by Moe Howard
November 23 started as an ordinary day. Shemp had gone to the horse races in the afternoon and to the prize fights that night. All of Shemp’s friends got a kick out of his reactions to the fights. He would jab, jerk, and duck in his seat, reacting to the fighters in the ring. The audience would watch him as much as they watched the fight. People sitting on either side of him would often get up and change their seats to avoid jabs in the ribs from Shemp’s wild blows. After the fights, Shemp got into the car of one of his friends and was telling jokes when he suddenly dropped his head, leaned against one of the men, closed his eyes, and, with a smile on his face, died.
When I heard the news that night, I was dumbfounded. I had such a feeling of loneliness and frustration. It took me weeks to gather my thoughts, to make plans for the future, and to try once more to put the act together again. I don’t know what I would have done without Helen’s encouragement, for at that moment I wanted to give it all up.
Daffy detectives Moe, Larry, and Shemp again get themselves entangled in offers to solve a mystery in a haunted castle in Scotched in Scotland (1954).
Hugh McCollum and Christine McIntyre pose with the Stooges in Scotched in Scotland before the boys embark on their de-haunting of the castle.
The boys’ adventures in a Scottish castle put them close to Christine McIntyre, one of their frequent leading ladies, in Scotched in Scotland.
The boys borrow blacksmith Jock Mahoney’s anvil for devious purposes in Knutzy Knights (1954).
Philip Van Zandt and assorted baddies menace Moe, Larry, and Shemp in Knutzy Knights.
Inept restaurateurs Shemp, Moe, and Larry tangle with gangsters Kenneth MacDonald and Frank Lackteen in Of Cash and Hash (1955).
In Blunder Boys (1955), our heroes are at war with the army, and the surrender is unconditional.
Shemp tries to impress Moe in Gypped in the Penthouse (1955) under the disapproving glare of gold digger Jean Wiles.
Shemp, Moe, and Larry play their own sons in Creeps (1956).
Helen and Larry urged me to go on with the act, and I slowly brought myself around to finding a replacement. I started out by trying to get Joe DeRita to take Shemp’s place. I knew Joe’s work from burlesque. He was fat and chubby with a round, jovial face, and, with his hair clipped close, he would look a great deal like my brother Curly. I went to see him and put the proposition to him. He told me he’d like nothing better than to get out of burlesque and join the Stooges. “But Harold Minsky has me under contract.” No matter how much Larry and I pleaded with Minsky, he would not turn Joe loose. I could readily see why. Joe was the best comic he had. Now what to do?
I then recalled that Joe Besser, another chubby burlesque comic, had made several pictures at Columbia on his own and was known to television viewers for his stooging on Milton Berle’s show. He, too, said that he would love to join the act except that he owed Columbia another two-reel comedy on his contract, but I talked the studio into releasing Joe from the deal and letting him join the Stooges.
The first short with the “new” Three Stooges was Hoofs and Goofs, in which our “sister”—played by Harriette Tarler—is reincarnated as a horse. In 1958, after making sixteen more two-reelers with Joe Besser, all directed by Jules White, we completed our contract with Columbia. Now what? Joe informed us that he could not go on tour with us, since his wife was ailing. Once again, a crisis in the Stooges’ careers.
Larry, Joe Besser, and Moe confuse even themselves as identical triplets in A Merry Mix-Up (1957).
Joe Besser’s flair as a chef dismays Moe and Larry and their dates—Ruth Godfrey White, Jeanne Carmen, and Harriette Tarler—in A Merry Mix-Up.
Joe, Larry, and Moe try to convince their sister-turned-pony that she won’t go to the glue factory in Horsing Around (1957).
A musical Stooges interlude in Guns A Poppin! (1957) before the boys depart for a cabin in the woods.
The boys survey an escape route in Pies and Guys (1958) while unfriendly Milton Frome counts to three.
Moe blows his top in Fifi Blows Her Top (1958), as Joe and Larry try to keep him contained and Vanda Dupre, Harriette Tarler, Diana Darrin, and Joe Palma look on.
Moe and Larry bid farewell to Joe Besser.
