Red Skelton Read online

  Doctor Phillip M. Summers, president emeritus and project coordinator of Vincennes University, generously opened the Red Skelton Collection to me, even though the holdings are not yet fully cataloged and available to the general public. Two of his assistants, Billie Jean Primus and Jackie Bloebaum, were especially helpful. Indeed, Billie Jean’s knowledge of the materials was invaluable. Robert “Gus” Stevens, of Vincennes College’s Lewis Historical Library, provided invaluable advice and shared his own research on Skelton.

  An interview and correspondence with Brenda Grant, the daughter of Carl Hopper (the apparent model for Skelton’s Clem Kadiddlehopper) was a major plus. Correspondence with Janice Thompson Dudley, the sister of Red’s first childhood sweetheart, provided an interesting window on his childhood. Earl Williams, a Skelton friend and former general manager of Ball State University’s Emens Auditorium, provided background material on Skelton.

  University of Southern California archivist Ned Comstock always goes out of his way to be helpful on my books. Western Illinois University Special Collections archivist Marla Vizdal also went the extra mile to assist me in my Skelton research.

  Friends Joe and Maria Pacino provided both valuable research assistance and a place to crash when I was in the Los Angeles area. My department chair, Nancy Carlson, helped secure release time. Film historian Conrad Lane was always available for manuscript advice. Hoosier historian Dave Smith opened his considerable Skelton collection to me. As usual, Janet Warner logged time as my copy editor. The computer preparation of the manuscript was done by Jean Thurman.

  A special ongoing thank you is in order for Ray E. Boomhower, Indiana Historical Society Press Senior editor. I am forever grateful to his support of my writing, from the pages of Traces, which he edits, to my earlier IHS Press biographies of Carole Lombard and James Dean. An award-winning historian himself, Ray is a wonderful facilitator for any biographer with a life to tell.

  Mark Twain once wrote, “A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it.”24 If I have accomplished that goal, the sheer volume of material I waded through might have given me some de facto assistance—short of creating a multiple volume Encyclopedia of Skelton, I attempted to keep it tight. I was reminded more than once of my graduate college mentor, film historian Richard Dyer MacCann, and the framed axiom in his office, “When in doubt, leave it out.” My daughters, Sarah and Emily, avid students of film comedy, were patient and insightful when I frequently utilized them as Skelton sounding boards in the editing process. And an army of friends and family, especially my parents, were an ongoing rooting section for the project. Thank you one and all.

  Preface Notes

  1. Virginia MacPherson, “Mischievous Red Skelton Tangled Up in Red Tape,” Alameda (CA) Times Star, November 28, 1947.

  2. Claire Tomalin, quoted in Thomas Mallon’s review, “Thomas Hardy’s English Lessons,” New York Times, January 28, 2007.

  3. Marc Pachter, “The Biographer Himself: An Introduction,” in Telling Lives: The Biographer’s Art, Marc Pachter, ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 14.

  4. Jeffrey Meyers, Hemingway: Life into Art (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000), 134.

  5. Valentina Skelton Alonso, interview with author, March 5, 2007.

  6. Various court records, starting with the January 1893 indictment from the Daviess Circuit Court of Indiana: “State of Indiana vs. Ella Cochran [formerly Ella Richardville]” for “Keeping a House of Ill-Fame”; and the Red Skelton folder “Memories By Red,” both are in the “Personal Legal Documents/Papers” box, Red Skelton Collection, Vincennes University, Vincennes, Indiana.

  7. Wes Gehring, The Charlie Chaplin Murder Mystery (Shreveport, LA: Ramble House Press, 2006).

  8. Skelton Collection.

  9. Tom Hiney, Raymond Chandler: A Biography (New York: Grove Press, 1997), vii.

  10. Groucho Marx, Groucho and Me (1959; reprint, New York: Manor Books, 1974), 136.

  11. Alonso interview, February 27, 2007.

  12. Steve Allen, The Funny Men (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956), 145.

  13. Wes Gehring, Seeing Red … The Skelton in Hollywood’s Closet: An Analytical Biography (Davenport, IA: Robin Vincent Publishing, 2001).

  14. Bill Davidson, “‘I’m Nuts and I Know It,’” Saturday Evening Post, June 17, 1967, p. 69.

  15. The culmination of Red Skelton’s Ball State University visits was the school awarding him an honorary doctorate on September 18, 1986. The author gave the keynote address on this occasion.

