by Wes Gehring
Skelton’s antiheroic persona embraces a philosophy of feel-good populism—a study in comedic humanism that celebrates the persevering good of the common man. Skelton was consistent to this characterization throughout his complete oeuvre (stage, screen, radio, and television), without even a threat of a Verdoux-like detour. The best encapsulation of Skelton’s persona came from a Cab review by Los Angeles Times critic Philip K. Scheuer: “Skelton always comes up smiling, quick to forgive and ready to believe the best of his fellow men. He is the servant of the people, the courteous Yellow Cab Man.”6
As a related Cab footnote, personality comedians often acknowledge their special link with fans through direct address—breaking the fourth wall and playing directly to the camera/audience. Invariably, the clown is the only one in the cast with this playful awareness of the story’s pretend nature, which further cements his bond with the equally artifice-conscious audience. Fittingly, Skelton’s Cab opens with the comedian giving a direct address tip of his hat to viewers—a fan connection gesture further underlined by then holding that clown image in a friendly freeze frame.
Appropriately, Cab was a major critical and commercial hit, with a profit margin double that of Skelton’s greatest picture, A Southern Yankee ($545,000 to $263,000).7 (While both movies had roughly the same domestic box office, Cab cost less to produce and attracted a larger foreign audience.) Of the picture’s many positive reviews, the Motion Picture Herald’s critic was most magnanimous: “‘The Yellow Cab Man’ is as wonderful a bit of Red Skelton zany business as has ever come off the Metro [MGM] lot.”8
In playing a cabbie or a Fuller Brush man, Skelton’s comedy had benefited from having one foot in reality. In fact, Skelton’s Fuller Brush Man director (S. Sylvan Simon) actually drew movie material from real company surveys. With that thought in mind, Skelton’s film follow-up to Cab takes the process one step further; Skelton plays a real person, songwriter Harry Ruby. The biography picture in question, Three Little Words, chronicles the career of Ruby and his writing partner, Bert Kalmar, played by Fred Astaire.
Normally, one might have misgivings about derailing an up-an-coming personality comedian into a biography film. But Words presents several extenuating circumstances. First, Ruby is an often comic character, especially as related to his obsession with baseball. Through the songwriter’s friendship with Washington Senators pitcher Al Schact, Ruby frequently worked out with the players. These amusing segments in the movie provide Skelton with physical comedy opportunities that draw upon reality. That is, besides Ruby’s less-than-major-league skills, his diamond friend Schact later became more famous as the “Clown Prince of Baseball.” Plus, Ruby’s favorite team then occupied a belovedly antiheroic position most synonymous today with the Chicago Cubs. The following is a popular baseball axiom about the luckless Senators: “Washington, first in war, first in peace [pause], and last in the American League.”
A second extenuating reason for the appropriateness of casting Skelton in the movie was his pre-established comedy connection with baseball. This came courtesy of Skelton’s inspired shenanigans in Whistling in Brooklyn (1944), when he did comic battle with another revered bunch of baseball losers—the Brooklyn Dodgers. Add to this Skelton’s occasional baseball references in other pictures, such as catching ricocheting bullets with his glove in The Yellow Cab Man, and the national pastime seems the perfect setting for Skelton’s comedy.
A final justification for Skelton turning up in this film biography is that while Kalmar and Ruby’s music might be most associated with romance, such as the haunting “Three Little Words,” which doubles as the movie’s title, comedy connoisseurs gravitate towards their funny musical numbers. These comic songs included: “Hooray for Captain Spaulding,” Animal Crackers (1930, the Marx Brothers, and later Groucho’s theme song), “Everyone Says ‘I Love You’” and “I’m Against It,” Horse Feathers (1932, Marx Brothers), and “The Country’s Going to War,” Duck Soup (1933, Marx Brothers). Kalmar and Ruby also wrote Helen “boop-boop de-doop” Kane’s signature song “I Wanna Be Loved by You.” And Woody Allen creatively reprised “Everyone Says ‘I Love You’” throughout his charming musical comedy of the same name (1996). Moreover, though often forgotten today, Kalmar and Ruby provided music and scripts for pivotal pictures by other important 1930 comedians, such as Eddie Cantor (The Kid From Spain, 1932), Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey (Kentucky Kernels, 1934), and Joe E. Brown (Bright Lights, 1935). While Three Little Words did not fully address Kalmar and Ruby’s comedy legacy, its mere existence further legitimized the casting of Skelton as Ruby.
