by Wes Gehring
Stillwell was a resiliently upbeat populist at heart, which could be capsulated in her expression, “everything usually happens for the best.”27 One might apply that philosophy more specifically to the Avalon program in two ways. First, in a big-picture perspective, Avalon not only allowed her husband to get used to his own coast-to-coast program, it also provided her with a tutorial on writing and producing such a broadcast. By the time of Skelton’s next radio series, Stillwell exercised an amazing amount of control on both the program and other writers’ access to her husband/star.
Second, applying her “for the best” philosophy to a more personal take on the sudden significant emergence of Avalon in their lives, canceling their Christmas stopover in Vincennes resulted in a February 19, 1939, visit that became a celebratory return for the prodigal entertainer. Feted by the town fathers, the comedian also brought his vaudeville troupe to the local Pantheon Theatre for five shows. And it had become a regional media event even before that Sunday, from Skelton periodically noting the forthcoming return on his Avalon program, to front-page coverage in the local newspapers, such as the Vincennes Post headline: “City Prepares Homecoming for ‘Red’ Skelton.”28
While the broad local print coverage of the event offers a wealth of information, one can see the community pride simply in the newspaper headlines, from the Vincennes Sun-Commercial’s “City Greets Red Skelton, Famous Entertainer At Reception Sunday, Civic Dinner Monday,” to the Post’s “Vincennes Takes Delight In Honoring Popular ‘Red’ Skelton.”29 Moreover, as yet another local article noted, “‘Red’s’ coming to Vincennes has been one of the most talked about attractions that the Pantheon has had.”30
Fittingly, Skelton and Stillwell stayed at the Vincennes home of early mentor Stout. The Stouts had joined much of the town in meeting the couple at the local train depot that Sunday morning as the couple came in from Cincinnati (still the site of the Avalon program). While there were nonstop activities for the next two days, ranging from performances to civic honors (including Skelton being made an honorary Vincennes fire chief and a member of the Junior Chamber of Commerce), the Stout home was a meeting place for a steady stream of Skelton friends, fans, and relatives. The Vincennes Post chronicled the first night’s happy gathering: “This jolly group enjoyed dinner and the air was blue with talk of ‘old-timers.’”31
The most pivotal Skelton relatives on hand included his grandmother, Susan Fields, who often played babysitter for young Red when his widowed adoptive mother was at work, and the comedian’s brother, Paul Skelton. Of Skelton’s three older brothers, Red was closest in age and temperament to the piano-playing Paul. Neither the comedian’s siblings nor his mother still lived in Vincennes. But Skelton remained fiercely loyal to family, regularly sending money to his only surviving parent (Ida Mae Skelton) and having his brothers manage various Midwest businesses in which he had invested. By 1941 these included both a small bakery chain and a dry-cleaning chain. Red, ever the superstitious and/or pessimistic performer, was allegedly using the investments as a safety valve. That is, according to a period piece in the New York Times, he felt “if things ever get tough out in Hollywood it won’t be a case of being ‘back home and broke.’”32
As is befitting of all heroes, whether historical or contemporary, Skelton’s honored-son status provoked many testimonials. One would have been right at home in Carl Sandburg’s epic mythic-making biography of Abraham Lincoln, as it involved Skelton’s honesty and work ethic as an employee at Theodore Charles’s Moon Theatre. Besides being an usher, the future comedian was responsible for cleaning. While addressing these latter duties, the youngster had found a box-office sack of coins under a back step in the theater. (A small-town movie ticket for a child then cost no more than ten cents.) Some time before Charles had placed the bag in this natural hideaway and promptly forgotten about it. The comic paradox of the story, however, was that while the businessman was touched by Skelton’s honesty (especially given Skelton’s impoverished background), he was more impressed that the boy was the only worker whose thoroughness in cleaning had uncovered this secret cubbyhole. The same issue of the Post that included this “feel good” story on the front page also boasted a greeting advertisement to Sketon from the Moon Theatre owner and his wife, accompanied by a Skelton picture, with the following caption: “RED, WE WELCOME YOU BACK HOME! Mr. & Mrs. Theodore CHARLES.”33
The manager of the Pantheon Theatre, Adler Lyons, the Moon’s much larger rival, assumed a more wryly comic position on the visiting comedian, since Skelton and his road show were not appearing gratis at the Pantheon: “I have thrown that boy out of the theatre at least 3,000 times and now I’m paying him money to come back.”34 As noted earlier, Skelton had always been very forthright about his money-making schemes. And this paying Pantheon booking, during the comedian’s homecoming, definitely demonstrates another example of Skelton’s moxie about money. (This tendency was undoubtedly further reinforced by his wife’s often shrewd financial abilities.)
