combining skinned meshes from different fbx into a single game object (from the game editor)

Hi all, I have a morphing character with many clothing items that I export into an fbx no problem. But If I attempt to import this fbx into Unity with everything in it. Unity blows up with System out of memory (after many minutes).

So I tried exporting out the same character (but with the clothes individually selected in each but including the figure). No problem. I dragged the clothing items (Skinned mesh object) out of these prefabs and into my main one. And set the root bone of these mesh to the main characters rig. It all looks correct. But the skinned mesh object continues to think the rig is coming from the other prefab. I can see the bounding box is surrounding the new item un the right place in the game window. But the actual mesh is still bound to the old prefabs game object. If I delete the old prefab I pulled the mesh object out of it. It will stop animating the object entirely.

All the fbx's are have the exact same figure in them, same morphs etc,etc. Just broken out to save the importer from doing all this at once.

I just need confirmation this is supposed to work, or a solution to how to do this. There is no way I can import a single character with all these clothing items at once. Even if it did work. Unity would probably spend an hour or more on it. And I my work flow would come to a grind.