Stooges creator Ted Healy’s death still a mystery

Comedy actor Ted Healy, best known as the man who created the Three Stooges, staggered out of a nightclub 80 years ago and died under mysterious circumstances.

The Three Stooges — Larry Fine, Jerome ‘Curly’ Howard and Moe Howard — with Ted Healy in 1932.

IN the early hours of December 21, 1937, comedy star Ted Healy staggered out of the Cafe Trocadero, on Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, dazed, bruised and bleeding. Taken by taxi to his hotel, he told friends who saw him that he had been beaten up by three college boys.

Someone called a doctor, who treated him at the hotel putting stitches in a gash over his eye, but in the morning Healy began having convulsions. His personal physician Wyant LaMont was called in but Healy died. LaMont refused to sign a death certificate, given the nature of Healy’s injuries and an autopsy was called for.

American comedian Ted Healy in 1937.

The finding was nephritis, inflammation of the kidneys, brought on by alcohol abuse. But not everyone was satisfied with that explanation. It later emerged that Albert “Cubby” Broccoli was involved in a fight with Healy, though his account has left many lingering questions.

It was an ignominious end to Healy’s life and career. He was the man credited with giving the Three Stooges their start. But although he became a star in his own right without the Stooges, he had problems with women and money.

Born Ernest Lea Nash on October 1, 1896, in Texas, his father was a businessman who moved the family to New York in 1908. Healy went to good schools, but at the age of 15 he felt the lure of show business. He and his Brooklyn-born friend Moe Horowitz went looking for work in theatre. They got their first gig together with Australian-born Annette Kellerman, who had a vaudeville diving show, for which they both provided some of the comic relief.

When an accident in the theatre closed Kellerman’s show, Healy and Horowitz looked for other work. Adopting the stage name Ted Healy, he worked up a vaudeville comedy act, involving singing, telling jokes and a bit of slapstick, which was hugely successful.

Ted Healy and his stooges (Curly, Moe and Larry) in the 1934 film Dancing Lady.

In the ’20s he became one of the highest-paid vaudeville performers, and in 1922 married actor Betty Brown, who became part of the act. But it was a rocky marriage, because Healy was a womaniser, bad with money and an alcoholic who became belligerent when drunk.

In 1922 Horowitz, now known as Howard, joined the act, playing a pretend stooge (a show-business term for an audience member picked to participate in the show) who would get the better of the star. Moe’s brother Shemp joined in 1923 as a pretend heckler and, in 1925, Larry Fine was hired to make a trio of stooges. Ted Healy and his stooges became one of the most popular acts on vaudeville.

Soon Hollywood wanted to put them all on screen, but a disagreement over a movie contract resulted in the stooges leaving Healy in 1930. Larry, Moe and Shemp (who was replaced by brother Curly in 1932) later became more famous than Healy and Healy’s attempt to hire replacement stooges was a failure.

There were other problems to deal with. Healy had been having affairs, including with heiress Mary Warburton so, in, 1932 Brown divorced him. By the time his divorce came through he was seeing actor Betty Hickman.

Fortunately in the early ’30s he signed a contract with MGM and made a series of films including San Francisco and Mad Holiday. In 1936 he married Hickman and on December 17, 1937, she gave birth to his first and only child, John Jacob Nash.

Healy was on a high at the time, his film Hollywood Hotel had its premiere on December 20 and he decided to go out on the town to celebrate the birth and the film. He went to a couple of nightclubs including the Trocadero, which was run by Hollywood agent Pat DiCiccio, who was alleged to have had connections to mobster Lucky Luciano.

Film producer Albert R. “Cubby” Broccoli.

Actors Wallace Beery (left) with Jackie Cooper in1931 film The Champ.

Also at the club that night was actor Wallace Beery, and Albert “Cubby” Broccoli, from the wealthy farming family and a cousin of DiCiccio.

Broccoli had left his family in Long Island to pursue a dream of being involved in show business in Hollywood.

According to one version of events a drunk Healy started a fight with Beery and Broccoli stepped in. Broccoli gave his account to a newspaper at the time, not mentioning Beery and saying that Healy had punched Broccoli in the nose first but that he had shoved the comedian away, before attendants took Healy away. Broccoli claimed they later shook hands and “He got into a taxicab and that’s the last I saw of him”.

But Healy went to his hotel and later died. MGM said it was a heart attack but, after the autopsy, that story changed. There have long been rumours that MGM’s “fixer” Eddie Mannix and a team from the studio visited the Trocadero and paid people to hush the real story up and that even the autopsy report was faked. However, none of
that can be substantiated.