by Wes Gehring
Of course, by the 1960s, such Skelton/Sellers mystical confessions not only sounded strange, they also were out of touch with that era’s darkly comic approach to such subjects. For example, here are two now classic jokes from one of the decade’s pivotal stand-up comedians, Woody Allen: “I was thrown out of NYU. On my metaphysics final I looked within the soul of the boy sitting next to me.… [Actually] I don’t believe in the afterlife but I am bringing a change of underwear.”24 Regardless, before leaving the subject of mystical-like parallels between Skelton and Sellers, one must cite their compulsive need to escape into various characterizations. They likened themselves to empty vessels, before a given personality took over. Interestingly, Skelton’s “multitude of humanity within me,” to borrow a phrase from poet Walt Whitman, even stretched beyond his one-man band of comedy characters. According to Guy della Cioppa, the first chief of Skelton’s Van Bernard Productions (formed when Skelton’s television show expanded to an hour in 1962), “[The comedian] always thinks of himself as two people. The offstage Skelton is Red. The fellow who performs onstage he always refers to in the third person as ‘Victor Van Bernard.’”25 (Bernard was Skelton’s middle name. But by adding the upper class “Van,” the name is reminiscent of Jackie Gleason’s pompous character Reginald Van Gleason III.)
Woody Allen and frequent costar Diane Keaton relax on the set of the 1973 comedy Sleeper. (Wes D. Gehring Stills Collection)
Moving beyond ghosts and Skelton’s multiple characters, how did Palm Springs become a creative retreat for the comedian? First, Skelton seemed to be in a better state of mind. This is probably best symbolized by dismantling the funeral parlor aspects of their Bel Air mansion shortly after the move to the desert. (They retained both residences, because Skelton stayed in Los Angeles two or three nights a week when his television series was in production.) Two years after the move, Skelton told syndicated Hollywood columnist Hedda Hopper, “Georgia and I have always done everything together—painting, swimming, shopping—and she’s a great audience for testing [the comedy] material I write. We’re happy with our home in the desert and the life we lead there when I’m not working. We get to bed early and get up early; we like regular hours.”26
Second, by physically getting away from any and all distractions, Skelton was able to devote more time to his numerous hobbies, especially painting. Although he had been dabbling in this area for years, the Palm Springs move finally made him get serious about his art. Skelton’s wife, a former art student, was the catalyst for this interest. Shortly after their move to the desert, he told a reporter, “Georgia taught me painting 20 years ago. She’s very good.”27
A Screenland article from more than ten years earlier, however, more fully fleshes out Davis’s art-instructor influence on her husband. The original goal was just to use painting as a way of getting him to relax. When Skelton struggled at first, she encouraged him to paint what he knew, which is how his focus on clowns began. “I called each [Skelton] painting a step into control of his imagination,” said Davis.28 Skelton’s first wife, Stillwell, is also on record for strongly supporting the comedian’s beginning artistic efforts, which would have paralleled the managing portion of her career with him.
Valentina said that her father was a very prolific artist. “The paintings would stack up,” she remembered. “Dad did tons and tons of Freddies [Freddie the Freeloader] and people—celebrities—in clown form.”29 A broad spectrum of entertainers bought Skelton’s work, ranging from Hope to Burt Reynolds. Valentina noted a certain irony in her father’s success as an artist. Skelton was so needy of attention that he had a smothering effect on Davis, to the point where Valentina believed her mother was “losing her identity.” The added paradox for Valentina was that Davis was the trained artist, yet ultimately, “Dad overshadowed her there [in art], too.”30
When discussing painting, Skelton the raconteur often enjoyed telling an apocryphal story about an abstract exhibition he had once seen in, of all places, a large urban department store (the city and date frequently changed.). He supposedly asked the price of one prominent painting in this modern art collection. When the clerk answered, “10,000 wouldn’t buy that one,” Skelton comically replied, “And I would be one of the 10,000.” After this, he decided to try painting. Though it is unlikely this comic exchange ever took place, the construction of the story reveals a great deal about Skelton. First, even though the comedy comes from a play on words, Skelton, as a child of poverty, was greatly impressed with anything costing $10,000. Second, as the most practical of people, at some level one can assume he might have thought, “If an abstract painting can be priced that high, why couldn’t I make even more money with representational art? Third, Skelton’s story also clearly places him with the masses (one of ten thousand) on his rejection of modern art. And though some of Skelton’s later canvases fetched tens of thousands of dollars, he was always most pleased with making his art affordable to the general public by way of poster and plate reproductions.
