Red Skelton

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search
Red Skelton

Image:Skelton1.jpg
Skelton (and two of his characters) caricatured by Sam Berman for NBC's 1947 promotional book.

Birth name Richard Bernard Skelton
Born July 18 1913(1913-07-18)
Image:Flag of the United States.svg Vincennes, Indiana
Died September 17 1997 (aged 84)
Palm Springs, California
Show Red Skelton Show
Station(s) NBC, CBS
Style Comedian
Country United States

Richard Bernard "Red" Skelton (July 18 1913 – September 17 1997) was an American comedian who was best known as a top radio and television star from 1937 to 1971. Skelton's show business career began in his teens as a circus clown and went on to vaudeville, Broadway, films, radio, TV, clubs and casinos, while pursuing another career as a painter.

Contents

[edit] Early life

Born in Vincennes, Indiana, Skelton was the son of a Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus clown named Joe who died in 1913 shortly before the birth of his son. Skelton himself got one of his earliest tastes of show business with the same circus as a teenager. Before that, however, he had been given the show business bug at age ten by entertainer Ed Wynn, who spotted him selling newspapers in front of the Pantheon Theatre, in Vincennes, Indiana, trying to help his family. After buying every newspaper in Skelton's stock, Wynn took the boy backstage and introduced him to every member of the show with which he was traveling. By age 15, Skelton had hit the road full-time as an entertainer, working everywhere from medicine shows and vaudeville to burlesque, showboats, minstrel shows and circuses.

[edit] Films

While performing in Kansas City in 1930, Skelton met and married his first wife, Edna Stillwell. The couple divorced 13 years later, but they remained cordial enough that Stillwell remained one of his chief writers. Seven years after their marriage, Skelton caught his big break in two media at once: radio and film. Beginning with Having Wonderful Time (1938), Skelton appeared in more than 30 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer films during the 1940s and 1950s.

In 1945, he married Georgia Davis; the couple had two children, Richard and Valentina; Richard's childhood death of leukemia devastated the household. Red and Georgia divorced in 1971, and he remarried. In 1976, Georgia committed suicide by gunshot. Deeply wounded by the loss of his ex-wife, Red would abstain from performing for the next decade and a half, finding solace only in painting clowns.

[edit] Radio

After 1937 appearances on The Rudy Vallee Show, Skelton became a regular in 1939 on NBC's Avalon Time, sponsored by Avalon Cigarettes. On October 7, 1941, Skelton premiered his own radio show, The Raleigh Cigarette Program, developing routines involving a number of recurring characters, including punch-drunk boxer Cauliflower McPugg, inebriated Willie Lump-Lump and "mean widdle kid" Junior, whose favorite phrase ("I dood it!") became part of the American lexicon. That, along with "He bwoke my widdle arm!" or other body part, and "He don't know me vewy well, do he?" all found their way into various Warner Bros. cartoons. Skelton himself was referenced in a Popeye cartoon in which the title character enters a haunted house and encounters a "red skeleton".

There was con man San Fernando Red with his pair of crosseyed seagulls, Gertrude and Heathcliffe, and singing cabdriver Clem Kadiddlehopper, a country bumpkin with a big heart and a slow wit. Clem had an unintentional knack for upstaging high society slickers, even if he couldn't manipulate his cynical father: "When the stork brought you, Clem, I shoulda shot him on sight!" Skelton would later consider court action against the apparent usurption of this character by Bill Scott, for the voice of Bullwinkle.

Skelton also helped sell WWII war bonds on the top-rated show, which featured Ozzie and Harriet Nelson in the supporting cast, plus the Ozzie Nelson Orchestra and announcer Truman Bradley. Harriet Nelson was the show's vocalist.

It was during this period that Red divorced his first wife Edna and married his second wife Georgia. Red and Georgia's only child, son Richard, was born in 1945. Georgia continued in her role as Red's manager until the 1960s.

Skelton was drafted in March 1944, and the popular series was discontinued June 6, 1944. Shipped overseas to serve with an Army entertainment unit as a private, Skelton had a nervous breakdown in Italy, spent three months in a hospital and was discharged in September 1945. He once joked about his military career, "I was the only celebrity who went in and came out a private."

