Of All the Gin Joints

by Mark Bailey

  We had to live on food and water for several days!”

  “I never worry about being driven to drink; I just worry about being driven home.”

  “Who put pineapple juice in my pineapple juice?”

  “I was in love with a beautiful blonde once, dear. She drove me to drink.

  That’s the one thing I am indebted to her for.”

  “The cost of living has gone up another dollar a quart.”

  JOHN GILBERT

  1897–1936

  ACTOR AND MATINEE IDOL

  Telegram to the set of John Gilbert’s final film: HURRY UP, THE costs ARE STAGGERING.

  Reply: SO IS THE CAST.

  John Gilbert was known for his striking looks, rivaling Rudolph Valentino for the mantle of “The Great Lover.” At one point the highest-paid actor in Hollywood, Gilbert starred in The Big Parade (1925), the second-highest grossing silent film in history. He had affairs with Clara Bow, Lupe Vélez, Marlene Dietrich, and most notably Greta Garbo—who left him standing at the altar. After an MGM underling signed Gilbert to what was then an outrageous $250,000 per movie, the studio pushed poor material his way, hoping Gilbert would leave. At the arrival of sound, Gilbert secretly slipped into a screening of his first talkie only to hear the audience laugh at his squeaky, high-pitched voice. (The high pitch was rumored to have been exaggerated by MGM’s sound engineer.) With no movie offers, but still under contract, Gilbert refused to be bought out. He became a $10,000-a-week beach bum.

  FOR GOODNESS SAKES, WHAT NOW? Adela Rogers St. Johns, a well-known journalist with Hearst and a Hollywood social fixture of the era (who, fifty years later, appeared as herself in Reds), was used to the occasional racket from the house next door.

  St. Johns covered the entertainment beat, so she knew what to expect when the house was rented by MGM producer Paul Bern. Bern was the trusted confidant of production chief and Hollywood wunderkind Irving Thalberg—the inspiration for Monroe Starr, protagonist of Fitzgerald’s unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon.

  Thalberg was forever stopping by the house with the actor John Gilbert. And wherever Gilbert went, loud music, bootleg liquor, and women followed, Gilbert being the reigning matinee idol and MGM’s golden boy—golden on-screen, anyway.

  Off-screen, he was the opposite. For one thing, MGM president Louis B. Mayer despised Gilbert and by 1928 was refusing to speak to him. Another problem was Gilbert himself. Longtime friend and director King Vidor described the actor as the first in a long line of Hollywood stars who, young and lacking confidence, confused fiction with reality and became the roles they played. Off-screen, he would adopt the mannerisms of each new character until the next role came along. “John was impressionable, not too well established in the role of his own life.”

  One day Gilbert would be cast as a Russian and hire an entire Russian orchestra to perform at his house over caviar dinners; the next he’d fire the orchestra, dump his caviar and, having played a sailor of some type, buy an extravagant sailboat that he didn’t know how to use and would sell a year later.

  Gilbert was also dubbed “The Great Lover,” and that role, too, he embraced off-screen, to the delight of many Hollywood actresses, models, and extras. His affair with Greta Garbo lasted three years, during which she repeatedly balked at the idea of marriage. After finally agreeing to wed, the story goes that Garbo left Gilbert standing at the altar. After that profound embarrassment and his disastrous attempt to shift to talkies, Gilbert’s life and relationships grew increasingly dark. On-screen he was now a failure and, true to form, he became a failure in real life.

  * * *

  Gilbert was also dubbed “The Great Lover,” and that role, too, he embraced off-screen, to the delight of many Hollywood actresses, models, and extras.

  * * *

  But none of those things had happened yet in 1926, on the night that Adela Rogers St. Johns claimed to have heard the party at her neighbor’s house. At that time, Gilbert was still a handsome, charming movie star who liked women and loved parties. And that was the cause of the ruckus next door. Or so St. Johns thought. But the more she listened, the more it sounded distinctly different from a party. Her curiosity was heightened by the possible presence of Paul Bern’s fiancée, the raunchy actress Barbara La Marr (“I take lovers like roses. By the dozen.”) St. Johns’s reporting instincts took over and she walked next door. What she discovered became legend.

