Red Skelton

by Wes Gehring

  Lewis further underscored the importance of this providential pratfall by having Skelton orchestrate a similar “accident” for every new audience, though they worked on minimizing the number of “Hot Springs System Tonic” bottles that were broken. (This cure-all elixir was largely composed of water, sugar, and Epsom salts.) The second entertainment lesson Skelton drew from the incident, beyond the popularity of pratfalls, was that the funniest things were spontaneous, or at least seemed that way. Mistakes and/or accidents were regularly scripted into his later long-running television show. Indeed, Skelton sometimes added to an ongoing rocky relationship with his writers by relishing jokes that misfired so that he could seemingly ad-lib a variation of “I told the writers that wasn’t funny.”

  While Skelton sometimes dated his entertainment exit from hometown Vincennes as early as the age of ten, this was an exaggeration. Though there might have been some random summer performing experiences of a preteen nature, Skelton was still very much a Vincennes citizen as late as 1929, the year he turned sixteen. Besides, the aforementioned local reviews for Skelton’s appearances in the Stout-produced minstrels, there are also periodic 1929 Vincennes newspaper notices for Skelton’s clowning in local circus shows. For example, the Vincennes Sun highlighted the teen’s comic confrontation (dressed as señorita) with a bull (costumed boys) in a front-page story about the YMCA circus.46

  As noted earlier, Skelton’s first significant touring was under Stout’s guidance when the veteran Vincennes composer took his minstrel show on the road in 1929. Past accounts of Skelton’s apprentice performing activities have also included stints with the John Lawrence Stock Company, a Mississippi stern-wheeler showboat, and a touring circus.47 While sketchy Skelton accounts implied these just noted activities covered years of his post-Vincennes life, it now appears they involved, at most, several months. That is, Skelton met his pivotal first wife, writer/manager Edna Stillwell, in 1930, when he was a beginning burlesque comedian and she was a head usher with a gift for comedy.48 Yet, Skelton had allegedly already logged his time with the various just noted performing groups. And this is less than a year removed from his minstrel touring with Stout. The numbers do not add up, even if these assorted activities were really just summer jobs. (To recycle a pivotal Skelton quote, “That’s my trouble. If you wanta good story—talk to me. If you want the facts—talk to Edna [Stillwell].”49)

  What this means, besides Skelton’s weakness for embellishing his life story, is that his Vincennes mentors, particularly Stout, represented much more of an entertainment foundation for the comedian than has ever before been fully recognized. Moreover, examining Skelton’s initial performing experiences also reveals that essentially all his struggling on-the-road time really came during the early years of his show business partnership/marriage to Stillwell. And just as the discovery elevates the importance of Stout in this chapter, the disclosure increases the already significant debt Skelton owed to his guru to success—Stillwell.

  Chapter 2 Notes

  1. Robert Schultheis, “Stark Account of Skelton’s Life in Vincennes Rings True,” Vincennes Valley Advance, October 9, 1979.

  2. David L. Smith, Hoosiers in Hollywood (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society Press, 2006), 88.

  3. Wes Gehring, “The Mentor and The Clown: Clarence Stout and Red Skelton,” Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History 12, no. 4 (Fall 2000): 32–41.

  4. Clarence Stout, letter to music publishing executive Lou Levy, October 31, 1947, Clarence Stout Papers, Lewis Historical Library, Vincennes University, Vincennes, Indiana.

  5. Robert Schultheis, “Vincennes’ Composer Had His Own Tin Pan Alley,” Vincennes Valley Advance, October 5, 1967.

  6. Robert Schultheis, “Stout’s Minstrel Shows Gave Start to Lad Called Red,” ibid., October 19, 1967.

  7. Richard Day, Vincennes: A Pictorial History (Saint Louis: G. Bradley Publishing, 1988).

  8. “City Prepares Homecoming for ‘Red’ Skelton,” Vincennes Post, February 15, 1939.

  9. Edna and Red Skelton, letter to Inez and Clarence Stout, February 27, 1939, Stout Papers.

  10. Ibid.

  11. “City Greets Red Skelton, Famous Entertainer at Reception Sunday, Civic Dinner Monday,” Vincennes Sun-Commercial, February 20, 1939.

