Red Skelton

by Wes Gehring

  15. See the comedian’s one-man-show programs, such as the September 20, 1986, performance notes, “Red Skelton: America’s Pantomimist Extraordinaire,” for Ball State University’s Emens Auditorium, author’s collection.

  16. Harry Ruskin and Jeanne Bartlett, Watch the Birdie treatment, October 18, 1948, 9, in the Watch the Birdie script material, Cinema-Television Library, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California.

  17. Buster Keaton, with Charles Samuels, My Wonderful World of Slapstick (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, 1960), 263–64.

  18. Watch the Birdie review, Film Daily, November 28, 1950.

  19. Watch the Birdie review, Variety, November 29, 1950.

  20. Excuse My Dust review, Hollywood Reporter, May 23, 1951.

  21. Bosley Crowther, Excuse My Dust review, New York Times, June 28, 1951.

  22. Excuse My Dust review, Variety, May 23, 1951.

  23. Buster Keaton, Roy Rowland, and George Wells, Excuse My Dust addendum, “NOTES,” May 9, 1950, 1-3, in the Excuse My Dust script material, University of Southern California Cinema-Television Library, Los Angeles, California.

  24. “‘Excuse My Dust’ Recalls How Nice It Was in 1900,” Washington Star, July 5, 1951.

  25. Erskine Johnson (syndicated), “Erskine Johnson,” Los Angeles Daily News, February 23, 1951.

  26. Jack Quigg, “Fantastic Capers by Red Skelton Are a Prelude to His TV Show,” Kansas City Star, May 13, 1951.

  27. Arthur Marx, Red Skelton (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1979), 160.

  28. “Red Skelton,” Time, July 9, 1951, p. 32.

  29. “Laugh Clown,” Newsweek, July 9, 1951, p. 46.

  30. “Red Skelton Hailed for Averting Panic on Crippled Airliner over Alps,” Los Angeles Herald Express, June 28, 1951.

  31. “The Palladium: Mr. Skelton,” London Times, July 3, 1951.

  32. Harry Crocker, “Behind the Make-Up,” Los Angeles Examiner, July 26, 1951.

  33. “Skelton Calls from London [and] Lauds Penny Ice Program” (syndicated), Wichita Beacon, July 23, 1951.

  34. “Gene Fowler Finds Skelton a Big Hit in London Palladium,” Chicago Tribune, July 12, 1951.

  35. Martin Gottfried, Nobody’s Fool: The Lives of Danny Kaye (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), 162.

  36. Lloyd Shearer, “Red Skelton: He Never Stops Clowning,” Parade (May 8, 1955): 30.

  37. “Video Reviews: The Red Skelton Show,” Hollywood Reporter, October 1, 1951.

  38. Harriet Van Horne, “Red Skelton Impressive in TV Bow,” New York World Telegram, October 2, 1951.

  39. “Red Skelton Show,” Variety, October 3, 1951.

  40. “Red Skelton TV Debut Brings Down House,” Los Angeles Herald Express, October 1, 1951.

  41. Owen Collin, “Red Skelton Wins 2 ‘Emmys’ at Annual TV Academy Banquet,” Los Angeles Herald Express, February 19, 1952.

  42. Lynn Bowers, “‘Texas’ Film Lot of Fun,” Los Angeles Examiner, September 27, 1951.

  43. Special Collections, MGM Legal Department Records, 1951–52, Herrick Library.

  44. Harry MacArthur, “Red Skelton Is Summer Sub For [Arthur] Godfrey on Wednesdays,” Washington Star, July 15, 1954.

  45. Bob Thomas, “Red Skelton May Quit Television,” Waterbury (CT) Independent, October 22, 1952.

  46. Hal Humphrey, “Hal Humphrey,” Los Angeles Mirror, October 14, 1952.

  47. Red Skelton (subbing for syndicated columnist Erskine Johnson), “TV Proves Toughest Nut to Crack for Entertainment’s Funniest Nut,” Bingham Press, September 4, 1952.

  48. Tim Brooks and Earle Marsh, The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network TV Shows, 1946–Present (New York: Ballantine Books, 1979), 802.

  49. Marx, Red Skelton, 313.

  50. Donald Hall, “Simple Things: A Poet’s Poet,” House and Garden, September 2003, 164.

  51. Red Skelton’s Writing, Box 9, ABC, “The Critic” folder, Red Skelton Collection, Vincennes University, Vincennes, Indiana.

  52. “How Red Skelton’s First Wife Arranged His Second Marriage,” TV Picture Life, March 1969, p. 56.

