In desperation, Healy made a failed attempt to salvage his act by hiring replacement Stooges. It proved anything but a joyful reunion. This left the Stooges a man down. Healy was scathing. With all the foresight and perception that comes with drinking Wild Turkey for breakfast, he took one look at the future Curly Howard, the most beloved of all the Stooges, and dismissed him as not funny.
Admittedly, Jerry did not much resemble his iconic alter ego at that point, sporting long red hair and a handlebar moustache. This earned him a huge laugh from the crowd vaudeville audiences were obviously a push-over , and one of the most gifted comic performers of the 20th century had officially arrived.
The contract was not renewed, and in Healy and his Stooges finally went their separate ways. Not only was he prone to violent, drunken rages, he was apt to do some very dumb things indeed. Already several sheets to the wind when he arrived at the Trocadero on the Sunset Strip, Healy lost no time in mixing things up with another famously belligerent drunk, character actor Wallace Beery, who was drinking at the bar with DiCicco. Healy suggested they take things outside. They duly did, and Beery and DiCicco proceeded to beat Healy to a pulp.
The beating was so savage, in fact, that the following day Healy fell into a coma and died. Mayer deployed his infamous fixers Eddie Mannix and Howard Strickling to protect Beery, one of his top stars, by covering up the incident.
MGM story editor Samuel Marx confirmed this in an interview shortly before his death in And by then, they had quite another ruthless sociopath to contend with. They were on the brink of their greatest success and had honed their act into the classic Stooge mode that defines them to this day. The internal mechanism of The Three Stooges is deceptively simple. Moe, with his gravelly voice, permanent scowl and menacing helmet of bowl-cut hair, was the leader, invariably the under-boss entreated with overseeing whatever hopelessly doomed endeavour the Stooges found themselves pursuing and whatever it was, you can bet it involved heavy objects and the potential for maximum mayhem; plumbing, not surprisingly, was a favourite Stooge profession.
Moe actually had his brother Shemp to thank for his signature move. Once, during a card game, Shemp became so convinced that Larry was cheating him he leapt up and poked him in both eyes. Moe made a note of it and duly incorporated it into the act.
An easygoing simpleton, Larry was the essential, non-threatening intermediary, and he brought a special genius to the role. Even given the quick-fire production schedule for shorts, the Stooges were extraordinarily prolific during their Columbia years, churning out film after film of, more often than not, admirable quality in terms of writing, direction and production values, given they were shot in a mere four or five days. And their films were hugely popular, often getting a more positive response than the features they were designed to accompany.
Naturally, their talent, industriousness and lucrative bankability were rewarded with all the bounteous largesse for which Harry Cohn was justly famous. Although the legend that in the 23 years they spent at Columbia the Stooges never received a payrise is untrue, it is rooted in reality.
Playing his customary dual role of ruthless businessman and enthusiastic sadist, Cohn kept the Stooges on a one-year contract throughout their career at the studio, forcing them to re-negotiate their employment every 12 months, browbeating them into signing for a pittance with warnings that the shorts department was in financial trouble.
Keeping its biggest stars in the dark as to their true value was a deliberate ploy to ensure they worked cheap. For one, they were terrified of Cohn and his Mob connections, as were a good many people in Hollywood.
As working-class guys, fearful of losing their livelihood, they were happy to take what they were given. Playing a human punchbag day in, day out for years, enduring constant blows to the head — most of which, according to Moe Howard, were every bit as real as they looked — brought on a series of minor cerebral haemorrhages that slowed him down to the point that he was unable to make personal appearances.
Shemp, now under contract to Columbia himself, was brought in to replace Curly in live performances. Cohn flatly refused to give Curly leave of absence, and it was not long before his declining health became evident on screen. This should have signalled, at the very least, an extended period of rest and recuperation.
