new thread
I was watching reruns of the 3 stooges today and I decided I wanted to know a bit more about them. Looking through their biographies, I was surprised to find that 2 of the stooges had been longhairs. Here are the relevant passages:
Moe suggested to Healy that his kid brother; Babe (Curly), was available and would make an excellent replacement for Shemp, since he was familiar with the act. Ted agreed, asking Curly to join the act, but under the condition that he shave his head. At the time, Curly sported long, wavy brown hair and a mustache. In an interview; Curly recalled the incident: "I had beautiful wavy hair and a waxed mustache. When I went to see Ted Healy about a job as one of the Stooges, he said, `What can you do?' I said, `I don't know.' He said, `I know what you can do. You can shave off your hair to start with.' Then later on I had to shave off my poor mustache. I had to shave it off right down to the skin."
Curly's wacky style of comedy started to emerge, first on stage and then on screen when Healy and his Stooges starred in numerous features and comedy shorts for MCM. Later; in 1934, Curly played an integral part in the team's rise to fame as the Three Stooges at Columbia Pictures, where he starred as a Stooge in 97 two-reel comedies.
But success virtually destroyed Curly. He started to drink heavily, feeling that his shaven head robbed him of his sex appeal. Larry Fine once remarked that Curly wore a hat in public to confirm an image of masculinity, since he felt like a little kid with his hair shaved off Curly was also unable to save a cent.
And on Moe..
Throughout Moe's career, columnists the world over tried to find words to describe his unusual haircut; buster brown, spittoon, Sugar Bowl, Rose Bowl and Beatle were but a few. His hair color changed with the years from black in his youth to reddish-brown when he dyed it) to silver-white (its final natural color) during the seventies. He had a marvelous mop of hair until the day he died, but during grammar school days it was the bane of his existence. He was constantly taunted by his class mates over his head of shoulder-length curls-which his mother adored, having always wanted a girl. One day, tired of fighting with his school chums, Moe grabbed a pair of shears and hacked off the curls that encircled his freckled face; the resulting hairstyle was a raggedy version of the one that became his trademark.
If you want to read the full biographies, the site is
http://www.3-stooges.com/
Thanks for that information Pink Floyd Sound, with the subject being the Three Stooges I was expecting a post about them pulling hair instead of having it.
Although waves can be underappreciated these days, Curly would have fared much better as a shaved head now. It certainly does not have the same reputation these days. Interesting trade off though, he chose the demands of the job over perceived sex-appeal. That is not too far from the choice people sometimes make today to keep the hair or the job.
Elizabeth, swooning at the thought of a silver-white Moe
It's a little sad how others controlling the length of their hair really screwed up both of them. Curly because he felt unattractive with a shaved head, and Moe because he felt he looked like a girl with shoulder length hair.
There's a profound lesson there. No-one should ever try to force on someone else their ideas of what they should look like. Life is too short for that cr*p!