Here we were with an act that still had the potential to earn us a living—if not in films, then in personal-appearance tours—and even though it seemed hopeless, I just couldn’t let this happen. I had put so much into it through the years. Where to turn? What to do? I remembered Minsky had Joe DeRita. It couldn’t hurt if I tried him again. To my surprise he said, “Moe, I’m in luck. My contract with Minsky is over next week, if you still want me.” I said, “Joe, you’re in. We’ll start rehearsing with you next Monday.”
15
THE COMEBACK: LARRY, MOE, AND CURLY-JOE
We got back into action in 1958 after finally getting Joe DeRita to join us, and we broke in our new act with a date at the Holiday Inn in Bakersfield, California. It was really a heartbreaker. Business was lousy, and the audience, a flock of beer-drinking sheepherders, was unreceptive. They didn’t understand our humor. We got two laughs: one when I poked Joe DeRita—Curly-Joe, as we called him—in the eyes, the other when I hit him in the stomach. One man kept putting liquor in his beer and, after a few minutes, began yelling at us, “Quiet, you’re waking my friend up!” I leaned over and said, “You now have thirty-two teeth; would you like to try for none?”
I was terribly discouraged, but I tried not to show it. How we got through that show I’ll never know. At the second one, we switched our material and got a few laughs. There were two more days, which meant four more shows in all. I wasn’t sure I could make it. I longed for Curly or Shemp. If it weren’t for the fact that my wife was beside me, I might have broken down completely. I was ready to quit the whole thing. I told myself this must be a bad dream or maybe this was what I needed to spur me on to a greater effort.
The next night, the club owner even tried to renege on his contract with us, complaining about bad business. He asked us to take a substantial salary cut. My son-in-law, Norman Maurer, convinced us to turn him down. If the club’s business had tripled, we would not have been entitled to another dime, so if receipts were slimmer than anticipated, we shouldn’t have to give any refunds.
Curly-Joe DeRita becomes the third Stooge in style in 1959.
At our next performance after the argument, my heart was pounding terribly. Out on the stage we went, all smiles, the actor’s mask which frequently covers heartbreak. We kept switching material, even sticking in a few off-color jokes. The patrons’ reception of us improved slightly; we were getting some solid laughs, but it was a far cry from the old days.
Nightclubs, I decided, just weren’t for us. Our film career was over; we were really meant for vaudeville, but vaudeville was dead.
I wondered where our next booking would be.
Then we learned through the grapevine and trade-paper articles that Columbia Pictures, through Screen Gems, its TV subsidiary, was putting together the first batch of thirty or forty Three Stooges shorts for television. The bulk of them were old, dating back to the 1930s, and Columbia did not hold out too much hope for their success, offering the package at bargain prices. Almost overnight, the Three Stooges became one of the hottest children’s TV properties. A whole generation—millions of kids who had never seen the Three Stooges—were suddenly exposed to something brand new in TV fare. Popeye cartoons had been dominating the TV market; kids found that we were live characters who did the wild, exaggerated antics of animated characters, and did them even wilder. Variety headlined an article about the new Three Stooges phenomenon—”Three Stooges as Screen Gems Top Bananas”—and within a matter of weeks, the old Stooges shorts were the number-one children’s TV series throughout the country.
Clowning for a Life magazine spread on the fantastic comeback of the Three Stooges.
Word of our new success spread fast in show business, and offers started to pour in from every part of the country. T
he Stooges were back in business with a flood of offers for records, comic books, fairs, shopping-center promotions, movies, TV, and so on. Suddenly, the entire nation seemed to have gone Stooge-crazy, and we were in a position to command salaries ten and twenty times what we had been getting. That Bakersfield club appearance had brought us $2,500 for the week. Now we were being offered as much as $25,000 a day to dedicate a new shopping center in New York.
In the summer of 1958, John Bertera, the owner of a Pittsburgh nightclub and restaurant, was reading the Sunday paper. His three young children were lying on the floor near him, watching television and laughing hilariously. The rather looked up from his paper and said, “Now come on, kids, stop all that racket, you’re disturbing me.”