  12. Clarence Stout, letter to Thomas Gerety, April 18, 1947, Stout Papers.

  13. A. A. Mercey, “Bag of Tricks Unloaded at ‘The Minstrel-Revue,’” Vincennes Commercial, May 14, 1929.

  14. Ibid.

  15. Harold Williamson, “Minstrel Revue Scores a Hit,” Vincennes Sun, May 14, 1929.

  16. “Skelton Out of the Closet: Red Skelton’s Film Masterpiece Has Never Grossed a Dollar,” Baltimore Sun, October 12, 1941.

  17. Ibid.

  18. Williamson, “Minstrel Revue Scores a Hit.”

  19. Carl Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and the War Years (1926; reprint, New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966), 385.

  20. Red Skelton, “I’ll Tell All” (part 2), Milwaukee Journal, December 9, 1941.

  21. Arthur Marx, Red Skelton (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1979).

  22. Stout letter to Levy.

  23. Schultheis, “Stout’s Minstrel Shows Gave Start to Lad Called Red.”

  24. Red Skelton, telegram to Clarence Stout, March 15, 1937, Stout Papers.

  25. Richard Schickel, D. W. Griffith: An American Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), 215.

  26. “The Evolution of Richard Hofstadter,” New York Times, August 6, 2006.

  27. John M. Blum, “Retreat From Responsibility,” in The National Experience: A History of the United States, John M. Blum, ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1968), 640.

  28. “Ku Klux Klan Initiation” advertisement, Vincennes Morning Commercial, February 20, 1924.

  29. “Clarence A. Stout, Composer, Friend of Red Skelton, Dies,” Vincennes Sun-Commercial, October 30, 1960.

  30. Betty Baytos, “Interview with Red Skelton,” Dance Collection Oral History, New York Public Library at Lincoln Center, February 20, 1996.

  31. Red Skelton Scrapbook, Lewis Historical Library.

  32. Ibid.

  33. John Strausbaugh, Black Like You: Blackface, Whiteface, Insult and Imitation in American Popular Culture (New York: Penguin, 2006), 24.

  34. Ibid., 72.

  35. Schultheis, “Stout’s Minstrel Shows Gave Start to Lad Called Red.”

  36. Bound letters to Georgia, Box 10, R. R. S. Letters to Friends, August 15, 1967, and Red Skelton letter to Godfrey Cambridge, Skelton Collection.

  37. “Our Dear Sweet Beloved Richard,” Funeral Scrapbook (I), May 1958, Sammy Davis Telegram, ibid.

  38. Douglas Wissing, “Red Skelton: The Last Vaudevillian,” Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History 10, no. 1 (Winter 1998): 12.

  39. Glen Elsasser, “We Remember Red,” Indianapolis Star Magazine, August 26, 1962.

  40. “Red Skelton,” in Current Biography 1947, Anna Rothe, ed. (New York: H. W. Wilson Company, 1948), 580.

  41. Baytos, “Interview with Red Skelton.”

  42. For example, see David W. Jackson, “Vincennes’ Famed Comedian Drops in for Visit to His Old Home Wednesday,” Vincennes Sun Commercial, October 30, 1962.

  43. Marx, Red Skelton, 9.

  44. Skelton, “I’ll Tell All.”

  45. Ibid.

  46. “1929 YMCA Circus Scores Biggest Hit,” Vincennes Sun, April 19, 1929.

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

  48. Frederick C. Othman, “Ex-Usherette Leads Skelton to Success,” New York World Telegram, August 14, 1941.

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

  3

  First Wife Mentor: Edna Stillwell Skelton

  “If it weren’t for her he’d [Red Skelton] be a bum. That’s exactly what he [Skelton] said … Edna did it all.
Red insists she did.”1

  Frederick C. Othman

  When Red Skelton and Edna Stillwell married in June 1931 she had just turned sixteen, and he was a month shy of eighteen. They had met the year before and it was not love at first sight. He was the self-proclaimed “youngest comic in burlesque” and she was the sassy head usherette at Kansas City’s Pantages Theatre, a vaudeville house. Skelton was appearing at a nearby burlesque theater, the Gaiety. But vaudeville was a step up on the entertainment chain, and the young comedian hung out at the Pantages, ever available if an act failed to appear. Ironically, when Skelton’s opportunity came, he was at the Gaiety. The balcony box stooge for one of the Pantages acts did not show and a desperate stage manager pressed Skelton into vaudeville service. It was left up to flashlight-bearing usherette Stillwell to both lead Skelton to his box and flesh out what was expected of him.

