November 27, 2024 • 35 mins
Norm’s being replaced by Raising Cane’s in Hollywood/ Mistletoe Auctions in England from a man/ Doug’s Holiday Parties in the 80s Story. // Copper thieves cut off this SoCal suburb's phones for months...BUT...the bills kept coming! // Guest: Burt Kearns to discuss his book, “Shemp”.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
It's KMF. I am six forty and you're listening to
The Conway Show on demand on the iHeartRadio app.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
Bomb.
Speaker 3 (00:09):
Doug mcatarre in for Tim Conway Junior. Tim will be
back after the Holly Days and I'm here till seven o'clock.
Later on this hour, Burt Kerns will be with us.
He has written a biography of Shimp of the three Stooges. Yes, Shimp,
not Curly Shmp, So we'll talk about that. It's a
really interesting story. So you want to hang on for that.
(00:29):
Stooge fans, or even if you're not a Stuge fan,
you'll find it interesting. Just a couple of quick news stories.
A New York City judge has denied Diddy his bail request.
Federal judge denied Sean diddy Combe's request to be released
on bail, finding clear and convincing evidence that the hip
hop Mogul is potentially dangerous and that no condition or
combination of conditions will reasonably assure the safety of the community.
(00:54):
The judge said there is compelling evidence of colmb's propensity
for violence, citing that to twenty sixteen Intercontinental Hotel incident
with Protege Cassie Ventura and Ditty's lawyers had been asking
to get him out on bail, and the judge said,
now that constitute's obstruction from prison his attempts to reach
(01:16):
out and influence witnesses.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
So he's staying in jail now.
Speaker 3 (01:19):
Personally, I think you know he belongs behind bars, just
because I didn't get invited to any of those parties.
I got skunked on the debauchery. And by the way,
the last thing you want to be at is a
Ditty party if I'm there, because that means he's lost
his magic. Anyway, that weird story continues, that'll be going
(01:40):
on forever. And this say it isn't so. The oldest
surviving Norms restaurant, the one built in nineteen fifty seven,
the same year I was built, located on Los Sienaga Boulevard,
the famous Googie architecture. Norms Restaurant is flipping from Norms
to a Raising Cane's Chicken Place, But because it has
(02:02):
historical cultural monument status since twenty fifteen, the new owners
insists that it will not well, they can't change it.
It's now protected, maintained forever. The iconic there's that word again.
Iconic googie architectural style, which I suppose is a victory.
There's a couple of those places left that I love.
Dinah's down there, pans on Los Sienega. Love that place,
(02:27):
another place, been there since the fifties. But I'm sorry,
it's not going to be norms anymore. But at least
they're not going to wreck the building, at least not yet.
You know, it's one of the weird things. So many
of the of the beloved I'm trying not to use
the word iconic, but the beloved La Southern California, places
like the Bob's Big Boy over here in right in
Burbank to Luca Lake, they're not It's not the Trevia Fountain,
(02:52):
it's not the Coliseum in Rome. It's like stuff that
we like, but it's a commercial establishment, so it has
to be economically viable, and sometimes it's not anymore. There
used to be that place, the TikTok Restaurant from C. C.
Brown's on Hollywood Boulevard was the allegedly the birthplace of
the Hot Fudge Sunday and their businesses. And at some point,
(03:15):
either the rent goes off or the property value becomes unjustifiable.
To keep a hot fudge Sunday place on Hollywood Boulevard.
Or it's a family owned restaurant and the kids aren't interested,
or the grandkids aren't interested in running the business anymore.
So what are you gonna do about it? But that's
part of the you know, my wife and I we've
(03:35):
always talked about this when we make our rare appearances
out of the country. You go to Europe and you
go to Italy or something like that. Or I just
read about this butcher's shop in England that's closing after
and I'm not making this up seven hundred years. It's
been a butcher shop for seven hundred years. And here,
you know, you go to Orange County and the historic
(03:56):
district is nineteen ninety two. You know, there's parts of
these new developments that are out there around the country,
some of those suburbs outside of Phoenix, you know, established
in two thousand and five, and people go, wow, it
goes all the way back to two thousand and five.
Who And you know in Europe there's a pub it's
been there for six hundred years. But what's fascinating is
(04:19):
when people from there come to Los Angeles, they want
to see strip malls. They like the idea of billboards
and all those power lines going across. So anyway, things
are different. One of the things that's different, by the way,
is speaking of England. You know mistletoe, which missletoe and
(04:40):
hollyot's in the Christmas carols and office parties. They used
to actually hang missletoe and you're supposed to kiss whoever
you're standing with underneath the missletoe. There's a tradition that
hasn't aged well in the hashtag met too era. Well,
apparently mistletoe in England is sold at auction and it
(05:01):
has to be sold in the winter time.
Speaker 2 (05:02):
I don't know anything.
Speaker 3 (05:03):
About mistletoe except nobody ever wanted to stand under the
even a ditties party. They didn't want to stand under
the mistletoe with me. But by the seventeen hundreds, mistletoe
was commonly used as a Christmas decoration. And mistletoe needs
frost to ripen the berries and turn them from green
to white. And there's a guy known as mister Mistletoe
(05:27):
Nick Champion, and he's a renowned mistletoe auctioneer. I'd have
no idea what he does the rest of the year,
but apparently he's like the people in punk Satani Pennsylvania.
It works one day a year. But he has been
staging mistletoe auctions in England for years and years and years,
forty seven years. As a matter of fact, he expects
about five hundred lots of the plant to go under
(05:49):
the hammer, compared to two thousand lots in previous years.
And he said workers used to kiss under the mistletoe
at Christmas parties, but with all the wokeriy nowadays, they
would be accused of a no kidding. We used to
have four auctions, but mistletoe sales peaked in the early
nineteen nineties. The whole idea of office parties is really thin.
Speaker 2 (06:10):
Ice.
Speaker 3 (06:11):
Let's face it. You got your coworkers and booze.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
Steph.
Speaker 3 (06:15):
Take a look around. Take a look around at who's
working on this show right now. You want to see
these people drunk? Not really, no kidding, this is it's
a recipe for disaster, career suicide.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
And like you said, almost nobody here.
Speaker 3 (06:31):
Yeah, well that's the reason some of them were because
of their behavior at Christmas parties. I used to when
I was working over at KBC years ago. I mean,
this has got to be twenty five thirty is when
I first started, and they have these big Buckian alls
and you'd see, you know, Gloria allread dancing on a
table and stuff like that that doesn't happen anymore. In fact,
(06:54):
before I moved to California, I worked at this ad
agency in New York and I they started December like
tenth or something like that.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
I started.
Speaker 3 (07:06):
My first day on the job was the Christmas party.
Was the office Christmas party, only it wasn't at the office.
This is you know, in the in the eighties when
everybody was doing coke or something. I don't know what
they were spending the money on it, but they had
this fantastic colligula like Christmas party at some place, some
(07:29):
river club on the East River on the East side
of New York.
Speaker 2 (07:32):
And I mean this place was blow and Dough.
Speaker 3 (07:34):
They were auctioning off television sets and you know, just
drawing numbers out and people winning prizes and all kinds
of fantastic things. I knew nobody. I literally barely met
the person who hired me.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
I didn't know their last name. It was some guy
who hired me.
Speaker 3 (07:51):
And it was my first day underwear, so I'm standing
there and I got a Heineken in my hand. They
got heinekens, you know. That's that's the kind of party
this was. And I see this sort of short, rumpy
guy wearing suspenders and he's got this big walrus mustache
and he's drinking, and nobody's talking to him either. So
I start gabbing with this guy, seemed to be some
social misfit like me. I said, what do you do?
(08:13):
And he said, oh, I'm the new CEO. Chuckle chuckle, chuckle. Okay,
blah blah blah. A couple drinks later, and the evening
wears on and somebody's up at a microphone saying, and
ladies and gentlemen, please welcome our new CEO. And there's
the guy with the mustache and the suspenders, and he was,
in fact the new CEO of company, but he was
as new as I was, and no one knew what
(08:33):
he looked like, so no one was talking to him.
