The other day here, I posted a link to a video of Red Skelton doing a monologue on The Ed Sullivan Show. Here's a message I received from James Curtis…
A bit of trivia about the Red Skelton monologue.
I was in the audience the night this segment was recorded at Television City. It was on a Monday, which, as you know, was the usual night of the Skelton dress rehearsal. No orchestra, just a piano, but otherwise the whole show, apart from the musical numbers and credits. My friend and I had tickets for Jonathan Winters, but then one of the pages appeared with tickets for the Skelton show. I asked who the guest stars were, and he said, "Boris Karloff and Vincent Price." That was all I had to hear.
We got great aisle seats — third or fourth row — with two seats taped off directly behind us. Just before the start of the show, the tape was removed and down the aisle came Ed Sullivan and another man. As Sullivan sat down, I felt his hands on my shoulders and they gave me a squeeze. I turned around and asked him for his autograph, and he asked for my birthday. I said November 16th and he wrote "Hello Jim, and a happy November 16 to you, young fellow." Nice man; I still have it.
I later came to understand that if you wanted Red on your show, you had to come to him. So after the monologue, during which Sullivan emerged from the audience for a little on-stage banter, a replica of Ed's New York set was brought in, new linoleum was laid, Sullivan made the introduction, and out came Red as we see in the clip. I understand the whole episode is on a home video set, and I should probably pick it up for a quick glimpse of my 14 year-old self.
Then James added…
P.S. One thing that stuck with me about that night was that Boris Karloff was obviously quite frail — he died in London about five months later — and that he performed the rehearsal in a wheelchair pushed by a little man wearing a rubber Frankenstein mask. Despite this, he knew his part cold, and although Vincent Price and Skelton were glued to their respective cue cards, Karloff never glanced at his once. And when I watched the air show — which was taped the following night — Karloff did the whole thing on his feet. It was a remarkable show of stamina and professionalism at the very end of a distinguished career, and it later turned out to be a valuable thing for me to have witnessed.
I have seen that kind of professionalism now and then. I'm not sure if there are as many comparable tales of non-performers rising to those kinds of challenges but there does seem to be something about being in front of an audience that brings it out in performers.
Skelton seems to have been one of those stars who had his own odd ways of doing things and you either played by his rules or you didn't play with him. I would guess that Ed Sullivan and/or CBS decided that it would be mutually beneficial to both Ed's show and Red's to have that little crossover and they engineered that. It may not have been that Red insisted they come to him. It might have been that CBS wanted it to happen and Red couldn't fly to New York, do Ed's show and get back without disrupting the taping schedule of his own program.
But maybe Red did insist they come to him. He was on odd guy. Those "dirty hour" rehearsals he insisted on doing for his show cost a lot of time and money but if you wanted The Red Skelton Hour to get taped Tuesday night, you had to let him do that.