by Wes Gehring
Though the couple’s relationship was often that of a teacher to a student, a better analogy was parent and child. As Stillwell comically observed even before their marriage, “I … discovered that he needed a guardian angel. Or at least a guardian.”16 Skelton’s longtime friend and film costar, Ann Miller (Watch the Birdie, 1950; Texas Carnival, 1951, and Lovely to Look At 1952), later recalled that “Red did everything Edna said. She was like his mama. And he called her Mommie.”17 (Appropriately, Stillwell’s nickname for him was Junior.) Skelton’s later explanation was that he was actually calling Stillwell “Mummy,” an outgrowth of her cold, disapproving, mummy-like (à la ancient Egypt) stare when he made a mistake. But even this qualifies as having a sort of Mommie Dearest tone to it—a reference to actress Joan Crawford’s domination of daughter Christina Crawford. Regardless, Miller was hardly alone in describing the Skelton-Stillwell relationship as like that of a parent and child. Powerful Hollywood newspaper columnist Hedda Hopper noted in a 1946 article, “At his [Skelton’s radio] broadcasts Edna stands in the wings where he can see her. During a show recently, he glanced at the place she usually stands and she was gone. She’d just stepped out for a smoke. ‘But,’ said Red, ‘I almost got panicky. After the show, I told her, ‘Don’t ever do that to me again.’”18 What makes the comments of Miller and Hopper doubly amazing, with regard to Stillwell’s mothering mastery of Skelton, is that both the actress and columnist are describing a period after the Skeltons’ divorce—when the former usherette continued to manage and write for the comedian. Stillwell’s own description of her post-divorce relationship with Skelton was “a kind of nurse maid to an adult.”19 One would assume she had exercised even more control during their marriage, which lasted from 1931 to 1943.
Ann Miller (left), Skelton, and Arlene Dahl in Watch the Birdie (1950). Miller was a longtime friend and frequent Skelton costar. (Wes D. Gehring Stills Collection)
These developments, however, are getting ahead of the story. In 1931 Skelton and Stillwell were like many young Great Depression couples, struggling to get by. Physically, the Skeltons were also reminiscent of the then phenomenally popular newspaper comic strip duo Mutt and Jeff, where skinny Mutt towered above his short pal. Similarly, the gangly six-foot-three Skelton towered over the petite Stillwell. Adding to the dissimilarity was Skelton’s carrot-topped head, versus Stillwell’s blonde bob, though she colored it brunette in later years. This comic contrast was pertinent to their act, since Skelton used his wife as his theater stooge later in the 1930s. While not having to pay an assistant was probably the biggest reason for Stillwell doubling as her husband’s sometime sidekick, an amusing physical difference is always a plus in a comedy act.
Fittingly, for someone not immediately taken with Skelton’s talents, Stillwell’s initial stooging for Skelton was as a heckling audience plant. She loved to yell, “Take him off!” Stillwell later explained, “I like to holler, and it fed him lines, anyhow.”20 Though Stillwell’s writing forte was yet to be discovered and she was never comfortable as a performer, her stage appearances were still enough of a plus to merit being singled out. For example, Variety’s review of Skelton’s March 1937 booking at the Capitol Theatre in Washington, D.C., noted, “Skelton, after some [comic] patter, brings on Edna Stillwell. Girl makes pretty foil and gets by with [musical number] ‘Sing, Sing, Sing.’”21
A sexy publicity still of Edna Stillwell Skelton (circa late 1930s). (David Smith Collection)
Of course, this Capitol booking chronicled a time from the couple’s later vaudeville heyday. Their early 1930s beginnings had been less than secure. Skelton was still a former burlesque comic trying to make it in the world of walkathons. Indeed, Skelton’s mother-in-law had originally objected to her daughter marrying a burlesque comedian. (Stillwell later comically wrote, “Red didn’t help matters much by telling her that he was going to reform and become a dope-peddler.”22) Following the walkathon phenomenon from city to city, Skelton became confident enough as a master of ceremonies to eventually ask for a percentage of the gate instead of a straight salary. But consistent with his childlike nature, he naively accepted promoters’ box-office numbers, even if they were watered down. This is when Stillwell first came into her own as Skelton’s money manager, negotiating contracts that also made her the cashier (as she had been back at Kansas City’s El Torreon Ballroom), so she could check on the attendance figures. Eventually, Stillwell worked Skelton’s weekly walkathon income up from seventy-five dollars to five hundred dollars—quite a raise for someone who had to borrow his three dollar marriage-license fee from his bride.23