For their part, the other Stooges took on the extra responsibility willingly, hoping that Curly would eventually recover sufficiently to resume his role. But it was a losing battle and in , between takes on the short Half-Wits Holiday a remake of the two-reeler, Hoi Polloi , Curly suffered a massive, paralysing stroke. In this he was as mistaken as many observers have been since.
And if it was not immediately apparent to Cohn what replacing Curly entailed, the endless auditions for a new third Stooge alerted him to what Moe and Larry already knew: they were not going to find another Curly. But the decision to bring Shemp back into the act was not that simple.
After some initial trepidation, Harry Cohn was keen for Shemp to rejoin the act, and with Shemp under contract to Columbia, Cohn began to exert his influence of course, he expected Shemp to take a 50 per cent pay cut for relinquishing his hard-won independence.
Reluctantly, he signed on — but only, he insisted, until a permanent replacement for Curly could be found. In the end, Shemp remained a Stooge until his dying day. One is that, after Curly retired, Shemp did a valiant job but there was always something missing. Such wines are Shemps. Although devastated, Moe and Larry kept the act alive, recruiting comedian Joe Besser as the third Stooge.
This, as any Stooge fan will tell you, was the beginning of the end. Besser was never happy as a Stooge and, wary of what had happened to Curly, had a clause in his contract forbidding Moe from hitting him. By now, Columbia was the only studio in town producing shorts, and in , with television taking over the market, the department was shut down.
Healy agreed to take the young comedian into the group under one condition. He was still in high demand for films and a respectable star, despite his off-screen behavior and inability to manage his finances. Then in , Healy had gone out for a drink to celebrate the birth of his son, John Jacob Nash. He reportedly stumbled from bar to bar before ending up at the Trocadero on Sunset Boulevard where he got into a fistfight with year-old Albert Broccoli who would go on to produce the James Bond films.
Eventually the two made up, but another eyewitness in the bar said they saw Healy become belligerent with two other men in the bar who were on dates that night. A friend found him in front of the Hollywood Plaza Hotel and took him to a doctor who bandaged Healy up and sent him home.
His condition only got worse. He eventually suffered a massive heart attack that put him into a coma from which he never recovered, just two days after becoming a father.
Instead, the coroner ruled that acute and chronic alcoholism caused his death. Another report suggested he died of the heart attack but the attending physician, the same who had just brought his son into the world two days earlier, refused to sign the death certificate. His widow Betty and sister Marcia insisted Healy had been sober for eight months prior and only had a few drinks to celebrate his new son.
Devastated by Healy's death, the boys pressed on with the act. One of their signature gags, however, was actually invented during this formative time by Shemp who worked in films with Abbott and Costello and W.
Moe recalled in a radio interview that he, Shemp and Larry were playing bridge and Shemp accused Larry of cheating. The argument became so heated that Shemp reared back with two fingers and poked Larry hard in both eyes. It struck me so funny I leaned backward in a chair and went right through a glass door. The pokes, punches and slaps may have been well choreographed from their years of work in clubs and enhanced with wacky Foley sound effects, but there were still many dangers to be had during filming.
The Stooges didn't start using a Foley machine to enhance their physical gags until they started working with director Jules White at Columbia and Healy usually held nothing back while slapping and punching his Stooges. The Stooges may have done their own stunts in slap fights but they were hardly stuntmen and insisted they have three professionals stand in for them. The director eventually relented and hired some doubles to stand in for them.
The doubles suffered several broken ribs and limbs from the hard tackle and the studio hired doubles ever since to handle the bigger stunts. Even the infamous pie fights, most of which were thrown by Moe who developed a science for flinging pies , were serious hazards on the set. Since filming required multiple takes and the shorts department had smaller budgets, they had to reuse the thrown pies for retakes. The crew simply swept up the gooey mixtures off the hardwood floor and slapped them back in the pans.
Sometimes, one of the recycled pies would have an occasional nail or wood shard from the dirty studio floor mixed in with them. Hackett, a seasoned Catskills stand-up comedian, had a wife and child to support and a second one on the way.
0コメント