by Wes Gehring
The initial catalyst for a lengthy 1969 letter is the televised movie the Skeltons had watched in bed the previous night, a British courtroom drama titled Man in the Middle (1964). But Skelton soon segues into an affectionate chronicle of their life, actually qualifying this writing for the phrase the comedian so loosely applied to all his in-house correspondence—“love letters”: “But we were safe in our beds, free to talk, laugh and grumble a bit, to read and have a cold glass of milk with an oatmeal cookie. My, we sure live it up. It’s for sure, if anyone says we are hokey, they had better add ‘and healthy, too.’ You have never been more understanding, more lovable, more kind. When we go over our notes [to each other] … we will find not one cross word … How we are blessed with love. It’s like love should be, not talked about or read about but lived.”22
To paraphrase a line from Ernest Hemingway, no subject is more complicated than man. How else does one mesh these just cited sweet and amusing Skelton ramblings with the other difficult and often unappealing sketches of him previously noted? But to muddy the waters all the more, sometimes Skelton’s daily letters to Davis neither praise nor disparage his spouse. Instead, they retreat into the world of political paranoia. In a 1968 letter he claimed, “The Cuban Missile Crisis [1962] joke was to get Democratic governors elected under [President] Kennedy. I wonder why the U.S. news agency has never told the people about Russian fishing boats that unloaded off the coast of Big Sur, Cal., twenty atomic bombs which were placed in aircraft—seven to be exact, and they took off to different parts of the U.S. But where?”23
Earlier in the book Skelton’s conservative questioning of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s negotiations with the Soviet Union were addressed. But there is little to prepare one for such a crackpot claim that the Cuban Missile Crisis was a Democratic scam. Paradoxically, though his letter questioned the legitimacy of the Cuban incident, he frequently stockpiled canned goods in the years after the crisis, convinced that a nuclear Armageddon was inevitable. The comedian’s nephew recently shared a conversation he once had with Phil Harris, the Hoosier-born bandleader/comic who lived near his uncle’s Palm Springs home. All a mystified Harris could say about Skelton was, “That guy is weird.”24 But Marvin could not get Harris to embellish his comments. My guess is they simply talked a little politics.
Though a global apocalypse never came to pass, a series of events at the end of the 1960s precipitated Skelton’s own personal meltdown. In 1969 the twenty-two-year-old Valentina married Carlos J. Alonso, a bouncer at a private membership-only Los Angeles nightclub called Climax. “Dad was totally against him,” said Valentina. “He was not up to their [my parents’] standards, and he was not American, being European.” Although Skelton went on to get Alonso a job at CBS’s local film department, Valentina soon felt “ostracized as a black sheep,” a relationship status with her father that characterized much of his remaining years.25 The Skeltons had wanted their daughter to marry a wealthy captain of industry, and had even tried to play matchmaker with the millionaire oil man Ed Pauley. Valentina, who today sees her rebelliousness as akin to the independent young Davis, had other ideas. Combine this with a lack of interest in show business and “my parents were very disappointed in me,” Valentina said.26
Coupled with this, CBS canceled Skelton’s television program at the end of the 1969–70 season, and the subsequent move to NBC also failed. As often happens in all walks of life, when a career is in crisis, so goes the personal life, too. Almost twenty years before, when Skelton’s television show last struggled, the comedian’s marriage had gone through its most publicized problem period. This time neither the show nor the marital union survived. But the failed marriage was further fueled by another 1969 development—Skelton met Lothian Toland, the daughter of famed cinematographer Greg Toland, who pioneered the deep-focus technique synonymous with Citizen Kane (1941).
The thirty-two-year-old Toland (Skelton was fifty-six) was the secretary/girlfriend of composer Frederick Loewe, who collaborated with lyricist Alan Jay Lerner on such hit Broadway musicals as Brigadoon, Paint Your Wagon, My Fair Lady, and Camelot. With the Skeltons and Loewe being members of Palm Springs’s Tamarisk Country Club, they were soon socializing. Davis, who soon nicknamed Toland the “nymphet,” later told one of Skelton’s television producers, “You wouldn’t believe how that girl went after Red.”27
According to Valentina, the relationship between the Skeltons and Toland “started out as a happy friendship but Lothy was aggressive and she and Dad soon had a phone code—three rings meant it was her. It was so obvious, so very Hollywood. There’s a movie there.”28 Davis’s health issues, often related to or exacerbated by her alcoholism, meant she was frequently hospitalized, providing numerous rendezvous possibilities for Skelton and Toland. In addition, Skelton essentially had a separate residence in his teahouse/office.
