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

  Reconciliations, fights, separations, more reconciliations. One of the separations occurred during John’s 55th birthday (February 14, 1937) and the Bundy Drive gang sent a gift up to Bella Vista — a naked young lady wrapped in cellophane with a festive silver bow.

  Not only did the Bundy Drive gang hate Elaine, so did the public, who for all their disgust at Barrymore’s wasted genius, saw his new on-again-off-again Mrs. as a predator who sunk her blood-red fingernails into the ruins of a once-great man. She wasn’t a gold-digger — the debt-strapped Barrymore had no more gold to dig; she was a ball-buster, who publicly boasted that she had to buy the marriage license when she eloped with her celebrated, flat-broke spouse. She quickly became a dirty national joke, with only sporadic defense from her husband, who cursed her in public, mocked her on the radio and, as David Niven remembered, was outspokenly vulgar in his reasons for marrying her:“You want to know what I see in my wife?” he roared. “Well, I’ll tell you! You put it in, and it goes right through the main saloon and into the galley; then the cabin boy comes down a ladder and rings a bell… In other words, you stupid bastard, IT FITS.”

  Elaine had her own last laughs. “I know him better than any Barrymore,” Elaine once crowed to John’s daughter Diana, and in many ways she did. Their wedding night had been blissful, or so she wrote: “He made me unashamed of the natural. He made me glory in my sensuality.” But she also had been with him at Kelly’s. She had control, and indeed, come a 1937 reconciliation, Elaine demanded he not only allow her to pursue her career, but that he dress nicely, dye his hair (allowing a gray steak in the front), wear suits and ties, shave and all in all look his best — which now included the still-vain actor wearing a girdle.

  He fought back wildly and viciously at times, yet Elaine usually succeeded in retrospectively twisting his rages to suit herself. She told Sandford Dody (who ghostwrote her memoir) of “that terrible night” in New York, presumably during their 1940 run together in Broadway’s lamentable My Dear Children, when John tried to throw her from the terrace of their 20th-floor 79th Street apartment. Madly jealous, the actor had emerged from a 48-hour coma, believed his doctor was a pimp who ran a male brothel, and found a male nurse in the process of… well, as Elaine told it (and Dody recorded it in his own 1980 book, Giving up the Ghost):

  John throttles Lionel in Rasputin and the Empress

  Now it is true that when John woke up, came out of his coma, the nurse was giving him a colonic — an olive-oil colonic — you may well raise your eyebrows, dear, but it does the trick. It brought him back. I’m quite an expert in these matters. It brought him back, all right, but John was outraged. The posture didn’t suit him. And with rage he always had the strength of ten. That “big, blond stud,” which John kept calling him, flew like a timid girl the moment his patient got violent. Flew — this dedicated man in white — leaving me with a homicidal maniac…

  John kept circling me on tippy-toe. It was the most terrible sight, and he was smirking like a gargoyle and hissing invective. I remember thinking he looked like Ethel and Lionel and Satan as well. Even his eyes had turned color. Then he stopped circling and closed in. Twisting my arm, he dragged me out to the terrace through the French doors. The hedges, the privet hedges we had planted together, tore at me as I found myself half through them. He was now screaming about the parade of boys he saw me with after his death….

  He was holding me over the edge and the street below rushed toward me and I felt sick.

  “I will not allow you to make my grave a mattress!” he said. “Only if you die first can I have peace, slut. You’ve come as high as you could…Well, child of the asphalt,” he now intoned, “You’re going home at last. Back to the gutter!”

  Elaine claimed she begged him to kill her, to give her peace. They ended up crying. “It usually ended that way,” she said. Yet note the dramatic qualities of the story: John, humiliated from a symbolic anal rape, insanely jealous over her affections, and she the winsome heroine in the clutches of the mad actor — even willing to die, offering self-sacrifice.

  She lorded over the man, enjoying her power as keeper of the ruins and even joining him on the radio series called Streamline Shakespeare. And yes, on July 11, 1937, they performed The Tempest — John Barrymore as Caliban, and Elaine Barrie Barrymore as Ariel.

  Why did John Barrymore indulge her? One suspects that, in her vampy stylistics, capricious selfishness and self-serving seduction of a lonely and frightened lost soul, Elaine possibly reminded Barrymore of Mamie Floyd, his stepmother. Mamie sexually abused John in his childhood when he was 13, and Elaine was nailing him in his virtual second childhood when he was 53.

