Of All the Gin Joints

by Mark Bailey

  Not surprisingly, there was a back room at Stanley’s, an art gallery that also served as a clubhouse for Hollywood writers who aspired to be more than hacks: Nathanael West, Budd Schulberg, John Fante, Dalton Trumbo, William Saroyan, Gene Fowler, among others. The gallery featured modernist art, original Picassos and Klees mixed in with local artists like Fletcher Martin. At this home away from home, writers would sit and drink the orange wine Stanley served up by the pitcher. As Budd Schulberg said, “In those pre-hip-expresso-bongo days, Stanley’s was the nearest thing to a Left Bank we had out there.” They talked about politics, about women, about all that was wrong with movie work. In fact, so writer-friendly was Stanley’s back room and the back room next door at Musso’s that together they inspired the title of Edmund Wilson’s, The Boys in the Back Room: Notes on California Novelists.

  Sadly, by the time Wilson’s book was published, the Stanley Rose Bookshop had already closed. A victim of Stanley’s laissez-faire accounting style, it was shut down in 1939, little more than a month after the publication of his good friend Nathanael West’s Day of the Locust—a masterpiece that not only mentions the bookstore, but captures so well the seamy underside of Hollywood that Stanley Rose adored.

  IN ADDITION TO BEING an art gallery, the back room of the Stanley Rose Bookstore was a place for writers to talk and to drink. The beverage served was orange wine, poured from a pitcher.

  That many of the writers who congregated there shared a fondness for booze is widely accepted, as is their dislike of the film business. Raymond Chandler perhaps put it best when he noted, “The very nicest thing Hollywood can think to say to a writer is that he is too good to be only a writer.” Not that they were drowning their sorrows, but it isn’t hard to imagine a lot of pitchers went down.

  Harder to know is exactly what the orange wine was.

  Today, there are at least three different types of alcohol that are considered orange wine. The first kind of so-called orange wine has nothing to do with oranges. Essentially white wine, it is made by letting the grape juice ferment with the skins after crushing. Also called “skin-contact wine,” it has an orange hue. Popular in the U.S. since around 2009, this orange wine can be found at wine shops and on restaurant menus. Many people consider it a pleasant middle ground between a rich white and a light red, others just an annoying trend. There is no recipe, just buy a bottle, take it home, and drink it.

  The second kind of orange wine is again white wine, though with the addition of orange peel—this version has been popularized by culinary personality Laura Calder.

  The last kind of orange wine is actually made from the juice of oranges, as opposed to grapes. You can do this with virtually any fruit: blackberries, pears, plums, cherries, pineapples, etc. Somewhat complicated to make, the process can take months. It is hard to know, but easy to imagine, that Stanley Rose and his pals would never have had the patience.

  ORANGE WINE

  1 BOTTLE OF WHITE WINE (DRY IS PREFERABLE)

  1 MEDIUM ORANGE

  ⅓ CUP OF SUGAR

  First, empty out a little of the wine so it doesn’t overflow. Pour it into the sink or into your own wine glass. Then, zest a whole orange, avoiding the bitter white pith. Push the zest into the mouth of the bottle, and pour in the sugar. Recork, then shake by turning the bottle upside down, so as to dissolve the sugar. Refrigerate for one week, being sure to shake once a day. Strain into a pitcher and serve cold.

  TOM MIX

  1880–1940

  ACTOR AND RODEO STAR

  “I don’t think a man is under the influence of liquor until he has to hold on to the grass to keep from falling down.”

  Tom Mix was the first superstar of movie Westerns. The archetypal screen cowboy, he made over three hundred silent films that showcased his rodeo skills. Wisely declining to smoke or drink on camera, he became an idol to a generation of kids playing Cowboys and Indians, and his aura of authenticity—he was an honorary Texas Ranger and a pallbearer at Wyatt Earp’s funeral—made him unassailable as any studio’s first choice. Mix lost most of his multimillion-dollar fortune in the 1929 stock market crash. He worked into the sound era, but as injuries and age mounted, younger and brighter stars soon dimmed his own. Undaunted, he continued as a headline attraction at rodeos and circuses until his strange death in 1940.

