by Mark Bailey
* * *
MGM decided to hire a full-time nurse, Mae Scriven, to keep him off the bottle. Clearly, that hadn’t worked either. Buster quickly seduced her, and soon enough the pair of them were going on benders together.
* * *
For his past few films, MGM had mandated sobriety and would check Keaton into the Keeley Institute before production started. The Keeley method was simple. Upon arrival, you would immediately be put on a rigid liquid-only diet: whiskey, gin, rum, beer, brandy, wine. You’d get a drink every half hour. You’d throw up when necessary to avoid alcohol poisoning. After three days, you left swearing that you’d never touch another drop. It is a practice still in use, now known as aversion therapy.
But when Keaton went through Keeley before the picture he was currently shooting (What! No Beer?), the cure didn’t stick. He was drinking again within hours. And so MGM decided to hire a full-time nurse, Mae Scriven, to keep him off the bottle. Clearly, that hadn’t worked either. Buster quickly seduced her, and soon enough the pair of them were going on benders together. And although he hadn’t counted on the charade continuing this long, here they now were—in bed together, in Ensenada, Mexico. Scriven, at least, could remember everything.
Apparently, Keaton had suggested the trip a few days before New Year’s. It was now the second week in January. He couldn’t care less that he missed the mandatory New Year’s party at MGM chief Louis B. Mayer’s house. Or that he was holding up production of What! No Beer? He’d done that a million times before. If that was all the bad news, he was golden. Turns out it wasn’t. Mae Scriven cheerfully informed him that they were now Mr. and Mrs. Buster Keaton. On January 8th, they’d gone before a judge in Ensenada and had made it official.
For the rest of his life, Keaton could not remember a single thing about the wedding day of his “marriage of inconvenience.” What was far more likely is that he spent that morning in Ensenada thinking about his last marriage, to Natalie Talmadge, the nonacting sister of Constance and Norma. Or specifically, the fact that they weren’t yet divorced.
the BROWN DERBY
3427 WILSHIRE BLVD.
1628 NORTH VINE ST.
FOR ALMOST HALF A century, the Brown Derby was a Los Angeles institution, the first and finest purveyor of upscale comfort food. Its building, which was literally shaped like a brown derby hat, became an icon of studio-era Hollywood. When it opened in 1926, actors and executives loved its late hours (open until 4 a.m.), its ostentatious policy of delivering phone calls directly to your table, and its semiofficial policy of only hiring attractive women for its waitstaff. The in-crowd sat in VIP booths that circled the room, while fans could occupy tables in the center to catalog their idols’ every bite. Charlie Chaplin, W. C. Fields, and John Barrymore were regulars. Co-owner and playwright Wilson Mizner had a standing claim on Booth 50.
A second location opened in 1929 on Vine St. It soon became the hottest lunch spot in Hollywood, decorated with caricatures of the stars that ate there—which were judiciously rotated based on the subject’s standing in town. Clark Gable proposed to Carole Lombard in Booth 5. Stars began getting their fan mail delivered there. Predictably, Hearst gossip queen Louella Parsons eventually pitched a tent and became the most powerful career-maker (and -breaker) in American celebrity journalism. Her nemesis, Hedda Hopper, later took over the other half of the room.
The Derby continued as one of Hollywood’s finest restaurants until the late 1980s, by which time both restaurants had closed for good. The original location had a strip mall built around it, and today the signature derby sits incongruously among insurance brokers and cell-phone hawkers. The dome itself houses a Korean bar popular among hipsters.
THE GENERALLY ACCEPTED STORY is that late one night Brown Derby president Robert Cobb found himself hastily preparing a meal. Sid Grauman, showman and owner of the famous Chinese Theater, had dropped by, but the restaurant’s kitchen was almost bare. Improvising, Cobb tossed together lettuce, bacon, and blue cheese—and the Cobb Salad was born.
As for the Brown Derby Cocktail, its history is a bit murkier. Some say it was absolutely created at the restaurant. Others credit the nearby Vendome Restaurant with inventing the drink and naming it after its neighbor. Still others argue the cocktail just looks like a brown hat. Regardless, both the drink and the restaurant were wildly popular in the 1930s.
