The 3 Stooges’ 2nd Banana Still Nyuking It Up in Camarillo

For Emil Sitka, the past is as sweet as the countless cream pies that once plastered his mug.

“All those hits. . .” he recalls, stretching out in an easy chair at his Camarillo home. “Moe was really very soft with them, very gentle. He was a master.”

Sitka should know. As a favorite foil of the Three Stooges, he endured the twisted nose, the gouged eye, the pounded head and the artfully flung pie. In some 70 zany episodes, he was the Stooges’ first-chair second-banana, playing butlers, scientists, businessmen and other models of uprightness ensnared and undone by the unholy trio.

“I did authority parts, dominant parts, high-society parts, whatever,” he says. “In my roles, I’m in conflict with the Stooges. I’m dignified. I’m someone they’re always trying to get around.”

And so they did for more than 20 years, chortling, wisecracking and nyuk-nyuk-nyuking all the way from “Halfwits Holiday” to “Flying Saucer Daffy,” with stops at “Pies and Guys,” “Three Hams on Rye,” “Vagabond Loafers,” “Jungle Gents,” “The Three Stooges Meet Hercules” and other minor classics.

A veteran character actor who also worked with the likes of Lucille Ball, Red Skelton and Cesar Romero, Sitka still takes the occasional movie role. He last appeared in “The XYZ Murders” in 1987.

A hearty 74, he is living out the perfect retirement. He swims and dances. He plays paddle tennis. He has a wide circle of friends.

But his heart belongs to the Stooges. He talks about them at schools and colleges. He keeps up a brisk correspondence with fans, whose outpourings are stacked around his dining-room table and on his kitchen counters. His Leisure Village condo is packed with Stooges memorabilia. His license plate says STOOGES. Weekends, he tries to catch their ancient antics on TV.

“They used to call me One-Take Sitka,” he proudly recalls. “At first, they gave me six shirts for the pie fights, because the pies would have to hit just the right way. If they missed by even a little bit, it was off to the showers.

“But I’d already been on the stage for 10 years. I was used to doing things just once. I’d do it--bingo!--in just one take.”

Sitka did not begin life as a straight man.

An orphan, he was raised in a Catholic church home in Pittsburgh, where he spent his youth studying for the priesthood. His first theatrical role was in a church Passion play, leading the mob that wanted to crucify Jesus.

“I was sold on acting from then on,” he says.

But the Depression ended his budding career with a Pittsburgh stock company. He and his brother lived under a bridge in New York for six months, rode the rails and begged food and work from coast to coast.

In 1936 he landed in Los Angeles, where he happened by a rehearsal in a small theater. He wound up living in the dressing room for two years as he honed his craft. By day, he worked a series of odd jobs; by night, he starred in works as somber as Maxim Gorky’s “The Lower Depths.”

He was recognized as the year’s best local actor by Playgoer Magazine in 1946--which also was the year he was plucked from a play called “The Viper’s Fang” and thrust into his first film with the Stooges.

“A scout from Columbia found me,” he recalls, “playing a maniac dentist who wanted to pull teeth. They kept me chained in a basement.”

But different roles awaited him under the tutelage of director Jules White in Columbia’s comedy department.

“My first Stooges role was as a butler in ‘Halfwits Holiday.’ He told me to do it like William Powell in ‘My Man Godfrey’--very sophisticated, very smooth. Curly called me ‘sir’ almost through the entire shooting.”

“Halfwits Holiday” ended in tragedy. It was to be the last major role for Curly--by far the most popular of all six men who were to perform as Stooges. He suffered a stroke on the set and died six years later.

“He slumped over in his chair and couldn’t get up,” says Sitka. “They had to redo the pie fight.”

Sitka quickly scaled the ladder of low comedy. “They’d rely on me for anything special,” he says. “I’d be the one with the hose up my sleeve for the water that’s supposed to come out the phone.”

Today, he is a legend. Stooge entrepreneurs sell signed Emil Sitka notes and canceled Emil Sitka checks for $10 and up. Stooge scholars call him for his reminiscences.

In a recent survey by Gary Lassin, president of the 2,000-member Three Stooges Fan Club, Sitka was named second most popular Stooge supporting actor. The most popular, Vernon Dent, is dead. He edged Sitka out by a hair, Lassin said.

