Red Skelton

by Wes Gehring

  The resulting “hodgepodge,” to quote Newsweek’s review, is not without some charming interludes, such as another classic deadpan number from O’Brien, or Lena Horne’s sexy rendition of “It Was Just One of Those Things” (the best Cole Porter song retained from the play).37 The picture receives low marks here because Skelton, as one of three sailors on leave (with Ragland and Ben Blue), is lost in this variety show shuffle. As the New York Times complains, “the usually irrepressible Red Skelton is so held in check … that his favorite expression, ‘I dood it,’ is this time an idle boast.”38

  In two of Skelton’s three remaining wartime pictures, Du Barry Was a Lady and Bathing Beauty, he is often brilliant—when he is on-screen. Unfortunately, however, an MGM variety show mindset often has him playing a supporting role. The 1943 Du Barry screen adaptation had been the prestige picture promised to Skelton back in 1941, after the major hit status of Whistling in the Dark caused MGM to renegotiate the comedian’s contract. Like Panama Hattie, Du Barry had also been a racy Broadway musical comedy hit that featured Cole Porter songs and stage star Ethel Merman. MGM’s soon to be legendary musical producer, Arthur Freed, faced the same censorship challenge on Du Barry that he had on Panama Hattie—tone down the language without destroying the spirit of the material. For some critics, such as the always censorship-conscious Edgar Price of the Brooklyn Citizen, the screen version was a disappointment: “The Hays office, no doubt, was responsible for blue-penciling the play’s original off-color dialogue.”39 Variety’s critique comically concurred: “‘Du Barry’s too much of a lady now.”40 Newsweek’s review opined a similar slant, noting that Lucille Ball’s title character, “in the Ethel Merman role, is both willing and attractive but her Du Barry is much too much the lady for her own good.”41

  In fairness to the screen Du Barry, however, the film is an often entertaining Technicolor variety show, particularly when Skelton’s nightclub hatcheck attendant is drugged into a dream sequence where he is France’s King Louis XV. The New York Journal American comically encapsulated this time-tripping transition in the title of its Du Barry review: “Skidding into History on a Mickey Finn.”42 (This time machine-like segment might have been the catalyst for the later dream sequence by Donald O’Connor, in Freed’s celebrated musical Singin’ in the Rain, 1952.)

  Regardless, the best thing about the Du Barry sojourn back in history, Hollywood style, is that Skelton’s screen time does increase. Coupled with the inspired lunacy of Skelton doing his comic shtick in the height of eighteenth-century French fashion, is his amusing nonstop smart-aleck attitude, such as the comedian’s comment while chasing Ball on the world’s largest bed, “This isn’t a love affair; it’s a track meet.” When Skelton is not essaying this Hope-like wise guy, he is drawing upon his own greatest hits repertoire, such as Skelton’s patented “Fox” howl from the Whistling films, or recycling signature bits from his radio program. When Skelton’s King Louis is wounded by an arrow to the behind, his response is suddenly that of his “mean widdle kid” Junior: “My widdle back, my widdle back!” And though most of Porter’s songs are again missing in action (as occurred with Panama Hattie), the two redheads (Ball and Skelton, in brightest Technicolor) perform a rousing rendition of the composer’s delightful “Friendship.”

  Skelton brings slapstick to the French court in DuBarry Was a Lady (1943). (Wes D. Gehring Stills Collection)

  Although Skelton was frequently off camera for long stretches of DuBarry, he did receive some excellent notices for the picture. The Hollywood Reporter stated, “Red Skelton is a riot as Louis, the hatcheck boy who dreamed of himself as king,” while the New York Times’s pantheon-like praise claimed, “[DuBarry] permits Mr. Skelton to be as funny as he has ever been in films.”43 For today’s viewer, the movie is now most memorable for its teaming of the two redheads who later dominated early television comedy. (As a Technicolor footnote, this was the film in which Ball first acquired her trademark hair color. Paradoxically, Skelton’s naturally red hair had to be dyed a shade that did not clash with her new coloring.)

