Of All the Gin Joints

by Mark Bailey

  The footage was disastrous. A sauced Van Dyke had shot way too much, but despite that, there was no story, no discipline, no sense. Mayer thought they would have to cut it into shorter travel films. Thalberg insisted on seeing it through. He put his best writers on it. Six months later, they, too, had nothing. Thalberg was growing increasingly resigned to abandoning the film. Then one of the writers had the novel idea to see if the original book (from which the film was adapted) could be of use. This led to Thalberg’s fantastic discovery that there wasn’t a single copy of the book on the entire lot. He bought one from a bookstore, and the stunned writers found the perfect structure that had previously eluded them. Reshoots began almost immediately.

  Despite his frequent inebriation, Van Dyke had had the sense to bring back the African actors who played major roles. The biggest role was Horn’s gun bearer, played by Mutia Omoolu. The tribesman agreed to travel to America if a thatch hut was built for him. It was—on Studio Lot Three. Tall, his head shaven, a ring through his nose, Omoolu had sex with prostitutes whenever possible and ended up in the hospital with a veneral disease. During publicity, he declared the MGM lion too fat. Finally, two years later, Trader Horn was released. It was MGM’s biggest grossing film of 1931, made the studio a million dollars, and was nominated for a best-picture Oscar.

  RAMON NOVARRO

  1899–1968

  ACTOR

  “I only had a bourbon and soda, officer. Or maybe three.”

  Ramon Novarro was the best known of all Hollywood’s post-Valentino “Latin Lovers.” Born in Mexico to a prominent family, his parents moved to Los Angeles to escape the Mexican revolution. By his teens, Novarro was already working as a singing waiter and a bit player in films. His first hit as a leading man was Scaramouche (1923), and two years later he had his greatest success with Ben-Hur (1925). Novarro was homosexual and would go to well-known gay bars with female stars as his cover. Throughout his career, his studio, MGM, remained determined to keep his orientation out of the newspaper. Novarro continued to act in MGM films through 1935, then fell off the public’s radar. He would not find headlines again until his death, over thirty years later, when he was the victim of one of Los Angeles’s most infamous murders. Having invited two young brothers, both hustlers, up to his Laurel Canyon home, Novarro was severely beaten and then asphyxiated.

  IT WAS A DINNER PARTY hosted by actress Una Merkel, and everyone was on pins and needles. The last two guests had just arrived—billionaire eccentric Howard Hughes and his new girlfriend, Ginger Rogers. The problem was Jean Harlow. Rogers hated the libidinous Harlow, a constant star in the Hughes universe and reportedly his onetime lover. It was always a tricky business mixing starlets—and when you poured enough gin on top of that, it became downright dangerous. Still, as everyone sat down to eat, the two women were gracious and perfectly mannered. It was Ramon Novarro who’d become the night’s most memorable guest.

  This was in 1933, and Novarro was in a bit of a rut. His brother had just died of cancer. His last few movies had been stinkers. He was still a star in the public’s eyes, still had a contract, and could still make hearts flutter. But everyone sensed the end was coming soon. His best friend, actress Myrna Loy, chalked it up to the obvious: He had started losing his looks.

  Novarro was in his mid-thirties, and the ruthless studios had little use for romantic leads unable to remain handsome into middle age, unless they were gifted character actors, which Novarro wasn’t. His contract was up in a year, and there was little hope of renewing it. Added to that was a more devastating truth: Puritanical MGM chief Louis B. Mayer simply hated homosexuals.

  Never mind that everyone in Hollywood knew about Novarro’s sexual orientation. In the 1920s, as long as you didn’t end up in a newspaper, MGM was tolerant of homosexuality, which was still illegal and considered deviant in America at large. But if audiences caught wind, then marriages of convenience (what Hollywood called a lavender marriage), terminated contracts, and other such discrimination would ensue.

  * * *

  Novarro was in his mid-30s, and the ruthless studios had little use for romantic leads unable to remain handsome into middle age, unless they were gifted character actors, which Novarro wasn’t.

