Red Skelton
Page 7
A neglected aspect of Skelton’s involvement in Stout’s 1929 Minstrel-Revue involved his participation in a sketch titled “Memories of the South.” Again, the comedian’s work is praised by local critics, but what makes the routine of more interest today is its source material—Harriett Beecher Stowe’s groundbreaking 1854 abolitionist novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin.18 Though its racial stereotypes are now seen as politically incorrect, the book’s then radical antislavery message greatly contributed to the moral climate that resulted in the Civil War. In fact, upon first being introduced to Stowe, a tongue-in-cheek Abraham Lincoln is alleged to have affectionately chided the author, upon her visit to the White House, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war.”19
Though neither Stowe nor Uncle Tom’s Cabin are mentioned by name in reviews of the Stout sketch, the characters noted are clearly from the novel. Stowe’s book was a poplar source for morality plays well into the twentieth century. And the Stowe-Stout-Skelton connection clarifies a misperception in the comedian’s forever vague personal accounts of his early performing career. Stout took his theater troupe on the road to play other small-town dates in Indiana and neighboring states. But Skelton’s later accounts of this minstrel and Stowe-related work, starting with the serialized memoir that appeared in the Milwaukee Journal in December 1941, date the comedian’s blackface entertaining as occurring after his employment by “Doc” Lewis’s Medicine Show and the John Lawrence Stock Company.20 Unfortunately, other Skelton biographers, such as Arthur Marx, have seconded this later minstrel/Uncle Tom’s Cabin chronology.21
Once again Skelton finds himself in the awkward position of contradicting himself—crediting Stout as his beginning mentor and then pushing their collaboration back on his entertainment timeline. But if the previously cited Stout documentation (correspondence and critiques of 1929’s Minstrel-Revue) were not enough to weight the chronology in the mentor’s favor, another passage from a previously cited Stout letter cinches it. In 1947 correspondence with music publishing executive Lou Levy, Stout stated: “The following year [1930] he [Skelton] had a chance to go with a Med[icine] show, and I urged him to take it and get more [performing] experience.”22 This later medicine show time frame reinforces the spoon story cited in chapter one of a teenaged Skelton giving his first girlfriend, Velma Thompson, a set of spoons lifted from the “Cracker Jack”-like boxes of candy he was in charge of preparing for “Doc” Lewis. This approximates the 1930 date earlier noted by Stout.
Before exploring other early Skelton performing experiences, there needs to be some closing comments on the unique relationship between Skelton and Stout, the parentlike mentor he affectionately nicknamed “Professor” and “Doc.” Whereas, Doll and Beless simply provided pioneering entertaining chances for the youngster, Stout gave Skelton invaluable starter tips on “selling” a routine, general comic timing, and an ongoing sense of stage presence. Moreover, while Stout immediately recognized that the youngster “outdid the show’s [1929] veterans in a specialty art,” the Jolson parody, he also advised Skelton never to get a big head.23 Years later Skelton demonstrated that he had learned such lessons well. After a series of personal stage triumphs, the comedian assured Stout in a 1937 telegram: “my hat [size] is still seven and one-eights and I haven’t forgotten you or the old gang.”24
As one would expect of a fatherly adviser, Stout’s life lessons to Skelton often went beyond show business, from the importance of perseverance to racial tolerance. While the former principle is self-evident, the latter bears fleshing out. Skelton was a child in the most bigoted of eras, one that saw the 1915 rebirth of the infamous American racial hate group the Ku Klux Klan. Ironically, for the entertainment-bound Skelton, born in 1913, a motion picture helped fuel the resurrection of a Klan whose origins dated from post-Civil War Reconstruction. The film in question was pioneering director D. W. Griffith’s Birth of Nation (1915), a groundbreaking technological achievement that romanticized the origins of the Klan. But as Griffith’s definitive biographer, Richard Schickel, has so movingly observed, “high artistic vision does not necessarily correlate with a similarly elevated social vision.”25 Coupled with this, Indiana was a hotbed of the KKK resurgence that peaked in the early 1920s.