  CHANGE A FEW DETAILS, and it could’ve been a Tom Mix movie. The old cowboy, pushing sixty, rides into Tucson early one morning. He’s been left for dead multiple times—including by one of his big-city wives after she shot him five times—and he’s had a rough couple of years, but he is still the fastest draw in the land, and he has started a campaign to remind everybody.

  Which is to say that, on the eve of his 1941 comeback rodeo tour of South America, Tom Mix arrived in Tucson, checked into the old Saint Rita Hotel, and went looking for Ed Echols.

  Echols and Mix had been five-star hell-raisers at the 101 Ranch in Oklahoma. Now Echols was Pima County sheriff, and Mix was a Hollywood superstar. (In the movie version, one of them would clearly have to be shot by the other upon learning this outcome, though it’s hard to predict which guy would take the bullet.)

  Mix and Echols headed over to the home of writer Walt Coburn for an afternoon of rolled cigarettes and whiskey. Mix biographer Richard Jensen later tracked down Coburn for an account of the day: The three old friends talked about the 101 Ranch, the Calgary Stampede, and the Alaska Yukon Pacific. Tom hated all his wives (including, apparently, the one he was currently married to) and couldn’t stop ringing the hundred-year-old mission bell on Walt’s front porch, listening until the ring faded full away. “If you ever take a notion to sell that old bell,” Mix told Walt, “I’d like to have it.”

  Mix stayed too long, drank too much, and slept too late the next morning. Sometime around noon, he pulled onto Highway 79 toward Phoenix in his convertible roadster, a luxury car that did nothing to stain his bona fides as a cowboy. Such was his reputation, even still.

  The events that followed are a matter of some conjecture. This can occur when the investigating sheriff has a nuanced view of what may or may not be relevant, as Ed Echols surely did. There was talk that Mix had stopped off at the Oracle Junction Inn for a few hands of cards and some whiskey, but nobody came forward to confirm it. Regardless, it’s a known fact that, a few hours later, two highway workers witnessed Mix drive around a corner of Highway 79 doing about ninety and, missing a detour, roll his roadster twice, which killed him instantly.

  A theory has since emerged that Mix had been carrying a couple of fancy silver suitcases in his backseat, and when he hit the brakes at the detour, one of them had flown up and hit him in the head so hard it broke his neck and killed him on spot. This so-called “Suitcase of Death” is even on display at the Tom Mix museum in Oklahoma.

  Here’s the thing. Those suitcases are not made of silver (that would be too extravagant, even for Mix). They’re made of aluminum. So while the Suitcase of Death is great pulp, Tom Mix probably deserves something a little more simple, like the poetry of the Westerns that he inspired: He died riding too hard.

  the HOLLYWOOD

  ATHLETIC CLUB

  6525 SUNSET BLVD.

  AT SEVEN STORIES, the Hollywood Athletic Club was the tallest building in greater Los Angeles when it opened in 1924. Designed by Meyer and Holler, the architectural firm behind Grauman’s Chinese and Egyptian theaters, the 120-room hotel and spa contained an indoor pool, steam rooms, a barbershop, and a gym; it also doubled as a private, all-male health club boasting a thousand-plus members, a good many of them quite prominent in the film business. In addition to sweating off a hangover, members could avail themselves of one of the rooms upstairs, the perfect hideaway for a man on a bender or a husband on the outs. Over time, management put a bar in one of the rooms and the Hollywood Atheltic Club shifted even further away from exercise, unless you count twelve-ounce curls. It became such a social hub, in fact, that in the mid-1930s, John Ford, John Wayne, Johnny Weissmuller, and a d
ozen or so other members (presumably some who were not named John) formed their own club within the club: The Young Men’s Purity Total Abstinence and Snooker Pool Association.

  At the time, show business people were barred from the city’s more upscale country clubs, and so the members enjoyed poking fun at such snobbery. They held ad hoc meetings that alternated between the steam room and the lounge upstairs. Ford always took minutes, later preserved by his son, and thus surviving as the only copy of the original TYMPTASPA charter.

  GOAL: “To promulgate the cause of alcoholism.”

  SLOGAN: “Jews but no dues.”

  CLUB PRESIDENT: Buck Buchanan, the “distinguished Afro-American” steam-room monitor.

  MEMBERSHIP REQUIREMENT: proof of status as a “career-oriented drunkard, or at least a gutter-oriented one.”

