Red Skelton

by Wes Gehring

  Chapter 4 Notes

  1. Edna and Red Skelton, letter to Inez and Clarence Stout, May 28, 1937, Clarence Stout Papers, Lewis Historical Library, Vincennes University, Vincennes, Indiana.

  2. Josh Rottenberg, “The Piracy Debate,” Entertainment Weekly, July 14, 2006, p. 41.

  3. “Capitol, Wash.,” Variety, March 10, 1937, p. 50.

  4. Nelson B. Bell, “‘Maid of Salem,’ on the Screen, and ‘Red Skelton,’ on Stage, Capitol Hit,” Washington Post, March 6, 1937.

  5. “Capitol, Wash.,” 50.

  6. Capitol Theatre advertisement, Washington Post, March 4, 1937.

  7. “Capitol, Wash.,” Variety, March 17, 1937, p. 50.

  8. Nelson B. Bell, “‘Red’ Skelton, Who Opens His Second Week at the Capitol Today, Begins Ascent to Top of the Heap,” Washington Post, March 12, 1937.

  9. Red Skelton: America’s Greatest Clown (Eugene, OR: Brentwood, 2005), “G. I. McPugg” DVD episode, undated.

  10. “Loew’s, Montreal,” Variety, April 7, 1937.

  11. Royal Alexandra, “Shea’s Stage,” Toronto Daily Star, April 10, 1937.

  12. “At Loew’s Theatre,” Montreal Gazette, April 3, 1937.

  13. “Loew’s, Montreal.”

  14. “At the Riverside,” Milwaukee Journal, June 20, 1937.

  15. “1929 Y.M.C.A. Circus Scores Biggest Hit,” Vincennes Sun, April 19, 1928.

  16. Tom Bronzini, “Red Skelton’s Former Wife, Edna, Dies: Married 12 Years, She Wrote Some of Comedian’s Best Material,” Los Angeles Times, November 19, 1982.

  17. “‘Big Town Girl’ Proves Diverting Comedy,” Philadelphia Inquirer, December 4, 1937.

  18. Steve Allen, “Red Skelton,” in The Funny Men (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956), 271.

  19. Frederic Raphael, Eyes Wide Open: A Memoir of Stanley Kubrick (New York: Ballantine Books, 1999), 47.

  20. Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889; reprint, Scranton: Chandler Publishing Company, 1963), 54.

  21. “Capitol, Wash.,” Variety, July 14, 1937, p. 60.

  22. “Loew’s State, N.Y.,” Variety, August 18, 1937.

  23. John Crosby, “Radio and Television: Mr. Skelton’s Middle Phase,” New York Herald Tribune, October 24, 1951.

  24. Red Skelton’s Christmas Dinner review, Variety, January 1, 1986.

  25. Red Skelton’s Greatest Clown (Eugene, OR: Brentwood, 2005); “Clem and the Dalton Girls,” DVD episode, 1962.

  26. Skeltons to Stouts (May 28, 1937).

  27. “Indiana Boy’s Doughnut Dunking Hit on Stage,” Indianapolis Star, June 27.

  28. Skeltons to Stouts (May 28, 1937).

  29. “NEW ACTS: Red Skelton,” Variety, June 15, 1937, 50.

  30. John Dunning, On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 593.

  31. Skeltons to Stouts (May 28, 1937).

  32. “‘Red’ Skelton Tells of City in Radio Debut,” Vincennes Sun-Commercial, August 13, 1937.

  33. Arthur Marx, Red Skelton (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1979), 65.

  34. Ibid., 64–65.

  35. Henry Jenkins, What Made Pistachio Nuts? Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 72.

  36. David L. Smith, Hoosiers in Hollywood (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society Press, 2006), 249.

  37. “Red Skelton to Pursue Feud with Joe Cook on Air Tonight,” Vincennes Sun-Commercial, August 26, 1937.

  38. Ibid.

  39. Irving A. Fein, Jack Benny: An Intimate Biography (1976; reprint, New York: Pocket Books, 1977), 57.

  40. Ibid., 58.

  41. In order of appearance: “The Skunk Trap,” from the record album The Best of W. C. Fields (Columbia CG 34144); “Children” and “Feathered Friends,” both from the record album W. C. Fields on Radio: With Edgar Bergen & Charlie McCarthy (Columbia CS 9890).

