Curly Howard


Jerome Howard, better known by his stage name Curly Howard, was an American comedian and actor. He was a member of The Three Stooges comedy team, which also featured his elder brothers Moe and Shemp Howard, as well as vaudevillian Larry Fine. In early shorts, he was billed as "Curley". He was generally considered the most popular and recognizable of the Stooges.
He was known for his high-pitched voice, odd vocal expressions, and non-rhotic dialect, as well as his physical comedy, improvisations, and athleticism. An untrained actor, Curly borrowed the "woob woob" from "nervous" comedian Hugh Herbert. Curly's unique version of "woob, woob, woob" was firmly established by the time of the Stooges' second Columbia film, Punch Drunks.
Howard left the Three Stooges in May 1946 when a stroke ended his show business career. He suffered serious health problems and several more strokes until his death in 1952 at age 48.

Early life

Howard was born Jerome Lester Horwitz in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn, New York, on October 22, 1903. Of Lithuanian Jewish ancestry, he was the youngest of the five sons of Jennie and Solomon Horwitz. Because he was the youngest, his brothers called him "Babe". When his elder brother Shemp married Gertrude Frank, who was also nicknamed "Babe", the brothers dubbed him "Curly" to avoid confusion. His full formal Hebrew name was "Yehudah Leib bar Shlomo Natan HaLevi".
A quiet child, Howard rarely caused problems for his parents. He was a mediocre student, but excelled as an athlete on the school basketball team. He did not graduate high school; instead, he kept himself busy with odd jobs and constantly following his older brothers, whom he idolized. He was also an accomplished ballroom dancer and singer, and regularly turned up at the Triangle Ballroom in Queens, occasionally bumping into actor George Raft.
When Howard was 13, he accidentally shot himself in the left ankle while cleaning a rifle. Moe rushed him to the hospital, saving his life, but the wound resulted in a noticeably thinner left leg and a slight limp. Curly was so afraid of surgery that he never had the limp corrected. While with the Stooges, he developed his famous exaggerated walk to conceal the limp on screen.
Howard was interested in music and comedy, and watched his brothers Shemp and Moe perform as stooges in Ted Healy's vaudeville act. He also liked to hang around backstage, although he never participated in any of the routines.

Career

The Three Stooges

Howard's first on-stage appearance was as a comedy musical conductor in 1928 for the Orville Knapp orchestra; Howard would conduct the ensemble with his arms flailing, unaware that he was losing his pants. Moe later recalled that his performances usually overshadowed those of the band. Though he enjoyed the gig, he watched as brothers Moe and Shemp with partner Larry Fine made it big as some of Ted Healy's "Stooges". Vaudeville star Healy had a very popular stage act, in which he would try to tell jokes or sing, only to have his noisy assistants wander on stage and interrupt or heckle him and cause disturbances from the audience. Meanwhile, Healy and company appeared in their first feature film, Rube Goldberg's Soup to Nuts.
Shemp Howard, however, soon tired of Healy's abrasiveness, bad temper, and alcoholism. In 1932, he was offered a contract at the Vitaphone Studios in Brooklyn. With Shemp gone, Moe suggested that his kid brother Jerry could fill the third-stooge role, and Jerry ran through his Orville Knapp act but Healy was unimpressed: "Is that all he can do? Let his pants fall down? Get me a real comedian, not this amateur. He doesn't even look right!" Healy felt that Jerry, with his thick, chestnut hair and elegant waxed mustache, looked too good for a low comedian. Howard left the room and returned minutes later with his head shaven. Moe and Larry started improvising with this new character:
That exchange sold the act to Healy, and Jerry Horwitz became Curly Howard. In one of the few interviews Curly Howard gave in his lifetime, he complained about the loss of his hair: "I had to shave it off right down to the skin."
In 1934, MGM was building Healy up as a solo comedian in feature films, and Moe saw the writing on the wall. Healy alone was under contract to the studio; his Stooges answered to Healy, who paid each of them only $100 a week. When Healy's lucrative MGM contract was up for renewal on March 6, 1934, Moe proposed that Healy and his stooges should split: "Let's just break up. No hard feelings, no sneaking around. Just a good, clean split." Healy agreed, and left to pursue his own career. That same year, with "The Three Stooges" as the act's new name, they signed to appear in two-reel comedy short subjects for Columbia Pictures. Their third short, Men in Black, was nominated for the "Best Short Subject" Academy Award. It lost to the pioneer Technicolor featurette La Cucaracha, but it did establish The Three Stooges as new comedy stars. It also won the Stooges movie-star salaries: Columbia paid each of them $2,500 per short subject. The Stooges soon became the studio's most popular short-subject attraction, with Curly playing an integral part in the trio's work.

