by Mark Bailey
It wasn’t the last time Milland was mistaken for a drunk on the streets of New York. During filming of the famous scene where Birnam stumbles down Third Avenue looking for a pawnshop, Milland passed an old friend of his wife and another woman—some flirt he’d once asked the management of a hotel in Mexico City to remove from his room. So believable was Milland’s appearance and manner (cameras were hidden, so there wasn’t an immediate tip-off) that word of his public drunkenness started to filter into the gossip columns.
Back on set at the Paramount lot, shooting was less eventful, if not less amusing. As Milland tells it in his autobiography, interiors Stage Five had been rebuilt into an exact duplicate of the popular New York writers’ bar P. J. Clarke’s. No detail of Clarke’s was spared, from the stools to the bottles to “the dusty stuffed cat on the top of the telephone booth.” Every day during shooting, at around five, the stage door would open and a strange man would walk onto the set. Whether film was rolling or not, the man would head to the bar and order a whiskey. The bartender, being played by Howard da Silva, would indulge him by pouring a real bourbon from a real bottle. The man would gaze about the bar and tip back his whiskey, maybe make some banal comment about the weather. He would finish the glass, put down fifty cents and leave. Apparently, Robert Benchley was working at the studio—and he was homesick for New York.
The Lost Weekend was finished in December 1944, only two months after production began, but long enough for Paramount to once again get cold feet. Some say the liquor lobby was offering the studio millions of dollars in an effort to stop its release. It wouldn’t see the light of day until the following year; but when it did, it became an instant classic, winning Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Writing, as well as for Best Actor. The likeable Milland had succeeded in showing that humanity remains even in our darkest moments.
CHARLES BUTTERWORTH
1899–1946
CHARACTER ACTOR
“Looks like it’s going to get drunk out tonight.”
Wit and wingman first class, Charles Butterworth rarely received top billing in his films, but his natural charm made him an ideal supporting actor. His best-remembered role: Eddie Dibble in This Is the Army (1943), though he’s also known for being the inspiration for the voice of Cap’n Crunch as well as the sidekick of writer Robert Benchley. Butterworth studied law at Notre Dame, then worked as a reporter for a time, but soon quit to take up acting. He moved to Hollywood in 1930 and had a fourteen-year, forty-two-film streak of unqualified success. Because of Butterworth’s gift for improvising funny dialogue, screenwriters often provided him with fragmentary scenes, expecting him to come up with better lines on his own. (Most famous: “You ought to get out of those wet clothes and into a dry martini,” Every Day’s a Holiday, 1937.) He had only begun to display his marquee talents when he died in a car accident on Sunset Boulevard—six months after Benchley passed away.
CHARLIE BUTTERWORTH AND Bob Benchley were inseparable. As in “could not be separated.” If you even glanced at the Garden of Allah in the 1930s, you saw Benchley, and if you saw Benchley, you saw Butterworth next to him. They were like a ventriloquist and his doll, always arguing who was the real dummy. And they had a way of making their presence known.
One night, while drifting to sleep in the room beneath Benchley’s, screenwriters Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich could hear the two men drinking and talking upstairs. When they woke up at 8:30 a.m., Benchley and Butterworth were still at it. A typical early morning conversation would go like this: “Look Charlie, we can’t have martinis forever. We must have something to sober up with. Let’s have three vodkas.”
Another time, director Elliott Nugent had come to the Garden for a peaceful vacation with his wife and kids. When it was over, Nugent left a note: “When I hear laughter coming from Bungalow 16, I know it’s coming from comedian Butterworth and literary wit Benchley. But my children, who have never heard of you, regard you as a couple of drunks.”
* * *
A typical early morning conversation would go like this: “Look Charlie, we can’t have martinis forever. We must have something to sober up with. Let’s have three vodkas.”
* * *
Benchley had even told his wife that Butterworth was practically living with him. In fact, it was due to their incessant giggling and carrying on—they were “like a couple of pansies,” according to singer Kay Thompson—that the rumor spread: The Garden of Allah is being infiltrated by homosexuals.
