform, and when the train came to a stop, Shemp and I were standing by, each holding a horse by the bridle.

  Mother looked around for a few minutes and never recognized us. Then she saw Curly sitting in the surrey, and as she approached it, Shemp and I each took an arm and kissed her on each cheek. Mother, a very staid person, became terribly embarrassed because of the crowd that had gathered and, as we drove away, asked us, “How can you do such crazy things? The people will think you’re meshuga!”

  Several days later Curly decided to go hunting with a neighbor. He took my rifle, a .22-caliber gun with a hair trigger. Curly later told us that he was sitting on the ground with his legs crossed and the end of the rifle barrel pointed at his foot. Without any thought that he had a rifle in his hand, he kept playing with the trigger. It discharged with a roar, sending the bullet into his ankle. He went up to our bedroom, and there he lay, white as a sheet, blood oozing from his foot. We had him rushed to St. Peter’s Hospital in Albany, sixty miles away, where it was touch and go as to whether he would lose his foot.

  I dread to think what would have happened if our mother had been there at the time.

  For six days, I walked the three and a half miles from our farm to the railroad station in Chatham, took the train to Albany to visit with Curly for a couple of hours, and talked to the doctors about him. They told me that in about six months his instep and ankle bones should be broken and put in a cast so that he would be able to bend his ankle. Curly decided against this, and although it gave him much pain and he limped his way through life, he never let it interfere with his work … or, for that matter, his play.

  In 1917 Shemp and I worked our comedy act for both the Loew’s and RKO circuits. This was unheard of, as there was an unwritten agreement between the two circuits. If you worked for one, the other wouldn’t hire you. We got around this by playing a blackface act for RKO and a whiteface act for Loew’s.

  Shemp and Moe, vaudevillians, in 1919.

  The theaters at the time held between two hundred and four hundred people, but the owners weren’t very dependable, so we had to make certain that we’d get the $12.50 for our two days’ work. To solve our problem we found an agent who would be responsible for collecting our salary. One act that we worked with was a contortionist, Ferry the Frogman, who was breaking in a new act at the time. During one part of his routine he would fold his legs behind his neck and sit on a very small whiskey glass. Every night he would take about twenty minutes to limber up. His costumes were an integral part of the act. For the matinee, Ferry would wear a green frog costume made of thousands of sparkling white sequins; for his evening performance he wore a smashing suit with the opposite colors.

  I remember one night we all went to dinner. I ordered a sardine sandwich, Shemp a ham and cheese, and Ferry ordered a double burger and beans. After dinner we returned to the theater. Shemp and I finished our act, then Ferry came onstage in his beautiful white suit covered with green sequins. He made a frog-like entrance, walking on his hands, and after twisting himself into some unbelievable positions, he placed a small whiskey glass on the stage and proceeded to lock his legs behind his neck. After staying in that position about two minutes, he started to turn as green as his costume, then vomited all over his elegant attire. It was then that the stage hands noticed that he was stuck in that pretzel shape and was unable to untangle himself. They ran onstage, lifted him up, tangles and all, and carried him off.

  The next day he was well enough to do the two shows. He explained that usually he had only a glass of milk for supper and ate his dinner after the last performance. Hamburger and beans, he later told us, were just too much for his pretzel-shaped colon. The next day he sent his costume to the cleaners. The cleaning cost more than the salary he had earned.

  At the Peerless in Brooklyn, Shemp and I appeared on the bill with an acrobatic act, “Page, Hack, and Mack.” Page, a contortionist, was Mack’s wife. Mack was a behemoth of a man, six feet tall and 240 pounds; Hack, a short, stocky German, weighed only 124 and was five foot seven.