BROWN DERBY COCKTAIL
2 OZ. BOURBON
1 OZ. FRESHLY SQUEEZED GRAPEFRUIT JUICE
½ OZ. HONEY (MAKE AS YOU WOULD SIMPLE SYRUP)
Pour all ingredients into a cocktail shaker filled with ice cubes. Shake well. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass.
FRITZ LANG
1890–1976
DIRECTOR
“Directors who don’t drink, the day they drink will be the day they’ll make the best film in the world.”
Considered one of the all-time masters, in his era, Fritz Lang was rivaled only by Hitchcock and Hawks. Born in Vienna, Lang was seriously wounded while serving in the Austrian army during World War I. Discharged in 1918, he directed his first film, Harakiri, one year later. Lang quickly established himself internationally with a unique style that combined German Expressionist visuals with genre storytelling; this later proved to be the primary antecedent of and influence on film noir. His science-fiction epic, Metropolis (1927), was one of the most expensive silent films ever made. Lang’s first talkie, M (1931)—his masterpiece—is considered the progenitor of the “psycho-killer” genre. Supposedly brutal to his actors, legend has it Lang tossed Peter Lorre down a flight of stairs before the final scene of M to make him appear properly battered. Lang left Germany in 1933, and over the next twenty years, he toyed with nearly every genre in Hollywood: Westerns, noir, costume dramas, even musicals. Highlights: Fury (1936), Ministry of Fear (1944), and especially The Big Heat (1953). He returned to Germany in late 1950s, making three final films before failing eyesight forced his retirement in 1960. Embraced by new wave filmmakers worldwide, Lang’s cinematic swan song was playing a winking version of himself in Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (1963).
HERE’S YOUR REAL SCOOP, he insisted: my martinis. In the mid-1970s, American writer Charlotte Chandler was interviewing director Fritz Lang for her biography of Marlene Dietrich, whom the legendary filmmaker had directed in the Western Rancho Notorious and whose company he’d enjoyed, both sexually and otherwise, decades earlier.
Chandler wanted to talk about Dietrich, but Lang kept pushing his damn martinis. He had a unique recipe, he told her conspiratorially: Tanqueray gin, Noilly Prat vermouth—real Noilly Prat, he emphasized—and a secret ingredient that, when mixed with the gin and vermouth, caused a chemical reaction that turned the drink a deep shade of blue.
That was the best part: It was a blue martini.
Making a blue martini for a woman was, Lang alleged, a foolproof path to seduction. When he fell in love with someone, he’d ask her if she’d ever had a blue martini, and naturally, she would reply that she hadn’t. “She would be mystified, intrigued, enchanted, and fall into my arms,” he told Chandler.
To be clear, like W. C. Fields before him, Lang was a historically staunch advocate of all forms of the martini, blue or otherwise. He’d drink them any time of day. As a young vagabond in Paris, he’d order one at a café (paying for it with money he earned selling postcard-size sketches), down half of it, complain that it wasn’t dry enough, then receive another full one for free.
* * *
Making a blue martini for a woman was, Lang alleged, a foolproof path to seduction.
* * *
Later, in his Beverly Hills mansion, Lang hung a mural he painted of topless women dancing out of a martini glass. One of the most charming virtues of Gloria Grahame’s character in The Big Heat is her ability to mix a perfect martini. Many film directors had their own peculiar recipes (Hitchcock: “Five parts gin and a quick glance at a vermouth bottle”), but Lang’s blue martini became legendary—mostly because it combined Lang’s thre
e greatest loves: martinis, women, and mystery.
Lang once said he didn’t consider Don Juan a philanderer so much as a perfectionist. During his time in Hollywood, Lang had affairs with (among others) Miriam Hopkins, Kay Francis, Joan Bennett, and Dietrich, with whom he had an extreme love-hate relationship. Dietrich found him arrogant and impatient (as did most); he found her annoying, particularly her habit on set of invoking “what von Sternberg would do.”
