Red Skelton
Page 14
With Borzage, however, they worked this game as if Stillwell’s many pitches were actually old bits of theirs. But in fact, she was merely trolling for something groundbreakingly different with which to inspire her husband’s ad-libbing abilities. She hit a home run with her suggestion that Skelton do his parody of how various film heroes die. Pretending to be merely reminding her husband, she then sketched out some basic scenarios using James Cagney, Errol Flynn, Lionel Barrymore, and others. Given this instant outline, the amazing Skelton ad-libbed himself into a movie career.
For Borzage and everyone else who saw Skelton’s test, the dying heroes routine was the best bit in the film. Skelton’s MGM compilation proved so popular with various studio insiders, it was soon called “The busiest strip of film in the whole film capital.”54 Plus, this never-intended-for-release test later prompted the tellingly titled article, “Skelton Out of the Closet: Red Skelton’s Film Masterpiece Has Never Grossed a Dollar.”55 MGM signed the young comic, and his first movie for the studio, Flight Command (1940), was directed by Borzage.
Marx’s biography of Skelton adds controversy to the comedian’s second shot at Hollywood by suggesting Velez’s recommendation might have been sexually driven. The claim is that she was having an affair with the comedian during their joint appearance at New York’s Paramount Theatre.56 Marx’s evidence is sketchy at best, though Velez was infamous for bedding anything in pants. While such an indiscretion might have occurred, especially since the Skeltons divorced in 1943, Marx’s claim that the dalliance occurred in the actress’s dressing room, between stage shows, is most unlikely. During the comedian’s working hours, even in the early years after the Skeltons’ divorce, the then very insecure Skelton always wanted the still manager/writer Stillwell nearby. Moreover, at the time of the alleged affair, Skelton’s wife had become a high-profile part of their stage act, too—guaranteeing that she would be ever present. An example of this added visibility can be found in the aforementioned positive Paramount review of Velez, which also noted, “[Skelton’s] Best bit finds Edna Stillwell, credited as his writer, also stooging for him in a magic sequence. Miss Stillwell, incidentally, has quite a personality of her own.”57 Even when the Skeltons traveled west in the summer of 1940 to shoot his MGM screen test, the comedian was so nervous and superstitious that he insisted his wife also be included in the film. Strangely enough, the normally gossipy Marx missed a provocative coincidence in his circumstantial scenario about an affair between Skelton and Velez—Stillwell and Borzage later had a real romance. Briefly married, their union ultimately failed because Stillwell was still so involved in managing her former husband’s career. Interestingly, one could rightly argue that Skelton’s alleged involvement with Borzage’s “Mexican Spitfire” later helped fuel a relationship between the director and Stillwell.
Regardless of such conjecture, certain very definite Skelton facts exist from this period in 1940. His stage act was so popular that the comedian was setting “house records in leading cinema theaters in New York and other cities, including Chicago and Washington.”58 Skelton’s live material, which often ran long, was in such demand that movie houses in these large urban settings were forced to cut back on their short subject programs (including cartoons, newsreels, and travelogues). Although strong recommendations from Rooney and Velez undoubtedly helped make Skelton’s second chance at Hollywood a possibility, MGM power brokers might have taken note of all the superlative Skelton notices from New York and other eastern outposts. After all, when one studies the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ clipping files from the 1930s and 1940s, reviews from the many New York daily newspapers of that era clearly dominate.59
Naturally, barring any future revelations about the newspaper subscription habits of Mayer, this suggestion remains simply scholarly speculation. One might best end the chapter with a notice bemoaning the inevitability of Skelton’s Hollywood success: “The resourceful Skelton is in his second and final week on the Earle [Washington, D.C.] stage before a Hollywood screen test. Whether he’s mocking people in a drug store or kidding with amiable Edna Stillwell, ‘Red’ is so refreshingly pleasant a comic that it would be a shame to have the films nab him away from the variety houses.”60
Chapter 5 Notes
1. Edna Stillwell Skelton (as told to James Reid), “I Married a Screwball,” Silver Screen (June 1942).
2. Frank S. Nugent, Having Wonderful Time review, New York Times, July 8, 1938.
3. Having Wonderful Time review, Variety, June 15, 1937.
4. Nugent, Having Wonderful Time review.
5. Ginger Rogers, Ginger: My Story (New York: Harper Collins, 1991), 190.
6. Ibid.
7. “Loew’s State, N.Y.,” Variety, August 18, 1937.
