Curly’s Bio

Curly Howard, the world’s SuperStooge, was born Jerome Lester "Babe" Horwitz October 22 1903, the baby of the family. Directly above in the family was brother Moe who was 6 years older, and Shemp, who was 8 years older. Curly was a very good baby, giving his parents no trouble, but his older brothers, especially Shemp, didn’t let Curly’s amiable personality keep them from having their fun. When Curly was just an infant, still young enough to be in a baby carriage, Moe and Shemp took Curly’s brand new baby carriage and souped it up until they had their very own race carriage. They dragged the poor little guy all over town in it, until their parents caught up with them.

Even though there was a great age difference between the boys, Shemp and Moe still allowed Curly to participate in their basement shows, instilling in the 4-year-old a love for comedy. He followed his brothers anywhere he could, and did what he could for them. When Shemp and Moe eventually joined up with Ted Healy, Curly would bring them sandwiches and just hang around the stage, never intimating that he wanted to be a part of the production.

Curly was not a good student, but was popular with the kids his age, having been described as an attractive guy with long straight brown hair and light eyes. He had a great singing voice and became an accomplished ballroom dancer, hanging out at the Triangle Ballroom whenever he could. He also tried his hand at the ukulele, an instrument Shemp played well, and Moe played horribly, and got to be pretty good at it. Whereas Moe had to sing loudly to drown out the sound of his horrible playing, Curly had a beautiful voice and a talent.

When Moe and Shemp reached their late teens, they started cultivating serious careers in show business. Whenever he was in town, Moe would take his brother to see their vaudeville shows and to the theater, but Curly loved music and comedy.

In 1916, the boys’ parents purchased a farm. Moe and Shemp worked the farm in between vaudeville engagements, while their older brother Jack worked it full time. Eager to spend some time with his glamorous older brothers, Curly joined them on the farm when he was thirteen and was anxious to learn how to do everything he could, unlike Shemp, who would dodge his way out of any chores he could. Moe was happy to oblige his younger brother, and one day allowed him to do the mowing. Moe taught him how to work the machine and then left. After about an hour of mowing, Curly cut through a nest of bees, which chased both him and Moe to a nearby stream. The two of them came out of it covered with stings.

That same summer, when Curly was just thirteen, he decided to go hunting with a neighbor, and borrowed Moe’s gun, a .22 rifle with a hair trigger. "Sitting on the ground with this legs cross and the end of the riffle barrel pointed at his foot . . . he kept playing with the trigger. It discharged with a roar, sending the bullet into his ankle." His brothers rushed him to a hospital, where doctors feared he would have to have the foot amputated. Eventually the ankle healed, but doctors still thought that in six months he should have "his instep and ankles bones" broken and rest so he could bend his ankle. Curly refused not to have this procedure done and limped through the rest of his life in a manner that has come to be known as the Curly Shuffle.

In his late teens, Curly discovered a hobby that he would experiment with several times over the course of his life—marriage. He found a girl and convinced her to marry him, only to have his mother force him to get the marriage annulled. Though it is common knowledge that Curly did in fact marry, no one seems to know this first girl’s name.

When Curly was twenty, he got into a car accident that gave him a deep scar on the left side of his face, but even this didn’t slow him down with the ladies. Despite the scar and his bum ankle, Curly continued to frequent the dance halls and was known to jump on stage and join the band on the string bass.

In 1928, he got a job as "a comedy musical conductor" for the Orville Knapp band. The band would play and Curly would come out and lead them, wildly waving a baton. His clothes would begin to fall off a piece at a time, as Curly continued to conduct the band, seemingly oblivious. At the end of the routine, Curly would be left wearing nothing but a pair of long underwear with a drop seat pinned up with a huge safety pin, at which time the band would complete their piece and Curly’d take his bow and exit.

With the loss of his hair, Curly suffered a huge loss in self-confidence, and Moe’s description of him as looking and walking "Like a fat fairy" probably didn’t help matters. Though Curly was out all night at all the hot spots getting drunk and dancing, he felt that the loss of his hair, and later his moustache kept him from being attractive to girls. Whenever he was in public he’d wear a hat because he thought his poor shorn head made him look like a kid. He started drinking heavily to give himself enough courage to talk to women. He’d go out at night, get drunk, and "take the table cloth between his fingers and just tear it in two". He also played the spoons, would join the band—just do anything. Moe used to lie awake in whatever hotel they were staying in, waiting for his brother to return at night. He knew Curly was back in the hotel when he heard someone in the lobby yelling "Swing it!"

With Curly on board, the team got a contract for a few films at MGM and Curly shaved his mustache. Also, the pay structure within the trio changed, with Moe now earning $140, Larry $125 and Curly just $75 a week. The team did a bunch of shorts for MGM, and a few films, but the boys were unhappy about constantly being in Healy’s long, dark, chiseling shadow. So in 1934, they decided to break with him, and quickly landed a contract with Columbia.

The Stooges odd blend of physical humor with sly satirical dialogue worked, and the boys were on their way. Much to Moe’s chagrin, he soon found that his brother was often unable to remember all of his lines. Curly’s remedy? He’d roll his eyes back, fall to the ground and either slither off screen on his back or spin around like a top, making strange noises. It was difficult for Moe, with his photographic memory, to take, but he realized that not knowing what Curly was about to do or say added an extra punch to the Stooges already fast paced action and dialogue.

Soon the Stooges were international stars, and as the only unmarried Stooge, Curly was in demand socially. Also, as emotionally vulnerable as he was, he was in danger. The Gold diggers began to come out of the woodwork. Curly never truly grew up, and was even more careless with his money than Larry. As soon as he got his check he’d go out and spend, and usually on some woman. All it took was a good spiel, and Curly was had. It seemed that every week he had a new house, a new car, a new woman and a new dog. Moe handled most of his affairs, even filling out his tax forms.

