Red Skelton Read online

  Indiana Historical Society Press

  Indianapolis 2008

  Red Skelton: The Mask behind the Mask is made possible through the generous support of the Lacy Foundation/LDI, Ltd.

  Red Skelton’s book says it all in A Southern Yankee (1948), Skelton’s greatest film.

  ©2008, 2013 Indiana Historical Society Press

  This book is a publication of the

  Indiana Historical Society Press

  Eugene and Marilyn Glick Indiana History Center

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  To Cassie and my daughters,

  Sarah and Emily

  “Comedy is … ”

  laughing at this “cockeyed

  caravan” instead of

  turning on the gas,

  realizing the “boy genius” was

  no genius when it came to

  homogenizing the Marxes,

  wondering if a reference

  to Carmen Miranda should

  have occurred in Brazil,

  hurting your sides instead

  of those people talking

  during Chaplin’s “Oceana Roll,”

  knowing Buster’s “Great Stone Face”

  still managed an Oscar load

  of expression with those eyes.

  being thankful for all the ways

  in which Red Skelton brought

  “I dood it” humor to the world.

  —Wes D. Gehring

  An earlier version of this poem first appeared in Literature/Film Quarterly 23, no. 2 (1995).

  Contents

  Foreword

  Preface

  Prologue

  1 The Early Years

  2 Clarence Stout and Other Early Skelton Mentors

  3 First Wife Mentor: Edna Stillwell Skelton

  4 Early Star Status: Memorable 1937

  5 Roller-Coaster Years: 1938–40

  6 Major Stardom: Movies, Radio, and a Touch of “Hope”

  7 War Year Complexities: Radio and Redefining Red’s Relationship with Edna

  8 War Year Complexities: Movies, Military, and Marriage

  9 Resuming a Film Career: The Buster Keaton Factor

  10 A Small-Screen Chaplin Wannabe and the Two Mrs. Skeltons

  11 Racking up the Pressure

  12 Triumph and Tragedy in the 1950s

  13 The Skeltons in Palm Springs: Paradise or Prison?

  14 The Last Act

  Filmography

  Select Bibliography

  Foreword

  Red Skelton: My Dad Remembered

  Valentina and Richard Skelton, a few years before his leukemia diagnosis. (Vincennes University Foundation, Red Skelton Collection)

  In early 1957 nine-year-old Valentina’s younger brother Richard (then eight) was diagnosed with leukemia. Later that year, while the disease was in remission, the family did a great deal of traveling—an attempt to jam a lifetime of experiences into a few months. But Red, well aware of all the attention Richard was getting, wisely sensed that Valentina was feeling neglected. Thus, what follows is a special memory of a father-daughter date.

  My first real experience of realizing how talented dad was happened when on a summer vacation in Honolulu, Hawaii, in 1957. He said, “There is a movie playing called The Clown, I’d like to take you to see it.” So, dad and I went to the movie. We sat down with popcorn and soda. The show began. It was black and white and I realized that it was dad up on the screen. He was The Clown. The story was so sad it made me cry. I felt the pain of that clown and his sadness. At the end of the movie I turned to dad and said, “That was you on the screen.” I gave him a hug and held his hand as we walked out of the theater. I realized my dad’s talent then as a hero; I was taken by him.

  I commend biographer Wes D. Gehring for researching my dad’s life story, and for helping me to understand more about my father. Thank you Professor Gehring for writing this story for those young and old about one of America’s distinguished clowns.

  Valentina Marie Skelton Alonso

  Preface

  After Red Skelton’s hyperbolic tendencies had gotten him in trouble with the fourth estate, the comedian would confess to a reporter, “That’s my trouble. If you want a good story—talk to me. If you want the facts—talk to Edna [Stillwell, Red’s first wife and manager].”1

  The above statement, a rare dropping of Red Skelton’s public mask, is easily the most significant admission made by the comedian in his long career. It is the Skelton Rosetta stone, pivotal to deciphering the apocryphal tendencies of this most gifted of comedians. Granted, a common phenomenon of writing any biography is wrestling with that most human of traits: “Like most people, he gave different accounts of what he believed at different times.”2 But Skelton’s propensity to reverse reality to mold his own personal mythology went well beyond the natural changes associated with that old movie montage cliché of pages falling from the calendar.

  Of course, Skelton’s inventive inclinations towards his life story put him in great embellishing company, including such diverse iconic figures as Dizzy Dean, Ernest Hemingway, and Bob Dylan. Indeed, biographer Marc Pachter has even articulated a key question for the professional profiler to ponder: “How much can be learned about an individual from the facts he invents about himself [?]”3

  The full answer to that question, with regard to Skelton, lies in the following pages. But it seems apropos to briefly note, without turning it into a Freudian free-for-all, some seminal suggestions. First, probably the greatest catalyst for his mythomania was seemingly quite simple—the need to tell a better story. After all, what came easier for Skelton, one of the greatest comic storytellers in the history of American entertainment? Second, to borrow a page from literary scholar Jeffrey Meyers, what follows is an insight about Hemingway that applies equally to Skelton: “[He] combined a scrupulous honesty in his fiction with a tendency to distort and rewrite the story of his life … [There was a] reluctance to disappoint either his own expectations or those of his audience … he felt virtually forced to invent an exciting and imaginative alternative to commonplace reality.”4

  Here is how those comments are equally applicable to Skelton, an artist whose work brilliantly tells the truth through comedy (especially his attention to slice-of-life reality) but whose personal story seems to have been gerrymandered by Skelton to complement his comedy career. The diversity of examples ranged from Skelton’s false claim that his grocer father was a famous clown and a college professor, to later deleting the sizable influence of Stillwell and legendary comedian Buster Keaton from his entertainment résumé.