Thanks to his increased activity as a Palm Springs painter, Skelton had his first art show in June 1964. The exhibition was at Las Vegas’s Sands Hotel, where Skelton was entertaining. The public was charmed by this revelation about a clown painting clowns, and it generated a great deal of publicity, including a color photo spread in Look magazine. Even the manner in which Skelton’s art was showcased produced kudos. The upper portion of a wall covered by rows of his clown paintings included a window-like opening that allowed Skelton, made-up as a clown, to pose from the other side, as if he were yet another painting.
The comedian knew he had arrived when major art collectors in show business, people such as Maurice Chevalier and Frank Sinatra, wanted a Skelton original. Despite this success, Skelton remained self-deprecating about his painting, such as the revelation, “I work on … [two paintings simultaneously] until I can figure out what’s wrong with the first one. Sometimes I don’t find out for weeks. Sometimes I just don’t find out.”31 Trying to stay cool in the desert heat, Skelton also found that painting in the shallow end of his pool presented certain problems, as in oil and water do not mix: “You ought to see the pool after one of my painting sprees. It’s an olympic-sized palette.”32 But consistent with his revisionist history tendencies, once someone was out of his life, after his divorce from Davis and her subsequent death, she ceased to be credited with introducing him to painting.
By his final years Skelton had spun a story that sounds apocryphal in nature: too poor for supplies, he fashioned a brush from a lock of his hair, which was somehow attached to a pencil. Paint was scrounged from discarded school supplies. Skelton was nothing if not a good storyteller. When I ran all these art stories by Valentina she further fleshed out her mother’s art resume.33 Davis was going to be an illustrator for the Denver Post but it did not work out. She attended the Art Center School in Los Angeles and qualified for a commercial degree but there was little work available. Georgia then drifted into modeling and was soon signed by MGM. Valentina’s final adjunct to the art story, however, was that while she had never heard her father’s homespun yarn about a brush from his hair and so on, he had done some early painting. That is, Skelton had once gifted her with a painting he dated from his teenage years. (In Skelton’s last years, when health problems kept him from performing, his painting gave the comedian great comfort, allowing him to continue to be creative.)
Skelton and his wife Davis early in their marriage with one of the comedian’s earliest hobbies—a train set. (Wes D. Gehring Stills Collection)
Besides the comedian’s full embrace of painting during the Palm Spring years, Skelton divided his free time among several other hobbies. His interest in gardening resulted in buying the vacant lots on either side of the Palm Beach residence. They were soon transformed into formal Italian and Japanese gardens, with Skelton’s favorite horticulture activity being the care and maintenance of his bonsai trees—the small, ornamental shrublike plants whose size and shape are severely restricted by the grow
er. In the Japanese garden Skelton also had an elaborate teahouse constructed that ultimately might have doubled as a guesthouse. This building became hobby central, with Skelton working here on his musical compositions and short stories, not to mention his paintings.
