Curley Stecker

Algernon Maltby "Curley" Stecker (July 10, 1892 – June 16, 1924) was an early Hollywood animal trainer, Universal City Zoo superintendent, animal-film producer, and occasional actor-stuntman.

Along with Charles Gay, Curley Stecker was one of the two main providers of lions for silent-era Hollywood films. Stecker was also the primary trainer of Joe Martin, Universal's star orangutan, eventually producing Joe Martin comedies alongside director Harry Burns. The near-fatal attack on him in 1923 by Charlie the Elephant, an animal he'd worked with for at least 10 years, made national headlines. In Natacha Rambova's 1926 memoir of her late ex-husband Rudolph Valentino, she wrote that one of their favorite activities was visiting with Curley Stecker at the Universal menagerie, where they would help care for the animals, and listen "for hours" to Stecker's "yarns and experiences. After a generous allowance of these tales of hairbreadth escapes, he would take us to visit our more particular animal friends."

Biography Algernon Maltby Stecker was born in the Copper Country of Michigan to George W. and Maria Jane Oughten Stecker. efn Stecker used his legal given name Algernon rarely, and his legal middle name Maltby even less often. Stecker usually substituted C. or S. as a middle initial In 1900, at age eight he was living with his uncle Seth W. Stecker. According to one newspaper source he was the stepson of actor and fellow animal trainer Rex de Rosselli. Still another said he was from a long line of animal trainers. In approximately 1903, Stecker ran away to join the circus. Technically it was a hypnotist he ran off with but nonetheless young Stecker then "drifted from one traveling show to another until he finally found his forte with the menagerie of a circus. When it was learned he could manage wild animals his fortune was made." Another report stated, "Mr. Stecker has been training animals since he was 11 years old. He was following a circus, toting water to the animals, and the first animal that responded to his training was an elephant." thumb leftStecker apparently worked for Barnum & Bailey Circus, Forepaugh Circus, and Ringlings. In 1911 he was with the Greater United Shows working as a wild animal trainer. According to a newspaper report, "In 1911, Stecker was in Jacksonville, Fla. with Col. W. N. Selig producing the first animal cinema ever made for the screen. Kathlyn Williams was being starred." While standing in as Williams' stunt double, Stecker was mauled by a tiger that bit into his shoulder, clawed his chest and tore off a chunk of flesh. A doctor visiting from New York performed a skin graft using a live chicken, connecting the chicken's blood vessels to Stecker. The chicken died after three days but Stecker survived the mauling and ensuing sepsis. During the same production there was apparently a small elephant stampede; Williams apparently felt that Curley Stecker was responsible for saving her and her male costar from being trampled. During his Selig era he appeared in Selig's 1913 animal film Terror of the Jungle as "Nig." He appeared in full-body blackface to play the part, in which his character plays into the "faithful retainer" stereotype of African-Americans when the character stays behind to protect his mistress. thumb Part of a cartoon by Wyn Barden about Universal City, published in the Los Angeles Herald in August 1919Curley may have been at Universal as early as 1913, as it was reported that he and Charlie hauled the first loads of lumber that built Universal City. There is a photo in the Los Angeles-centric Security Pacific National Bank Collection wherein "an elephant named 'Old Charlie' is pulling a wagon as men clear brush from a hillside near a road in April 1914." In 1915 Stecker was part of a film crew headed by director Harry McRae that filmed on the wreck of the Aggi Nord, a ship that had run aground on the Santa Barbara Islands.

Mr. McRae and the party in his boat, comprising Allan Watt, assistant director of the Bison Company; Don Meaney; and Curley Stecker, were washed out of reach of the others and drifted to a coral reef about a half mile away where they were forced to land and bail out their boat. It was two days later before they were able to beat their way back against wind and waves to the wreck. Stecker did stunt work in His Master's Wife (1917), directed by Harry McRae, wherein a lion jumped on his back. In October 1917 Stecker married a 25-year-old vaudeville actress named Ethel L. Spurgin Schroeder, the mother of his one-year-old son Roy. When filling out draft cards that year, Stecker reported that had a past broken kneecap but it hadn't bothered him the last two years.

In January 1919 it was reported that Stecker has been working on "aviation serials" recently "but after having two bad falls...he came back to the lions for a quiet life." Stecker lost part of a finger—the little finger of the left hand was off at the knuckle—in 1921 in an accident while shooting a lion scene on Terror Trail! with Eileen Sedgwick. Also in 1921 he had a credited on-screen part in the lion-tamer romance The Man Tamer (1921) starring Gladys Walton, alongside past and future Universal City Zoo superintendents Rex De Rosselli and Charles B. Murphy. In 1922 he was mauled by a lioness named Ethel. It may have been on this occasion that "boy wonder" producer Irving Thalberg, who sometimes demonstrated a "lack of sensitivity to other people's problems...went to the hospital and lectured Stecker on the proper way to take care of wild animals."

In 1923, Stecker was attacked and nearly killed by Charlie the elephant. The attack took place during a break in shooting the genie-in-a-bottle film The Brass Bottle, directed by Maurice Tourneur. Charlie had spent the day leading a parade of camels and donkeys down a London street set—"the elephant had been painted white and loaded with gorgeous East Indian trappings for the scene and it is believed this may have angered him." Charlie wrapped his trunk around Stecker, pulled Stecker's head in his mouth and was trying to kneel on him. Stecker's older brother Carl Stecker and another man, carpenter A. H. Kuhlman, together using some combination of pitchfork, spear, club or "a piece of concrete," fended off Charlie long enough for Curley to survive the initial attack. The collapse of the elaborate howdah on his back also distracted and "hampered" Charlie as it crashed down around him. Stecker suffered lacerations, contusions, "three double-fractured ribs", and a concussion. "Charlie started picking up rocks with his trunk and throwing them at the horses. I told him to stop. He paid no attention. I jumped at him with a sharp command—and he did the rest. He thought I, in my business clothes, was my brother, and my brother 50 feet away in the clothes familiar to Charlie was 'the master.'" Rose wrote that "a mean elephant trampled Curley Stecker to death out of revenge."

Stecker died a year later from leukemia with a contributing factor of "wild animal injury." The funeral was held at Leroy Bagley Chapel at Hollywood and Western on June 19, 1924. Curly's brother Carl Stecker continued as an animal trainer, working with camels and dogs, well into the 1930s. Stecker had named his daughter Marie, born in 1920, after actress Marie Walcamp, who had starred in several Universal animal pictures.