The Three Stooges were sued by a scandalous Broadway producer after staging the ‘Stand-In’ skit on ‘Ed Sullivan’
Headaches ensued when Moe Howard, Larry Fine, and Curly Joe DeRita revived their comical Hollywood stunt double sketch from the Depression-era ‘George White’s Scandals’ revue on a live 1961 episode of ‘The Ed Sullivan Show’
The Three Stooges were on top of the world in the summer of 1939. Moe Howard, younger brother Curly Howard, and pal Larry Fine had been cranking out Columbia two-reelers for five years, and their madcap comedies lifted spirits struggling to make ends meet during the Great Depression. A personal appearance tour of Europe, including multiple dates at the prestigious London Palladium, earned rave reviews.
George White, a producer with 30 years of Broadway experience, was casting about for the latest iteration of George White’s Scandals. The mastermind of the expensive series of revues akin to the Ziegfeld Follies and Earl Carroll Vanities reached out to the Stooges’ representatives. Scandals, so christened because White wanted to “tease a spinster aunt who was shocked by the scanty costumes” worn by the showgirls, had packed New York theaters. Hollywood subsequently greenlit three movies based on the play, and future Tinseltown leading ladies Alice Faye, Eleanor Powell, Ethel Merman, and Ann Miller all owed a debt of gratitude to White.
Before ascending to stardom, the Stooges toiled away in vaudeville, often accompanying abusive, inebriated boss Ted Healy. Live audiences were no sweat, so Moe accepted White’s offer after ensuring the team’s Columbia shooting schedule did not conflict. White corralled his 100-strong cast to the Garden Pier Theatre in Atlantic City for a week-long tryout. Intended as a two-act, 30-scene production, Scandals lasted a staggering four hours. Another trial run was booked at the Shubert Theatre in Boston for severe scene trimming.
Finally on August 28, 1939, the Alvin Theatre, since renamed in honor of Neil Simon, hosted Scandals’ official Broadway debut in Manhattan. Humorous vignettes coated in double entendres, choreographed musical numbers, and luxurious air conditioning greeted patrons willing to shell out $4.40 for a ticket [matinee prices ran as low as $1.10-$2.75]. Miller, destined for more Stooges nyuks in the feature length musical comedy Time Out for Rhythm, showcased the “Mexiconga” in a failed attempt to ignite a new dance craze. The Turkey Trot and the Black Bottom had been by-products of Scandals in the Roaring Twenties. Even the Stooges honed their mellifluous chops. Harmonizing on a song called “Three Smart Girls,” they were dressed from head to toe in drag according to Steve Cox and Jim Terry’s One Fine Stooge: Larry Fine’s Frizzy Life in Pictures.
UPI reporter Jack Gaver was not enthralled with Scandals but applauded the Stooges’ participation. “Those three maniacal looking gents do much to pep up the humor department with the traditional laugh-getters of slapstick — belts on the cranium, pie throwing, and ludicrous costumes,” relayed Gaver. “It’s standard but it’s still effective.” Columbia studio head Harry Cohn unsurprisingly halted the Stooges’ Broadway sojourn, demanding they report back to California by the first week of November to commence shooting Rockin’ Thru the Rockies with frequent director Jules White. Scandals limped onward to Broadway’s Hollywood Theatre for another month before culminating in a series of road shows.
The revue would be a forgotten footnote in the Stooges’ vast oeuvre if not for one sketch which had legs in the coming decades. Written by Matt Brooks and Eddie Davis — the former had submitted Stooge material in the pre-Columbia Healy shorts financed by MGM — “The Stand-In” hilariously chronicles the duties of a beleaguered cowboy stunt man [Curly] ordered around by a no-nonsense director [Moe]. At the slightest hint of danger — a pie landing squarely on the nose counts — hero “Bawdry” [Larry] is instantly replaced by his double.
Imitation is supposedly the sincerest form of flattery. “Uncle Miltie” Berle transposed the prairie setting to an urban screwball comedy on the NBC ratings smash Texaco Star Theater. Two decades later Moe was still smarting from the indignity of the unmistakably stagey 1949 Berle skit when he allowed Richard Lamparski, author of Whatever Became Of…, a condensed series examining celebrities of yesteryear, to interview him at his Thrasher Avenue home situated above the Sunset Strip. “Milton Berle has been copying it ever since,” stated Moe matter-of-factly. Furthermore, Looney Tunes distributed the classic “A Star Is Bored” in 1956 where a deluded, jealous Daffy Duck blunders his way through stunts that the jaded Bugs Bunny sits out. When he’s injured, Daffy hollers, “Make-up!” Other variations of “The Stand-In” likely exist.
The crushing deaths of Curly and elder sibling Shemp Howard could have spelled the end of the trio, but they soldiered on with temporary replacement Joe Besser until settling permanently on Curly Joe DeRita. Columbia scuttled their contract, and the Stooges were destined for yesterday’s news until the nascent television medium breathed new life by rebroadcasting their career-affirming 1934–1958 shorts. A comeback was in the air when late night innovator Steve Allen asked them to guest three times on his prime time party the following year. Serendipitously, they revived “The Stand-In” during the second occasion on February 22, 1959. Available above, Curly Joe’s wordless reactions are priceless. Moe is the consummate trooper in the face of real-life pneumonia, suffering from a high fever and hoarse voice on the verge of collapse.
The Stooges mounted “The Stand-In” at least one more time for TV’s best-known variety series, The Ed Sullivan Show, on May 14, 1961. Besides a completely recovered Moe, Larry had grown tired of depicting the bland protagonist and swapped roles for slapstick-indulging outlaw “Pedro.” White was at home watching and slapped the Stooges with a lawsuit arguing he owned all the rights. Moe’s only daughter Joan Howard Maurer asserted in The Three Stooges Scrapbook that the sketch’s co-writer Matt Brooks had “granted permission for the Stooges to reuse it on Allen’s show.” Whether they assumed they had consent to perform it elsewhere is not divulged but obviously the Stooges believed so.
Perhaps cognizant of White’s infamous encounter with Rudy Vallee where he punched the crooner repeatedly in the nose for disputing White’s contention that salaries would have to be slashed or else Scandals would have to close its Broadway engagement, the Stooges settled out of court with White for a nominal fee. The Ed Sullivan Show 15th Anniversary Special, a 90-minute retrospective of past highlights, incorporated a clip of the “Stand-In” sketch when aired in 1963 without incident. Sullivan’s official YouTube posted the clip in December 2021 but has since inexplicably removed it [fortunately “The Doctor” routine, taken from the Stooges’ second of four Sullivan spots, survives in an unofficial upload below]. Did C3 Entertainment seek residuals for their legacy triumvirate?
White fell into hard times, pleading “guilty to a charge of failure to stop and render assistance” in the 1946 hit and run deaths of Claude and Lena Ann Lee, who had been married just a few hours before. He served eight and a half months at a San Diego prison farm, tending sheep and gardening for 35 cents a day. For a cultured gentleman who once hosted lavish parties and drove a Rolls Royce, what a bringdown. In the early ’50s White ironically popped up on The Milton Berle Show and Ed Sullivan. Scandals was also staged in nightclubs across the USA, but the damage was done to White’s reputation. Filing for bankruptcy twice, he slipped into obscurity and was diagnosed with leukemia in 1968. A Cedars-Sinai spokeswoman painted a bleak portrait of the producer seeing “very few visitors during his final month, but he had been a pretty sick man.” White succumbed to the blood cancer at age 78.
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