Sometime in the late thirties the pair had a brief fling, which lasted about same amount of time it took for Dietrich to reach across the pillow and phone another man. Yet despite his icy demeanor—so cruel, the joke went, that he could only achieve orgasm with the taste of blood in his mouth—Lang had established himself as a ladies’ man, and he credited much of his success to his trademark blue martini. “It was the greatest seduction technique,” he told Chandler. The third ingredient was classified, he’d often demur, but the American writer dragged the secret chemical out of him at long last. Food coloring.
Upon hearing this, Chandler proposed her own theory about the drink’s powers of seduction: perhaps it wasn’t the martini or its blueness that was irresistible to these women, but the man mixing them. Perhaps Lang himself was the blue martini. Lang considered this for a long moment, and then responded with a question of his own.
“Would you like a blue martini?”
BLUE MARTINI
2 OZ. TANQUERAY GIN
1 OZ. NOILLY PRAT DRY VERMOUTH
2 DROPS BLUE FOOD COLORING
LEMON PEEL
Pour gin and vermouth into a mixing glass filled with ice cubes. Add food coloring and stir well. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with lemon peel.
STAN LAUREL
1890–1965
ACTOR AND COMEDIAN
Ollie: Go ahead and drink your half. (Stanley drains the entire glass.) Do you know what you’ve done? What made you do it?
Stanley: I couldn’t help it. My half was on the bottom.
—“Men O’ War” (1929)
Born in England, Stan Laurel started out as a stage actor (once Charlie Chaplin’s understudy) but in 1914 moved to Hollywood to pursue film. After many silent shorts, he discovered an onscreen chemistry with a portly funnyman named Oliver Hardy. In 1927, the pair would formally become the famed comic duo Laurel and Hardy. As the thinner, mopier straight man, Laurel starred in no less than 106 films. He is best remembered for The Music Box (Academy Award winner, 1932), Way Out West (1937), and Babes in Toyland (1934)—and for Laurel and Hardy’s now evergreen catchphrase: “Well, here’s another nice mess you’ve gotten me into.”
FANS WERE OFTEN SURPRISED to read that Stan Laurel was the polar opposite of the madcap smarty-pants he played on screen. In interviews, he was a thoughtful, intelligent, soft-spoken man. He would make time for any fan. He did the unheard-of by keeping his phone number listed. He would answer any call, reply to any letter. He seemed a true gentleman.
But when anyone who knew Stan Laurel personally heard this, they would laugh and tell you that that was really his best performance yet. In actuality, Laurel was a total maniac. Especially when it came to women. Laurel was a hard-drinking, chain-smoking reveler, but “impulsive” couldn’t begin to describe his adventures in matrimony. He amassed four wives, one of whom he married twice, and the third of which he had to marry on three separate occasions to avoid charges of bigamy. He invited his first wife on his honeymoon with his third—on a private chartered yacht, no less—and divulged that fact to Wife Three only when Wife One showed up at the dock.
It all seems very difficult to keep track of, even more so when you are drinking a ton of whiskey—which Laurel constantly was. By 1938 his vices and sins reached their apex (or nadir, depending) when a perfect storm crossed his path: this in the form of Wife Three, a “Russian opera singer” named Vera Illiana Shuvalova. A twenty-eight-year-old firecracker who somehow managed to make Laurel seem temperate.
The couple had met the year before, when Shuvalova auditioned at a Laurel and Hardy casting call. They were married on New Year’s Day, 1938. Within mere months, Shuvalova had racked up two DUIs, a few stints in jail, a reputation as the most belligerent woman in greater Los Angeles, and a disorderly conduct charge for the unusual crime of “loudly discussing the Russian situation with herself.”
* * *
In actuality, Laurel was a total maniac. Especially when it came to women.
* * *
Laurel was hardly the steady hand to guide her. He, too, got pulled over for a DUI that year, and apparently he was dead set on one-upping his wife in a campaign of the ridiculous. He told the cops he wasn’t drunk, just upset about a fight with his new bride, who had “a terrific temper.” Things had gotten so heated that she had assaulted Laurel with the base of a telephone and further threatened to hit him with “a frying pan of potatoes.” This account bore a striking resemblance to the plot of an old Laurel and Hardy movie. He was arrested in short order.