  53. Erskine Johnson, “Erskine Johnson,” Los Angeles Daily News, February 23, 1951.

  54. Louella Parsons (syndicated), “Red Skelton Moves Out; Ex-Wife Has Role in Row,” Seattle Post, December 4, 1952.

  55. Red Skelton, letter to Hedda Hopper, January 31, 1951, Hedda Hopper Collection, Special Collections, Herrick Library.

  56. Earl Wilson, “Red Skelton Phones Earl: I’m Getting a Divorce,” New York Post, December 3, 1952.

  57. “Red Skelton Reconsiders Divorce Plans,” Seattle Times, December 3, 1952.

  58. “Wife Pins Skelton Rift on Dawn Visits to Kids,” New York World, December 4, 1952.

  59. Arline Mosby, “Locked Bedroom Told in Red Skelton Rift,” Los Angeles Herald Express, December 4, 1952.

  60. “Skelton May Get a Divorce,” Los Angeles Herald Express, December 3, 1952.

  61. “Skelton in Tiff with Wife: Interrupts Gag-Writing,” San Francisco News, December 3, 1952.

  62. Vivian Cosby, “Edna Skelton’s Lasting Loyalty,” American Weekly, November 13, 1949.

  63. Mosby, “Locked Bedroom Told in Red Skelton Rift.”

  12

  Triumph and Tragedy in the 1950s

  Under the headline, “Skelton Wows ’Em at Las Vegas Club: Just Like Atomic Blast,” the Los Angeles Herald Express stated, “Few comedians—if any—have received the rousing ovation accorded Red.”1

  Los Angeles Herald Express, July 15, 1953

  The hit opening alluded to in the above quote, embellished with a period reference to atomic testing in the desert, was the beginning of Red Skelton’s television resurrection. Of course, the comedian’s late 1952 very public feud with his second wife, Georgia Davis Skelton, was old news by then, helped along by a reconciliation through a medical emergency. The comedian had needed surgery for a diaphragmatic hernia—a condition in which the stomach is constricted at the center and presses against the heart and lungs. The procedure was successfully performed on December 12, 1952, with Skelton generating some positive press with the adhesive tape note he stuck to his chest just before the operation: “Do Not Open Till Christmas.”2 Almost simultaneous to the surgery, the holiday film release of Skelton’s hit The Clown (though often listed as a 1953 film) had also given him some critical balm after the painful panning of his second season.

  Despite this “sophomore jinx,” rival CBS was interested in luring Skelton from NBC. CBS was in the midst of a power struggle with NBC (ABC was then a distant third in importance.) Stories of Skelton’s drinking during the comedian’s 1952 meltdown, however, had CBS executives second-guessing this inclination. Writer Marty Rackin, a Skelton friend since the 1930s, convinced Skelton that he could turn everything around with a showcase of his best material in a Las Vegas act. CBS representatives could come and see a sober Skelton knocking the audience in the proverbial aisles.

  Rackin arranged a July 1953 booking for Skelton with the Sahara nightclub and helped him select material. Moreover, when Skelton wanted to back out at the eleventh hour, Rackin all but kidnapped him to America’s gambling capital, or as comics like to describe it, “The place where you get nothing for something.” His act was a smashing success, including everything from his cast of comedy characters to a revival of Skelton’s parody of how stars such as James Cagney die in the movies. Ironically, for someone trying to demonstrate his sober discipline, Skelton’s pièce de résistance was the “Guzzler’s Gin” sketch. Variety’s review even keyed on the sketch and how it produced “continuous roars of laughter.”3 Before the end of July, the comedian had signed a lucrative contract with CBS.4 Amazingly, the comedian who by all rights should have been bounced off the tube for the previous season’s abysmal reviews, now would be making $12,000 a week.

  A new direction at CBS involved returning to a totally “live” show, with the comedian exercising less control behind the scenes in terms of directing and producin
g the program. Unfortunately, Skelton’s binge drinking and unstable tendencies, such as playing with his extensive (always loaded) gun collection while under the influence, continued into the new television season. Though stress was the catalyst for much of this unstable behavior, Skelton had become a fan of alcohol in the 1940s, undoubtedly fueled in part by his hard-drinking friend Gene Fowler (crony to such celebrated imbibers as W. C. Fields and John Barrymore) and Skelton’s alcoholic wife, Davis. Indeed, the Skeltons’ daughter, Valentina Skelton Alonso, later recalled: “There was a lot of drinking going on with Fowler and his wife Agnes. My parents would always come back [from the Fowlers’ home] drunk.”5 Along related lines, Skelton’s father had been an alcoholic, with the prevailing feeling in the family being that he had drank himself to death. During this period of excess, Skelton operated at cross purposes with novelist Gustave Flaubert’s famous axiom for artists—live the quiet bourgeois life and save one’s wildness for the work. But conversely, maybe Skelton’s passion for his comedy craft was driven, in part, by the release it provided him from his private demons.

