by Wes Gehring
The comedian’s two movies whose East Coast releases had been delayed, Lady Be Good and Dr. Kildare’s Wedding Day, only further bolstered Skelton’s stock with MGM. Skelton’s supporting player reviews were so strong they might have been lifted from his Whistling notices, a movie often alluded to in these critiques. This was the New York Daily News’s take on Skelton in Wedding: “Skelton, recently catapulted to stardom [by Whistling], does some of his funny vaudeville tricks [such as a slapstick routine involving a phone booth and numerous parcels], which caused his studio to sit up and take notice.”40 And the New York Times’s review of Lady stated, “Red Skelton keeps popping up at random moments to remind the audience that he is a very, very funny fellow.”41
Skelton’s gift for physical comedy is showcased in a box-and-baggage routine in Doctor Kildare’s Wedding Day (1941). (Wes D. Gehring Stills Collection)
True to form, Skelton remained self-deprecatingly comic about his sudden emergence as a film star. Late in 1941 he confessed, “That must be somebody else, I thought, and I still think so, for, as I’ve often said, Edna and I came to Hollywood solely because she had a pair of slacks she wanted to wear under a mink coat.”42 Surprisingly enough, Skelton’s abrupt 1941 stardom would not be limited to the movies. In October of that year he also found comparable success on radio with his own coast-to-coast NBC comedy program. The following passage from Jim Knipfel’s much later comic memoir, Slackjaw (1999), might have been penned with the young workaholic Skelton in mind: “[His life had] become one long slapstick routine—like living a Marx Brothers movie, except without quite so many musical numbers.”43
Skelton relished all the activity, and if truth be told, the comedian preferred radio over the movies, because he and Stillwell controlled the program. At MGM, he was merely a hired hand, albeit a well-paid one. He had, however, managed to get something by MGM. His studio contract allowed him to have a radio program or a television show. The former clause was standard studio fare for the time. In fact, because so many major screen clowns from this era had programs, they are now often referred to as the “radio comedians,” even when discussing their movie work. But the television clause was something new. The small screen was years away from being considered a threat to the film industry. Skelton’s contract loophole, however, became controversial by 1951, when his television show made its debut on NBC. By then Hollywood was in an outright war with the new medium over viewers. Studios routinely barred major stars from appearing on the small screen, let alone hosting their own show.
Why was Skelton so sage about the small screen? In sifting through a mountain of material on the comedian, there is no pat answer. One might assume it was partly an outgrowth of his high-profile New York stage work at the end of the 1930s. The city was then a hotbed of interest in the new technology, and this was further fueled by New York playing host to the 1939 World’s Fair. As a further addendum, the comedian took part in an early pioneering TV broadcast during this period. Fittingly, his celebrated “Guzzler’s Gin” routine, about a television pitchman, dates from 1940.
One can sense Skelton’s well-informed enthusiasm about television from an early 1946 interview/article with the comedian for the Long Beach Press Telegram. Noting that “television is here, and I’m trying to learn all I can about it,” he insightfully added, “Television will produce an entirely new line of talent, just as [motion picture] talkies revised the list of silent stars.”44 This was Skelton’s wish for a future television show, “I’d like to appear in one scene as Clem, then go through a door and come out as Willie Lump-Lump.”45
Of course, Skelton’s affinity for television might simply be a product of that comic axiom, “No more things should be presumed to exist than are absolutely necessary.”46 Translation: the simplest explanation is usually correct. Maybe Skelton the vaudevillian plainly saw the appropriateness of television as a showcase for the variety program format that spawned him. After all, during the early 1950s, television was sometimes jokingly referred to as “vaudeville in a box.” Regardless, MGM’s new cinema sensation was about to become a radio star, too.
