The last of the Stooges is dead, reports the LA Times. Paul “Mousie” Garner, a slapstick comedian believed to be the last survivor among the men who played one of the Three Stooges over the comedy team’s 50 years of cranial contusions and eye-poking ridiculousness, died last Sunday of natural causes. He was 95. Nicknamed Mousie for the way he nibbled food, Garner worked with nine Stooges. He began by filling in for Shemp Howard when Howard was “unavailable,” whatever that means. In 1931, when the original Stooges – Shemp, Moe, and Larry – went on tour, Garner, Jack Wolf, and Dick Hakins took their places on Broadway. In 2002, Mousie received the lifetime achievement award from the National Comedy Hall of Fame.
Vivian Grow, a former Miss Hollywood and Miss Los Angeles, has died of natural causes at the age of 84 in an LA hospital. Born Vivian Coe, she was a dancer, stunt double, and bit player before scoring the female lead in the Republic serial Adventures of Red Ryder and finding a career as a leading lady in such B-movies as Trigger Trail, Boss of Boomtown, Twilight on the Prairie, Cobra Woman, and She Gets Her Man. Her two men were husbands Glenn Austin, a Beverly Hills car dealer, and Dr. Kenneth Grow. (more)
Complications from a broken hip caused the death, in Lauderdale Lakes, Florida, of 90-year-old actress Eve “Evie” Johnson, who had been married to actors Keenan Wynn and Van Johnson. Her name was Eve Abbott when she toured with legendary stage actress Katherine Cornell, but gave up her acting career when she married Wynn. Unfortunately for Wynn, they became friends with bachelor matinee idol Johnson in the 1940s, and were even involved with him in an automobile accident. Perhaps cocktails were involved? (LA Times)
In 1947, Eve Wynn and Van Johnson traveled to El Paso, separately and under assumed names, and then went to Juarez, Mexico, where she divorced Wynn and married Johnson on Jan. 25, 1947. As Mrs. Johnson, she came into her own as the vivacious and well-dressed doyenne of lavish parties in the glamorous days of Hollywood. But that marriage also ended in divorce, in 1962.
