Ted Healy

Ted Healy was was born Ernest Lea Nash and grew up as a very good friend of Moses "Moe" and Samuel "Shemp" Horwitz (later Moe and Shemp Howard). In the '20s he changed his name to Ted Healy and got Moe, Shemp, and a violinist named Larry Feinberg (later Larry Fine) to do vaudeville acts with him as his stooges. As the 1930s started, Ted was becoming addicted to alcohol. Shemp left the act and Moe replaced him with Jerome "Curly" Howard. Those three also left the act because Ted Healy underpaid them and kept getting drunk. He spent the rest of his life doing feature films, most notably "Operator 13." Ted Healy died on December 21, 1937 while out celebrating the birth of his son. The cause of death was listed as nephritis on the autopsy.