A couple of times in the seventies, I trucked out to the Motion Picture Country Home in Woodland Hills to visit Larry Fine, the oft-mauled "middle" member of the Three Stooges. Larry was recovering from a stroke and he welcomed company and a chance to tell his anecdotes, of which he had about a dozen. No matter what you asked him, he told you the same twelve stories. In fact, the second time I was there, he told me one yarn three times. The question everyone apparently put to him was "Did you ever get injured making those movies?" and he'd developed a little five minute monologue/reply that you'd hear if you asked him what time it was.
He also introduced me to other old actors who were living out there, most notably a woman named Babe London who was "the fat girl" in countless films, including some with Buster Keaton and Laurel & Hardy. Ms. London was thrilled that I knew who she was and she'd try to hijack my visits with Larry, diverting the conversation to her dozen anecdotes, which Larry was thoroughly sick of hearing. So I'd just sit there while she tried to tell me for the third time about being falsely accused of having an affair with Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle while Larry would impatiently wait for her to finish so he could tell me for the fifth time about him getting a quill pen stuck in his forehead in one film.
Neither of them was much good for history beyond the little collection of oft-told tales. When I got to speak, which wasn't often, I'd ask something like, "What was Charley Chase like?" And since neither Babe nor Larry had a good Charley Chase story, they'd both say, "He was great." And then Babe would quickly start telling me the Fatty Arbuckle story again while Larry would try to interrupt and tell me one more time about the quill pen. Or if I asked something that actually did jog either's memory, it would suddenly turn into a scene from The Sunshine Boys…
"We had this prop man at Columbia named Tommy Blake…"
"Tommy Blake didn't work for Columbia. He was over at Republic."
"Like hell he was. I used to see him every time I drove on the lot at Columbia and I'd always say, 'Hi, Tommy!'"
"Well, I don't know who you were saying hello to at Columbia because Tommy Blake was at Republic. That's where I said hi to him."
"When did you ever work for Republic?"
In 1973, Larry's autobiography was published. It was called A Stroke of Luck and it's very rare these days. I once turned down $500 for my copy of what may well be the worst-written celebrity autobiography ever. Its other two distinctions are that (a) it probably holds the world's record for the most typographical errors ever in one volume and (b) you rarely see anyone unintentionally get so many of the details of his own life wrong.
I'll tell you how bad it is. If it was about someone else, you'd read a few pages of it and say, "Who wrote this? One of the Three Stooges?"
What's really odd about it is that as per its title, the book tries to view the story of Larry's stroke — the one that put him in a hospital for the rest of his life and took away his ability to walk — as a good thing. I can certainly understand trying to put a positive spin on bad news and can admire the tenacity involved in living with it and overcoming as much of it as can be overcome. But the book is so clumsily authored that at times, it's like Larry's saying, "Thank God I had that stroke…best thing that ever happened to me…you oughta try it."
The book is Larry's autobiography and it's written in the first person, as if by him. But the cover says "by James Carone" on it and there's an author photo of Mr. Carone on the back of the dust jacket. I don't know who Mr. Carone is or was, other than that he seemed to believe that you should never write eight words in a row without inserting at least four commas in there someplace. He even invented a whole new kind of punctuation where you put two or three commas in a row. But he took down Larry's memories and somehow managed to pry more than the usual twelve stories out of him. I suppose we should be grateful that he got as much history as he did out of the Center Stooge. Certainly, a lot of later books about the Stooges have unearthed a couple of true details of Larry's life buried somewhere amidst the errors and commas of Stroke of Luck.
There was a later biography of Larry (entitled simply Larry) by his brother, Morris "Moe" Feinberg, that compensated some for the shortcomings of Larry's book. And now, two very good authors — Stephen Cox and Jim Terry — have written a new book that I'm looking forward to. It's called One Fine Stooge: A Frizzy Life in Pictures and it looks quite well researched and exhaustive. We just may have that definitive Larry Fine biography we've all been waiting for.
Before I leave this topic, I feel like I should include one other memory. I mention it elsewhere on this site but one of the oddest things I ever saw on television was on the local CBS News the evening after Larry died. They hurried a camera crew over to Moe's house to get his reaction and Moe — big surprise — was just devastated. He was crying and having trouble forming words as he talked about Larry and said, "He was like a brother to me…I loved him so…he was my best friend…" And as he spoke, they cut to old footage of Moe breaking pottery over his best friend's head, running a saw across his best friend's scalp and ripping large handfuls of hair out of his best friend's skull. Now, that's friendship.