by Wes Gehring
34. Nora Ephron, And Now … Here’s Johnny! (1967; reprint, New York: Avon Books, 1968), 78.
35. Donald Freeman, “Big Break Comes to Johnny Carson,” San Diego Union, [August 1954], Red Skelton Scrapbook Number 24, July 1954–October 1955, Skelton Collection.
36. Ibid.
37. Walter Ames, “Carson Signed to CBS Writer-Actor Contract,” Los Angeles Times, September 3, 1954.
38. Ronald L. Smith, Johnny Carson (New York: Saint Martin’s Press, 1987), 39.
39. “Johnny Carson,” Current Biography 1964, Charles Moritz, ed. (New York: H. W. Wilson Company, 1965), 71.
40. W. Granger Blair, “President Enjoys Birthday As World Says ‘Get Well,’” New York Times, October 15, 1955.
41. “Mr. Crockett Is Dead Shot as Salesman,” New York Times, June 1, 1955.
42. “Kids Can’t Get at Davy; Skelton Monopolizes Him,” Redwood City (CA) Tribune, May 11, 1955.
43. Ibid.
44. James Bacon, “Red Skelton Biggest Fan of Crockett,” Sarasota (FL) Journal, August 8, 1955.
45. Ibid.
46. William R. Conklin, “Marciano Retires from Boxing; Heavyweight Ruler Undefeated,” New York Times, April 28, 1956.
47. “Marciano Knocks Out End of Retirement Idea,” ibid., October 14, 1955.
48. Melvin Durslay, “Rocky vs. McPugg,” Los Angeles Examiner, [October 1956], Red Skelton Scrapbook Number 26, January–December 1956, Skelton Collection.
49. “Rockabye Baby,” New York Times, April 28, 1956.
50. For example, see Sheila Graham, “Skelton to Play Own Clown Role,” Hollywood Citizen News, February 12, 1948;“Skelton to Star in His Biography,” ibid., March 23, 1948.
51. James Bacon, “Red Skelton Writes Biography of Biographer,” Las Vegas Sun, May 24, 1956.
52. Red Skelton’s Writing, box 11, Skelton Collection.
53. “Gene Fowler,” Current Biography 1944, Anna Rothe, ed. (New York: H. W. Wilson Company, 1945), 221.
54. “The Hollywood Scene: Father Goose,” New York Times, October 28, 1934.
55. Gene Fowler, Minutes of the Last Meeting (New York: Viking Press, 1954), 104.
56. Marx, Red Skelton, 182.
57. Dick Williams, “Skelton Back in Films to Use TV Technique,” Los Angeles Mirror, May 11, 1956.
58. Half a Hero review, Variety, July 29, 1953.
59. “Skelton Sparkles in Matt Rapf Prod.,” Hollywood Reporter, July 29, 1953.
60. Sarah Hamilton, “Timid Skelton Does Fine Job,” Los Angeles Examiner, September 17, 1953.
61. Special Collections, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Legal Department Records, 1953–54, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hill, California.
62. Great Diamond Robbery review, Time, February 15, 1954.
63. “‘Diamond Robbery’ Lets Skelton Down,” Hollywood Reporter, November 30, 1953.
64. James O’Neill, Jr., “It’s All Skelton,” Washington News, May 24, 1957.
65. James Powers, Public Pigeon No. 1 review, Hollywood Reporter, December 31, 1956.
66. Public Pigeon No. 1 review, New York Times, May 18, 1957.
67. Besides the 1957 reviews for the film version (see notes 64–66), see also: “Skelton Forms His Own Firm,” Los Angeles Herald Express, February 8, 1956, and Williams, “Skelton Back in Films to Use TV Technique.”
68. Walter Hawver, “Durable Red Skelton to Return Next Fall,” Albany (NY) Knickerbacker News, June 13, 1957.
69. Robert de Roos, “Television’s Greatest Clown,” TV Guide, (part 1), October 14, 1961, 12–15, (part two) October 21, 1961, 26–28, 30.
70. “Skelton’s Philosophy: Always Room for One More Laugh,” Los Angeles Times, June 23, 1957.
71. Brooks and Marsh, Complete Directory to Prime Time Network TV Shows, 804.
72. “Skelton Caught in Cross Fire” (syndicated), Portland (OR) Journal, December 15, 1957.
73. “Nitery Review: Riviera Hotel,” Variety, August 6, 1958.