  St. Johns entered to find Gilbert and Thalberg crowded into a small bathroom. The producer Paul Bern was on the floor, wearing what looked like a neck brace. He appeared to have been crying, though his friends seemed more on the verge of laughter. Gilbert emerged, poured a drink, and unwound the story for St. Johns.

  La Marr had been refusing Bern’s proposals for months, and finally she eloped with cowboy star Jack Dougherty. That night, Bern found out. As the friends got more and more drunk, Bern left for the bathroom. Soon thereafter, they heard Bern’s histrionics, and rushed in to find Bern beyond hammered with his head inside the toilet. Trying to drown himself.

  Containing their laughter, the friends tried to pull him out, but now they had another problem: the older, pudgy Bern had become stuck inside the toilet bowl he was supposed to drown in. He couldn’t even get that right. Thalberg got a screwdriver and eventually Bern was extracted from his poor-man’s noose. Gilbert shared with St. Johns his theory about the attempted suicide. “He has a Magdalene complex,” Gilbert said. “Paul does crazy things for whores.”

  St. Johns laughed, but there was still the question of how a doctor could possibly have had time to drive over, outfit Bern with a neck brace, and leave again. The question was answered easily enough; the thing around his neck was no brace—it was the toilet seat.

  GARDEN OF ALLAH HOTEL

  8152 SUNSET BLVD.

  THE GARDEN OF ALLAH was the original Melrose Place, except its residents were great writers and actors instead of knuckleheads.

  Initially a mansion, the residence was leased by debaucherous silent actress Alla Nazimova in 1918. By 1927, her career fading and in need of a steady retirement income, she remodeled the house as a bungalow hotel, complete with the now-mandatory pool in the center courtyard. She celebrated the occasion by throwing an eighteen-hour party.

  At one point or another over the next decade, every important figure of prewar cinema film lived there. Humphrey Bogart, Laurence Olivier, John Barrymore, Vivien Leigh, Charlie Chaplin, Gloria Swanson, Fatty Arbuckle, Clara Bow, the Marx Brothers, Errol Flynn, Greta Garbo, and Lillian Gish—all either lived at the Garden of Allah or partied there so much that it became a second home. Some stayed for days, others for months.

  A host of East Coast writers adopted it as their own private oasis from the soulless and unforgiving film industry. A West Coast Algonquin, such famous residents included George S. Kaufman, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, Alexander Woollcott, Dorothy Parker, and Robert Benchley. As one might imagine of a forty-room apartment complex that houses actors and self-loathing writers, the Garden also became their own private Sodom.

  Writer Lucius Beebe described it as the most pronounced example of “concentrated alcoholism and general dementia” since the Harvard-Yale boat races during Prohibition. The tradition of diving into the pool while still decked out in formal regalia was reportedly started by Clara Bow, though the most famous incident involves the time Tallulah Bankhead, the original celebutante, allegedly dove in fully clothed and covered with diamonds. Then there was the evening John Carradine proclaimed he was Jesus Christ and tried to walk across the pool. It was just such antics that supposedly inspired Robert Benchley’s famous quip, “Why don’t you get out of those wet clothes and into a dry martini,” though Benchley insisted that his friend, actor Charles Butterworth, said it first.

  As late as 1941, long after Nazimova had sold the place, Sinatra lived at the Garden during his stint at the Cocoanut Grove. Apparently the Ambassador was too stuffy for the Chairman of the Board. When the Garde
n closed, in late August 1959, its last hurrah was a costume party to which 350 people showed up, many dressed as former denizens.

  The complex was torn down, and today the site is home of a strip mall anchored by a McDonald’s.

  D. W. GRIFFITH

  1875–1948

  DIRECTOR

  “The motion pictures give man a place to go besides the saloons.”

  D.W. Griffith is unanimously considered the greatest American filmmaker of the Silent Era and the first American “auteur.” A notorious perfectionist, he began by making silent shorts for Biograph Films in New York City. Griffith soon moved west and became both the first director to shoot a film in Hollywood (In Old California, 1910) and the first American director to make a feature-length film (Judith of Bethulia, 1914). Credited with pioneering almost every device that now constitutes modern cinematic language, from basics like fades, dissolves, and close-ups to the more complicated techniques of flashbacks and crosscutting. He launched the careers of Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford, Constance Talmadge, and director Raoul Walsh, among others. Griffith’s controversial second feature, The Birth of a Nation (1915), was the first Hollywood blockbuster, but his follow-up a year later, Intolerance (now considered one of the top ten films of all time), was a box office failure that began a steady decline in his output and popularity. When sound arrived, Griffith insisted that it ruined the poetry of filmmaking—and would be a passing fad.