  Putting on a happy face, Skelton and his family: wife Georgia, Richard, and Valentina (circa mid-1950s). (Wes D. Gehring Stills Collection)

  A possible window into these dark days comes from an unusual insider source, a novel by former Skelton writer Ben Freedman. Called Lootville (1957), Freedman’s book, coauthored with his wife Nancy, sympathetically tells the tale of a self-destructive redheaded television clown named Zane Cochrane. Here are the most obvious parallels with Skelton, besides being set in 1953: a former MGM star obsessed with making people laugh, double Emmy winner in 1952, alcoholic tendencies, struggling to maintain television career, father of a young daughter and son, collects guns, suffered a mental breakdown during World War II, had an attractive alcoholic wife, and was a personable people person.

  Given this obvious fictional link to Skelton, what kind of possible insights are provided by the Freedmans’ Lootville? First, when Skelton’s program was floundering, one suggested solution from NBC was to put him in a situation comedy. The phenomenal success of I Love Lucy had made this genre the answer to any network problem. Coincidently, the character of Zane Cochrane is being asked to consider a sitcom format, and his entertainingly stressful rant sounds a great deal like Skelton, “It doesn’t matter to them [the network] that situation comedy is not what I do. I’m a clown. I’m wild, nutty, fruity, a low comic, that’s what I am. I don’t know from situation comedy. It’s what they call believable. Like Lucy gets dressed up like an Egyptian belly dancer and Desi doesn’t recognize her. With that show if Desi ever recognizes her, they’re dead … [And this is believable?] That’s their [network] principle—take what’s selling and go it one better.”6

  Second, Freeman also amusingly addresses a comic paradox between Skelton’s favorite drink (vodka) and his paranoia about Communism. Thus, Zane observes, “Damn Communist drink. [I] have a revolution in my guts every time I pour it down.”7 (Fittingly, an undated passage in Skelton’s unpublished private papers suggests his fears about Communism probably originated with his fatherly drinking companion Fowler. The comedian wrote of Fowler, “As a newspaperman, he saw the government from the inside as well as the outside and learned the profoundly important truth … conquer the disease of Communism.”8)

  Third, Lootville paints the beautiful alcoholic wife of its comedian as being oversexed to the point of nymphomania. While that would be an unfair assessment of Davis, Skelton was frequently suspicious of his wife’s relationships with any number of other men. According to Arthur Marx’s biography of Skelton, which drew upon the writer’s industry insider status as the son of Groucho Marx, Skelton’s anxiety was grounded in fact. The comedian had caught Davis in bed with a member of their personal staff. Marx wrote: “‘I know it’s true,’ says [Skelton producer Seymour] Berns, ‘because Red personally told me the story of coming home and catching them in the act. [Skelton business manager] Bo Roos told me the same story. He knew about it because Red made him do the firing.’”9

  As a footnote to Skelton’s milquetoast nonconfrontational behavior (even in such an inflammatory situation), the comedian generally avoided conflict. Along similar lines, I will later address the often daily “love letters” he wrote to Davis in the 1960s, and how they were sometimes more admonishments—written admonishments I am convinced he never shared with her. Or, one could also backtrack to an argument between the Skeltons about late-night access to the children that was quickly defused by the comedian’s sudden flip-flopping epiphany, “I’m so much in love [with Davis] it’s pitiful.”10 Here was the spirit of an arrested child in search of affection, and as Valentina even said, “Mom would refer to Dad as her ‘man/child.’” Plus, while Skelton could have many moods, the marital spats with Davis were invariably precipitated by minor details—the tantrums of a child. Skelton avoided major confrontations.

