In case you just tuned in, I am using the Wikipedia entry on Wallace Beery – alleging that he was involved in the death of Ted Healy – as a way to explore Wikipedia’s fundamental problems with accuracy and delve into Hollywood myths.  This is a slow, paragraph by paragraph analysis and, yes, it’s tedious. I hope the research drudges in the audience will find it interesting.

In Part 1, we found that Wikipedia had eight entries linking Beery to Healy’s death. Two of them were nearly identical and the rest contradicted one another – sometimes drastically. So much for Wikipedia being as accurate and reliable as an encyclopedia.

In Part 2, we began looking at the book that was cited in all the entries that listed a source: E.J. Fleming’s “The Fixers,” a book that failed to get a review from a single reputable news outlet. We also found that a main informant, Col. Barney Oldfield, most likely had no firsthand knowledge of the incident.

In Part 3, we dissected a paragraph of “The Fixers” and found numerous problems.

In Part 4, we looked at a portion of another paragraph in “The Fixers” and found problems with the chronology in its version of Ted Healy’s death.

In Part 5, we contrasted the 2004 account in “The Fixers” with Albert Broccoli’s version of the incident, published in 1937, citing the Los Angeles Examiner. This is an account ignored by “The Fixers” – but not Jeff and Tom Forresters’ 2002 “The Three Stooges” – in  which  Ted Healy struck Broccoli, who didn’t fight back.

Today, let’s see what is in the next paragraph of “The Fixers.” (Yes, we are going paragraph by paragraph. Tedious, isn’t it?)

Let’s check out footnote No. 197.

The first few words of the sentence are “even more strange, the article indicated Healy died of ‘natural causes,’ the result of his alcoholism.” There’s nothing strange about this. Every contemporary news source said exactly the same thing, including The Times, which cited Dr. A.F. Wagner, autopsy surgeon, in its Dec. 23, 1937 story:

To be continued.