Red Skelton

by Wes Gehring

  An embarrassed but innocently honest Skelton then paid his writer/wife the ultimate compliment: “Before I met Edna, no one ever called me.”16 For once, Mayer was speechless.

  Another Skelton bugaboo for the MGM chief was a more normal problem—he wanted his new comedian to lose weight. Just as RKO had put Skelton on a diet prior to shooting Having Wonderful Time, during the heyday of his donut-dunking (and eating) period, Skelton had again gained thirty-plus pounds. While one could still blame the donut sketch, which Skelton had pulled out of retirement to perform as part of his act at the then mushrooming number of California military bases, a bigger culprit was simply Skelton’s poor eating habits. Growing up in southern Indiana’s Vincennes, close to the Kentucky border, meant Skelton relished such tasty, but rich, Southern dishes as fried chicken, fried potatoes, pork chops, grits, biscuits and gravy, and so on. Plus, what is more common than a formerly impoverished individual putting on weight once his metaphorical ship has come in?

  Granted, the Skeltons had become very familiar with success before this second chance at Hollywood, however, in contrast to their former hectic “new vaudeville” multiple-shows-each-day schedule, the couple’s initial relocation to the film capital involved a great deal of free time. If this were not enough to contribute to a weight gain, the couple also did a great deal of socializing in the early 1940s. By the 1950s Skelton became almost reclusive, but in the comedian’s Hollywood beginnings there was lots of partying and nightclubbing.

  An all-purpose film factory such as MGM had a simple answer for fat—the studio gym. Thus, Skelton lost some weight. But playing the “wise fool” in real life, Skelton had another easier way to seemingly drop pounds. The comedian bought pricey, slightly oversized clothing. Then, when the powers that be would ask about his dieting/exercising, Skelton quickly showed off the baggy pants and roomy sports jacket. It was an effective scam, because Skelton, the perennial huckster, later told me he was still getting away with this oversized clothing routine in the late 1940s.17 But the comedian never warmed to working out. Here is one of Skelton’s favorite jokes from late in life: “I get plenty of exercise carrying the coffins of my friends who exercise.”

  As a footnote to why Skelton eventually veered from being a party person to a recluse, beyond a later marriage and children, was that Skelton soon tired of the always “on” one-upmanship practiced by entertainers. Moreover, Skelton felt this lack of sincerity was especially strong among comedians. Eventually, he divorced himself from hanging out with fellow funnymen. Interestingly, a period joke on the subject survives from another midwestern family-orientated comedian such as Skelton, Joe E. Brown. What further connects the joke’s heartland humanism to Skelton and Indiana is that Brown chose to tell it to an Indianapolis audience while on tour with the play Harvey. His setup for the story involved four film comedians who met regularly, but their conversation was simply an excuse to try to top each other. Brown then stated: “Mostly, they didn’t listen to what anyone [else] was saying, for they were so intent on what they were going to say next. Anyway, one day one of them finished a story, there was automatic laughter and another said, ‘You may wonder why I’m so quiet, but today I had news that has just about knocked me out. My father and I were very close. We corresponded regularly until I came out here and then I sort of drifted away. Today I heard—he died last night.’ The man paused for a second, and immediately another comic burst in with, ‘If you think that’s funny, listen to this.’”18

  While Skelton’s shrinking from comedians was still a few years off in the early 1940s, the huge success of what is sometimes listed as his next vehicle, a star turn in Whistling in the Dark (1941), made him the envy of screen clowns everywhere. To clarify, the film industry then was still many years away from a movie opening simultaneously across the country. Regardless of when a 1940s picture premiered on the East or West Coast, it routinely took months to reach small-town markets. Consequently, filmographies from this era are often dated from when a movie opened in the country’s most important market—New York City. (The Hollywood Reporter even regularly ran capsule reviews from the then many New York daily newspapers.)

  In 1941 Skelton appeared in three pictures: Lady Be Good, Dr. Kildare’s Wedding Day, and Whistling, which was also the order in which they were shot.19 Lady was an A production musical comedy orchestrated by the legendary lyricist/producer Arthur Freed (including Singing in the Rain, 1952), with Skelton in support. Wedding was yet another installment of the Kildare series, and this time Skelton’s comic relief intern had more to do. But long before either Lady or Day was ready for release, MGM was so impressed with the young comedian that it decided to star him in Whistling—what might be labeled a B+ feature. The studio was not shy about this epiphany moment, either. The story made the front page of the Hollywood Reporter, under the headline “Skelton ‘Whistling’ First MGM Break.”20 Then, with the impressive slam-dunk completion of Whistling, the studio leapfrogged the movie past Lady and Day to open first in pivotal New York.