In response, the bar at the hotel instituted a new policy—every male patron had to be accompanied by a woman. A bouncer was put in place to enforce it, a Pinkerton nonetheless. But when Benchley and Butterworth got wind of the rule, they not only knew why it had been instated, but how to get around it: Butterworth simply dressed as a woman.
JOHN CARRADINE
1906–1988
ACTOR
“Like every dog, I’ve had my day.”
Renowned eccentric and patriarch of an acting dynasty, John Carradine was nicknamed “Bard of the Boulevard” for his habit of wandering Hollywood Boulevard dressed in a cape and bellowing Shakespeare. He studied art in the Northeast as a youth and later hitched through the South peddling portraits of people he encountered along the way. First major acting job: a New Orleans production of Camille (1925). First major movie: DeMille’s Sign of the Cross (1932). His good standing as a member of John Ford’s stock company (see his major roles: Stagecoach (1939), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), among others) was nearly overshadowed by late-life status as a B-movie icon. Carradine played Dracula three times, replacing Bela Lugosi in Universal’s House of Frankenstein (1944) and House of Dracula (1945) and reprising the role for a final time (ludicrously) in Billy the Kid vs. Dracula (1966). The money from such schlock went to fund his own repertory theater company. Married four times, he had five sons, of whom David, Keith, and Robert became film actors. The exact number of films Carradine appeared in remains in dispute, but most sources put it at close to three hundred.
CARRADINE WAS OFFICIALLY IN. John Barrymore, the King of Hollywood Lushes, saw in the young actor all the makings of a Bundy Drive Boy, and he was soon initiated into the club. Carradine was the right blend of brilliant, drunk, and crazy, and on top of that, he openly worshipped Barrymore, which never hurt … well, most of the time. It was definitely not cool when the young sycophant, who had taken to publicly reciting Shakespeare (as if Barrymore didn’t own that trick), drummed up the nerve to reveal to the legend, “I’m told you are very much impressed with me.”
“Sure,” Barrymore said. “In fact, I know a screen test you’d be perfect for.”
This could not be happening. Carradine had worshipped Barrymore since he was sixteen, after seeing him in a New York production of Hamlet. It was Barrymore’s performance—which Carradine attended six times—that sparked the younger man’s lifelong love of Shakespeare. When Carradine had landed the role of Richard III in a production at the University of Southern California in 1929, he decided it was time to meet his idol. He drove to Barrymore’s estate, rang the house from a telephone at the back gate, and somehow talked his way onto the property. Barrymore met him outside. “Mr. Barrymore,” Carradine said, “I’m going to play Richard III.” “Really,” Barrymore replied with a smirk. “Let’s have a drink!”
And so it began, specifically with two Tom Collins cocktails, and thousands more drinks to follow in the coming years. Errol Flynn, who became their Third Musketeer, later recalled that they’d “start out in some bistro at noon, and a week later find ourselves in Mexico or on a yacht off Catalina with a dozen bottles on the floor and a gaggle of whores puking their guts all over the place.”
Still, Carradine had to know his place. If he strayed too far from the role of young apprentice, Barrymore might stop calling him “shithead” (Barrymore’s highest compliment). And if he got too cocky, Barrymore might teach him a lesson.
Which brings us back to the s
creen test. Carradine would be auditioning for a supporting role in a movie that Barrymore was set to star in. The screen test required him to dress up “like a fop” and give a long soliloquy at a dinner banquet. Never mind that the soliloquy was a total piece of crap, Carradine played it like Shakespeare—after all, he wanted to make his idol proud.
And proud Barrymore was. So much so that he celebrated by screening the clip to a select group of friends. He introduced the clip by assuring those gathered that it would demonstrate Carradine’s “uncanny special talents.” But to Carradine’s surprise, the test had been drastically edited down and now contained only two scenes: a close-up, in which he wiped his mouth with a napkin and delivered the soliloquy’s final line: “Delicious! The best I’ve ever had!”
Cut to: A shot of Barrymore from the waist down, zipping up his fly.