What gives Skelton’s triumph on radio a certain consistency with his emergence as a movie personality was the presence again of a Hope factor. Just as MGM saw the wisdom of applying Paramount’s parody mix of the comedy thriller and Hope’s antihero/smart-aleck persona to Skelton’s Whistling in the Dark, NBC Radio had even more reason to accent the two comedians’ connection, as the network produced both programs starring the comedians. Moreover, to maximize the link, NBC put the comedy shows back-to-back on Tuesday nights, with Hope providing the lead-in for Skelton. Besides the legitimate parallels between both comics, it was simply good business for NBC to promote the connection, given that Radio Daily’s annual poll shortly crowned Hope the number one comedian of the airwaves.47
Interestingly, the Radio Daily poll offered another indirect tie to the Hope-Skelton link. While Hope had won the “best comedian” title, funnyman Jack Benny had received the “best airshow” award. A popular component of Benny’s program was gifted black comedian Eddie “Rochester” Anderson. Though Rochester played the valet and general man Friday, Benny was the comic antihero. Hope was a fan of their teaming, and tried to obtain Anderson to play his sidekick in The Ghost Breakers, the year before Skelton’s radio program came to NBC. When Anderson proved unavailable, Hope used popular black comedian Willie Best in the film. Flash forward to the initial cast of Skelton’s new airshow, and one finds the young black comedian “Wonderful” Smith. As with Benny playing antihero to Rochester, Smith’s specialty was comically hassling Skelton, a character type handled years before by Stillwell. Radio historian John Dunning stated that Smith’s spot on Skelton’s program helped make him 1941’s “Negro comedy find of the year.”48 Granted, Skelton’s mentorship by Vincennes’s Clarence Stout probably predisposed Skelton to work with black talent. But the Benny-Hope influence here seems hard to deny.
The radio reviews for Skelton’s new program were very positive. Variety’s comments were typical: “Much more costly entertainments would have been pleased this season to have done relatively as well on their inaugural program as did Red Skelton.… It was a very enjoyable bit of comedy and music that, if able to maintain the level, should find lots of listeners.”49 Skelton managed to more than “maintain the level.” The comedian’s Hooper radio ratings for a typical week that season (1941–42) clobbered the competing numbers of such show business legends as Bing Crosby, Burns and Allen, Eddie Cantor, Fred Allen, Rudy Vallee, and Kate Smith.50 The handful of stars, besides Hope, that bested Skelton are among the most notable in this golden age (1930s and 1940s) of radio: Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, Fibber McGee and Molly, Jack Benny, and Frank Morgan and Fannie Brice. Plus, Skelton was almost in a dead heat with the latter duo—the incomparable character actor Morgan (the title figure from The Wizard of Oz, 1939), and the multitalented Brice, whose signature character, Baby Snooks, undoubtedly influenced Skelton’s Junior figure.
While the basic components of Skelton’s radio program are fully fleshed out in the following chapter, suffice it to say this medium allowed him more creative control. Though there were many parallels with the Hope persona, radio (more than the movies) gave Skelton a better platform on which to differentiate himself from Hope. Most specifically, there was the growing number of Skelton characters, starting with an early variation of his seminal silly figure, Clem Kadiddlehopper. This was an area in which Hope did not even attempt to compete.
Along related lines, the senescent Skelton liked to imply that having a densely packed psyche (all those comedy characters) probably made him a little crazy, but as long as he was making money, he was safe from the people with nets! Skelton would have undoubtedly enjoyed the following story from the modern screwball classic, America’s Sweethearts (2001). In the picture, an actor (John Cusack) on a press junket is upset that he did not receive a large luxurious suite in the hotel. Instead, Cusack simply has a small bungalow on the gro
unds. But when he reminds the publicist that his ex-wife costar (Catherine Zeta-Jones) has one of these grand suites, he is told she has an entourage. Cusack’s Skelton-related rebuttal: “I am a paranoid schizophrenic. I am my own entourage.”
Whether, however, one sees Skelton as a comedy entourage or a single multifaceted clown, the twin triumphs of 1941, MGM’s Whistling and the NBC radio program, put him on the entertainment map. And as is still typical of American society, when major success elevates the individual to a new chapter of his life, the public is interested in his past. Consequently, a five-part autobiographical series by Skelton ran in the Milwaukee Journal, segments of which were picked up by newspapers across the United States.51 While Skelton’s memoir musings can sometimes become apocryphal, as has been noted earlier in the text, the main thrust of the Journal story was a fundamental truth: “in his most fantastic moments before the cameras, he never portrayed a story more amazing than his own.”52 Skelton’s public fame soon reconfigured his private life.