  * * *

  Novarro had been careful, mostly. Still, for whatever reason, Louis B. Mayer changed his policy in 1933. Something of a tyrant, he decided to rid the studio of any gay actor who wasn’t immensely profitable, i.e., everyone except the rumored bisexual Cary Grant. The defiantly open William Haines and Niles Asther were the first to go. And Novarro looked like the odds-on favorite to be next. True, he was far more discreet, but there had been a few hiccups.

  In 1926 the studio discovered that Novarro and Haines had visited a male brothel. Mayer was incensed that Novarro, the recent star of “a religious picture” (Ben-Hur), would have put the entire film in jeopardy. He wanted Novarro fired on the spot, but the star had powerful backers—namely Irving Thalberg and W. R. Hearst—so instead the two actors were forbidden to see each other.

  But by 1933 Thalberg was ill and Hearst was about to leave MGM for Warner Brothers. Mayer called Novarro into his office and tried to persuade him to enter a lavender marriage with Myrna Loy. Novarro deferred, telling his boss he’d think about it. Una Merkel’s dinner party was during just this period of introspection. Let it be said that Novarro was far less discreet in his drinking than his carousing. The man had probably accrued more DUIs than any other star in Hollywood, no small feat. And he was not going to face this particular dilemma without a cocktail firmly in hand.

  Sometime after dinner, as the table chatted idly in the lull that often falls between dessert and departure, the guests heard a noise. It sounded like someone doing jumping jacks on the second floor, coupled with loud shouts. Figuring that it was some sort of sexual escapade, Hughes told all the women to stay put and went to investigate. What he found wasn’t a sex escapade, exactly, though it was equally scandalous. Hughes and a few other men walked into Merkel’s bedroom to find Novarro drunk as a monkey and jumping on the actress’s bed. He was completely naked, save a bandana wrapped around his head, and he wasn’t shouting, but singing: “I’m Queen Victoria on her deathbed! I’m Queen Victoria on her deathbed!”

  Apparently, Novarro had made his decision. He would not marry Myrna Loy. And so yes, his contract would expire and his career would soon be over.

  THE WEDDING MARCH (1928)

  Director Erich von Stroheim was known as a perfectionist, intractable, insane. “What we want is better pictures,” he would declare, “but restraint will never produce them.” In The Wedding March, von Stroheim would put that to the test.

  Already rumors were swirling that a scene in his previous film, Merry-Go-Round, had been excised when the actors got too drunk and a few female extras got too naked. At a time when shooting on real locations was considered radical, von Stroheim was a director known to go even further. He insisted that actors wear authentic costumes, too, and eat real caviar and drink real champagne. But even when he ordered the actress Fay Wray off the set of The Wedding March and instructed that the room be boarded up for privacy, no one quite believed it would happen—that he’d shoot a real orgy.

  Biographer Richard Koszarski would later sum up the ensuing events as “exactitude bordering on madness.” Von Stroheim was a heavy drinker, and he forced the actors to match him drink for drink as they consumed gin and champagne. Some call girls arrived shortly thereafter and joined in.

  As von Stroheim was lining up shots, clothes were peeled off. By the time he was rolling, the actors and call girls had partnered up and were screwing beneath carpets. When a few of the actors had, uh, “nailed their parts,” the call girls noticed a couple of donkeys wandering around. Encouraged by von Stroheim, they began coaxing erections out of the burros, too. Full-on penetration, lesbian scenes, bestiality—the resulting footage still stands as one of the most graphic scenes ever filmed for a mainstream movie.

  Not that it was ever
to be included in The Wedding March itself. Von Stroheim was fired by Paramount before he finished shooting. His replacement, ironically, was Josef von Sternberg, whose own career would later be destroyed by the exact same kind of insane demands and foolish stubbornness.

  For von Stroheim, it was pretty much the end of his career as a director. His antics had pissed off one studio head too many, and within a decade he found himself broke and humbled. But his admirers, including scores of young directors, refused to let the story end tragically. They gave him acting roles and revived his career, most notably Jean Renoir in Grand Illusion and Billy Wilder in Sunset Boulevard. They even let his characters drink real drinks.

  MARY PICKFORD

  1892–1979

  ACTRESS

  “I wanted a drink so badly, but I was afraid to get up and get it. So I just waited until it was daylight and got two.”