  NOT A MEMBERSHIP REQUIREMENT BUT HELPFUL: fondness for steam rooms.

  At subsequent meetings, members were quick to note that these qualifications alone hardly guaranteed membership. Frequent applications by one Dudley Nichols, screenwriter, provided a nice case study. Nichols had two major strikes against him, as voters saw it. For one, he did not drink with total and complete abandon, bearing an unfortunate tendency to fall on the wagon. And second, his politics were “socially reprehensible,” since he believed in justice, fairness, and other radical left-wing fantasies.

  Despite his shortcomings, Nichols ultimately became a member in 1937 at the expense of another member: character actor Ward Bond, a TYMPTASPA founder who was “summarily dropped from our rolls for conduct and behavior which is unpleasant to put in print,” Ford wrote in the minutes. “Mr. Nichols’s first action on becoming a member was a motion changing the name of the association to The Young Workers of the World’s Anti-Chauvinistic Total Abstinence League for the Promulgation of Propaganda Contra Fascism. This motion was defeated.”

  Several months earlier, the group actually had approved a name change: The Young Men’s Purity Total Abstinence and Yachting Association. When this was later shortened to the Emerald Bay Yacht Club, the group’s primary mission became wearing seafaring blazers with far too many insignias sewn on them. At their first annual St. Patrick’s Day dinner, the group ventured to conduct its business in public, choosing as its venue the Cocoanut Grove. The meeting ended prematurely when a food fight led to their expulsion. Ford wrote a letter to Cocoanut Grove management the following day. “I neither understand nor condone our behavior at the recent fête,” Ford wrote. “Unfortunately, I am not in a position to remember it.”

  MABEL NORMAND

  1892–1930

  ACTRESS AND COMEDIENNE

  Asked about her hobbies: “Just say I like to pinch babies and twist their legs. And get drunk.”

  The leading lady of Mack Sennett’s Keystone Studios, Mabel Normand became the greatest female comic of the silent era. As a teenager, Normand modeled for illustrated postcards and magazines, and in her early films she was cast as a “bathing beauty.” But with Sennett, Normand would quickly demonstrate a remarkable gift for comedy. Appearing in almost two hundred films, she was the first actor to execute the signature gag of silent film comedy: throwing a pie in someone’s face, on film. She is best known for frequent work with Chaplin and for her “Fatty and Mabel” series with Fatty Arbuckle. Her nickname outside Hollywood was the “Queen of Comedy”; her nickname inside, the “I Don’t Care Girl.” One of the first women to write, direct, and produce, Normand eventually ran her own eponymous studio.

  YOU COULD SPEND HOURS WAITING outside Irving Thalberg’s office. Nicknamed the “Boy Wonder,” Thalberg was running production for Universal by the time he was twenty-one. For over a decade, he would produce MGM’s most literary and prestigious films, but getting his ear wasn’t easy. It became a joke. Didn’t matter when you had a meeting or how important it was, and the worst was if you were a writer. Outside the office there was “the million-dollar bench,” so named for all the talent that had sat there. An example of this is the time Harpo, Groucho, and Chico Marx were made to wait so long they actually built a small fire outside Thalberg’s door. The smell of smoke managed to flush out the young executive.

  Director King Vidor recalled one day in particular, in February 1930, when he and the writer Laurence Stallings ran in wearing tennis clothes for a story meeting about their new project, Billy the Kid. With a draft in hand, it turned out, they didn’t have to wait this time at all. Instead, the secretary hustled them into Mr. Thalberg’s limousine. Thalberg was sitting in back talking numbers with MGM exec Eddie Mannix. The limo pulled out and Vidor and his writer just sat and listened. There had yet to be any acknowledgment that they were even in the car. Finally, Thalberg looked over. “Let’s hear what you have,” Vidor recalls him saying. And with that King Vidor dove headlong into his pitch and paid no attention to where they were driving until the car stopped in a driveway. It was then the director looked up and saw a long line of other limousines, men in gloves, and a large crowd further away, many of them crying. They were at a funeral.

  Thalberg got out. Vidor and his writer were a bit self-conscious now—should they know who died? And as they’d come in tennis clothes, how could they explain attending a funeral in white trousers and sweaters? Director Marshall Neilan helped them out of the car. He was crying, too. They had to go in. They were too mortified to ask anyone about the deceased until they were seated next to Mannix. When he told them, Vidor was in shock: It was Mabel Normand.

