Red Skelton

by Wes Gehring

  Carl Hopper, the Skelton childhood friend who was the apparent model for Clem Kadiddlehopper. (Wes D. Gehring Stills Collection)

  Of course, since Skelton’s Kadiddlehopper occasionally said something surprisingly insightful, one could also pigeonhole this rube in the most universal of comedy types—the wise fool. Through the centuries, a mask of incompetence allowed the comic fool to safely state unpopular truths. For the student of American humor, Skelton was born just after the heyday of a movement known as the Literary Comedians.42 This school of comedy drew much of its entertainment from rubes known for their misspellings and hyperbole.

  Interestingly, shortly after the birth of Skelton, a carryover of the Literary Comedian rube found great success in the writing of Ring Lardner. His emergence as a national humor presence came from a series of Saturday Evening Post short stories later collected in book form as You Know Me Al: A Busher’s Letters (1914).43 The pieces, a fictional correspondence from a rookie Chicago White Sox pitcher (Jack Keefe) to a hometown friend, chronicled the comic misadventures of an amusingly self-centered rube in the Major Leagues. Keefe is barely literate, and again the humor comes from misspellings and exaggeration. But Lardner peppered his prose with an inspired ear for dialogue and American slang. He did not so much take the air out of the national pastime as just remind us it was part of the human comedy, too.

  Skelton as Clem Kadiddlehopper (circa 1960). (Wes D. Gehring Stills Collection)

  Why is this important to Skelton and the evolution of Kadiddlehopper? During Skelton’s formative years Lardner’s rube-orientated humor cast a huge shadow on American comedy, from the Keefe pieces to later Lardner diamond tales such as the celebrated short story “Alibi Ike” (1915), and the play Elmer the Great (1928, coscripted with George M. Cohan). Moreover, Lardner’s baseball rubes are from Indiana. Keefe begins his correspondence from Terre Haute, long a popular place name for humorists in search of funny sounding towns. Elmer starts in the small Hoosier town of Gentryville. And despite Lardner’s early 1930s death, his legacy continued for years, fueled in part by the very popular Joe E. Brown film trilogy, Fireman, Save My Child (1932, from Keefe-like material), Elmer the Great (1933), and Alibi Ike (1935).

  Another conceivable Indiana-based literary rube who might have impacted Skelton’s Kadiddlehopper is Kin Hubbard’s Abe Martin, whose comic axioms were syndicated in hundreds of newspapers throughout the United States during Skelton’s youth. No less a humorist than Will Rogers believed that Hubbard was “the funniest man in America.”44 Martin was more cracker-barrel philosopher than fool (Kadiddlehopper was often simply “crackers”), but there are small-town Indiana parallels, especially since Martin became progressively more antiheroic through the years.45 For instance, “Th’ first thing a feller does when he’s held up is change his mind about what he used t’ think he’d do,” is something Kadiddlehopper might have said, too.46 In addition, one cannot help noting the close proximity of Skelton and Kadiddlehopper’s poor Vincennes to Abe Martin’s down-home base in Brown County, Indiana. In either case, they are throwbacks to an earlier, harder time. As Martin once opined, “Beauty is only skin deep but it’s a valuable asset if you’re poor or haven’t any sense.”47 New York Herald Tribune media critic John Crosby even placed Skelton’s Kadiddlehopper in a timeframe that paralleled both the original Literary Comedians and the Hubbard/Martin formative years: “Clem Kadiddlehopper is a rustic of rococo design not seen in these parts since the 1880’s.”48

  Besides these hypothetical takes upon the creation of Skelton’s Kadiddlehopper, one must add a final pertinent entertainer the comedian claims to have met during his childhood—Ed Wynn. A vaudeville headliner before he was twenty, Wynn first started appearing in Broadway’s acclaimed Ziegfeld Follies in 1914. His comedy persona was known as the “Perfect Fool,” a country rube with a high-pitched voice, an unbelievably happy nature, and a propensity for funny hats. Wynn rode this loopy character to a lengthy stage success, as well as later triumphs on radio, television, and the occasional movie. One such inspired late-career appearance of his “Perfect Fool” was when Wynn was cast as the somewhat befuddled fairy godfather to Jerry Lewis’s title character in the film Cinderfella (1960).

