Hollywood's Hellfire Club: The Misadventures of John Barrymore, W.C. Fields, Errol Flynn and the Bundy Drive Boys Page 11

  Carlotta Monti

  “Mr. Muckle!” roars W.C. time and again. Indeed, only Fields could engineer a film so the audience hated the guts of a blind man. He also copes with a nasty Mr. Fitchmueller (Morgan Wallace) bellowing, “Where are my kumquats?” and a molasses-spilling Baby LeRoy (whom W.C. refers to at one point as “Blood Poison”).

  By this time, Fields had moved to a ranch in Encino (where It’s a Gift’s final orange grove exterior was shot) and had met Carlotta Monti, a 27-year-old actress then landing screen roles here and there (e.g., Madi, Priestess of Zar, in 1933’s Tarzan the Fearless). Carlotta of the large bonnets and profile poses became W.C.’s mistress. She called her sugar daddy “Woody.” He called her “Chinaman.” She moved in with W.C. at Encino, and her book, W.C. Fields and Me, suggests a deep, heartfelt relationship:Beginning with the first intimate night together when we consummated our love — I will not disclose the wonderful details except to comment briefly that it was ecstasy — I felt more intensely alive and responsive than any time before in my life, my mind quicker and honed to a fine sharpness, my energies keyed higher and stronger. Woody seemed starved for real love and affection, and I gave it to him in large quantities. During that year I blossomed into full womanhood…

  Ron Fields doesn’t believe it. Later when W.C. was living at 655 Funchall in Bel Air, he referred to Carlotta in a letter to a friend as “The young lady who is furnishing the poon-tang at 655.”

  “Women are like elephants to me,” said W.C. “I like looking at them, but I wouldn’t want to own one.”

  On March 29, 1934, the Los Angeles Times reports that John Decker and stage director J. Belmar Hall would create a “Tony Pastor’s Theatre Club,” modeled after the old New York playhouse that had presented “Gay ‘90s” melodramas.” The club, located at 5746 Sunset Boulevard, opened in May, complete with a performance of the stage thriller The Ticket of Leave Man starring Sheldon Lewis and with a foyer featuring Decker’s satirical paintings. There was, according to the L.A. Times, “a riot of forgotten variety and song acts,” and the crowd sang along to songs like “The Man on the Flying Trapeze.” The club was a popular Hollywood novelty for a time, but managing a club wasn’t Decker’s forté, and “Tony Pastor’s Theatre Club” soon shut its doors.

  1934 saw the publication of Father Goose, Gene Fowler’s book concerning the rise and fall of Keystone comedy producer Mack Sennett. “An uproarious biography of Mack Sennett, the man who made America conscious of pie-throwing, Keystone cops and bathing beauties…” promised the cover jacket. The author vastly preferred book writing to script writing and hoped to devote himself full-time to such activity as soon as possible.

  Barrymore and Lombard in Twentieth Century

  April 12, 1934: Film Daily reviewed the Ben Hecht-scripted Viva Villa! starring Wallace Beery as Pancho. The film provided Hecht one of his favorite Hollywood memories: during the location shoot in Mexico, a drunken Lee Tracy (playing reporter Johnny Sykes) stood naked on a balcony and pissed on a squadron of Mexican troops. The south-of-the-border wrath and Hollywood fallout saw Jack Conway replace Howard Hawks as director and Stuart Erwin taking over for Lee Tracy (who was hustled out of Mexico in a plane and fired by Louis B. Mayer).

  Hecht’s rowdy script included a vignette in which Beery’s Villa whipped Fay Wray’s Teresa and — perhaps most memorably — a baroque death scene in which Joseph Schildkraut’s villainous General Pascal was stripped, smeared with honey and tied to an anthill as a feast for the insects and vultures (all done off-screen, to the accompaniment of Schildkraut’s screams). Viva Villa! won Hecht another Academy nomination. He’d lose to Robert Riskin of It Happened One Night.

  Meanwhile, Hecht and MacArthur, in a daring move, co-produced, co-directed and co-wrote their own film — Crime Without Passion, the melodrama of a flamboyant lawyer (Claude Rains) who kills a voluptuary (Margo), then topples into insanity. The bravura film, shot in New York at Paramount’s old Astoria Studios, came complete with an opening montage of Furies (!) flying over a New York City night sky and cameos by Hecht, MacArthur, Helen Hayes and Fannie Brice.

  Rains later claimed it was his favorite screen experience: “I’ve never done anything I like as well as this role … a role that comes once in an actor’s lifetime.”