As good as these numbers were for the Great Depression, walkathons were not always steady work. Plus, one never knew when they would end. There was inevitably down time between engagements. Moreover, the Skeltons’ on-the-road expenses ate up most of their money, as they had to pay for food, lodging, and transportation to the next walkathon city. Early in the Skeltons’ marriage, when they were just hoping for that seventy-five dollars a week, they often had to get creative to survive. Consequently, Skelton fell back on the huckster skills he had employed as a child in Vincennes, where his numerous schemes included doctoring old playing cards and selling them as new novelty decks.24 When the couple found themselves stranded in Saint Louis, Skelton created a fog-preventer for car windshields. All this amounted to were slivers of soap wrapped in recycled tinfoil taken from discarded cigarette packages. But it was not so much the product as the comedian’s ability to “sell” anything on a street corner—briefly recalling the shakedown skills of “Doc” Lewis, the medicine man salesman for whom Skelton had worked as a child. Stillwell stooged as the eager ice-breaking first customer and lookout for any patrolling street cops.
While Skelton could play the classic wheeler-dealer confidence man, à la his later San Fernando Red character, the comedian’s real personality was still that of a man-child who could not handle money. Ironically, despite Skelton’s proven con-artist skills, he was a sucker for competing scam artists, too. In addition, Skelton was also an easy touch for any sob story involving a handout. And after a lifetime of impoverishment, any extra money would, to borrow a popular Great Depression era phrase, “burn a hole in his pocket.” Befiting a husband she called Junior, Stillwell put Skelton on a modest allowance and handled all money matters. Even years later, after their divorce, Skelton’s checks had to be cosigned by manager Stillwell. This was both a safeguard to protect the comedian from bad investments, and simply an exercise in basic bookkeeping—Skelton was bad at keeping records of his purchases. If he wrote anything on his check stub, it would be something goofy, like “None of your business.”
What proved even more exasperating to Stillwell was that for much of their long association Skelton refused to be concerned about money. Or, as she phrased it, “He’s allergic to financial worries.”25 Undoubtedly, part of this was a product of his never having had anything, yet always somehow getting by. Skelton’s real-life personality seemed fueled by the central characteristic that attracts us to most personality comedians—the resiliency factor. Yet, the financial freedom with which Stillwell gifted her boy/man (today’s “kidult”) by playing purse-strings parent became a strain on their relationship.
Another minimelodrama for Stillwell involved Skelton’s proclivity for pets, an outgrowth of both his overgrown youngster nature and the unconditional love animals tend to give caretakers, something a formerly attention-starved Skelton could appreciate. Their menagerie often included multiple dogs, as well as “once a duck, and a polar bear cub they used in their act.”26 To say Stillwell was in charge of pet “damage control” was to state the literal truth. When the aptly named polar bear cub, Snowball, got loose in a hotel dining area, a Mack Sennett-like scenario ensued. What Skelton most recalled was Snowball chasing the waiters. “They were pretty fast afoot but so was the bear,” he remembered. “They’d cut and twist among the tables like a halfback running a broken field but they couldn’t shake Snowball. … There was
considerable furniture and glassware smashed in the melee and no doubt a few nerves were shattered but I think the hotel people were severe [in their angry response].”27
Besides playing diplomat over these pet problems, Stillwell also had to be a fast-talking arbitrator for those occasions when Skelton allowed his walkathon comedy to take on destructive surreal silliness. For example, during a Minneapolis competition he invited a contestant to sing a song on stage. As the contestant launched into his rendition of “Singin’ in the Rain,” Skelton had a comic epiphany—simulate a raining backdrop to see if this sudden “storm front” would derail the wannabe warbler. Skelton began by squirting the contestant with a seltzer bottler, just as Harpo Marx had tried to quiet a blaring radio in the film comedy classic Duck Soup (1933). When that did not faze the singer, the comedian doused him with a couple buckets of water—still nothing. But egged on by an appreciative crowd, Skelton moved to his comedy coup de grâce—spraying him off the stage with a fire hose. This was such a hit with the audience that Skelton then decided to turn the hose on the crowd. Though this topper greatly pleased the dry portion of the audience and Skelton, “It was a [comic] riot—one of the best I’ve ever seen,” the walkathon “manager was all in favor of killing me … over the piffling matter of the organ under the stage which … was not waterproof.”28
According to Skelton, however, the initial anger and follow-up intermediary skills necessitated by Stillwell following the funny fiasco with the organ “was nothing” compared to the ire and draining diplomacy exhibited by his wife when he “chopped down [the legs of] a rare and very expensive piano at [a walkathon in] Atlantic City.”29 Such chaotically surreal comedy was possibly influenced by the often absurd movie milieu of the Marx Brothers, a film comedy team then at the height of its popularity. Skelton’s antics also anticipated by decades the comically violent showmanship of pioneering rock ’n roll musicians, such as Jerry Lee Lewis once setting his piano on fire during a finale performance of his signature song, “Great Balls of Fire.”
