By the age of nineteen, Webb had become a professional ballroom dancer and, taking the stage name "Clifton Webb", sang and danced in about two dozen operettas before debuting on
Broadway as Bosco in
The Purple Road, which opened at the
Liberty Theater on
April 7, 1913 and ran for 136 performances before closing in August. His mother (billed as Mabel Parmalee) was also listed in the program as a member of the opening night cast. His next musical was an
Al Jolson vehicle,
Sigmund Romberg's Dancing Around. It opened at the
Winter Garden Theatre on
October 10, 1914, and had 145 performances, closing in February, 1915. Later that year, Webb was in the all-star revue
Ned Wayburn's Town Topics, which boasted 117 famous performers, including
Will Rogers, listed in the
Century Theatre opening night program of
September 23, 1915. It closed 68 performances later on
November 20, 1915. In 1916, he had another short run with
Cole Porter's operetta
See America First, which opened at
Maxine Elliott's Theatre on
March 28, 1916, and closed after 15 performances on
April 8, 1916. The
World War I year of 1917 proved to be better, with a 233-performance run of
Jerome Kern's Love o'Mike, which opened at the
Shubert Theatre on
January 15, 1917. After moving to
Maxine Elliott's Theatre and
Casino Theatre, it closed on
September 29, 1917. Future
Mama star
Peggy Wood was also in the cast. Webb's final show of the 1910s, the musical
Listen Lester, had the longest run, 272 performances. It opened at the
Knickerbocker Theatre December 23, 1918 and closed in August, 1919.
The 1920s saw Clifton Webb in no less than eight Broadway shows, numerous other stage appearances, including
vaudeville, and a handful of
silent films. The revue
As You Were, with additional songs by Cole Porter, opened at the
Central Theatre on
January 29, 1920 and closed 143 performances later on
May 29, 1920. Busy with films, tours and vaudeville, he did not return to Broadway until 1923, with the musical
Jack and Jill (
Globe Theatre) which had 92 performances between
March 22, 1923 and
June 9, 1923, and
Lynn Starling's comic play
Meet the Wife which opened on
November 26, 1923 and ran into the summer of 1924, closing in August. The play's juvenile lead was 24-year old
Humphrey Bogart.
In 1925, Webb appeared on stage in a dance act with vaudeville star and silent film actress
Mary Hay. Later that year, when she and her husband,
Tol'able David star
Richard Barthelmess, decided to produce and star in their own film vehicle
New Toys, they chose Webb to be second lead. The movie proved to be financially successful, but 19 more years would pass before Webb appeared in another feature film.
Webb's mainstay was the
Broadway theatre. Between 1913 and 1947, the tall and slender performer who sang in a clear, gentle tenor, appeared in 23 Broadway shows, starting with major supporting roles and quickly progressing to leads. He introduced
Irving Berlin's "Easter Parade" and
George and
Ira Gershwin's "I've Got a Crush on You" in
Treasure Girl (1928);
Arthur Schwartz and
Howard Dietz's "I Guess I'll Have to Change My Plan" in
The Little Show (1929) and "Louisiana Hayride" in
Flying Colors (1932); and
Irving Berlin's "Not for All the Rice in China" in
As Thousands Cheer (1933). One of his stage sketches, performed with co-star
Fred Allen, was filmed by
Vitaphone as a short subject titled
The Still Alarm. (Allen's experiences while working with Clifton Webb appear in Allen's memoirs.)
Most of Webb's Broadway shows were musicals, but he also starred in
Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, and his longtime friend
Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit and
Present Laughter, in parts that Coward wrote with Webb in mind.
Webb was a friend and Broadway co-star of
lesbian singer
Libby Holman. Webb and his mother used to take frequent vacations with Holman, and they would remain friends until the mid-1940s.
His Broadway credentials were impressive and his
London stage appearances were critically praised, but
Hollywood was another story. After
New Toys and another
1925 silent
The Heart of a Siren, he was classified as a character actor and stereotyped as a fussy, effete snob. Mother Mabelle also preferred
New York to Hollywood with its "yes men."
