J. Watson Webb Jr.; Film Editor Also Oversaw Family’s Museum

J. Watson Webb Jr., veteran film editor who also headed the museum of Americana created by his family in Shelburne, Vt., is dead at 84.

Webb died Saturday in his Brentwood home.

Born in New York City and educated at Yale, the scion of the wealthy, art-collecting family decided to make his individual mark on life in Hollywood. He became a film editor and rose to head the editing department at 20th Century Fox.

Among his credits are “A Letter to Three Wives” in 1949 starring Jeanne Crain, Linda Darnell, Ann Sothern and Kirk Douglas; “The Jackpot” in 1950 with James Stewart and “Don’t Bother to Knock” in 1952 starring Marilyn Monroe, Richard Widmark and Anne Bancroft.

But Webb made no attempt to escape his family roots, and embraced his art-collecting heritage.

For decades, a focal point of his California home was “Mary O’Connor,” the wooden cigar store Indian his mother had purchased at age 18 outside a store in Stamford, Conn. The statue had the unusual name because its young buyer named it for a beloved family servant.

The single purchase had started his mother, Electra Havemeyer Webb, on her unusual collecting path and had taken the family appreciation of art in a whole new direction--folk art and odd bits of early Americana. While ancestors had frequented galleries and artists’ studios in New York and Europe, she went on buying sprees in junkyards, railroad stations, sawmills and textile mills.

Webb’s mother was the daughter of sugar tycoon Henry Osborne Havemeyer and her husband was J. Watson Webb Sr., grandson of William H. Vanderbilt. Her mother, Louisine Elder Havemeyer, left part of her own collection--about 2,000 pieces--to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1929. Given the family history, neither money nor good taste was much of a problem.

Despite some derision that she was a mere “pack rat,” Webb’s mother continued collecting folk art until she had to establish a museum to house her treasures. That was 1947 and the museum was named the Shelburne Museum for the little hamlet where it is located, about 10 miles south of Burlington, Vt.

Webb applauded his mother’s artistic taste and efforts to build the museum, once giving her a pillow, which is now on exhibit, with the embroidered message: “We live in deeds, not years.”

The Hollywood film editor succeeded his mother as president of the museum when she died in 1960 and headed it for 17 years. After retiring as president, he served as chairman of the museum board from 1977 until 1996.

He resigned that year in protest after the museum decided to sell off some works--including paintings by French Impressionists Monet and Degas--to raise operating funds.

The museum has 37 buildings arranged on 45 acres of land and includes such exhibits as the S.S. Ticonderoga, a sidewheel passenger steamship that plied U.S. lakes and rivers in the 19th century; the 1871 Colchester Reef Light House; an 1890s rail car titled the Grand Isle; three carved miniature circuses and a massive collection of carriages, sleighs and surreys.

Webb, who never married, is survived by three nephews and six nieces.