Vera-Ellen and Fred Astaire are fascinated by Skelton and a canine friend in Three Little Words (1950). (Wes D. Gehring Stills Collection)
Three Little Words scored highly with both the public and critics. As one of 1950s top box office pictures, it grossed nearly as much as the year’s critically acclaimed All About Eve, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture, as well as a then unprecedented thirteen nominations in other categories.9 Skelton’s reviews for Words were yet another exercise in superlatives, with even the hard-to-please New Yorker waxing poetic about his understated performance, “Red Skelton does splendidly as Mr. Ruby.”10 The Hollywood Citizen News credited Skelton’s “surprising performance … [which] proves that he has the stuff for weightier efforts than his slapstick films.”11
After this excursion into film biography, Skelton returned to the familiar landscape of clown comedy, starring in Watch the Birdie, a loose remake of Keaton’s The Cameraman (1928). In Birdie Skelton orchestrates a comedy trifecta, as he plays cameraman Rusty Cammeron, as well as the character’s father and grandfather. His multiple role trick might have been encouraged by the previous year’s Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), the British dark-comedy hit in which Alec Guinness plays eight comic victims. Regardless, critics were taken with Skelton’s comedy cloning. The reviewer for the Los Angeles Examiner observed, “Red continues to grow in stature as an actor with each succeeding effort on the screen. This time, in a brave challenge, he does it by way of three distinct roles.”12 This triple-threat Skelton also won over new fans. The Los Angeles Mirror critic normally found Skelton “predictable,” but in the comedian’s playing of the father and grandfather, “he becomes an actor. He concentrates on the humor inherent in the characters, and he’s much more amusing.”13
Skelton’s sensitive Birdie portrayal of father/grandfather figures is reminiscent of comedian Brown’s comparable playing of senior family figures in his movies of the 1930s and early 1940s, especially in The Circus Clown (1934).14 While both Brown and Skelton had a tendency to make their main characters over the top, they often reined in these older types to an almost poignant minimalism. Appropriately, Skelton further honed his senior figures as he aged, often highlighting them on the pantomime portion or “silent spot” of his long-running television show. Three of his most age-related pantomimes, which were invariably featured in his later post-television one-man-shows, were: “Old man watching parade,” “Old man playing golf,” and “Old man smoking pipe.”15 Of course, in a broader context, Skelton’s playing of multiple figures in a 1950 movie seemed to be a sneak preview for his character-laden television series.
The most entertaining interaction of Birdie Skeltons occurs when “Grandpop” gives shy grandson Rusty a cinema tutorial on romance. This scene also allows MGM to promote two of its biggest contract stars, Clark Gable and Robert Taylor, by having Skelton “study” Gable’s Boom Town (1940) and Taylor’s Johnny Eager (1941). The topper to this—beyond two Skeltons interacting—is that Grandpop encourages Rusty to mimic the now politically incorrect rough-with-the-ladies style of Gable and Taylor. Not surprisingly, timid young Skelton asks old Skelton, “What if she slaps back?” A knowing Grandpop comically answers, “That, my boy [chuckling pause], is marriage.” But this somewhat cracked crackerbarrel wisdom is consistent for a character that amused viewers with this senior axiom on romance: “Let the ladies beware, let the music begin, there�
�s many a good tune in an old violin.”
There are, however, a wealth of funny Birdie scenes that do not depend upon Skelton’s older characters. The two best are actually lifted from Keaton’s Cameraman original. The first is a sight gag where a camera-carrying Skelton risks the proverbial “life and limb” to board a speeding fire truck in hopes of scooping the competition on some newsworthy disaster. Holding precariously to the side of the emergency vehicle, Skelton’s bravado immediately involves the viewer in this race for provocative film footage. Where will the fire truck take him/us? Soon the destination is clear—the fire truck is simply returning to the station!