  16. Carl Rollyson, A Higher Form of Cannibalism? Adventures in the Art and Politics of Biography (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2005), 4.

  17. David Wild, “Steve Martin: The ‘Rolling Stone’ Interview,” Rolling Stone, September 2, 1990, p. 90.

  18. Cheech Marin, conversation with the author, January 31, 2004.

  19. John A. Williams and Dennis A. Williams, If I Stop I’ll Die: The Comedy and Tragedy of Richard Pryor (1991; reprint, New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2006), 41.

  20. Ibid., 45.

  21. Frank Friedrichsen, “The Short Tragic Life of Jimmy Dean,” Movie Star Parade, December 1955, p. 42.

  22. Alonso interview, March 5, 2007.

  23. Dwight Garner, “Sontag, Late and Early,” New York Times, March 11, 2007.

  24. Mark Twain, The Selected Letters of Mark Twain, Charles Neider, ed. (1982; reprint, New York: Cooper Square Press, 1999), 245.

  Prologue

  It All Started with the Donuts

  “Comedy is taking the everyday and slightly exaggerating it.”1

  Red Skelton (1986)

  Years before Red Skelton’s phenomenal success on radio, television, and in the movies made him a household name, he was a struggling comedian in assorted live venues, from minstrel shows to Depression-era walkathons and vaudeville. But in the mid-1930s, this was all about to change. And it all came down to watching a man dunk a donut in a coffee shop.

  As often happens in life, the catalyst for this memorable moment came out of desperation—Skelton needed new material. There are two variations, however, to the donut rescue. One story has the comedian tanking in a Montreal nightclub, the Lido, because on his initial visit to French Canada he overreached his talents, attempting to be a Hoosier Maurice Chevalier. But when Skelton fell back on his tired standard shtick, his exasperated wife/manager Edna Stillwell said, “‘I could write stuff better than that.’ Red’s answer was, ‘Why don’t you?’ also in sarcasm. But she did, and she has written his material ever since.”2

  The second take on how Stillwell came to create the sketches is born of triumph, not failure. Skelton is a smash success at the Lido club, and one night a representative for Montreal’s top vaudeville house/film theater, Loew’s Harry Anger, sees the act. Anger is bowled over and signs Skelton for an extended booking at Loew’s. After a short exit to honor a prior Chicago commitment, the comedian is again headlining at Loew’s, but Anger wanted all-new material. Skelton noted: “That floored me, but again it was Edna to the rescue. She said she could write ’em. I said, Well, now was certainly the time for her to display her hidden talent, if any … So Edna took over my writing, and she’s been at it ever since. And there’s no better.”3

  These two 1941 reports were both credited to Skelton within a time span of three months. Such are the frustrations of a biographer. But as noted chronicler Paul Murray Kendall reminds fans of the genre, getting the “absolute truth” is nearly an impossible task. Instead, one must aspire for the “best truth.”4 In this situation the “best truth” would seem to be that in the mid-1930s (probably late 1935) when Skelton elevated his performance skills to “major league” status. This soon led to vaudeville’s “A” bookings, all of which was dependent upon Stillwell’s observational humor. (Critiques of Skelton’s performances at Loew’s begin to appear in the Montreal Gazette during 1936.) An additional “best truth” take occurs in yet another 1941 article that indicated Stillwell’s initial writ
ing “didn’t seem funny to that experienced comedian, Red Skelton. ‘But the customers laughed,’ he said. ‘Edna knew what she was doing. She kept on writing my material.’”5 Fittingly, this latter article was amusingly titled, “Ex-Usherette [Wife] Leads Skelton to Success.” And this title is hardly hyperbole. As a Photoplay essay from the following year stated, “There can be no story of Red Skelton without Edna.”6

  So where does the aforementioned coffee shop donut man figure in these preceedings? Well, the young, desperate-for-new-material couple were sitting in a Montreal diner when the eureka moment arrived. Skelton recalled, “Edna noticed a man at the counter dunking doughnuts in coffee and Edna said, ‘There’s our first routine.’ Darned if the gal wasn’t right … [what followed was] probably the best thing I’ve ever done.’”7 Skelton biographer Arthur Marx (son of Groucho Marx), even called this donut epiphany the “exact moment when he [Skelton] quit being just another entertainer and crossed over to the ranks of the superstars.8

  The donut-dunking routine that evolved from “slightly exaggerating” reality had Skelton inventively demonstrating various types of dunkers, from the petite to the sloppy, with several sorts in between. The other varieties included both the flamboyant dunker and the timid one who tries to dunk on the sly. But my favorite Skelton donut dunker is the most antiheroic, the poor person who miscalculates his pastry submersion time and dissolves the donut!