“He’s the closest thing to a Stooge that people can get to right now,” said Lassin, an accountant for a Philadelphia mail-order company. “Emil is the next best thing to a Stooge.”

Stooge fans, a tightknit group of folks who tend to say “Keep Stoogin’ ” instead of “Goodby”--seek Sitka’s blessings -- literally.

As a wacky justice of the peace in “Brideless Grooms,” he unleashed pandemonium every time he uttered the line, “Hold hands, you lovebirds.” Hard-core fans have asked Sitka to recite that line into the phone for amplification at their weddings. More moderate fans, like Doris Armstrong of Chicago Ridge, Ill., merely ask him to inscribe it on their wedding pictures.

Why?

“Emil Sitka is the best,” says Armstrong. “I mean, come on! “

Some critics have agreed. Film historian Ted Okuda praises Sitka for bringing “a razor-sharp sense of comic timing to all his roles, weaving subtle nuances into the broadest slapstick antics.”

Sitka is the only surviving player to have performed with the Stooges in all their incarnations--Moe Howard, Larry Fine and Curly; Moe, Larry and Shemp Howard; Moe, Larry and Joe Besser; and Moe, Larry, and Joe DeRita. All are now dead except DeRita, who is in very poor health.

Sitka is a trove of Stooges lore.

Free-spirited as they appeared on screen, the Stooges were not exactly a barrel of laughs when the cameras stopped rolling.

“They’d have loud, serious arguments about blowing a line or muffing a bit,” says Sitka. “They were real businesslike, totally unlike comedians.”

Moe, the only Stooge who became a close friend of Sitka’s, “would put off kids at personal appearances. He’d tell jokes and invariably explain them, and these kids would back away from him. He grew grouchier and touchier over the years. He was deadly serious.

“He was so conservative. He owned a furniture factory and had an interest in a couple of barbershops. You couldn’t believe he was in comedy.”

Larry “was the most argumentative, with the least to contribute,” says Sitka. “He was mainly concerned with betting on the horses and on fights.”

Shemp “was almost like a workman, coming to work with his lunch bucket. He was a funny-looking guy, with two slits for eyes and a potato for a nose.” He also was the only Stooge with a flair for spontaneity, offering “terrific ad libs when the script called for ‘general mayhem,’ ” Sitka said.

Occasionally, the mayhem went too far.

On a shoot at Newport Beach, Sitka had to slap Joe DeRita three times, each time a bit harder.

“Ed Bernds told me to make his jowls wobble,” Sitka says, recalling the director’s instructions. “But he left the set seething. Moe told me to watch out for the cake scene later.

“I was wondering whether he was going to put a bolt in it, or what. So finally it came, way harder than necessary. I pretended to be shaken--like, ‘OOOH! What a blow!’--just to appease him.”

The Stooges would go their own ways at the end of the day, united by not much more than an envy of Abbott and Costello. The Stooges were locked into a 25-year contract with Columbia, earning $20,000 apiece for eight comedy shorts a year. To make ends meet, Sitka, a father of seven, held down a full-time job as an assistant construction engineer during his entire film career.

Abbott and Costello, on the other hand, were making feature-length movies and far more money.

The Stooges also were stung by criticism about the violence in many of their episodes.

“The screwdrivers up the nose, the pliers on the ears, the electric currents--it’s way too violent for kids,” Sitka agrees. “But remember: These weren’t originally aimed at kids. They were made as fillers for theaters.”

In 1974, Larry Fine was partially paralyzed by a stroke. Moe picked Sitka as his replacement, but Moe--and the final resurrection of the Stooges--died just as filming of “The Jet Set” was getting under way in Palm Springs in 1975.

Sitka felt the loss of his friend more than the loss of his own shot at stardom.

“I loved what I did,” he says. “I didn’t want to be a Stooge. I knew how to feed their comedy. The more I reacted with horror to what they did, it made them that much funnier.”

Besides, there was the danger of being swallowed whole by the act.

“Joe Besser and all the others lost their identity,” Sitka says. “They were just one of the Stooges. The star on the Walk of Fame doesn’t say Joe Besser--it just says the Three Stooges.”