  42. Walter Winchell, On Broadway, Indianapolis Star, August 24, 1937.

  43. “Red Returns to Radio by Popular Demand,” Vincennes Post, August 27, 1937.

  44. “Wave Lengths,” Indianapolis News, August 25, 1937.

  45. Eileen Creelman, “Red Skelton of ‘Having Wonderful Time,’ Discusses His Hollywood Debut,” New York Sun, July 6, 1938.

  46. Edna Stillwell Skelton (as told to James Reid), “I Married a Screwball,” Silver Screen (June 1942): 61.

  47. Creelman, “Red Skelton of ‘Having Wonderful Time,’” 17.

  48. “Red Skelton,” in Current Biography 1947, Anna Rothe, ed. (New York: H. W. Wilson Company, 1948), 581.

  49. Edna Skelton, “I Married a Screwball,” 61.

  50. Kristopher Tapley, “The (Tinsel) Town That Ate Superman,” New York Times, August 20, 2006.

  5

  Roller-Coaster Years: 1938–40

  “A funny thing about Red—he has had to try everything twice to succeed at it. The first time he emceed walkathons, he was a flop … the first time he tried vaudeville, he didn’t make the grade.… And the first time he tried the movies, he didn’t go over.”1

  Edna Stillwell Skelton, 1942

  Edna Stillwell Skelton, Red Skelton’s first wife and writer/manager, was overly critical of her husband’s first feature-film appearance. What she might more specifically have noted, however, was that Having Wonderful Time (1938) flopped. Indeed, Skelton’s supporting role as an entertainment director at a summer resort was one of the better features of this Ginger Rogers and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. romantic comedy. The New York Times called Skelton “faultless,” and credited his “Itchy” character with being “the irrepressible master of ceremonies.”2 Detail-conscious Variety focused on the signature routine that had gotten Skelton the role: “Richard Skelton, as the chief of entertainment, gets some honest laughs from an exposé of doughnut dunking.”3 While the picture still plays pleasantly enough today, the complaint at the time was that a boisterous ethnic play about a Jewish “borsht belt” summer camp, which was a hit on Broadway, had been completely emasculated. The New York Times diplomatically addressed the issue at the top of its review: “There was nothing genteel about Arthur Kober’s ‘Having Wonderful Time’ and—bless its folksy heart—there was nothing gentile either. But RKO-Radio’s film version … is both.”4

  Hollywood’s often Jewish-dominated powerbrokers were reluctant to adopt Hebrew-orientated stories to the screen. They were sensitive to how an ethnic slant would play in America’s conservative “white-bread” heartland. But in their defense, period censorship was equally conservative. In fact, in her autobiography Rogers blamed the latter for the picture’s problems: “At the insistence of the Hays Office [Hollywood censorship], the ethnic Jewish story was played by a decidedly gentile cast. As a result, the film was not nearly as funny as the play and, understandably, was nowhere near as successful.”5

  Interestingly, Rogers also believed that Skelton’s supporting role should have been larger. Her brief but highly complimentary comments about him in her memoir were as follows: “A very funny up-and-coming comic named Red Skelton made his film debut; unfortunately, much of his antic inventiveness ended up on the cutting-room floor.”6 These comments meshed with earlier accounts of Skelton’s donut sketch running much longer than this movie’s approximately three-minute version. While the film also showcased another Skelton routine (on various ways people go up stairs), the comedian had numerous other “how to” bits, one or more of which was presumably filmed but not used.

  As a footnote to Rogers, the man who earlier teamed her with Fred Astaire, Pandro S. Berman, produced Having Wonderful Time. When Berman visited New York during August of 1937 to obtain the movie rights to Time, he had caught Skelton’s comedy act at Loew’s State Theatre. But this was hardly a lucky coincidence as critics were lining up to praise of Skelton’s stage act. For example, Variety best summarized the situation: “[The] comic scores every time.”7 Though one might not normally think of Berman as a comedy scout, his first principle of entertainment, including the
Astaire-Rogers musicals, was to look for humor.8

  Despite Skelton’s personal triumph in Having Wonderful Time, which thankfully preserved (albeit abridged) his classic donut routine for comedy history, the picture was unable to launch his movie career. The Skeltons’ disappointment over this fact undoubtedly colored her broad panning of the picture in general. While Hollywood had initially overwhelmed Skelton, Stillwell had absorbed the town’s most basic rule—“You are only as good as your last movie.” In an early 1938 letter to Clarence Stout, Stillwell described a couple bracing for failure: “Now the dirt—the picture [Having Wonderful Time] still hasn’t been released and won’t be until May [the opening would drag out to June], but day after tomorrow Red’s [RKO] option comes up—which they must either pick up or refuse; naturally we are hoping for the best but don’t expect it!”9