Prime years

Howard's childlike mannerisms and natural comedic charm made him a hit with audiences, particularly children. He was known in the act for having an "indestructible" head, which always won out by breaking anything that assaulted it, including saws and hammers. Although Howard had no formal acting training, his comedic skills were exceptional. Often, directors let the camera roll freely and let Howard improvise. Jules White, in particular, left gaps in the Stooge scripts where he could improvise for several minutes. In later years, White commented: "If we wrote a scene and needed a little something extra, I'd say to Curly, 'Look, we've got a gap to fill this in with a "woob-woob" or some other bit of business', and he never disappointed us."
By the time the Stooges hit their peak in the late 1930s, their films had almost become vehicles for Curly Howard's unbridled comic performances. Such Stooge classics as A Plumbing We Will Go, We Want Our Mummy, An Ache in Every Stake, and Cactus Makes Perfect display his ability to take inanimate objects and turn them into ingenious comic props. Moe Howard later confirmed that when Curly forgot his lines, that merely allowed him to improvise on the spot so that the "take" could continue uninterrupted:
Howard also developed a set of Brooklyn-accented reactions and expressions that the other Stooges would imitate long after he had left the act:
  • "Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk" – his trademark laugh, accompanied by manic finger-snapping, often used to amuse himself
  • "Woob, woob, woob!" – cheering used when he was either happy, scared, dazed, or flirting with a "dame"
  • "Hmmm!" – an under-the-breath, high-pitched sound meant to express frustration
  • "Nyahh-ahhh-ahhh!" – a scared reaction, which was most often used by the other Stooges after Curly's departure
  • "Lah-dee" or simply "La, la, laaa" – his singing used when he was acting innocently right before taking out an enemy
  • "Ruff! Ruff!" – a dog bark, used to express anger, showing defiance, barking at an attractive dame, and/or giving an enemy a final push before departing the scene
  • "Ha-cha-cha!" – a take on Jimmy Durante's catchphrase
  • "I'm a victim of soikemstance !" – used to deflect blame from himself
  • "Soiteny!"
  • "I'll moider you!"
  • "Huff huff huff!" – sharp, huffing exhales either due to excitement or meant to provoke a foe
  • "Ah-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba!" – a sort of nonsense, high-pitched yelling that signified being scared or overly excited, which was used during his later years
  • "Indubitably" – an expression used to feign an intelligent response
  • Nervous teeth chattering, which made the sound of a small hammer striking a chisel
  • "Oh! A WISE guy, eh?" – an annoyed response
  • "Oh, look!" – a surprised remark, usually pointing out a saw or hammer which was damaged when it came into contact with his hard head.
  • "Say a few syllables!" – to another Stooge, usually Moe
  • Occasionally, the Stooges faced a problem that required deep thought, whereupon Curly would bang his head on a wall several times, then shout, "I got it! I got it!" Moe would ask, "What have you got?" Curly's answer: "A terrific headache."
  • Despite his mispronunciations, he had an uncanny ability to instantly spell big words, such as "chrysanthemum", if asked. The gag was that Curly never did it when something important was at stake. In one scene, the Stooges were in a situation where this talent might have landed them a job, but Curly had missed his opportunity. Moe's reaction would be to growl, "Where were you a minute ago?" and then smack him.
On several occasions, Moe Howard was convinced that rising star Lou Costello was stealing material from his brother. Costello was known to acquire prints of the Stooges' films from Columbia Pictures on occasion, presumably to study him. Inevitably, Curly Howard's routines would appear in Abbott and Costello feature films, much to Moe's chagrin.
Curly was the only "third Stooge" who never made a series of his short films without Moe or Larry, either before joining the Stooges or after leaving. Shemp Howard, Joe Besser, and Joe DeRita each starred as solo comedians in theatrical short subjects.

Illness

Decline

By 1944, Curly Howard's energy began to wane. His performances in films such as Idle Roomers and Booby Dupes present a Curly whose voice was deeper and his actions were slower. It was believed that Howard suffered the first of several strokes between the production of Idiots Deluxe and If a Body Meets a Body. During Curly's illness, producer-director Jules White salvaged an incomplete Curly performance by inserting sequences from an older film; Beer Barrel Polecats borrowed from So Long Mr. Chumps. Following the completion of the feature-length Rockin' in the Rockies, Moe Howard persuaded Curly to seek medical attention. He was admitted to Cottage Hospital in Santa Barbara, California, on January 23, 1945. There, he received diagnoses of severe hypertension, retinal hemorrhage, and obesity, necessitating a period of rest. Consequently, only five short films were released in 1945, a notable reduction from the usual six to eight per year.
In August 1945 the Stooges appeared in a Gale Storm musical feature, Swing Parade of 1946, co-produced at Monogram Pictures by the Stooges' agent, Harry A. Romm. Curly appears healthier and more animated than in his concurrent Columbia shorts, but from then on his health would fluctuate from film to film.
Despite Moe Howard's appeals to Harry Cohn to grant his brother an extended leave to recuperate, Cohn refused to disrupt the production schedule of the profitable Stooges shorts. The Stooges finally went on a hiatus of five months between August 1945 and January 1946, during which they spent three weeks working at Monogram for Swing Parade of 1946, and then undertook a demanding two-month schedule of live performances in New York City, performing daily. During this period, Howard met Marion Buxbaum, whom he married on October 17, 1945, after a two-week courtship.
Upon returning to Los Angeles in late November 1945, Howard's health had deteriorated significantly. Despite two months of relative rest, the team's 1946 production schedule at Columbia resumed in late January, involving only 24 days of filming between February and early May. Even with an additional eight weeks of leave during this timeframe, Howard's physical and mental state continued to decline.
By early 1946, Howard's voice had grown increasingly coarse, and he struggled to recall even the simplest dialogue. He exhibited significant weight loss and pronounced facial lines, reflecting the toll of his deteriorating health. His faculties wavered as the year progressed: sometimes he was sharp, sometimes he was slow. As director Edward Bernds recalled, "It was strange the way he went up and down. In the order I shot the pictures, not in the order they were released, he was down for A Bird in the Head and The Three Troubledoers, he was up for Micro-Phonies, way down for Monkey Businessmen and then up again, for the last time, in Three Little Pirates."