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IT'S hard to think of Red Skelton as my hoss, despite the fact that for three years I've been his radio "Namah."
I play his grandmother. I'm old enough to be his mother. Actually, there is something very close to a mother-son relationship in the way we feel about one another.
I love that Red-head. I'd Uke to spank him sometimes . . . he's a problem child sometimes like all little boys . . . but I love him. And I would fight for him. So would everyone else who works for him — and in that fact lies his success secret. Understand that and you imderstand why Red is a star now, and why he must continue to grow — to do greater things yet.
Red and I were friends for a ye£ir before I even heard his radio show. We met backstage at NBC in 1940. I was playing the veddy, veddy ultra Mrs. Hipperton on the Joan Davis show — and we were on the air, then, directly opposite the Skelton show.
Sometimes Red and I would "hit the hall" at the same moment, bob out of our adjoining studios during rehearsal for a quick breather. We were never introduced, just got to talking the way actors will
VERNA FEITON
who is heard as Grandma in the Red Skelton show, Tuesday nights at 10:30 EST, on NBC
. . . aU right, I'll admit it, talking about ourselves.
I was fascinated with Red's story, the Horatio Alger tale in which a gawky kid who began his theatrical career dancing in Walkathons in Vincennes, Indiana, climbed to the top in show business.
I loved his yam about the day he met Edna StillweU, the girl who was to be his wife for fifteen years, and who stiU writes most of his material, and figures prominently behind the scenes in aU of his business and professional dealings.
Edna was an usher in a Kansas City, Mo. theater. She came backstage one day and, unlike most of his dressing-room visitors, told him his act was terrible.
"You have lousy material," she said.
Red, sensitive to criticism then as now, replied in a huff, "I suppose you could, write better."
"I certainly could," she said, and she proceeded to prove it.
Red never fails to give Edna credit for her part in his metamorphosis from small time vaudeviUian to star. Nothing that has happened in their personal relations — ^their divorce, and both their remarriages, Red's to Georgia Davis, Edna's to Frank Borzage — changes the fact that she stUl is and must continue to be a vital factor in his professional life.
"Mummie," as Red calls Edna, devised the littleboy, character which made him famoiis.
"She said," he told me, looking sheepish, "that all men are little boys at heart."
"If an old lady is entitled to an opinion," I replied, "she was certainly right about this one."
"You're no old lady," Red shot back, ducking the issue.
"I was acting before you were bom," I told him. And then he had to listen to my story.
I made my professional debut when I was eight, playing the title role in "Little Lord Fauntleroy," I am fifty-seven now, so that was a long time ago. Most child actors are "bom in a trunk." I wasn't. My father was a doctor in San Jose, California — ^I am one of those rare flora, a {Condnued. on page 81)
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