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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.