  This message from John Barrymore heralded The New York Times May 3, 1934 ad for Twentieth Century, one of the greatest screwball comedies. The role of Oscar Jaffe, the Greatest Ham in the World, fit Barrymore to a “T.”

  As Mildred Plotka, whom Barrymore’s Jaffe transforms into Lily Garland, star supreme and worthy adversary, Carole Lombard came into her own. Originally intimidated by Barrymore, she was pulling punches until director Howard Hawks took her aside and asked how she’d react if some man spoke to her the way Oscar Jaffe was talking to Lily Garland.

  “I’d kick him in the balls!” vowed Lombard.

  At Hawks’ suggestion, she did exactly that on the next take. Barrymore screamed in surprise and presumably a bit of pain. Come the next take in the film, Lombard kicked his shins. The fire was lit — Twentieth Century is a firecracker.

  In his book Alternate Oscars, Danny Peary argues that Barrymore should have been the Academy’s choice as Best Actor of 1934, the year Clark Gable took home the prize for It Happened One Night. As it was, Barrymore wasn’t even nominated. He never would be. It hurt him more than he ever revealed, and he said late in life: “I think they were afraid I’d show up at the banquet drunk, both embarrassing myself and them. But I wouldn’t have, you know.”

  The Hollywood opportunities for the Bundy Drive Boys to strut their stuff were soon to become more limited. 1934 saw the rise of the revised Production Code, as well as the Roman Catholic Legion of Decency. Barrymore’s Twentieth Century battles with thigh-flashing Carole Lombard arrived just under the wire — the censorship office managed to nix a publicity still in which Lombard revealed her leggy charms to her all-eyes co-star.

  As the movies cleaned up, John Barrymore fell apart. On his next film, RKO’s A Hat, Coat and Glove, Barrymore’s memory totally failed him and he was replaced by Ricardo Cortez. He tried to revive himself by taking a cruise with Dolores, the children and their nurse, once again, to the always-revitalizing Alaska. During the voyage he became so desperate for alcohol he drank Dolores’ perfume. Barrymore got to shore one night, went on a wild bender, returned in the morning drunk and responded to the nurse’s shocked “Oh, Mr. Barrymore!” by breaking her nose — and then attacking Dolores.

  Mr. Hyde was loose.

  The marriage broke up. Barrymore feared Dolores would place him in an asylum. His pious and fleecing business managers, Henry and Helios Hotchener, fed his fears. He fled with them to England, where a proposed film of Hamlet fizzled before it even began after John saw himself in his old costume and realized he could no longer remember the soliloquies.

  He fled again, this time with Helios, a spiritualist, seeking to save sanity and soul by running all the way to India.

  Errol Flynn in The Dawn Patrol

  Chapter Nine

  Captain Blood

  Oh, I have seen enough and done enough and been places enough and livened my senses enough and dulled my senses enough and probed enough and laughed enough and wept more than most people would suspect.

  — Errol Flynn, 1959, shortly before his death

  It was Marlene Dietrich who allegedly gave Errol Flynn the sobriquet “Satan’s Angel.” It was a considerable tribute, coming from a woman who (at least in the early 1930s) was the screen’s most demonic female voluptuary; after all, in 1935, when Flynn played Captain Blood, Dietrich starred in The Devil Is a Woman. Surely it was a sensual salute to a man his friend David Niven called “a magnificent specimen of the rampant male.”

  There was, however, a major difference between Flynn and La Dietrich. The lady, a female Narcissus, enjoyed a lifelong love affair with herself and her cinema image that vitalized her until her death in 1991 at the age of 90. Errol Flynn despised himself a
nd died at the age of 50.

  John Decker painted Flynn’s portrait. Ben Hecht saw it as… the story of a troubled and ennuied soul peering out of weary eyes. Under the analytic Decker brush, the pugilistic Flynn chin grows gentle, the mouth whose smile has enchanted millions grows full of fretfulness. It is not a glamour boy who looks from the canvas, but a tormented fellow with a dislike for himself and the world.

  As the painting revealed, Errol Flynn was very much a sad, kindred spirit of Decker, Barrymore and other Bundy Drive Boys. “He was a charming and magnetic man, but so tormented,” said Olivia de Havilland, Maid Marian to his Robin Hood. “I don’t know about what, but tormented.”