THEY FIRST MET at Bella Vista, John Barrymore’s legendary Beverly Hills estate, named after the spectacular view of the city below. A 7,000-square-foot Mediterranean villa built for director King Vidor, the estate included two guest houses, as well as a pool and stone cabana. Pleasant to think of John Carradine and Barrymore each enjoying a Tom Collins. This was 1929, out on the veranda. Barrymore was wearing a blue polka-dot dressing gown, as perhaps one does on one’s estate. Carradine sported striped morning pants, spats (to distract from the fact that he had no socks), a wing collar and York puff tie, topped off by a Homburg hat and cane.
A pair of freaks, or master thespians—depending upon your point of view—each with a Tom Collins in hand.
TOM COLLINS
2 OZ. GIN
¾ OZ. FRESH LEMON JUICE
¾ OZ. SIMPLE SYRUP
CLUB SODA
ORANGE SLICE
MARASCHINO CHERRY
Pour gin, lemon juice, and simple syrup into a cocktail shaker filled with ice. Shake briefly. Strain into a Collins glass filled with ice cubes. Top with club soda and stir gently. Granish with orange slice and cherry. Serve with two straws.
RASPUTIN AND THE EMPRESS (1932)
Nobody thought it could be done. Teaming the three Barrymore acting siblings—Lionel, Ethel, and John—in one motion picture? No way. Too many ghosts, too much ego. You couldn’t cast Ethel as the romantic lead. Opposite her brothers? Or as the mother. Of her siblings? Not to mention how John’s insane alcohol consumption made him dangerously unreliable. Or how Lionel’s alleged morphine addiction made him dangerously uninspired. Seriously: Forget it.
Yet one man in Hollywood wouldn’t; he alone believed it could work brilliantly. Fortunately, he was John Barrymore himself. “It’s like a circus with three white whales,” he once declared. (White whales at a circus? Never mind.) If John would do it, MGM’s Irving Thalberg knew that the other dominoes would fall. Ethel owed thousands in back taxes, and though she’d made her name on Broadway, she desperately needed a film gig. And Lionel needed money for his morphine habit. Now all they needed was a script. Languishing in MGM’s story vault were the rights to Alfred Klabund’s 1927 novel Rasputin, about the notorious Russian mystic whose sway over Russian Czar Nicholas II and his wife, Alexandra, led in part to the October Revolution. Ethel could be Alexandra; Lionel, Rasputin; and John, Prince Felix Youssoupoff, a triggerman at Rasputin’s 1916 assassination. Done.
A demi-script was cobbled together, but only hours into principal photography, the crew began to rue the day that Ethel had ever signed on. She’d never made a sound movie before and was completely lost on set. When a crew member asked aloud if “Grandma was ready” (“Grandma” being the nickname of the sound blimp on the camera), Ethel blew her stack, assuming she was Grandma. Ten days later, she personally saw to the firing of director Charles Brabin and to his replacement by Richard Boleslavski, a Stanislavski alumnus.
Lionel had an entirely different issue, and it wasn’t even morphine: John was trying to upstage Lionel’s own chin-stroking, scenery-eating performance as the villainous Rasputin. Things got so bad that the crew started referring to the movie as Disputin. And that was before the real problem emerged—the script.
According to biographer Mark Vieira, everyone had a different take on what film they were making. Screenwriter Charles MacArthur wanted a movie that revealed the true reason Rasputin had succeeded in duping the powerful Romanoffs: because the powerful Romanoffs were dumb. Thankfully, Thalberg vetoed it, though his grounds for doing so had nothing to do with so-called “artistic merit.” Rather, the Czarina was the granddaughter of Queen Victoria, and England was a vital market. Nobody complained.
Thalberg had his own solution: There should be a scene, he insisted, in which Princess Natasha, the wife of Prince Paul, gets raped by Rasputin. Okay. But for starters, Princess Irina and Prince Felix (the real-life models for Natasha and Paul) were very much alive, and thus had certain legal rights. There was also the minor issue that such a rape had never occurred. No matter. It had been decreed, so off everybody went to make their movie in which the hero never bathes because he’s too busy raping and murdering dumb royals.