74. Don Bailer, “Red Skelton Big Vegas Hit,” Los Angeles Herald Express, August 5, 1958.
75. Red Skelton Scrapbook Number 29, August–September 1958, Skelton Collection.
76. Wesley Hyatt, A Critical History of Television’s “The Red Skelton Show,” 1951–1971 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2004), 63.
77. “It Hasn’t All Been Laughs,” TV Guide, February 20, 1960, p. 19.
78. “Comedian Red Skelton’s Son Victim of Leukemia, Unaware of Condition,” Los Angeles Times, January 4, 1957.
79. “A Sad Red Skelton Back on TV Tonight,” New York Post, January 15, 1957.
80. “Skelton, Ill Son in Washington on ‘See It All Tour,’” Albany (NY) Knickerbacker News, June 28, 1957.
81. “Skelton Family Off for Pompeii to Bring Another Dream to Life,” New York Post, July 9, 1957.
82. “Red Skelton and His Son Reach Rome, Buffalo (NY) Courier Express, July 19, 1957.
83. “Skeltons Squabble on Tour,” Columbus (OH) Citizen, July 25, 1957.
84. “Show Stolen By Skelton in Paris,” Tri-City (WA) Herald, July 29, 1957.
85. “‘Doomed’ Skelton Boy Jokes with Reporter,” Boston Independent, August 1, 1957.
86. Simon Ward’s column is extensively quoted in “Everybody Says I’m Going to Die—That Means Everybody but Me,” Phoenix Gazette, August 1, 1957.
87. John Camsell, “Little Dick Skelton Looks at Death—And It Has No Terror for Him,” New York Journal American, August 1, 1957.
88. Red Skelton’s comments are quoted in John Camsell, “Red Says London Unkind; Cuts Family’s Stay Short,” Cedar Rapids (IA) Gazette, August 2, 1957.
89. “Skelton Denies Trip with Dying Son Was Just a Publicity Stunt,” Red Wing (MN) Republican Eagle, August 5, 1957.
90. “Skelton’s Homecoming,” Los Angeles Herald Express, August 7, 1957.
91. “Skelton Insult Denied by British, Los Angeles Times, August 13, 1957.
92. Vernon Scott, “Comic Tells of Son’s Last Hours,” Indianapolis Star, May 12, 1958.
93. “Our Dear Sweet Beloved Richard [1],” Funeral Scrapbook, May 1958, Skelton Collection.
94. Both scrapbooks are labeled: “Our Dear Sweet Beloved Richard.” See footnote 93. (All celebrity sympathy cards and telegrams, unless otherwise noted; are found in “Our Dear Sweet Beloved Richard [1].”)
13
The Skeltons in Palm Springs: Paradise or Prison?
“It seems to me that ever since we moved to Palm Springs [1962], things have straightened out.”1
Red Skelton, 1967
Losing one’s child goes against the natural order of things. Red and Georgia Davis Skelton believed they could never recover from the 1958 death of their son Richard Skelton. Some people, however, find reservoirs of strength when coping with tragedy. In time, Red Skelton turned a corner on his grief, claiming that his son’s death “gave him an understanding of pain and feeling for people who were suffering.”2 Coupled with this, he suddenly had a newfound joy in the simple things of life. This is clearly an example where Skelton’s personal history lends itself to one of biography’s basic precepts—showcasing “the evolution of an individual.”3 I am also reminded of the axiom, “Our lives are not determined by what happens to us, but how we react to what happens.”4 Regardless, Skelton’s resilience was undoubtedly assisted by the demands of getting back to a weekly television series.
Davis did not have a comparable distraction. Plus, one of the idiosyncrasies of Skelton’s recovery handicapped his wife’s improvement. The comedian felt the need to turn parts of the Skeltons’ Bel Air mansion into a memorial to Richard. Skelton decided that everything in the boy’s room had to remain exactly as it was when he was alive—wherever the toys were last played with, or discarded. Indeed, even bags of fan mail sent to Richard during his long struggle with leukemia remained on the floor of the child’s room. Skelton also had a glass cabinet full of Richard mementoes placed in the hall outside the roo
m.
These things only served to further depress Davis, especially since she was home all day, every day. Moreover, Richard’s room and the mourning cabinet were in her wing of the home, making them harder to ignore, and despite her protestations this remained the status quo for years. Skelton seemed to need these artifacts to better communicate with his son. As in a populist film by director John Ford, in which the grave of a loved one frequently becomes a comforting catalyst for regular monologues with the deceased, Skelton recurrently talked to Richard in the boy’s bedroom.