  * * *

  Chaplin was still lamenting that his only chance to touch her perfect lips was in front of a camera. Samuel Goldwyn once declared her “the most valuable property in Hollywood.”

  * * *

  Vidor had fallen in love with Normand when he began working as a ticket-taker in Texas nickelodeons. He wasn’t alone; for almost a decade, Hollywood moguls sparred over her. Mack Sennett built a studio and gave it to her. Thirty years later, Chaplin was still lamenting that his only chance to touch her perfect lips was in front of a camera. Samuel Goldwyn once declared her “the most valuable property in Hollywood.”

  Normand was the icon of a preflapper generation of girls called Sports. The distinction between flappers and sports really just boiled down to the haircut. Sports smoked, drank gin, and talked like sailors. Normand’s friends seemed to agree that her fatal mistake was taking the role far too seriously. She drank constantly. She stood aloof and smirked at serious advances from serious men. During a lunch at the Savoy Hotel in New York, she ordered nine martinis, a Baked Alaska, and a hundred Melachrinos (Egyptian cigarettes) to be delivered at once. In time, Mabel started snorting cocaine. The drug had in fact been legal before the war, but now forced her to run with a shadier crowd. She somehow ended up in the vicinity of a couple of murders.

  Vidor hadn’t read a paper in days, and he hadn’t heard much about Normand recently. Still, he did recall something about the scandals. Thalberg leaned over and whispered, “Too many murders.” Vidor nodded, “Shame, shame.” Then Thalberg leaned over again and added, a bit too loudly, “The audience won’t accept it.”

  Apparently, he was talking about Vidor’s project, Billy the Kid.

  TRADER HORN (1931)

  If MGM production chief Irving Thalberg could trust anyone to pull this off, it’d be filmmaker Woody Van Dyke. The workmanlike director was nicknamed “one-take Woody” for the speed with which he’d complete a shoot.

  A few weeks earlier, Van Dyke had told Thalberg he wanted his next movie to be something different and ambitious. What Thalberg ended up suggesting was more along the lines of flat-out crazy: He wanted to make a film version of the popular book Trader Horn, based on the life of explorer Alfred Horn. And he wanted Van Dyke to shoot on location, with a full Hollywood crew—in Africa.

  The crazy part? Thalberg would let Van Dyke set sail with an unlimited budget and half-baked script. When the cast and crew landed in Mombasa, they slowly marched inland to their first location—225 people and ninety tons of equipment.

/>   Almost every American caught malaria within a week. Lead actress Edwina Booth was particularly besieged by insects due to her skimpy outfit; she also got dysentery, fell out of a tree (almost fracturing her skull), and claimed she was “forced” to sunbathe nude on the ship to get the tan required to make her role believable. (It took her six years to regain her full health, after which she never made another film.) As for the director, Van Dyke figured he could inoculate himself from any parasites by drinking gin and more gin. Which he reportedly did.

  After a few days of shooting, Thalberg sent an insane order of his own: Start over, using sound. Nobody cared about silent films anymore, and they’d care even less when this epic finally premiered in a year or two. Trader Horn had to be a talkie. Now they needed sound equipment (none of the crew had made a sound picture before), not to mention an actual script. Three weeks later, a huge shipment of sound equipment arrived and was promptly dropped into the ocean by dockworkers. An “accident.” It’d be several weeks before a replacement set arrived and made it safely to shore.

  With little to do but sweat, the cast and crew followed their director’s lead and drank “at least three fingers of whiskey every morning and three more every night.” Unsurprisingly, everybody soon dismissed this odd notion of a script. And so, after two months of accomplishing exactly nothing, the Trader Horn cast and crew finally descended into the African jungle to make the most ambitious moving picture of all time.

  Seven months later, the ragtag crew came stumbling out. One crew member had been eaten by a crocodile. Another was horned to death by a rhino. Everyone was drunk, sick, or both. Van Dyke returned to Hollywood with an astounding 4 million feet of film (around 600 hours)—and announced he needed to shoot more. MGM had already spent $1 million, so Thalberg and studio chief Louis B. Mayer decided they’d better watch some of the dailies before pouring more money into it.