Edward Everett Horton: Timid, Timorous, and Talented

He portrayed befuddled butlers, henpecked husbands, addled aristocrats, and more in a stage, screen and TV career that spanned more than seven decades, and he was one of Classic Hollywood’s busiest supporting players. Chances are, however, that if you’re familiar with Edward Everett Horton you remember him as either a voice from a cult favorite animated TV series or as one of a group of 1930s and ‘40s character actors who excelled at what came to be known—for better or worse–as “sissy roles.”

Born in Brooklyn in 1886, Edward Everett Horton, Jr. went to the borough’s famous Boy’s High before his family moved to Baltimore. He would attend Oberlin College in Ohio, but got the boot after a prank involving tossing a dummy off a building roof and pretending he had jumped. Moving on to Columbia University, Horton got involved in dramatics and made his professional stage debut in 1906. At first billed as simply “Edward Horton,” his father talked him into adding his middle name so as to stand out from any other Edward Hortons out there (how many there actually were is open to debate).

A flurry of vaudeville and Broadway performances followed, until Edward convinced his brother George to join him in a cross-country move to Southern California and its blossoming entertainment scene. After working for several years on and behind the stage, Edward made his film debut in a now-lost 1922 Vitagraph comedy, Too Much Business. He starred in the title role of the English valet who follows his employer to the American frontier in a 1923 version of Ruggles of Red Gap and two years later again took top billing as a composer who must choose between marrying for love or money in Beggar on Horseback, adapted from a George S. Kaufman/Marc Connelly stage play. Edward also appeared alongside John Gilbert and Lillian Gish in M-G-M’s 1926 adaptation of Puccini’s La Bohème (yes, they made silent movies based on operas).

As Hollywood shifted from silent films to talkies Horton made a seamless switch, headlining a series of 1927-29 silent shorts—produced by his friend Harold Lloyd—for Paramount, and then hopping over to Educational Pictures for several sound shorts. He appeared as a Scotland Yard detective in Warner Bros.’ 1929 shocker The Terror, the first all-talking horror film, and later that year was a browbeaten spouse who makes good in the comedy The Sap. At the same time the Horton brothers began buying up land in the Encino area, 22 prime acres of SoCal real estate where Edward would eventually build homes for himself, his family and friends, and seemingly anyone who happened by (F. Scott Fitzgerald is said to have stayed at one of his bungalows). Horton gave his fiefdom the punny name Belleigh Acres.

The 1930s would offer occasional lead roles for Horton, but he blossomed in an array of supporting turns, often as the hero or heroine’s devoted best friend. He was a fussy reporter who’d rather be writing poetry in the original The Front Page (1931), while he spilled the tea—literally—as the Mad Hatter in Paramount’s bizarre all-star, live-action Alice in Wonderland. While Edward was at Paramount, director Ernest Lubitsch made fine use of his comedic skills—particularly Horton’s trademark double take, where he would nod in agreement with whatever was going on, then slowly look gloomier and gloomier as it dawned on him what he had just agreed to—in a quintet of sophisticated romantic comedies: Trouble in Paradise (1932) Design for Living (1933), The Merry Widow (1934), Angel (1937), and Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1938).

Over at RKO, Horton supplied comedic relief in three Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers musicals—1934’s The Gay Divorcee (memorable for a swimsuit-clad Horton dancing with a young Betty Grable to “Let’s K-nock K-nees”), 1935’s Top Hat, and 1937’s Shall We Dance. Also in ’37, Edward was one of the travelers who found themselves in the Edenic Himalayan hideaway of Shangri-La in Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon and was valet to famed 1700s actor David Garrick (Brian Aherne) in  James Whale’s The Great Garrick. The following year saw the actor cast as Professor Potter in the Cary Grant/Katharine Hepburn screwball comedy Holiday (the same role he played in a 1930 version). In a contemporary New York Times article on the actor, the paper claimed Horton’s recent film roles had led him to develop “a certain muliebrity [womanliness] of manner which has caused certain of the more captious among filmgoers to accuse him of effeminacy.” This, of course, was a polite way of saying his screen persona–despite often playing a married man–was secretly gay.

A similar situation occurred in Edward’s personal life. Living for many years with fellow actor Gavin Gordon, Horton was notoriously tight-lipped about his private affairs, but on the set he sometimes found himself typecast in such “lavender” parts, a fate he shared with such performers as Eric Blore, Franklin Pangborn, and others.

Such stories didn’t affect Horton’s popularity, as the 1940s offered him choice supporting turns as a heavenly messenger in Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941) and the follow-up Down to Earth (1947); playing opposite Brazilian bombshell Carmen Miranda in Springtime in the Rockies (1942) and The Gang’s All Here (1943); as a sanitarium superintendent in Capra’s Arsenic and Old Lace (1944); as a widowed schoolteacher who thinks he’s invented a self-inflating life raft in the comedy San Diego, I Love You (1944); and as an advertising executive in the Lucille Ball/Franchot Tone comedy Her Husband’s Affairs (1947).

While he had but one ‘50s movie role (a cameo as Sir Walter Raleigh in Irwin Allen’s 1957 epic The Story of Mankind), Edward found new opportunities for work in the nascent medium of television. After debuting on the small screen as Sheridan Whiteside in a 1949 The Ford Theatre Hour staging of “The Man Who Came to Dinner,” he appeared in episodes of I Love Lucy, Playhouse 90, Burke’s Law, and more. Horton had semi-recurring roles as “Uncle Ned” on Dennis the Menace and as Hekawi medicine man Roaring Chicken on F Troop (a part he spoofed as “Screaming Chicken” on Batman), but his most famous TV gig was as the oft-perplexed narrator of the “Fractured Fairy Tales” segment on the classic cartoon The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle.

When asked about retiring in a 1966 interview, a spry 80-year-old Horton responded, “Dear Lord! I would go right out of my mind.” Time, however, was catching up to him. He played a butler in Frank Capra’s final film, 1961’s Pocketful of Miracles, and—like nearly all of Hollywood—cameoed in Stanley Kramer’s 1964 slapstick saga It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. After passing away from cancer at 84 in September of 1970, Edward’s final big-screen performance came the following year, a silent turn as the aged–and flatulent–head of a tobacco company trying to get a small Iowa town’s residents to break their “no smoking” pledge, in Norman Lear’s raucous satire Cold Turkey.

“I have my own little kingdom. I do the scavenger parts no one else wants and I get well paid for it,” the actor said in a vintage interview. The parts may not have been to other actors’ liking, but audiences enjoyed them, and Horton had a unique gift for making them his own.