Eventually, any pretense was dropped, and Skelton spent most nights at Toland’s nearby condominium, returning each day to his Palm Springs estate to hole up in the teahouse and work on his various artistic projects. Presumably, there were no more daily love letters to Davis, though they lunched together. Ironically, Davis kept writing to him. The bound letters to Skelton during their last year (he filed for divorce in November 1971) provide a harrowing window into the life of a desperate woman. Her often pleading tone is sensitive to the “respect” the comedian found so important. In an undated letter from 1971 she described finding some old love notes to her husband and offered them to him as homage/proof of her love: “I would be honored if you would keep them. Perhaps ten years from now you may see the blinding brilliance of my love and respect for you down through our lives together. You so dwell now on only the unhappy days and forget our joyous ones. You say your daughter believed we gave her no proper childhood, yet the films [home movies] and remembrances of happy times prove her wrong.… [These surviving] letters to you, dear, dear Big Red [Skelton] … prove my deeply sustained powerful devotion, admiration and respect for you all this time.”29
On May 19, 1971, at five in the morning, Davis wrote: “My dearest, beloved Big Red, please, please read my note. I humbly ask your forgiveness for what it is I have done to contribute to your losing faith in yourself [his program would have recently been canceled] and in our precious holy love. Again, may I ask your forgiveness for the apparent disrespect I’ve shown you for not paying more attention to your physical agonies [years of pratfalls would eventually necessitate that Skelton wear leg braces].”30
By the time of Davis’s October 5, 1971, letter, there was general resignation (even about Toland), as Davis savored what time they had together and prayed for the renewal of his creative gift: “My heart’s spirit wants to give you every happiness possible during the hours you remain with me, to bring you and us, just us, happiness and joy as we have always known it during our good times together—and there always were so many, if we truthfully look introspectively.… Please, always remember my heart is yours forever, and my love and respect for you only grows more magnificently with each bright new dawn. May God bless your friend [Toland] who loves you so and wishes with all her heart and soul she might take wing with your spirit and soar.… Then the God-given creative flow in you will [again] well up to overflowing.”31
Before becoming resigned to the divorce, Davis had used some very unorthodox actions to get Skelton back, including having a lover move into the Skeltons’ Palm Springs home in hopes of making her husband jealous. After the couple’s divorce, according to Valentina, her mother had no kind words to say about Toland. Moreover, she continued to “escape” through various affairs, including a lesbian liaison.32 Years later, after the 1973 marriage of Skelton and Toland and the 1976 suicide of Davis, the comedian glossed over these events, and added some patented Skelton embellishments: “I pushed her [Toland] in a baby buggy when she was little. I’d visit her father [Greg Toland] when she was just a little thing. My wife Georgia, to whom I was married for 26 years, was dying of cancer, and she said to Lothian,
‘If you see your way clear, you kind of take care of Red because you know him better than anyone.” 33
As a rebuttal witness once remarked, “Where to begin.” One might start by repeating a quote already noted in the book, with Skelton saying in 1947: “That’s my trouble. If you wanta good story—talk to me. If you want the facts—talk to Edna [Skelton’s former wife and then manager].”34 Skelton’s story about a dying Davis implied that they were still married at the time of her death and Toland only came in later for the passing of the marital baton. As the previous pages have documented, this was obviously not the case. Plus, according to Valentina and period press coverage of Davis’s suicide, she was not dying of cancer.35