  In his own earthy, masochistic, spectacularly self-destructive way, John Barrymore was fucking — and fucked by — one of his most merciless nightmares.

  W.C. Fields was ill in these years, and made few screen appearances. However, his popularity stayed secure via his famous feuds with ventriloquist Edgar Bergen’s top-hat-and-monocle-sporting dummy Charlie McCarthy on radio’s The Chase and Sanborn Hour. The show also featured Dorothy Lamour and emcee Don Ameche, who sometimes refereed the insult battles, as on this May 30, 1937 broadcast:Ameche: Now Bill, don’t be too angry with Charlie. He isn’t feeling well today — he needs a doctor.

  W.C.: He needs a tree surgeon!

  John Decker later claimed “the greatest unpublished W.C. Fields story” concerned “that hysteric occasion when his famous red nose exploded!”

  One weekend, Fields was down in the ocean, off Lower California, deep sea fishing. Since he was angling for big fish, and since he was drinking a bottle of Scotch, his helpers strapped him to a chair and then nailed the chair to the deck — so that if he fell asleep, a big bite wouldn’t yank him overboard. It was a cool day, cloudy day, and after no nibbles and sufficient firewater, the comedian fell asleep per schedule. Ten minutes after he dozed off, the sun broke out hot and bright and searing. It roasted the boat, and there was Fields asleep on the deck. His helpers were afraid to wake him, afraid of his anger and wrath at being disturbed. So they allowed him to bake under the sizzling sun. In two hours, water blisters began to form on W.C. Fields’ big beak, and then more blisters — and suddenly after four hours — they exploded on his nose! Some explosion! It knocked him out of his straps and flat on his back!

  “I was rushed to the hospital,” Fields told me, “and they put my nose in splinters and tied it with bandages. I look back on that day with great embarrassment. You see, Decker, it was the only time in my life I blew up in public!”

  As for Fields’ nemesis Charlie McCarthy (“The woodpecker’s pin-up boy,” as W.C. called him), the impudent dummy arrived when Edgar Bergen commissioned Decker to paint Charlie’s portrait in Old Masters style. Decker selected Franz Hals’ The Laughing Cavalier as the showcase for Charlie, and told Irving Wallace:I shall never forget what occurred after I finished that portrait of Charlie McCarthy as The Laughing Cavalier. I took it up to Edgar Bergen’s place to show it to him. I was halted at the entrance by Bergen’s secretary. She asked what I wanted. I held up the painting for her. She stared at it a moment, then said, “But it’s ridiculous! You know Charlie doesn’t wear that kind of costume!”

  So that’s why Bergen doesn’t own the painting and why it’s hanging in Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe in New York today!

  Billy Rose, by the way, was a popular target for Decker’s chicanery. The artist reveled in the story of how he once promised to get Rose a genuine Renoir, and naturally painted a forgery:Then, in a good mood, I had the copy slightly aged, wrapped it in old butcher paper, and wrote a semi-illiterate note with it which read, “Dear Mr. Rose, I understand you want a Renoir. I am a refugee from Europe. It is terrible in Europe. My uncle he gave me this original. You can have it for $524.49, which I need badly. My phone number is SR-90090. Signed Mrs. Schineskyvich.”

  I sent this by special messenger over to Billy Rose’s apartment. I got there before his messenger. I wanted to be in on the kil
l. Billy Rose was shaving when the doorbell rang. I brought in the package. He jumped over it. He jumps and hops after everything. He ripped it open, studied the painting, read the note and in a glow made one statement:

  “God, John, the price is right! And this is a Renoir!”

  Immediately he called the telephone number in the note.

  “Is Mrs. Schineskyvich in?” inquired Billy.

  “Who?”

  “Mrs. Schineskyvich. Is she in?” asked Billy impatiently.

  “This is Norma Shearer,” came the answer.

  “If you’re Norma Shearer, then I’m Billy Rose! Now will you put Mrs. - — “

  The phone banged in Billy Rose’s ear. He was in a lather, and not from shaving. And I was sprawled on the floor, convulsed. It was once I’d proved to Billy he didn’t know a damn thing about art.