Webb was in his mid-fifties when actor/director
Otto Preminger chose him over the objections of
20th Century Fox chief
Darryl F. Zanuck to play the classy, but evil,
radio columnist Waldo Lydecker, who is obsessed with
Gene Tierney's character in the 1944
film noir Laura. His performance was showered with acclaim and made him an unlikely movie star. Despite Zanuck's original objection, Webb was immediately signed to a long-term contract with Fox. Two years later he was reunited with Tierney in another highly praised role as the elitist Elliott Templeton in
The Razor's Edge (1946). He received
Academy Award nominations for
Best Actor in a Supporting Role for both.
Webb received an Oscar nomination for
Best Actor in a Leading Role in 1949 for
Sitting Pretty, the first in a three-film series of comedic "
Mr. Belvedere" features with Webb portraying the snide and omniscient central character. In the 1950s and 60s, TV producers unsuccessfully continued trying to revive "Mr. Belvedere" as a
sitcom character—
Reginald Gardiner was the star of the first TV series pilot in 1956, followed by
Hans Conried in 1959 and
Victor Buono in 1965. When it finally did become a popular
ABC series that ran for five years starting in 1985, "Mr. Belvedere", now reborn as the all-knowing male housekeeper to
Bob Uecker, was portrayed by another gay actor,
Christopher Hewett.
In 1950's film
Cheaper by the Dozen, Webb and
Myrna Loy played
Frank and
Lillian Gilbreth, real-life efficiency experts of the 1910s and 1920s, and the parents of 12 children. The film's success led to a sequel,
Belles on Their Toes, without Webb.
Webb's subsequent movie roles include that of college professor Thornton Sayre, who in his younger days was known as silent film idol Bruce "Dreamboat" Blair. Now a distinguished academic who wants no part of his past fame, he sets out to stop the showing of his old films on
television in 1952's
Dreamboat. Also in 1952 he starred in the
Technicolor movie biography of bandmaster
John Philip Sousa, Stars and Stripes Forever. In 1953 he had his most dramatic role as the doomed husband of unfaithful
Barbara Stanwyck in
Titanic and in 1954 played the (fictional) novelist John Frederick Shadwell in
Three Coins in the Fountain. In 1957's
Boy on a Dolphin, second-billed to
Alan Ladd, with third-billed
Sophia Loren, he portrayed a wealthy sophisticate who enjoyed collecting illegally obtained
Greek antiquities. In a nod to his own identity, the character's amusingly-chosen name was "Victor
Parmalee".
Webb's elegant taste kept him on Hollywood's best-dressed lists for decades. Even though he exhibited comically foppish mannerisms in portraying Mr. Belvedere and other movie characters, his scrupulous private life kept him free of scandal. In more open modern times, comedian
Bob Newhart once told
Johnny Carson about being at a Hollywood party in the early 1960s; Newhart was fairly startled when Webb asked him if he would like to dance.
In fact, the character of Lynn Belvedere is said to have been very close to his real life—he had an almost Oedipal-like extreme devotion to his mother Mabelle, who was his companion and who lived with him until her death at age ninety-one. Although he was
gay, he might be better defined as
asexual, given that the object of his love and tenderness was his mother.
When Webb's mourning for his mother continued for a year with no signs of letting up,
Noel Coward, in a fit of comic exasperation is said to have finally told Webb, "It must be difficult to be orphaned at 70, Clifton."
But the twilight had arrived for Webb's life and career. Inconsolable in his grief, he completed a final role as an initially sarcastic, but ultimately self-sacrificing
Catholic priest in
Leo McCarey's Satan Never Sleeps. The film, which was set in
China, showed the victory of Mao Tse-tung's armies in the Chinese civil war, which ended with his ascension to power in 1949, but was actually filmed in
England during the summer of 1961, using sets from the 1958 film,
The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, which had the same milieu.
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