  Flynn was a phenomenon. An adoring Ann Sheridan called him “one of the wild characters of the world,” and it was this most sex-charged male star of his era, via his 1943 rape trial, that inspired the expression “in like Flynn.” Vincent Sherman, director of The Adventures of Don Juan (1948), remembered visiting Flynn’s dressing room and finding the star wearing only a towel, which he dropped to reveal a giant phallus. It was, in fact, a fake — Flynn had engaged Warner Bros. makeup wizard Perc Westmore to create this penile prosthesis, possibly out of deference to the nickname the Warners mailroom boys had awarded Flynn: “Great Cock.” After Sherman enjoyed the joke, Flynn asked his director to send in Alan Hale, who took a gander at Flynn’s fabulous fake.

  “I’ll take a pound-and-a-half,” said Hale.

  Jack Warner (whom Flynn hated) eulogized him at Forest Lawn (which he also hated) as “the personification of gallantry, the essence of bravery, the great adventurer.” He was Hollywood’s classic swashbuckler in every sense of the word, and his classic sword duels with Basil Rathbone in Captain Blood and The Adventures of Robin Hood have storybook magic, an angel vs. devil iconography and an Astaire and Rogers dance beauty.

  As with John Decker and John Barrymore, the villains behind Flynn’s torment were women — in Flynn’s case, a mother who had the personality of a Basil Rathbone screen villain, and a first wife who was definitely no Maid Marian.

  Errol Flynn’s mother told the press in 1946 that her son had not only been a “dirty little brute,” but “a nasty little boy.”

  Errol’s description of her, meanwhile, was “Christ-bitten.”

  At any rate, Errol Leslie Thomson Flynn, born in Hobart, Tasmania, June 20, 1909 was the son of Prof. Theodore Thomson Flynn, a marine biology professor who eventually became a Member of the British Empire, and mother Lily Mary (who vainly renamed herself “Marelle”), a descendant of Midshipman Edward Young, one the mutineers of the Bounty. As Jeffrey Meyers wrote in Inherited Risk: A sinister character, Young was a chief instigator as well as participant in the mutiny. He wound up on Pitcairn Island, where he provoked a massacre of the natives in which Fletcher Christian and other English sailors were killed. In that grisly conflict, Young was one of the two white male survivors…

  The redoubtable Young had nabbed Captain Bligh’s captured sword, passing it down to his family — as a child, Flynn played with it.

  One fancifully imagines the sword bore a curse. Marelle seemed possessed by the ghost of Captain Bligh. An auburn-haired beauty, singer, pianist, athlete, sadist and religious zealot, she blithely cuckolded her scholar husband and viciously beat her son. Both Flynn and his 10-years-younger sister Rosemary soon realized they were unwanted children. The Flynn biographers all disdain Marelle. Charles Higham, author of Errol Flynn: The Untold Story, wrote that Marelle “refused to breast feed Errol because she feared her breasts might be ruined. She gave him bottled milk, which had not been pasteurized. As a result he contracted undulant fever that recurred throughout his adult life.” Jeffrey Meyers, calling Marelle “a Tasmanian She-Devil,” reports that, during one of Theodore’s research trips, Marelle dolled herself up (as Flynn put it) in “her 1914 motoring hat, her long white veil tied under her chin and flowing in the breeze,” and drove off for a rendezvous with the local cinema manager — taking along five-year-old Errol in the back seat. The exploit not only traumatized the boy, but, as Meyers writes, “eroticized both automobiles and movies.”

  Flynn never recovered from Marelle, who outlived him. He distrusted women, possibly even feared them, and as Higham wrote, “It was a failing which flawed his life and destroyed his marriages.”

  Flynn grew up loving the ocean, savoring books such as Treasure Island and Moby Dick. A natural rebel, Errol was expelled from private schools in Australia and England and embarked on various adventures as a young adult: a clerk for a shipping company, a government service cadet, overseer on a plantation, ship’s cook, boxer, pearl diver, newspaper correspondent. Learning of the New Guinea gold rush, Flynn went there as a jungle guide and ended up in the 1932 documentary Dr. H. Erbin’s New Guinea Expedition. Flynn later spoke with nostalgia about his New Guinea adventures, including the jungle dangers he faced, the wives of employers he banged and the diseases he battled — malaria and syphilis.

  Flynn’s dashing looks attracted the eye of Australian producer/director Charles Chauvel, who cast him as Fletcher Christian in In the Wake of the Bounty (1933). Finding acting the most attractive venture of all his many adventures, Flynn joined the Northampton Repertory Company in the English midlands, which led to a role in Murder at Monte Carlo. Irving Asher, excited by Flynn’s potential, sent a copy of Murder at Monte Carlo and a Flynn screen test to Jack Warner in Hollywood. Warner never even looked at it.