  EVERYTHING HAD BEEN FINE just minutes ago. The party of four were sitting in a discreet booth at the swanky Hollywood restaurant Romanoff’s. There was studio mogul Samuel Goldwyn, his wife Frances, the hot new director Billy Wilder, and his fiancée Audrey Young, all laughing and sharing stories. Wilder was fresh off the success of what would become two of his great classics, Double Indemnity and that whiskey-soaked horror show The Lost Weekend. Goldwyn was eager to produce his next film. The problem was, Wilder had no idea what he wanted to do next.

  It was then that Wilder spotted him at the bar—a tall drunk staring them down. The man was dressed like a deposed czar: his clothes regal but frayed, stained with drink. To Wilder’s growing consternation, the man started heading toward their table. He walked unsteadily, and everyone could smell gin when he stuck his finger in Goldwyn’s face. “Here you are, you son of a bitch,” he muttered, “I ought to be making pictures.” Although Goldwyn was too stunned to muster a response, his wife Frances did. She told the “silly drunk” to leave them alone immediately. The old man acquiesced and walked away. Immediately, Wilder asked Goldwyn who the hell that was. Goldwyn ordered another drink. “That,” he said, “was D. W. Griffith.”

  * * *

  He had grown to like sound films, which he once predicted would be dead within a decade: “The trouble with the whole industry is that it talked before it thought.”

  * * *

  There had been rumors that the increasingly reclusive Griffith had been spotted out on the town again. Only a few weeks earlier, journalist Ezra Goodman had heard that Griffith had been holed up at the Knickerbocker Hotel for almost three years, having meals and liquor delivered to his room. Goodman showed up unannounced and tried to interview the great director; his request was declined. A few days later, he showed up with a beautiful young girl, who called alone. Griffith immediately let her in. Quickly, Goodman elbowed his way in after. Unable to kick Goodman out, and after a few drinks, Griffith engaged in an actual interview that would be his last.

  He had grown to like sound films, which he once predicted would be dead within a decade. (“The trouble with the whole industry is that it talked before it thought.”) He blamed himself for his career problems. He’d grown to dislike The Birth of a Nation, which he called a lousy, cheap melodrama. He had lived in the hotel for a few years; before that he had homes in Los Angeles and Kentucky. He had some money and was comfortable. He may have grown to like sound films, but he hated current cinema. Sound wasn’t the problem—the lack of good directors was. He liked Sturges, Walsh, and a couple of others. He liked Gone with the Wind, saw it twice. He loved Citizen Kane, “particularly the ideas Welles took from me.” “Ah, the superb egotism of the old man in his hotel room!” Goodman commented in print later.

  Eventually, things grew quiet and Goodman took his cue to leave. Griffith had been assuming the girl would stay. When she didn’t, Goodman didn’t know if Griffith’s parting words were about movies or the interview: “We have taken beauty and exchanged it for stilted voices.”

  Goodman’s article was the type of story that has since become an old saw of arts journalism—young fan finds old master living in squalor, brings the forgotten master to public attention, and master has an artistic renaissance. The problem was that in 1948, nobody liked such stories. They contained too much truth. Goodman eventually got it printed in a B-grade gossip rag when Griffith died a few months later from a cerebral hemorrhage.

  Nobody paid attention to Goodman’s story until he turned it into a book a decade later, but at least one man was profoundly affected by Griffith’s final months: Billy Wilder. When Goldwyn told Wilder that he’d just seen the ghost of the man who single-handedly dragged film from vaudeville novelty to genuine art—Griffith being one of Wilder’s idols—Wilder was deeply affected. Goldwyn would only understand how much so when he got the script for Wilder’s next film some months later. It was titled Sunset Boulevard—the definitive elegy for the fading stars of the silent era.