Ironically, while their son’s death worsened Davis’s alcoholism and addiction to prescription drugs, Skelton stopped drinking hard liquor. Like many individuals with great discipline, he did not always understand how others were incapable of just stopping addictive behavior. For example, in a rough draft of a letter Skelton wrote to Davis in the 1960s, he shared a story about an “anonymous” alcoholic woman and the problem-solving lessons to be drawn from classic literature: “so many lovely ladies became old—ugly—half asleep all day [and] they drink the nite unto sunrise. What happiness [Daniel] Defoe tried to give to the world with the simple story of Robinson Crusoe learning the value of self without becoming bored, uninspired.”5
Paradoxically, for all that discipline, Skelton avoided confrontation, so it is unlikely that Davis ever saw this teaching epistle. In fact, another bit of correspondence included with this letter begins, “In going over letters I have never given to you.”6 Also, two additional fallacies about Skelton’s wifely correspondence merit addressing at this point. First, though the comedian enjoyed telling reporters he wrote a love letter every day to Davis, “love” is probably not the best term. While many are quite romantic, “reflections” would better describe them. Under the latter moniker, their tone ranges from the philosophical parable (such as the previously cited Defoe example), to outright anger. This is evidently how the nonconfrontational comedian worked out his aggression, since his target person did not see the written complaint.
This sounds like a perversion of something Skelton might have acquired in therapy, where patients are sometimes encouraged to write a purging letter to a source of frustration who is no longer alive. Or, this venting correspondence might have represented another example of the comedian’s own peculiar brand of Eastern mysticism. After several 1950s visits to Japan, Skelton became fascinated by that country’s culture, everything from Buddhism to bonsai trees. On more than one occasion Skelton told me about a ceremony he and his then third wife (Lothian Toland, whom he married after his 1973 divorce from Davis) performed if someone had wronged them.7 The ritual involved lighting a candle, saying something nice about the individual and then totally erasing that person’s existence from their lives. As with the “love” letters, there was no direct confrontation.
This rite was not unlike Skelton biographer Arthur Marx’s description of a phenomenon already addressed—the comedian’s ability to simply not acknowledge someone (like first wife Edna Stillwell or Buster Keaton) once they were no longer part of Skelton’s life. Marx christened this Skelton’s “way of mentally burying people.”8 Along related lines, Toland also became the target of biting Skelton letters that were never delivered.9
A second fallacy about Skelton’s daily love letters to his wife is that they were written throughout their marriage. To the contrary, in a Boston Globe article from 1969, Davis revealed that this homegrown correspondence only began after their 1962 move to Palm Springs.10 This is borne out by the previously mentioned Skelton Collection at Vincennes University, with the often bound letters beginning in 1962. This is yet another example of Skelton’s proclivity for always trying to tell a better, in this case, a more romantic, story.
In that same Globe article, Davis seconds the sentiments expressed by Skelton to open this chapter—by moving to Palm Springs they “found peace and tranquility.”11 So what motivated this seemingly positive move? Several factors were at play, starting with the mental health of the couple’s daughter, Valentina Skelton. In 1970 she revealed that at the time of her brother’s death, “I thought my parents loved him more than they loved me … I was so silly, I was jealous, but then I was only eleven at the time.”12 Consistent with that understandable but misguided perspective, Valentina’s claim that the move came on the advice of her doctor, as a way to curb the girl’s ongoing feeling of inferiority, gives great credence to this being the primary reason for exiting Los Angeles.13 More recently, Valentina has added an addendum to this position, indicating that her parents were also anxious to get her away from some young people they believed were a bad influence on the fifteen-year-old.14
A second explanation for the move is a general consensus among Skelton friends and professional colleagues that the mansion as memorial was finally getting to Skelton by the early 1960s, too, making him more receptive to Davis’s and/or Valentina’s need for change. Third, the near loss of their Los Angeles home in 1961 to one of Southern California’s intermittent brush fires somehow made the subject of moving more palatable. Fourth, with so many of their entertainment friends and acquaintances already comfortably ensconced in Palm Springs, celebrities such as Bob Hope, Frank Sinatra, and Indiana-born bandleader/comedian Phil Harris, the desert community had become a tempting second home for Hollywood types such as the Skeltons.
