by Mark Bailey
However decadent or excessive Hollywood might have been in the 1920s, good old Scott, the bard of the Jazz Age, had them beat. That said, for a committed drinker, Fitzgerald was a spectacularly lousy one. The problem being, he got drunk very easily. Fitzgerald’s first stint in Hollywood was in 1927, with Zelda along for the ride (as you can imagine, she did little to quiet the storm). They stayed for two months, sharing a bungalow at the Ambassador Hotel with, among others, John Barrymore (no quiet from him either). Fitzgerald had been hired to write a scenario for a comedy titled Lipstick, to star Constance Talmadge. But work seemed to be the last thing on the Fitzgeralds’ minds.
* * *
For a committed drinker, Fitzgerald was a spectacularly lousy one. The problem being, he got drunk very easily.
* * *
The stories from this trip are manifold. That they arrived at a fashionable party dressed only in their pajamas. Or at another gathering, under the pretext of a magic trick, they collected guests’ watches and jewelry, then retreated to the kitchen and proceeded to boil the booty in tomato sauce. As Cole Porter sang that very same year, “We’re all alone, no chaperone … Let’s misbehave!” Crashing Samuel Goldwyn’s costume party, the couple was found on the doorstep on all fours barking—as if dressed up as dogs. Once inside, Zelda marched upstairs and ran a bath. The party happened to be in honor of none other than Constance Talmadge herself, and she never forgave Scott. His scenario would be rejected, and the Fitzgeralds would soon flee Hollywood. Their final gesture: stacking all their hotel furniture into a pile, the unpaid bill on top.
Years later, Fitzgerald would say he had been overconfident, believing himself “a sort of magician with words.” While for her part, Zelda had just found the town boring. “Hollywood is not gay like the magazines say but very quiet,” she wrote their daughter, Scottie, swearing that, “If we ever get out of here I will never go near another moving picture theatre or actor again.” It would be almost four years before Scott returned to Hollywood, and by then Zelda, very much unwell, was left in the care of her parents in Montgomery, Alabama.
Fitzgerald’s second chance at screenwriting was given to him in 1931 by MGM’s boy genius, Irving Thalberg. He was hired to write some “smart lines” for the Jean Harlow vehicle Red-Headed Woman. Hollywood’s attitude toward one of America’s great men of letters might have been amusing were it not so sad. Years later Fitzgerald would cross paths with another red-headed woman, Joan Crawford, who famously exhorted him to, “Write hard, Mr. Fitzgerald, write hard!” By most accounts he did write hard. He just played hard, too. And on this trip there was to be another social fiasco—at a tea party held on a Sunday afternoon at the home of his boss Irving Thalberg and Thalberg’s movie-star wife, Norma Shearer, after far too much gin, Fitzgerald gathered together the crowd of A-list actors and directors—John Gilbert, Marion Davies, Robert Montgomery, et al—for a parlor trick. He asked Norma Shearer for a small dog and a piano player; he was given a poodle and Ramon Navarro. Clearly soused, with the dog cradled in his arms, Fitzgerald sang a drunken tune he had written years ago at Princeton with his old pal Edmund “Bunny” Wilson. It was a song about dogs. “Larger that a rat!/ More faithful than a cat! /Dog! Dog! Dog!” The song was a flop and, despite five weeks of work, the script was, too—Thalberg rejected Fitzgerald’s draft and gave the film to Anita Loos.
It would take more than half a decade and the death of Irving Thalberg for Fitzgerald to return to Hollywood. By then, 1937, Zelda was in a sanitarium, and Fitzgerald’s life was truly in shambles. He had already written The Crack-Up for Esquire, that early masterpiece of self-revelation. But this time he would really give Tinseltown a go, spending three and a half years writing scripts. All told, little of significance ended up on screen. But maybe he and Hollywood were finally warming up to each other. Under contract with the studios, Fitzgerald spent the majority of his time on the wagon. There were of course a few exceptions; most notably a week-long binge with screenwriter Budd Schulberg. But then that took place in New Hampshire during the dead of winter, at Dartmouth, no less—who could blame him? Back West, Fitzgerald was head over heels for columnist Sheilah Graham, which helped, his first truly intimate relationship since Zelda. And he had begun his first novel in nearly a decade, The Last Tycoon, a book about Hollywood and about America. All this, and then Fitzgerald went and died of a heart attack at Graham’s apartment in Hollywood, age forty-four. But even if the town never really loved him, most would agree, it wasn’t what killed him either.