But those are the kinds of events, ladies and gentlemen,
like an terminated career. So that was like early eighties,
or it was about nineteen eighty two.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker 3 (08:45):
Yeah wow, oh yeah, they were some of those places,
these parties were unbelievable, and that Bargatsi actually does a
really funny bit about being a surprise guest at some
thing in Florida. And he didn't know what the guy did,
but he was some guy who gig cars away literally
at the office Christmas party. Uh, and he said, none
(09:06):
is surprise. Everybody has a special guest. We're gonna have comedy.
And nobody knew who he was. It was total crickets.
But you know, those parts, those days are over. Nobody's
doing that anymore. First of all, how do you have
an office party if everybody's working on zoom?
Speaker 2 (09:22):
You know, what do you do?
Speaker 3 (09:22):
Just get on the uh, you know, jump on the
zoom Christmas.
Speaker 2 (09:27):
We can download the Christmas party.
Speaker 3 (09:29):
I always thought that about those, uh, those online universities
that you could what down home download homecoming. It's not
quite the same thing as the in person experience. But uh,
as you're write down another thing. There doesn't seem to
be a lot of future in the missletoe business, according
to mister Missletoe Nick Champion in England, who may be
(09:50):
looking for a gig gift of forty seven years.
Speaker 4 (09:53):
You're listening to Tim Conway Junior on demand from KFI
AM six forty.
Speaker 3 (09:59):
In just a few minutes, we're going to talk with
Bert Kerns, author of Shemp So Stooge fans, your dream
has come true, a full life, full length biography of
Shemp Howard of all people. Actually, it's a fascinating story,
so stick with us. We'll get into that, and in
the third hour we're going to talk about that the
plunge in office rental, that there's a fifty five story
(10:22):
building in downtown LA lost two thirds of its value.
We'll talk with Stephen Spear about that, and I will
tell the drunken Turkey story. I've had a lot of
requests for people since it is Thanksgiving. Those of you
have heard me prattle on for low the many years
I've been on the air in LA have requested the
Turkey story, and today it shall be told.
Speaker 2 (10:42):
That's coming up in the next hour.
Speaker 3 (10:44):
Meanwhile, I saw this story that copper thieves had cut
into this in the Hacienda Heights area. They cut into
the phone lines to steal the copper out of the wires.
And the company, by the way, was still Frontier Communications,
was still sending out the bills by the way the
(11:05):
wires had been installn nobody had any phone service, but
you were still getting the bills.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
Well, you can see how that happens. The computer just
spits out the bill.
Speaker 3 (11:13):
The computer doesn't know that barbarians visigoths had come in
and plundered from the community. So the bills got sent
out and eventually get that straightened out. But in addition
to that story, we had a rash of reporting on
the vandalism at LAUSD schools, including Wadsworth Elementary School in
(11:34):
South la has been hit by burglars and vandals six
times so far this year, six times twenty four classrooms
where doors were damaged, individuals that access to the classrooms
those doors, some of them had to be replaced, and
the entire system needs to be rekeyed. They estimated at
this point the damage is around one hundred and fifteen
thousand dollars and that's not even counting the other stuff
(11:55):
that was broken and looted in the repeated b and
ease and burglars and vandals had hit LAUSD school property
one hundred and seventy one times since August two. On
that number, one hundred and seventy one times since August
reprehensible acts against the schools. They broke it to South
(12:15):
La Elementary. I just told you about that one. And
this has just been one of the one hundred and
seventy one instance of burglary and vandalism in the LAUSD system.
And the reason I want to talk about this because
we've had countless reports of the copper wire. I mentioned
(12:35):
earlier in passing that I play a senior softball and
we play in the LA Park system and for about
two years there were no lights on the fields because
thieves had stripped the light poles of the wiring system.
And it took LA Parks and Rex, you know, two
years to get around to repairing it. And it's a
(12:58):
constant struggle the neighbor It's all over southern California and
specifically in La in La County where there are no
street lights functioning street lights because people have stripped the
copper wire out. Now, you know, this is a maddening
problem because it has to be sold. So there are
(13:18):
scrap yards and they know damn well that the people
bringing this stuff in didn't, you know, just have it
laying around the house. It's not some excess copper that
they just happened to have from when they did that
diy or DYI project after watching YouTube, University that it's
stolen property. Every once in a while, By the way,
(13:39):
somebody loses their life doing this because they grab a
hold of some live wires and they get electrocuted. There
were rather infamous examples of statues, public statues that were
being cut down and they're lugging, you know, these one thousand,
two thousand pounds two ton statues to a salvage yard.
Obviously this is stolen property, and the people don't care.
(14:02):
They just take it as scrap. Sometimes they call the cops.
For the most part, the answer is no. The answer
is they don't care. I mean, thank god we're not
in Philadelphia. I mean, they'd get the liberty bell and
they'd haul that down to a scrap yard. And when
when you look at these things, as you know, we
just shake our head and go out, what are you
(14:22):
going to do about it?
Speaker 2 (14:23):
What are you going to do with it?
Speaker 3 (14:24):
This is this is the long trail of the George
gasconing of law enforcement that people do just sort of
throw up their hands and go, oh, what are you
going to do about it?
Speaker 2 (14:33):
I don't have any kids in school.
Speaker 3 (14:35):
So but when you are a civil society that allows
the beacons of the future, the school system, the infrastructure
that makes it possible. A lot of times people were
taking fire hydrants. They're literally knocking fire hydrants out of
the street and bringing them down.
Speaker 2 (14:54):
For scrap metal.
Speaker 3 (14:56):
And guess what happens when you live in a place
where it burns. Can't allow this kind of civic decay
to go unpunished and unprosecuted. You just can't do it, because,
I mean, it's the fall of Rome. It's like when
all of a sudden people were I don't know what
happened in the you know, thousands of years ago in
ancient Rome, which was a magnificent, incredible empire if you
(15:20):
actually read about the scope of it, not just the
geographics go, but what Rome represented, those incredible buildings, and
they fell into literally crumbling ruin because they got too
fat inlent and lazy to defend themselves. And then the
ignorant hordes came down from the north and plundered what
(15:41):
was the glory of Rome. And sometimes you do get
that feeling a drive around in neighborhoods when you see
the homeless encampments and you see the power lines are down,
and the copper has been taken out of the street lights,
and the schools are under attack. They go, why are
we allowing this to happen? Why did we allow things?
Speaker 5 (15:59):
I know?
Speaker 2 (15:59):
You know, look, you've heard it. You listen to KFI.
Speaker 3 (16:01):
You've heard this a thousand times from you know, John
covered was covered again today when we spend billions of dollars,
literally billions of dollars on homeless services, and people are
still pooping on the streets, and the folks throw up
their hands and say, what are you going to do
about it? Well, at some point you have to say, no,
this is not this isn't cruelty. It's not like people
(16:22):
are hard hearted. We've demonstrated time and time again we're
not hard hearted about it, both with charitable giving and
food kitchens and food pantries and voting to tax ourselves
in perpetuity to fund homeless programs. And then they spend
the money foolishly, wastefully, or they can't even explain how
they've spent the money. Are they built seven hundred thousand
(16:44):
dollars re unit apartments. But you can't let schools be
attacked like this. You can't let the plumbing and the
electrical grid that keeps the city functioning be stripped by vandals.
And unfortunately, we have a lot allowed that to happen
over the last number of years, to the point where
I guess people feel empowered that they could do it
(17:06):
at whatever they want. One hundred and seventy one time
since August. All right, ladies and Joe, won't we come back?
We need a little slap happy with some stooge talk
with Bert Kern's, author of Shemp, the Face of Comedy himself.
Speaker 4 (17:21):
You're listening to Tim Conway Junior on demand from KFI
AM six forty.
Speaker 3 (17:28):
If you heard a three blind mis plan, it meant
the Stooges were coming on, all right. You know that
if you're of a certain age, you just grew up
on Saturdays watching the stooges whack each other in the head.
And there was a hierarchy of stooges, as you know,
the three Stooges.
Speaker 2 (17:44):
It was Mo, Larry and Curly.