8. Pandro S. Berman, interview with author, Beverly Hills, California, June 1975.
9. Edna and Red Skelton, letter to Inez and Clarence Stout, March 30, 1938, Clarence Stout Papers, Lewis Historical Library, Vincennes University, Vincennes, Indiana.
10. “RKO Takes ‘Lady’ Off Shelf For Lens,” Hollywood Reporter, October 28, 1937.
11. Eileen Creelman, “Red Skelton of ‘Having Wonderful Time,’ Discusses His Hollywood Debut,” New York Sun, July 6, 1938.
12. Ibid.
13. Dwight Whitney, “‘A Clown Is a Warrior Who Fights Gloom … and Red Skelton Fights Harder Than Anyone,” TV Guide (August 20, 1966).
14. “‘Having Wonderful Time’ OK Summer Camp Life Comedy,” Hollywood Reporter, June 11, 1938.
15. “Richard Skelton Given Comedy Spot in ‘Time,’” September 7, 1937, ibid.
16. Paul Harrison, “Red Skelton’s Screen Test Which Won Him Film Role, So Funny It May Be Made a Short” (syndicated column), Vincennes Sun-Commercial, December 18, 1940.
17. Edna and Red Skelton, postcard to Clarence Stout, November 21, 1937, Stout Papers.
18. YMCA Circus program/ad, Vincennes Sun, April 18, 1929.
19. Glen C. Pullen, “‘Red’ Skelton Funnier in His New Palace Act,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, February 12, 1938.
20. Skeltons to Stouts (March 30, 1938).
21. Red Skelton, “I’ll Tell All” (part 5), Milwaukee Journal, December 12, 1941.
22. Betsy Baytos, “Interview with Red Skelton,” Dance Collection Oral History, New York Public Library at Lincoln Center, New York, New York, February 20, 1996.
23. Ibid.
24. Edna and Red Skelton, telegram to Inez and Clarence Stout, December 15, 1938, Stout Papers.
25. Harrison B. Summers, ed. A Thirty-Year History of Programs Carried on National Radio Networks in the United States, 1926–1956 (New York: Arno Press, 1971), 75.
26. Edna Stillwell Skelton, “I Married a Screwball.”
27. For example, see Skeltons to Stouts, May 28, 1937, Stout Papers.
28. “City Prepares Homecoming for ‘Red’ Skelton,” Vincennes Post, February 15, 1939.
29. “City Greets Red Skelton, Famous Entertainer, at Reception Sunday, Civic Dinner Monday,” Vincennes Sun-Commercial, February 20, 1939, and “Vincennes Takes Delight in Honoring Popular ‘Red’ Skelton,” Vincennes Post, February 21, 1939.
30. “City Prepares Homecoming For ‘Red’ Skelton.”
31. “Vincennes Takes Delight In Honoring Popular ‘Red’ Skelton.”
32. “Truant from the Midway,” New York Times, June 8, 1941.
33. “‘Red’ Skelton Homecoming Starts at 10:12 Today,” Vincennes Post, February 19, 1939, and welcome home advertisement for Red Skelton, ibid.
34. “‘Red’ Skelton Homecoming Starts at 10:12 Today.”
35. Ibid.
36. Red Skelton, interview with author, September 18, 1986, Muncie, Indiana.
37. Red and Edna Skelton publicity still, Vincennes Post, February 19, 1939.
38. “Red Goes Back to School, but Not to Study,” Vincennes Sun-Commercial, February 21, 1939.
39. “Vincennes Takes Delight in Honoring Popular ‘Red’ Skelton.”
40.
Ibid.
41. Skeltons to Stouts (February 27, 1939).
42. Hermione Lee, “Casting a Cold Eye,” New York Times, November 21, 1999.
43. Edna Stillwell Skelton, “I Married a Screwball.”
44. “Chicago,” Variety, September 6, 1939.
45. Arthur Marx, Red Skelton (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1979), 109–11.
46. “Paramount, N.Y.,” Variety, March 20, 1940, p. 46.
47. Hedley Donovan, “President’s Birthday Balls Draw 20,000 Here,” Washington Post, January 31, 1940.
48. Cobbett Steinberg, Reel Facts: The Movie Book of Records (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 404.
49. Marx, Red Skelton, 3.
50. “Red Skelton, Conferral of the Degree Doctor of Humanities, honoris causa,” Muncie, Indiana, Ball State University, September 18, 1986.