ERROL FLYNN
1909–1959
ACTOR
“I like my whiskey old and my women young.”
Errol Flynn became famous for his roles as swashbucklers and chivalrous rogues—costumed adventures that were a precursor to action films. See Captain Blood (1935), his first starring role, or The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), the defining portrayal of the folk hero. Onstage, Flynn often did his own stunts. Offstage, he was a gallant hedonist whose antics exceeded those of his screen persona. Nicknamed “Satan’s Angel” by Marlene Dietrich, the phrase “In like Flynn” referred to his facility with women. Acquitted on two charges of statutory rape, Flynn once spanked gossip queen Hedda Hopper at a nightclub for a negative story. Although his career slowed in the early fifties, he had a late-life renaissance playing aging alcoholics—most famously The Sun Also Rises (1957) and Too Much, Too Soon (1958), in which he played old drinking buddy John Barrymore. In regard to his newfound respect as a serious actor, Flynn said, “Why all the fuss? I was only playing myself.” He wrote one of the best Hollywood memoirs the year before his death, My Wicked, Wicked Ways (he had wanted to call it In Like Me). Flynn’s debauched lifestyle led to diabetes, paralysis, and, finally, heart failure. His friend David Niven would describe him as “a magnificent specimen of the rampant male.” He was buried with six bottles of whiskey in his casket.
RAOUL WALSH REFUSED TO believe it. Walsh, a respected Hollywood director (High Sierra, White Heat), had just completed the brilliant Objective, Burma! for Warner Brothers. A week before its release, he was summoned to the office of Jack Warner, who ran the studio. Such a summons rarely portended good news.
But when Warner told Walsh exactly why he had brought him into his office, the reason proved to be more laughable than anything else. Errol Flynn, the star of Objective, Burma! was slated to begin a week of press in New York the following day. At the time, Flynn was an international sensation and among the studio’s most bankable actors. But to Warner’s great consternation, he was also a world-class reveler and loyal member of the Bundy Drive Boys. As the club’s own in-house chronicler, screenwriter Gene Fowler (The Mighty Barnum, Billy the Kid), noted in his memoir, “These men lived intensely, as do children and poets and jaguars.” Flynn was one of Walsh’s best friends, having starred in five of the director’s previous six films. Flynn loved Walsh and, more important, would listen to him. Thus Walsh had managed to keep the hard-living Flynn sober on most shoot days. (“Sober” being a relative term. In his autobiography, Walsh says that Flynn did have a half-dozen drinks a day, “which to him was total abstention.”)
* * *
Flynn had just bought his love interest two pedigreed poodles, at $500 each, and again put it on the Warner tab. He even gave his name to the breeding house as “Jack L. Warner.” Flynn had a peculiar habit when drunk of buying animals.
* * *
So now Jack Warner wanted Walsh to babysit Flynn on the New York press tour—partly to keep Flynn sober during interviews (made sense), and partly because “turning Flynn loose in New York is playing with dynamite. If you don’t watch out, he’ll bankrupt us.” (Wait, what?) True, Flynn was the loosest of cannons. In 1943, when he was on trial for the statutory rape of two seventeen-year-olds, Flynn spent his free time romancing an eighteen-year-old courthouse worker—Nora Eddingon, who also happened to be the daughter of a police captain. He was acquitted of the statutory rape charges, but got Nora pregnant and made her his second wife.
The next day in Manhattan, as Flynn and Walsh entered a lavish two-bedroom suite at the Waldorf, Flynn glumly noted that, “It’ll have to do, I suppose.” He plopped down and phoned room service for scotch, gin, and brandy in bottles and two magnums of champagne on ice. As Flynn himself would readily confess, “I can’t reconcile my gross habits with my net income.” Walsh held his tongue.