Regardless, if there were a metaphorical Rosetta Stone on Skelton discovered by some comedy archeologist it would be that all stories eventually lead to pathos. Thus, once one gets by the cockeyed compliment nature of Lyons’s comments on Skelton, the Pantheon manager reveals an underlying mournfulness to his tale about the comedian. Those “3,000 times” Lyons tossed Skelton out of the theater were not about punishing a poor kid for sneaking into the movies: “It was a regular nightly duty for months to be sure ‘Red’ had left the premises before closing up after the last show to make sure he wouldn’t get locked in all night.”35 I later asked the comedian about this statement, Lyons’s irony laced with pathos. I wanted to know if it meant the sheer magnetism of the theater was responsible for holding him, or if he hid there simply because it was a warm sanctuary during winter months when his home was a cold, drafty rental shack.36 Unfortunately, I never really got a straight answer. Skelton had a way of ignoring a question he did not like. And while he had often expressed his love of any theater setting, I also believe that the then luxurious Pantheon would have been preferable to an attic bed where he often awoke to find snow on his quilt. But to tell me that would probably, in Skelton’s mind, somehow reflect badly upon his beloved, overworked adoptive mother. Of course, biography, unlike a detective story, is a genre where one has to sometime live without exact answers.
Along more amusing lines, one could argue that Skelton’s noteworthy Vincennes visit produced a second star—Stillwell. Sifting through period press coverage I was reminded of President John F. Kennedy’s (1961) tongue-in-cheek comment about being eclipsed by his beautiful wife on a state visit to France: “I am the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris and I have enjoyed it.” Skelton had inadvertently encouraged Stillwell’s elevated status by her more prominent position in the act when they had both been guests on Vallee’s radio program a few months earlier. Then add the fact that Stillwell was an extremely attractive, leggy blonde, whose physical attributes were showcased in a provocative publicity pose that ran in the Post on the day of the couple’s arrival, and one has another reason for all the local interest in her.37 Indeed, Skelton’s secondary placement in said picture suggested that Stillwell was the star and he was the stooge. Her sex appeal is also implied in a visit the couple made to a journalism class at Vincennes’s Lincoln High School. When Skelton asked the students what they would most “like to know,” the “unanimous answer” was: “We would like to know how you met your wife.” Appropriately, even the front page Vincennes Sun-Commercial article covering this academic stop has a slightly suggestive title, “Red Goes Back to School, but Not to Study.”38
Befitting Stillwell’s status as Skelton’s writer, she was not just another pretty face. She was quick to respond verbally to comic situations. For instance, on one of Skelton’s radio broadcasts he claimed to have last left Vincennes barefoot. Consequently, among the gifts that the comedian received from the town fathers were “a pair of very serviceable though hardly becomi
ng … shoes.” While a surprised Skelton looked on, Stillwell responded, “He’ll wear them to his next [radio] broadcast.”39 The Post undoubtedly spoke for most of the comedian’s hometown when it observed that “Mrs. Skelton was practically a ‘native daughter’ by the time she said her ‘good-byes.’ Vincennes warmed immediately to her gracious and cultured charms. All agree she was the girl for ‘our boy.’”40
While Skelton’s vagabond vaudevillian lifestyle had kept the comedian away from Vincennes for years, the special homecoming celebration and his steady radio work in Chicago changed all that. When Stillwell wrote a lengthy thank-you letter to the Stouts following the Skeltons’ triumphant visit, she promised they would make regular pilgrimages back—a fact that is borne out by later press coverage. The same correspondence hinted at a modest degree of normalcy made possible by the Avalon show: “We are going to have a lot of our stuff brought on from the coast [California]—such as, our dog, car, books and a lot of other knickknacks. I think they would be nice for Red—he misses the dog so.”41
Biographer Hermione Lee feels that the greatest challenge to a profiler is “trying to see the life and the work as part of a total pattern.”42 But for Skelton the man-child, equating work with play was the only pattern in which the comedian felt comfortable. Like a hungry man going after a waffle, the long deprived young comedian embraced life and entertaining as fully as possible. Since, according to Stillwell, Skelton was “allergic to rest and quiet,” she often channeled his high energy into a mutual drive to succeed.43 For the eternally optimistic couple, the vast world of entertainment was as simple and straightforward as the alphabet, with just as many possibilities. When Skelton was not contracted for a second season on Avalon (where the new rustic comedian was Cliff Arquette, later famous for his Charley Weaver character), Skelton successfully returned to what was sometimes called “new vaudeville”—stage show support of first-run feature films.