  Third, beyond telling a better story and suggesting Skelton was a total comedy auteur (having received no help, beyond the sentimental hook of a clown father), Skelton’s embellishments were also about creating positive details for a black hole of a childhood. As the comedian’s only surviving child, Valentina Skelton Alonso, recently told me, “My father was from a major dysfunctional family.”5 The following chapters include a number of bombshells, from Skelton’s paternal grandmother operating a brothel in Washington, Indiana, (near Skelton’s hometown of Vincennes), to the comedian’s later strong belief that his biological mother was actually a prostitute who died in childbirth.6

  Some might say why dredge up disturbing facts. Such c
ritics would be fans of an earthy axiom by Skelton’s favorite comedian, Charlie Chaplin: “The more you stir an old turd, the more it stinks.”7 But the justification for such thoroughness, beyond simply being a conscientious biographer, is that much of the controversial material to be found in Skelton’s private papers was earmarked for a memoir he never got around to writing.8 Skelton was not like film-noir writer Raymond Chandler. When a publisher attempted to get the novelist to write his memoirs, Chandler refused, saying, “Who cares how a writer got his first bicycle?”9 Skelton cared about the details, and even had a researcher doing the legwork for his book.

  One could say that Skelton was a self-made man who was not as well made as he might have been, but who (like all of us) was coping. And despite those private demons, or maybe because of them, Skelton became one of the clowns of the twentieth century. No less a pantheon comedian than Groucho Marx called him “the logical successor to Chaplin.”10 Thus, besides exploring the mask behind the mask that was the private Skelton, this book also addresses his funny public persona, from his dual focus screen characters (fluctuating between antihero and smart aleck), to the troupe of buffoons through which he filtered his humor on radio and television.

  Sadly, Skelton’s bitterness over his television program being canceled by CBS has hurt his comedy legacy. He was an early victim of demographics. Skelton was dropped, despite high ratings, because his Nielsen numbers skewered too small town/rural and old. CBS was looking for a younger urban audience—an audience more likely to part with its money. In retaliation, Skelton kept his amazing twenty consecutive years (1951–71) of inspired television locked away from video viewers. Due to the network’s perceived lack of respect, CBS would never again make a profit from Skelton’s comedy—at least that was his reasoning. He even threatened to have the programs burned when he died. Consequently, despite being every bit as significant as Lucille Ball and Jackie Gleason, arguably early television’s two most iconic figures (thanks to the broadcasting in perpetuity of I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners), Skelton’s small-screen work is today largely unknown to younger viewers.

  Skelton’s acrimony towards CBS, to the point of flirting with destroying his greatest legacy, was a window into a less stable world the public seldom saw. But as his daughter Valentina shared in another interview, while “Dad was open and warm with fans, there was always a lot of secrecy going on with the family.”11 One could posit, as Steve Allen entertainingly does in his book The Funny Men (1956, including a chapter on Skelton), “I have never known a successful comedian who was not somewhat neurotic.”12 But after spending years researching Skelton for this book, as well as an earlier biography, I am convinced he pushed the envelope on this subject.13 In fact, one of the signature lines of the brilliant but unstable wit Oscar Levant reminds me more of Skelton: “There’s a thin line between genius and insanity … and I have erased that line.”

  Fittingly, in later years Skelton was even fond of saying, “I’m nuts and I know it, but as long as I make them laugh they ain’t going to lock me up.”14 In fact, I heard the comedian utter this mantra, or variations thereof, on several of his performing visits to Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, times when I was able to interview and interact with Skelton.15 Obviously, by this point it was largely done for effect. But after studying his private papers, and interviewing various family members, there is no doubt that he was often a tormented man. In short, Skelton fits, almost too perfectly, the stereotype of the tragic clown. One is reminded of the notable British clown Joseph Grimaldi (1779–1837) and the apocryphal story about his depression. Visiting an eminent doctor for his melancholia, the physician prescribed a night at the theater with the remarkable Grimaldi. After a pause, his patient hauntingly replied, “I am Grimaldi.” Skelton could be called a modern-day Grimaldi.