Soon, heavily into the bottles, Flynn announced a new devil to be conquered: he was hungry. Caviar, oysters, and twelve bottles of Guinness Stout arrived forthwith. As they ate, Flynn revealed yet another surprise: “I’m in love.” Actually, this was not a surprise. Walsh had seen Flynn fall in and out of love an average of twice a week during their time together, so he remained unconcerned, until Flynn picked up the phone and ordered six dozen roses delivered to the woman every day—all on the Warner tab.
He next placed a mysterious call, the subject of which only became clear to Walsh after it was too late: Flynn had just bought his love interest two pedigreed poodles, at $500 each, and again put it on the Warner tab. He even gave his name to the breeding house as “Jack L. Warner.” Flynn had a peculiar habit, when drunk, of buying animals. Once, on another bender in Chicago, he bought a female lion cub he named Wellington and promptly abandoned her in the lobby of a hotel. Walsh knew that this would be where the worm turned. He insisted that Flynn cancel the order, and ultimately Flynn acquiesced and promised his dear friend that there would be no poodles.
The poodles arrived the next day.
IT WASN’T UNTIL the mid–1940s that Errol Flynn first laid eyes on the Bloody Mary. In his memoir, My Wicked, Wicked Ways, he reported, “One day, on the lot, I asked Ann Sheridan what she was drinking. It looked like tomato juice. It was, but it had vodka in it. I took up vodka drinking. Vodka has no odor. Nobody need know you have had it.” It was the beginning of a lifelong love affair. Flynn looked into his heart: “Why didn’t I tire of it? Why did most things pall on me, but vodka never?”
At this point, by his own admission, Flynn was up to more than a fifth a day. And obviously, when you’re drinking like that, discretion is a necessity—even more so if you have Jack Warner to contend with. In fact, when on the studio lot, another one of Errol’s tricks was to inject an orange full of vodka. That seems a little complicated. Better to stick with Bloody Marys.
BLOODY MARY
2 OZ. VODKA
4 OZ. TOMATO JUICE
1 OZ. FRESH LEMON JUICE
3 DASHES OF TABASCO
3 DASHES OF WORCESTERSHIRE
½ TSP. WHITE HORSERADISH
1 PINCH OF CRACKED PEPPER
1 PINCH OF SALT
1 PINCH CELERY SALT (OPTIONAL)
CELERY STALK
LIME WEDGE
Combine all ingredients except celery stalk and lime wedge in a highball glass, then carefully pour into another highball glass filled with ice cubes. Stir gently. Garnish with celery stalk and lime wedge.
THE BIG TRAIL (1930)
When Raoul Walsh was tapped to direct The Big Trail less than a year after an on-set accident cost him his right eye, he wasn’t simply being asked to work again; he was being asked to rescue a studio. Not long after buying out distributor Marcus Loew in 1929, Fox Studio chief William Fox was injured in a car crash that required a lengthy (and expensive) rehabilitation. While Fox was still mending, MGM boss Louis B. Mayer, capitalizing on his friendship with President Herbert Hoover, suggested the Justice Department launch an antitrust investigation into the Fox/Loew deal. Then, in October 1929, the stock market crashed. The Fox Film Corporation, Walsh’s longtime employer, was on the brink of collapse.
Fox was banking on the success of a new widescreen 70 mm film format the company called Fox Grandeur. To sell the gimmick, the studio needed a spectacle. So they turned to their most-trusted hand, Walsh, and put him in charge of an epic Western talkie that would be shot on location in five states—Arizona, California, Utah, Wyoming, and Montana—with a budget of $2 million. It was a huge gamble at a desperate time.
Driving the stakes even higher: The Big Trail, a tale of revenge set on the Oregon Trail in 1842, was saddled with an unknown lead. Walsh had cast a Fox stagehand named Marion Morrison, who had played football at USC, after spying him moving furniture on the lot. The studio, needless to say, balked. Only after numerous screen tests (and the discovery that Tom Mix and Gary Cooper were unavailable) did Fox acquiesce, on the condition that the man change his deeply forgettable name. He did: Marion Morrison would become known to the world as John Wayne.