On December 4, 1945, The Raleigh Cigarette Program resumed where it left off with Skelton introducing some new characters, including Bolivar Shagnasty and J. Newton Numbskull. Lurene Tuttle and Verna Felton appeared as Junior's mother and grandmother. David Forrester and David Rose led the orchestra, featuring vocalist Anita Ellis. The announcers were Pat McGeehan and Rod O'Connor. The series ended May 20, 1949, and that fall he moved to CBS. Ironically, given that his peak of popularity came with his television show, in recent years recordings of the Red Skelton radio show have become much easier to come by than the TV show.

[edit] Television

In 1951 (the same year the network introduced I Love Lucy), CBS beckoned Skelton to bring his radio show to television. His characters worked even better on screen than on radio; television also provoked him to create his second best-remembered character, Freddie the Freeloader, a traditional tramp whose appearance suggested the elder brother of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus clown Emmett Kelly. Announcer/voice actor Art Gilmore, who voiced numerous movie trailers in Hollywood in the 1940s and 50s, became the announcer on the show with David Rose and his orchestra providing the music. A hit instrumental for Rose, called "Holiday for Strings", was used as Skelton's TV theme song.

Skelton's weekly signoff -- "Good night and may God bless" -- became as familiar to television viewers as Edward R. Murrow's "Good night and good luck" or Walter Cronkite's "And that's the way it is".

Skelton was the first CBS television host to begin taping his weekly programs in color, in the early 1960s, after he bought an old movie studio and converted it for television productions. He tried to encourage CBS to tape other shows in color at the facility, although most shows were taped in black and white at Television City near the Farmers Market in Los Angeles. However, CBS boss William S. Paley had generally given up on color television after the network's unsuccessful efforts to receive FCC approval for their "color wheel" system (developed by inventor Peter Goldmark) in the early 1950s. Although CBS occasionally would use NBC facilities for specials in color, the network avoided color programming --except for telecasts of The Wizard of Oz and Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella -- until the fall of 1965, when both NBC and ABC began televising most of their programs in RCA's compatible color process. By that time, Skelton had abandoned his own studio and moved to Television City, where he resumed color programs until he left the network.

Quite literally at the height of Skelton's popularity his son was diagnosed with leukemia. In 1957 this was a virtual death sentence for any child. The illness and subsequent death of Richard Skelton at age 13 left Skelton unable to perform for much of the 1957-1958 television season. The show continued with guest hosts that included a very young Johnny Carson. CBS management was exceptionally understanding of Red's situation and no talk of cancellation was ever entertained by CBS president Paley. Skelton would seemingly turn on CBS and Paley after his show was cancelled in 1970.

Skelton was inducted into the International Clown Hall of Fame in 1989, but as Kadiddlehopper showed, he was more than an interpretive clown. One of his best-known routines was "The Pledge of Allegiance," in which he explained the pledge word by word. Another Skelton staple, a pantomime of the crowd at a small town parade as the American flag passes by, reflected Skelton's essentially conservative, rural, Americana tastes.

Skelton frequently used the art of pantomime for his characters, using few props. He had a hat that he would use for his various bits, a floppy fedora that he would quickly mold into whatever shape was needed for the moment.

In his autobiography Groucho And Me, Groucho Marx, in asserting that comic acting is much more difficult than straight acting, rated Red Skelton's acting ability highly and considered him a worthy successor to Charles Chaplin. One of the last known on-camera interviews with Skelton was conducted by Steven F. Zambo. A small portion of this interview can be seen in the 2005 PBS special The Pioneers of Primetime.

[edit] Off the air

Skelton kept his high television ratings into 1970, but he ran into two problems with CBS: demographics showed he no longer appealed to younger viewers, and his contracted annual salary raises grew disproportionately thanks to inflation. Since CBS had earlier decided to keep another longtime favorite, Gunsmoke, whose appeal was strictly to older audiences, it's possible that without Skelton's inflationary contract raises he might have been kept on the air a few more years. He moved to NBC in 1971 for one season in a half-hour Monday night version of his show, then ended his long television career after being canceled.

Skelton was said to be bitter about CBS's cancellation for many years to follow. Ignoring the demographics and salary issues, he bitterly accused CBS of caving in to the anti-establishment, anti-war faction at the height of the Vietnam War, saying his conservative politics and traditional values caused CBS to turn against him. Skelton invited prominent Republicans, including Vice President Spiro T. Agnew and Senate Republican Leader Everett Dirksen, to appear on his program.

As if the loss of his show was not enough, his wife Georgia committed suicide in 1976, five years after their divorce, and on the anniversary of their son's death years before. This was her second attempt at suicide but this time she made sure with a self-inflicted gun shot wound to the head.

