by Wes Gehring
“Success,” as the old axiom goes, “often has many parents.” While Stillwell was the author of the donut sketch, she might have been inspired by director Frank Capra’s hit film It Happened One Night (1934), a pioneering screwball comedy with Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert. Where’s the donut connection? Capra’s movie has an auto camp scene in which Gable’s man-of-the-people type briefly demonstrates the appropriate way to dunk a donut to his debutante sidekick Colbert. It is a fleeting moment in a film that otherwise milks such scenes. But it might have planted an idea in Stillwell’s mind.
A circa 1935 Skelton apes Claudette Colbert’s leg shot from It Happened One Night (1934). (Wes D. Gehring Stills Collection)
What are the chances she even saw the film? Excellent. There is a period photograph of Skelton parodying another more famous Night scene—Gable’s how to hitchhike routine. Paradoxically, for all the worldly wisdom of Gable’s everyman, his tried and tested thumb is no match for Colbert’s shapely leg. The aforementioned Skelton-spoof photograph has him exposing a less than lovely limb. But even without this Night-related picture of the comedian, it would have been hard to miss the influence of the Capra movie. Night is one of the seminal films in Hollywood history. And it was a box-office smash that would not go away, getting extended 1935 playing dates after that year’s Academy Awards made Night the first film to ever sweep all five main categories—Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, and Screenplay. (This is something that has still only happened twice since Night—One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in 1975 and Silence of the Lambs in 1991.) The Oscar overdose that came Night’s way, followed by 1935 repeat business, approximates the genesis of the Skelton donut-dunking sketch.
Of course, one could argue that a whole “how to” mentality permeated 1930s comedy, from the hitchhiking and donut examples of Night, to Stillwell’s proclivity for variations upon the signature donut sketch she created for Skelton. For example, another Stillwell routine for Skelton, which was also featured in Having Wonderful Time, had the comedian amusingly demonstrating the various ways people go up and down stairs. But the nominal 1930s comedy king of “how-to” humor was Robert Benchley. His first book-length collections of comic essays began to appear in the 1920s, something he complemented with drama reviews for the old humor magazine Life (before moving to the New Yorker) and the occasional comic lectures in vaudeville. One could argue that after the 1935 death of Will Rogers, Benchley soon assumed the mantle of America’s favorite humorist.26 He was certainly one of the most active. While the popular writing continued, he was increasingly active in film and on radio. Most germane to the Skeltons were Benchley’s acclaimed short films, such as his Oscar-winning (Best Live Action Short Subject) How to Sleep (1935).
A sleeping Robert Benchley, despite those loud Picasso-like pajamas, from the Oscar-winning How to Sleep (1935). Benchley was a comedian who had a great influence on Skelton. (Wes D. Gehring Stills Collection)
Benchley had pioneered the live-action sound short with such brilliant early outings as The Treasurer’s Report (1928, which he originally made a hit in 1920s vaudeville) and The Sex Life of the Polyp (1928). However, the plaudits generated by How to Sleep had Benchley doing assorted “how-to” films for years. As with the 1935 awards and re-issuing of It Happened One Night, How to Sleep was generating attention at approximately the same time Stillwell was creating the donut dunking sketch for Skelton. Moreover, the numerous observational routines that Stilwell soon penned for her husband were often reminiscent of Benchley’s lecture or professorial style. Indeed, this Skelton-Benchley link is given a historically casual connection in a 1937 Detroit Free Press rave review of Skelton’s donut sketch. On the same page that critic James S. Pooler praises the comedian’s routine as a comic “lecture” is a review of Benchley’s latest parody lecture, How to Start the Day Right (1937).27