  Let me be quick to add, however, that this book is not limited to being a sad tale about a celebrity who was overly inventive about his private life. Though this is part of the portrait, given that these are components of Skelton’s life, I am much more about celebrating the unique range of his comedy gift. This places me in agreement with Oscar Wilde’s biting take on too many modern biographies, “formerly we used to canonize our heroes. … The modern method is to vulgarize them. Cheap editions of great books may be delightful but cheap editions of great men are absolutely detestable.”16

  I first came to Skelton as an elementary age class clown desperately in need of suitable material for my recess riffs and cafeteria cut ups. A television clown whose monologues regularly included the “team” of Gertrude and Heathcliff, video’s only stand-up comedy seagulls, was more than user friendly for an underage wannabe comedian. Only decades later did I realize the army of youngsters for whom Skelton was providing material. Many have gone on to comedy acclaim. For example, in a 1999 Rolling Stone interview Steve Martin related a childhood memory very similar to mine. That is, when asked about the first time he was funny, Martin said, “Probably in the third grade … I would watch Red Skelton the night before I came in and do his bits.”17 One should add that years before Martin first became famous as that “wild and crazy guy,” with the fake arrow through his head, Skelton’s Sheriff Deadeye character, the cowboy whose slipping holster often gave him a sissy-pants walk, frequently had a ten-gallon hat full of arrows.

  Like the universality of Bill Cosby’s later childhood-orientated inner-city stories, which still resonated with me (a midwestern small-town white kid), Skelton’s all-inclusive comedy and pantomime cut across racial lines, too. This was first brought to my attention during a 2004 conversation with Cheech Marin of Cheech and Chong comedy fame. The comedian shared that as a youngster he “especially liked Red Skelton. There was a purity about him that shined through. And he had a great [comic] film career that no one [now] seems to know about.”18

  Soon after that, while researching an article on Richard Pryor, I discovered that this comedian had also “admired and imitated in grade school … [all things in] the Red Skelton style.”19 And though Pryor later became controversial to conservatives for his adult language, so seemingly distant from Skelton’s public image, one often forgets the poignant pantomime of which Pryor was capable throughout his career. For example, there is the touchingly inspired yet funny sketch about a deer at a watering hole, with hunters in the distance, showcased in the comedian’s best performance film, Richard Pryor–Live in Concert (1979). One cannot watch a routine like this without thinking of Skelton’s “Silent Spot,” the pantomime section of Skelton’s television program.

  For another black comedian, the now underrated television entertainer Flip Wilson, Skelton’s pièce de résistance was the sheer size of his one-man cast of comedy buffoons. A young Wilson had a practical epiphany: “the comedians who have done characters have had the longevity. Gleason, Skelton had characters to help them carry the weight on TV.”20 Flash forward to Wilson’s hit variety program, the Flip Wilson Show (1970–74), and the young performer has a one-man troupe almost as imposing as Skelton’s. Two of Wilson’s most creative characters were the sassy Geraldine and Reverend LeRoy of the Church of What’s Happening Now. Geraldine’s enormously popular signature line, “The Devil made me do it!,” was even reminiscent of Skelton’s single best known catchphrase (by way of his “mean widdle kid” character, Junior), “If I do I get a whippin’ … I dood it!”

  All in all, Skelton was not only a hugely influential comedian, he was, like Will Rogers, one of the profession’s most beloved figures. Whereas many performers, such as Skelton’s fellow Hoosier James Dean, generated a broad range of criticism—“He has been cussed, discussed, loved and hated”—Skelton’s relationship with the public was one long mutual-admiration society.21 His daughter Valentina “enjoyed how the room would light up when Dad came into it, and fans would surround him.”22 But ironically, as previously suggested, the private Skelton had many demons, making for the most full-blooded of biographies. Unlike one memorably savage review of an early Susan Sontag novel, “The
tone is detached, the action almost nonexistent, and the characters do not lead lives, they assume postures,” Skelton’s life was more Eugene O’Neill meets Mack Sennett.23 So be advised: the story that follows, like so many tales of genius, is a real roller coaster. And if it is true, as suggested by Henry David Thoreau, “That most men lead lives of quiet desperation,” Skelton might have served as the axiom’s poster child.

  This study was made possible by a number of libraries and archives across the country: the Red Skelton Collection at the Lewis Historical Library in Vincennes, Indiana; the Red Skelton Collection at Western Illinois University in Macomb, Illinois; the New York Public Library’s Performing Arts Library at Lincoln Center; the main New York Public Library at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street; the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hills, California; the MGM/Red Skelton script material in the Cinema-Television Library at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, California; the Museum of Television and Radio in Beverly Hills, California; the Television Academy in Beverly Hills, California; the Vincennes Public Library in Vincennes, Indiana; and the Ball State University Library in Muncie, Indiana.

  Numerous people helped make this book possible. Skelton’s daughter, Valentina Alonso, granted me two lengthy informative interviews. Valentina’s daughter, Sabrina, the comedian’s only grandchild, also gave me a very helpful candid interview. Marvin L. Skelton, Red’s nephew, did three insightful interview sessions with me. The comedian’s widow, Lothian Toland Skelton, who donated the Skelton collection to the Vincennes University Foundation, answered a number of questions for my first biography of her husband.