When he was presented with the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences' Governor's Award in 1986, he received a standing ovation. "I want to thank you for sitting down," Skelton said when the ovation subsided. "I thought you were pulling a CBS and walking out on me."

[edit] Aftermath

Skelton returned to live performance after his television days ended, in nightclubs and casinos and resorts, as well as performing such venues as Carnegie Hall. Many of those shows yielded segments that were edited into part of the Funny Faces video series on HBO's Standing Room Only. He also spent more time on his lifetime love of painting, usually of clown images, and his works began to attract prices over $80,000.

Red married for a third and last time in 1983 to the much younger Lothian Toland. She continues to maintain a website and business selling Skelton memorabilia and art prints.

In Death Valley Junction, California, circus performers painted by Marta Becket decorate the Red Skelton Room in the 23-room Amargosa Hotel, where Skelton stayed four times. The room is dedicated to Skelton, as explained by John Mulvihill in his essay "Lost Highway Hotel":

Marta Becket is the magic behind the Amargosa Hotel. For the past 32 years it has provided both a home and a venue for her lifetime ambition: to perform her dance and pantomime works to paying audiences. Since 1968 she's been doing just that, twice a week, audiences or no. The hotel guest’s first encounter with Marta is through her paintings in the lobby and dining area. Once she and her husband had upgraded the structure of the hotel and theatre, she make them unique by painting their walls with shimmering frescoes (not real frescoes but the effect is the same) in a style uniquely hers. Some of the paintings are deceptively three-dimensional, like the guitar leaning against a wall that you don’t realize is a painting until you reach to pick it up. Some are evocative of carnival art from the early part of this century. All are vibrant, whimsical. If you’re lucky, your room will be graced with similar wall paintings. Room 22 is where Red Skelton used to stay. He visited once to catch Marta’s show, and like so many others, fell victim to the Amargosa’s enchantment and returned again and again. He asked Marta to illustrate his room with circus performers and though he died shortly thereafter, she did so anyway. Staying in this room, with acrobats scaling the walls and trapeze artists flying from the ceiling, is a singularly evocative experience, one I wouldn’t trade for a suite at the Waldorf-Astoria. [1]

Near the end of his life, Skelton said his daily routine included writing a short story a day. He collected the best stories in self-published chapbooks. He also composed music which he sold to background music services such as Muzak. Among his more notable compositions was his patriotic "Red's White and Blue March."

Red Skelton died in a hospital in Palm Springs, California of pneumonia on September 17, 1997. At the time of his death, he lived in Anza, California. He is buried in Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California.

In 2002 during the controversy over the phrase "under God," which had been added to U.S. Pledge of Allegiance in 1954, a recording of a monologue Skelton performed on his 1969 television show resurfaced. In the speech, he commented on the meaning of each phrase of the Pledge. At the end, he added: "Wouldn't it be a pity if someone said that is a prayer and that would be eliminated from schools too?" Given that Constitution advocates were arguing that the inclusion of "under God" in a pledge recited daily in U.S. public schools violated the First Amendment separation of church and state, Skelton suddenly regained popularity among religious conservatives who wanted the phrase to remain.

The Red Skelton Bridge spans the Wabash River and provides the highway link between Illinois and Indiana on U.S. Route 50, near his hometown of Vincennes, Indiana. The Red Skelton Performing Arts Center on the Vincennes University campus was constructed in 2006. On May 17, 2006, the Vincennes Sun-Commercial reported that a non-profit group in Red's hometown of Vincennes, began to renovate the historic Pantheon Theater. According to the article, the stage at the Pantheon will be named in honor of Red Skelton.

[edit] Filmography

Features:

Short Subjects:

  • Broadway Brevity: The Broadway Buckaroo (1939)
  • Seeing Red (1939)
  • Radio Bugs (1944) (voice only)
  • Weekend in Hollywood (1947)
  • The Luckiest Guy in the World (1947) (voice only)
  • Some of the Best (1949)
  • Hollywood Goes to War (1954)

[edit] Listen to

[edit] External links


Persondata
NAME Skelton, Red
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Skelton, Richard Bernard
SHORT DESCRIPTION comedian
DATE OF BIRTH July 18 1913
PLACE OF BIRTH Vincennes, Indiana
DATE OF DEATH September 17 1997
PLACE OF DEATH Palm Springs, California
de:Red Skelton

fr:Red Skelton fi:Red Skelton sv:Red Skelton

Retrieved from "http://india.smashits.com/wikipedia/Red_Skelton"
Views
Personal tools

Toolbox