  The bored and sometimes “drunken” heckler and/or disruptive audience member is a special treat for the student of comedy, since this bit of stage shtick is as old as the theater itself. Filmed examples stretch from Charlie Chaplin’s A Night in the Show (1915) to those old men Muppets who sabotage The Muppet Show from their balcony perch. Chaplin’s short subject expands his disruptions to two characters: a drunk in the auditorium (Mr. Pest) and a tipsy blue-collar type in the balcony (Mr. Rowdy), with the latter figure frequently in danger of tumbling to the main floor. Skelton would have known some version of this sketch, since variations of the routine had been playing vaudeville houses for years. Chaplin had done two stage tours of the United States for Britain’s famed Fred Karno troupe dating from 1910 to 1913. Thanks to Chaplin, an earlier version of Show, Mumming Birds (also known as A Night in an English Music Hall) was the company’s most popular property.2 But even after comedy film pioneer Mack Sennett discovered the English comedian in 1913 (the year of Skelton’s birth), another Karno troupe continued to crisscross America with Mumming Birds in its repertoire. Copycat variations of the sketch proliferated throughout show business, including comedian Joe E. Brown’s inventive later take on the material in his popular film Bright Lights (1935).

  Regardless, the version of this routine playing the Pantages in 1930 was ineffective for budding comedy critic Stillwell—a fact she shared with young Skelton as she led him to his balcony debut. Given her lofty criteria, she was also neither a fan of Skelton’s vaudeville baptism under fire, nor his subsequent subbing opportunities at the Pantages. The comedian’s standard routine, after graduating from audience heckler, was heavy with slapstick—opening with a spectacular fall “into the orchestra pit and coming up with a bass drum wrapped around his neck.”3 Skelton later observed that after taking the fall he would yell at the orchestra from the pit, “‘Wise guys! Movin’ the stage on you when you’re not looking.’ And then I get [back] on the stage and I say, ‘Why don’t you fill that in, that hole.’ And then [I go] into my act.”4 The hard to impress Stillwell went so far as to encourage her boss, the stage manager who had retrieved Skelton from the Gaiety, to fire the young comic. The more forgiving manager had the perfect comeback: “I don’t have to fire him. He’ll probably kill himself falling into the orchestra pit.”5

  In a serialized 1941 autobiography for the Milwaukee Journal, Skelton revealed that Stillwell’s initial reservations about him were much broader than he had ever imagined: “She told me since that she didn’t like my act, nor the way I dressed, nor the way I talked.”6 Not surprisingly, when Skelton attempted to date her, he received a “freezing brush-off.”7 With the young comic still on a burlesque circuit that also included Saint Louis, Indianapolis, South Bend, Chicago, Toronto, and Buffalo, Skelton and Stillwell parted company for several months.

  The two next met at the El Torreon Ballroom in Kansas City. While some things had not changed, such as the city and Edna’s icy demeanor towards Skelton, both teenagers were now in different jobs. Stillwell was the El Torreon cashier and Skelton was the master of ceremonies for a walkathon at the ballroom. Walkathons were a new quasi-sadistic entertainment born of the Great Depression. The walkathon (also known as the danceathon) involved dozens of couples in a competition to be the last duo standing. With no time limit, the event could go on for weeks as the couples staggered around a dance floor fighting the exhaustion that eventually weaned their numbers down to a winning pair. (Competitors were allowed one ten-minute break per hour for food and bathroom needs.) Colloquial comedy of the time nicknamed the walkathon the “fallen-arch marathon.”8 But the phenomenon was a first cousin to all those Depression-era endurance “entertainments,” such as the six-day bicycle race, which was also the subject of a popular period film comedy starring Brown, titled 6-Day Bike Rider (1934). The walkathon/danceathon would be immortalized in film by the much later screen classic They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969).