By 1938 Skelton himself was accenting the professor slant with the press. Pic magazine, drawing upon the comedian’s material, stated, “Professor Red Skelton, B. D. (Bachelor of Dunking), is currently delivering his lecture on ‘Dunking As Art and Science’ in the movies.”28 With a photo spread done at Maxwell House Coffee’s “doughnuttery” on Broadway, Skelton had the comic last word, “‘The field of dunking,’ says the professor, ‘has not yet been fully explored. And I for one think it’s just as well.’”29
None of the previous professorial parallels need take away from the comic creativity of Skelton’s partner. One could simply liken this Depression-era tendency for a “how to” humor to what the Germans call zeitgeist—the mood or spirit of a particular period of history. Regardless of the source of inspiration, this donut-dunking bit would lead the Skeltons to star status in 1930s America. (The sketch also brought Skelton some early fame back home in Indiana when the Indianapolis Star ran a Sunday feature titled “Indiana Boy’s Doughnut Dunking Hit on Stage” in 1937.30) Ultimately, the Stillwell routines brilliantly bring an audience a slice-of-life silliness which, to paraphrase the much later New Yorker critic Hilton Als, was “not her world but the world.”31
While Stilwell’s writing made a unique contribution to Skelton’s career, it is not unusual for celebrated comedians to be greatly assisted by creative women. For instance, today’s most prominent Hoosier humorist, David Letterman, owes much of his success to his longtime companion and former Late Night head writer Merrill Markoe. Even her take on Letterman’s style, what she labeled “perceived reality,” is comparable to Stillwell making Skelton appreciate “slightly exaggerating” reality.32 To borrow an insight from art critic Holland Cotter, “Sometimes a revolution is just a matter of altered perspective, changed position.”33
David Letterman early in his television career (circa 1980), another Hoosier comedian whose early career was assisted by the writing of a woman with whom he was romantically involved. (Wes D. Gehring Stills Collection)
Interestingly enough, a few years after Stillwell’s writing and managing helped orchestrate Skelton’s stardom, one of his eventual celebrated comedy contemporaries, Danny Kaye, came to owe his success to another writing/manager wife, Sylvia Fine. The description of Fine’s relationship to Kaye, by the comedian’s definitive biographer, Martin Gottfried, might just as well be describing Skelton and Stillwell: “The most important thing in Danny’s life was to succeed as an entertainer, and for that he lacked not just material but a performing identity. Sylvia, as a writer, needed a medium. In Danny, she found a purpose, almost a maternal one: to use her gift to conceive and nurture the man of her dreams; to give birth to Danny Kaye.”34
Ironically, the obsessive drive of both Stillwell and Fine ultimately soured their personal relationships with the comedy legends they helped to create, though Stillwell continued to manage and write for Skelton well into his second marriage. But that is getting ahead of the couple’s donut changing beginnings. Now it is time for the rest of the story.
Prologue Notes
1. Red Skelton, interview with author, Muncie, Indiana, September 18, 1986.
2. “Hoosier Comedian Makes Good in Films,” Indianapolis Star, August 31, 1941.
3. Red Skelton, “I’ll Tell All” (part 5), Milwaukee Journal, December 12, 1941.
4. Paul Murray Kendall, The Art of Biography (1965; reprint, New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1985), 130.
5. Frederick C. Othman, “Ex-Usherette Leads Skelton to Success,” New York World Telegram, August 14, 1941.
6. Sally Jefferson, “The Skelton in Hollywood’s Closet,” Photoplay, July 1942, p. 38.
7. Skelton, “I’ll Tell All.”
8. Arthur Marx, Red Skelton (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1979), 54.
9. The best single overview was from “Capitol, Wash.,” Variety, March 10, 1937, p. 50.
10. Nancy Lee, “At the Riverside,” Milwaukee Journal, June 20, 1937.
11. John G. Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 166.
12. Leo McCarey, �
�The Could-Be Quality,” Hollywood Reporter, October 28, 1939. See also Wes Gehring, Leo McCarey: From Marx to McCarthy (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2005).
13. Betty Baytos, “Interview with Red Skelton,” Dance Collection Oral History, New York Public Library at Lincoln Center, February 20, 1996.