  So what is this pivotal picture all about? Whistling is a comedy thriller, inspired by two like-minded Bob Hope hits for Paramount (The Cat and the Canary, 1939, and The Ghost Breakers, 1940), and had Skelton playing a radio murder mystery expert kidnapped by real killers. The leader of a fake religious cult (Conrad Veidt, the eerie somnambulist from the German Expressionistic classic The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1919) needs a perfect scenario for a murder his organization is about to commit. Naturally, Skelton’s underdog character is elected for the job.

  The headquarters for the cult is a spooky old mansion with sliding panels, secret passageways, and a creepy housekeeper—the same haunted-house scenario used in the aforementioned Hope pictures. This means that the formula upon which both Hope and Skelton rose to film stardom was clown comedy meets parody, spoofing a mystery thriller setting. Initially, this might not seem so earth shattering. After all, personality comedians and parody were not, even then, a new movie mix. Be it cross-eyed comic Ben Turpin spoofing sexy Latin-lover Rudolph Valentino in the pun-titled The Shriek of Araby (1923), or Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy having trouble Way Out West (1937), clowns and parody were an established happy equation. But what made the Hope and Skelton variations something different was their new type of hyphenated hero, one who could fluctuate between the most cowardly incompetent of comic antiheroes and cool, egotistical wise guy. Or, to comically paraphrase, they can talk the talk but they almost always trip on the walk.

  Bob Hope and an unwanted guest in Ghost Breakers (1940). (Wes D. Gehring Stills Collection)

  If this dual personae sounds familiar, Woody Allen, the greatest film comedy auteur of the modern era (post-1960), has also affectionately highjacked the Hope dual personality persona. Allen freely admitted this in his cinematic tribute to Hope, My Favorite Comedian (1979): “There are certain moments in his older movies when I think he’s the best thing I have ever seen … [But] it’s hard to tell when I do [him], because I’m so unlike him physically and in tone of voice, but once you know I do it, it’s absolutely unmistakable.”21 Along similar lines, Skelton was also a huge Hope fan. As late as 1948, Photoplay critic Maxine Arnold stated, “[Skelton] laughs so loud at Bob Hope’s pictures that those around him suspect him of faking it.”22

  Unlike the undersized goofy-looking glasses character to which Allen alludes, both Skelton and Hope had the typical good looks of a leading man—that is, when they were not comically contorting said features. This fact actually assists the duality of the antihero/smart-aleck persona. The viewer more readily accepts the witty repartee of what appears to be a handsome hero. Conversely, when the Hope or Skelton character then suddenly metamorphoses into a cowardly antihero, the comedy payoff is again greater, because one expects the typical leading man to stoically soldier through whatever movie misfortune occurs.

  Credit for this unique evolution of a still very modern comedy character (such as Owen Wilson’s cowardly cowboy in Shanghai Noon, 2000) clearly belongs to Hope. But
with Skelton’s persona already predisposed towards being an antihero/smart aleck anyway, and because MGM placed him in the Hope-like Whistling in the Dark so closely after the ski-slope nosed comedian’s screen ascendancy, Skelton’s movie future as a star was all but assured. The studio irony here is that during Hollywood’s golden age (the 1930s and 1940s), MGM was hardly the best place to be a comedian. Indeed, the studio was actually better at derailing the careers of funnymen. For example, when MGM took away Buster Keaton’s creative autonomy at the start of the sound era (the late 1920s), the studio’s actions contributed to self-destructive tendencies in the legendary comedian’s personal life. Paradoxically, MGM is credited with resurrecting the Marx Brothers’ screen fortunes in the mid-1930s. But it was at a cost—the studio homogenized the team, taking away their iconoclastic edge. Comedy connoisseurs prefer the chaos-producing purity of their earlier Paramount pictures.23

  Fittingly, the Hope movies from which MGM drew their Whistling in the Dark model were from Paramount, too. The latter studio is where that era’s pantheon comedians W. C. Fields, the Marx Brothers, Mae West, and Hope—with and without his “road picture” teammate Bing Crosby—made their best films.24 In the case of Skelton, MGM deserves credit for successfully launching the career of a major comedy talent. Later in the decade there were questions as to whether the studio was fully utilizing the Hoosier’s talents, but there is no doubt MGM’s plan for Skelton was brilliant.