Speaker 3 (17:46):
And when it wasn't Curly, when it was Shemp, you'd go,
oh rats, we got a Shemp. And it got worse
after that. It could be Joe Besser, or it could
be Curly Joe de Rita. But guess what, As it
turned out, Shemp was really the original stooge. And now
we have the evidence because there's a brand new biography
(18:08):
of Shemp. Howard called Shemp the face of comedy. It's
a pleasure to welcome to the show. The author Bert Kerns, Bert,
how are you?
Speaker 5 (18:17):
Oh, very good, thanks for having Shemp and I am oh.
Speaker 3 (18:20):
Now, hey, listen, we had Zeppo on yesterday, so there's
no way we weren't doing Shemp today.
Speaker 5 (18:26):
Another fourth man.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3 (18:28):
And it's kind of interesting because he really was the
fourth of the three Stooges the way Zeppo was the
fourth of the three Marx brothers, but as it turns out,
he really was the first and the fourth stooge.
Speaker 5 (18:40):
Yeah, yeah, people. I don't know if people know it,
but the Stooges came from a family. There was There
was Samuel Horowitz who was Shemp. He was born in
eighteen ninety five. His younger brother, Moe was born two
years later, and then six years down the line came
the baby brother early and so they were a family act.
And originally the act was Shemp and Mo before they
(19:03):
hooked up with a guy named Ted Healy became his
stooges on stage in Vaudeville on Broadway and then went
into motion pictures. Shemp quit the act and baby brother
Curly took over.
Speaker 3 (19:16):
Yeah, Jerome Howard aka Curle. It became really in some
ways the most famous and the most beloved of the stooges.
But Shemp and Mo growing up in Brooklyn at the
turn of the last century, they happened to have a
motion picture studio right near where they lived, and they
were smitten by it.
Speaker 5 (19:36):
Yeah, they were smitten by show business. There were five
sons in the family that the two older ones stayed
out of show business. But really it was Mo from
the beginning, from the time he was about eleven years old.
He set his sights on being a serious actor and
that's what that's what he wanted to be from the beginning.
And his older brother Shemp, as Mo tells the story,
it was just sort of a goofy mare do well,
(19:57):
scaredy cat who was afraid of his own chef, and
Moe had to sort of lead Shemp by the hand
into show business. That's Moe's story and That's what was
the issue when I came to write this biography, and
it started out as a simple biography project. But as
I started digging into the stories of the Three Stooges,
I found out that most everything that's been written that
(20:18):
you know about the Stuge's history is fiction. And the
reason is is that most everybody who's written a book
about the Three Stooges, there hadn't been a book about
Shemp at the time we started this project. Most every
book about the Three Stooges goes back to the Bible,
and the Bible in this case is the autobiography of
mo Howard that he wrote at the end of his
(20:40):
life in the mid seventies. He died before he finished it.
His daughter had to complete it for him, and a
lot of the stories that he tells in it are
untrue and at the expense of his older brother, Shemp
to make himself look like the leader of the gang
from the beginning, which he really wasn't.
Speaker 3 (20:56):
We're talking about Bert Kerns, who was the author of Shemp,
which is the new biography of shempowered by Applause Books,
and it's available in Good bookstores and of course at
Amazon and mister Bezos be happy to get you a
copy lickety split. So it really had to have been
a challenge because, as you mentioned, the subtitle of your
(21:18):
book could have been fact checking Mo, because you had
to rely on as a starting point a biography that
an autobiography that Mo wrote late in life, and there
was a book that Larry sort of participated in as
well that suffered from the same deficits of fact checking.
And one of the real challenges is that Curly died
(21:40):
very young, and Shemp died nineteen fifty five, and there's
no interviews. There are no surviving interviews in any form
of Curly or Shemp. So as a result, you have
to start from ground zero to kind of reconstruct his
personal story.
Speaker 5 (22:00):
And you know, Mo outlived Shemp by twenty years. And
in the nineteen sixties when the Stooges had their renaissance,
when they were syndicated on television and we watched them
as kids, Moe was going on you know, the Mike
Douglas Show. He's going on television, he's going on radio,
and he's telling the stories of the three Stooges and
he remembers how, you know, he got together with this
(22:21):
comedian singer named Ted Healy back in nineteen twenty three
and went on an eleven year run with Ted Healy.
And how he can't forget the day that he was
there when he discovered Larry and he wasn't he can't
forget the day when Shemp quit because he was afraid
of Ted Healy. And one of that was true. The
dates didn't add up. Mo left out the fact that
he quit the act for three and a half years
(22:42):
to sell real estate back in the early days where
and you know, Shemp went off on his own with
Ted Healy, conquered Broadway, conquered Vaudeville, had his name in
lights as big as Ted Heally was. And when he
quit the act, it wasn't because he was afraid of
Ted Healy because they used to get knocked around on date.
Shemp couit the act because he was the star of
(23:03):
the act and demanded more money. And when he couldn't
get the money, he went off on his.
Speaker 3 (23:07):
Own and he made a lot more money. And that's
the thing, if you certainly in the book you cover this.
Shep had a very successful and prolific solo film career
and he worked with big stars and including By the way,
one of my all time favorite scenes in any movie
is with W. C. Fields and the bank Dick when
(23:27):
he is the straight man for Field's great line, did
I come in here last night and did I spend
a twenty dollar bill? And Shemp as the bartender, says
yeah you did, and he goes, Oh, what a load
that is off my mind.
Speaker 2 (23:37):
I thought I'd lost it.
Speaker 3 (23:39):
It's one of the one of the most sophisticated jokes
and just such a brilliant character joke. But Shemp worked
with all kinds of big celebrities, including ab and Costello
and other comics want on them, but also in dramas.
Speaker 5 (23:52):
Yeah well, he made five pictures of Abbot and Costello.
He was in pictures with The Dead End Kids. He
worked with William Powell and Myrna Loy in the Thin
Man features. He worked with John Wayne, Randolph Scott, Marlena District,
Jimmy Stewart, Fatty Arbuckle in his early days. You know,
we all know the Stooges because we know they're shorts.
They've lived on from the time they were syndicated in
(24:14):
the sixties. Watched them today. But what you forget what
people don't realize is that, you know, the three Stooges
were making movie shorts from the nineteen thirties to the
nineteen fifties, Well so was Shemp. He was making solo shorts,
and there were other comedians making these shorts that, you know,
fifteen minute little pictures that they put before a James
(24:35):
Cagney or a John Wayne movie. You'd go to the
movie theater, you'd see a newsreel, you'd see a comedy short,
then you'd see the main feature. Well, Shamp was making
his own shorts through that entire time period, and a
lot of them are funnier than the Three Stooges, and
only a lot more versatile than the other three were.
Speaker 3 (24:55):
You know, the irony here is that when Curley joined
the act to replace Shemp, Shemp ultimately ended up replacing
Curly when Curley had a terrible stroke in the early
nineteen fifties. And there's a very poignant film where one
(25:15):
of the three Stoogie shorts. Actually all of the brothers
are in the all four Stooges. It's the only time
they're on film together, and it happened by accident. Tell
us how that happened?
Speaker 5 (25:26):
Yeah, Well, what happened was Curly was fading for a
number of years. He had some mini strokes. You know,
Moe kept his team on the road. Whenever they weren't
making shorts at Columbia Pictures on Gower Street, he had
them on the road. They weren't working at the studio
the full year, and so, you know, he was just
always trying to get make more money for the team,
(25:48):
keep them working. Curly kept having strokes, they kept them
going until finally he had the debilitating stroke. Moe convinced
Shemp to give up his solo career and come on temporarily.
Well it wasn't temporary. Curly never got better. But about
four years after Curly left the act, he was he was.
(26:09):
He came and visited the team while they were making
a picture, and they came up with the idea of
having Curly appear as a train passenger as a three
walk As the three of them walked by, Malari and
Schamp walk by on a train and saw a guy
snoring and lifted the hat and there was Curly look
a little bit different. He had he had a full
head of hair at this point, and that was the
only time they were they were seen.
Speaker 2 (26:29):
Yeah, yeah, it's interesting.
Speaker 5 (26:31):
You know.
Speaker 3 (26:31):
In yesterday's conversation about the Marx brothers, and I have
this disclaimer. By the way, I'm a Marx I'm a Marxist.
I grew up just crazy.
Speaker 2 (26:40):
I drove my.