Like the “thrill comedy” actions of silent film star Harold Lloyd, forever synonymous with the Safety Last (1923) sequence where he hangs from the hand of a skyscraper clock, Skelton was also happy to put himself in harm’s way for comedy’s sake. At one competition he rode a midget bicycle along the railing of a balcony overlooking the auditorium stage. After taking an unplanned fall and nearly going over said railing, he decided to begin the next night’s festivities by hanging from a beam over the stage. This proved such a hit that the following evening Skelton noted that he “planted a dummy dressed like me on the beam, called to the crowd again, then pushed the dummy off into space. People fainted all over the establishment and once more it was only Edna who saved me from being torn limb from limb by the powers that were.”30
Of course, all these Stillwell to the rescue stories merely reinforce the parent-child dichotomy of the Skelton marriage. Still, the surface has merely been scratched. Skelton had several other little-boy tendencies, such as a 1941 Photoplay article chronicling that “he will have absolutely nothing to do with that newfangled invention called the telephone.”31 Between Skelton having no experience with a phone during an impoverished childhood, and a later mistaken booking experience in adulthood, Stillwell was the only “telephone operator” in the Skelton household. If Stillwell did not answer the phone, the comedian simply let it ring. Skelton’s allowance from his wife also often went to childlike purchases, such as the acquisition of an extensive toy train set. The adult Skelton tended to buy youth-orientated items in collectable bulk as if to be poignantly making up for a childhood that never was.
Given the mother-son relationship that defined the Skeltons’ marriage, it should come as no surprise that Stillwell later used her husband as the “inspiration for the [all-important 1940s] radio character of Junior. I had to watch him [Red] the way Junior’s mother had to watch Junior, or he’s bound to get into mischief. He has the same approach to life: ‘If I dood it, I get a whippin’ … I dood it!’ He even calls me ‘Mummy.’”32 While Stillwell’s creation of this pivotal figure, second only in Skelton’s large cast of characters to the much later Freddie the Freeloader, will be fleshed out later, suffice it to say that this accomplishment rivals her penning of the donut-dunking routine. What’s more, both were born of simple observation. But instead of an eating act being drawn from a stranger at a coffee shop, Stillwell simply had to sketch Junior from, to paraphrase humorist James Thurber, “her life and hard times with Red.”33
What makes this revelation all the more fascinating now is that while Skelton is far from unique in essaying a man-child comedy persona, his seems to have been actually drawn from a real-life case of entertainingly arrested development. New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis opened her review of the Owen Wilson comedy You, Me and Dupree (2006) with a sweeping reference to the lengthy tenure of the boy-man in cinema: “The movies have long nurtured the arrested development of the American male, serving as a virtual playpen for whom Peter Pan isn’t a syndrome but a way of life.”34 But in a lifetime of writing about personality comedians, often in the man-child mold (of which Wilson is a current prime example), I have rarely seen such a close correlation (as in the Skelton case) between performer and persona. Naturally, popular culture literature often enjoys blurring the line between fact and fiction, reinforcing a natural tendency by viewers to confuse screen characters with the performers. With the possible exception of director Frank Capra’s description of the close parallels between comedian Harry Langdon and his “kidult” persona (which Capra helped shape), however, the Skelton scenario is strangely unique.35 Perhaps this dependent relationship would explain why the comedian tried to erase Stillwell from his later life. Seymour Berns, Skelton’s television producer in the 1960s, recalled, “When I first went to work for Red, he used to give Edna a lot of credit for getting him where he was. But as the years went by, he blotted her out of his consciousness. Finally Red reached a point where he would barely acknowledge that she had ever existed.”36