  The year after 1943’s Du Barry, Skelton is again absent for long periods of time in another MGM Technicolor extravaganza, Bathing Beauty. The picture’s working title was Mr. Co-Ed, since Skelton plays a songwriter trying to salvage his marriage by following his bride back to the girls’ college where she teaches. Finding a loophole that only a movie script could invent, Skelton becomes a student to save his marriage. Given the variety show mindset of the MGM war years, it was a foregone conclusion that Skelton would have to share time with a host of talented support players. But what knocked him from Mr. Co-Ed title character to secondary Bathing Beauty status was the casting of beautiful swimming sensation starlet Esther Williams as his screen wife.

  Sometime during the 1944 post-production, MGM decided that the shapely Williams could herald a new subgenre, what might be called an aqua-musical category, in which grandiose water ballet numbers, in brightest Technicolor, reminded viewers of Busby Berkeley choreography, gone under the sea. Overnight Skelton’s Mr. Co-Ed became Williams’s Bathing Beauty, and Skelton, who had just entered the army, was in a state of shock.

  Williams, who had won several swimming events at the U.S. Nationals in 1939, had been brought along so slowly by MGM that many had all but forgotten the girl who might have been an Olympic star had the Games not been canceled in both 1940 and 1944 due to the war. Her screen debut in Andy Hardy’s Double Life (1942) had made title character Rooney gaga—a phenomenon that seemingly also described the state of MGM officials while a rough cut of Bathing Beauty was being assembled. Though the usurping of Skelton on the picture undoubtedly had him thinking of the tag line of comedy contemporary Jimmy Durante, “What a revoltin’ development,” the studio had correctly “read” the sexy attraction that was Williams. The New York Times blushingly observed, “Miss Williams’ talents as a swimmer—not to mention her other attributes—make any title the studio wants to put on it [Bathing Beauty] okay to us.”44

  Sadly, while previous MGM musical epics had still produced critical hosannas for Skelton, despite reduced screen time, the often Williams-obsessed critical reception of Bathing Beauty frequently minimized Skelton’s involvement. For example, after New York Morning Telegraph critic Leo Miskin bluntly noted, “There is only one reason … why anybody should go to see a picture called ‘Bathing Beauty’—the acres of exposed epidermis.” He condescendingly referenced Skelton’s tutu scene (the movies’ funniest sketch) by stating: “getting back to Brother S [Skelton] and his ballet skirt, as if anybody’s interested.”45 One finds the same attitude in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle’s review, which only gets around to the film’s original star in the third paragraph, as an afterthought: “Red Skelton, by the way, is there, too.”46

  After MGM’s insightful placement of Skelton in the Hope-like Whistling films, the studio was wasting him in its overblown variety shows. Granted, Williams’s water ballet films eventually elevated her to a top ten box-office star by the end of the 1940s (a status never reached by Skelton).47 But conversely, any lesser clown might have been assigned to play her romantic co-star.

  Ironically, despite Skelton’s second-class status on Bathing Beauty, the picture showcases two of the comedian’s most inspired sketches. The first is the aforementioned ballet routine, which was created by the great Buster Keaton. The former silent film star had been reduced to being a gag consultant at MGM. The sketch’s pièce de résistance was a bit Keaton had borrowed from his father, vaudevillian Joe Keaton. Skelton finds himself in a girl’s ballet class, with one leg horizontal to the bar. The comically martinet instructor commands the comedian to seemingly defy gravity by lifting his other leg to a parallel position with said bar.

  Amazingly, Skelton briefly seems to defy the laws of science (with both legs horizontal to the ballet bar) before taking one of his amazing patented pratfalls. Just as Joe Keaton’s use of the bit was a hit on stage, Skelton’s rendition is a tour de silly, too. The sketch is so mem
orable I often use it as a classic example of slapstick for my college seminar on American film comedy. As noted earlier, such violent physical comedy over a lifetime easily documents why an elderly Skelton was forced to wear leg braces to support permanently weakened limbs.

  A second neglected watershed Skelton sketch from Bathing Beauty is a variation of a routine originally devised for the comedian’s 1930s vaudeville act by Stillwell. The bit involved a woman’s morning preparation ritual, and drew upon everything from putting on makeup to a wrestling match that passes for trying to get into an undersized girdle. While this routine, like the ballet number, first existed as an autonomous sketch, both bits are effectively incorporated into the Bathing Beauty story by way of the fact that Skelton’s character is playing a student at a girl’s school.