  The link to Hope, moreover, is not some analogy spun by Monday morning academics. MGM’s Hope plan for Skelton was common knowledge in the film industry. This awareness even leaked into early Whistling reviews. For example, here are the opening comments from the New York Morning Telegram critic: “The talk is that the MGM studios fondly believe they’ve discovered another Bob Hope in the personality of a lad named Red Skelton … it would appear that this belief is not altogether unjustified.”25

  If MGM had had any second thoughts about the strategy of opening Whistling on the East Coast, ahead of two previously completed Skelton movies (in supporting roles), an early sneak preview critique from the Hollywood Reporter alleviated any anxiety. This film capital insider publication served notice that a special talent was emerging. Under the review headline, “Comic Hailed as Bright New Star,” the Reporter also predicted happy days for the studio: “Obviously, MGM had only one purpose … [here:] showcase in a modest package the comedy talents of Red Skelton. So well is this objective achieved that one look at the film should bring ‘radiant’ smiles to the faces of MGM executives and all their [theater] exhibitors, ‘Whistling in the Dark’ brings to light … a really comic trouper named Skelton who needs merely a couple of good pictures to zoom right up to the top. He’s dynamite with an audience.”26

  When the New York reviews for Whistling validated the picture, MGM turned loose an advertising blitz that resulted in some amusingly supportive coverage from the Hollywood Reporter: “Large [New York] ads in the gazettes [newspapers] have been proclaiming Red Skelton as the new comedy sensation and ‘Whistling in the Dark’ as a riot. Sometimes, such advertisements turn out to be slightly fanciful. This is not one of those sometimes. Skelton IS the new comedy sensation; the flicker [movie] IS a riot, and the reviews were NOT written by Metro’s [MGM] press department—although they might well have been.”27

  New York World Telegram reviewer, William Boehnel, an earlier fan of Skelton’s vaudeville work, waxed the most poetic about Skelton. Under the headline, “Red Skelton Terrific in Funny Picture,” Boehnel wrote: “Meet a new star.… He’s terrific, as those of you who have seen him in stage shows probably know, because it’s been a long time now since the screen provided such a fresh, unaffected, bubbling clown.”28 New York Mirror critic Edith Werner was amusingly complimentary about everyone involved in the production. But by zeroing in on Skelton and his director, S. Sylvan Simon, Werner was anticipating a collaboration that produced some of the comedian’s greatest pictures (including 1948’s The Fuller Brush Man): “Anyone who has anything to do with ‘Whistling in the Dark’ can pat himself on the back. Director Simon and star Skelton can take two pats and a pinch on the cheek, too. For they have concocted a gusty dish with laughs and thrills galore.”29 The New York Times’s Bosley Crowther added, “To the cheerfully swelling list of bright new film comedians you may add the rosy name of … Skelton. For Metro [MGM] has really turned up an impressive young Bob Hopeful in the person of this jaunty chap.”30 As Crowther’s comic reference to Hope might suggest, several newspapers played punningly with Skelton’s ties to the ski-nosed funnyman, such as PM’s inventive title for its Whistling review: “Meet Red Skelton, Hope of the B’s.”31 But credit the Brooklyn Daily Eagle with quickly moving past the seemingly obligatory pun (calling Skelton “Metro’s great white Hope”) to a spirited differential defense of the Hoosier: “Red Skelton isn’t aping [Hope]. He had a Hope-like style long before it was profitable to be like Hope. He [Skelton] is just coming into his own, and he came the hard way.”32

  Though these complimentary and often comic Whistling reviews were cognizant of a comedy star being born, they were short on specific examples of content. Consequently, what follows is a Whistling illustration of Skelton’s dual-focus personae, which fluctuates quickly from smart aleck to coward. One of the cult thugs growls at Skelton’s character (Wally), “Quit stalling … You get in my hair!”

  Wally’s quick response is equally gruff, “Yeah, well, I’ll tell you something!”

  The mobster’s comeback is an even tougher, “What?”

  An abruptly meek Wally submissively replies, “You could use a shampoo.”