Though Skelton’s notices were again strong, he was not immune to rough spots, most specifically, the forced retirement of his signature donut sketch. He had been doing the routine for three years, and a Variety review of a September 1939 engagement in Chicago voiced a common complaint: “The disappointment is Skelton, with this moth-eaten vaud routine. The donut dunking bit, which used to get laughs, failed to connect at all with [the] audience.”44
Once again, however, it was Stillwell to the rescue. By early 1940 she had fashioned a new routine that became more synonymous with Skelton than the donut sketch. Now famous as the “Guzzler’s Gin” routine, the bit has Skelton parodying a television announcer doing a gin commercial. (New York City’s 1939 World’s Fair had made the “new” technology of television a hot topic.) With each commercial break, Skelton’s announcer downs a generous portion of the product, getting progressively more drunk. Best showcased in the Ziegfeld Follies (1946), Skelton also periodically performed the sketch on his long-running television program. His original pitch for the gin had him claiming, “No bad aftertaste, no upsetting of the nerves. Just a nice, smooth drink.” But as Skelton’s character gets ever more entertainingly hammered, the advertising copy is eventually reduced to the single drawn-out word: “Smoooooooooooooth!” To this day it remains the most diverting of routines, as well as being a special favorite among my college students when I lecture on personality comedians.
Skelton doing his “Guzzler’s Gin” routine (circa 1941). (Vincennes University Foundation, Red Skelton Collection)
Although Arthur Marx’s biography of Skelton makes a case for the sketch having been lifted from Fred Allen’s radio show, that two-person routine involved an announcer being coached by a radio director.45 Skelton’s commercial spoof was strictly solo, interspersed with the comedian doubling as the program’s featured talent, an amusing professorial poet. That is, when Skelton was not getting ever more looped pitching and sampling the gin, his poet was reciting such “weighty” verse as: “I bought my girl some garters; bought at the five and ten; she gave them to her mother; that’s the last I’ll see of them.”
What is more, the Allen radio routine was strictly a verbal bit, while Skelton’s sketch is inspiringly embellished with Stillwell’s patented pantomime, which has become Skelton’s greatest legacy. (That is why Skelton is playing a television announcer.) This verbal shtick involves everything from the comedian gradually assuming the general demeanor of a drunk to the amusing problems he has with props, such as the coat sleeve that swallows his arm. If Stillwell’s routine is stolen, then someone might claim Lucille Ball’s revered “Vitameatavegamin” sketch is lifted, too. Part of the I Love Lucy episode “Lucy Does a TV Commercial” (first broadcast May 5, 1952), the Vitameatavegamin bit had the comedienne getting increasingly inebriated as she rehearses and samples an alcohol-laced vitamin product. Paradoxically, of these three drinking routines, Ball’s take is by far the most famous. Maybe the secret is not being first but most frequent; through syndication I Love Lucy has been on continuously for more than half a century.