  When Warner never responded, Hal Wallis trusted Irving Asher’s judgment and signed Errol Flynn, who arrived in Hollywood on a Warner Bros. contract that paid $125 per week. His debut: The Case of the Curious Bride, a Perry Mason “B” in which Flynn appeared as a corpse in silhouette and a minute-long flashback as a blackmailer, killed by falling upon a piece of broken mirror. While shooting the violent scene, in which leading lady Margaret Lindsay fought off Flynn with a fireplace poker, Flynn accidentally knocked her out — and, as she regained consciousness, was sincerely and deeply contrite.

  He seemed fated for a career as a small-part handsome heel — and then two thunderbolts struck.

  First, Flynn fell madly in love with French actress Lili Damita, whose nickname was “Tiger Lil” and who has historically rated “tempestuous.” Her lovers allegedly ranged from King Alfonso XIII of Spain to Marlene Dietrich. She was fiercely jealous, with a bisexual sensuality that dominated Flynn’s heterosexual one. Still, they wed in Yuma June 19, 1935, and Lili clipped eight years off her age to insist she and Flynn were both 26. As Flynn wrote of “Tiger Lil” in his memoir My Wicked, Wicked Ways:She knew, however, that she was the greatest — bar none, no holds barred. I record it as a fact of any possibly interest to future historians.

  I do not know where she learned the arts of amour, or whether she was born gifted, but I had the feeling that she performed as if she personally was convinced that she carried with her all the legend, glory and reputation of the French.

  We fought. We reconciled. We fought again.

  Thunderbolt Two came as Warners prepared to shoot Captain Blood, its extravaganza based on the Sabatini novel. The formidable Michael Curtiz was set to direct; he was Warners’ most versatile and explosive director, a raging Hungarian who favored jodhpurs, high boots and a whip and was famous for his fractured language — e.g., “The next time I send a no-good son-of-a-bitch to do something, I go myself!” It was Curtiz who had directed The Case of the Curious Bride. Curtiz was now peacefully wed to Bess; his first wife — to whom he’d been married briefly in 1925 and 1926 — had been Lili Damita.

  As Warners blueprinted its costly production, there was a major problem: they had no Captain Blood. The studio had expected Robert Donat (who later won the 1939 Best Actor Oscar for the British-made Goodbye Mr. Chips) to come from London and play Captain Blood, but Donat claimed his asthma prevented a trip to Hollywood. Privately, he told Irving Asher he actually couldn’t bear the idea of leaving his mistress in London (and when Asher naturally suggested he simply bring her along, a weeping Dona
t said she didn’t want to make the trip). Hal Wallis had Curtiz test George Brent, Ian Hunter and Errol Flynn for Captain Blood, and as Hal Wallis wrote in his book, Star Maker :He wasn’t an admirable character, but he was a magnificent male animal, and his sex appeal was obvious. Jack and I took a gamble, and gave him a test. It seemed not to matter whether he could act. He leapt from the screen into the projection room with the impact of a bullet.

  Flynn won the role. Olivia de Havilland was his leading lady. The villains were considerably better paid than the $125-per-week title role player: Lionel Atwill signed to play the whip-cracking Col. Bishop for $2,000 per week, while Basil Rathbone, as the pirate Levassuer who wages the famous swordfight in the surf with Blood, received a princely $5,500 per week. Flynn, realizing the inequity, soon demanded a raise in midproduction, and he got one — to $750 per week.

  He was earning his pay. It was a volatile set, and Curtiz, directing his ex-wife’s new husband, was merciless in his insults.

  “Stop acting like a goddamn faggot, you no-good Tasmanian bum son-of-a-bitch!” Curtiz would scream.

  “Go fuck yourself, you dumb Hungarian!” Flynn vollied.

  Meanwhile, Hal Wallis, watching the rushes each night, wasn’t too gentle on Curtiz, as this September 30, 1935 memo, printed in Inside Warner Bros. (1935-1951), reveals:I distinctly remember telling you, I don’t know how many times, that I did not want you to use lace collars or cuffs on Errol Flynn. What in the hell is the matter with you … I want the man to look like a pirate, not a molly-coddle. You have him standing up here dealing with a lot of hard-boiled characters, and you’ve got him dressed up like a goddamned faggot…