“We can’t help it,” the older boy said, “these guys are terrific.” Bertera got up to watch the show and found himself joining their laughter. He asked, “Do you like those fellows so much?” and his son replied, “Dad, the whole school is crazy about them.”
About one week later Bertera’s agent contacted us and asked if we wanted to play the Holiday House in Pittsburgh for five days. I saw no harm in it—the money was good—so I okayed the date. We arrived in Pittsburgh on a Monday, did a couple of TV appearances on station WTAE with Paul Shannon, who was the host of our comedies on that station.
We opened on the following Thursday, and we did smash business for the whole week. Bertera’s agent asked us to come back and do an additional three weeks with a substantial raise in salary and an option for two more weeks. We did something at Holiday House that we had never done before in our act: we made our entrance through the audience, packed with kids. It felt strange with all these children reaching out, just wanting to be able to touch us.
At the end of the three weeks, John Bertera picked up our option for the other two, at another raise in salary. During the weeks that followed, Paul Shannon held a contest on TV, awarding prizes to the youngsters sending in the best likeness of the Stooges done in the most unusual way. We were staying at the Holiday Inn and, during the week of the contest, we received twelve large mailbags containing letters and packages by the thousands—we estimated about twenty-five thousand pieces. We had to take an extra room to hold all of it. I remember how one ten-year-old winner painted our likenesses on three hard-boiled eggs.
At the close of our engagement, Bertera told us that it was the first time in the twelve years he had been operating the club that children had brought their parents.
He said to me, “Moe, this may not interest you, but we have started on our third ton of hamburgers, and it is very strange, but if it weren’t that my kids were crazy about you fellows, I would never have booked you.”
We did three Ed Sullivan shows. Now, Ed was a very nice man but, for a showman, quite forgetful. On our first appearance, he introduced us as the Three Ritz Brothers. He got out of it by adding, “who look more like the Three Stooges to me.” We also did three shows for Steve Allen. In one we did our “Stand-In” sketch from the George White’s Scandals. I came close that night to missing the only performance of my career, but I went on despite a temperature of 103°. After the show, I went to bed for over a week. It’s hard to believe that in sixty years of performing I had never missed a single performance. Clean living—and lots of good luck.
The Three Stooges are Ed Sullivan’s guests on his Sunday-night TV show.
We did TV with Ed Wynn, Kate Smith, Frances Langford, Merv Griffin, and Joey Bishop. Our one show with Milton Berle wasn’t very enjoyable. With all due respect to Milton’s talent, I guess I’m spoiled. I don’t like being on the receiving end of slapstick. Especially since Berle came across with a slap in one routine which cracked my front tooth.
Larry, Moe, and Curly-Joe tiptoe their way into your heart on the Frances Langford television special.
The Stooges sing along with Mary Costa, Frances Langford, Don Ameche, Johnny Mathis, and Jack “Mr. Bongo” Costanzo.
Publicity for the boys’ unsold television pilot Three Stooges Scrapbook (1960), which combined live-action segments and animated shorts.
The boys are packed for their newest adventure in the Three Stooges Scrapbook pilot.
The animated Three Stooges, as they appeared in Three Stooges Scrapbook.
Finally, after all these years of waiting and pleading with Columbia to make a feature, they came to us with an offer to make one called Have Rocket—Will Travel, with my agent Harry Romm producing. The film—our first feature-length movie in eight years—was released in 1959 and was a smash. It had cost less than $400,000 to make and brought in several million dollars to Columbia. By this time, we had made many personal appearances all over the country and had our own fan club with over a hundred thousand members. Photographs of the Stooges were on millions of Fleer Bubblegum trading cards; Western Publishing had put out a series of Three Stooges comic books; and there were Three Stooges toys, punching bags, puzzles, coloring books, puppets—to name just some of the countless items that appeared with our names and likenesses throughout the world.
The zanies have landed on a new planet and discover a peculiar-looking unicorn in their first film after being “rediscovered,” Columbia’s Have Rocket—Will Travel (1959).
It’s mayhem as usual as Moe and Larry try to dig their way back into their rocket in Have Rocket—Will Travel.
