Somehow a copy of Moe Howard’s autobiography, I Stooged to Conquer, showed up on my KIndle. I didn’t order it, unless it was accidentally when I was looking over KIdle Store options. I already had a hard copy of it, back when the title was Moe Howard and the Three Stooges. But it was there, and worth re-reading.
I came across this choice bit:
I knew about Annette Kellermann (she spelled her name both with and without a final “nn”) – I had written about her in my book Lost Wonderland, the history of Revere MA’s Wonderland Park, the largest in New England while it was open between 1906 and 1910. The park was noted for having the latest attractions and for changing its offerings frequently. 1908 was arguably their biggest year. Their roster of live performers included Chiquita the Doll Lady, Pawnee Bill and his Wild West show, and Annette Kellermann – The Australian Mermaid.
There’s a lot written about Kellermann on the internet, and a lot of it is wrong. She overcame rickets (not polio, as is often stated), took up swimming to build up her legs (and she initially hated it), and rapidly rose to become one of the best swimmers in the world. She narrowly missed being the first woman to swim the English Channel. She was by turns famous and infamous for her form-fitting bathing suit, which she designed (and later marketed and sold) herself. The story most often told about her is how she was arrested on Revere Beach in 1908 when she appeared in her abbreviated bathing suit for a exercise swim across Broad Sound. She defended herself ably at the trial, the story continues, arguing how an athletic competitor couldn’t afford all those ruffles and drag-inducing frills. And besides, she was completely covered up. The story not only appeared in print, it was dramatized in her 1952 biopic, Million Dollar Mermaid (in which Esther Williams played Kellermann).
It’s a great and dramatic story. And, as if often the case with great and dramatic stories, there’s not a bit of truth in it. Kellermann was never arrested for her skimpy (by contemporary standards) bathing suit, although other women were. There arre no police records of the arrest, no trial records, and no contemporary newspaper accounts of the arrest or trial. The story first appears in the 1920s. Kellermann later wrote it up in her still unpublished autobiography, which the screenwriter used for the movie, and which Kellermann approved. It’s pretty clear that Kellermann made the story up and promoted it herself. I’d explain why she did this, but this digression is already too long. It’s in my book.
So my eyes lit up when I saw this about Kellermann. How interesting that her life and Moe Hoiward’s intersected in this way. So I looked into it.
Kellermann’s act consisted of swimming and diving. After she opened the way, lots of copycat “Diving Girl” acts started sprining up. I hadn’t heard that Kellermann had every performed at Coney Island, so I started looking through newspaper accounts – and couldn’t find any mention of it. Kellermann was performing in New York in 1912, but it was onstage in midtown Manhattan at the Winter Garden theater and elsewhere. And she had no cadre of Diving Girls with her.
Not finding corroboration here, I decided to look into the other name listed – the unfortunate .Gladys Kelly. I did find reports of her death. In fact, the story was reported in newspapers across the country. Sometimes on the front page. But she didn’t die in 1912. Her tragic accident occurred at the end of October, 1913. And she was not associated with Kellermann.
Gladys Kelly was part of an act called “Six Diving Belles”. They were performing at the Hansen theater in Brooklyn at the beginning of October, 1913, but had moved to the 86th street theater in Manhattan by the end of the month. I found Gladys in some stories about competitive swimmers in Brooklyn, too.
In the act, six girls dove off high boards , performing a somersault on the way down. Gladys was backstage atop the diving board while a comedian was performing onstage. The Boards were very springy and easy to fall off of. She didn’t misjudge an intended dive in front of an audience – she accidentally fell off while still backstage. The newspaper accounts make much of the comedian performing while tragedy occurred behind the curtain. Her head struck the side of the tank and she broke her neck. Sadly, she didn’t die instantly, but was taken a few blocks away to Flowers Hospital, where she expired.
This all makes me suspicious of Moe Howard’s account. He clearly wasn’t performing with Annette Kellermann – she didn’t have any Diving Girls with her. But I found it hard to believe that he was performing with Six Diving Belles. By his own account, four of them were boys (in their teens). I could believe if they were part of a company of , say, twenty diving “girls”, It’d be easy to ignore a few boys among the girls in a large group. But it four of the Six Diving Belles were boys, I think people would’ve noticed. And I think that, if they had to perform a somersault on the way down, Moe would’ve mentioned it. His account suggests relatively simple diving.
So what WAS Moe doing? There were, in fact, Diving Girl shows at two of the big amusement parks on Coney Island – Dreamland and Luna Park. He, Ted, and the other boys might have been part of one of those. Or of some other Diving Girl shows. I know there were copycat shows in Revere at the time – it wouldn’t surprise me in there were more in Brooklyn that just these.
Moe was writing his autobiography sixty years after the fact. He might easily have gotten details wrong. Searching his mind for names he could easily have remembered the spectacular Annette Kellermann (still faintly redolent of scandal, even after all this time) and the well-publicized death of Gladys Kelly.
The thing to do, if you want to be sure, is to contact someone who might know. So I wrote to Moe’s family. To my surprise, they wrote back. Moe hadn’t talked about this incident, and kept no memorabilia of it. But he was no fabulist – he was guilty, at most, or misremembering, no o making things up.