14. Ibid.
15. G. E. Blackford, “‘Whistling in the Dark’ Shown at Loew Criterion,” New York Journal American, August 28, 1941.
16. Robert Coleman, “Red Skelton Gets $35,000,” New York Daily Mirror, November 10, 1938.
17. Blaud Johaueson, “Ate 12,000 and Each Made ’em Roar,” New York Daily Mirror, July 13, 1938.
18. John Chapman, “Mainly About Manhattan,” New York Daily News, July 8, 1938.
19. Red Skelton, interview with author, September 18, 1986.
20. Jay Dee, “Red Recalls Great Days in Milwaukee,” [1947], incomplete citation, in Red Skelton Scrapbook #12, May–September 1947, Red Skelton Collection, Vincennes University, Vincennes, Indiana.
21. Valentina Skelton Alonso, interview with the author, March 5, 2007.
22. Joe E. Brown, as told to Ralph Hancock, Laughter is a Wonderful Thing (New York: A. S. Barnes and Company, 1956), 202.
23. “His Heavy (Eating) Role Fits Joe Brown Exactly,” New York World Telegram, May 6, 1933.
24. Wes Gehring, Seeing Red … The Skelton in Hollywood’s Closet: An Analytical Biography (Davenport, IA: Robin Vincent Publishing, 2001).
25. Barbara W. Tuchman, “Biography as a Prism of History,” in Biography as High Adventure, Stephen B. Oates, ed. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986), 94.
26. Wes Gehring, “Mr. B” or Comforting Thoughts about the Bison: A Critical Biography of Robert Benchley (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992) and Film Clowns of the Depression: 12 Memorable Movies (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2007).
27. James S. Pooler, “Mickey Rooney Steals Show as Cabin Boy in ‘Slave Ship,’” Detroit Free Press, July 3, 1937, and “Humorist Ready with a New Farce,” Detroit Free Press, July 3, 1937.
28. “All the World Loves a Dunker,” Pic magazine, August 23, 1938, p. 24.
29. Ibid.
30. “Indiana Boy’s Doughnut Dunking Hit on Stage,” Indianapolis Star, June 27, 1937.
31. Hilton Als, “Shining Hours,” The New Yorker, May 22, 2006, p. 87.
32. Caroline Latham, The David Letterman Story (1987; reprint, New York: Berkley Books, 1988), 112.
33. Holland Cotter, “Pollock on Paper: A Magician Flinging Swirls and Pixie Dust,” New York Times, May 26, 2006.
34. Martin Gottfried, Nobody’s Fool: The Lives of Danny Kaye (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), 52.
1
The Early Years
On the superiority of being a clown: “I mean, a clown’s got it all. He never has to hold back. He can do as he pleases. The mouth and the eyes are painted on. So if you wanta cry, you can go right ahead. The makeup won’t smear. You’ll still be smiling.”1
Red Skelton, 1979
The pathos inherent in the above statement is fitting for comedian Red Skelton, born on July 18, 1913, into abject poverty in Vincennes, Indiana, with his thirty-four-year-old father having died the preceding May. The Dickensian childhood of Skelton (christened Richard Bernard), whose hair color gave him his nickname, included three older brothers—Joseph Ishmal (1905), Christian, (1907), and Paul (1908). Their overworked and overwhelmed mother, Ida Mae Skelton, widowed before she was thirty, struggled to make ends meet by taking in washing and cleaning businesses and homes. Paradoxically, one of Ida Mae’s key jobs was cleaning a vaudeville house.
