Ted Healy Bio
Much has been said about Ted Healy, some good, some in tremorous voices full of awe, but most in the tone most of us reserve for talking about SOB’s. To most Stooge fan’s, Ted Healy is our nemesis, the consummate bad guy. He’s the Lex Luther of Stooge mythology. Most of us don’t know him that well, we’ve just seen those gawd awful MGM shorts and only about one out of every fifteen Stooge fans has seen "Soup to Nuts". Still, shouldn’t we hate him?
The problem is, the boys have become a myth in and of themselves, and the story demands a bad guy. Without Ted Healy as the mythological antagonist, Stoogephiles would be forced to relate a story of a couple of nice guys who did okay in the business, leaving fans for years to come with a treasure trove of filmed comedic prodigy. That’s a Hallmark card, not a gripping story! Thus enter Ted Healy, the sleazy, capitalistic drunk who abused the boys genius and naivete for his own materialistic gain. In reality, Ted was a regular guy addled with a serious drinking problem and a quickly lit, blazing hot temper.
Ted Healy was born Charles Earnest Lee Nash October 1st of 1896 in Texas, but his family moved North to New York in 1908. Ted and Moe first ran into each other the summer of 1909, where Moe was virtually living at the beach, playing his ukulele loudly, but not well, and singing. Healy was spending his summer in the "exclusive Wawanda Cottages near the beach, which meant that they were well enough endowed with world good", while Moe was just a poor kid over from Bensonhurst. Still, when the short kid who played the ukulele badly heard a new and great singing voice out on the beach one day, he inched closer to it, hoping that it would drown out his bad playing. The two boys became inseparable friends, but when the summer was over, Moe returned to Bensonhurst and Healy to the Riverside Drive apartment in Manhattan.
At this time, Healy was planning on going into business, and for years expended his energies in this direction, but in 1912, he relaxed a bit, and joined Moe and a few other guys in becoming a part of the Annette Kellerman Diving Girls, where the boys would dress up in long swimsuits, with newspaper stuffed into the top, and then dive 30 feet into a 7x7x7 tank. The job ended when the boys saw one of the real girls fall to her death. Healy returned to his original business plans, but found that he was no good at it, and he decided to go into theater.
Once Healy decided to be in show biz, he worked like a demon at it, polishing his skills and perfecting his timing. Upon making the decision to abandon the small time stuff, Healy stopped calling himself Lee Nash, and changed his name to Ted Healy.
Healy’s hard work paid off, and he became a Broadway star of immense proportions, earning the highest pay of any vaudevillian of his day. He was very quick witted and had a formidable talent at ad libbing, mostly because he was unable to memorize his lines. Though Healy was making big bucks, he decided that having a "stooge" or two would enhance his act, and he cast about for one or two likely candidates.
In 1922, Moe saw an ad in the newspaper announcing that his old pal Ted and his wife would be performing at a nearby theater. Having not seen Ted in ten years, Moe went round the back of the theater to see him. Healy had just had an argument with his German acrobats and they’d walked out on him, so seeing Moe pop up at his back door seemed like a gift from God. Ted told Moe that he wanted him to think about joining his act. After hearing Healy’s idea, Moe joined the act, and began touring with Healy.
Three years later, in 1925, Moe had just walked out on stage when he heard the unmistakable sound of his brother Shemp’s loud, braying laugh. He conveyed this fact to Healy, and Healy walked to the front of the stage and said, "I would like to have another young man come up, preferably one from Brooklyn." Shemp meandered up to the stage, eating a pear and ad libbed an entire routine with his brother and Healy that had the audience in convulsions. After his good showing in Chicago, Shemp was part of the act.
The year 1927 bought Shemp his son, Morton, and also made him think more about the act with Healy. He decided to try something a little different, and announced his intentions while Healy, Moe and himself were catching the stage show at the Marigold Gardens in Chicago. Performing that night was a short, 25 year old man with light, hay colored hair in "high silk hat and tails, playing the violin and doing a Russian dance." H is name? Larry Fine. Healy immediately wanted this guy for his act, and talked to him backstage, offering him $90 a week to be in the act, and $10 to ditch the violin, a proposition to which Larry allegedly answered "For $11 a week, I’ll do anything!" Eventually Shemp made his way back into the fold, and Healy found himself with a trio of Stooges, surely enough for anyone.
