Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,537
By This is the grave of Edward Everett Horton.
Born in Brooklyn in 1886, Horton grew up pretty well off. His father, Edward Everett Horton, Sr (this explains why someone would be named for Edward Everett as late as 1886) worked for the New York Times. His mother was Cuban and he got some of her looks, setting himself up for later in the life. The family eventually moved to Baltimore, Horton went to very good schools, and then he was off to college at Oberlin. But he got kicked out of Oberlin after he went to the top of a building and threw a dummy off of it, faking a suicide to the horror of the crowd below. He thought this was hilarious. Oberlin administrators were….less amused.
Horton went back to New York and enrolled in college a couple of times, but he was a lot more interested in performance than school and acting is where life took him. He started working vaudeville in 1906 and, surprisingly, his parents were pretty supportive. In fact, his father told him he should use his whole name, that it would stand out a lot more than not using the Everett. Solid career advice; when you think about it for a second, dad was right.
Horton had some success, enough to keep a career going in any case. In 1919, he moved to Los Angeles to have a go in the movies. He moved to the top of the comedy world pretty quickly. He was the lead in the 1922 film Too Much Business and often was the lead in comedies. OK, he wasn’t quite at the Chaplin/Keaton/Lloyd level, but the studios cranked out a lot of comedies in this era and he was the kind of workingman actor who would take some good roles but where not every film had to be genius. He started working for Lloyd, appearing in a bunch of the comedies under that genius’ larger umbrella.
Horton was able to transition quite easily to the talkies. He had a good voice, which was the #1 requirement. But he also was able to bring the best of the silents into the talkies. He was the master of the double-take, which always works. I can already see that delayed reaction in my head from so many films. He didn’t quite have the charisma to lead films and never moved out of only being top-billed for minor comedies. But he became one of the real masters of the supporting actor world. In this, he worked in many of the top films of the era. Those include Arsenic and Old Lace, Holiday, Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife, Here Comes Mr. Jordan, the 1932 version of Alice in Wonderland, Top Hat, and several Astaire/Rodgers musicals. He was just the super reliable character actor of the day who made everything he was in a little better.
After World War II, the quality of roles Horton received began to slip and he started to age out of the film business. But that was OK, because like this was perfect for TV and beginning in the early 50s and continuing the rest of his career, he was in tons of television shows. These were usually of the guest appearance type, the sort of thing where mom and dad would recognize someone in the shows that their kids now watched religiously. Plus there was the early TV world of putting on stage shows that appealed to older audiences and Horton was frequently cast in these. He was Uncle Ned in Dennis the Menace. He was also the voice for the Fractured Fairy Tales cartoons, as well as appearing on Batman and in a pretty racist spot on F Troop as a cowardly Indian.
Mostly though, Horton was the guy who worked all the time. There are a lot of actors like this–people who prefer to move role to role very quickly. Perhaps this is to avoid being themselves, I don’t know. Sometimes this hurt him. In 1960, Frank Capra wanted to cast him in a major film–Pocketful of Miracles. But Horton was working some play and so he called Buster Keaton, who to be fair, needed the work, and asked him to finish the play while he worked the film. Everyone wins.
Horton was also super rich and good investor of his money. He bought a lot of California real estate and built himself a big ranch. In fact, F. Scott Fitzgerald rented a cabin on Horton’s land. However, the state forced him to sell a large part of his land since the Ventura Freeway was to go through it. He also owned theaters and generally had a lot of irons in the fire. He also worked theater for much of his career too. Between movies, for decades he starred in runs of Springtime for Henry at the Hollywood Playhouse. He is thought to have played in this about 3,000 times.
Once, Horton was asked why he kept working so much. He stated, “I have my own little kingdom. I do the scavenger parts no one else wants, and I get well paid for it. “It’s not that I really need the money, it’s simply that I like money–lots of it. I must admit I’m sometimes over-frugal.” In fact, he was a cheap bastard and really quite legendary for it. Shortly before his death, his friends recalled seeing him doing the things he truly loved–going over his expense accounts and including things like the cost of stamps in his accounting.
Also, Horton was almost certainly gay. He never talked about his private life at all and had a long time companion named Gavin Gordon. But like many in the closet, Horton would destroy any physical evidence of the relationship and so it remains strictly at the point of speculation.
Horton died in 1970. He was 84 years old.
Edward Everett Horton is buried in Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Glendale, California.
If you would like this series to visit other people involved in the making of Arsenic and Old Lace, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Priscilla Lane is in Arlington, Virginia and Raymond Massey is in New Haven, Connecticut. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.