If I had to sum up Ted Healy in one sentence, it would be "more than just a Stooge." I don’t care for the Three Stooges at all (don’t email me), but I enjoy the work of their "founding father," Ted Healy. I’ve seen him in 3 movies: Reckless, Dancing Lady, and Bombshell.
Ted was born in Houston in 1896. His real name is a matter of dispute; various sources state it as Ernest Lee Nash, Charles Lee Nash, or Clarence Lee Nash. He gave up the life of a salesman in 1919 and went to work on vaudeville, changing his name to Ted Healy. He and his wife Betty (both his wives were named Betty, so I’m not sure which one it was) had an act called "Ted & Betty Healy: The Flapper and The Philosopher." That must have been interesting, to say the least. In 1923 he founded a stage act with two childhood friends, Moe and Shemp Howard (later joined by Larry Fine) and called it "Ted Healy and His Stooges." Thus a legend was born. Shemp left the act and was replaced by Moe’s brother Jerome, who shaved his head and was known as Curly. The Stooges parted ways with Ted in 1934 when they were offered a contract with Columbia Studios.
Ted and The Stooges were still an act, however, when I first saw him, in Dancing Lady. Ted plays Steve, the assistant to Patch Gallagher (Clark Gable), a Broadway producer. (The Stooges are stagehands who make minor appearances, mainly to tease Joan Crawford.) Steve is not just comic relief but a fairly well-rounded character, somewhat inept on his own but loyal to his boss. In Bombshell, he plays Jean Harlow’s drunken lout of a brother, but doesn’t show up until the second half of the film, just in time to stomp all over her plans to adopt a baby with his bad behavior. In Reckless he’s rather endearing as one of William Powell’s sidekicks, Smiley, another not-too-bright-but-loyal-pal-of-the-leading-man. At the racetrack with a stiff and proper English lady, he’s boorish but funny. I don’t think Ted ever could have been a leading man, but he’s still fun to watch, and gives a good performance. Ted also wrote five films: Nertsery Rhymes, Beer and Pretzels, Hello Pop!, Plane Nuts, and The Big Idea.
Sadly, Ted had a problem with alcohol, which was one of the factors in his split from the Stooges. His only child, John Jacob Nash, was born December 17, 1937, and Ted went out drinking that night to celebrate. He ended up in a bar fight, was found unconscious on the sidewalk, and died on December 21 from his injuries and kidney failure brought on by years of alcoholism. He’s buried in Calvary Cemetery in Los Angeles.
I picked Ted as a CAIL mainly because of his performance in Dancing Lady, which is one of my all time favorite classic movies, ever. I can’t really explain why. It’s not a great epic like Gone With the Wind, or even a popular classic like The Women, two of my other favorites. Dancing Lady is the movie equivalent of comfort food to me; I’ll pop it in even when I’m not planning to sit down and watch it all the way through. It serves as background noise while I’m doing chores or cooking, something I can watch in bits and pieces just to unwind, or I’ll actually sit down for another complete viewing of an old favorite. It has quite a cast: Joan Crawford, Clark Gable, Franchot Tone, Winnie Lightner, Robert Benchley, Ted & The Stooges, May Robson, Nelson Eddy, Sterling Holloway (voice of Winnie the Pooh) and Fred Astaire, playing himself in his first movie role. It’s a musical, a backstage story, a comedy, a love story, a drama. The songs are hokey (example: "Let’s Go Bavarian," about the joys of German beer), and not ones anyone remembers fondly today, but I’ll catch myself humming them under my breath. I’ll stop here because I could (and plan to) do a whole separate entry about this movie, and I didn’t mean to get so far off the original topic. (It was Ted Healy, remember?)
No comments:
Post a Comment