Healy, Howard, Fine and Howard appeared in many Broadway shows, and made their first screen appearance as a team in Rube Goldberg’s very odd, but hilarious comedy "Soup to Nuts" for Fox studios, for which Healy was purportedly paid $1, 250 a week. His three stooges got a pay raise to $150 a week for the 5-week duration of the filming. The performances in this movie were good enough to convince Winnie Sheehan, the head of Fox, to offer the boys a seven-year contract. Angered, Ted went to see Sheehan and raged that the contract would be invalid without his approval. When Sheehan took it out, Healy snatched it from his hands and tore it to bits. Then calming a bit, he said, "You know Mr. Sheehan, you’re ruining my act by signing the boys for a contract. I didn't think one Irishman would do this to another Irishman." Don’t be concerned, Ted." Sheehan assured him, "I’ll take care of this." When the boys found out about his act of duplicity, they left and became Howard, Fine and Howard—Three Lost Souls, meeting success.
Healy found a trio of new stooges and got a booking in New York. After the very first performance, the manager told him "Ted, you’ll ruin yourself working with these three men. They have no sense of timing and don’t understand your act. Play sick, and get out of this date." Ted walked. Meanwhile, the stooges, who in 1931 hired Jack Walsh, who "complemented the trio’s broad, physical style of comedy to perfection" to be their straight man, were making headlines. Healy realized that he had better get his original stooges back.
First he filed a legal suit against the boys, claiming that stooge newspaper ads announcing "Howard, Find and Howard—Former associates of Ted Healy in A Night in Venice" constituted an illegal use of his name. He also claimed that the stooges were in effect stealing his material, since a few of their skits were taken from "A Night in Venice." Fortunately, Moe, having caught wind of Ted’s threats to sue the Hippodrome Theater if the stooges appeared using "his" material, had already gone to J.J. Shubert. Moe knew Shubert would be on his side, because Ted had recently tried to sue him also. Shubert drew up a paper allowing the stooges to "use any jokes, scenes, or material that [they] wished to from the plays A Night in Venice and A Night in Spain." The papers were photocopied, and notarized. Then a stenographer was hired to sit in the audience and copy the "dialogue word for word and describe the action". Those papers were also notarized. The suit was ruled in favor of the Stooges.
Next, Healy tried everything from trying to lure the stooges back one by one to hiring some toughs from Chicago to educate the stooges on "what was good for them". The threats were starting to get to Shemp, who started thinking about leaving the act, especially after Healy threatened to bomb the boys out of a theater. Even when Healy came back and begged the stooges to return to his act, Shemp was wary, but he allowed his brother and Larry to convince him, and so Ted Healy once again had three stooges—that is, as long as he stopped drinking, the main force behind his freaky moods. "Ted is not the wonderful guy you think he is;" Shemp told his brother. "He’s basically an alcoholic. He’s only one drink from going back to his terrifying benders."
With Moe, Larry and Shemp back with him, Healy was once again on top of the world, and quickly got booked into J.J Shubert’s new show, "The Passing Show of 1932", for which Healy was being paid $2800 a week. Before the show could even open, Healy’s personal manager noticed that Ted’s contract omitted a closing date, making it void. Ted snatched at the chance to leave the Shubert show and take an offer from another Circuit that would pay him $6000 a week. Shemp refused to leave the show, sick of Healy’s duplicity, but Moe and Larry went with Healy, using "Soup to Nuts" co-star Freddie Sandborn as a Shemp replacement temporarily. For a more permanent solution, Moe looked to his younger brother Jerome.
Looking at Moe’s 29-year-old younger brother, Healy at once noted something wrong with his new picture. "Larry, you have a head like a wild porcupine. You, Moe, have a spittoon haircut. But Jerome, with your wavy hair and wax-tipped mustache, you just don’t fit in." Jerome left the meeting, and 20 minutes later he returned, crying, his head shaved "to look like a dirty tennis ball". "If you want me," Jerome said, sobbing. "You can call me Curly." 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 signed a contract with Columbia Pictures.
Healy continued to appear in films for Fox, Warner Brothers and MGM up to the time of his death. On December 19th of 1937, Ted came to see Moe’s wife Helen, to tell her that his second wife was expecting a child. He was elated.
Two days later, Healy went out drinking at the Trocadero night club and got in an argument with three college men, calling them the worst things he could think of. The argument escalated to the point that 41 year-old Ted offered to take each of the guys out of the club to deal with one on one. When they got outside, Ted didn’t have a chance as the three young men jumped him at once and beat the crap out of him, kicking him everywhere, including the head. A friends of Ted’s made his way to the scene, pried Healy off the ground and took him home, where he died. It was December 21, 1937. Ted was just 41 years old. Ironically, the child Ted had been so excite about was born that very night.