Pushing Toland in a baby carriage is an interesting touch and certainly not the kind of admission most people would make about their May-December relationship. But it is consistent with Skelton’s enjoyment of comic surprise, despite an equal fondness for old jokes. Yet, maybe part of the shock involved is a cover for the unlikelihood of it occurring. Toland was born in 1937, at a time when Skelton and Edna Stillwell were nomadic vaudevillians entertaining in the eastern half of the United States. Other than one brief stop in Hollywood for Skelton’s small role in Having Wonderful Time (1938), the couple did not relocate to the film capital until the early 1940s. Thus, while the carriage story is possible, given Skelton’s “creative” track record, one cannot be blamed for questioning it. Even his only grandchild, documentary filmmaker Sabrina Alonso, questions the baby-carriage story. During a lengthy interview she told me, “I’m sure he [Skelton] made it up. It was probably a big joke for him.”36
Before exploring the whys and wherefores for all this invention, Skelton’s tale of Davis’s death has another apocryphal element. He was fond of saying, “on the day that our son died of leukemia, my wife couldn’t stand the pain from her own cancer any longer. So she took her life at the very hour that he passed away. And she left a note: ‘The reason I chose this day was so you wouldn’t feel bad twice in one year.’”37
Davis did commit suicide on the anniversary (May 10) of her son’s death. But besides the fact that she was not dying of cancer, press coverage at the time was adamant about there not being a suicide note. However, maybe one turned up later, like the fascinating case of director James Whale, whose mysterious death long puzzled Hollywood, until it was discovered years later that his Catholic housekeeper had hidden the suicide note to save him from the damnation of the church.38
In Davis’s case, I do not think there was a note. But I am not questioning the veracity of Skelton’s claim. By killing herself on the same day her son died, Davis’s troubled mind might have believed this would minimize the family’s future suffering. But this bit of Skelton storytelling demonstrates yet another facet of the comedian’s tall-tale tendencies. Whereas the please “take care of Red” spiel was self-serving, both covering up a messy affair and probably placating a sense of guilt over abandoning such an unstable woman, Skelton’s yarn about Davis’s stoic suicide is every bit as romantically noble as the sacrificial suicide of Norman Maine (James Mason) at the close of A Star Is Born (1954). Skelton is trying to soften and recast a harsh act.
Yet these are just two extremes (the self-serving versus the noble) of Skelton’s tendency to reverse reality to mold his own personal mythology. The greatest catalyst to his mythomania was seemingly quite simple—the need to tell a better story. Earlier I paraphrased an Ernest Hemingway comment about man being the most complicated of all subjects. But it is even more pertinent to reference the novelist’s Skelton-like proclivity for self-invention. Literary scholar Jeffrey Meyers wrote, “Hemingway always tended to exaggerate and embroider the events of his life.… [He] combined a scrupulous honesty in his fiction with a tendency to distort and rewrite the story of his life. Given his predisposition to mythomania, his reluctance to disappoint either his own expectations or those of his audience, and the difficulty of refuting or verifying the facts of his life, he felt virtually forced to invent an exciting and imaginative alternative to commonplace reality.”39
All these comments are equally applicable to Skelton, whose art brilliantly tells the truth through comedy (especially his miniaturist’s eye in amusingly capturing so many human foibles), but whose personal history is a crazy quilt of invention, from claims that his father was a world famous clown and a college professor, to Skelton later erasing the influence of Stillwell and Buster Keaton from his life. Like Hemingway, there was also a “reluctance to disappoint either his own expectations or those of his audience.” For example, when the comedian reveals in his private papers the belief that his mother was actually a prostitute in his grandmother’s brothel, he adds, “Such a story will rock the foundation of my career.”40 And while Skelton felt that it should come out, he never got around to telling his true life story, despite the fact that his career is peppered with announcements about forthcoming autobiographical books and films.