  Red Skelton’s donut routine—preparing to eat the “props” (circa 1938). (Wes D. Gehring Stills Collection)

  Drawing from period reviews, which sometimes suggest as many as nine dunker types by 1937, Skelton also further embellished the routine through making a big deal of dragging onto the stage a table, a large cup of coffee, and a plate of donuts.9 After this comic setup, Skelton peppered his visual shtick with amusing verbal patter. One might label this a pioneering example of gross-out humor, since Skelton talked with his mouth full, occasionally “broadcasting” donut chunks in every direction. The comedian also became known for throwing several “sinkers” into the audience. Not quite gross-out Gallagher, the melon-smashing fanatic of fifty years later, but it was still groundbreaking comedy for the Great Depression. Appropriately, the Milwaukee Journal critic praised the merry mess of a routine as the “donut-dunking massacre.”10

  Despite the realistic foundation of Skelton’s sketch, the ultimate over-the-top “donut-dunking massacre” nature of the routine reminds me of pop culture critic John G. Cawelti’s description of the comic-laden mystery prose of Dashiell Hammett, where “‘realistic’ detail [can take on] a surrealistic flavor.”11 For film comedy guru Leo McCarey, a writer/director contemporary of Skelton and Hammett, starting with an anchor in reality is central to comic exaggeration: “Even in comedy of the most fantastic variety there has to be a could-be quality lurking around in every sequence. We may stretch the credulity of audiences to the breaking point one moment—but we have to snap right back into reality [for people to fully connect with the comedy].”12 Thus, Skelton’s donut sketch realistically started with one type of dunker, only to have the comedian amusingly pervert the situation. Red would then “snap right back into reality” with another “could-be” dunker that he would comically exaggerate, and so on.

  Sixty years after the routine’s creation Skelton confessed, “When I did the donut bit for the first time I had written on the tablecloth the next little piece of business I was going to do.”13 And during the initial performance history of the sketch he sometimes changed his personal prompter, depending upon the audience’s response. Skelton claimed, “The first time, it ran, like, fifteen minutes [he chuckled]. The stagehand said, ‘Hey, that’s a funny bit but it’s awful long.’ So then I started cutting things out that didn’t get the big laughs.”14

  This routine defined him for years. For example, when Skelton’s career-making movie Whistling in the Dark (1941) opened, it was not unusual for critics, such as the New York Journal American’s G. E. Blackford, to footnote just who this new movie comic was by way of the sketch: “many know Mr. Skelton from his efforts to educate the amusement-seeking public as to the correct and modern and most efficacious manner of dunking a donut.”15

  Of course, for a vaudevillian such as Skelton, even in that medium’s declining 1930s, a classic routine could fuel a career for years. Unlike the later “glass furnace” nature of television, where a nightly audience of millions metaphorically burned up countless material, a stage sketch played to just a fraction of those numbers. Moreover, with a vaudevillian only visiting a given city once or twice a year, positive word-of-mouth comments even gave legendary bits an added uniqueness.

  Skelton’s donut shtick also represented an entertainingly amusing subject for a series of advertisement-like articles. In 1938 New York Daily Mirror writer Robert Coleman turned mathematician as he documented that the routine necessitated the comedian eat nine donuts a show and vaudeville had him doing five shows a day! Is it any wonder that Coleman observed, “Red is a doughnut consumer. He slaughters doughnuts in wholesale lots.”16 Earlier that year the New York Daily Mirror film critic Blaud Johaueson also went the merry math route with regard to Skelton’s famous sketch. Though her numbers were somewhat inflated, the article was titled, “Ate 12,000 and Each Made ’em Roar.” Again crediting Stillwell as Skelton’s writer, Johaueson posited that the “American public always gives a doughnut a laugh.”17 At the same time Skelton gave his own comic take on the subject to the New York Daily News, “Red Skelton, the doughnut-eating fool at Loew’s State, says he has eaten so many doughnuts in the last few years that he swells when it rains.”18 Years later Skelton told me this avalanche of Great Depression donuts resulted in a more than thirty-pound weight gain.19 When Hollywood eventually called to put the routine on film, in Having Wonderful Time (1938), the producing studio (RKO) put the comedian on a strict diet.

