TELEVISION: Sixth Sense Only

When Red Skelton does a nightclub or television show, a man with a towel stands by at all times in case Red’s stomach suffers one of its frequent reactions to the strain. Throughout the performance, whether he is Clem Kaddiddlehopper or Cauliflower McPugg, his characters have at least one thing in common: they are all but afloat in nervous perspiration. Red trembles and his eyes are alight with tears as, in the end, he inhales his grand ration of applause; and the people who swarm backstage for his autograph find an obliging man, usually dressed in an old kimono, whose lips quiver and whose hands shake.

One such experience would be enough to tire the average light-heavyweight longshoreman, but Skelton does it—and needs it—night after night in clubs, week after week on television. While that feared acetylene torch called overexposure has singed, seared or crisped one comedian after another, Red Skelton’s popularity has never really stopped growing. At 47 he is the only comedian left on TV who has, year in and year out, sustained a live weekly program, and this week The Red Skelton Show (CBS) begins its seventh season, during which he will also do two specials.

The shuffling, pratfalling, rubber-faced, cross-eyed Skelton characters are as familiar to audiences as their own neighborhood eccentrics, but Richard Bernard Skelton himself is more eccentric than any of them. In an age of canned biographies and prefabricated flamboyance, he is one Hollywood character that no pressagent yet born could possibly have invented.

Stories & Games. All the lights in his 27-room Bel Air mansion can be turned on from a single switch, and they are generally left on from sunset to sunrise, for Red is admittedly afraid of the dark. He has the gates of his estate bugged so that he can hear in his bedroom anyone who might be prowling about, and another electronic device tells him when people have entered his property. He once discouraged a visit from CBS’s Person to Person show, which he describes as “kinda nosy.” He prefers to keep the place to himself, his wife Georgia, his 13-year-old daughter Valentina, and three servants. Also on the premises: a stuffed gorilla, five dogs, a macaw, and a parrot that occupies a refrigerator during spells of warm weather.

Deep into the night, every night, Red sits up and writes a short story. He has them bound in red morocco leather, with the words “By Red Skelton” lettered on each volume in gold. None has been published or even read by any but his closest friends. The late Gene Fowler (“my only father”), who was to have been Skelton’s biographer, once reported that every Skelton story was about a redhead—redheaded boys, redheaded men, even redheaded old ladies. He likes to paint, too, committing to canvas an endless series of clowns.

When Skelton finally turns in, he lies down—usually with two or three of his dogs—on something that suggests a discount house with springs. His 49-square-foot bed has a control panel hooked up with three television sets (plus a portable for emergencies), an air purifier to combat his asthma, a tape recorder, and gadgets that close curtains and regulate the air conditioning. Two secretaries arrive for breakfast, and while Red eats they play a newspaper “Brain Game” with him, firing general information questions at him. If the phone rings, he shudders. He has such a phobia for telephones that he will talk to no one but his wife and manager.

So goes the normal routine, but beneath the spread of idiosyncracy in Skelton’s life there has been true misfortune; often he retreats to the toy-filled room of his late son, Richard, who died of leukemia in 1958. He sits there and broods for hours. Once Skelton kept a small trailer at the back of his property and would close himself away in it for days at a time.

Falling Like Rain. Skelton, the Bel Air millionaire who recently gave away one of his three Rolls-Royces, was born so poor that he sang for pennies in the streets of Vincennes, Ind. when he was seven. His father, a circus clown, had died before Richard Skelton was born, and when Red was ten he ran away from home to join a show-business type known as Dr. R. E. Lewis—an itinerant medicine man who peddled a solution of water, sugar and Epsom salts called the Hot Springs System Tonic. Mississippi showboats, minstrel shows and vaudeville later gave Red his secondary education and set him up for radio, Hollywood and television, but Dr. Lewis, inadvertently, had already shown him his best professional asset. The “doctor” pushed Red off the medicine wagon one day, and when the boy nose-dived to the ground, the crowd shook with laughter. Skelton has fallen like rain ever since, spattering himself all over sets and stages. He has banged up arms, fingers, ribs, and suffered one serious concussion.

The second largest asset of his early career came indirectly from vaudeville. He married a Kansas City usherette named Edna Stilwell, a hardheaded girl who managed his business affairs so well that she continued to do so for five years after they were divorced and he married Girl-about-Hollywood Georgia Davis. But even as Edna helped guide him toward the stability of oil wells and real estate holdings (he even owns his own film studio now), she could not overcome his deeper fears. According to a friend, Skelton feels that vague assailants known as “they” have always been after him. He once went around with a suitcase full of cash, explaining: “They won’t get this away from me.”

Soundest Proof. Between Edna and Georgia, Skelton filled in with alcohol, but now drinks very little and does not smoke, although he almost always has a cigar with him and manages to chew up some 25 to 30 stogies a day. Nor does he gamble—in public—since that might disillusion his followers. When he is in Las Vegas, the hotel management installs a slot machine in his room, last month turned back to him $350 he had lost while playing his enormously successful engagement at The Sands.

Skelton has 22 Bibles, has studied assorted Oriental and Occidental faiths, often says that he believes all people are placed on earth by God for a purpose and that his is to make people laugh. The soundest proof of this, as he sees it, comes when small children approach him after shows, and climb silently into his lap. A master malapropist, Skelton perhaps sums up what draws children and all people to him when he speaks of “extra-sensitive perception.” His troubled life has given him the sensitivity that has made him a great clown. “I’ve got the sixth sense,” he admits, “but I don’t have the other five.”