  But the anticlimax was even better. Billy Rose finally did get his hands on a genuine Renoir. He paid $25,000 for it and gave it to his handsome wife, Eleanor Holm, as a gift. He brought the Renoir into her room. Wanted to hang it on the wall. “You get that thing out of here!” ranted Eleanor. “You’re not going to knock holes in my wall!”

  John Barrymore had to work. MGM gave him a featured role in the Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy operetta Maytime (1937). As a Svengali-like impresario madly in love with MacDonald (he jealously shoots and kills Eddy come the climax), he actually had very little rapport with Metro’s “Iron Butterfly” diva. Her futile attempt to upstage him met with a perfectly serious ultimatum.

  “If you wave that loathsome chiffon rag you call a kerchief once more while I’m speaking,” warned Jack, “I shall ram it down your gurgling throat!”

  A happier time was had with Carole Lombard on True Confession, with Barrymore as a master of disguises, even performing a Chaplin impersonation. He was still a sight to see in his films, but the shadows were approaching, and he relied on blackboards from which he read his lines. Decker and friends fully believed Barrymore could remember if he wanted to — he no longer wanted to.

  John Decker, meanwhile, continued to cherish his time with Barrymore:Barrymore’s ability to turn a classical phrase was best illustrated on that afternoon when I went with him over to Gene Fowler’s house. Fowler wanted to introduce Barrymore to his daughter Jane.

  Jane Fowler was thrilled. She said pertly, “Mr. Barrymore, to celebrate your meeting, let me mix you a drink.”

  Barrymore beamed. “Fine, fine, fine.”

  Alas, though, little Jane did not know the actor’s taste. Naively, she mixed him a chocolate soda. She handed it to him. And without bothering to study its contents, Barrymore held the glass high, recited a toast and took a deep swallow. Just one swallow. Suddenly his eyes popped. He choked, shivered, sputtered and spat out the drink. He rose to his feet with a wild shriek.

  “Curses!” yelled Barrymore. “I have come to the house of Borgia!”

  As for Gene Fowler, Decker had another favorite story:A spot of liquor does peculiar things to people. But to Gene Fowler it does the most peculiar thing of all — it makes him visit funeral parlors. Whenever Gene gets tight, he goes to the nearest funeral parlor and bargains for a plot of land in the parlor’s cemetery. He argues with great passion. He wants to know details. How much land? What kind of grass? And so forth. In fact, I believe he owns a cemetery plot in every large city in these United Sates. Once, in San Francisco, a trifle plastered, Gene Fowler attempted to purchase a plot of land for four dead relatives to be buried standing up and facing the Pacific. “They’re all sailors who died with their boots on,” Fowler explained.

  There is one funeral parlor, in Los Angeles, which Fowler visited many times. The director of it was his favorite character, a dour, sour little man who looked like Death itself. Gene Fowler had known this funeral director for five and twenty years and never once, not once, seen him smile. One afternoon, feeling gay, Fowler went into the parlor to visit with his gloomy friend.

  The funeral director entered. And the left corner of his mouth was curled upward ever so slightly.

  “My God!” exploded Fowler. “I bet you’re smiling! Why are you smiling? What’s happened?”

  “Because this is a joyous moment in my life, Mr. Fowler,” explained the funeral director. “There are five old maids living up the block. They are all Christian Scientists — and Diphtheria has finally broken out!”

  Many believed John Barrymore was the inspiration for Norman Maine, the alcoholic, has-been suicide star, played by Fredric March in A Star is Born (1937). However, when Hecht and Gene Fowler did a rewrite on the original script by William Wellman (who directed the film) and Robert Carson, other influences were at play.

  Wellman and Carson had tapped the sad fate of actor John Bowers, who on November 17, 1936, rented a sailboat, told a friend he was about to “sail into the sunset,” and drowned. Hecht and Fowler, however, thought of MGM’s catastrophic sound casualty John Gilbert. William MacAdams writes in his Ben Hecht biography:One evening in the fall of 1935 when Hecht and MacArthur were socializing with Gilbert and a few friends at his Malibu beach house, Gilbert had jumped up and announced he was going to kill himself by swimming out to sea. He rushed out of the house before anyone could stop him but was back an hour later, drenched. Opening his mouth to talk, he vomited instead, then collapsed on the floor. “Always the silent star,” MacArthur quipped.