  Mary Pickford was the biggest star (by far) of the silent era. The first actress dubbed “America’s Sweetheart,” she was also known as the “Girl with the Golden Curls” and “Little Mary.” Hired by D. W. Griffith at Biograph in 1909, Pickford appeared in fifty-one films in the first year alone. By 1919 she had helped create the star system and was the highest-paid film actress ever, eventually earning $1 million per year. Her films Tess of the Storm Country (1914) and Sparrows (1926) are routinely mentioned as being among the best silent films in history. Pickford married swashbuckling actor Douglas Fairbanks, and the couple built a fifty-six-acre Beverly Hills estate christened Pickfair, the first movie star mansion in Beverly Hills and an epicenter of Hollywood high society. A founding member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, as well as United Artists, Pickford won an Oscar for her first sound film, Coquette (1929) but retired in 1933. Most of her fans would not see her again until her acceptance speech for an honorary Oscar in 1976, at the age of eighty-four.

  IN 1917 PHOTOPLAY MAGAZINE SAID of Mary Pickford, “If everybody were as pure minded as she, there would be no sin in the world.” Pure minded? How about pure nonsense?

  The truth was, Pickford, “America’s Sweetheart,” just wouldn’t drink in public (or hold any object that could be taken for a cigarette). Having almost single-handedly launched the culture of celebrity, she was probably the first actor with a public image—and consequently, an image to protect.

  But with Mary’s siblings, on the other hand, it was a different story. Her younger brother Jack was a B-list actor, but an A-list lush. A womanizer who was loaded most all the time, the women around town called him Mr. Syphilis—this, because he had it. Rumored a heroin addict, too, Jack would marry three times—each wife a Ziegfeld chorus girl. And then there was Mary’s younger sister Lottie, a step behind on the drink but a step ahead on the marrying. Lottie was married four times, including once to a bootlegger who posed as an undertaker so as to smuggle hootch in his hearse. She also liked to party naked.

  As for Mary—Mary was the teetotaler, right? Wrong. Director Eddie Sutherland, one-time husband of Louise Brooks and not averse to drink himself, recalls an evening out on the town with Mary’s brother, Jack. The pair had been hopping from speakeasy to speakeasy, but now they desperately needed more liquor. Jack suggested a pitstop at Mary’s Beverly Hills mansion, Pickfair. Nonsense, thought Sutherland. Everyone knew that Mary and her equally famous husband, Douglas Fairbanks, abstained. They constantly hosted parties at their palatial estate, but Mary didn’t even drink then. And now that alcohol was illegal, there wouldn’t be a drop within shouting distance of the home.

  * * *

  “Having almost singlehandedly launched the culture of celebrity, she was probably first actor with a public image—and consequently, an image to protect.”

  * * *

  So why the hell are we going there? Sutherland remembers wondering. But Jack assured him that it wouldn’t take long. Pulling up to the fabled mansion, Sutherland was shocked to see Jack stride right through the unlocked front door—no knock, no doorbell. Why this was the home of America’s sweetheart! Well, the sweetheart was out. And so Jack walked upstairs, through her bedroom and into her bathroom. Sutherland followed sheepishly, knowing that getting caught in Mary Pickford’s bathroom, uninvited and bombed, would not place him atop the studios’ hiring lists.

  Jack pulled out two medicinal items: hydrogen peroxide and Listerine. “Gin or whiskey?” he asked Sutherland. Sutherland didn’t want either. Whatever Jack wanted to jokingly call this stuff, Sutherland didn’t have the stomach for a prohibition-era adventure in swallowing poison. Jack took a swig from one bottle, and handed the other to Sutherland. After some prodding, Sutherland cautiously smelled it, then took a taste. Wow. Okay. It was real liquor. Only then did Sutherland understand. Mary was a closet boozer—or perhaps more accurately, a bathroom boozer. As Buddy Rogers, her third husband would later admit, “The little dickens, she gets to drinking and she just can’t stop.”

  Sutherland and Jack sat down on the tile and began to down the bottles. Did it feel glamorous getting hammered in the bathroom of the world’s most famous teetotaler? Did it matter?