Skelton enjoys himself at Ball State University upon receiving an honorary doctorate from the institution. (Ball State University Photographic Services)
I am reminded of a relevant story by one of Skelton’s favorite comedians—W. C. Fields.41 Fields was famous for his hyperbolic approach to his own personal history, especially when he played center-stage raconteur at dinner parties. Late in life Fields had an increasing reluctance to enter into these biographical tall tales, confessing concern about getting caught in a network of entertainingly conflicting whoppers. Something very much like this might have played out in Skelton’s mind, too. So instead, to borrow another analogy from Meyers, “The scholar concerned with the truth finds himself lost in rumor and—proved fact, in conflicting statements and pure fantasy.”42 While Skelton never published a memoir, he continued to write and stockpile stories somewhere between fact and fiction. Or, to lift a phrase from literary criticism, these were tales seeped in “non-fiction fiction.” Examining these unpublished stories allows the Skelton biographer to experience the traditional benefit to be derived from autobiographical musings, as defined by New York Times critic Danielle Trussoni, “The real pleasure of reading a memoir lies not in the consumption of confessions but in watching a writer grapple with the reality that shaped him.”43 Skelton grappled more than most.
Though Skelton never got over his dismissal from television, it fueled the comedian’s active return to live performances, especially playing numerous college campuses. He wanted to prove the network demographic gurus wrong. Skelton seemed to have accomplished this in 1978, when he was awarded the College Comedian of the Year Award. The governing board that selected him, the National Entertainment Conference, represented 460 colleges and universities. But Skelton also played various other venues, with the pièce de résistance being two acclaimed shows at Carnegie Hall in 1977. The New York Times said, “He is as hilariously rubbery as ever, nimble legs, facile hands, plastic-putty face and expressive eyes.”44
The New York Daily News critic wished that the not quite sixty-four-year-old comedian had featured his Mean Widdle Kid in his Carnegie material, but insightfully added, “Junior still lurks behind every Skelton move. The man watching the drive-in movie alone—who finally gives up on the film to eyeball the [sexual] action in the next car—is simply the mean widdle kid at middle age.”45 Even when the Daily News reviewer had problems with Skelton’s act, such as calling the comedian’s “Pledge of Allegiance” routine “patriotic camp,” the criticism was still perceptive—“[Skelton’s] main malady; his brain is still in his heart.”46
The most telling critical remarks about this Carnegie engagement, however, came from the Hollywood Reporter. This publication focused on the extremely warm reception Skelton received from his audience. Like Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, I think of Skelton as more a comedian of the people, and best appreciated, even revered, by the people. The audience response chronicled by the Reporter was repeated in numerous heartland appearances by Skelton. The Reporter stated there was a standing ovation before the concert
began, followed by the most responsive of crowds: “The audience reacted with hilarity to the stories and applauded his mimicry vociferously.”47 Along similar lines, the New York Daily News even noted the post-Carnegie show emotion: “lots of people were milling [around] with tears in their eyes. A man told his wife that he wished Skelton had stayed on stage longer.”48 This was the typical response of a Skelton audience, whether it was New York or Muncie, Indiana.
Besides reconnecting with live audiences and winning the College Comedian of the Year Award, there were many other honors in Skelton’s final years. These prestigious acknowledgements included: the Golden Globes’ 1978 Cecil B. DeMille Award for “outstanding contributions to the entertainment industry,” the aforementioned 1986 Emmy for lifetime achievement, a 1987 Screen Actors Guild Award for career achievements, his 1989 induction into the Television Academy’s Hall of Fame, and his 1993 admission into the Comedy Hall of Fame. Skelton’s many diverse regional honors ranged from a 1964 homecoming to Vincennes, Indiana, for the dedication of a Wabash River bridge named in his honor, to a 1986 honorary doctorate bestowed upon him by Ball State University.
Despite all this love, or maybe partly because of it, Skelton’s rancor over his television cancellation continued. But his bitterness seemed to take on an unstable note in a 1980 interview with People magazine: “Skelton has directed that the original kinescopes and tapes of his TV programs be burned upon his own death. ‘I worked hard to make them, and they’re not going on the market for someone else to use.’”49 Not surprisingly, several of his former television writers took Skelton to court to block such an action, citing possible loss of income from syndication rights. Later that year, Skelton told Variety it had all been a misunderstanding, yet he still seemed combative: “Would you burn the only monument you’ve built over 20 years? … [But] how can they [the writers] sue over something in a will anyhow? Nobody knows what’s in a man’s will until he dies and it goes through probate. But the burning’s not in my will.”50