  As implied in Stillwell’s letter, the movie’s delayed release had not been a good sign. In a period when Hollywood’s turnaround time for a film was exceptionally brief, Having Wonderful Time had been on the shelf for months. Indeed, a movie Rogers shot after Time, Vivacious Lady (1938), eventually opened six weeks before the summer-resort comedy.10 Nevertheless, Skelton, whose RKO option had not been picked up, put on a brave face when he talked to New York Sun’s film critic Eileen Creelman shortly before the picture’s East Coast opening: “I’m going to be the first in line at the [Radio City] Music Hall tomorrow. Even going to pay for my ticket, so they can’t throw me out [if it doesn’t go over].”11 The interview was peppered with this sort of self-deprecating humor, which often dovetailed into a poignancy that was antiheroically endearing. For instance, here is Skelton’s funny/sad confession about the “nerve-racking experience” of first viewing himself on the big screen in a studio projection room: “[It was] like seeing a photograph of yourself that you know is terrible, and then having everyone else say it looks just like you—and ‘what a good picture you take.’”12

  Skelton may have been able to compartmentalize the fact that he was still funny in a film that failed. Though he remained very much in that “kidult” phase at this point of his career, with a motherlike Stillwell directing his personal and private life, one must never minimize the painful vulnerability a comedian forever fights. Years later, Skelton became almost mawkish in his description of this phenomenon—the potential absence of love from an audience. “A clown is a warrior who fights gloom,” he noted. “When deafening silence [greets] his gestures, the agony comes. [It is] the loneliness of a lover saying good-by, a prelude to death.… There is no medication to relieve the pain, no understanding to wrap the wound in. He stands there and bleeds.”13

  At least Skelton experienced the Having Wonderful Time opening in New York, where he was more of a known stage commodity, and generated some positive attention, including the previously noted high-profile piece in the New York Sun and being singled out for praise in New York reviews of the picture. In contrast, the critique from the film industry’s insider newspaper, the Hollywood Reporter, briefly undercut Skelton’s performance, though never mentioning him by name: “[The film] could stand some extra story footage in place of some lengthy and extremely unfunny antics by a supposed camp comic.”14 The publication’s failure to even note Skelton’s name was consistent with its coverage, or lack thereof, during the time (autumn 1937) Skelton logged in the film capital for the Time shoot. Only one brief Skelton-related piece appeared, shortly before shooting commenced. But the short news item did reveal a possible explanation for the surprisingly vitriolic nature of the later Hollywood Reporter review reference to Skelton. The gifted screen comedian and popular Hollywood personality Jack Oakie was originally to have shared comedy duties on Having Wonderful Time with Skelton.15 The fact that newcomer Skelton somehow usurped this beloved film insider might have colored the later critique—bad notices have often been born of much less.

  Portentously, when Skelton attended Time’s New York opening at the prestigious Radio City Music Hall, the film broke just as the comedian first appeared on the screen. “Out of the ensuing blackness and above the murmurs of the audience came Skelton’s exclamation: ‘!*~z! Those cutters [movie editors] are still working on [deleting] me!’”16 Once again, even during adversity, Skelton was good for an ad-lib. But this time, the disgruntled comic dropped his normal ban on salty language.

  The movie’s negative fallout, however, was several months away. Initially, there were several positives that came from being in a Hollywood feature film. First, Skelton’s two thousand dollar a week RKO salary for twelve weeks, twice the amount he earned from his stage work, briefly gave the Skeltons some financial freedom. This enabled the workaholic couple to do the unthinkable—take a vacation. Thus, shortly before Thanksgiving of 1937, Skelton sent a postcard to Stout, “I’m down in Mexico trying to throw the bull!”17 Besides being yet another example of the comedian’s weakness for bad puns (à la “shooting the bull”) and a general reference to Mexico’s love affair with bullfighting, the phrase “trying to throw the bull” had a Vincennes connection, as well. Back in 1929, when Skelton was not quite sixteen, he had played a Mexican señorita in a comedy sketch for his hometown YMCA circus. The routine involved a comic confrontation between the in-drag Skelton and a pair of actors in a bull costume.18