At their inevitable divorce hearing later that year, Vera Shuvalova would state the obvious: Stan’s frying-pan story was just a desperate attempt to avoid public embarrassment and getting fired by the studio. But if avoiding bad publicity was his goal, Laurel failed in a spectacular fashion. Indeed, “another nice mess you’ve gotten me into.”
A bitter Shuvalova would tell the court and the world, “Hell yes, Laurel was drunk.” He’d been drinking all day. In fact, not only was he drunk, he had beaten her and threatened to kill her. “And was not just any kind of death, your honor.” He dug a grave in their backyard and told her to get in so he could bury her alive.
Naturally, the story made the front page. Stan Laurel’s contract would be terminated by the studio within the year. After the whole mess was done, he built a high wall around his house and posted a sign: ALL ATTACKING BLONDES WILL BE REPELLED ON SIGHT. Then he married Wife Two again.
THE GOLD RUSH (1925)
A mere decade into his career, Charlie Chaplin’s place in the pantheon of film legend was already secure, and he knew it. At the time, most of his films (in fact most films in general) were improvised from a basic idea or a title. Chaplin would simply go through each bit over and over until he found something that inspired him, usually with the camera rolling. But as his fellow directors became more sophisticated, Chaplin felt compelled to keep pace.
Although he’d been directing films since 1914, 1925’s The Gold Rush was, astonishingly, his first feature with anything resembling an actual written outline. The movie tells the story of the 1896 gold rush at the Klondike pass. Chaplin had originally planned to shoot the film on location (another then-novel idea), and indeed, he arrived in Truckee, California, in early 1924 with every intention of doing so. Director Eddie Sutherland was serving as producer and was charged with rounding up extras for a marching scene that would open the film. A relentless perfectionist, Chaplin insisted that these men be the same homeless drifter types that had struck gold at Klondike twenty years earlier.
Sutherland spent a week in Sacramento corralling as many as he could find. He rounded up five hundred of them.
In order to gain the men’s trust (and because Sutherland was something of a boozer), he insisted on drinking with them every night. This gesture the homeless men appreciated, until it became clear the production had not brought nearly enough liquor. Without missing a beat, they were all soon drinking Sterno (Sutherland included), strained through a sock and diluted by water. Sutherland feared he might be dead before they even reached Truckee.
But somehow he survived. The “hobos,” as Chaplin called them, cheered their star when he arrived on location in his tramp costume, and very quickly he subsumed their pathos into his character. It was a stunning performance. And Sutherland’s near-death bonding experience had been worthwhile. Until a few weeks later.
Hotel employees had been whispering about the sixteen-year-old lead, Lita Grey, going into Chaplin’s suite every afternoon for “rehearsals.” (Supposedly Grey was the
model for Lolita thirty years later.) Then she became pregnant. With jail as his alternative, Chaplin was forced to both marry her and replace her in the film. The entire movie would have to be reshot from scratch, with a new lead.
When the cast reconvened, it was on a studio lot in Los Angeles, and only a single shot from the first shoot ended up in the final film. Not that the new location solved anything. Soon enough, Chaplin was schtupping both the replacement lead (Georgia Hale, far more age appropriate at twenty) and Sutherland’s girlfriend (eighteen-year-old Louise Brooks). It was a hell of a thank-you.
STANLEY ROSE BOOKSHOP
6661½ HOLLYWOOD BLVD.
OPENING IN 1935, just a few doors down from Musso & Frank, the proprietor was a free-wheeling Texan named Stanley Rose. A first-rate storyteller with a face raked by whiskey, Stanley swore he had never read a book, and yet he owned and operated the best bookstore in Los Angeles. This was a man of appetites: for drinking, gambling, and whoring; for hunting and fishing; and quite possibly for literature and the company of the men and women (but mostly men) who created it. His bookstore serviced all the big studios; every name producer, director, and star had a charge account and an open ear for Stanley’s latest bestseller.
But colorfulness and clout aside, what was talked about most was Stanley’s generosity. A disinterested businessman at best, he staked his pals whenever they needed it. Writers not only ran up huge bills at the bookstore, but Stanley would often cover their tabs next door at Musso’s, where all they had to do was sign Stanley’s name.