  An undated Ed Wynn appearance on Skelton’s hit CBS television program. (Wes D. Gehring Stills Collection)

  As the aforementioned description of Wynn’s “Perfect Fool” suggests, there are definite parallels with Skelton’s later Kadiddlehopper. In addition, both characters could run a broad range of emotions, from a slapstick over eagerness to please to a propensity for pathos. Also, Skelton and Wynn enjoyed taking their alter ego off the stage, such as unexpectantly popping up in the audience before a show, or somehow managing to be at the door to shake the surprised hands of exiting fans. During the 1930s Skelton even had a baseball sketch where he ran from the stage to the back of the theater to catch an imaginary baseball. Fifty years later, Skelton sometimes got on the public-address system shortly before curtain time to provide comically nonsensical traffic reports. Besides amusing and further endearing themselves to their public, it was good business—fans never knew where they would surface. (This practice was not limited to Wynn and Skelton. For example, Brown sometimes worked the box-office window of his stage show.)

  So when did young Skelton meet Wynn? Here the story gets a little murky, not unlike the claim that the comedian’s father was a clown. Skelton’s age at the time varies from reference to reference, ranging from seven to fifteen. The comedian himself has often contributed to the confusion with conflicting stories. But in the mid-1980s he actually gave a newspaper reporter a specific year (1923), something he had rarely, if ever, done.49 This would have made him approximately ten years old.

  The story begins with Skelton selling newspapers in front of the theater where Wynn’s stage show was booked. A stranger asked the youngster, “What do you do for excitement in this town?” The boy politely replied, “Well, sir, we’ve got a big show coming into the theatre tonight. You could go to that.” When the stranger asked him if he was going to attend, Skelton said he had newspapers to sell. The man then bought all his papers, to ensure that the youngster saw the show. Years later Skelton concluded this anecdote by adding, “I’ll never forget how surprised I was that night to see that the guy who had bought all my papers was the star of the show.”50 The event proved so memorable that Skelton decided that night he would become a comedian, something the boy shared with Wynn after the show, as he thanked the performer for making it possible.

  The only problem with the story is that there is no evidence of a Wynn stop in Vincennes during the time periods cited. Poring over period publications, in which a visit by someone of Wynn’s status would have generated sizable coverage, I have yet to find documentation of the event. In fact, a prominent Vincennes University historian has confided to me privately that he feels the Wynn connection should be assigned to Indiana folklore. I am not prepared to go that far, though chronicling this as another Skelton example of the aforementioned Big Fish phenomenon is tempting.

  The case for a Skelton-Wynn connection is also damaged by the fact that Skelton does not include the story in early high-profile chronicles of his life. In late 1941 he authored (probably dictated to first wife Edna Stillwell Skelton) a five-part autobiography that ran in the Milwaukee Journal under the title “I’ll Tell All.”51 No mention of Wynn occurs. Six years later, when Skelton was profiled in the prestigious Current Biography, Wynn is again missing in action.52 For such a seemingly significant event, it seems odd that the story only surfaced in the 1950s, in conjunction with one of Wynn’s guest appearances on Skelton’s television show. In fairness to Skelton, he does bring the Vincennes visit up with Wynn on the program. But when I presented this television evidence to my doubting Vincennes University historian, he had a simple rebuttal—the vacuous look in Wynn’s eyes during the segment suggests a polite acquiescence instead of an actual memory.