Chapter 6 Notes
1. Fred D. Cavinder, The Indiana Book of Quotes (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society Press, 2005), 215.
2. “Skelton, Back Home from Hollywood, Reveals He Has Gone Serious in New Film,” Vincennes Sun-Commercial, October 14, 1940.
3. Paul Harrison, “Red Skelton’s Screen Test Which Won Him Film Role, So Funny It May Be Made a Short,” Vincennes Sun-Commercial, October 18, 1940.
4. “Swings Hammer,” Vincennes Post, October 15, 1940.
5. Flight Command review, Film Daily, December 23, 1940.
6. “MGM’s ‘Flight Command’ Clicks from All Angles,” Hollywood Reporter, December 17, 1940.
7. Archer Winsten, “‘Flight Command’ Zooms into Capitol Theatre,” New York Post, January 17, 1941.
8. Robert Francis, “‘Flight Command’ at the Capitol,” Brooklyn Eagle, January 17, 1941.
9. Leo Mishkin, Flight Command review, New York Telegram, January 17, 1941.
10. Edna Stillwell Skelton (as told to James Reid), “I Married a Screwball,” Silver Screen (June 1942): 62.
11. “Ragland Gets Workout,” Hollywood Reporter, June 2, 1941.
12. “Skelton Sees ‘Dr.,’ ibid., June 5, 1941.
13. Wanda Hale, “Dr. Kildare Is Back, Showing at Criterion,” New York Daily News, May 8, 1941.
14. “Slight Dip in High Average for Series,” Hollywood Reporter, April 30, 1941.
15. Gilbert Kanour, “‘The People vs. Dr. Kildare’ Now Showing at New Theater,” Baltimore Evening Sun, May 9, 1941.
16. Arthur Marx, Red Skelton (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1979), 77.
17. Red Skelton, interview with author, Muncie, Indiana, September 18, 1986.
18. “Harvey Makes ‘Sage’ Out of Joe E. Brown,” Indianapolis News, February 16, 1948.
19. At this time, the daily Hollywood Reporter would list, once a week, which films were in production. The movies in question first appeared in this section during the following weeks in 1941: Lady Be Good (March 14), Dr. Kildare’s Wedding (June 6, listed as “untitled”), and Whistling in the Dark (June 27).
20. “Skelton ‘Whistling’ First MGM Break,” Hollywood Reporter, June 12, 1941.
21. Eric Lax, Woody Allen: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), 25.
22. Maxine Arnold, “Clown in Civies,” Photoplay (February 1948): 89.
23. Wes Gehring, The Marx Brothers: A Bio-Bibliography (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1987) and Groucho and W. C. Fields: Huckster Comedians (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994).
24. Gehring, W. C. Fields: A Bio-Bibliography (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984) and Film Clowns of the Depression: 12 Memorable Movies (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007).
25. “Red Skelton Scores in First Starring Role,” New York Morning Telegram, August 28, 1941.
26. “Comic Hailed as Bright New Star,” Hollywood Reporter, July 30, 1941.
27. Irving Hoffman, “Red Skelton Hailed as New MGM Star,” Hollywood Reporter, September 2, 1941.
28. William Boehnel, “Red Skelton Terrific in Funny Picture,” New York World Telegram, August 28, 1941.
29. Edith Werner, “Skelton’s ‘Whistling in Dark’ Clicks as Laugh-Thriller,” New York Mirror, August 28, 1941.
30. Bosley Crowther, Whistling in the Dark review, New York Times, August 28, 1941, 23.
31. “Meet Red Skelton, Hope of the B’s,” PM, August 28, 1941.
32. Herbert Cohn, “Red Skelton Arrives as a Comedy Star,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, August 28, 1941.
33. Wanda Hale, “Red Skelton Clicks in First Big Role, New York Daily News, August 28, 1941.
34. “Meet Red Skelton, Hope of the B’s.”