Speaker 3 (26:41):
Family, my poor mother and father and my brother and said,
I drove them crazy with my obsession over the Marx brothers.
Speaker 2 (26:47):
And I love the student.
Speaker 3 (26:48):
I watched the Stooges, but it actually I was actually
a Larry guy by the way, while everybody else I'm
a big Larry fan.
Speaker 2 (26:58):
But as I've got and older, I've actually grown.
Speaker 3 (27:01):
To appreciate the art of what the Stooges were about
even more than I did as a kid. In some ways, Bert,
I look at him like it's it's human animation, because
every frame of their films has motion of some kind,
and a lot of it had to be just invented
(27:23):
by them on the fly. We'll talk about this in
the unique nature of that act, which was incredibly physical
and possibly lethal, when we come back. We've got Bert
Kerns with us for another segment. The book is called Shemp.
It's in bookstores now. It's on Amazon, of course, you
can find it it's really a great read. If you're
a Stooge fan, it's must have.
Speaker 4 (27:41):
You're listening to Tim Conway Junior on demand from KFI
AM six forty.
Speaker 2 (27:47):
We are talking with Bert Kerns.
Speaker 3 (27:49):
He is the author of a new biography of Shemp,
The Face of Film Comedy by Applause Books and Bert,
You've got an event this Saturday at book Soup.
Speaker 2 (27:59):
Is that correct?
Speaker 5 (28:01):
Yes, we do it two pm on Saturday. It's Small
business Day, Independent bookstore Day. And we've all heard about Glicked,
you know, the whole Wicked and Gladiator combination that's out there.
We have something a bit different. It's called the Chempranos
and it's I'm going to be talking with Ray Richmond,
who's got a new book out, The Sopranos, The Complete
(28:23):
Visual History on the influence of Three Stooges slapstick Violence
on the Sopranos, which really exists David Chase and the
executive producer and writer Terence Winters. We're great Three Stoges
fans and really use that as the aesthetic and a
lot of the violent scenes.
Speaker 3 (28:40):
They did and what time is that and folks can
go down there and take all that in.
Speaker 5 (28:46):
It's two pm. Okay Books Souper.
Speaker 3 (28:48):
Right on Sunset Boulevard, can't miss that, one of the
great bookstores in the LA area. And while you're in
there telling them to put my book Frank Shadow on
those shelves.
Speaker 2 (28:57):
Shadow, thank you.
Speaker 5 (28:58):
We're both by a right.
Speaker 3 (29:01):
Hey, listen, I want to talk to you exactly about
the violence of this act, because eventually the stooges themselves started.
I know that there's an interview we I'm always talking
about later in life about how they're pulling punches literally
on the violence, because of course all of us were
whacking each other over the head, replicating In fact, I
(29:21):
just saw Billy van zandt He's got a book out,
and Billy was talking about the early stooge influence. He
took a flower pot and hit it over a friend's head,
producing stitches and a lot of yelling. But this was
an incredibly violent act. And talk to us about Ted
Healy because he's kind of like the forgotten starting point.
(29:43):
He was the star of the early stage act. How
did they come up with the idea that you would
just beat each other up and that would be funny?
Speaker 5 (29:51):
Well, Ted Heally was of vaudeville. He was one of
the biggest names in vaudeville back in the nineteen twenties.
He was a singer, he was a comedian, and he
had the whole troop of He didn't call them stooges
at the time, but they were his stooges. And what
he would do was he would be singing a song
and he would be interrupted by someone from the audience,
a plant. The person would come up on stage, they
(30:12):
do a little bit of comedy and Heally would end
the act by slapping the guy in the face hard
enough and loud enough that it could be heard in
the back row of the highest balcony. It was known
as a rough house act. And when Mo and shamp
joined the act, they were the students. They were the
ones who were getting hit, knocked across the stage, thrown
(30:32):
on the ground, etc. They and so from the beginning
they were getting beaten up on stage. When they left
Ted Healy, Mo always said, you know, I was the
smart one. I took Ted Heey's place. I dished out
all the slaps in the hits and the stooges from
the nineteen twenties all the way through to the nineteen
sixties continued their stage act. They were able to pull
(30:56):
the punches and use sound effects when they were on screen,
but when they were on the road, when they were
in a theater, the hits for real. And so this
went on, you know, for thirty years for some of
these guys.
Speaker 3 (31:07):
Now, this is a really fascinating point that you make
in the book because all those doinks and boinks and
yanks and stuff that we hear in the films weren't
there when they were doing the thousands of live stage appearances.
So you could imagine in a crowded theater with a
third balcony, how hard you have to hit somebody in
order for that slap to be funny. Without the sound,
(31:30):
it's not nearly as funny. And one of the theories
about the early deaths of Curly Shimp and ultimately Larry's
fatal stroke is that it could have been the piling
up of concussive head injuries.
Speaker 5 (31:48):
Yeah, well, when you're looking at you know, brain bleeds
and strokes, that could definitely be a cause of it.
I mean, Sampless was getting hit up until you know,
the age of sixty when he died. Is the depth
certificate said he died of a heart attack, but his family,
including his daughter in law who is still alive today,
insists they were there at the time and said he
died of a brain hemorrhage of a stroke. Larry lived
(32:12):
much longer, but he died of the same thing. Moe
is the only one of the Stooges who you know,
he died of cancer. He didn't die of that. And
then again, he was the one who was dishing out
those slaps. It was, you know, you wonder why Curly was,
you know, having these mini strokes on the road. When
I looked at some of the some of the diagnosis
he got when he was finally put in the hospital,
(32:33):
and he had you know, Curly was like a Blushi type.
You know, he was a heavy drinker and a partier
and he was he was always out. But he also
when he was brought into the hospital, he had hemorrhaging
behind his eyes and a lot of that comes from
getting hit in the head. Like it was like a
football player.
Speaker 3 (32:49):
Yeah, you know, when you put it in that context,
it casts a pall over it. That's not going to
stop me from laughing, though I don't know why because
it was just funny.
Speaker 2 (32:59):
But but you know, I'm a.
Speaker 3 (33:02):
Junkie for early show business history from the vaudeville and
one of the things I mean, I know that we've
got you know, rap stars that literally we used to
have battles of the band in the nineteen forties between
swing bands, and then the battles became actual bloodshed when
there were feuds between rappers. But show business at the
turn of the century was violent. It was just a
tough life and there's no more physical evidence of it
(33:27):
than the Three Stooges to this day.
Speaker 5 (33:30):
Yeah, it's funny we talked about the Three Stooges. We
always talk about the slapstick and the violence, you know,
like who are the successors and the three students. Well,
it's America's funniest home video and Dad's getting it, you know,
in the cross with a fastball or you know, or WWE.
But when you watch the Stooges, it's really split second
comic timing as well. I mean, these guys were experienced,
(33:51):
hardcore vaudeville veterans who brought that vaudeville onto the screen
and onto the stage.
Speaker 3 (33:57):
Well that's why I said, you know, Bert, when I
want much the Stooges, Now I look at it it's
like it's human beings doing live animation. Because the the
the choreography of every moment of a frame of a
stooge is short, is extraordinary when you actually break down
what's what they had to think of to do to
make that come alive.
Speaker 5 (34:19):
And there's one other note with that is that, Yeah,
when you look at Moe, Larry and Curly, they were caricatures.
They were they were they were cartoon characters. You could
doodle their faces and make mow Larry and Curly. When
Shemp came back, came on board, he was different. This
was he was a real person. And I think that
was the real difference with Shemp when he joined the
Three Stooges. He brought a real humanity to the group.
(34:41):
I mean he didn't look you know, Curly was just
this this lovable big baby. You know, he'd barked like
a dog and spin around on the floor. But but
Shemp was, you know, he was a man. And that's
why he scared us as kids, that's what we want.
We appreciated them later when we grew up.
Speaker 3 (34:57):
Well Bert, good luck with the blook Again. Saturday at
book Soup, you can go down and get your copies
signed by Bert and the sopranos as well. The book
is called Shimp The Biography of the Three Stooge of
Shimp Howard the Face of Filmed in Comedy. The author
is Bert Currents. Bert, thanks so much for being with us.
Appreciate it.