  Personally, I am convinced a visiting vaudevillian
showed a special kindness to young Skelton, the sidewalk newsboy. Whether or not it was actually Wynn will probably forever remain a mystery. But the story deserves a special addendum. It first surfaced at a time when Wynn’s career was on the skids. Besides Skelton helping out the veteran performer with several guest appearances on his long-running television show, Skelton was especially supportive when Wynn struggled with a breakthrough dramatic part on the watershed CBS anthology series Playhouse 90. Undoubtedly, this experience paved the way for Wynn’s Oscar-nominated Best Supporting Actor performance in The Diary of Anne Frank (1959). Consistent with the great compassion Skelton showed for both friends and fans throughout his life, an embellishment of a childhood event (with Wynn penciled in as the hero) sounds like something the benevolent Skelton would do for a special colleague going through a tough time. In writing an earlier biography of Skelton, and spending time with him, I saw countless examples of thoughtful, innocent fabrications.53 He signed autographs to strangers, “To my dear friend,” so that people would later have “bragging rights.” On one of his Ball State concert date visits, a fan requested that he meet with the man’s dying mother, a longtime fan of the comedian. Skelton immediately acquiesced, requesting only that there be no publicity. And when he met with the woman, the comedian waxed poetic about what a wonderful mother she had been. Skelton was forever the thoughtful embellisher. I am convinced this trait lies at the heart of the Wynn story. As Abe Martin once noted, “It’s purty hard t’ be interestin’ without embellishin’ th’ truth a little.”54

  While Skelton was later in a position to tweak his biography, there was no fooling anyone when he was a poor youngster. One of the most painful results of this situation was losing his first teenage girlfriend, Velma Thompson of Vincennes. According to Velma’s younger sister, Janice Thompson Dudley, the girls’ parents broke up the romance with Skelton because he “had no future.”55 One can hardly blame the Thompsons. Besides Skelton’s impoverished background and his family’s checkered background with the law, he was then working for “Doc” R. E. Lewis’s Patent Medicine Show, which traveled small-town middle America selling a magic bottled elixir. The youngster who had showed huckster traits in earlier money-making schemes had graduated to working for a seasoned con artist.

  A funny-sad story of Skelton conning the con artist (“Doc” Lewis) comes out of this period. The youngster gave Velma a set of spoons when she and Janice were “at the railroad station seeing [off] Red and the Medicine Show.”56 Skelton had no money for gifts, but Lewis’s show sold candy as well as “medicine.” And this former “Cracker Jack”-like product had “A Prize in Every Box,” an added selling point for financially strapped customers. Janice later hypothesized that Skelton was probably in charge of stuffing the candy boxes, which gave him the opportunity to “liberate” six spoons for his girl. But why spoons? Janice later observed, “I would think that just maybe Velma had found a spoon in an earlier box of candy and remarked to Red how much she liked it. And to impress Velma he gave her six spoons.”57

  Given that tough times were the only kind of times young Skelton knew, he forever tried to see the funny side of life, not unlike his early signature character Kadiddlehopper. And as the aging Skelton was “always on,” the boy was a constant kidder, too. Carl Hopper remembered Skelton as a practical joker, once picking up a playmate’s dachshund (wiener dog) between two pieces of bread and pretending to hawk this hot “dog.”58 Another classmate, Dorothy West Hagemeier, recalled Skelton doing a headstand on the train tracks topped off by spinning around. She also added that he made funny faces, as if to “turn his whole face wrong side out.” For Hagemeier and the other students, “He was only there to make you laugh.”59 She might have added that Skelton had a head start with his locks, which Hagemeier called “the reddest hair I’ve ever seen in my life.” Of course, some classmates were not fans of Skelton’s jokes. During elementary school, Norma Grubb sat in front of the boy earmarked for comedy greatness. She described Skelton as “mean,” because he would forever dip her pigtails in the inkwell on his desk.60

  Vincennes’s Velma Thompson, Skelton’s first sweetheart. (Wes D. Gehring Stills Collection)

  As with many class-clown types, such acting out did not play well in school, so Skelton often simply skipped school. His Uncle Fred later recalled that Red was the least academic minded of Ida Mae’s four sons. The comedian eventually dropped out of Vincennes’s Clark Junior High School when he was thirteen or fourteen, depending upon the source. This would date his early exit as 1926 or 1927. (His first wife, Edna Stillwell, later helped him earn a General Education Development degree, as well as encourage his comedy-related study.) Skelton’s formal education might have gone differently had there been more elementary teachers such as Andria Ross, who supported Skelton’s performing aspirations and even critiqued his halting attempts at writing comedy. Fittingly, he could also be amusingly brash about chiding her, if he felt Ross’s comments were too brief: “You didn’t read a word of it, did you?”61

  Even with an army of Rosses, however, Skelton’s formal education probably would have suffered due to his unstable family environment. His overworked, widowed “Mur” (who the boy saw as an adoptive mother), could provide little adult supervision. Skelton’s private musings, both in his autobiographical writings, as well as the occasional verbal revelations, suggest his half brothers flirted with what another age would call juvenile delinquency. There were frequent moves in and around Vincennes, presumably for cheaper lodgings or to avoid overdue rent. And young Red’s food and clothing were often provided by various members of the community, from his sometimes employer at Kramer’s Pool Hall to local songwriter Clarence Stout, Skelton’s first important show-business mentor.