  THE DEADLY GLASS OF BEER (1916)

  Scripts as we know them did not emerge until the sound era; silent films were shot using prose treatments, or even just an idea or a title. The treatment below, the entire shooting script for the two-reel short The Deadly Glass of Beer, provides a neat encapsulation of how much and how little Hollywood filmmaking has changed in the past 100 years. (Certainly, it wouldn’t be hard to believe that this was perhaps the synopsis for a new Judd Apatow vehicle.)

  This scenario (as it was then called) was written by Anita Loos, who wrote several hundred early films. She was paid $25 for this one (about $500 today). Loos later became a star herself with the book and film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which began as an angry letter to her lifelong crush and “friend” H. L. Mencken.

  Henry and Frank are cousins who meet at a lawyer’s office to hear their uncle’s will read. The will states: “I leave one million dollars to my nephew Frank if by his twenty-first birthday he has remained a strict teetotaler. But if Frank should drink even a single glass of beer, my entire fortune is to go to Henry.” Henry, smothering his fury, plots Frank’s downfall.

  Disguised by false whiskers, Henry trails Frank about town in the hope of catching him taking a drink. One day Frank passes a saloon, hesitates, looks furtively up and down the street, and ducks in. Henry follows him into the saloon, grabs off his false whiskers, raps Frank on the back, and says, “Aha! I’ve caught you!” At which Frank turns around and shows his glass to be full of buttermilk.

  The day before Frank’s twenty-first Birthday, Henry becomes desperate. Aided by cohorts, he kidnaps Frank and takes him to a den on the waterfront. There he is strapped to a table; his mouth is propped open and Henry is about to pour a bottle of beer into Frank when, just as the clock strikes twelve, police break in to arrest Henry for serving liquor without a license.

  MUSSO & FRANK GRILL

  6667 HOLLYWOOD BLVD.

  OPEN!

  A FEW BLOCKS EAST OF the Montmartre sits an early-Hollywood institution that not only remains open to this day, but continues to thrive. The Musso & Frank Grill, a no-frills steakhouse and bar was opened in 1919, and has been owned and operated by the same two families since 1927.

  Very likely the oldest restaurant in Hollywood, celebrities were originally drawn to its Italian authenticity, New York feel, and no-nonsense menu. Since the Writers Guild was located just opposite and the Stanley Rose Bookshop next door, the place became a lifeboat for writers adrift in the celluloid sea. In 1934 Musso’s expanded into a small space behind the neighboring Vogue Theater. A door was punched through the wall of the dining room, and thus the famed “Back Room” was created, expressly for the literary set. Just to mention a few: William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett, William Saroyan, Nathanael West, Aldous Huxley, John O’Hara, Dorothy Parker, Ben Hecht, and Ernest Hemingway.

  Whether, to parap
hrase Irish playwright Brendan Behan, they were writers with drinking problems or drinkers with writing problems, these men and women knew how to bend an elbow. It is widely said that Chandler penned The Big Sleep in one of the booths. But, even though he mentions the restaurant in the novel, that seems unlikely. And that F. Scott Fitzgerald proofread his work there is even less likely. More plausible is Jim Thompson, broke and out of print, wandering down late in the afternoon after working on Kubrick’s The Killing (the director would later cheat him out of his credit). The Back Room after all was not a place to write, but a place to drink, to talk, to miss New York from. As Charles Bukowski put it, “I never actually ate. I just looked at the menu and told them ‘Not yet,’ and kept ordering drinks.”

  Of course, Musso’s wasn’t only for writers; actors loved it, too. Chaplin naturally had a special booth (did the man ever sleep?). He liked their martinis. And Tom Mix sat by the window so his fans could see him. There is the likely apocryphal tale of Valentino and Douglas Fairbanks racing each other on horseback down Hollywood Boulevard to Musso’s. But the list moves forward in time, as virtual roll call of Hollywood cultural history: Arthur Miller, R. W. Schindler, Orson Welles, the Rat Pack, on to Sean Penn, Johnny Depp, and Keith Richards. From John Barrymore to Drew Barrymore, over the last ninety years everyone who was anyone has graced its entrance and sung its praises.