  Gilbert had become lovers with Marlene Dietrich, and one night in early 1936 allowed the notoriously bisexual star to take him to a gay party in Hollywood. As he danced with Dietrich, his toupee either fell off or was yanked off — accounts vary — and as he tried to retrieve it from under La Dietrich’s spiked heels, the lavender crowd shrieked and howled with laughter. It was the final humiliation — John Gilbert was found dead in his bed at his mansion on Tower Road (near Barrymore’s Bella Vista) the next day, January 9, 1936, the victim of a heart attack. He was 38 years old.

  Rather than tap this grotesque story, Hecht and Fowler respectfully gave the Norman Maine character a powerful, almost mystical suicide — simply walking into the Pacific at night. It was just what producer David Selznick wanted, and Dorothy Parker and Alan Campbell let it be as they performed a final rewrite. A Star Is Born won the 1937 Academy Award for Best Original Story, but the prize went to its original writers, William Wellman and Robert Carson.

  Ben Hecht also scripted 1937’s Nothing Sacred, a Selznick-produced Technicolor screwball comedy starring Carole Lombard and Fredric March, and opening with this Hechtian foreword:THIS IS NEW YORK

  Skyscraper Champion of

  The World…

  Where the Slickers and

  Know-It-Alls peddle gold bricks

  To each other…

  and where Truth, crushed

  to earth, rises again more

  phony than a glass eye…

  The comedy, directed by William A. Wellman, concerns a Ben Hecht-like reporter (March) passing off one Hazel Flagg (Lombard), from Warsaw, Vermont, as dying from radiation poisoning. A send-up of the public’s morbid fascination with Death, Nothing Sacred lives up to its title, a blazingly non-politically-correct movie that includes a black shoeshine man posing as a Pooh-Bah, a hilarious campy nightclub show (complete with a blonde-wigged Lady Godiva on a horse) and the marvelous moment when a little boy runs out of a Vermont yard and — for no reason at all — bites March on the back of his thigh.

  In the fall of 1937, Warners began shooting The Adventures of Robin Hood on location — Chico, California standing in for Sherwood Forest. It remains one of Hollywood’s few timeless, near-perfect films. Errol Flynn was captivating as Robin — swinging on a Sherwood vine, eluding a castle of villains, winning an archery tournament by splitting the arrow in a perfect bull’s-eye (champion archer Howard Hill was on hand for that spectacle) and wooing Olivia de Havilland’s lovely Maid Marian. Basil Rathbone was a wicked Sir Guy of Gisbourne, Claude Rains a splendid King John, and the lush Technicolor and Erich Wolfgang Korngold musical score all make Th
e Adventures of Robin Hood a beautiful storybook of a movie.

  The shoot, of course, was not so enchanting.

  In Chico, Patric Knowles, who played Will Scarlet, taught Flynn (who had recently published his first book, Beam Ends, based on his early exploits) to pilot a plane, entirely against studio safety and insurance precautions. As Knowles recalled, “We had drunk a great deal,” and as they flew back in the night, they remembered the little airstrip in Chico had no landing lights. The plane was running out of fuel and the two actors feared they were doomed. They battled over who would have the last cigarette and who’d try to land the plane, and Knowles finally saw the two water tanks he knew as landmarks, and the runway. As Knowles related in Charles Higham’s Errol Flynn: The Untold Story:My heart turned over when I noticed a long line of automobile headlights. The people looking for us had placed their cars the whole length of the runway so we could see our way in. I handed Flynn the cigarette and said, “Now, Flynn you let me take this in because I’ve piloted this thing and I know what I’m doing.” He said, “To hell with you. I’m going to hang on to the controls, too.” He threw away the cigarette. We used the dual controls. We bumped our way up and down. It was a very bad landing…

  Back in Hollywood, Knowles would face disciplinary action by the Screen Actors Guild for his joy flights. So would Flynn — for allegedly telling makeup man Ward Hamilton that he planned to complain about his wig, makeup and beard to delay shooting and wrangle another salary boost.

  Also, after the company came back to Hollywood, Warners replaced director William Keighley (who was behind schedule, and whom Flynn greatly liked) with the hated, jodhpurs-wearing, whip-brandishing Mike Curtiz. Flynn was incensed. The first shooting day with Curtiz, on the castle banquet set, Flynn uproariously sabotaged a scene as he drank from a goblet and spat out the soda pop (that stood in for wine).