Ted Healy, who was fucking Thelma Todd under Pat DiCicco’s nose, is not bright enough to leave Los Angeles. Ted Healy still goes to clubs, and still gets drunk, but somehow Ted Healy also contrives to marry and have a child. Ted Healy is celebrating this child’s birth when Pat DiCicco, who does not forgive and does not forget, spies him at the Trocadero on Sunset Strip. Pat DiCicco is drinking with Wallace Beery, the same Wallace Beery who was once tapped by Hal Roach to be Babe’s replacement during the first of the contract spats.
Ted Healy does not like Wallace Beery. In this, at least, Ted Healy shows some discernment. Given Wallace Beery’s present company, Ted Healy should just move on, but Ted Healy has somehow convinced himself that Thelma Todd’s death has brought to an end any lingering animosity Pat DiCicco may have toward him, or maybe Ted Healy is just dumb enough to believe that Pat DiCicco never knew about him and Thelma Todd to begin with.
Ted Healy argues with Wallace Beery. The argument grows heated. It moves outside, and Pat DiCicco moves with it, as a shadow follows the sun.
Together, Wallace Beery and Pat DiCicco beat Ted Healy so badly that Ted Healy dies two days later.
Which, he considers, at least proves conclusively that there is nothing funny about Wallace Beery.
He hears the rest of the story years later, when he moves to Fox, where there is no great love for MGM or Louis B. Mayer.
Wallace Beery has sobered up by the time Ted Healy dies in hospital, and realizes the depth of his troubles. Because Wallace Beery does not generally move in the kind of circles familiar with murder, it’s left to Louis B. Mayer to clean up the mess created by one of his biggest stars. Wallace Beery takes an unscheduled vacation to Europe. Louis B. Mayer dispatches Eddie Mannix and Howard Strickling, his bagmen, to make some calls and spend some money. Ted Healy’s wife Betty, a player on the MGM lot, is fired for talking to the press about the lack of progress in the investigation into her husband’s killing. Anyone else who complains gets a visit from Pat DiCicco, although these dissenting voices are rare. It’s fortunate that few people were fond of Ted Healy, apart from his wife, and who in this town cares what she, a nobody, thinks about anything anyway?
He cares.
He knows Betty Healy. Betty Healy plays his wife in Our Relations. In the years that follow, he is always available when Betty Healy calls, and listens as she speaks fondly of a man largely despised by others.
They got away with it, Betty Healy tells him. They killed Ted, and they got away with it.
And he can only reply, Yes, they got away with it.
That is what such men do.
137
At the Oceana Apartments, he is inclined to switch off the television when the Three Stooges appear. In part this is because they remind him of Ted Healy, who reminds him in turn of Thelma Todd. Mostly it’s because he does not find the Stooges funny. He sees no beauty in the Stooges. He sees no gentleness. He sees only hatefulness and violence.
He does, though, feel pity for them. Hal Roach might have been careful with a buck, but Hal Roach was no ogre. The Stooges suffered at Columbia under Harry Cohn, who was an ogre, and ran with the kind of men who made Pat DiCicco look like a priest. Harry Cohn would sign the Stooges only to cheap one-year contracts, and kept them in the dark about the level of their success. Harry Cohn also drank with the Stooges’ manager, Harry Romm, and together they fucked the Stooges three ways to Sunday.
Maybe Harry Cohn was not so different from Hal Roach after all.
He meets one of the Stooges, Jerome Horwitz – Curly Howard to the Audience – at a fundraiser for the troops. Jerome Horwitz has a reputation as a womanizer and a drinker, but all this is behind him now. His brother, Moses Horwitz, has hit Jerome Horwitz so often on the head in the course of their routines that Jerome Horwitz’s brain is bleeding into his skull. Jerome Horwitz shuffles as a consequence, and speaks with a slur.
But Jerome Horwitz keeps working, because Harry Cohn orders him to work, and Moses Horwitz continues to hit Jerome Horwitz on the head, because Moses Horwitz is afraid that the Stooges will otherwise be thrown off the lot. Eventually, Jerome Horwitz suffers a massive stroke and –
And returns to work, because Harry Cohn decrees it, and Moses Horwitz resumes hitting Jerome Horwitz on the head, except not so hard now, and Moses Horwitz tries to hit Larry Fine more often instead, just to take some of the pressure off his brother. So Jerome Horwitz shuffles and slurs for another year until a final stroke paralyzes him on the set of Half-Wits Holiday, leaving Jerome Horwitz to spend the rest of his days in a chair.
All because Moses Horwitz couldn’t pull a punch.
In his years with Babe, the only serious injury he suffers comes when he misjudges a step on set and tears a tendon.
Babe would rather have quit than strike him hard.
138
Babe takes the view that 1936 can only be better than 1935.
Babe is an idealist, and the gods laugh at idealists.
But 1936 does begin well, because Henry Ginsberg resigns.
Hal Roach is throwing money at features, and Henry Ginsberg’s sole purpose is to stop Hal Roach throwing money at anything. But features require investment, and Hal Roach’s creditors understand this even if Henry Ginsberg does not.
Jimmy Finlayson has been collecting for a going-away gift for Henry Ginsberg. Jimmy Finlayson has been collecting for a going-away gift ever since Henry Ginsberg joined the studio in the hope that, if Henry Ginsberg were given a going-away gift, Henry Ginsberg might go away. Now that Henry Ginsberg is actually going away, Jimmy Finlayson suspends the fund and spends the money on liquor instead.
The Bohemian Girl has been salvaged. It now contains so little of Thelma Todd that she might as well not be present at all, but the Audience flocks to it, and even Hal Roach has to admit that it hangs together well. But Hal Roach will not admit this to him, or recognize his contribution to saving the picture. Together, he and Hal Roach are storing up slights.
Let me explain something to you, Hal Roach says to him, as he stands on the splayed skin of a new dead animal. You see this studio? I built it, with my money. You see the pictures we make? I pay for them, with my money. You see the house you live in, the car you drive, the boat you own? You paid for them, but with my money.
This, of course, is not entirely true. Hal Roach makes pictures with other people’s money as well as his own, and does not share the profits.
So if you want to invest your money in your own studio, Hal Roach continues, or find some other sucker to do it for you, then be my guest. When you do, you can make all the decisions you want, and you can film all the gags you like, and you can ignore all the instructions you don’t like. You can run your studio into the ground, but my studio, you’re not going to run into the ground. My studio is going to remain just the way it is. You know what your problem is?
He tells Hal Roach that he does not.
– You want to be like Chaplin. You want to make a million dollars a picture. You want to follow your vision. But nobody is Chaplin but Chaplin. If Chaplin makes a million dollars a picture, Chaplin makes it because Chaplin has gambled his own money on the production and come out a winner. But you want to gamble my money, which means you’re not Chaplin.
– I know I’m not Chaplin.