Box Turtle Bulletin

Born On This Day, 1888: Monty Woolley

(d. 1963) Born Edgar Montillion Woolley in New York to a wealthy family, Monty grew up among the crème de la crème of society. A Bachelor’s degree from Yale (with Cole Porter as a very close friend and classmate (Jun 9)), Master’s degrees from Yale and Harvard, he became an English professor at Yale with Thornton Wilder (Apr 17) and Pulitzer honoree poet Stephen Vincent Benét among his students. Wooly began directing on Broadway in 1929, and his second career of acting in 1935 at the age of forty-eight.

His upper-crust background made him a natural for his most famous performance in the 1939 Kaufman and Hart comedy The Man who Came to Dinner. His portrayal of meddling and obnoxious prima donna radio star Sheridan Whiteside who visits a family in Ohio and winds up spending a month there, ran for 783 performances and rave reviews. Woolley signed with 20th Century Fox in the 1940s and appeared in the 1942 film adaption of The Man Who Came to Dinner with Bette Davis and Ann Sheridan. Bosley Crowther of the New York Times called the comedy the “most vicious but hilarious cat-clawing exhibition ever put on the screen, a deliciously wicked character portrait and a helter-skelter satire. (Woolley) spouts alliterations as though he were spitting out orange seeds …A more entertaining buttinsky could hardly be conceived.” Time said, “Woolley plays Sheridan Whiteside with such vast authority and competence that it is difficult to imagine anyone else attempting it.”

“My great aunt Jennifer ate a whole box of candy every day of her life. She lived to be 102, and when she had been dead three days, she looked better than you do now.”

Indeed, it is hard to imagine anyone else. It suited his personality perfectly. And one cannot talk about Woolley without mentioning an incident at a dinner party, when after dinner he suddenly belched. A woman seating nearby glared at him. He glared back: “And what did you expect, my good woman? Chimes?” Woolley liked that line so well that he made sure it was written into his next film role.

His character-defining beard and mustache were as much a star as he was; fans affectionately nicknamed him “The Beard.” His hand and beard prints were both cast in concrete at Grauman’s Chinese Theater. He went on to earn Academy Award nominations for his appearances in The Pied Piper and Since You Went Away, playing crusty but lovable curmudgeons. but his sharp-tongued portrayal of the acerbic Sheridan Whiteside would come to define the rest of his career. Off screen, Woolley insisted that he was easy to get along with. Friends agreed, saying he was unusually generous and the life of every party. Yet when people saw him in a restaurant, it seemed they wouldn’t leave him alone until he finally dispatched them with an acerbic insult. Only then would they walk away deliriously happy. But when he bought a home in Saratoga Springs, New York, he got to know and love the townspeople, and they returned his affection by electing him mayor in a write-in vote. He declined the offer, but showed his appreciation by giving a special performance of The Man Who Came to Dinner. “My heart lies in Saratoga Springs,” Monty said. “In Saratoga, I’m not Monty. I’m Edgar and that makes me happy indeed.”

At about the same time, Woolley met Cary Abbott, and the two moved in together in Saratoga Springs. After about five years together, Abbott suddenly died in 1948, leaving Woolley bereft. The kind and generous Woolley soon began drinking and becoming the acerbic old man he portrayed on screen. Even his good friend Cole Porter abandoned him, although part Porter’s disapproval came from Woolley’s affair with an African-American handyman. Woolley continued to appear in small roles in the 1950s, including a life television performance of The Man Who Came to Dinner, in a production that was condensed into a miserable forty-five minutes. He hated the result and critics agreed. Woolley died of kidney and heart disease in 1963 at the age of seventy-five.