Born On This Day- March 18th... Fred Astaire's Straight Man

From the very start of film as an art form, slightly coded gay characters were used for the easy laugh: sissies, gallery owners, interior decorators, fussy bachelors & prissy artistic types. These incidental characters added spice to the urbane sophisticated comedies of the era. The homosexual hints these minor characters provided were in juxtaposition to the livelier & sexier romantic men of the era. Film comedies deftly employed actors like Clifton Webb, Frances Langford, & Edward Everett Horton as gay comic relief with stereotypes that didn’t threatened the moviegoers, male or female.



I have always had a place in my heart for the work of Edward Everett Horton. I immediately identify Horton with his work in the Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers musicals at RKO including the apt named The Gay Divorcee, but he provided notable roles onscreen during the 1930s included a portrayal of The Mad Hatter in the 1933 Alice in Wonderland, & a neurotic paleontologist, who first appears disguised as a woman, in Frank Capra's Lost Horizon (1937).

Starting in the early 1930s, Horton made at least 6 films a year for a quarter of a century. Reflecting his work on the stage, there were occasional serious variations in his roles. He played an unusually forceful role in Douglas Sirk's Summer Storm (1944), & he delivered a comedic masterful turn in Busby Berkeley's The Gang's All Here (1943).


Horton worked steadily for more than 60 years. He may have been a sissy, but he was no dummy. He bought up property in the San Fernando Valley starting in the 1920s. He developed what he named- Beleigh Acres, a 23-acre development where he lived with his long time partner- Gavin Gordon & his mother, who passed away at age 102.


Like a good homo, Horton collected antiques, & at the time of his death in 1970, he had a collection worth a million dollars. He was busy on television throughout the 1950s & 1960s: onscreen, voice-overs for commercials, & as host for the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show at Madison Square Garden. Horton was on the silly Western series F Troop, playing Running Chicken, a Hekawi Indian tribe medicine man. But his most enduring work from the 1960s was as the narrator of Fractured Fairy Tales, on Rocky & Bullwinkle, in which he was prominently billed in the opening credits of every episode. This work endeared him to millions of baby boomers like me. One of my favorites of his appearances is an I Love Lucy episode, where he is cast against type as a frisky, amorous suitor.




Edward Everett Horton died in 1970, at age 84. He continued to work up until the week he passed away.