  Despite the general neglect of Skelton by both his studio and most reviewers, a few critics recognized the uniqueness of Skelton’s contribution to Bathing Beauty. The Hollywood Citizen News’s Lowell E. Redelings said, “It is his antics—in cold retrospect—which are the entertainment gems.”48 Redelings also entertainingly chronicled the added comedy generated by the audience’s response to Skelton’s previously highlighted Bathing Beauty sketches, noting that the extended ballet bit “caused a young lady behind me to become hysterical with laughter … [while Skelton’s woman-in-the-morning] scene had the audience roaring, this eyewitness included.”49

  New York Herald Tribune critic Otis L. Guernsey Jr. was similarly supportive of Skelton, while taking a potshot at MGM: “Audiences apparently are supposed to care a good deal more about what the heroine is wearing than whether Skelton gets her in the final reel.”50 New York World Telegram reviewer Alton Cook seconded this line of thinking in even stronger prose: “All the details of this picture have been given pleasant attention except that one matter of material for Red. He must have wonderful control over his temper.… They [MGM] seem to have an idea.… that Red’s admirers are so smitten with him his presence itself is enough to keep everyone happy.”51

  Skelton’s frustration over what might have been with Bathing Beauty was abated, in part, by his induction (May 25, 1944) into the U.S. Army, one month before the East Coast opening of the picture. While one might have assumed his brief appearance in the previous year’s Thousands Cheer (1943, MGM’s wartime salute to the army) would be Skelton’s closest brush with the armed forces (beyond military camp shows), the comedian’s divorce from Stillwell made his draft status 1-A.

  Romantically, his bachelor years had been a bust. After starlet Muriel Morris called off their marriage at the eleventh hour, he was briefly but seriously involved with contract player Lynn Merrick, whom he had met on a war-bond tour. But she was not interested in marriage. Quite possibly, she, like Morris, was put off by Skelton’s ongoing professional relationship with his ex-wife. Indeed, friends of the former couple were convinced, right up until Skelton’s marriage to twenty-three-year-old MGM starlet Georgia Davis (March 19, 1945), that the comedian would reunite with his first wife. Although Skelton had tried to win Stillwell back, she preferred their new arrangement.

  Davis later described her husband’s unhappiness at this time: “He hated the bachelor existence he was leading, [and he] was mixed up. He’d struggled for years, and what did it add up to?”52 Not surprisingly, her description of Skelton sounds like earlier comments by Stillwell: “He is a madcap clown, with an appealing helplessness and kindness that opens your heart.”53 Paradoxically, the new couple’s first meeting had not gone well. Friends of the comedian had brought the actress to a 1944 party at his home. Skelton later confessed, “Because I am a comedian who is always ‘on,’ I started to kid her [Davis] by saying, ‘Look, I just had that sofa reupholstered, so how about removing your feet [one of Davis’s legs was curled under her]? Let’s keep the seat neat. Are you a real redhead or can’t you stay out of trouble? How about those freckles? Sincere or something out of a box of confetti?’”54

  “Miss Georgia Davis arose to her full height, looked me straight in the eye and observed, ‘Mr. Skelton, I think you are the rudest man it has ever been my misfortune to meet.’ And she stalked out of the house with most of the male members of our dinner party trying in furious pursuit to explain that I was a corny character who meant no wrong but who had to play Bogart now and then,” Skelton said.55 Such began the fiery relationship of two volatile redheads.

  The perennially insecure Skelton, his comically aggressive come-on to Davis notwithstanding, was immediately taken with the spunky auburn-haired beauty. Couple this with the added vulnerability Skelton was feeling during these wartime bachelor years, and he was quickly into marriage-proposal mode. But Davis, once she got past her “rudest man” assessment of Skelton, wanted to take the romance slowly. Consequently, theirs was largely a service courtship, with Skelton entering the army early in the relationship. Given that the comedian entertained stateside troops from June 1944 until March 1945, furlough possibilities with Davis were available.