The second Keaton bit showcased in Skelton’s remake was even comically footnoted in the Birdie script treatment: “Here we steal a scene from ‘The Cameraman.’ The … [routine] where Buster Keaton and another man change clothes in a dressing room hardly big enough for one midget.”16 Unfortunately, while the new version is funny, the laugh quotient of the original is much higher. Keaton later dissected the problem in his autobiography: “[MGM used] Mike Mazurki, the huge, ex-wrestler as the other man in that undressing scene. In my opinion, the audience just did not believe that Mazurki would not have thrown Red Skelton out the moment he got annoyed enough. [Keaton’s dressing-room nemesis was more his size.]”17
Skelton battles with Mike Mazurki in the dressing-room scene from Watch the Birdie (1950). (Wes D. Gehring Stills Collection)
This lack of creative tweaking notwithstanding, Birdie was another critical and box-office hit. As with Cab, the hosannas began with Birdie’s opening credits. Film Daily observed, “A cleverly contrived credit sequence, with Red Skelton joking about the cast and crew of his latest comic endeavor, starts the laugh-chain reaction which lasts throughout the footage.”18 Variety added, “[Skelton’s] followers will like it and others will find much to chuckle at.”19 As an addendum to this rosy reception, MGM had possibly helped to garner goodwill for the film during production with witty press releases centering upon Skelton’s multiple Birdie roles. For example, the studio assigned the comedian three dressing rooms, and each day three Skelton scripts were delivered to the set. How this affected the reviews is anyone’s guess, but it certainly generated a great deal of affectionately amusing free publicity, such as the New York Telegraph article, “Red Skelton Is ‘The Third Man,’” which punningly referenced the previous year’s acclaimed noirish thriller from Britain, The Third Man (1949).
Skelton’s string of hit movies continued with Excuse My Dust (1951), which opened the summer before the autumn debut of his small-screen series. Dust is an amalgamation of Skelton’s then recent film successes. Like Cab and Birdie, the picture is a personality comedy. Because Dust is a period piece, about a small-town automotive pioneer from Skelton’s home state of Indiana, the movie is a more restrained clown comedy. Thus, the Hollywood Reporter felt “It’s a Skelton more like that of ‘Three Little Words’ than in his days as a broad buffoon—and the metamorphosis is all to the good.”20
Paradoxically, for all this high praise of a low comedian, Dust’s most acclaimed sequence is its slapstick finale, a race of vintage automobiles. Even the staid New York Times, a publication often unimpressed by Skelton, was moved to comment: “[The] old-fashioned cross-country [horseless carriage] race … is a frantically funny affair, well worth the time given to it.”21 Fittingly, a segment that was called “a socko ‘third-act’” by Variety, came courtesy of Keaton.22 Ironically, this Dust finale, constructed by Keaton and fellow gagmen Roy Royland and George Wells, also represented the last time Keaton teamed with Skelton on a picture.23 Since Skelton was always more interested in radio and television than film, to the utter frustration of Keaton, how appropriate that their closing collaboration occurred on the very eve of Skelton’s television series.
Besides showcasing the comedy talents of Skelton and Keaton, Dust also charmed viewers with its nostalgic Technicolor homage to yesteryear. The title of the Washington (DC) Star review said it all, “‘Excuse My Dust’ Recalls How Nice It Was in 1900.”24 The Star’s Americana perspective on Dust, moreover, found time to highlight the Indiana setting for the film, implying that the Hoosier State was almost a universal backdrop for amusingly wistful pop culture time tripping to the past.
