I note that today is the birthday of character actor Edward Everett Horton. Horton’s screen career began in the silents, where he started out as a comic lead. By the time of the talkies, he settled into supporting roles as the Nervous Nellie best friend (playing second banana to Fred Astaire, among others). His characters often appear with self-absorbed smirks on their faces, gliding obliviously through life. But security is fleeting, and time and again their faith in the status quo is abruptly undermined. When the rug is yanked out from under, surprise, anxiety, and frustration are registered in a trademark double-take.
Earlier experience on the stage, in vaudeville and on Broadway, allowed Horton to hone his comic timing. He was the ne plus ultra of flustered, fidgety fussbudgets. Over a 50-year career, he would appear in some 130 movies.
To anyone who grew up in the era of classic television or its reruns, Horton will be recognized as the voice of the narrator in Rocky and Bullwinkle’s “Fractured Fairy Tales,” as Roaring Chicken on “F Troop,” or as Chief Screaming Chicken (alongside Vincent Price’s Egghead) on “Batman.” Furthermore, I have seen no confirmation of this, but surely the character of C-3PO owes a thing or two to Horton. Without knowing anything of his romantic proclivities (in real life he sold himself as a bachelor), on screen, alongside Franklin Pangborn and Eric Blore, he was ever the coded “gay” character.
While Horton was an indispensable presence during the TCM-era of comfort food comedies, the primary reason I mention him is because decades ago I heard a recording of him on the radio, narrating Ernst Bacon’s “Fables.” It was a live performance, likely borrowed from an archive (possibly the Fleisher Collection?) and probably not available commercially. At any rate, I have never been able to locate it. Until now. Or an excerpt anyway, posted on YouTube. Today I share this movement with Horton narrating “The Lion and the Sheep.”
Bacon, who was awarded three Guggenheim Fellowships and a Pulitzer Scholarship in 1932 for his Symphony No. 2, is remembered primarily for his vast output of art song, having set poetry by Matthew Arnold, William Blake, Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Burns, Emily Dickinson, Benjamin Franklin, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Heinrich Heine, A. E. Housman, Nikolaus Lenau, Herman Melville, Carl Sandburg, William Shakespeare, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sara Teasdale, and Walt Whitman, among others.
I’m amused to learn that Horton was kicked out of Oberlin College (where he majored in German) after he climbed to the top of a building and, to the horror of a gathering crowd, threw a dummy off the roof. That’s the kind of prank I could really get behind.
Happy birthday, Edward Everett Horton!
Horton and Eric Blore in “Shall We Dance” with Fred Astaire
“Fractured Fairy Tales”
Ernst Bacon, Symphony No. 2
Four Poems of Emily Dickinson