  An army courtship starring Skelton and Georgia Davis (circa 1944). (Vincennes University Foundation, Red Skelton Collection)

  A circa 1944 photograph of young Hollywood starlet Davis, soon to be Skelton’s second wife. (Vincennes University, Red Skelton Collection)

  That being said, Skelton was one busy private. By opting to serve as a regular soldier (with field artillery duty/training at California’s Camp Roberts), he inadvertently set himself up for double duty—a soldier constantly asked to entertain. Eventually the strain would be too much, and he entered special services as a performer. Still, his easy-going nature and desire to please resulted in too many one-man shows, with a nervous breakdown occurring shortly after being shipped to the Italian war zone in early 1945.

  One can see danger signs, however, in Skelton’s press-clipping banter shortly before going overseas. For example, here is his comic take on always being tired since entering the service: “I think I know why the Army keeps you so darned busy all the time. If it didn’t, every guy in camp would be falling sound asleep. I’ve actually seen fellows so tired that they have gone asleep standing up. And that’s no gag.”56 In a military hospital article titled “Everyone’s a Kid is Basis for Skelton’s Philosophy,” the comedian also revealed a positive fatalism: “Everything that ever happened to me or anybody else has happened for a reason … though I may never know it. Good is going to come out of it because out of everything springs some good.”57

  One need not equate this with some simplistic happy-face mindset. Skelton was quite capable of using his army experience to address some unpleasant truths. In a Hollywood Press Times piece “GIs Perplexed Red Skelton Reveals,” the comedian documented an embarrassing irony rarely hinted at in history books: “When the war is explained to a GI ‘as a war to defeat the forces that enslave Catholics, Jews and other people,’ the GI answers, ‘but we have those forces in our country, so why are we fighting?’ Among the wounded there is no race, creed or color; civilians re-stimulate prejudice when the boys return. If we could raise one generation in which mothers would say to their children, ‘all people are equal,’ America would be a long way towards democracy.”58

  These were truly brave comments to make in 1945, reflecting, in part, the color-blind legacy Skelton learned from his Vincennes mentor Clarence Stout. I am aware of only one other World War II entertainer who expressed similar embarrassment over hypocrisy on the home front—the comedian Joe E. Brown. Best remembered now as the aging millionaire of Some Like It Hot (1959) who falls for Jack Lemmon in drag, during the war Brown repeatedly noted how servicemen were disappointed by the shameful placement of Japanese-Americans in interment camps.59 (Skelton’s advocacy tendencies towards GIs was also demonstrated by one of his army nicknames, “Chaplain,” because “he’s always fighting someone’s battles.”60 Given that the thirty-one-year-old Skelton was ten to thirteen years older than most recruits, they also affectionately called him “Pops.”)

  GI Skelton was doing so many military camp shows aro
und the United States that Stillwell’s 1944 Christmas gift to her ex-husband was a “cross-indexed gag-file of 80,000 jokes” that conveniently fit into a leather carrying case.61 Skelton might have continued this ongoing domestic base tour until war’s end, but he lobbied strongly to go overseas. The comedian wanted to entertain closer to the real conflict. Otherwise, his service only seemed like he was playing at war. In fact, Skelton kiddingly implied just that in a well-published comment (including an appearance on the front page of the Vincennes Sun-Commercial) he made to a high-ranking officer: “General, it seems I’m doing much better than [the antiheroic] Private Hargrove.”62 This was a tongue-in-cheek reference to Marion Hargrove’s comic memoir of army life, See Here, Private Hargrove (1942), sort of a print version of cartoonist George Baker’s comic strip about another antiheroic soldier, The Sad Sack, which also debuted in 1942. Skelton made his crack shortly after See Here, Private Hargrove (1944) had become a hugely successful film. (And this would be followed by the cinema sequel, What Next, Corporal Hargrove? 1945.)

  As the old axiom suggests, “be careful what you wish for” because you might receive it. The Atlantic crossing was an ordeal for Skelton. He later wrote Los Angeles Herald Express columnist Harrison Carroll, “I was so sick [on the troopship USS General Altman] the face of my watch turned green.”63 With Skelton’s direct ties to the Herald Express, and his detailed scrapbooks, the first stateside announcement that he had left the country was probably an April 17, 1945, article in that publication: “Red Skelton Now In Overseas Area.”64