  Another immediate positive that came out of the film experience was the added confidence it brought to Skelton’s stage presence. In February 1938 the critic for the Cleveland Plain Dealer made the following assessment of the comedian’s stage act: “Skelton’s recent trip to Hollywood … was apparently a valuable educational experience. The young doughnut dunking champion … has improved at least 60 percent. He displays much more assurance … [and] times his daffy quips more expertly.”19

  Of course, added confidence can sometimes lead to new creative enterprises that do not pan out. After not making any professional miscues in breakout 1937, the Skeltons overextended themselves by putting together their own vaudeville troupe in early 1938. This involved an East Coast orchestra (Enoch Light), sixteen chorus girls, and five different acts. Unfortunately, according to one of the Skeltons’ letters to Stout and his wife, Inez, the troupe immediately ran into booking problems: “you see we have some contracts for Red alone which still must be played out and those particular dates can’t afford to buy the whole show—so our manager is trying to book the show in two and three day stands (to keep them all together) while we finish up his old contracts.”20

  Ironically, even when the Skelton troupe hit its critical and commercial stride in 1938, there were still problems. In Skelton’s later (1941) serialized Milwaukee Journal autobiography, the comedian stated, “We broke house records everywhere and lost about $1,500 a week. It was all very thrilling to me but one day Edna sharpened up her pencil and said: ‘We’ve dropped $5,000 in three weeks. We spent too much. Breaking box office marks and losing money proves we’re in the wrong end of the business. We quit.’ We did.”21

  Skelton’s career roller-coaster ride returned to solid ground with a series of late 1938 radio bookings on country singer Red Foley’s Avalon Variety program. Skelton’s rustic humor, especially as personified by an early version of the comedian’s Clem Kadiddlehopper, meshed so effectively with Foley’s country format that Skelton soon became a regular on the show. Given Skelton’s radio experience with Rudy Vallee, the comedian felt better prepared in tailoring his material to a listening audience.

  In a later oral history for the New York Public Library, the comedian explained the process. On the first Vallee program he had attempted a radio version of his famed donut routine. But while the studio audience loved it, Skelton felt the listeners at home were disappointed. Consequently, by the second Vallee broadcast Skelton attempted “picture-orientated jokes,” such as, “[A] lady says to her little boy, ‘You pulling that cat’s tail?’ ‘No, I’m not pulling the cat’s tail. I’m holding on. He’s doing the pulling.’ Well, you know, that’s a picture. The people can picture this. So that’s how I established all my
jokes on radio.”22

  Interestingly, this classic pulling the cat’s tail bit was later used verbatim for his Junior character (the “mean widdle kid”), on both the comedian’s next radio program, the Red Skelton Show (1941–53), and his similarly titled television series. A bratty child seemed especially appropriate for an imaginative radio audience. At this point in Skelton’s career, he believed his strongest radio character was his early take on Kadiddlehopper. Noting that he always did radio jokes that “the audience could see,” Skelton added, “That’s why they liked Clem. They could see this idiot. [Then going into Clem character, the comedian began the sing-song patter that might be entitled Clem’s theme:] ‘Du-du-du du-du-du.’”23

  The positives coming by way of Skelton’s association with the Avalon Variety program quickly mushroomed. As late as December 1938 Skelton was merely an impromptu featured guest. In fact, according to a telegram to the Stouts at this time, a last-minute booking on the program necessitated canceling an early Christmas visit to Vincennes: “Will be on Avalon Cigarette program Saturday night, seven [o’clock, broadcast out] of Cincinnati. This spoils our [planned] visit but we still love you.”24 Yet by early 1939, Skelton had reached nearly costar status with Foley on the program. And after the country singer refused to leave Cincinnati when the program moved to Chicago in March of that year, Skelton essentially inherited the show. Though his ratings for the rest of the season were only so-so, he was competitive with other veteran broadcasts, such as Robert Benchley’s Old Gold Program, the Jack Haley Program, and George Jessel’s For Men Only.25 Most important for Skelton, he had a nationally broadcast show.

  Coming back full circle to the Stillwell quote that opens this chapter, Skelton seemed to do his best the second time he attempted something. Dissecting this observation further, his wife and head writer for both the Avalon program and the comedian’s more celebrated 1940s radio series felt this meant that her husband was “somebody who has to be happy [or comfortable] to be a success.”26 The Avalon show was a Skelton shakedown cruise for the hit radio program he had in the 1940s.