Historian Richard Hofstadter has linked the revival of the Klan and other reactionary developments of the 1920s (such as antievolutionism) to what he calls “status politics.” For example, “in the boom years of the 1920s … millions of small-town and rural ‘native stock’ Americans, alarmed by the ascendancy of the country’s pluralistic urban culture, had embraced the organized bigotry of the Ku Klux Klan and flocked to the punitive crusades of anti-evolutionism and Prohibition.”26 With regard to the Klan, only the 1925 second-degree murder conviction of Hoosier Klan leader D. C. Stephenson and its resultant political fallout (including an Indianapolis mayor and a local congressman going to jail), helped curb the Klan’s growth, both nationally and in Indiana.27
Even a cursory examination of period literature from Skelton’s hometown reveals the Klan’s high profile. For example, an early 1924 issue of the Vincennes Morning Commercial showcases a large ad for a “Ku Klux Klan Initiation.”28 More chilling still is the casual inclusion of the rally’s location, complete with its KKK-directed misspelling—Knox Kounty Klan Park. As if the KKK’s blasé appropriation of a park were not disturbing enough, the nonchalant enticement, “Public Invited,” suggests this was the most natural thing in the world, which it then undoubtedly was.
The black friendships of Skelton mentor Stout long predated the older man’s songwriting ties with such memorable African American entertainers as the aforementioned Williams and Handy. Stout’s color blindness was born of grade-school baseball with young minority classmates. “His interest in the songs of the Negro was credited to this. And the Negro’s song style influenced his early works [musical compositions],” a Vincennes newspaper noted upon Stout’s death.29 Because of Stout, Skelton was both long cognizant of black contributions to the popular arts and a vocal proponent for racial equality. Even as late as 1996, the year before Skelton’s death, the comedian spoke out passionately against racism: “I could never understand it [racism], myself. I tried to make friends with everybody … blacks were treated not as human beings. Let’s put it that way … and in some parts of the country it’s still that way now, which is sad. It’s sad.”30
If the world according to Stout had not been enough to totally convince Skelton about the wisdom of racial harmony, there were two other factors that no doubt helped shepherd the boy towards that philosophy. First, like Stout, Skelton had black classmates. And given the extreme poverty of the youngster’s family, Skelton often had more in common with the disadvantaged plight of these African American children. Indeed, the future comedian sometimes received assistance from minority mentors. Local black barber Dudley Miller often gave the child free haircuts because Skelton’s “widowed mother was having a hard time.”31 Second, Skelton also accepted both help and musical tips from veteran Vincennes minstrel man Gabe Jackson. This talented black entertainer, a friend of Stout’s, taught Skelton how “to finger a few chords” on his (Jackson’s) instrument of choice—the ukulele.32
One should also note that while the image of white performers wearing blackface in minstrel shows is now offensive, black entertainers (such as Vincennes’s Jackson, or the celebrated toast of Broadway, Williams) appeared in minstrel shows, too. Granted, this could be used to demonstrate the then limited performing opportunities available to African American entertainers. But it is a little known, ironic fact that the genesis of the minstrel show dates from blacks in the pre-Civil War South. Plantation slaves created an early form of the genre as a satirical take on both white masters, and on house slaves (as opposed to field slaves), for taking on the refined airs of the whites. And as pivotal cultural historian John Strausbaugh notes, “However shameful we [now] find it, blackface has played a large and integral role in the formation of American popular c
ulture,” especially as the minstrel filtered into vaudeville.33 Strausbaugh also movingly adds, “the question of whether minstrelsy was White or Black music was moot. It was a mix, a mutt—that is, it was American music.”34
Consistent with that, Stout was a true populist who, to borrow a later phrase from the Reverend Jessie Jackson, had a veritable “rainbow coalition” of friends. Stout could also appreciate a good comic send-up of racism. A much repeated story involved one of Stout’s periodic Chicago get-togethers with Handy. Accompanied by his wife Inez, Stout had the opportunity to pitch some songs to Handy as well as to socialize with the legendary blues giant. On one visit the two men found themselves in a downtown Chicago bar. A racist bartender said to Clarence, “That will be fifty cents for you, and five dollars for him [pointing to Handy].”35 Handy, by this time a very successful entertainer/composer, lackadaisically took a twenty dollar bill from his pocket (much more than a week’s salary for most Americans at that time), and blasély placed it on the bar. “Keep the change,” he said to the amazed bartender. Life lessons such as these helped mold Skelton into a color-blind adult and ongoing spokesman for racial tolerance.
