‘Idle Roomers’ (1944) is the 80th comedy short-subject made by The Three Stooges for Columbia Pictures. It was photographed from Wednesday, November 17th to Saturday, November 20th, 1943 and was released on Saturday, July 15th, 1944 (the 197th day of the Gregorian calendar). It’s a good solid early-later era Curly entry (the period I assign to the 1942-44 films) with Del Lord’s usual brisk directions, good (if not inspired) gags and some of Moe’s most pointlessly sadistic acts of violence. (He seems to become disproportionately angry at relatively minor things–I think this is what we now refer to as ‘an anger problem’.) What may be most important about this short, though, is a little bit of ‘six-degrees-of’ trivia that shows us how small the history of show-biz truly is.

Let’s begin with a question: what connects The Three Stooges to The Marx Brothers and Florenz Ziegfeld? The answer is Eddie Laughton. Laughton, who plays the hotel manager in the opening scene, was an English-born comedy character actor who was friends with Larry Fine. Larry’s influence brought him into the world of the Columbia Short-Subject Unit stock company, appearing almost entirely in Stooge comedies. He also became something of a real-life stooge to the Stooges, traveling with them on personal appearance tours as both comic relief and drinking companion. Now here’s where it gets good: In 1944 Laughton made news by marrying Mary Eaton, a former Broadway star of the 1920s who was the romantic leading lady in the Marx Brothers debut film ‘The Cocoanuts’ (1929). Eaton had been a Ziegfeld Follies girl for almost ten years at that time, being groomed by the showman to replace Marilyn Miller as the leading Ziegfeld star of that era. To that end, the great Flo starred Eaton in his 1929 Paramount film ‘Glorifying The American Girl’. The film exists and is a remarkable document of that era, though at the time it was considered something of a disastrous disappointment. Eaton’s screen career was suddenly over and she fell precipitously from leading lady of stage and screen to unemployed ex-chorine with a massive drinking problem. In this article that I found on newspapers.com, the peculiar marriage of the once unattainable-by-most-men Eaton and the Stooges low-rent stooge Eddie Laughton is frankly addressed; apparently Laughton fell in love with Eaton twenty years before they married when he was a nobody. The fickle finger of fate turned the tables and now he was in a position to marry the has-been Mary. Of course it wasn’t so much the position he was in–lowly Columbia contract knockabout day-player–that made the marriage possible, so much as it was Eaton’s unfortunately straitened circumstances that made Laughton a last-gasp choice for her. Reading the tea-leaves, we can actually discern a rather touching tale of show-biz love and reversals. The young and world-famous Ziegfeld beauty of the 1920s would certainly never have given the lowly comic a tumble, much less the time of day. Twenty years later he became her savior, the puppy dog who followed her around and finally was invited to sit on her lap. Not that it worked out terribly well for either of them. Eaton died of alcohol related illness in 1948, age 46, and Laughton followed her a few years later in 1952, age 48. I like to think, though, that in their cups they had at least a few years of relatively cozy togetherness, probably punctuated by a the occasional empty bottle of Scotch being hurled against a wall in their small Hollywood apartment.