Ethel wrapped in mid-October, but the production dragged on until December 12, with MacArthur sometimes turning in scenes the morning they were to be shot. The premiere (an event so ridiculously star-studded that it was lampooned in a 1933 Mickey Mouse cartoon) took place a week and a half later. Reviews were surprisingly favorable and the movie took in $1 million at the box office. And so it ended.
Until 1934, when Princess Irina sued MGM for $700,000 in libel damages because, as it turned out, she didn’t want everyone thinking she was raped. MGM argued it was fiction. The royals scoffed. Their evidence? A press release from Thalberg’s office, sent to John Barrymore when he first signed onto the film. The release stated that he’d be playing the role of “Youssoupoff”—Prince Felix’s real name, not the character’s. Case closed.
The loss spooked the studio so badly that you can see its fingerprints on every film and television show made today: “All characters and events portrayed in this film are entirely fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, either living or dead, is coincidental.” The disclaimer was put into use shortly after and as a direct result of Rasputin.
RAYMOND CHANDLER
1888–1959
AUTHOR AND SCREENWRITER
“Anyone who doesn’t like Hollywood is either crazy or sober.”
The patron saint of late bloomers, Raymond Chandler lost his job as an oil industry executive at the age of forty-four due to excessive drinking, then launched a new career as a hard-boiled fiction writer—and proceeded to revitalize the genre. His sharp, lyrical prose and dialogue had a lasting influence on writers of all stripes, and his evocative renderings of thirties/forties Los Angeles, his adopted home, are still considered definitive. He eventually completed eight novels, each centered on private detective Philip Marlowe; all but one were turned into films. (Most notable: The Big Sleep in 1946, directed by Howard Hawks, starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, with a screenplay by William Faulkner.) Chandler earned two Academy Award nominations as a screenwriter himself, first for Double Indemnity (1944), then for The Blue Dahlia (1946). He was hired by Hitchcock to adapt Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train but was fired after calling the director a “fat bastard.” He spent his final years in seclusion at his home in La Jolla, California; he remains one of the most revered architects of classic film noir.
RAYMOND CHANDLER KNEW THERE was no alternative. The novelist and screenwriter sat in producer John Houseman’s office, his confidence shattered. The day before, Paramount had offered him a bonus of $5,000 if Chandler delivered the remaining pages of his screenplay The Blue Dahlia on schedule. And given that they’d already been shooting for weeks, the phrase “on schedule” was pretty generous.
The truth was, The Blue Dahlia had been a rush job from the beginning. In early 1945, actor Alan Ladd had been unexpectedly called up to the army. Paramount wanted to squeeze one more film out of him before he left, but they had nothing in the pipeline that was suitable. So they had e
xactly three months to write, cast, and shoot a film from scratch—for one of their biggest stars.
Chandler, who was under contract with Paramount at the time, happened to have a half-written novel laying around that he thought might make a better screenplay. He gave the first 120 pages to Houseman. A few weeks later, with only a partially completed script in place, principal photography began. Veronica Lake was to star alongside Alan Ladd (both boozers in their own right). And then Chandler got writer’s block.
Production rolled on, eventually getting ahead of the pages, and panic started to set in. And yet, Chandler didn’t consider the $5,000 bonus an enticement, he considered it an insult, a bribe that revealed a complete lack of faith. For a man in a crisis, it only made things worse. No, much as it pained Chandler to disappoint Houseman, he didn’t see any possible way he could complete the film. Unless …
It was no secret that Chandler had had problems with alcohol in the past. But before shooting began, he had assured Houseman that he was sober—happily, proudly sober—he had given up booze for good. But drinking empowered Chandler in a way nothing else could, unlocked his creative tumblers. And if Chandler was going to crank out the rest of The Blue Dahlia, he was going to have to start drinking again—and twenty-four/seven. This required nothing less than a “continuous alcoholic siege.”