by Mark Bailey
JUDY GARLAND WAS BOX-OFFICE GOLD. She had to be. When Dore Schary took over as head of production at MGM in July 1948, the studio was coming off its worst year since the Depression: just $4.2 million in profits, buoyed only by a still-strong musical division and its top star, Judy Garland. She was a valuable asset, Schary knew, but also a major headache, troubled and self-destructive. He got his first real taste of what to expect early in his tenure, when word leaked of her drunken tryst with another MGM talent, Mario Lanza.
Lanza had signed with MGM the previous year, after Louis B. Mayer had seen him perform at the Hollywood Bowl. Lanza had yet to release a picture with the studio—his first, That Midnight Kiss, wouldn’t come out until 1949—but that didn’t stop him from taking full advantage of all the benefits his new Hollywood status granted. Specifically, Lanza was bedding every woman in sight, with little regard for privacy. Sometimes he didn’t even bother shutting the door to his dressing room, boasting that anyone fortunate enough to catch him in the act couldn’t help but learn a thing or two. (Oh, and he was married.)
Whereas Lanza was flush with the promise of impending success, Garland was falling apart from the pressures of actually having achieved it. She’d just returned from a suspension for excessive absences during production of The Barkleys of Broadway. She’d self-medicate with booze and pills every morning, and even though she and Lanza weren’t working on a film together, the math of their tryst was simple: fragile starlet + confident womanizer + excessive alcohol = trouble. It started on the lot, though at least it didn’t move into his dressing room. Instead, they found a driver to chauffeur them into the Hollywood Hills, where they proceeded to get acquainted in the backseat.
* * *
Even though she and Lanza weren’t working on a film together, the math of their tryst was simple: fragile starlet + confident womanizer + excessive alcohol = trouble.
* * *
Schary was livid when he heard the news, but again, Garland was gold, something MGM was desperate for. But the question soon became, how desperate? Garland’s next project was supposed to be Annie Get Your Gun, yet once again she was suspended due to excessive absences. Then the same thing happened a year later, during the production of Royal Wedding. MGM ended its affiliation with Garland for good in 1950. Lanza didn’t last much longer: MGM fired him for insubordination despite the fact that his picture, The Great Caruso, was the top-grossing film of 1951.
Unfortunately, for this and too many other transgressions to enumerate, Garland had gone from box office gold to perhaps tarnished silver.
JUDY GARLAND’S FAVORITE drink was vodka and grapefruit juice, what is essentially a Greyhound. It’s not just a perfect eye-opener; when on tour her assistant kept two thermoses at the ready—one filled with pre-mixed vodka and grapefruit juice, the other with ice. Garland even kept a thermos on hand while working on A Star Is Born, drinking right up through the film’s premiere. For that occasion, she had her dress designer fashion a hand muff large enough to hide a bottle.
GREYHOUND
2 OZ. VODKA
5 OZ. FRESH GRAPEFRUIT JUICE
Pour vodka and grapefruit juice into a highball glass filled with ice cubes. Stir gently.
MOCAMBO
8588 SUNSET BLVD.
FORMER TALENT AGENT Charlie Morrison had no training in the nightclub arts when he created Mocambo, the legendary club that opened on January 3, 1941. Leave it to an agent to think that experience wouldn’t matter—and get away with it. Well, sort of. He did have a partner, entrepreneur Felix Young, but for the next eleven years, Morrison was the face of the hottest spot on the Strip. Mocambo guests walked into a setting once described as a mix of “Imperial Rome, Salvador Dalí, and a birdcage.” It was one of the most striking nightclubs in town. Strikingly awful, that is.
Morrison had hired costume design icon Tony Duquette to create the club’s interior. Armed with around a hundred grand ($1.5 million today), Duquette set out to fashion something unique and modern. This eventually translated into a Latin American–inspired main room, walls adorned with paintings by Jane Berlandina, and a large aviary containing twenty-one parakeets, four macaws, and a cockatoo.
The aviary actually delayed Mocambo’s opening, originally slated for New Year’s Eve 1941. Animal-rights advocates wanted assurance that the birds wouldn’t be harmed by exposure to the excessive noise. Sadly, those advocates (clearly not candidates for the Audubon society) stood down after Morrison observed that the birds were actually “enjoying themselves.” Also, the owner promised to close the drapes during the day so they could get more sleep.