51. Baytos, “Interview with Red Skelton,” 56.
52. “Paramount, N.Y.” Variety, April 17, 1940, p. 48.
53. Baytos, “Interview with Red Skelton,” 56.
54. Harrison, “Red Skelton’s Screen Test Which Won Him Film Role, So Funny It May Be Made a Short.”
55. “Skelton Out of the Closet: Red Skelton’s Film Masterpiece Has Never Grossed a Dollar,” Baltimore Sun, October 12, 1941.
56. Marx, Red Skelton, 72.
57. “Paramount, N.Y.,” Variety, April 17, 1940, p. 48.
58. “Red Skelton,” in Current Biography 1947, Anna Rothe, ed. (New York: H. W. Wilson Company, 1948), 581.
59. This has been my Academy experience in researching twenty-eight film-related books.
60. Richard L. Coe, “‘Oscar’ Awards and ‘Typhoon’ Click at Earle: Dorothy Lamour, Bob Preston in Feature; Skelton Continues,” Washington Post, May 18, 1940.
6
Major Stardom: Movies, Radio, and a Touch of “Hope”
“We’re all put on earth for a purpose, and mine is to make people laugh.”1
Red Skelton
A popular axiom among writers is: “I became an author because books gave me such happiness.” One could extrapolate a comparable maxim from this for Red Skelton—he became an entertainer because comedy gave him amazing joy. Indeed, such an insight also provides another explanation/defense for Skelton’s mildly controversial habit of often laughing at his own material. Regardless, the comedian had been knocking on the door of major stardom since his breakout year of 1937.
During a late 1940 hometown visit to Vincennes, on the eve of another watershed entertainment year, there was an added confidence to his comments. Discussing his just completed supporting part in Flight Command (1940), Skelton told the Vincennes Sun-Commercial: “If light comedy is all you can do, well and good, but if you can show that your talents are more diversified and that you can play really serious roles, all the better. I am glad for the opportunity this picture has given me.”2 But before one could ask what became of our Hoosier humorist, Skelton, with amusing nonchalance, then stated to another hometown journalist, “Of course, I’m already the second-best comic … Who’s first? Well, the last time I counted up, there were 29 guys claiming that position.”3
In a third Vincennes article from this visit, the comedian’s writer wife, Edna Stillwell Skelton, provided a diverting interview about their new home and lifestyle in Tarzana, California. A bemused Stillwell confessed that Skelton and a “buddy” took three weeks to build a garage that a contractor claimed was a job of “two or three days.” But in fairness to her carpentry-challenged husband, she said the West Coast had not affected Skelton’s hometown citizenship: “Out there they swear that he’s hired by the Vincennes Chamber of Commerce. He even brags about Indiana weather—and that’s a capital offense in California.”4
Fittingly, for an entertainer later synonymous with patriotism, Skelton’s aforementioned Flight Command was a flag-waving affair about American military preparedness, while World War II already raged in Europe. For modern viewers, the picture now seems a fairly pedestrian affair about navy flyers, especially when one factors in a melodramatic subplot involving star Robert Taylor and his commander’s wife, played by Ruth Hussey. But unlike the poor reception accorded RKO’s Having Wonderful Time (1938), Flight Command was a critical and commercial hit. Film Daily called the movie “one of the best of the ‘Service’ yarns turned out of the Hollywood mill to date.”5 And the headline atop the Hollywood Reporter’s review told the same story: “MGM’s ‘Flight Command’ Clicks From All Angles.”6
Skelton acquitted himself admirably in Flight Command, but the modesty of the part did not always merit much attention in reviews. Given his status as a popular stage star in New York, Skelton’s best notices, though brief, appeared in New York newspapers. The New York Post’s comments were most reminiscent of the comedian’s earlier hometown remarks about not being just a comedian: “Skelton’s … skirmishes with the camera, while not allowing him an opportunity to perform the vaudeville acts that have made him a famous comic, reveal that he can act.”7 In contrast, the Brooklyn Eagle provided a more typical take on the comic: “What little comedy there is falls to Red Skelton as a wise-cracking lieutenant.”8 The New York Telegram assumed a patriotic posture as it democratically included him with the picture’s more prominent stars: “It’s nice to know, in the end … that the Naval Air Service is manned by such clean-cut, upstanding, clear-eyed fellows as Robert Taylor and Walter Pidgeon, and even Dick Purcell and Red Skelton, who came along for comic relief.”9