Speaker 5 (35:15):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (35:16):
Happy Thanksgiving Conway show on demand on the iHeartRadio app.
Now you can always hear us live on KFI AM
six forty four to seven pm Monday through Friday, and
anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio app.
It's KMF. I am six forty and you're listening to
The Conway Show on demand on the iHeartRadio app.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
Bomb.
Speaker 3 (00:09):
Doug mcatarre in for Tim Conway Junior. Tim will be
back after the Holly Days and I'm here till seven o'clock.
Later on this hour, Burt Kerns will be with us.
He has written a biography of Shimp of the three Stooges. Yes, Shimp,
not Curly Shmp, So we'll talk about that. It's a
really interesting story. So you want to hang on for that.
(00:29):
Stooge fans, or even if you're not a Stuge fan,
you'll find it interesting. Just a couple of quick news stories.
A New York City judge has denied Diddy his bail request.
Federal judge denied Sean diddy Combe's request to be released
on bail, finding clear and convincing evidence that the hip
hop Mogul is potentially dangerous and that no condition or
combination of conditions will reasonably assure the safety of the community.
(00:54):
The judge said there is compelling evidence of colmb's propensity
for violence, citing that to twenty sixteen Intercontinental Hotel incident
with Protege Cassie Ventura and Ditty's lawyers had been asking
to get him out on bail, and the judge said,
now that constitute's obstruction from prison his attempts to reach
(01:16):
out and influence witnesses.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
So he's staying in jail now.
Speaker 3 (01:19):
Personally, I think you know he belongs behind bars, just
because I didn't get invited to any of those parties.
I got skunked on the debauchery. And by the way,
the last thing you want to be at is a
Ditty party if I'm there, because that means he's lost
his magic. Anyway, that weird story continues, that'll be going
(01:40):
on forever. And this say it isn't so. The oldest
surviving Norms restaurant, the one built in nineteen fifty seven,
the same year I was built, located on Los Sienaga Boulevard,
the famous Googie architecture. Norms Restaurant is flipping from Norms
to a Raising Cane's Chicken Place, But because it has
(02:02):
historical cultural monument status since twenty fifteen, the new owners
insists that it will not well, they can't change it.
It's now protected, maintained forever. The iconic there's that word again.
Iconic googie architectural style, which I suppose is a victory.
There's a couple of those places left that I love.
Dinah's down there, pans on Los Sienega. Love that place,
(02:27):
another place, been there since the fifties. But I'm sorry,
it's not going to be norms anymore. But at least
they're not going to wreck the building, at least not yet.
You know, it's one of the weird things. So many
of the of the beloved I'm trying not to use
the word iconic, but the beloved La Southern California, places
like the Bob's Big Boy over here in right in
Burbank to Luca Lake, they're not It's not the Trevia Fountain,
(02:52):
it's not the Coliseum in Rome. It's like stuff that
we like, but it's a commercial establishment, so it has
to be economically viable, and sometimes it's not anymore. There
used to be that place, the TikTok Restaurant from C. C.
Brown's on Hollywood Boulevard was the allegedly the birthplace of
the Hot Fudge Sunday and their businesses. And at some point,
(03:15):
either the rent goes off or the property value becomes unjustifiable.
To keep a hot fudge Sunday place on Hollywood Boulevard.
Or it's a family owned restaurant and the kids aren't interested,
or the grandkids aren't interested in running the business anymore.
So what are you gonna do about it? But that's
part of the you know, my wife and I we've
(03:35):
always talked about this when we make our rare appearances
out of the country. You go to Europe and you
go to Italy or something like that. Or I just
read about this butcher's shop in England that's closing after
and I'm not making this up seven hundred years. It's
been a butcher shop for seven hundred years. And here,
you know, you go to Orange County and the historic
(03:56):
district is nineteen ninety two. You know, there's parts of
these new developments that are out there around the country,
some of those suburbs outside of Phoenix, you know, established
in two thousand and five, and people go, wow, it
goes all the way back to two thousand and five.
Who And you know in Europe there's a pub it's
been there for six hundred years. But what's fascinating is
(04:19):
when people from there come to Los Angeles, they want
to see strip malls. They like the idea of billboards
and all those power lines going across. So anyway, things
are different. One of the things that's different, by the way,
is speaking of England. You know mistletoe, which missletoe and
(04:40):
hollyot's in the Christmas carols and office parties. They used
to actually hang missletoe and you're supposed to kiss whoever
you're standing with underneath the missletoe. There's a tradition that
hasn't aged well in the hashtag met too era. Well,
apparently mistletoe in England is sold at auction and it
(05:01):
has to be sold in the winter time.
Speaker 2 (05:02):
I don't know anything.
Speaker 3 (05:03):
About mistletoe except nobody ever wanted to stand under the
even a ditties party. They didn't want to stand under
the mistletoe with me. But by the seventeen hundreds, mistletoe
was commonly used as a Christmas decoration. And mistletoe needs
frost to ripen the berries and turn them from green
to white. And there's a guy known as mister Mistletoe
(05:27):
Nick Champion, and he's a renowned mistletoe auctioneer. I'd have
no idea what he does the rest of the year,
but apparently he's like the people in punk Satani Pennsylvania.
It works one day a year. But he has been
staging mistletoe auctions in England for years and years and years,
forty seven years. As a matter of fact, he expects
about five hundred lots of the plant to go under
(05:49):
the hammer, compared to two thousand lots in previous years.
And he said workers used to kiss under the mistletoe
at Christmas parties, but with all the wokeriy nowadays, they
would be accused of a no kidding. We used to
have four auctions, but mistletoe sales peaked in the early
nineteen nineties. The whole idea of office parties is really thin.
Speaker 2 (06:10):
Ice.
Speaker 3 (06:11):
Let's face it. You got your coworkers and booze.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
Steph.
Speaker 3 (06:15):
Take a look around. Take a look around at who's
working on this show right now. You want to see
these people drunk? Not really, no kidding, this is it's
a recipe for disaster, career suicide.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
And like you said, almost nobody here.
Speaker 3 (06:31):
Yeah, well that's the reason some of them were because
of their behavior at Christmas parties. I used to when
I was working over at KBC years ago. I mean,
this has got to be twenty five thirty is when
I first started, and they have these big Buckian alls
and you'd see, you know, Gloria allread dancing on a
table and stuff like that that doesn't happen anymore. In fact,
(06:54):
before I moved to California, I worked at this ad
agency in New York and I they started December like
tenth or something like that.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
I started.
Speaker 3 (07:06):
My first day on the job was the Christmas party.
Was the office Christmas party, only it wasn't at the office.
This is you know, in the in the eighties when
everybody was doing coke or something. I don't know what
they were spending the money on it, but they had
this fantastic colligula like Christmas party at some place, some
(07:29):
river club on the East River on the East side
of New York.
Speaker 2 (07:32):
And I mean this place was blow and Dough.
Speaker 3 (07:34):
They were auctioning off television sets and you know, just
drawing numbers out and people winning prizes and all kinds
of fantastic things. I knew nobody. I literally barely met
the person who hired me.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
I didn't know their last name. It was some guy
who hired me.
Speaker 3 (07:51):
And it was my first day underwear, so I'm standing
there and I got a Heineken in my hand. They
got heinekens, you know. That's that's the kind of party
this was. And I see this sort of short, rumpy
guy wearing suspenders and he's got this big walrus mustache
and he's drinking, and nobody's talking to him either. So
I start gabbing with this guy, seemed to be some
social misfit like me. I said, what do you do?
(08:13):
And he said, oh, I'm the new CEO. Chuckle chuckle, chuckle. Okay,
blah blah blah. A couple drinks later, and the evening
wears on and somebody's up at a microphone saying, and
ladies and gentlemen, please welcome our new CEO. And there's
the guy with the mustache and the suspenders, and he was,
in fact the new CEO of company, but he was
as new as I was, and no one knew what
(08:33):
he looked like, so no one was talking to him.
But those are the kinds of events, ladies and gentlemen,
like an terminated career. So that was like early eighties,
or it was about nineteen eighty two.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker 3 (08:45):
Yeah wow, oh yeah, they were some of those places,
these parties were unbelievable, and that Bargatsi actually does a
really funny bit about being a surprise guest at some
thing in Florida. And he didn't know what the guy did,
but he was some guy who gig cars away literally
at the office Christmas party. Uh, and he said, none
(09:06):
is surprise. Everybody has a special guest. We're gonna have comedy.
