Gehring - Red Skelton: the Mask behind the Mask

After Red Skeltons hyperbolic tendencies had gotten him in trouble with the fourth estate, the comedian would confess to a reporter, Thats my trouble. If you want a good storytalk to me. If you want the factstalk to Edna [Stillwell, Reds first wife and manager].

The above statement, a rare dropping of Red Skeltons public mask, is easily the most significant admission made by the comedian in his long career. It is the Skelton Rosetta stone, pivotal to deciphering the apocryphal tendencies of this most gifted of comedians. Granted, a common phenomenon of writing any biography is wrestling with that most human of traits: Like most people, he gave different accounts of what he believed at different times. But Skeltons propensity to reverse reality to mold his own personal mythology went well beyond the natural changes associated with that old movie montage clich of pages falling from the calendar.

Of course, Skeltons inventive inclinations towards his life story put him in great embellishing company, including such diverse iconic figures as Dizzy Dean, Ernest Hemingway, and Bob Dylan. Indeed, biographer Marc Pachter has even articulated a key question for the professional profiler to ponder: How much can be learned about an individual from the facts he invents about himself [?]

The full answer to that question, with regard to Skelton, lies in the following pages. But it seems apropos to briefly note, without turning it into a Freudian free-for-all, some seminal suggestions. First, probably the greatest catalyst for his mythomania was seemingly quite simplethe need to tell a better story. After all, what came easier for Skelton, one of the greatest comic storytellers in the history of American entertainment? Second, to borrow a page from literary scholar Jeffrey Meyers, what follows is an insight about Hemingway that applies equally to Skelton: [He] combined a scrupulous honesty in his fiction with a tendency to distort and rewrite the story of his life [There was a] reluctance to disappoint either his own expectations or those of his audience he felt virtually forced to invent an exciting and imaginative alternative to commonplace reality.

Here is how those comments are equally applicable to Skelton, an artist whose work brilliantly tells the truth through comedy (especially his attention to slice-of-life reality) but whose personal story seems to have been gerrymandered by Skelton to complement his comedy career. The diversity of examples ranged from Skeltons false claim that his grocer father was a famous clown and a college professor, to later deleting the sizable influence of Stillwell and legendary comedian Buster Keaton from his entertainment rsum.

Third, beyond telling a better story and suggesting Skelton was a total comedy auteur (having received no help, beyond the sentimental hook of a clown father), Skeltons embellishments were also about creating positive details for a black hole of a childhood. As the comedians only surviving child, Valentina Skelton Alonso, recently told me, My father was from a major dysfunctional family.

Some might say why dredge up disturbing facts. Such critics would be fans of an earthy axiom by Skeltons favorite comedian, Charlie Chaplin: The more you stir an old turd, the more it stinks. Skelton cared about the details, and even had a researcher doing the legwork for his book.

One could say that Skelton was a self-made man who was not as well made as he might have been, but who (like all of us) was coping. And despite those private demons, or maybe because of them, Skelton became one of the clowns of the twentieth century. No less a pantheon comedian than Groucho Marx called him the logical successor to Chaplin. Thus, besides exploring the mask behind the mask that was the private Skelton, this book also addresses his funny public persona, from his dual focus screen characters (fluctuating between antihero and smart aleck), to the troupe of buffoons through which he filtered his humor on radio and television.