LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Clifton Webb: Death
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The 1912 sinking of the luxury liner Titanic is used as a backdrop for a several fictional subplots, chief of which involves snooty socialite Clifton Webb and his wife Barbara Stanwyck. Stanwyck has booked passage on the ill-fated passenger ship with her daughter (Audrey Dalton) and son (Harper Carter), leaving Webb far behind. Webb manages to board the ship at the last minute, and discovers that Stanwyck plans to divorce him; she further informs him that he is not the father of their son. When the Titanic sideswipes an iceberg and begins its slow descent in the Atlantic, the women and children are put on the lifeboats while the men stay behind to face death (except for cowardly cardsharp Allyn Joslyn, who disguises himself as a woman). The formerly class-conscious Webb acts with conspicuous bravery, seeing to it that several steerage passengers are ushered to safety. He is reunited with his son, who has given up his lifeboat seat to an elderly woman. All misunderstandings swept aside, Webb and his son face their final moments on earth together.
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Despite his image as a pedantic fussbudget, Webb was a well-known figure on the Hollywood party circuit, usually escorting his mother, Maybelle, to parties and dances until she died in 1959. Visitors to the mausoleum have reported seeing a ghostly figure of a well-dressed man near Webb's crypt, and his home on Rexford Drive in Beverly Hills was reportedly haunted from the time of Webb's death until it was torn down. Before his death, Webb told friends that he loved the home, and he would never leave it, even after his death.
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As minister of justice Webb worked diligently to modernise New Zealand’s penal system. He always argued that the law should relate to what the average person regarded as common sense and common justice. Despite being in charge of the legislation reintroducing the death penalty, he was responsible for more liberal criminal, marriage and penal laws. Also, although an abstainer, he guided bills through Parliament that provided minor reforms in the licensing laws.
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Webb was always stylishly dressed in public, and owned dozens of expensive suits -- he was, in many ways, the America's first pop-culture metrosexual, and he made it work for two decades. The death of Webb's mother in 1960, reportedly at age 90, was an event from which the actor never fully recovered.
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