  Edna Stillwell Skelton—Red’s first wife and the creator of his career-making donut sketch. (Vincennes University Foundation, Red Skelton Collection)

  Sometimes the donut-related problems had nothing to do with the added poundage. Often it was difficult just maintaining the pastry supply. Skelton needed five to six dozen donuts a day; four dozen were for the show, with the extras covering the random hungry fellow vaudevillian, who would eat the “props.” But shortly before one late 1930s Milwaukee opening, Skelton and Stillwell arrived at the theater to find empty donut boxes.20 At first they thought it was a prank or overly ravenous performers. It soon became apparent, however, that the Skelton’s Boston bulldog, Jiggs, had eaten more than sixty donuts. While the various stage acts on the bill fanned out in the neighborhood in search of “props” for Red’s routine, the comedian took care of a very sick Jiggs. This was the same bulldog that figured in some later entertainingly hyperbolic Skelton stories. Skelton’s daughter, Valentina, remembered how Jiggs would be somehow lowered out an upper story boardinghouse (where pets were not allowed) window for his late-night constitutional. One evening this allegedly caused a passing drunk to stumble back to a nearby bar and shout, “There’s flying bulldogs out there!”21

  The thankfully preserved sinker sketch of Having Wonderful Time, with a dieted thin Skelton, is a more streamlined look at the routine. Running right at three minutes, it features three dunker types: the cross-eyed variety, the society sort, and the sneaky dunker. Though not as outrageous as the review descriptions of the stage original, the movie take on donut dunking gives one a sense of the added business the comedian brought to the bit, from using a second tablecloth as a comic bib, to his ongoing patter: “Notice [coming out squeaky and high-pitched] how I hold the little creature [the donut], with the index finger. The pinky [finger] should always be out, that’s so if you slip you won’t go to your elbow [into the coffee cup].”

  The athletic Joe E. Brown often comically focused on food in his films. Here he “costars” with some pie in Local Boy Makes Good (1931). (Wes D. Gehring Stills Collection)

  Naturally, one need not be a psychology
student to see a certain irony in an eating routine being so popular during the Great Depression. Granted, funny films of all eras feature food sketches, from Charlie Chaplin stealing hot dog bites from a child in The Kid (1921) to John Belushi’s instigation of the food fight in National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978). Still, there are a plethora of eating-related sketches in Depression-era movie comedies. And the range is simply inspired, be it loopy Stan Laurel munching on wax fruit in Sons of the Desert (1933), or Chico and Harpo Marx pitting their combination peanut and hot dog stand against Edgar Kennedy’s lemonade concession in Duck Soup (1933).

  The proverbial golden spoon, however, for the Depression-era food-conscious clown would probably go to Joe E. “cavernous-mouthed” Brown. The comedian’s first extended comedy scene in one of his definitive films, Elmer the Great (1933), is predicated upon his title character eating the largest breakfast on record—stacks of pancakes and ham, apple pie, gingerbread, donuts and jam, and assorted fruit (especially a comic favorite, the banana), while drinking coffee and a large glass of milk. But unlike a more typical comedy eating scene, such as when the Marx Brothers focus on pigging out in Room Service (1938), Brown’s breakfast in Elmer has him talking away, too. He later amusingly confessed, this was no easy task, “even with my mouth.”22

  I dwell on Brown for a special food-related comedy connection to Skelton. Upon the release of Elmer a New York World Telegram article appeared titled “His Heavy (Eating) Role Fits Joe Brown Exactly.” The piece revealed that the comedian “attributes his propensity for eating parts to the time when he would have appreciated them because of the scarcity of good [eating] fare in his days of initiation into show business.”23 This catalyst was equally applicable to Skelton. In fact, he told me as much on several different occasions when I was preparing my first biography of the comedian.24 But for both Brown and Skelton, the lack of food factor predates their early apprenticeship as entertainers. Each of these funnymen had Dickensian childhoods, where a square meal was almost as rare as a new pair of shoes. Flash forward to the Great Depression, and millions of Americans were suffering through similar deprivation. Consequently, just as 1930s screwball comedies featured the escapism of watching the eccentric idle rich, the era’s personality comedies often showcased another vicarious bit of voyeurism—a comic abundance of food. One could even liken the sweeping comprehensiveness of individual food phenomenon bits to Barbara W. Tuchman’s definition of the biography, “The universal in the particular.”25