While his music skills were never in a class with his paintings, which eventually generated millions of dollars for the comedian, several Skelton compositions were published by sheet-music companies, such as “The Kadiddlehopper March” and “Red’s White and Blue March.” His writing skills, despite the tutelage by Gene Fowler, never really panned out. There was a charming children’s book, Gertrude and Heathcliff (1971), about his two comic seagull characters, but that volume’s success is a product of Skelton’s humorous drawings. In fairness to Skelton, he seldom tried to market these tales, other than a handful sold with his artwork, such as his short story about “The Ventriloquist” or “Old Whity” (a horse). He simply preferred to stockpile them, as a someday legacy to his family. There are literally thousands of these Skelton stories, and story fragments, in Vincennes University’s Red Skelton Collection. As he demonstrated in his relationship with the press concerning an inventive take on his life history, Skelton’s writing often mixes fact and fantasy at random. Though many Skelton pieces show promise, the vast majority suffer from a lack of attention. Writing is essentially about rewriting. But Skelton seems to have been more concerned with daily numbers—one short story, five tunes, a love letter to Davis, and whatever else he included in this rigorous schedule.
Why did he turn what were essentially hobbies into such a daily grind? First, Skelton had always been blessed (cursed?) with a midwestern work ethic, and it had served him well through the years. I am reminded of critic Joan Acocella’s comment, “What allows genius to flower is not neurosis but its opposite … ordinary Sunday-school virtues such as tenacity and above all the ability to survive disappointment.”34 By reducing his television work week to two intense days, he had never had so much free time, and it was soon arranged like a work schedule.
A second explanation for this hobby intensity, especially as it embraced the arts (painting, musical composition, writing), was probably tied to creative respectability. Skelton used to regularly complain to his production company chief, Guy della Ciappa, “Most people think I’m just a cheap vaudeville clown. I get no respect from anybody.”35 Third, many of Skelton’s entertainment heroes through the years had worn many creative hats, from his Vincennes mentor Clarence Stout to the ultimate in multitasking, Charlie Chaplin. At some level, Skelton undoubtedly felt a true artist does it all. Consequently, with the extra time and creative isolation made possible by his Palm Springs getaway, Skelton’s artistic flowering was the 1960s.
Skelton painting in his Muncie, Indiana, hotel room prior to his one-man-show at Ball State University in 1977. (Ball State University Photographic Services)
Now, what boded well for Skelton the Renaissance man was not necessarily ideal for family and loved ones. Though he and Davis were at home more, and the comedian enjoyed talking about the couple doing things together, the truth of the matter was that Skelton tended to be off in his own creative world. Even before the move, the comedian had become something of a reclusive artist. What follows is a telling Skelton revelation, made two years prior to Palm Springs: “We stay home a lot, Georgia and I. When I’m not working, I stay in my room upstairs and write. Sometimes I don’t leave the room all day.”36 Ironically, while the title of the TV Guide interview/article this quote is drawn from, “It Hasn’t All Been Laughs,” is meant to document the dark side of being a clown, it also doubles as an apt description of life, in general, for this clown’s wife. Davis’s situation reminds me of the Chekhov adage, “If you are afraid of loneliness don’t marry.” This was worse than the Eleanor Rigby variety of loneliness, because in Davis’s case, her alleged soul mate was there but often missing in creative action.
If the situation was less than ideal for Davis, it was worse for the extended family. The comedian’s nephew, Marvin L. Skelton, told me that when Skelton and Davis moved to Palm Springs it was like they “dropped off the earth.”37 According to Marvin, while they were never a close family, there had been regular contact, though usually on his uncle’s terms. For example, Marvin’s father lived close to Skelton’s home studio (MGM), and the comedian sometimes stopped by after work. Plus, there were occasional special birthday parties for the family star. This all but ceased after the Palm Springs move. As a bit of back history, Marvin suggested that Skelton’s family ties were directly related to whom he was married. Calling Edna Stillwell a “great gal,” he said there was “lots of family contact when he [Skelton] was married to her.”38 Marvin believed Davis was always a bit standoffish and that often characterized the comedian’s family attitude during that marriage. Regarding Skelton’s third wife, Toland, Marvin hesitated to say anything, then, exhibiting some of the earthy humor favored by his uncle in private, he said, “She goes around like she has a chapped ass.”39 Needless to say, there was little family connection during Skelton’s third marriage.