An informal moment on the set for Skelton with Monica Lewis, the comedian’s costar in Excuse My Dust (1951). (Wes D. Gehring Stills Collection)
Be that as it may, Skelton’s wave of positive Dust reviews, which, in the presaturation booking days correlated to regional opening dates stretching from spring until midsummer, meant his biggest news competition was himself—articles about his new autumn television show. Even before Dust opened, Skelton agonized in print about failing on the small screen: “I think the campaign saying I’ll be great was started by my enemies. They’re giving me the big build-up so the people will expect too much and I’ll lay an egg. Please print that I’ll probably stink.”25
This “campaign saying I’ll be great” was largely generated by the string of Skelton hit movies that led up to his television debut. Here was a major movie star coming to the small screen. Prior to this, hit television personalities were performers who had either washed out of film, such as Milton “Mr. Television” Berle, or merely had been B movie stars, such as Hopalong Cassidy’s cowboy William Boyd. Skelton was something unique, with a huge $10 million contract to prove it! The underlying pressure to succeed, however, was huge—star status in two media was at stake. Fail on television and kiss the movies goodbye, too.
Skelton further helped rack up the stress by the frequent analogies he made between the great Chaplin and himself concerning Skelton’s small-screen aspirations. Of course, this connection went beyond Skelton just wanting to be the best television clown possible (à la Chaplin’s Tramp). Intuitively, Skelton seemed to sense what might be called the “blank page phenomenon.” When one is talented and first, you not only establish the quality standards, you also write the rules. Historical timing (a window to immortality), and a great gift, allowed Chaplin to forever become screen comedy’s gold standard. Skelton entered television early to achieve a comparable status on the small screen.
Skelton also contributed to a pressure situation by his obsessive preparation. With one of his many hobbies being amateur filmmaking, the comedian spent a fortune shooting test footage at home of potential sketches and costumes for his series. In a particularly detailed article titled “Fantastic Capers by Red Skelton Are a Prelude to His TV Show,” readers essentially receive a ticket to the comedian’s own “backyard movie set.”26 The shooting of these short films further fueled Skelton’s thoughts of the early Chaplin, whose first movie “shorts” were only one or two reels in length (ten to twenty minutes). Plus, as a pertinent point of reference, Skelton’s forthcoming series was in a half-hour time slot. When one subtracts the commercial breaks, the program that remains is roughly two reels in length.
While Skelton’s persistent insecurities made him anything but confident on the eve of his television debut, the general public could be forgiven for thinking the funnyman was all but bulletproof. This is because, in addition to Skelton’s recent string of movie hits and all the ballyhoo about his future on the small screen, a series of unexpected events was about to qualify the comedian as a real-life hero. Skelton had been booked to play London’s prestigious Palladium in July 1951. Other stops on this European visit for Skelton and Georgia Davis Skelton (the children remained at home) included entertaining American troops at bases in West Germany and France, and an audience with Pope Pius XII. But the flight from Rome to the London engagement was almost the last thing the Skeltons ever did.
The couple’s commercial airliner had mechanical problems in three of the four engines while flying over the Alps. With the pilot jettisoning fuel in order to compensate for lost altitude and to minimize fire and/or explosions during a forced landing, desperation gripped the fifty-four multinational passengers, many of whom were children. Among the people traveling with the
Skeltons was the Jesuit priest Father Edward Carney. Turning to the comedian he said, “Okay, Red, you take care of your department, and I’ll take care of mine.”27 As Carney gave last rites to passengers, Skelton went through what Time magazine called “35 minutes of juggling, shadow-boxing, and pantomime gags until the plane made an emergency landing in Lyon [France].”28 As reported by Newsweek, Skelton credited it as being “the performance of his life.”29
To borrow a line from America’s then most prominent novelist, Ernest Hemingway, Skelton had exhibited “grace under pressure,” though the often improvising comedian might have called it “humor under pressure.” (While much was deservedly made of the comedian’s emergency pantomiming, he later confessed to also segueing to his “mean widdle kid” character Junior, too.) Regardless, the darling of early 1950s film criticism had now upped the celebratory ante to embrace most of the fourth estate. The title of the Los Angeles Herald Express’s coverage nicely summarized the comedian’s new heroic status with the media: “Red Skelton Hailed for Averting Panic on Crippled Airliner over Alps.”30 Some headlines even hinted at the extraordinary mix of comedy and the potential for tragedy inherent in Skelton’s very real incident of “whistling in the dark.” For example, Newsweek labeled its piece “Laugh Clown,” à la the title of silent star Lon Chaney’s pathos-driven Laugh, Clown, Laugh (1928), where a funnyman sacrifices himself for the love of another.