Each of these elements no doubt played a factor in the Skeltons move to Palm Springs. At this point, however, I am tempted to quote a line writer Jean Strouse posits as the central task of the biographer. Originally attributed to American financier J. P. Morgan, the statement reads, “There are two reasons why a man does anything. There’s a good reason and there’s the real reason.”15 Years later, Skelton would see the “real reason” for the move entirely tied to his wife’s instability. In a 1968 rough draft of a rambling letter to Georgia he writes, “For 7 years now I have tried to live on the desert … [and] help bring you back.… We [still] have a beautiful home in Bel Air you don’t like—I need the feel of the city to be creative.”16 Almost ten years later, after the Skelton’s divorce and Davis’s subsequent suicide, Skelton gave a similar story to the New York Times. Again, he claimed to dislike the Palm Springs desert and blamed the move on Davis’s assorted demons: “She had a problem with alcohol and pills and fear. [And] she thought we could get away from … freeloaders.”17
So what is the real reason behind the relocation to Palm Springs? I would still emphasize the first four points, starting with the mental health of the Skeltons’ daughter. After losing one child, I cannot imagine anything else taking precedence over the well-being of their only surviving child. Moreover, Skelton’s bitter-sounding revisionist perspectives only surface much later, starting with a time when Davis’s addiction problems were at their worst. Of course, the most basic explanation is to simply quote a fundamental biography axiom credited to Claire Tomalin, “Like most people, he gave different accounts of what he believed at different times.”18 Still, after sifting through mountains of Skelton material at archives across the country, there is just too much evidence chronicling how creative and happy he was in their desert getaway, Davis’s problems notwithstanding. But before exploring some of this documentation that reveals how Skelton became a sort of Palm Springs Renaissance man, one must first address the strange development associated with the selection of their house in the desert.
Wealthy Palm Springs, located approximately a hundred miles east of Hollywood, has been kiddingly called “the sandbox of society,” but Hope’s application of a recycled line from the Road to Morocco (1942) is funnier: “This must be the place where they empty all the old hourglasses.” The community offered year-round sun, clean air, and beautiful golf courses, especially the trendy Tamarisk Country Club. While Skelton had given up the sport years before, after a brief trial run during his marriage to Edna Stillwell, he liked the idea of a home along one of Tamarisk’s fairways. As someone who did little socializing, he planned to keep up with friends as they golfed by.
The only pro
blem, however, was that none of the available houses did anything for the Skeltons. This all changed by the sixteenth fairway, when the couple saw a small but attractive U-shaped home accenting a swimming pool. But it was neither the setting nor the architecture that sold the place. This is where things get a little mystical, yet several reputable sources, including Marx’s 1979 biography of the comedian, reveal, “As Red and Georgia looked toward the place, they both simultaneously thought they saw the ghost of Richard playing and laughing on the grass in front of the house.”19 When I recently asked Valentina about the incident, she did not recall hearing the story. But she said it was consistent with Skelton’s mindset, adding, “My dad was very psychic.”20
There is more than a little irony involved in leaving one home, in part, because it has become too much like a memorial shrine to a dead son, only to select another house based upon seeing that son’s ghost. For some, such a ghostly event would bring to mind that previously noted Steve Allen quote: “I have never known a successful comedian who was not somewhat neurotic. The unsuccessful ones must be in even worse condition.”21 Yet as Valentina suggested, Skelton’s sighting of his son’s ghost was not the comedian’s only paranormal experience. Three years later, Skelton was credited with editing a collection of scary stories with the punning title, A Red Skelton in Your Closet (1965). The comedian confessed in his foreword, “Sometimes, just before I go on stage the ghost of the greatest pantomimist [Joseph Grimaldi] whispers in my ear.”22
In fairness to Skelton, as well as being consistent with Allen’s blanket statement about crazy comics, many laughmakers have had mystical beliefs. But what makes the Skelton story about Grimaldi especially intriguing is how much it resembles an often told tale by Peter Sellers. He believed that the spirit of Dan Leno, one of the most revered comedians of the Victorian age, guided his career: “He follows me around everywhere [in my mind]. For years I felt his help, especially with my timing. … He has given me some wonderful advice … it’s as though somebody is speaking inside your head, which is why many people dismiss it, dismiss spiritualism as being dotty [crazy].”23