Filming began in April 1930 in Yuma, Arizona, and eventually covered more than two thousand miles—a caravan of thirty-five principal cast members, dozens of extras, fourteen cameramen, six assistant directors, over two hundred other crew members, portable dressing rooms, equipment trucks, and a portable film lab. Because most theaters in the country weren’t equipped with widescreen projectors, the film had to be shot both in 70 mm and 35 mm, requiring radically different setups for each scene. And to save money on dubbing, the film was simultaneously being filmed in both English and German.
Also: there wasn’t really a script.
A screenwriter had been assigned to help Walsh round out a rough outline and write dialogue as they went, but his only real contribution was a large supply of booze he’d bought off a bootlegger in Yuma. It would turn out that Wayne could out-drink everybody. Walsh, who’d seen everything with the Bundy Drive Boys, even joked that the movie should be retitled The Big Drunk.
Wayne suffered from such severe dysentery and vomiting that it cost him three weeks shooting time and eighteen pounds. During his first scene back, supporting player Tully Marshall passed him a jug secretly filled with rotgut whiskey, an unpleasant surprise. Wayne’s female lead, Marguerite Churchill, would develop a horrible case of acne. The veteran cast complained about conditions on the trail and the early call times, mostly because they had stayed up all night drinking with Walsh. Through it all, the director did impressive work. His finest moment, an impromptu scene shot in the Hurricane Bluffs in Utah, entailed lowering several wagons and some livestock down the side of a canyon to the bottom of a ravine. When the last of the wagons slipped out of its ropes and crashed to the earth, splintering among the rocks, Walsh had the shot he needed.
But there would be no Hollywood ending. When The Big Trail was released in the fall of 1930, only two theaters—Grauman’s Chinese in Los Angeles and the Roxy in New York—showed the 70 mm version. The rest of the country saw a run-of-the-mill Western. Fox Grandeur was all name, no grandeur. Wayne, who’d banked on The Big Trail making his name, floundered as an actor for the next eight years. And Fox lost control of his company and declared bankruptcy.
But the film (thanks to Wayne) is considered one of the most important Westerns in cinema history—it’s also pretty good. So there’s that.
CLARK GABLE
1901–1960
ACTOR
“When a guy boozes with a friend, he usually lets you know something about what’s going on inside his noggin.”
The number-one leading man of his generation, Clark Gable is best remembered for his roles in Gone with the Wind (1939), Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), and It Happened One Night (1934). All three garnered Best Actor Oscar nods, but he won for It Happened One Night. Considered the epitome of virility and masculinity by women and men alike, this was somewhat ironic, given that Gable was mistakenly labeled a girl on his birth certificate. As a young man, he worked in oil fields and as a lumberjack. Later, he stumbled into acting and struck gold with his rugged good looks and alpha-dog personality. A notorious philanderer, he was married five times. He briefly gave up acting to join the Army Air Force during World War II. Mission: creating propaganda films that would encourage enlistment. (Upon
discovering this, Adolf Hitler—a fan—offered a reward to anyone who could capture and deliver Gable to him unscathed.) Gable returned to Hollywood in 1945, and despite his diminishing star-status as the studio system gradually eroded, he went on to make another twenty-two features. Gable’s final performance in The Misfits (1961)—also Marilyn Monroe’s final picture—is still considered among his finest.
“SIBERIA” WAS WHAT MGM boss Louis B. Mayer called Columbia Pictures. A rinky-dink studio with no stars of its own. And yet Mayer had agreed to loan them Clark Gable for a movie with “Bus” in the title. Night Bus. A crappy title based on a crappy story Columbia had bought from a woman’s magazine for just $5,000. Now this was a real slap-in-the-face. Gable needed a drink.
It was clear that the Columbia deal was Gable’s comeuppance for the attitude he had copped on his last picture, Dancing Lady. Gable had been absent for six weeks of production. Depending on who you talked to, some of this time was for medical reasons (getting his teeth replaced with dentures), and some was for personal reasons (his romance with Joan Crawford—this in the days before his affairs with Carole Lombard, Grace Kelly, and Marilyn Monroe). Regardless, the loss of time cost the studio an additional $150,000, and Mayer was not happy. On top of that, after finally wrapping, Gable had laid into the studio boss: he was tired of playing “gigolos,” and from now on, he’d only take parts that he liked.