  The act’s only prop was a table without a top. Hack would stand in the opening of the table, and as the music played and the drums rolled, he’d leap straight into the air and land with his feet on the edges of the table frame. Then, as Hack jumped in the air again, the frame of the table was slid into place. More frames and tops were added until Hack was standing on top of six tables, each thirty inches high. At this point, Page wrapped herself around Mack’s stomach, holding her ankles with her hands. Now as the music rose to a crescendo, Mack would step up to the footlights with Page wrapped around his middle; he would be facing the audience. Mack would raise his muscular arms into the air, and as the drumroll increased, Hack would leap forward off the tables with arms extended and Mack would catch him with a hand-to-hand grip, just stopping him from flying off the stage and into the orchestra pit. It was a breathtaking trick.

  The act went well for the first two days, but on the second show of the closing day, Hack leaped, his hands hit Mack’s hands, and he slid right through, plummeting headfirst into the orchestra pit. There were screams from the audience and then a hush as Hack got to his feet, bowed slowly, acknowledging their wild applause, and then passed out.

  Hack was taken to the hospital, where he was thought to have a fractured skull. Later he explained that he had forgotten to wipe the rosin bag over his hands to keep them from slipping.

  This was vaudeville, and Shemp and I continued with this insanity until 1922.

  Moe (second left) and Shemp (second right) with the Marguerite Bryant Players Stock Company, 1919.

  With a fellow vaudevillian … high spirits in Springfield, Missouri.

  5

  HELEN

  I met my wife, Helen, on the beach in Bensonhurst in 1922. Here was this charming young lady with fantastic legs, dressed in an old-fashioned bathing suit, all covered up—even long silk stockings. As she emerged from the water, I noticed her stockings were in shreds and dye from her suit was running down her legs.

  After a letter-writing courtship for three years, I married Helen Schonberger (she was a cousin of Harry Houdini) in Brooklyn. I had been touring in vaudeville for weeks at a time, so I used letters and poems to keep our relationship alive. She kept all the old poems hidden away for all these years.

  Our wedding day was quite trying for me. I was talked into wearing tails and a high hat by relatives of the bride-to-be. Before I left for the ceremony, I peeked out of a crack in the door to make sure none of my friends would see me in this wardrobe. Finally, high hat in hand, I ran out of the door into a cab that was at the corner about a hundred yards away. I’m sure I did that hundred in no time flat. I expected to be pelted with tomatoes and other soft vegetables. I guess I remembered what I’d done to high hats in my youth, but I made it.

  Moe and his wife, Helen, in 1927.

  Helen looked beautiful as a bride and to this day still looks beautiful despite nearly fifty years of marriage to a Stooge. No gold pie plates, please!

  Shemp married Gertrude Frank that same year. She was the daughter of a builder who lived in the Bensonhurst area. Gertrude was nicknamed Babe, and I guess that was why we took to calling our Ba
be “Curly.” It had gotten very confusing.

  6

  JOINING FORCES WITH TED HEALY

  In the winter of 1922, I spotted a newspaper ad announcing that Ted and Betty Healy were appearing on an eight-act vaudeville bill at Brooklyn’s Prospect Theater. I had not seen Ted in ten years.

  It was bitter cold and snowing the day I got to the stage door of the Prospect and came face to face with Ted. We hugged each other, and Ted said, “The good Lord must have sent you.”

  I replied, “An ad in the paper sent me.”

  He had grown a good twelve inches since 1912, making him more than six feet tall. He was about twenty-five; I was nine months younger and eight inches shorter. I learned that things had not gone well for him in business, and it had taken him ten years to realize that he really wasn’t cut out to be a businessman. He finally tried the theater, and it was then that he changed his name to Ted Healy and improved his financial status.

  After we reminisced for a while, he worked his way around to feeling me out about joining forces with him in a new act he wanted to test. “I make a speech to the audience and then proceed to pour water on the acrobat who is lying down in a box,” he said. “I’d call it ‘Fire and Water.’ You jump out and do a backflip like you used to do at the beach.” I reminded him that the stage was wood with cement beneath it. The beach was soft sand. He explained that he would have the dancer and another guy hold me up with a rope. Well, I tried the stunt, and as my legs came over from the backflip, I kicked one of the men in the neck and the other in the chin. Both of them quit.