  Consistent with the mild-mannered Skelton, here is how the narrator of the Freemans’ Lootville ultimately describes their fictional comedian: “A guy not out to save the world but neither particularly anxious to harm anyone, who liked to laugh and hear other people laugh and wasn’t too highbrow about how he got those laughs.”11 Though Skelton was initially embarrassed by the suggested revelations in the novel, maybe it helped save his life through greater self awareness. The tragic conclusion to Lootville has the central character committing suicide, a victim of his own pent-up anger. This novel-writing couple were not disasterizing for their art. Throughout the 1950s, many members of the Hollywood entertainment industry saw Skelton as a walking time bomb. As late as 1963, the mainstream Sunday supplement magazine Parade, in a positive cover story on the comedian, included the following jaw-dropping disclosure, “Two years ago one shrewd veteran observer told me, ‘Every morning I pick up the paper I expect to read about Red Skelton’s suicide.’ Another former Skelton employee told me: ‘This man has so much hostility within him … but no way of releasing it. He’s going to blow his top.’”12 (Ironically, years earlier, Parade had run an article on Skelton that related how he had once staged a rather theatrical suicide for his first wife, Edna Stillwell, in order to demonstrate his unhappiness, and encourage her to give him a divorce.13 Hyperbole, or the truth? It was hard to tell with Skelton.)

  Though the comedian’s marriage to Davis was a work-in-progress during the 1950s, the greatest stress early in the decade was still Skelton’s struggling television program. The calamitous ratings of 1952–53 continued through the next two seasons. But as one pores over the program’s press coverage during this time, a curious phenomenon begins to surface—call it a grassroots empathy for a beloved clown. For example, a critic for the San Diego Evening Tribune described the opening of Skelton’s 1953–54 season as a disappointment, yet he went on to poignantly add, “There isn’t another personality on video screens who has the same standing with audiences that Skelton seems to have. Almost everyone sympathizes with him, wants him to have hit shows and suffers for him when the entertainment isn’t up to par.”14

  What was it about Skelton that could elicit such an audience connection? Growing up in a 1950s household that always watched his program, I remember that my dad once insightfully described the attraction as Skelton’s apparently “genuine sincerity,” though my father found the comedian’s sign-off line, “And may God bless,” bordering upon the mawkish. Of course, for many conservative viewers in the 1950s, that particular phrase probably sealed the deal all the more as proof of Skelton’s sincerity. Years later television critic John Heisner elegantly fleshed out Skelton’s neighborly appeal. In an article treating Skelton as “probably the most interesting of all the TV institutions,” Heisner wrote, “His forte has got to be the great warmth that oozes from the man and reaches across the normally vast gulf separating the performer from the living room. Skelton probably comes as close as anybody ever has … to creating and maintaining the feeling that he is indeed right there in your home, talking directly to you, and telling
you those corny jokes.”15

  Skelton would later pooh-pooh his poor ratings during the early 1950s, suggesting that when one just barely falls out of the hallowed top ten everyone yells catastrophe. But Washington Star critic Harry MacArthur was closer to the truth when he stated that Skelton had “almost plummeted right out of television.”16 At one point during this attempted comeback period Skelton’s program had dropped to eighty-sixth in the ratings. Just as Skelton’s sympathetic fan base was rooting for him to recover, reviewers, such as MacArthur, were moved to put a positive spin on his personal problems.

  Although the sad clown is a stereotype hoary with age and countless exceptions, it is more than applicable to the often troubled Skelton. Given Skelton’s natural tendencies toward pathos, television critic MacArthur suggested that “Skelton should include in his show a sketch on the order of Jackie Gleason’s silent, heart-breaking Poor Soul. There is more to this man Skelton … than a falling-down-drunk [“Guzzler’s Gin] act and the country rube [Clem Kadiddlehopper] with straw in his hair.”17

  This wise comedy counsel had actually already been acted upon by Skelton, though the character had not yet fully registered with fans and reviewers. Arguably, the only positive to come out of Skelton’s abysmal second season was the introduction of his now most acclaimed and beloved figure, Freddie the Freeloader. This inspired character, sort of a cross between Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp and Emmett Kelly’s Weary Willie, was the most fully realized figure in Skelton’s eccentric menagerie. Like Gleason’s Poor Soul, Freddie was silent and predisposed to tragedy, though Skelton eventually let his character speak.

  When considering the various comedy characters played by both Skelton and Gleason, beyond Freddie and the Poor Soul, one key difference often noted in the 1950s, to the detriment of Skelton’s show, was that Gleason’s figures were more realistic. As early as the start of Skelton’s second season, San Francisco Examiner critic Dwight Newton wrote, “unlike Skelton’s characters, Gleason’s have a natural, true-to-life ring. Everyone knows a ‘loud mouth’ as Gleason portrays him, everyone has met a ‘Poor Soul,’ everyone has, imagined a [vain, pompous Reggie] ‘Van Gleason, III.’ When, as the Honeymooners, he [Gleason as Ralph Kramden] says: ‘I haven’t done one thing right since I have been married,’ there’s a genuine touch of pathos in his performance.”18