This has long been the accepted foundation to the Skelton story. But there is a darker side that has never before been told. Through the gift of the comedian’s private papers to Vincennes University, some of which had been earmarked for the comedian’s unrealized memoir, a more provocative tale unfolds. The central character in this real-life melodrama is Skelton’s paternal grandmother, Ella Richardville (from which the comedian’s given name of Richard comes.) In the late 1870s a teenaged Richardville went to work as a maid in the home of prominent Princeton, Indiana, attorney Newton Elmer Skelton. Richardville became pregnant and Joseph Elmer Skelton (Red’s father) was born on September 14, 1878. The scandal ruined Newton’s marriage and probably contributed to his premature death in 1880, when he was in his early forties. Joseph never knew his father. According to the researcher who uncovered these materials for the comedian’s projected autobiography, “You won’t believe it [Red] but you look exactly like … [Newton Elmer Skelton]—especially around the eyes.”2
Richardville seems to have fallen through the cracks of time until October 1891, when her common-law husband, Joseph Earhart (sometimes spelled Ehart, or Eheart), was charged in court with “unlawfully selling to one James E. Reney, one quart of intoxicating liquor.”3 Presumably Richardville had been with Earhart for some time, because Red’s father seems to have been named, or renamed, after him. (She also had a son with Ehart, Chris, Joseph’s half-brother.) Joseph fluctuated between using the last names Skelton and Ehart.4 His 1913 Vincennes obituaries listed him as Joseph Ehart.5
In December 1892 Ella married William Cochran, a union that produced court headlines over the next decade. For example, the following month Ella Cochran was indicted for “keeping a House of Ill-Fame,” with one of the prostitutes, Beatrice Richardville, probably being her sister.6 The brothel was in Washington, Indiana, another small town near Vincennes. This has special pertinence for Skelton, beyond helping to establish the roots of a dysfunctional family. Between autobiographical writings in the comedian’s private papers, and various interviews with his daughter, Valentina Skelton Alonso, it can now be revealed that Skelton believed his mother was a woman named Lillian—the favorite prostitute in Grandma Cochran’s brothel.
The prostitute Lillian doubled as the mistress of Skelton’s father. But like most of the comedian’s stories, there are various versions of the tale. The one commonality is that both Lillian and Ida Mae (the woman credited on Skelton’s birth certificate with being his biological mother) gave birth within days of each other. But Ida Mae’s child was stillborn, while Lillian delivered a healthy boy. Some accounts have Lillian dying in childbirth, others state she committed suicide. In either case, Ida Mae received Skelton as a replacement child.
When the comedian related this provocative take on his origins to Valentina, he seemed to focus on circumstantial evidence, such as “Why was I the only one with red hair and no resemblance to the other boys?7 While Skelton makes similar comments in his private papers, he also claims to have proof, explaining why he always called Ida Mae “Mur”—“This was the name I gave … [her] the instant she told me she was not my mother. For fifty-three years I gave her that title.”8 Though Skelton’s use of Mur as a reference to Ida Mae is well documented through the years, both publicly and privately, he had always kept the reason quiet, except to a few family members.
Skelton (the baby) with his adoptive mother, Ida Mae Skelton, and (left to right) his half-brothers Christian, Paul, and Joseph Ishmal. (Wes D. Gehring Stills Collection)
Obviously, this is a topic that will merit more examination throughout the book, but first the rest of Ella’s colorful story needs to be told. In May 1894 she was indicted for “receiving and concealing stolen goods.”9 In December 1900 Joseph Ehart (Red’s father) testified under oath that William Cochran (Joseph’s stepfather) shot and wounded Christopher Ehart (Joseph’s half-brother) with “premeditated malice … to kill and murder.”10
Cochran was convicted the following year and received a two- to fourteen-year sentence at State Prison North in Michigan City, Indiana. Ella subsequently filed for divorce, which was granted in January 1903.11 (At this point her occupation was listed as housekeeper.) Though Cochran was now safely incarcerated, family brushes with the law continued. These included multiple charges against Ella for selling “intoxicating liquor without a license,” a conviction for
carrying a concealed weapon against her son Chris (after the attempt on his life), and an “assault and battery” charge against Ella and Joseph. Ultimately, the ruling in the latter case went against Ella, with her son being found not guilty.12
The court records on the assault and battery case are sketchy, though it appears that Ella might have taken a guilty charge as a plea bargain to get Joseph off. Regardless, it is quite the rough-and-tumble family that has a mother and her oldest son taken to court on assault charges. The situation was probably exacerbated by the fact that Joseph was then living in a room at a local bar. Ironically, this point of information is revealed by yet another court case. Almost simultaneously with the assault case, Joseph was found guilty of the rather vague charge, “obstructing the view of his saloon room.”13 (Not surprisingly, the general consensus among Skelton family members is that Joseph’s premature death was brought upon by his alcoholism.14)