Comic actor Eddie Deezen contributed a lengthy post to Neatorama the other day telling the very sad story of the demise of Jerry “Curly” Howard of the Three Stooges. I had known the general outline of this story for a long time — Curly suffered a series of strokes that forced him to stop performing and was replaced by his brother Shemp — but I don’t think I had ever read a fuller account until this. The recounting of Moe finding Curly slumped in his chair on-set, tears rolling down his face because he had suffered another stroke, is simply heart-breaking. Curly was 48 years old when he died in 1952; the sixtieth anniversary of his death was Wednesday (the day the post ran at Neatorama).
Over the years, I’ve read a lot of biographies and histories of most of the great Hollywood comedy teams, yet somehow have managed to not read anything substantive about the Stooges. The bibliography on the Wikipedia article about them gives the impression that there probably wasn’t anything definitive written back when I was a film student. There’s a more recent book that touts itself as such, but some of the reviews on Amazon look askance at that claim. Moe’s daughter, Joan Howard Maurer did write a biography of Curly, and also finished/edited Moe’s autobiography. I guess I need to catch up a bit.
