First of all, let me state for the record that I’m not a fan of the Three Stooges. I liked them when I was about ten years old, but lost early my taste for slap-in-the-face, poke-in-the-eye humor (I got plenty of that in real life).

But there’s been talk lately about a new Three Stooges movie, which is supposed to star Benicio Del Toro as Moe, Sean Penn as Larry, and Jim Carrey as Curly (!). It’s not supposed to be a biopic, but a new work in Three Stooges idiom, sort of a live-action pastiche.

That reminded me of a story I discovered while noodling through Wikipedia one sleepless night. I’ve always been fascinated by early Hollywood, for some reason, and this was a very odd story I’d never heard of before.

I remember, years back, seeing an old movie (I can’t recall its title) which featured “Ted Healy and His Stooges.” To my surprise, it turned out to be this guy I’d never seen before, with Moe, Larry and Curly as his back-up. Ted Healy played the role we all associate with Moe, the tough guy who bosses the others around and physically abuses them. Moe was reduced to victim status, taking the punishment along with the others. It was kind of disorienting.

So I hunted around Wikipedia recently and found Ted Healy’s story. He was a vaudeville performer who gradually added his childhood friends, the Howard (Horwitz) brothers and their friend Larry Fine, to his act as fall-guys. In spite of commercial success, their relationship got strained, largely because of Healy’s drinking. Finally the Stooges spun off as an act of their own, while Healy went on to have a decent movie and vaudeville career by himself (and sometimes with new stooges).

Until December 21, 1937. That night he was in a bar, celebrating the birth of his first child, and he got into a fight. The official story released to the newspapers was that he’d come to blows with a group of college students who fatally injured him. None of the students was ever identified or prosecuted.

However, a writer named E. J. Fleming, in a book called The Fixers, told a very different story. By his account, Healy had not mixed it up with some anonymous college boys, but with three well-known Hollywood characters—actor Wallace Beery, Albert “Cubby” Broccoli (who would eventually produce the James Bond films), and Broccoli’s cousin, the gangster Pat DiCicco. Louis B. Mayer, head of MGM, put the “fix” in and arranged to send Beery, one of his most popular stars, on a sudden vacation to Europe. The other two, with their mob connections, presumably needed less cover.

It’s a strange story that just sticks in my mind. In combination with memories of the slapstick humor of the Stooges, it’s kind of surreal. I don’t see any lesson in it, except not to get drunk, and to believe nothing at all that you hear from Hollywood.