Red Skelton

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Red Skelton (b. Richard Bernard Skelton,July 18, 1913, Vincennes, Indiana – d. September 17, 1997, Palm Springs, California) was an American comedian whose greatest impact — in a career which began as a teen circus clown and graduated to vaudeville, Broadway, MGM films, and radio — began when he reached television stardom with The Red Skelton Show (NBC, 1951–1952, CBS, 1953–1970; NBC, 1970–1971).

1 Greasepaint in his blood
2 Air and celluloid
3 The picture box clown
4 Off the air
5 Aftermath
6 Filmography
7 External links

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Greasepaint in his blood

Skelton was the son of a Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus clown who died shortly before he was born. 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 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 fifteen, Skelton had hit the road full-time as an entertainer, working everywhere from medicine shows and vaudeville to burlesque, showboats, minstrel shows, and circuses.

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Air and celluloid

While performing in Kansas City in 1930, Skelton met and married his first wife, Edna Stillwell. The couple divorced thirteen 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 a Wonderful Time, Skelton appeared in over forty films for MGM in 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.

In 1941, Skelton premiered his own radio show, developing comic skits involving a number of clown characters, most of which accompanied him to television a decade later. These characters included Cauliflower McPugg, a punch-drunk boxer; Willie Lump Lump, a drunkard; The Mean Little Kid (his favourite phrase - "I dood it!" - became part of the American lexicon); San Fernando Red, a slickermaster con artist with a pair of crosseyed seagulls, Gertrude and Heathcliffe; and, especially, Clem Kadiddlehopper, a country bumpkin with a big heart, a slow wit, and an unintentional knack for upstaging high society slickers, even if he couldn't upstage his cynical father. ("When the stork bought you, Clem, I shoulda shot him on sight!")

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The picture box clown

Skelton helped sell war bonds during World War II and served with an Army entertainment unit as a private. He once joked about his military career, "I was the only celebrity who went in and came out a private." His radio show - called "Red Skelton's Scrapbook of Satire" - became increasingly popular as the 1940s wore on, and in 1951 - the same year in which the network introduced I Love Lucy- CBS beckoned Skelton to bring his radio show to television. His clown-based characters worked even better on screen than on radio; television also provoked him to create his second best-remembered character, Freddy the Freeloader, a traditional tramp whose appearance suggested the elder, gray-haired brother of the famous Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus clown Emmett Kelly. (His 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 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 rural, Americana tastes.

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 extremely highly and considered him a worthy successor to Charles Chaplin.

One of his 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.

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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 the inflation. Since CBS had earlier decided to keep another longtime favourite whose appeal was strictly to elder audiences, Gunsmoke, 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 patriotism and traditional values caused CBS to turn against him. Skelton invited prominent Republicans, including Vice President Spiro T. Agnew and Senate Republican Leader Everett McKinley Dirksen, to appear on his program.

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."

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Aftermath

Skelton returned to live performance after his television days ended, in nightclubs and casinos and resorts, as well as performing such halls as Carnegie Hall. Many of those shows yielded segments that were edited into part of the Funny Faces video series. He also resurrected a lifetime love of painting, usually of clown images, and his works began to attract prices over $80,000.

Near the end of his life, Skelton said his daily routine included writing a short story a day (he collected the best ones in self-published chapbooks) and composing a piece of music a day (which he would then sell to providers of background music such as Muzak).

Red Skelton died in a hospital in Palm Springs, California from an undisclosed illness 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.

The Red Skelton Bridge spans the Wabash River and provides the highway link between Illinois and Indiana on Highway 50.

The Red Skelton Performing Arts Center on the Vincennes University campus was constructed in 2006.

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