Early Life
Willson was born Henry Leroy Willson into a prominent show business family in Lansdowne, Pennsylvania. His father Horace was the vice-president of the Columbia Phonograph Company and advanced to the presidency when the company was renamed in 1922 as the Columbia Gramophone Manufacturing Company. Willson came in close contact with many Broadway theatre, opera, and vaudeville performers, and Will Rogers, Fanny Brice, and Fred Stone numbered among the family friends once they moved to Forest Hills, an upscale neighborhood in the New York City borough of Queens.
Concerned about his son's interest in tap dance, the elder Willson enrolled Henry in the Asheville School in North Carolina, where he hoped the school's many team sports and rugged weekend activities such as rock climbing and backpacking would have a positive influence on the boy. He later attended Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, spending weekends in Manhattan, where he wrote weekly gossip columns for Variety.
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