Though Skelton never complained publicly about Lucille Ball’s “Vitameatavegamin” 1952 television sketch, he was unhappy about how closely it mirrored his “Guzzler’s Gin” routine. (Wes D. Gehring Stills Collection)
Fueled in part by “Guzzler’s Gin,” Skelton’s stage notices in 1940 approached the sterling reviews immediately following the American introduction of the donut sketch in 1937. For example, here is Variety’s take on the comedian’s appearance at New York City’s Paramount Theatre, emceeing a bill that also featured Frank Sinatra: “Red Skelton clicks mightily with various takeoffs, from the opening ‘pigeon-toed jitterbug’ … to his finale ‘television announcer’ interlude. Latter is a howl all the way … Gets progressively drunk as the commercials come and go, and at the end is paralyzed [drunk]. Audience eats it up.”46
Earlier in 1940 Skelton scored critical success as the emcee of a birthday party/infantile paralysis charity ball on behalf of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the nation’s capital. According to the Washington Post, this particular installment of the annual White House-sponsored bash drew twenty thousand people, with an army of entertainment celebrities motoring among celebrations at eight area hotels and two movie theatres.47 While Skelton’s favored status with Roosevelt had made the comedian a regular at these gatherings since the late 1930s, this festivity paid special Hollywood dividends for Skelton.
Skelton’s Washington, D.C., emcee duties had him interacting with a who’s who of movie stars, including America’s top box-office favorite of 1939, Mickey Rooney, a position he retained through 1941.48 Rooney was equally popular with the president, especially after his affectionately comic impersonation of Roosevelt in MGM’s Babes in Arms (1939, with Judy Garland). Thus, Skelton and Rooney’s paths kept crossing during the charity activities of 1940, and the young actor was impressed with Skelton’s casual comedy style, such as Skelton interrupting a White House birthday toast with the warning, “Careful what you drink, Mr. President. I once got rolled in a joint like this.”49 (Besides charming Roosevelt, the line was a favorite with Skelton, too. Years later, when I repeated it during a keynote address honoring the comedian, Skelton smilingly nodded, as if to imply, “I can’t believe I was brash enough to say that.”50) Consequently, according to Skelton, Rooney promptly told his MGM studio boss, Louis B. Mayer, “There’s a guy [Skelton] at the White House, funny as can be. You ought to get him.”51
Normally, the recommendation of a box-office favorite such as Rooney would be more than enough to give Skelton a second chance at Hollywood, especially with Mayer having almost a father-son relationship with Rooney. But Skelton also had another filmland insider who was a fervent fan, the tempestuous, temperamental Mexican dancer/actress/singer Lupe Velez. A former nightclub performer who broke into movies as an exotic addition to Laurel and Hardy’s short subject Sailors Beware (1927), Velez soon heated up the screen as Douglas Fairbanks Sr.’s leading lady in The Gaucho (1927). Her intermittent screen career in the 1930s was often oversha
dowed by a stormy marriage to Tarzan star Johnny Weissmuller, with their public quarrels often spilling over into the scandal sheets. The title of one of her later popular pictures, Mexican Spitfire (1940), perfectly captures her persona for period fans.
So, how does Velez connect to Skelton? And what kind of clout would she have in Hollywood, since she was not in a box-office league with Rooney? The “Mexican Spitfire” costarred with Skelton for part of his April 1940 booking at New York City’s Paramount Theatre. Skelton’s comedy impressed Velez, especially when his stooging for her helped flesh out a thin act, or, as Variety put it, “[Velez’s] informality [is] making it appear that she lacks an act. That’s true enough but she overcomes it pretty well on sheer vivacity and personality.”52 Skelton later observed, “She was going with [two-time Oscar-winning MGM director] Frank Borzage at the time. She got him on the phone and she says, ‘There’s a guy here that looks like a turkey [with his red hair]. You got to put him in a movie.’”53
Skelton later costarred with Mickey Rooney in Thousands Cheer (1943, with Virginia O’Brien). (Wes D. Gehring Stills Collection)
With such strong support from Velez and Rooney, Skelton shot an MGM screen test later that spring with Borzage overseeing the production. The test might have been labeled “Red’s Greatest Hits,” since it included everything of note in his repertoire, from his career-making donut-dunking sketch to the comedian’s then new “Guzzler’s Gin” routine. But Borzage was a tough audience, despite the production crew being bowled over by Skelton’s broad comedy. The director wanted something different, edgier. This was the catalyst for a demonstration of yet another facet of the brilliant Skelton-Stillwell partnership. When comedy brainstorming, she had the ability to endlessly pitch ever-more inventive sketch ideas to her husband. His gift was to zero in on a rich suggestion and create something memorable.