35. “‘Whistling in the Dark’ Bowls ’Em Over at Capitol,” Washington Post, undated [1941], Red Skelton Scrapbook Number Two, 1941–42, Red Skelton Collection, Vincennes University, Vincennes, Indiana.
36. Whistling in the Dark picture caption, New York World Telegram, August 28, 1941.
37. “Skelton Wins New Deal and ‘DuBarry,’” Hollywood Reporter, October 30, 1941.
38. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Legal Department Records, Special Collection File, 1941–43, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, California.
39. Eileen Creelman, “Red Skelton of ‘Having Wonderful Time,’ Discusses His Hollywood Debut,” New York Sun, July 6, 1938.
40. Wanda Hale, “New Kildare Movie May Be Last of Series,” New York Daily News, September 18, 1941.
41. Lady Be Good review, New York Times, September 19, 1941.
42. Red Skelton, “I’ll Tell All” (part 5), Milwaukee Journal, December 12, 1941.
43. Jim Knipfel, Slackjaw (1999; reprint, New York: Berkley Books, 2000), 180.
44. “Look Out, Television; Here Comes Red Skelton!” Long Beach (CA) Press Telegram, February 13, 1946.
45. Ibid.
46. Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (New York: Vintage Books, 2003), 90.
47. “Benny’s Wit Called Best By 300 Editors in Poll,” Hollywood Reporter, December 23, 1941.
48. John Dunning, On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 593.
49. “Red Skelton,” Variety, October 15, 1941, p. 26.
50. All Hooper radio rating numbers were drawn from 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), 99.
51. Red Skelton, “I’ll Tell All” (5 parts), Milwaukee Journal, December 8–12, 1941.
52. Ibid. (part 1), December 8, 1941.
7
War Year Complexities: Radio and Redefining Red’s Relationship with Edna
“Mrs. Skelton said that she could work with her husband but could not continue living with him.”1
New York Times
Red Skelton’s World War II period (1941–45) was arguably the most volatile time of his lengthy life and career. The previous chapter documented the comedian’s rise to major star status via the motion picture Whistling in the Dark (1941), and his new radio program, the Red Skelton Scrapbook of Satire, or simply the Red Skelton Show, which made its debut in the fall of 1941. The war years were all about change for Skelton—something the comedian never handled well. This state of flux involved a divorce, a broken engagement, war service, a nervous breakdown, and a new marriage.
This chapter focuses on what, for Skelton, was his greatest 1940s creative outlet, radio, and the restructuring of the comedian’s most significant and complex relationship with first wife and pivotal mentor Edna Stillwell. The added control the Skeltons exercised in radio (as opposed to the movies) made the airways a medium in which Skelton could separate himself from his comedy contemporaries. But this represented a basic irony. Given the comedian’s expressive rubbery face and gift for pantomime, he was foremost a visual comedian. Of course, radio was full of such paradoxes. For example, one of the f
ew radio programs to initially top Skelton’s show in the ratings starred ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his smart-aleck dummy Charlie McCarthy.
The ticket for Skelton’s great success on the airwaves was tied to creative comedy characters. Before examining these figures and other basic components of Skelton’s radio program, one must address a major intangible—Edna Stillwell. Thus far, the Stillwell revealed in letters and comic articles has been a sympathetic, compassionate, funny, and seemingly regular person. Yet there was a tendency to be controlling and single-mindedly driven, such as her admission in correspondence to Clarence and Inez Stout that this concentrated focus could make her appear rude.2
When one polls Skelton’s other radio writers, however, they seem to have primarily known the darker Stillwell. Nineteen-year-old Benedict Freedman observed, “Edna wouldn’t let any of the writers see each other. She resented [writer Jack] Douglas trying to assert himself and dominate Red with his ideas … I guess because she had been the one who guided Skelton to where he was … So the first script conference was actually the last script conference where the writers and Edna and Red all got together and made suggestions.”3 Another writer, Sol Saks, explained what then evolved: “She [Stillwell] gave you a script, and you went home and rewrote the script with your lines—the same story with your lines—handed it in. And then in two weeks you might hear your lines.”4 Besides Stillwell’s own written contribution to said script, she acted as chief editor, responsible for the final copy.