The comedian’s kinship with black performers is best demonstrated by two documents in Vincennes University’s Red Skelton Collection. The first is a 1967 letter he had written to black comedian Godfrey Cambridge after the young performer had appeared on Skelton’s television show. What makes the correspondence especially pertinent, in addition to Skelton’s generous praise for a minority entertainer, is how Skelton eventually drew a direct line between Williams and Cambridge: “There will be many volumes written about you [Cambridge] in years to come praising your unmistakable wit, acting ability and practical wisdom. Each time I see you perform, it’s a pleasure … We, as gentlemen of the [clown’s] cap and bells … are giving to our generation the love of a great profession as did Ed Wynn and Bert Williams in their day.”36
The second example of Skelton’s lifelong affinity to African American performers born of Stout’s pioneering liberalness can be found in a 1958 telegram Skelton received from Sammy Davis Jr. after the comedian’s young son, Richard, died of leukemia: “Once when I was going through a trying time you helped me with these words ‘when chosen people are in doubt with every talent God can bestow upon them, they are sometimes called upon for still greater service in his behalf’ and your great loss will give infinite courage and heart to others throughout the world.”37
Thoughtfully, Skelton did not forget Stout in later years, periodically visiting the aging entertainer in his Vincennes home during the 1950s. Stout’s grandson, Douglas Wissing, fondly remembered those memorable visits when Skelton “would show up in a vast car and disappear behind the pocket doors [that slid into the walls] of my grandfather’s wainscoted [home] office, which was hung with hundreds of autographed publicity photos of show business greats, and not-so-greats, from the 1920s to the 1940s.”38
While Skelton’s entertainment career, and arguably his life in general, was most affected by Stout, other early performing influences merit inclusion. Most logically, this began with the woman formerly seen as Skelton’s mother, Ida Mae Skelton. Though she was often absent working multiple jobs to support the family, Ida Mae’s half-brother, Fred Foster, remembered her in terms that applied equally to the later comedian, “good natured, ambitious and, above all, clever.”39 More importantly, she always encouraged her youngest adopted son’s clowning tendencies. For example, when he eventually left home to perform, she made him a comic wig and gave him her blessing.40 Add to this Ida Mae’s apparent embellishment of the iffy clown background of Skelton’s father (stories that obviously further inspired an impressionable child), and Ida’s show-business effect on Red was significant. (Despite his later belief that Ida Mae was not his biological mother, he publicly gave her that title throughout his life.)
The musical talents of Skelton’s brother Paul Skelton, the youngest of the comedian’s three older brothers (five years his brother’s senior), also contributed to Red’s desire to be a performer. In fact, Red dreamed of teaming up with his brother. Even a lifetime later he sadly reminisced, “I wanted Paul to go into show business with me because he played piano. My mother played piano [too]. But he didn’t want to go into show business, so I went in alone. I wish he had gone with me.”41 This quote also movingly suggests how obsessed young Red was with entertaining. Any talent, such as simply playing the piano, was equated in his eyes with a basic production for use—entering show business.
As an addendum to Red’s fondness for Paul, their connection was not just about closeness in age and performing skills. They had shared a poor family’s misadventure that had nearly cost the older brother his life. The two boys had been responsible for procuring winter coal by whatever means possible from passing trains. This was a typical scenario for impoverished midwestern families of a bygone era. Ohio-born comedian Joe E. Brown kept his family in heating fuel as a child by making faces at passing train firemen, provoking them into throwing coal at him! (This was the first time young Brown realized his “cavernous” mouth could be an advantage.)