And nobody knew who he was. It was total crickets.
But you know, those parts, those days are over. Nobody's
doing that anymore. First of all, how do you have
an office party if everybody's working on zoom?
Speaker 2 (09:22):
You know, what do you do?
Speaker 3 (09:22):
Just get on the uh, you know, jump on the
zoom Christmas.
Speaker 2 (09:27):
We can download the Christmas party.
Speaker 3 (09:29):
I always thought that about those, uh, those online universities
that you could what down home download homecoming. It's not
quite the same thing as the in person experience. But uh,
as you're write down another thing. There doesn't seem to
be a lot of future in the missletoe business, according
to mister Missletoe Nick Champion in England, who may be
(09:50):
looking for a gig gift of forty seven years.
Speaker 4 (09:53):
You're listening to Tim Conway Junior on demand from KFI
AM six forty.
Speaker 3 (09:59):
In just a few minutes, we're going to talk with
Bert Kerns, author of Shemp So Stooge fans, your dream
has come true, a full life, full length biography of
Shemp Howard of all people. Actually, it's a fascinating story,
so stick with us. We'll get into that, and in
the third hour we're going to talk about that the
plunge in office rental, that there's a fifty five story
(10:22):
building in downtown LA lost two thirds of its value.
We'll talk with Stephen Spear about that, and I will
tell the drunken Turkey story. I've had a lot of
requests for people since it is Thanksgiving. Those of you
have heard me prattle on for low the many years
I've been on the air in LA have requested the
Turkey story, and today it shall be told.
Speaker 2 (10:42):
That's coming up in the next hour.
Speaker 3 (10:44):
Meanwhile, I saw this story that copper thieves had cut
into this in the Hacienda Heights area. They cut into
the phone lines to steal the copper out of the wires.
And the company, by the way, was still Frontier Communications,
was still sending out the bills by the way the
(11:05):
wires had been installn nobody had any phone service, but
you were still getting the bills.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
Well, you can see how that happens. The computer just
spits out the bill.
Speaker 3 (11:13):
The computer doesn't know that barbarians visigoths had come in
and plundered from the community. So the bills got sent
out and eventually get that straightened out. But in addition
to that story, we had a rash of reporting on
the vandalism at LAUSD schools, including Wadsworth Elementary School in
(11:34):
South la has been hit by burglars and vandals six
times so far this year, six times twenty four classrooms
where doors were damaged, individuals that access to the classrooms
those doors, some of them had to be replaced, and
the entire system needs to be rekeyed. They estimated at
this point the damage is around one hundred and fifteen
thousand dollars and that's not even counting the other stuff
(11:55):
that was broken and looted in the repeated b and
ease and burglars and vandals had hit LAUSD school property
one hundred and seventy one times since August two. On
that number, one hundred and seventy one times since August
reprehensible acts against the schools. They broke it to South
(12:15):
La Elementary. I just told you about that one. And
this has just been one of the one hundred and
seventy one instance of burglary and vandalism in the LAUSD system.
And the reason I want to talk about this because
we've had countless reports of the copper wire. I mentioned
(12:35):
earlier in passing that I play a senior softball and
we play in the LA Park system and for about
two years there were no lights on the fields because
thieves had stripped the light poles of the wiring system.
And it took LA Parks and Rex, you know, two
years to get around to repairing it. And it's a
(12:58):
constant struggle the neighbor It's all over southern California and
specifically in La in La County where there are no
street lights functioning street lights because people have stripped the
copper wire out. Now, you know, this is a maddening
problem because it has to be sold. So there are
(13:18):
scrap yards and they know damn well that the people
bringing this stuff in didn't, you know, just have it
laying around the house. It's not some excess copper that
they just happened to have from when they did that
diy or DYI project after watching YouTube, University that it's
stolen property. Every once in a while, By the way,
(13:39):
somebody loses their life doing this because they grab a
hold of some live wires and they get electrocuted. There
were rather infamous examples of statues, public statues that were
being cut down and they're lugging, you know, these one thousand,
two thousand pounds two ton statues to a salvage yard.
Obviously this is stolen property, and the people don't care.
(14:02):
They just take it as scrap. Sometimes they call the cops.
For the most part, the answer is no. The answer
is they don't care. I mean, thank god we're not
in Philadelphia. I mean, they'd get the liberty bell and
they'd haul that down to a scrap yard. And when
when you look at these things, as you know, we
just shake our head and go out, what are you
(14:22):
going to do about it?
Speaker 2 (14:23):
What are you going to do with it?
Speaker 3 (14:24):
This is this is the long trail of the George
gasconing of law enforcement that people do just sort of
throw up their hands and go, oh, what are you
going to do about it?
Speaker 2 (14:33):
I don't have any kids in school.
Speaker 3 (14:35):
So but when you are a civil society that allows
the beacons of the future, the school system, the infrastructure
that makes it possible. A lot of times people were
taking fire hydrants. They're literally knocking fire hydrants out of
the street and bringing them down.
Speaker 2 (14:54):
For scrap metal.
Speaker 3 (14:56):
And guess what happens when you live in a place
where it burns. Can't allow this kind of civic decay
to go unpunished and unprosecuted. You just can't do it, because,
I mean, it's the fall of Rome. It's like when
all of a sudden people were I don't know what
happened in the you know, thousands of years ago in
ancient Rome, which was a magnificent, incredible empire if you
(15:20):
actually read about the scope of it, not just the
geographics go, but what Rome represented, those incredible buildings, and
they fell into literally crumbling ruin because they got too
fat inlent and lazy to defend themselves. And then the
ignorant hordes came down from the north and plundered what
(15:41):
was the glory of Rome. And sometimes you do get
that feeling a drive around in neighborhoods when you see
the homeless encampments and you see the power lines are down,
and the copper has been taken out of the street lights,
and the schools are under attack. They go, why are
we allowing this to happen? Why did we allow things?
Speaker 5 (15:59):
I know?
Speaker 2 (15:59):
You know, look, you've heard it. You listen to KFI.
Speaker 3 (16:01):
You've heard this a thousand times from you know, John
covered was covered again today when we spend billions of dollars,
literally billions of dollars on homeless services, and people are
still pooping on the streets, and the folks throw up
their hands and say, what are you going to do
about it? Well, at some point you have to say, no,
this is not this isn't cruelty. It's not like people
(16:22):
are hard hearted. We've demonstrated time and time again we're
not hard hearted about it, both with charitable giving and
food kitchens and food pantries and voting to tax ourselves
in perpetuity to fund homeless programs. And then they spend
the money foolishly, wastefully, or they can't even explain how
they've spent the money. Are they built seven hundred thousand
(16:44):
dollars re unit apartments. But you can't let schools be
attacked like this. You can't let the plumbing and the
electrical grid that keeps the city functioning be stripped by vandals.
And unfortunately, we have a lot allowed that to happen
over the last number of years, to the point where
I guess people feel empowered that they could do it
(17:06):
at whatever they want. One hundred and seventy one time
since August. All right, ladies and Joe, won't we come back?
We need a little slap happy with some stooge talk
with Bert Kern's, author of Shemp, the Face of Comedy himself.
Speaker 4 (17:21):
You're listening to Tim Conway Junior on demand from KFI
AM six forty.
Speaker 3 (17:28):
If you heard a three blind mis plan, it meant
the Stooges were coming on, all right. You know that
if you're of a certain age, you just grew up
on Saturdays watching the stooges whack each other in the head.
And there was a hierarchy of stooges, as you know,
the three Stooges.
Speaker 2 (17:44):
It was Mo, Larry and Curly.
Speaker 3 (17:46):
And when it wasn't Curly, when it was Shemp, you'd go,
oh rats, we got a Shemp. And it got worse
after that. It could be Joe Besser, or it could
be Curly Joe de Rita. But guess what, As it
turned out, Shemp was really the original stooge. And now
we have the evidence because there's a brand new biography
(18:08):
of Shemp. Howard called Shemp the face of comedy. It's
a pleasure to welcome to the show. The author Bert Kerns, Bert,
how are you?