Though Curly had a bad habit of buying things, he had a worse weakness for women, especially after he felt he’d lost his sex appeal. Any pretty girl who came up to him with a good story was liable to be the next Mrs. Curly Howard. Curly has been described as everything from somewhat introverted to being "pretty dull" and without "all of his marbles . . . always on Cloud Nine". The truth probably lies somewhere in between, with Curly as a very shy man, who only came out of himself when either on camera, under the influence of alcohol or in the presence of Moe or Shemp. Whereas Moe was liable to throw a pie off a roof in real life, and Shemp was well known for being the most crazy, hilarious Howard off-camera, Curly was pretty reticent in his private life, and once he found a girl he thought was interesting enough, he’d stay home with her rather than running about in the streets.

After staying single for a long while, Curly succumbed to the charms of Elaine Ackerman in 1937 and married her. Elaine was the mother of his first child, a girl they named Marilyn. The marriage degenerated into one endless argument, and three years later Elaine filed suit for divorce.

Rid of Elaine, "Curly ate, drank and made merry." For the next five years he seemed to concentrate on having a good time, eating and drinking himself into serious health problems. He ballooned in size and in January of 1945 was diagnosed as suffering from "extreme hypertension, a retinal hemorrhage and obesity."

Eight months later, Curly met a woman named Marion Buxbaum who already had a ten-year-old kid from an earlier marriage. Alarmed by the obvious signs of Curly’s deterioration in health, Moe thought that perhaps marriage would make Curly settle down and stop his constant partying. He pushed Marion and Curly together, and they were married with insane haste. It was a miserable marriage, and the two separated after just three months, with Marion making up all sorts of horrible lies about Curly and his bodily cleanliness. The divorce became final less than nine months after the two were married.

Soon after Curly was rid of Marion, his health, which had been on a slow decline for over a year, began to deteriorate rapidly. To any fan of the Stooges, it is obvious that something was wrong with him, but for those who knew him, his ill health was attributed to his tremendous obesity and drinking. Some fans claim that Curly begins to look less than healthy as early as 1943, but the general consensus is that beginning in 1945, Curly is simply not himself. He doesn’t move well, and he’s unable to keep up his high pitched voice. He seems to croak his lines out and his face, once so animated, seems almost a mask. His trademark "WOO-WOO-WOO" is an imitation of itself.

With Curly’s coordination off, scenes were changed to allow Moe or Larry to do the things that Curly once would have been able to do for himself. A scene may have been written with Curly popping pills into his mouth, but if Curly was having a bad day, then it would be changed to Curly simply holding his mouth open as Moe pitched the pills into it. Camera angles were changed to hide the deterioration and Moe found himself having to coach his brother on his lines more than ever. When they filmed Monkey Businessmen, Curly was in horrible shape. Moe, who memorized every line in every short, had to coach his brother on every line, and short was filmed nearly a line at a time, with Curly simply repeating after his brother.

Looking back, it has been supposed that Curly had a series of small strokes starting early in 1945 and either didn’t realize that something was wrong, or was afraid to mention them, for fear of ending the Stooges. In any case, by comparing memories of that time with filming schedules and diaries, and also by talking with stroke specialists, it is virtually certain that Curly suffered many strokes, which more than accounts for his obvious ill health.

Curly’s downward spiral continued until Curly suffered a massive stroke in May of 1946, while the Stooges were filming their 97^th short, "Half Wits’ Holiday". It was a hot, humid day, and Curly had gone to sit in the director’s chair while Moe and Larry filmed a scene of which he was not a part. When they were done shooting the scene, the assistant director yelled for Curly to come and shoot his final scene, but Curly didn’t answer. Moe went down to get him, and found his brother unable to hold up his head or speak. His mouth was distorted and he just could not get the words to come out. Moe knew immediately that his baby brother had had a stroke, and soon both of their faces were wet with tears. Moe put Curly in a cab headed for Curly’s home, wiped off his face and went and shot the last scene of "Half Wits’ Holiday."

Curly began to slowly improve, giving his partners hope that one day he would be able to return to his role, so in the interim they got Shemp to fill in for him. In 1947, Curly met and married a woman named Valerie Newman, a good woman who actually cared about him and nursed him for the rest of his life. Valerie also provided Curly with his second daughter, a girl they named Janie. Also in 1947, in an effort to boost Curly’s morale, he was invited to make a gag appearance in stooge short entitled "Hold That Lion". It was the only short that the three show biz Howard’s appeared together in.

Curly’s health held steady for the next couple of years, and photographs of him from this period do show a man who looked patently better than the one we saw on screen in 1945 and 46, but in 1949, his health rapidly declined again, with him suffering a debilitating second stroke which left him partially paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair. Since Curly was dealing with other health problems, his doctors put him on a diet restricted to boiled rice and apples, which brought his weight down rapidly and dramatically. Sitting in the hospital in his wheelchair, Curly’s hand would constantly slip off the armrests of his wheelchair, and he was unable to get the arm back on the rest without the help of another person. For the remainder of his life, Curly would be in and out of hospitals. When he was out, Valerie would nurse him, but in 1951 she was forced to have him placed in a nursing home. In March he suffered yet another stroke, and Moe moved him out of the home because it didn’t meet state fire codes. The next month, Curly entered the North Hollywood Hospital and Sanitarium, but by December the staff felt that Curly’s mental deterioration was becoming too much for the home to handle and that Curly be placed into a mental hospital—a suggestion that Moe refused to even consider. Still, on January the 7^th of the next year, Moe had to leave the filming of a short to help move his little brother to the Baldy View Sanitarium. Eleven days later, Curly died. He was just forty-eight years old.