Columnist Scott Dickensheets: The Mousie that roared: Nyuk, nyuk!

Scott Dickensheets

Sunday, Feb. 28, 1999 | 9:39 a.m.

He was a stooge, all right, just not one of the Three.

Oh, he came close, but that's a story for later in the column. For now let's just say that on the roll call of real-life Stooges, there, along with Larry, Moe, Curley, Shemp, Curly Joe and that other guy -- farther down the list, to be sure, and with an asterisk by his name, but still there -- you'll find Mousie. Paul "Mousie" Garner, so nicknamed, presumably, for his small size.

Mousie, who started performing at age 4, was already an old vaudeville hand in 1930 or '31, when he and two pals were hired to back up seminal comedian Ted Healy as stooges, antic second bananas who got poked and whomped by the main comic. The jobs had recently been vacated by you-know-who, you-know-who and Shemp.

Those guys went on to become rich, famous and dead, while Mousie went on to be not so rich, not particularly famous but still alive, retired to Las Vegas nine years ago. At 90 he's frail and hard of hearing, with a come-and-go memory he chalks up to those years of hard-knock Stoogehood, "getting slapped around so much." He lives in a small apartment on the east side.

"It's funny, I can remember things from 60 years ago," he says. We -- he, I and his boon friend Jim Brasich -- are sitting at an outdoor table at the Jitters coffeehouse on Tropicana Avenue, talking show biz and watching the women come and go. "But if you ask me what we were talking about five minutes ago I couldn't remember."

What we were talking about was 60 years ago: his unsuspecting audition for Healy. "He motioned me to come up to him. He gave me a bang on the head and slapped me around. I got pretty mad, so I jumped on him. I bit his ear and finally jumped up to grab his nose. As I hit him back, he said with a big grin, 'You're hired!' "

Mousie didn't say any of that, at least not to me. It's from his new book, "Mousie Garner: Autobiography of a Vaudeville Stooge," which he will sign copies of at this very Jitters (Eastern and Tropicana), 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Tuesday.

"I never saw that kind of comedy before," Mousie recalls, "where they poke you in the eye, hit you in the head, kick you in the (figure it out yourself)."

He stooged behind Healy for four slap-happy years. But as his book makes clear, there's more to Mousie than the reflected glory of almost-Stoogedom. After opening with a clatter of rimshots -- "I'll never forget the day I was born," he yocks. "I cried like a baby." Ba-da bump! -- it details a merry career in lower-rung show biz, marked by occasional highlights. A long gig with Spike Jones. Work in the TV series "Surfside Six."

The journalist in me wants to ask the tough question -- do you regret not being among the elect Three? But it stalls on my lips; maybe there comes a point when you shouldn't have to relive your regrets, when you should be allowed to maintain whatever accommodation you've reached with them. At 90, he's surely there. But I want to know, so I do the next best thing: Ask Jim.

"Well, he regrets that he wasn't allowed to become one of the Three Stooges," Jim says. "They asked him to join when Shemp died. But Spike Jones had Mousie locked up in a 10-year contract and wouldn't let him." It turns out my delicacy wasn't necessary; Mousie isn't bitter. "He's over that," Jim says. "He's always looking forward to the next day."

Characteristic of Mousie's good nature, his book dispatches with that astonishing near miss in six quick sentences. "What can I say?" he says. "It was Spike's gain and my loss." Roll it around your tongue anyway: Larry, Moe and Mousie.

If Mousie missed the big time, at least he made the medium-size time, even if it was the lower medium-size time, and managed to live his dream. He lent me a brief video of his career highlights, 2 1/2 minutes of frantic slapsticking, face-making and pratfalling. It looked like a fun life.

Wait -- hold that past tense. Mousie is still very much alive. "There's a lot of beautiful girls coming here today," he says, having looked over every one.