Speaker 5 (18:17):
Oh, very good, thanks for having Shemp and I am oh.
Speaker 3 (18:20):
Now, hey, listen, we had Zeppo on yesterday, so there's
no way we weren't doing Shemp today.
Speaker 5 (18:26):
Another fourth man.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3 (18:28):
And it's kind of interesting because he really was the
fourth of the three Stooges the way Zeppo was the
fourth of the three Marx brothers, but as it turns out,
he really was the first and the fourth stooge.
Speaker 5 (18:40):
Yeah, yeah, people. I don't know if people know it,
but the Stooges came from a family. There was There
was Samuel Horowitz who was Shemp. He was born in
eighteen ninety five. His younger brother, Moe was born two
years later, and then six years down the line came
the baby brother early and so they were a family act.
And originally the act was Shemp and Mo before they
(19:03):
hooked up with a guy named Ted Healy became his
stooges on stage in Vaudeville on Broadway and then went
into motion pictures. Shemp quit the act and baby brother
Curly took over.
Speaker 3 (19:16):
Yeah, Jerome Howard aka Curle. It became really in some
ways the most famous and the most beloved of the stooges.
But Shemp and Mo growing up in Brooklyn at the
turn of the last century, they happened to have a
motion picture studio right near where they lived, and they
were smitten by it.
Speaker 5 (19:36):
Yeah, they were smitten by show business. There were five
sons in the family that the two older ones stayed
out of show business. But really it was Mo from
the beginning, from the time he was about eleven years old.
He set his sights on being a serious actor and
that's what that's what he wanted to be from the beginning.
And his older brother Shemp, as Mo tells the story,
it was just sort of a goofy mare do well,
(19:57):
scaredy cat who was afraid of his own chef, and
Moe had to sort of lead Shemp by the hand
into show business. That's Moe's story and That's what was
the issue when I came to write this biography, and
it started out as a simple biography project. But as
I started digging into the stories of the Three Stooges,
I found out that most everything that's been written that
(20:18):
you know about the Stuge's history is fiction. And the
reason is is that most everybody who's written a book
about the Three Stooges, there hadn't been a book about
Shemp at the time we started this project. Most every
book about the Three Stooges goes back to the Bible,
and the Bible in this case is the autobiography of
mo Howard that he wrote at the end of his
(20:40):
life in the mid seventies. He died before he finished it.
His daughter had to complete it for him, and a
lot of the stories that he tells in it are
untrue and at the expense of his older brother, Shemp
to make himself look like the leader of the gang
from the beginning, which he really wasn't.
Speaker 3 (20:56):
We're talking about Bert Kerns, who was the author of Shemp,
which is the new biography of shempowered by Applause Books,
and it's available in Good bookstores and of course at
Amazon and mister Bezos be happy to get you a
copy lickety split. So it really had to have been
a challenge because, as you mentioned, the subtitle of your
(21:18):
book could have been fact checking Mo, because you had
to rely on as a starting point a biography that
an autobiography that Mo wrote late in life, and there
was a book that Larry sort of participated in as
well that suffered from the same deficits of fact checking.
And one of the real challenges is that Curly died
(21:40):
very young, and Shemp died nineteen fifty five, and there's
no interviews. There are no surviving interviews in any form
of Curly or Shemp. So as a result, you have
to start from ground zero to kind of reconstruct his
personal story.
Speaker 5 (22:00):
And you know, Mo outlived Shemp by twenty years. And
in the nineteen sixties when the Stooges had their renaissance,
when they were syndicated on television and we watched them
as kids, Moe was going on you know, the Mike
Douglas Show. He's going on television, he's going on radio,
and he's telling the stories of the three Stooges and
he remembers how, you know, he got together with this
(22:21):
comedian singer named Ted Healy back in nineteen twenty three
and went on an eleven year run with Ted Healy.
And how he can't forget the day that he was
there when he discovered Larry and he wasn't he can't
forget the day when Shemp quit because he was afraid
of Ted Healy. And one of that was true. The
dates didn't add up. Mo left out the fact that
he quit the act for three and a half years
(22:42):
to sell real estate back in the early days where
and you know, Shemp went off on his own with
Ted Healy, conquered Broadway, conquered Vaudeville, had his name in
lights as big as Ted Heally was. And when he
quit the act, it wasn't because he was afraid of
Ted Healy because they used to get knocked around on date.
Shemp couit the act because he was the star of
(23:03):
the act and demanded more money. And when he couldn't
get the money, he went off on his.
Speaker 3 (23:07):
Own and he made a lot more money. And that's
the thing, if you certainly in the book you cover this.
Shep had a very successful and prolific solo film career
and he worked with big stars and including By the way,
one of my all time favorite scenes in any movie
is with W. C. Fields and the bank Dick when
(23:27):
he is the straight man for Field's great line, did
I come in here last night and did I spend
a twenty dollar bill? And Shemp as the bartender, says
yeah you did, and he goes, Oh, what a load
that is off my mind.
Speaker 2 (23:37):
I thought I'd lost it.
Speaker 3 (23:39):
It's one of the one of the most sophisticated jokes
and just such a brilliant character joke. But Shemp worked
with all kinds of big celebrities, including ab and Costello
and other comics want on them, but also in dramas.
Speaker 5 (23:52):
Yeah well, he made five pictures of Abbot and Costello.
He was in pictures with The Dead End Kids. He
worked with William Powell and Myrna Loy in the Thin
Man features. He worked with John Wayne, Randolph Scott, Marlena District,
Jimmy Stewart, Fatty Arbuckle in his early days. You know,
we all know the Stooges because we know they're shorts.
They've lived on from the time they were syndicated in
(24:14):
the sixties. Watched them today. But what you forget what
people don't realize is that, you know, the three Stooges
were making movie shorts from the nineteen thirties to the
nineteen fifties, Well so was Shemp. He was making solo shorts,
and there were other comedians making these shorts that, you know,
fifteen minute little pictures that they put before a James
(24:35):
Cagney or a John Wayne movie. You'd go to the
movie theater, you'd see a newsreel, you'd see a comedy short,
then you'd see the main feature. Well, Shamp was making
his own shorts through that entire time period, and a
lot of them are funnier than the Three Stooges, and
only a lot more versatile than the other three were.
Speaker 3 (24:55):
You know, the irony here is that when Curley joined
the act to replace Shemp, Shemp ultimately ended up replacing
Curly when Curley had a terrible stroke in the early
nineteen fifties. And there's a very poignant film where one
(25:15):
of the three Stoogie shorts. Actually all of the brothers
are in the all four Stooges. It's the only time
they're on film together, and it happened by accident. Tell
us how that happened?
Speaker 5 (25:26):
Yeah, Well, what happened was Curly was fading for a
number of years. He had some mini strokes. You know,
Moe kept his team on the road. Whenever they weren't
making shorts at Columbia Pictures on Gower Street, he had
them on the road. They weren't working at the studio
the full year, and so, you know, he was just
always trying to get make more money for the team,
(25:48):
keep them working. Curly kept having strokes, they kept them
going until finally he had the debilitating stroke. Moe convinced
Shemp to give up his solo career and come on temporarily.
Well it wasn't temporary. Curly never got better. But about
four years after Curly left the act, he was he was.
(26:09):
He came and visited the team while they were making
a picture, and they came up with the idea of
having Curly appear as a train passenger as a three
walk As the three of them walked by, Malari and
Schamp walk by on a train and saw a guy
snoring and lifted the hat and there was Curly look
a little bit different. He had he had a full
head of hair at this point, and that was the
only time they were they were seen.
Speaker 2 (26:29):
Yeah, yeah, it's interesting.
Speaker 5 (26:31):
You know.
Speaker 3 (26:31):
In yesterday's conversation about the Marx brothers, and I have
this disclaimer. By the way, I'm a Marx I'm a Marxist.
I grew up just crazy.
Speaker 2 (26:40):
I drove my.
Speaker 3 (26:41):
Family, my poor mother and father and my brother and said,
I drove them crazy with my obsession over the Marx brothers.
Speaker 2 (26:47):
And I love the student.