Despite Stillwell’s early controlling nature, or maybe because of it, the Skeltons often quarreled as a young couple. At one point she even left Skelton on the road and returned home to Kansas City. But that seemed to have been precipitated by the comedian giving a pretty waitress some free passes to the walkathon he was then headlining—a very naïve thing to do when one’s wife is the cashier. Skelton, however, was lost without Stillwell and showered her with long-distance communications. Besides, his was a little boy’s approach to anger: “He never stays mad longer than two consecutive minutes and can’t understand other people who keep on being mad when he isn’t.”37
When he was not making goofy faces for comic effect, Skelton was quite handsome, and his wife Stillwell, for a time, was billed as his sister. (Wes D. Gehring Stills Collection)
Still, Stillwell stayed away for months. For a young woman who never wanted children, she was probably coping with the fact that she had married an oversized kid. So why go back with Skelton? When one reads some of the letters she later wrote to Skelton’s Vincennes mentor Clarence Stout and his wife Inez, Stillwell sounds like the most supportive of spouses. Paradoxically, given the reason for their early separation (Stillwell’s jealousy over a waitress), one letter from 1937 reveals just how much was later asked of her for Skelton’s success. She confessed in a postscript about new publicity stills: “I’m known as Red’s sister instead of wife. Our mgr. recommends it—he’s right too, it does make a difference, and we don’t care just so he becomes a big, big comic—Love, Edna.”38
The same letter also reveals Stillwell’s casually warm style. After several affectionately detailed pages she observed, “Gee—this isn’t a letter it’s a visit.”39 There is genuine “aw shucks” charm to her correspondence that makes one think how appropriate she was writing comedy material for such an “aw shucks” Hoosier humorist. In addition, her engaging conversational style has a disarming directness, even if she is revealing a pers
onal weakness. One such example from a 1939 letter to the Stouts is especially pertinent, given Stillwell’s established controlling nature and their early arguments: “Before I go there’s one more thing, Red is always warning me about it too—he says that I’m too much of a worry-wart about [my perfectionist comedy writing] work and that many times because of it I am rude. So, please if I was at anytime during our visit won’t you forgive me?—I really didn’t mean to be. Honest.”40
With this later documented dedication, from playing sister to being a driven comedy collaborator, one has to assume Stillwell returned to Skelton, after their trial separation, with a new purpose. Providentially, shortly after their reunion Skelton’s move from walkathons to nightclubs and vaudeville gave Stillwell the opportunity to demonstrate her importance as a writer in elevating his comedy game. One has to add, moreover, that despite any frustration associated with being a surrogate parent to a man-child husband, Stillwell appreciated that Skelton shared her ambitiousness. Plus, when his comedy gift did not involve fire hoses and chopping down priceless pianos, Stillwell admired her husband’s comic aggressiveness to sell funny—funny she would soon be writing. Indeed, given the immediate positive impact of Stillwell’s sketch material for Skelton and her given outspokenness (such as criticizing his act even before they dated), one can assume she was giving Skelton comedy tips from the beginning.
Another footnote as to why Stillwell returned to her caretaker marriage might be stating the obvious—period pictures document that Skelton was a handsome young man. When this goofy, carrot-topped comedian wasn’t making with the rubber-faced plasticity synonymous to the comic arts, Skelton had matinee-idol good looks. Stillwell indirectly acknowledges this in a 1937 letter, confessing it is good for business if people think the young comedian is single. Even twenty-odd years later, the entertainer/comedy critic Steve Allen wrote of Skelton: “His face, too, is his fortune. An attractive face in repose, it becomes a true mask of comedy.”41