H. B. Warner — Unto the Sixth Generation (1929) 🇺🇸

January 13, 2024

To know H. B. Warner you must know his actor ancestors. They interlace the Englishman's customarily strong family ties with charming traditions. His inherent trait of meticulous convention is lightened by their jolly spirit.

by Myrtle Gebhart

There is something of that first trouper, five generations back, sack slung over his shoulder, his sole possession of value his mastery of Shakespeare, who wandered from shire to shire and plied his art of mimicry for a few pence, in the cultured, polished gentleman of today.

He is Belgravia and Broadway, cowslip meadows and a crisp fall breeze, a haberdasher’s pride and the heart of the theater — all blended, yet each impression assertive like carefully formed exclamation points.

A tall, wiry man, precise and dominant, he has at once a flexible manner. With springy step, he shows you his house and his garden, keeping up a fluent monologue couched in a sharp humor. He has an easy formality, making you at home immediately. The very air is somehow quite jaunty.

In repose Mr. Warner’s face is severe, except when his enthusiasms are touched upon.

In repose his face is harsh and furrowed. A smile, flashing with his enthusiasms, erases those lines until only their shadows remain, and his face glows. Seldom have I seen crevices so deeply worn — by concentrated thought, more than by turbulent emotion — vanish under an inner exhilaration. It fascinated me, that lean, tanned face, boldly criss-crossed, of a sudden young and alight. Even his eyes would seem to swim in it, as he shed the years, some fifty-odd.

His tastes and hobbies are simple. Rows of flowers, planted and tended by himself. Foxglove and tube roses and poinsettia, pansies and gladioli, bordering the deep, shady back lawn. He weeds and spades in white-flannel trousers, black patents, dark coat, handkerchief in cuff. But he knows his tulips!

One of those set-purposed people, he will see anything, however trivial, to a finish. The type who, chained to a regimen of small duties, thrives on them. Though ordinarily genial, he is quick to accept an argumentative blade; when real heat is aroused, he lapses into an exasperating patience. His absorbing love for his son is shown in his strict discipline. And his friends are mostly of the commercial world. Only a few professionals are intimates — the Edmund Lowes, Lionel Barrymores, Joseph Schildkrauts, and others formerly of the theater.

His range of reading includes French romanticists, biography, travel tales, and everything pertaining to the stage. O. Henry and Sabatini are favorites. Accused of being a romantic idealist, he protests; presented with proof, he pleads the handicap of Byron for a middle name.

“He is a creature of habits,” his wife sighs. “Tea must be served promptly. His setting-up exercises have not varied for fourteen years. And no matter what the hour of his return from theater or studio. I must sit with him in his study for five minutes, while he has a cigarette.

“He would rather ride with the children than attend any function. Joan, ten, H. B., Jr., eight, and Loraine, six, must have thorough educations. Though his great pride is his boy, he is terribly fond of the girls, and became quite chesty over the maternal manner Joan adopted when he took her abroad, on location for Sorrell and Son. She would send out the laundry, and order meals and boss him.”

Mrs. Warner, American, of English and French ancestry, is a brisk, concise woman, with an engaging candor and humor.

“It is up to the wife to keep a marriage happy. Men must be handled with care. Even so, we like to believe that ours is a bit exceptional. We quarrel nicely, without losing our tempers. I must give him an argument occasionally — but never when I really want my own way. One of our main beliefs is that the most precious part of the day is the glorious early morning. We ride and play tennis, and start the day gayly.”

She was Rita Stanwood, successful in musical comedy. Seeing him with his first wife in a restaurant, she got a crush on him. Four years later, when playing in theaters across the street from each other, they met. He made her his leading lady, taught her the drama and promoted her progress in serious plays. They rode together, and talked of the theater, books, and sports, for two years. During a vacation at Coronado, he found a rival in attendance. Orchids from one, gardenias representing the other. Need one ask if Mr. Warner sent the orchids? He isn’t the type. She made a “to-do,” finally, of wearing the gardenias — as if she hadn’t known all along!

“Adjustment to domestic life was difficult, but I realized that one career would be sufficient. I am occupied with Harry, the children, and his business.”

Though he prides himself upon his acumen, it is really she who has built up the Warner fortune, reputed to be half a million. Her principal job is fending off people from whom he would buy anything.

“I was terribly jealous. He was a great idol, and loved feminine adulation — what man doesn’t? I countered it with an assumed nonchalance until I saw that they meant nothing to him, individually. No, he has never been jealous of me. ‘I would not want a wife whom other men did not admire,’ he says, ‘and I trust you.’ That seems to close the matter. Never once has he questioned me. Though social life bores him, he will drive me to a party and call for me, and consider it quite right. When he isn’t working, I must lunch with him every day. That makes me feel very necessary.

“At times irritatingly persistent in small matters, he is magnificently generous in important sacrifices, and extremely attentive. His reserve renders ‘scenes’ impossible. He can be boiling and never show it.”

