Every so often, we come across photos that we think need to be shared. Here we have one of the few pics I've ever seen of the Hurwitz boys — Jerry, Samuel and Maurice, better known as Curly, Shemp and Moe…members of the Three Stooges, but not all at the same time. (To see a larger version of the picture, click above where it says.) At no point was the Stooges' act actually comprised of the three brothers. Shemp appeared in various permutations of the team when they were in vaudeville, providing comic relief to the terminally unfunny Ted Healy, who fronted the act. Then Shemp left to go it alone and Jerry/Curly took his place.
Eventually, sans Healy, The Three Stooges (Curly and Moe, plus Larry Fine) began making shorts for Columbia. Then Curly suffered a stroke and had to give up performing.
Many years ago, an actress named Carlotta Monti (now best recalled as the mistress of W.C. Fields) told me that Shemp had returned to the act largely under duress. She said — and this differs slightly from the way the tale is usually told — that when Curly took ill, Moe initially did all he could to keep it secret, lest it mean unemployment for the act. Eventually though, he had to tell the Columbia Studios biggies that Curly would not be reporting for their next picture, at which point the arguments began.
According to Ms. Monti, who was apparently a close friend of Shemp's, Moe initially wanted to change the act to The Two Stooges but Columbia would have none of that. "Theaters will want to pay two-thirds as much for the films," they joked, though their main concern was that Moe and Larry couldn't carry a film. The studio wanted to hire a rotund comic — someone built somewhat like Curly — so that the change would be less blatant and so that old stock footage of Curly (or his stuntman) could be reused. Already, to save money, a lot of the Stooges films were recycling earlier scenes.
At this, Moe balked. He didn't want a stranger in "his" act. Moreover, Ms. Monti claimed, they were then trying to keep Jerry's spirits up by telling him that if and when he got better, he could return to work. Moe suggested that they have Shemp fill in and then, when Curly was ready, it would be easier to have a brother step aside than to dump a non-kin Stooge. "Everyone knew Jerry would never work again," Ms. Monti told me. "But deep down, Moe didn't want to believe it."
Shemp was already making a name for himself as a solo comic and, when Moe nominated his sibling, the boys at Columbia grudgingly said they'd accept him…though they did have the concern that Shemp wasn't as physical as Curly and also that he looked too much like Moe. At this point, Moe and other members of the Howard (formerly Hurwitz) family confronted Shemp, who wasn't wild about giving up his solo career, mainly in features, to sign on with an act that did low-budget shorts. But he was told that "for the good of the family," he had to, and so he did. Curly never did get better enough to reclaim his old position, but he did do one cameo in a short called Hold That Lion. (The footage was reused six years later in Booty and the Beast, released after Curly's death.)
A few years later, Shemp died but they didn't immediately replace him. In a somewhat ghoulish procedure, the Stooges actually made four shorts by having Moe and Larry appear in new scenes — some with Shemp's stand-in, Joe Palma, who kept his back to the camera — and integrating them with old footage. Finally, Joe Besser was hired as the third Stooge and he finished out the team's time at Columbia. Joe De Rita eventually replaced Besser.
That's the tale of the Hurwitz Brothers. I'm Mark Evanier with your Hollywood Minute.