Even in the 1960s, Marvin’s main link with his uncle was by way of the woman the public thought of as the comedian’s mother, Ida Mae Skelton. Years before, Skelton had given her a home near MGM, where she lived with her husband, Gustave Soderstrom. After Skelton’s stepfather died, the comedian bought Ida Mae a house in Palm Springs. Through summer visits to his grandmother’s desert home, Marvin managed to maintain some affinity with his famous uncle, who lived just a few miles away. Though Skelton had largely let the family network slip away, he remained loyal to his adoptive mother. Marvin recalled, “Red was always giving her gifts. When she died [1966] there were stacks of $100 bills taped to the bottom of her bathroom floor mat. She didn’t care about material things; she was just happy to have a nice home.”40 Though she was in some ways overwhelmed by her son’s success, Marvin affectionately described her as, “a funny old gal that liked to drink beer and have a good time.”41
Ida Mae was also the catalyst for an eye-opening letter Skelton wrote to his daughter Valentina. The two had visited the octogenarian in the hospital, the year before she died. Valentina would have been approximately eighteen years old at the time, and presumably still at home. Thus, even before examining the document, one ponders the necessity of writing such a note. The answer, however, seems present in the loving but formal tone of the letter, which might have been penned in the Victorian era:
It was most generous and kind of you to accompany me to
Bel Air and to the hospital to visit your Grandmother
Mur [Skelton’s pet name for Ida Mae]. Most teenagers
are less polite towards Mothers and Dads and age itself.
I sure was proud to be in the company of such a well-
disciplined lady and happy to hear of the love you
revealed toward your dear Mother.
The respect you gave me will add to our [Davis and
Skelton’s] prayers that the blessing of God may attend
you in all your endeavors … I’ll bet He must find
it difficult to get more material to make another you.
Love,
Your Dad42
One would hope Skelton’s one-on-one time with his daughter was not so rigid, though the letter itself was still a convoluted “I love you” to Valentina. Skelton felt a need to quantify all aspects of his life—from bound-in-leather letter collections to the women he lived with, to the assorted stockpiles of art projects he kept turning out. Like a whirling dervish, Skelton’s professional side sometimes became mixed up with his personal, and his personal with professional. The result could be a parental note that sounds more like a “well done” commendation from a Dickens headmaster.
Valentina has indicated she has little memories of these at-home letters from her father.43 Consequently, as sometimes occurred with Skelton’s undelivered in-house correspondence to his second (Davis) and third (Toland) wives, writing became an end in itself.
If there was a complaint, the undelivered letter seemingly became cathartic, or, if such a note was complimentary, one supposes Skelton was stockpiling documentation of his love.
Since the highlighted letter to Valentina discussed her paternal grandmother, I asked Skelton’s daughter if her father had shared with her his controversial private belief that his biological mother had really been a prostitute. Surprisingly, Valentina said he had, and replicated much of what was discussed earlier. This was yet another enigma of the man, often secretive and prone to compartmentalization, here he could share the most provocative of suggestions with his daughter.
Before moving from this complex puzzle of a private life back to Skelton’s more familiar public persona, there is one more transition hobby to examine—watching and studying television. For most of his twenty consecutive years on television, Skelton was a regular video junkie. This went beyond research for his program, though given his workaholic tendencies, at some point he probably justified it along those lines. More correctly, he was, like most pioneering television viewers, totally mesmerized by the phenomenon. After all, this was a pop culture development that even changed America’s eating habits, introducing such new terms (and customs) as the “TV dinner” and the “TV tray”—eliminating the need for family small talk at dinner.
Given Skelton’s television insider status and his unlimited resources, the comedian had video recording capabilities at home decades ahead of the general public. At one point, he also had a bank of three television sets (for yesteryear’s three main networks) so that he could monitor all programming simultaneously. Though Skelton only had the sound on for one focus show, if something else of interest appeared on the competition, he was ready to tape. (His fascination with television-related technology was merely an updated example of Skelton’s longtime interest in gadgetry that began with photography and later included assorted tape recorders, which is how the comedian did his “writing.”)