There isn’t much of Old Hollywood left anymore, but its few remaining stars turned out last week to bid a sweet farewell to one of their own.
Bob Hope was there, 94 years old and walking slowly, but steadily, toward the front of the chapel. Milton Berle, remarkably spry at 89, followed close behind. A few rows back sat Esther Williams, a comparative youngster at 74 and still exuding the glamor of the golden age of Hollywood, when any star worthy of the name could sing, dance, act and you-name-it.
Among the sublime entertainers that Hollywood produced from the ’30s through the ’50s, however, few matched the originality of Red Skelton, who died Sept. 17 in Rancho Mirage, Calif., at age 84. Though Hollywood never lacked for master comics–from Buster Keaton to Lucille Ball–Skelton was much more than that.
From the beginning, the man practically operated a one-person vaudeville company, amusing audiences for several decades portraying such cockeyed characters as Clem Kadiddlehopper, Freddie the Freeloader, Sheriff Deadeye, San Fernando Red and the Mean
Widdle Kid (whose line “I dood it” became a national catch-phrase in a more innocent age).
Though various speakers stepped to the podium to remember Skelton, none articulated the man’s gifts more poetically than Berle.
“I’ll always remember the first time we met–64 years ago, in 1933, at the World’s Fair in Chicago,” said Berle, addressing family and friends at the Forest Lawn Cemetery near Hollywood. “I’ll always remember how he made me laugh, the first time and ever since.
“I just want to say how impressed I was at that time with his remarkable range of talent, timing and versatility.”
Later, Berle reminisced further about that first meeting with an unknown, 20-year-old clown from Vincennes, Ind.
“At the time, I was appearing at the Palace Theatre in Chicago . . . and somebody had told me that they had seen a young guy, a kid, over at the Armory, outside the World’s Fair,” remembered Berle.
“So I went over, and I met him, and what few people were there were laughing. And even then he did all the great characters that everyone knows.
“And I asked him where he got all that material, and he said all those characters were made up, which astonished me.”
That remarkable cast of characters, as well as Skelton’s talents as mime and walking joke machine, brought him fame on radio, in film and during the 20-year run of his prime-time comedy hour, “The Red Skelton Show,” which began practically at the dawn of television, in 1951.
Yet for all Skelton’s artistic and commercial success, he largely had faded from view during the past couple of decades. Though he routinely sold out live shows across North America (his last local appearance was at the Chicago Theatre in 1990), he no longer commanded the popularity of such contemporaries as Hope and Berle. Nor, apparently, did he want it.
“He was asked repeatedly by Leno and Carson to go on their shows, and he always said no,” remembered Frank Leone, the comedian’s musical director during the last nine years of his performing career.
“He had a peculiar attitude toward that. He regarded those TV news-magazines as a cheap way for TV to get top-notch entertainment for nothing.
“He was offered several pictures while I was with him, and always turned them down. He just wasn’t interested anymore.
“And yet, when we would be at the airport, he’d sit there at the gate and do his whole two-hour show for free, and a large crowd would gather around him.”
Skelton, in other words, remained to the end a medicine-show performer, just as he had been as a dirt-poor, 14-year-old working for pennies. Singing, dancing, miming, cavorting, telling jokes, falling on his face, doing anything and everything possible to make ’em laugh.
Having transported this archaic yet timeless act to radio, film and TV, Skelton felt he had nothing left to prove and nothing left to do–except play his gags wherever he could find a live, laughing audience. That was all that really mattered–television, movies and canonization were nearly irrelevant to him.
When his legs finally failed him, the result of too many falls on too many movie sets, he had to leave the stage, and that must have been the biggest heartbreak of all.
“I think that was the ultimate downer for him–performances and audiences were in his blood,” remembered Leone.
“He was offered opportunities to perform. The promoters said he could have sat in a very large and comfortable chair.
“But he refused. He did not want to perform unable to be on his feet.”
Yet, to the end, Skelton always dreamed of returning to his public, of getting back to the medicine show.
“In those last couple of years, he would say to me, `Maybe if I can straighten out the problems with my legs, I’ll come back,’ ” said Leone.
“He would always fantasize about that.”
It was that thought, in fact, that always had sustained Skelton through personal crises and tragedies, most notably the death of his only son, Richard, at age 8, of leukemia. Somehow, Skelton always got through the night by making someone else laugh.
“I don’t know what’s funny. When I walk out on that stage, I don’t ask questions,” Skelton once told this writer.
“I do know this–that when the show is over, after I’ve signed autographs and everybody’s gone and the theater’s empty, I stand in the middle of the stage, and I listen.
“I don’t hear any echoes of applause, I don’t hear laughter, and I say to myself:
“An hour ago, I was important. Tomorrow I must start again.”