  Maybe the best gauge of this dysfunctional family is documented by the Vincennes Public Schools records for 1923 and 1924.62 A parent or guardian is supposed to provide the name and birth date for each student in a household. Shockingly, none of the four Skelton boys’ birth dates from 1923 are a match for those listed for 1924. What is more, the spelling (misspelling?) of Ishmal and Christian changes, while Red is noted as Richard one year, and Bernard the next. In addition, Skelton was struggling with school at a time when popular culture often suggested education was overrated. No less a humorist than Hubbard observed, “Seems like ever feller that makes a success o’ anything never knowed nothin’ when he went t’ school.”63

  If academies represented the nadir of life for Skelton, the zenith was when the circus visited Vincennes. His Uncle Fred later related, “If a circus came to town, you could always bet on finding Red there—and usually he got in by doing jobs like watering the elephants.”64 Beyond the ongoing distraction a circus continued to exert on children, during the preradio and pretelevision days of Skelton’s youth, a circus visit was like being transported to another, better, world. As Indiana’s James Whitcomb Riley, arguably America’s most popular poet of the late nineteenth century, wrote in “The Circus-Day Parade”: “how the boys behind [the wagons], high and low of every kind, marched in unconscious capture, with a rapture undefined!”65

  Like young Skelton, humorist Hubbard remained obsessed with the circus throughout his life, for example, “Th’ trouble with walkin’ in a [circus] pe-rade is that life seems so dull an’ colorless afterward,”66 or, “It’s purty hard t’ think that ever’ thing is fer th’ best when it rains on circus day.”67 Skelton’s fellow screen comedian Brown later described his childhood enchantment with the circus in terms Skelton would have undoubtedly seconded: “I was fascinated by the gaudy [circus] colors everywhere. The sound of the band and the noise of the happy, laughing, crowd was the most beautiful music I’d ever heard.”68

  Although people of all ages need a steady flow of approval for mental and physical well-being, a disenfranchised youth such as Skelton badly needed the instant and repeated validation that comes through the positive response of an audience. Building upon a knack for being funny, not to mention how wonderful that lau
ghter feedback made him feel, the boy knew in his bones entertaining was for him. This was where the arc of his life began. Moreover, the statement that Skelton’s father had been a clown (whether true or not), probably helped make it seem like a more attainable goal, as well as being a way to reconnect with a parent he had never known. One can also argue that “myths are tales we tell over and over to help make sense of the world.”69 And just as claiming his father was a clown helped young Skelton make sense of a chaotic youth, attempting to be a clown maybe made the future less frightening. With that in mind, Skelton was about to begin an apprenticeship in the lowest rungs of the performing arts.

  Chapter 1 Notes

  1. “Red Skelton, TV and Film’s Quintessential Clown, Dies,” Los Angeles Times, September 18, 1997.

  2. Letter to Red Skelton from researcher L. Ross, February 14, 1964, in “Personal Legal Documents/Papers” box, Red Skelton Collection, Vincennes University, Vincennes, Indiana.

  3. State of Indiana vs. Joseph Earhart, October 1891, ibid.

  4. Robert “Gus” Stevens (Vincennes historian) conversation with the author, Vincennes University’s Lewis Historical Library, 1999, Vincennes, Indiana.

  5. For example, see, “North End Grocer Dies Suddenly,” Vincennes Western Sun, May 30, 1913.

  6. State of Indiana vs. Ella Cochran (formerly Richardville): Indictment for “Keeping a House of Ill-Fame,” January 1893, “Personal Legal Documents/Papers” box, Skelton Collection.

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