  Since Great Depression deprivation was ultimately about people finding a way to endure, audiences of the 1930s were often drawn to events that replicated the need for survival skills—a microcosm of their lives. As poetic as that sounds, walkathon entertainment frequently involved audiences savoring the collapse of competitors and the funny/sad sight of the partner attempting to keep them both upright. In addition, since there were never enough of these minitragedies, walkathons needed a master of ceremonies to keep things lively. Skelton’s ten-hour shift as master of ceremonies involved nonstop patter—a running commentary punctuated with jokes, comic songs, impromptu impressions, his signature pratfalls, kidding encounters with contestants, and whatever other distractions he could conjure up. Skelton once “borrowed” a mounted policeman’s horse and rode it around a walkathon dance floor just to keep an audience involved. Decades later I complimented him on the seamless comedy flow of his two-hour-plus concerts. His response was that compared to a walkathon shift, his one-man show stand-up dates were ever so easy.

  Skelton had moved to walkathon duty after a change in burlesque closed many theaters. With tough times and the added difficulty of finding paying customers, burlesque had moved from peppering its parody format with sexual innuendo to outright striptease acts. Local blue laws in midwestern cities often then closed these theaters, making the once dependable burlesque circuit an iffy proposition for comedians such as Skelton. Moreover, in the days before air conditioning, burlesque and small-market stage productions often shut down during the summer. But walkathons initially proved to have a year-round popularity.

  Some later accounts of the eventual Skelton-Stillwell romance have Stillwell actually being a contestant at a walkathon where Skelton was the master of ceremonies.9 Though the often sizable winning purse might have attracted the teenaged girl, further research suggested that this is more hyperbole by the always inventive comedian. Neither Skelton’s aforementioned serialized autobiography nor Stillwell’s own reminiscing article, “I Married a Screwball” (1942), make any mention of her competing during the walkathon.10 When dealing with the comedian’s personal life, I am reminded of an observation on baseball by New York Times sportswriter John Branch—“where the history runs deep and the folklore deeper.”11

  Regardless, the forever persistent Skelton eventually won over the icy Stillwell with his walkathon comedy. “For four weeks I tried to thaw her out,” Skelton noted. “Then one night from the stage I tossed a joke at which she laughed. It was her first smile for me, and I moved in fast, taking her out occasionally.”12 Ironically, the budding romance next had to cope with the fact Stillwell lived on the distant outskirts of Kansas City. Accompanying her home, they “embarked on what he [comically] claims was a streetcar ride that went from Kansas City to somewhere near the Ohio State line.”13 Stillwell later recalled a joking marriage proposal tied to those long streetcar trips: “After about three months, he [Skelton] said one night, ‘Why don’t we get married and save me all this travel?”14

  Despite all the faults Stillwell initially found with Skelton, they did have a number of things in common. First, neither had known his/her father. While the elder Skelton had died before
his son’s birth, Stillwell’s dad had abandoned the family while she was still a baby. Second, both teenagers had worked from a young age to help support a struggling household. Third, though Stillwell never thought of herself as a performer, even after later stooging for Skelton in their stage act, both youngsters were drawn to show business. Stillwell eventually found her entertainment gift to be writing comedy. Fourth, each was driven to succeed, with Stillwell channeling her talents into remaking Skelton into a star. Fifth, as in most teenage marriages, there was also a certain growing-up together factor, too.

  While Stillwell was the younger by nearly two years, hers was the dominant personality. Stillwell’s mission to remake her husband was not limited to show business. As noted earlier, she had initially disliked everything about him, from Skelton’s act to his general lack of education. Just as she eventually wrote him better material, she also undertook a sort of home-schooling mission. Indeed, when the couple’s late 1930s budget could afford it, their nonstop life-on-the-road existence included a tutor. Undoubtedly, this helped Skelton’s sense of self confidence. For example, Skelton’s childhood Vincennes friend, Dorothy West Hagemeier, remembered that schoolwork was a challenge for the comedian. There was a building across from their school called the “Dummy House,” for poor students and/or troublemakers. According to Hagemeier, “He [Skelton] spent a lot of time there but he was anything but dumb.”15

  In 1938 George Bernard Shaw’s celebrated play Pygmalion was inspiringly adapted to the screen. While Stillwell’s makeover of Skelton during this same decade does not approach Shaw’s transformation of a Cockney guttersnipe into a lady (the later basis for My Fair Lady, 1964), she represented a finishing school for the comedian. With her support, Skelton eventually passed a high school equivalency exam and even took some college extension classes. Plus, careerwise, Stillwell’s writing of material such as the groundbreaking donut sketch placed their act on vaudeville’s top rung.