  More frequently, however, Skelton’s Whistling transformation, from wise guy to antihero, occurs in the single reading of a line. That is, he starts out bravely but dovetails into a confession of cowardice. When a woman member of the cast asks him if he is a man or a mouse, Skelton replies, “I’m a man … but tell me if you see a cat coming.” On another occasion, he seemingly comforts a female costar by observing, “To show you it’s perfectly safe, I’ll let you go in first.” And after some broad slapstick (a comic fall down a short staircase), he breezingly notes, “Don’t worry about me … because that’s what I’m doing.” Like a junior psychiatrist, Skelton’s smart aleck/coward even coins a comedy credo grounded in amusing logic. The catalyst for this insight is a complaint from a costar about always making with the smart remarks. He replies, “If I don’t crack wise, I’ll crack up.”

  A poster advertising Skelton’s star-making film Whistling in the Dark (1941). (Wes D. Gehring Stills Collection)

  Beyond the delivery of witty lines, Skelton’s breakout performance in Whistling is also bolstered by his propensity for physical and/or visual comedy, especially the plasticity of his clown face. Handsome in repose, a sudden metamorphosis creates numerous comedy countenances, a humor take upon a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde scenario. This is best illustrated by Whistling borrowing from Skelton’s “Guzzler’s Gin” vaudeville routine, where he plays a television announcer getting progressively more drunk while he samples the sales product during each live commercial break. In Whistling, the heavies pose as potential sponsors for Skelton’s in-film radio program. Their product is a liquid vitamin drink that is heavily laced with alcohol. The response of Skelton’s character exactly mirrors his reactions with “Guzzler’s Gin”—involuntary comic contortions of his face and upper body, wheezing, accompanied by an eye-popping countenance, and the transformation of his voice to a throaty whisper.

  This creative incorporation of bits from Skelton’s stage act into Whistling’s story seems to have played well with the comedian’s vaudeville fans. For example, in critic Wanda Hale’s rave review of Whistling in the New York Daily News, she observed, “Skelton doesn’t have to be introduced to New Yorkers who get around.”33 But Skelton was in such an inspired comedy zone throughout Whistling that newcomers to the comedian seemed equally impressed, too. The critic for New York’s liberal period newspaper PM amusingly stated: “
[Skelton] recoils from reality with the matchless horror of a man trapped in a subway ladies’ room. He is strictly a find, and finding him in Whistling in the Dark was a pleasure.”34

  Bear in mind, the entertainment excitement generated by Whistling in New York was being replicated throughout the nation. This might best be demonstrated by the review from the Washington Post, which Stillwell included in one of her husband’s scrapbooks: “Conceding something to the enthusiasm of Washington audiences over their ‘adopted son’ in any of his merry manifestations, the rambunctious Red would be a hit in any man’s theatre in ‘Whistling in the Dark’ … Here in the National Capitol, where he launched his ‘big time’ [stage] career, a crowd that overflowed the most capacious picture theatre in town almost tore down the house.”35

  What was Skelton’s response to all this New York praise? Skelton’s statement managed to be comic, as well as utilize one of the city’s landmarks: “Hope my head fits when I try to get back to New York through the Holland Tunnel.”36 More importantly for the comedian was MGM’s response to all that hoopla over Whistling. By October 1941 the studio had signed Skelton to a new long-term contract, with a promise to star him in the big-budget musical comedy DuBarry Was a Lady, which had recently been a Broadway smash.37 (The DuBarry adaptation occurred in 1943, with Skelton co-starring with another redhead, Lucille Ball.)

  Ironically, according to MGM’s Legal Department Records, the comedian’s salary was only raised from $1,250 to $1,500 a week.38 Moreover, this was substantially less than his RKO pay for Having Wonderful Time (1938)—$2,000 a week. Still, $1,500 a week was a fortune in 1941. In addition, there was the prestige of working for MGM—the Cadillac of Hollywood studios. Skelton was rubbing shoulders with such box-office stars as Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, Judy Garland, and Skelton promoter Rooney. Plus, there was simple job security. As early as 1938, the comedian had seen that even the “new vaudeville” (stage shows in support of movie palace screenings) was ending. “If you are going to stay in show business, you have to go out there [Hollywood],” Skelton observed.39 Coupled with this practical side was the fact that Skelton had been flirting with film for some time now. Besides Having Wonderful Time, there had been periodic short subjects, often shot in New York. Occasionally promising, such as the Warner Brothers’s short Seeing Red (1939), nothing had come of these attempted forays into film. The comedian was feeling a certain quiet desperation about the movies. But most importantly, the Skeltons were ready to settle down after years of being on the road.