Edward & Henry

The air, ladled by scores of cardboard fans, washed about the tiny Clinton (N.J.) Music Hall like warm soup. A maple branch that had grown in through an open window drooped damply over the audience. The house shifted on its bone-hard, $2.40 seats, grumbling at the hard facts of summer theatergoing.

Then the scrofulous old curtain rolled up and all was forgiven in a gusty belly laugh. Edward Everett Horton, the 60-year-old grandpa of summer theater, blustered onstage and stood staring dazedly at the audience.

Giggles & Leers. So, last week, began Horton's 1,180th performance of Benn Levy's British farce, Springtime for Henry. In 15 years of off-&-on touring, Henry has brought Edward Horton almost $1,000,000. This summer, for the fifth consecutive season, Edward has taken the old boy on the summer circuit with a supporting cast of three (Lilian Bond, Elaine Ellis and Matthew Smith) and the prospect of an average $1,800-a-week net to add to Horton's earnings.

To the straw-hat circuit, Henry is worth every C-note of it. Horton gives a carefully turned performance as one of the most redoubtable rakes that ever jumped a garden wall. "I do not fall into the bass drum," he admits, "nor do I go up with the curtain. But everything else, I do." He simpers like a ninny, gives masterly double and triple takes (and even a few one-and-a-half takes, a Horton refinement). He waggles his square head in an idiotic semaphore of self-satisfaction, leers with lips that fit together like two nicked razor blades, and brings down the house with small, lewd giggles.

Education & Taxes. Edward has spent 40 years on stage & screen filling his bag of silly-boy tricks. After three years at Columbia University, he spent ten in stock companies, "got pretty well-known as a fellow who had nice clothes," even acquired his own troupe but never cut much of a figure on Broadway.

In 1918, at 30, he began starring in silent films, most of them box-office duds. After sound came, Horton began to win a movie public as a fuddy-duddy Mr. Fixit. In the high-grossing Ginger Rogers-Fred Astaire pictures, he became one of the screen's best-known comedians. Of late years he has operated as a "scavenger," making pictures "whenever they have a bad part they think I can rewrite. I twist the lines up, and they turn on the camera--of course, they may not have any film in it, but they pay me." Last year, the movies and radio paid him about $150,000. Edward's 88-year-old mother, after seeing him on the screen, once said gloomily: "I hope my son is saving his money."

He is. Bachelor Horton tots up every restaurant check himself, fills his pockets with tiny slips of paper listing his little daily expenses to be passed along to his manager-brother, Winter D. Horton. "Taxes, you know," explains Edward, who pays taxes on considerably more than his stage & screen income. He has built, furnished and rented "seven lovely houses" on his 25-acre San Fernando Valley farm, which a Hollywood wag christened "Belleigh Acres." Edward says: "My, but it's been an easy life."

Up & down the Eastern Seaboard, such sure-fire wandering stars as Horton promise to dominate this summer's season even more than seasons past. Summer stock as an acting and playwrighting laboratory has almost disappeared; at an average $2 a seat, there is too much money to be made with proven plays and proven stars. Money is also made from stage-struck youngsters who pay up to $500 a season for the privilege of collecting tickets, lugging scenery about and memorizing one-line roles. Twenty-five new theaters and some 175 old houses, about half of them employing Equity actors, are out to make it. To draw the crowds, most theater managers are trying to buy big Broadway and Hollywood names for their barbershop-window posters. Most sought-after star: Tallulah Bankhead. Most popular plays: Dream Girl and Joan of Lorraine.

On the West Coast, a few summer theaters seem to be catching on with a slightly different hold. One example is the Selznick Actors' Company (operated by Dorothy McGuire, Jennifer Jones, Joseph Cotten, Melchor Ferrer, Gregory Peck), which will present a play a week for six weeks. Explains Cinemactor Peck: "The Old Vic and Olivier have made us Hollywood actors very unhappy with our swimming pools."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.