February 9, 2017
Volume 47 - No. 06
By Friedrich Gomez
It is still the early predawn hours in 1937, a mild 65 degrees outside, and Red Skelton is sitting comfortably in his hotel room in New York City flipping the pages of his newspaper. He just read the musical reviews of a new dance band that debuted with high hopes of making it big someday. The music group failed miserably on the East Coast and disbanded. Red Skelton likes the fighting spirit of the bandleader who vowed not to give up and would try again. The orchestra leader goes under the name of Glenn Miller and he made good on his resolve: he would, one day, re-record the huge musical-hit “In the Mood” which would rule the charts for a staggering 13 straight weeks. Skelton’s interest in the young upstart, Glenn Miller, is two-fold: Glenn Miller’s never-give-up-attitude resonated deeply with Red Skelton’s own career as a struggling burlesque and vaudeville entertainer. Secondly, aside from his stage performances, Skelton is very musical-minded and would, in time, compose over 8,000 songs and symphonies, himself – a relatively unknown fact during the course of his lifetime. There was much about Red Skelton that the world never knew.
He reads further news. Franklin D. Roosevelt has begun his second term as President of the United States; a painter by the name of Pablo Picasso is making noise in the art world and starting to get a lot of attention in France, and, tragedy has struck close when the German airship, the Hindenburg, explodes into horrific flames over Lakehurst, New Jersey making 1937 world headlines and appearing in movie-theatre newsreels around the country. Skelton shakes his head in disbelief. Despite the fact that Skelton dropped out of school at a very early age, he would make up for lost ground by becoming an avid reader in the dailies as well as trade papers of the entertainment world. He was an extremely intelligent man on and off the stage. He reads more. A most sensitive area of news is the financial page because it harkens back to the years of his abject poverty. What he is now reading causes his face to grimace as it often did when confronting uncomfortable facts -- the 1937 cost of living seems to be going through the roof. He reads that the cost of a new home has skyrocketed to $4,100. Average cost for just renting a house has now reached an exorbitant $26 per month; a simple loaf of bread will set you back a full 9-cents, and gas prices for your automobile have zoomed up to a ridiculous 10-cents a gallon with no end in sight! Tossed into this maddening economic downswing is that the average man’s wages for an entire year’s work is a paltry $1,780.
As he reads about this dismal economic picture, he shifts his weight and recalls how he at one time barely had the finances to eat, drink, or have shelter. As he expresses in his own words: “Acts
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would come up to my room. We’d throw a quarter on the bed, a dime, or whatever we had and we’d go out and buy food.” Living in hotel rooms for Skelton was anything but the glamorous life of show business. As he recalls: “And we had a cooker that we’d sit on two bricks – then, we’d take a drawer out of the dresser and turn it upside down on the backs of two chairs and use that as a table. If the hotel manager smelled food – we’d quickly put the cooker outside on the fire escape!” There were times when Red Skelton would even hide from the hotel manager due to unpaid rent during his lean showbiz years. One time he owed three months back-rent at $9 per month at one hotel that more resembled a shanty. Three months unpaid rent put him in the arrears for a total of $18 (equivalent to over $300 in today’s dollar amount). Suddenly, Skelton is momentarily jarred from these thoughts and memories when he hears newspaper boys walking the streets below yelling at the top of
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their lungs: “EXTRA!! EXTRA!! READ ALL ABOUT IT! FAMOUS FEMALE PILOT, AMELIA EARHART, NOW MISSING SOMEWHERE OVER THE PACIFIC OCEAN!!”
The newsboys parading and yelling the front page news below his window causes him to briefly peer out over the fire escape. It is still early morning hours in New York City but he has already read most of the top newspaper stories. Throughout his life Skelton would always remain an early riser. He rarely slept more than 4 to 5 hours nightly, and would usually be up by 4:30 a.m. but sometimes as late as 5 a.m. He was already fairly caught-up on the local and world news items mentioned in the newspapers. Poor Amelia Earhart, he thought to himself. He was always an avid admirer of hers. Some newsworthy items had caught his attention more than others. In the
sports pages, new up-and-coming boxer, Joe Louis, nicknamed “The Brown Bomber,” was the new World Heavyweight Champion. Red Skelton created his own comical boxer named Cauliflower McPugg (the punch drunk fighter). Much of what Skelton saw in real life often gave him the matrix to reproduce an exaggerated version on the vaudeville stage.
Skelton always stayed keenly aware of the Hollywood scene because of his periodic connections there. The year 1937 had been a very good year for him. While still sitting on his hotel bed he reads with interest about some new actor making his debut in the movie “Love Is on the Air,” back in Hollywood. The actor’s movie reviews are dismal and discouraging -- no one really expects to ever hear of this relatively unknown, fledgling actor again, in the near or distant future. Skelton notices the actor’s name: Ronald Reagan, as if there were any serious need to remember.
Red Skelton . . . America’s Premier Clown Continued on Page 2