In his 2008 autobiography Christopher Plummer writes about how much he learned about comedy timing from playing on stage with an old pro, Edward Everett Horton, in Horton’s favored warhorse summer stock vehicle Springtime for Henry. In his 1930s movies, particularly those he was known for with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Horton was called upon to be a comic ditherer, a little dim, a lot pleased with himself, easily confused, easily alarmed, and given to double or even triple takes when he suddenly realized the point. But there was more to him than that, and luckily he worked enough to get some roles worthy of his full talent.
Horton was born in 1886, and he was known in his youth as a prankster, and rather a morbid one; he was thrown out of college for hurling a dummy off a building and making people think he had jumped. Maybe there was some despair in that, too. For Horton was gay in a time and place that either ignored the existence of such deviations or viewed them as criminal and revolting. There was always a genuine sense of panic underneath his technique because it was the panic of someone who is afraid of being somehow found out, for Horton was obviously not a masculine guy but he was masculine enough to pass, unlike his colleague Franklin Pangborn.
Yet it is this passing on screen that leads to bad moments for him like the scene where Thomas Mitchell derisively calls him “sister” in Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon (1937), or the musical sequence in The Gay Divorcee (1934) where a sexy young Betty Grable tries to hold his interest, which plays into the stereotype of this era that men who seemed queer were probably just shy of women, or afraid of them.
Horton went on the stage in his youth and enjoyed the laughs he got from a live audience, and he was in his thirties when he came out to Hollywood and eventually appeared in some comedy shorts. Horton is commanding in those shorts but a bit stagy when sound came in, yet he is appealingly relaxed in one of his best roles, Nick Potter in the first film of Philip Barry’s play Holiday (1930), a role that he would reprise in the better-known George Cukor-Katharine Hepburn version from 1938.
Horton has his guard down in the 1930 Holiday in the long sequence in the playroom, and he is very winning, but Cukor builds up his part in the 1938 version and lets us see many sides of his Nick Potter, professor and free spirit. He is married to Hedda Hopper in the 1930 version, which doesn’t feel right, but in the 1938 version he is wed to Jean Dixon’s Susan, who also works as a lecturer, and this feels like a precious glimpse of what looks like a bohemian marriage of equals where sexuality might be allowed to bend on both sides. Hepburn makes it clear that her Linda Seton is drawn strongly to Susan rather than Nick, for Susan is the dominant partner in the couple and the more politically engaged.
Horton worked constantly in pictures in the 1930s, and he saved his money and bought himself an estate called Belleigh Acres that could house his whole family, siblings and all, and a mother who lived to be one-hundred years old. The place was big enough, presumably, that Horton could be with his longtime companion Gavin Gordon, a younger and pretty actor who had been Garbo’s leading man in Romance (1930) and had played with Horton on stage in Private Lives. Neither Horton or Gordon ever spoke on the record about their lives with each other and what that entailed; this is lost to history and can only be guessed at. Whatever difficulties they might have had, it is to be hoped that they made each other happy in their own way.
Horton was used by Ernst Lubitsch quite a few times in the 1930s. In Lubitsch’s masterpiece Trouble in Paradise (1932), Horton is Monsieur Filiba, charmed by jewel thief Gaston (Herbert Marshall) into talking about his, uh, tonsils for ten minutes before getting robbed. “Tonsils!” he finally cries near the end of the film, having finally remembered who Gaston is. “Positively tonsils!” Horton’s Filiba is a comic type, and Horton limned this type of man for Lubitsch in both Trouble in Paradise and in Design for Living (1933) as a fairly unappealing, spiteful snob.
Lubitsch does give him one brief close-up in Design for Living to look hurt when he sees his wife Gilda (Miriam Hopkins) taking up again with her two attractive younger male lovers, but this is wiped out by Gary Cooper staring below Horton’s waist and calling him a “vegetable” down there. In Angel (1937), Lubitsch again notices that Horton can register hurt on his face when his gentleman’s gentleman feels insulted, and he places him in an antagonistic relationship with Franklin Pangborn in Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1938) and also has Gary Cooper kiss him on both cheeks, which was likely intensely pleasurable for Horton precisely because he cannot show any pleasure in character. But there are times in these Lubitsch pictures and his Fred and Ginger movies, wonderful as they are, where it would be very tempting to try to help Horton escape from them and see what he might do now in movies as a funny, middle-aged, and openly gay comic actor.
In Josef von Sternberg’s acidic The Devil Is a Woman (1935), Horton shows his range as an authoritarian official who rules his people with an iron hand and succumbs to the flirtations of Concha (Marlene Dietrich), and this performance is particularly intriguing because it feels clear that Horton has been given odd line readings by his director that he must gruffly follow to the letter; listen to how he snarls the word “beauty” in his last scene, or the way he orders, “If you catch a man stealing, shoot him!”
By the 1940s he was appearing in Fox musicals, but he was given a superb part in Douglas Sirk’s Summer Storm (1944), a highly sophisticated adaptation of a Chekhov short story in which Horton was cast against type as a very worldly and hedonistic aristocrat who thinks very well of himself, unlike so many of his other characters. “I have sort of a ready wit,” he boasts, and only settles on a Hortonian dither with, “Well, really….”
In this movie it feels like Horton has been given a feast after years of “nervous nellie” bread and water, and he lingers over the complexity of this man he is playing, making us wonder what kind of relationship he had with his late wife (did he adore her?) and seeming convincingly heterosexual in his dealings with Linda Darnell, a woman so abundantly attractive that she makes this job easy for him.
He went into TV by the 1950s and lived on to 1970, when he died at age 84. (Gordon lived on to 1983.) Because of how large his estate was, there was a lane named after him in LA after his death and also a bus stop, and surely this might have been the basis for a comic dithering routine from him. But his Nick Potter in both versions of Holiday showed that there was some soul and great warmth hiding beneath the comic technique he acquired to protect himself.
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