Speaker 3 (26:48):
I watched the Stooges, but it actually I was actually
a Larry guy by the way, while everybody else I'm
a big Larry fan.
Speaker 2 (26:58):
But as I've got and older, I've actually grown.
Speaker 3 (27:01):
To appreciate the art of what the Stooges were about
even more than I did as a kid. In some ways, Bert,
I look at him like it's it's human animation, because
every frame of their films has motion of some kind,
and a lot of it had to be just invented
(27:23):
by them on the fly. We'll talk about this in
the unique nature of that act, which was incredibly physical
and possibly lethal, when we come back. We've got Bert
Kerns with us for another segment. The book is called Shemp.
It's in bookstores now. It's on Amazon, of course, you
can find it it's really a great read. If you're
a Stooge fan, it's must have.
Speaker 4 (27:41):
You're listening to Tim Conway Junior on demand from KFI
AM six forty.
Speaker 2 (27:47):
We are talking with Bert Kerns.
Speaker 3 (27:49):
He is the author of a new biography of Shemp,
The Face of Film Comedy by Applause Books and Bert,
You've got an event this Saturday at book Soup.
Speaker 2 (27:59):
Is that correct?
Speaker 5 (28:01):
Yes, we do it two pm on Saturday. It's Small
business Day, Independent bookstore Day. And we've all heard about Glicked,
you know, the whole Wicked and Gladiator combination that's out there.
We have something a bit different. It's called the Chempranos
and it's I'm going to be talking with Ray Richmond,
who's got a new book out, The Sopranos, The Complete
(28:23):
Visual History on the influence of Three Stooges slapstick Violence
on the Sopranos, which really exists David Chase and the
executive producer and writer Terence Winters. We're great Three Stoges
fans and really use that as the aesthetic and a
lot of the violent scenes.
Speaker 3 (28:40):
They did and what time is that and folks can
go down there and take all that in.
Speaker 5 (28:46):
It's two pm. Okay Books Souper.
Speaker 3 (28:48):
Right on Sunset Boulevard, can't miss that, one of the
great bookstores in the LA area. And while you're in
there telling them to put my book Frank Shadow on
those shelves.
Speaker 2 (28:57):
Shadow, thank you.
Speaker 5 (28:58):
We're both by a right.
Speaker 3 (29:01):
Hey, listen, I want to talk to you exactly about
the violence of this act, because eventually the stooges themselves started.
I know that there's an interview we I'm always talking
about later in life about how they're pulling punches literally
on the violence, because of course all of us were
whacking each other over the head, replicating In fact, I
(29:21):
just saw Billy van zandt He's got a book out,
and Billy was talking about the early stooge influence. He
took a flower pot and hit it over a friend's head,
producing stitches and a lot of yelling. But this was
an incredibly violent act. And talk to us about Ted
Healy because he's kind of like the forgotten starting point.
(29:43):
He was the star of the early stage act. How
did they come up with the idea that you would
just beat each other up and that would be funny?
Speaker 5 (29:51):
Well, Ted Heally was of vaudeville. He was one of
the biggest names in vaudeville back in the nineteen twenties.
He was a singer, he was a comedian, and he
had the whole troop of He didn't call them stooges
at the time, but they were his stooges. And what
he would do was he would be singing a song
and he would be interrupted by someone from the audience,
a plant. The person would come up on stage, they
(30:12):
do a little bit of comedy and Heally would end
the act by slapping the guy in the face hard
enough and loud enough that it could be heard in
the back row of the highest balcony. It was known
as a rough house act. And when Mo and shamp
joined the act, they were the students. They were the
ones who were getting hit, knocked across the stage, thrown
(30:32):
on the ground, etc. They and so from the beginning
they were getting beaten up on stage. When they left
Ted Healy, Mo always said, you know, I was the
smart one. I took Ted Heey's place. I dished out
all the slaps in the hits and the stooges from
the nineteen twenties all the way through to the nineteen
sixties continued their stage act. They were able to pull
(30:56):
the punches and use sound effects when they were on screen,
but when they were on the road, when they were
in a theater, the hits for real. And so this
went on, you know, for thirty years for some of
these guys.
Speaker 3 (31:07):
Now, this is a really fascinating point that you make
in the book because all those doinks and boinks and
yanks and stuff that we hear in the films weren't
there when they were doing the thousands of live stage appearances.
So you could imagine in a crowded theater with a
third balcony, how hard you have to hit somebody in
order for that slap to be funny. Without the sound,
(31:30):
it's not nearly as funny. And one of the theories
about the early deaths of Curly Shimp and ultimately Larry's
fatal stroke is that it could have been the piling
up of concussive head injuries.
Speaker 5 (31:48):
Yeah, well, when you're looking at you know, brain bleeds
and strokes, that could definitely be a cause of it.
I mean, Sampless was getting hit up until you know,
the age of sixty when he died. Is the depth
certificate said he died of a heart attack, but his family,
including his daughter in law who is still alive today,
insists they were there at the time and said he
died of a brain hemorrhage of a stroke. Larry lived
(32:12):
much longer, but he died of the same thing. Moe
is the only one of the Stooges who you know,
he died of cancer. He didn't die of that. And
then again, he was the one who was dishing out
those slaps. It was, you know, you wonder why Curly was,
you know, having these mini strokes on the road. When
I looked at some of the some of the diagnosis
he got when he was finally put in the hospital,
(32:33):
and he had you know, Curly was like a Blushi type.
You know, he was a heavy drinker and a partier
and he was he was always out. But he also
when he was brought into the hospital, he had hemorrhaging
behind his eyes and a lot of that comes from
getting hit in the head. Like it was like a
football player.
Speaker 3 (32:49):
Yeah, you know, when you put it in that context,
it casts a pall over it. That's not going to
stop me from laughing, though I don't know why because
it was just funny.
Speaker 2 (32:59):
But but you know, I'm a.
Speaker 3 (33:02):
Junkie for early show business history from the vaudeville and
one of the things I mean, I know that we've
got you know, rap stars that literally we used to
have battles of the band in the nineteen forties between
swing bands, and then the battles became actual bloodshed when
there were feuds between rappers. But show business at the
turn of the century was violent. It was just a
tough life and there's no more physical evidence of it
(33:27):
than the Three Stooges to this day.
Speaker 5 (33:30):
Yeah, it's funny we talked about the Three Stooges. We
always talk about the slapstick and the violence, you know,
like who are the successors and the three students. Well,
it's America's funniest home video and Dad's getting it, you know,
in the cross with a fastball or you know, or WWE.
But when you watch the Stooges, it's really split second
comic timing as well. I mean, these guys were experienced,
(33:51):
hardcore vaudeville veterans who brought that vaudeville onto the screen
and onto the stage.
Speaker 3 (33:57):
Well that's why I said, you know, Bert, when I
want much the Stooges, Now I look at it it's
like it's human beings doing live animation. Because the the
the choreography of every moment of a frame of a
stooge is short, is extraordinary when you actually break down
what's what they had to think of to do to
make that come alive.
Speaker 5 (34:19):
And there's one other note with that is that, Yeah,
when you look at Moe, Larry and Curly, they were caricatures.
They were they were they were cartoon characters. You could
doodle their faces and make mow Larry and Curly. When
Shemp came back, came on board, he was different. This
was he was a real person. And I think that
was the real difference with Shemp when he joined the
Three Stooges. He brought a real humanity to the group.
(34:41):
I mean he didn't look you know, Curly was just
this this lovable big baby. You know, he'd barked like
a dog and spin around on the floor. But but
Shemp was, you know, he was a man. And that's
why he scared us as kids, that's what we want.
We appreciated them later when we grew up.
Speaker 3 (34:57):
Well Bert, good luck with the blook Again. Saturday at
book Soup, you can go down and get your copies
signed by Bert and the sopranos as well. The book
is called Shimp The Biography of the Three Stooge of
Shimp Howard the Face of Filmed in Comedy. The author
is Bert Currents. Bert, thanks so much for being with us.
Appreciate it.
Speaker 5 (35:15):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (35:16):
Happy Thanksgiving Conway show on demand on the iHeartRadio app.
Now you can always hear us live on KFI AM
six forty four to seven pm Monday through Friday, and
anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio app.
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