The Warner home, an unpretentious frame house, greets you with the oddest, friendly handshake — the welcome of a hundred hands of the past. The ancestors’ portraits look so real and hearty. Treasures are used; the old blends its mellow charm with the new; each belongs. Some are rare and priceless, others of no monetary value.

He is no “curio collector,” yet you run across chipped ivories, two hundred years old.

Beneath crossed rapiers is a cup proclaiming Mr. Warner champion of a famous London fencing club. Framed letters from Roosevelt and Taft are cluttered among Napoleonana: dog-eared scrap books started by his grandfather contain old handbills, first manuscripts of Charles Reid’s and other authors’ early plays, notated with stage directions, and a water color which H. B., at nine, made and sent his father, touring in Australia.

His study would be somber, with its old paintings in shadowy tones, were it not warmed with crimson velvet curtains, and deep chairs of well-worn tapestry.

With the screen articulate, training tells. His grandfather was huge and bald: stroking his long gray beard, at ninety-five he fascinated the boy with dramatic stories in which his grandfather figured. Heroic, those Warners; personal matters achieved a sort of folklore glamour.

His father, Charles W, was the idol of his day. At six, H. B. first trod the boards, the stage where father and grandsire had first acted and, a tale perhaps embroidered by tradition, where the two generations before them had presented their itinerant art. Though thrilled by the legendary stories, the boy resented being pushed into the theater. College was followed by business and the study of surgery; both grew irksome. Eventually heritage asserted itself, and he became assistant stage director of his father’s company, trained to qualify for the male roles of every play. Parts would be switched. If he failed, wrath fell upon him — of those forbears to whom a mispronounced word, or an eyebrow at an improper angle, was heinous.

His official debut occurred at twenty-three. He and his horse fell through the stage. History doing an encore. Years previous, on that very stage, his father was grappling with a villain on an iceberg, when both disappeared through a trap door. From the depths — while above the scenic ice heaved — boomed his father’s voice, “Dirty dog! You meant no good by her!” He renders such reminiscences doubly droll by acting them.

Thespic heritage and such training could not but result in success, in England and this country. Twenty-eight stage years preceded his movie debut three years ago — if one charitably excepts, as he asks, a term in 1914.

He likes to entertain, but everything must revolve about his home — except when he is memorizing a talkie. The screeching screen, incidentally, is a pet abomination. The adored children are barred from his study, and he mumbles soliloquies like a distracted Hamlet. A pastime of keen interest is the coaching of young actors, who are petrified by the microphone.

To such a veteran, might not the orders of some director prove annoying? Yet one never hears of Warner temperament.

“Patience wins. There is so little use in fighting. I wait, and when the moment seems propitious, suggest my ideas. Feeling, or technique? The heart, but not riotous emotion. Tempered to suit character and circumstance. Sincerity alone counts in all things — work, love of children, gardening, whatever you do. If it isn’t genuine, you can’t express it convincingly.

“The studios cast me as a villain, because I don’t look like one. Quite right, too. A man couldn’t be a villain if he resembled one.” The personal pronoun is absent, despite that inherited “we.” To only two dramas did he refer, and mention of them was but preamble to a reminiscence. Of his own work he says nothing, though of the stage he talks with that tense exhilaration peculiar to all bred to the theater.

The producers liked him so well in Sorrell and Son, The King of Kings, The Trial of Mary Dugan, The Gamblers, Conquest, and The Argyle Case, that they are paying him thirty-five hundred a week. The Green Goddess, with George Arliss, will be followed by “The Passing of the Third Floor Back,” for Fox.

One of his best recent performances, in Corinne Griffith’s The Divine Lady, resulted from an act of kindness. This is not generally known, even in Hollywood, and he asked the studio not to publicize it. Another actor had been engaged, at a salary far less than Warner’s, to play the ironic Lord Hamilton. Afflicted with sudden hallucination of wealth, he ran up debts and had to be sent to a sanitarium. Warner offered to fill the role, at the other’s salary, and used the money to pay the man’s debts.

Perhaps the fact that he has known sorrow awakens his response to human hurts. The loss of his father was a blow. His first sweetheart, at twenty-one, died in his arms, and his first wife was killed in an automobile accident.

An odd, yet beautiful, thing about his marriage is the intangible presence of her memory. Shortly after the second wedding, they visited her parents, who accepted Rita heartily. For four years the first Mrs. Warner’s photographs hung in their country home, and were removed by H. B. himself only when the first child, Joan, was born.

“If I should go, I would wish my successor to speak kindly of me.” Mrs. Warner explained her views. “We each have our place and our happiness, as time gives them to us. She would want me to make him happy, and I respect her. I cannot understand why people regard as odd my preservation of his memories of her.”

On several counts Mr. Warner is an unusual man. He has an exceptional wife, and he’s not so ordinary himself.