  A FORGOTTEN PRECURSOR to today’s Screwdriver, the near-obsolete Orange Blossom was one of the most popular cocktails of the Silent Era. Fatty Arbuckle’s costar, Virginia Rappe, was downing Orange Blossoms at San Francisco’s luxurious Hotel St. Francis the night she met her demise. Authorities would charge that she’d been crushed under Fatty’s great weight. Louise Brooks and Chaplin were drinking Orange Blossoms the night the little tramp painted his penis red with iodine and chased her around the hotel suite.

  But perhaps the most dedicated aficionado was D. W. Griffith. As an old man, living alone at the Knickerbocker Hotel, the silent era’s greatest director kept his windows lined with plump oranges, the key ingredient to his favorite cocktail.

  ORANGE BLOSSOM

  2 OZ. GIN

  2 OZ. FRESHLY SQUEEZED ORANGE JUICE

  ¼ OZ. SIMPLE SYRUP

  ORANGE WHEEL

  Pour all ingredients into a cocktail shaker filled with ice cubes. Shake well. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with orange wheel.

  ALEXANDRIA HOTEL

  501 S. SPRING ST.

  WHEN IT OPENED, IN 1906, the Alexandria Hotel was immediately crowned the swankiest hotel in Los Angeles; its posh lobby and opulent ballroom (added in 1911 and named the Palm Court) gave it glamour unrivaled by any hotel in the dusty outcroppings of Hollywood or Edendale—or anywhere in town, for that matter.

  Presidents held speeches in the ballroom, oilmen and industrial titans closed deals in its restaurant, and soon enough, rich and powerful film industry players would congregate in its bar. In the lobby, between crystal chandeliers and marble floors, lay “the million-dollar carpet,” so named because of the many film deals that closed within the walls of the hotel.

  Actors would linger in and around the lobby, hoping to be noticed. (Free sandwiches at the hotel bar didn’t hurt either.) In 1918 Rudolph Valentino charmed his way into his first lead roles in film here. Chaplin would rent a suite and try out some of his gags in the lobby. Cowboy actor Tom Mix rode his horse through the entrance. Jack Warner lived there, and Gloria Swanson met her first husband there.

  The hotel’s luster began to fade as Hollywood developed; by the 1960s, the rooms had crumbled into tenements and the ballroom, long neglected, had become a training ring for boxers. Renovations in the 1980s and 2000s led to its reopening, in 2008, as the most fabulous and historic low-income apartments in Southern California.

  BUSTER KEATON

  1895–1966

  ACTOR, COMEDIAN, DIRECTOR, WRITER

  “I’ll prove I’m your true friend
by not letting you get soused alone.”

  Buster Keaton’s talent as a silent film comedian is rated second only to Charlie Chaplin’s, and first by many. Nicknamed “Great Stone Face” for his unwavering stoic expression, his other trademarks were a porkpie hat and an astounding gift for physical comedy. Keaton started his own studio in 1920, and his streak of classic comedies from 1920–1929 is still hailed as an unparalleled run of flawless films. He did every one of his own stunts, including the classic chase on top of a train in his best-known film, The General (1926), a film considered by many critics to be the best comedy of all time. A move to MGM and the arrival of sound caused an unexpected lull in Keaton’s career, but he had a long and fruitful second act as a character actor and television star (The Buster Keaton Show).

  CHRIST, WHERE AM I?” Buster Keaton was getting used to this feeling. A few weeks earlier, on Christmas morning, he had woken up alone somewhere on the MGM lot surrounded by the ruins of a party. He had cuts on his head. It took him a few days to piece together that he’d gone a little overboard at the studio’s annual pre-Christmas bash, trying (and failing) to do pratfalls after drinking an entire bottle of whiskey.

  But this was a little more confusing. The last thing Keaton remembered was being at home in the Cheviot Hills area of Los Angeles, a few days after Christmas. Now, as the fog cleared, he found himself in a room he couldn’t quite place, probably because he’d never been there before. The mystery of his location, however, could be solved just by looking out the window: He was in Mexico.

  Keaton usually went to the Agua Caliente resort and casino in Tijuana. During prohibition, Agua Caliente was the day-trip of choice for the Hollywood elite—a resort hotel with a racetrack, spa, golf, tennis, gambling, prostitution, and most important, booze. But Keaton definitely wasn’t there now. This, curiously, was the nearby town of Ensenada. A woman slept next to him. Unfortunately, he knew who she was: the nurse MGM had hired to keep him sober.