In the latter part of 1958, we were signed by Twentieth Century-Fox to do a big-budget production—in Technicolor and CinemaScope. It would be called Snow White and the Three Stooges. Frank Tashlin would direct it, and Snow White would be played by figure-skating champion Carol Heiss. The budget was set at $750,000. Instead of our standard deal ($50,000 and 50 percent of the net profits), we decided to waive our percentage and took $75,000 up front. Then Walter Lang, who had worked with us in the ’30s on Meet the Baron at MGM and later did such major films as State Fair and Can-Can and got an Academy Award nomination for The King and I, replaced Frank Tashlin, and Spyros Skouras gave him carte blanche on Snow White and the Three Stooges. Under Lang, the film’s budget skyrocketed to $3 million. We Stooges never had been in such an expensive film. Luckily, we had gone for a straight salary, because our next picture, The Three Stooges Meet Hercules—made on a very small budget compared to the Fox movie—far outgrossed Snow White, which barely earned back its advertising and print costs.
Moe, Larry, and Curly-Joe sense danger ahead and try to warn Edson “Prince Charming” Stroll and Carol Heiss in Snow White and the Three Stooges (1961).
Passing themselves off as medicine men in Snow White and the Three Stooges, the boys advertise as “Ye Stooges Three, Sole Purveyors of Yuk.”
Larry, Carol Heiss, Curly-Joe, and Moe freeze it up in Snow White and the Three Stooges.
Moe is visited on the set of Snow White and the Three Stooges by Joan and Helen and his grandson Jeff.
Larry, Moe, and Curly-Joe appear to be taken in by villainous Guy Rolfe in Snow White and the Three Stooges.
On a publicity tour for Snow White and the Three Stooges, the boys join Spyros Skouras and his wife.
With the box-office success of Have Rocket, Columbia immediately made us an offer to do a second picture with Harry Romm. At this time, however, we formed our own company, Normandy Productions, with Norman Maurer as our writer and producer (and sometimes director), and had decided that we wanted to do The Three Stooges Meet Hercules (the Hercules movies were big hits at the time) as our next picture. So we turned down Columbia’s offer to do the second feature with Harry Romm and proceeded to prepare Norman’s script for Hercules. For the first time in a quarter of a century, Columbia had made an offer to do a Stooge film and could not get the Stooges to go along with them. Unable to get our services, Columbia decided to make a Stooge feature without the Stooges and had Harry Romm piece together excerpts from our old shorts and edit them together into a film called Stop! Look! and Laugh! with ventriloquist Paul Winchell as host. Seeing this as unfair competition, we immediately checked with our attorneys, who took
the matter to the Superior Court of Los Angeles. We were issued an injunction preventing Columbia from releasing the film. Columbia apologized, admitted they were wrong, and agreed to a settlement whereby they would be allowed to distribute Stop! Look! and Laugh! and would finance Normandy Productions’ The Three Stooges Meet Hercules. Columbia also agreed never again to put together a Stooges feature utilizing old film clips without our permission. The Three Stooges Meet Hercules was released in 1962 and was an even bigger success man Have Rocket—Will Travel.
Curly-Joe, Larry, and Moe gang up to take on beefy Sampson Burke in The Three Stooges Meet Hercules (1962).
An imposing figure accompanies the zany trio on the publicity tour for The Three Stooges Meet Hercules.
Curly-Joe, Moe, Larry, and Quinn Redeker are stalked by the Siamese Cyclops in The Three Stooges Meet Hercules.
We went on tour with Hercules, and everywhere, rain or shine, lines stretched around the block. In San Francisco, I remember, the lines were beyond belief, beginning at the box office and ending less than five feet away. This may sound like a short line, but it actually went around all four sides of a city block and reached almost back to the box office.
When we got to New York with the film, we were staying at the Hampshire House on Central Park South. A strategy meeting was called during our stay, requiring all three Stooges to be present. I phoned Curly-Joe in his room and told him I’d pick him up there and then we’d both go to Larry’s room. When I got to Joe’s room, the door swung open and there he stood—stark naked, from the top of his shaven head to the tip of his clipped toenails. With his hairless body and roly-poly weight, it was difficult at first to tell whether he was a man or a woman. To my amazement, he stepped into the hall and insisted on having the conference right there.