Red and Paul did not, however, obtain coal in the rubber-faced manner of future funnymen. Showing much more moxie than Brown, the Skelton boys actually boarded a local train at the Vincennes water stop. When the fireman briefly left the engine and coal car unattended, the two hurriedly filled their two sacks with coal. They then hid themselves between cars until the train started moving again. Since being poor often meant not only living on the proverbial “wrong side of the tracks” but also near the tracks themselves, the train soon passed by the latest Skelton family shack. Paul and Red then tossed their sacks from the moving train and jumped.
Though this was not exactly The Great Train Robbery (1903), the Skelton family routine of snitching coal was a time-honored system, having been passed down from older brothers Joseph Ishmal and Christian. Paul and Red became equally adept at the task—until Paul slipped. The boys’ normal train hiding place was between the coal and baggage cars, but one night Paul lost his footing and fell beneath the train. The only thing that saved him was a protruding metal bar the boy desperately held onto, plus young Red putting himself in harm’s way to grasp Paul, too. Somehow they held on until the next stop, a neighboring small town. As the old axiom suggests, “desperate times demand desperate measures.” The ongoing challenge that passed as Skelton’s childhood probably made the long shot odds of succeeding in show business all the more palatable.
While piano-playing Paul neglected to team up with Red as a performing duo, the youngest Skelton did get a sibling boost by borrowing one of his older brothers’ birth certificate. Through the years the comedian confided to countless people, including this author, that his underage entry into show business eventually necessitated using “a phony birth certificate showing I was born in 1906 so I could go to work.”42 Paradoxically, while actresses often shave years off their real age, the ongoing application of 1906 (instead of Skelton’s actual 1913 birth) often resulted in profiles making him older.
Of course, one could posit the further irony that none of the comedian’s brothers was born in 1906: Joseph (1905), Chris (1907), and Paul (1908). But then, that is par for Skelton’s sketchy handle on his personal history. More problematic are the aforementioned timeline troubles one encounters when attempting to date Skelton’s relationship with one final early pivotal mentor—the frequently cited “Doc” R. E. Lewis and his Patent Medicine Show. Ultimately, however, the significance of this individual is more important than the exact chronology. Given Lewis’s huckster persona, it is more than likely that he helped inspire Skelton’s later comic character San Fernando Red. Certainly, Lewis has been described in terms equally applicable to San Fernando—“as slippery a pitchman and charlatan as ever mesmerized an audience of Kadiddlehoppers.”43 Even when Lewis admonished young Skelton to work faster, the old con artist maintained a smooth W. C. Fields-like huckster patter: “Here, hurry out with some more [bot
tled medicine]. Don’t be the innocent means of depriving these wonderful people of an opportunity to purchase glowing health for such a minute sum.”44
Beyond the boy’s fascination with this figure, Lewis represented an endless tutorial on showmanship. Like the later song “Razzle Dazzle,” featured in the musical Chicago (2002), Lewis knew that if the product one was “selling” (be that a client on trial or a bottle of patent medicine) was without merit, it was necessary to dress up the proceedings with entertainingly mindless “razzle dazzle.” Consequently, after starting as a do-everything medicine show “gofer,” Skelton graduated to performing in both comic and dramatic sketches, as well as singing and playing his ukulele. (Given that a teenaged Skelton learned how to play the ukulele from the aforementioned Stout friend Gabe Jackson, this is more evidence that Skelton’s medicine show days occurred later than the comedian remembered.)
Young Skelton’s most memorable moral learned during his association with Lewis occurred at the beginning. Between the boy’s natural enthusiasm and Lewis’s demand for speed, Skelton accidentally took a spectacular fall into the audience while retrieving patent medicine bottles from a makeshift stage. Once it was clear that Skelton had survived this impromptu slapstick symposium, the crowd gave him an appreciative round of applause. His chance pratfall was an epiphany for the future comedian, as he punningly observed in 1941, “I went on falling for crowds, and if you’ll pardon a little boasting, they’ve been falling for me … [for] years now.”45