After the years of touring, landing a movie contract allowed the Skeltons to really put down roots at their Tarzana home in the San Fernando Valley. Combining their two first names, the couple comically christened their place “Redna Rancho.” It soon became a depository for the comedian’s many eclectic collections, which included photography equipment, electric trains, autograph books, police badges, and various real guns. And this says nothing about an ever-growing collection of live dogs. By 1942 Edna observed, “One more [dog] and we’ll be able to get a kennel license.”10
After Flight Command, Skelton’s next MGM assignment was another supporting role in the B movie The People vs. Dr. Kildare (1941). Though this was the most prestigious of all the Hollywood studios, famous for its tag line, “More stars than in the heavens,” MGM’s greatest regular source of income came from its popular B-movie series, such as the Doctor Kildare films. Though not quite in a league with the studio’s phenomenally profitable Andy Hardy series (with Mickey Rooney as the title character), the Kildare movies had a large loyal following. The basic formula for the Kildare series had an earnest young Lew Ayres as the title character, with veteran Lionel Barrymore as an entertainingly curmudgeon mentor. Consequently, giving Skelton a chance to play comic relief in The People vs. Dr. Kildare, however small his hospital intern part, was a great opportunity for a young screen comedian.
One could liken B movies to the upper echelons of baseball’s minor leagues—a place to get an actor ready for the majors. For example, at the same time MGM was grooming Skelton for better things, it was also promoting Skelton’s vaudeville comic friend, “Rags” Ragland, who soon costarred with the Hoosier in several films. What follows is the Hollywood Reporter’s period take on that preparation: “To familiarize him with work before the camera, MGM has assigned ‘Rags’ Ragland to a small role in ‘Ringside Maisie.’ After that brief bow, he goes into a top comedy role in MGM’s ‘Honky Tonk,’ Clark Gable-Lana Turner feature.”11 Shortly after Skelton’s supporting appearance in The People vs. Dr. Kildare, the Hollywood Reporter printed an abbreviated version of the Ragland slant for Skelton: “MGM spotlights Red Skelton in its newest ‘Dr. Kildare’ film as part of his star build-up there.”12
Despite being well into the series, The People was another affectionately received hit. The New York Daily News’s Wanda Hale said, “The Kildare pictures are like grandma’s pies. They never fail. It is gratifying that the latest [installment] on view at the Criterion Theatre keeps up the good work established in the beginning and sustained throughout the series.�
�13 Ironically, the Hollywood Reporter found Skelton and fellow comic Eddie Acuff too funny for a serious series: “[The screenwriters] give quite a bit of [comic] business to Red Skelton and Eddie Acuff as interns who replace the ambulance driver formerly played by Nat Pendleton. This is in addition to the laugh lines assigned … [series regulars]. It is a little too much fun for a well-managed hospital.”14 Once again, leave it to an East Coast critic to give Skelton unadulterated praise for The People. The Baltimore Evening Sun’s Gilbert Kanour, who had been a fan of Skelton’s many acclaimed stage appearances at nearby Washington, D.C.’s Capitol Theatre, stated, “Red Skelton again shows that he is one of the screen’s up-and-coming clowns.”15
The “up-and-coming” assessment reflected the thinking of MGM, too. But the young Hoosier, who was twenty-seven when he shot The People, also had a way of innocently exasperating studio chief Louis B. Mayer. Most incomprehensible to Mayer was Skelton’s refusal to talk on the phone. The comedian was somehow disoriented by a disembodied voice coming out of the receiver. Even after Mayer realized this new contract player had not suddenly “gone Hollywood” on him, something the MGM boss had frequently seen in his long studio tenure, the older man struggled with Skelton’s telephonophobia. Mayer, a bear for common sense, finally vented, “Well—but—God dammit—if you don’t answer the phone how do you get any business done?”
“That’s what Edna’s for,” Skelton answered.
Of course, debater-at-heart Mayer was not derailed by this goofy answer. Sensing a basic weakness in Skelton’s response, the Hollywood veteran asked, “Young man, just let me ask you one more question. Who answered the telephone before you met Edna?”