Featuring big band music, Mocambo quickly became the town’s premiere place to dance until you dropped. Ella Fitzgerald, Perry Como, Edith Piaf, Liberace—virtually every headliner around graced its stage. Lana Turner one night dropped $40,000 on a birthday party, while Myrna Loy and Arthur Hornblow went there to celebrate their divorce. When Charlie Morrison died in 1957, leaving his wife with no money, his friend Frank Sinatra had his solo debut there and sang for the next two weeks in an effort to pay for the funeral. Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz thought so highly of the place they modeled the Tropicana club in I Love Lucy after it.
Nothing quite like the Desilu stamp of approval.
JACKIE GLEASON
1916–1987
ACTOR AND COMEDIAN
“I’m no alcoholic; I’m a drunkard. There’s a difference. A drunkard doesn’t go to meetings.”
Best known for an Oscar-nominated performance in The Hustler (1961), and ribald turns as Ralph Kramden in the TV series The Honeymooners, and Buford T. Justice in the 1970s camp classic Smokey and the Bandit. Jackie Gleason was raised by his mother in Brooklyn after his father walked out. He fell in with gangs and hung out in pool halls as a teenager, but eventually started performing at amateur nights. He was discovered by Jack Warner in 1940 while working at New York’s Club 18. He landed a job as host of the CBS variety show The Cavalcade of Stars (1950), which was renamed The Jackie Gleason Show two years later. One of Gleason’s recurring characters, bus driver Ralph Kramden, was spun off into The Honeymooners. Though only thirty-nine episodes were initially completed (not counting later revivals and specials), The Honeymooners became one of the most beloved shows in the history of television and remained a syndication fixture for decades. Gleason played mostly bit parts in film, but his career revived with the original Smokey and the Bandit (1977) and its two sequels.
WHAT BETTER WAY for two friends to spend the afternoon? In one corner was Jackie Gleason, biggest television star in the world. In the other, Toots Shor, most beloved bar owner in Manhattan. The two were squaring off in a heavyweight-title bout of boozing. Gleason, as was his custom, was armed with a fifth of scotch; Shor, with a bottle of fifteen-year-old brandy. Nothing on the line but bragging rights.
During the 1940s and ‘50s, Toots Shor’s was the biggest sports bar and restaurant in Manhattan. Some called it a gymnasium with room service, though the health benefits were questionable. Toots, the owner, had worked his way up from bar back to bouncer to bartender, befriending the city’s elite along the way. His was an affectionately insulting brand of charm—”crum-bum” was his go-to nickname—and his clientele ate it up. DiMaggio, Mantle, Sinatra, Bogart, Chaplin, Berle, Cronkite were all regulars. But few loved the place, or its proprietor, as much as Gleason. When Gleason was down on his luck, the stretch between his failure in Hollywood and his job with CBS, Shor had taken care of him: At one point Shor estimated Gleason had owed him $10,000 in loans and unpaid bar tabs. Gleason never forgot it.
In later years, Gleason would call Shor the best friend he ever had. That didn’t mean, however, that he wasn’t willing to take the piss out of him from time to time. In fact, Gleason and Shor were constantly one-upping each other, always engaging in some stupid wager or another. Most famously, Gleason bet Shor double or nothing on his bar tab that he could beat him in a race around the block. The only stipulation was they had to run in opposite directions. S
hor accepted. As soon as Gleason saw Shor round the corner, he hailed a cab, drove around the block, and was patiently waiting at the bar when Shor returned, huffing and puffing.
* * *
Most famously, Gleason bet Shor double or nothing on his bar tab that he could beat him in a race around the block. The only stipulation was they had to run in opposite directions.
* * *
This latest drinking contest had started at noon. And by the time most of Manhattan was knocking off work for the day, both men were well into their second fifths. Gleason was talking trash about his opponent to everyone in earshot. At one point Shor had enough. “You’ve got the face of a pig,” Shor told him. Gleason shot right back: “Well, you’ve got the body!” Around 6 p.m., Gleason excused himself from the table. Said he needed to the use the bathroom. He stumbled across the bar, then did a face-plant at the entrance to the dining room—right in the path of everyone who wanted to step inside. The maître d’ and a waiter naturally rushed to pick him up.
“Leave him,” Shor instructed. “I want ‘em all to see what happens when you mess with the champ.”
CARY GRANT
1904–1986
ACTOR
“A shot of brandy can save your life, but a bottle of brandy can kill you.”
Known for his debonair, sophisticated manner, transatlantic accent, and formidable comedic talents, Cary Grant was born in England as Archibald Leach, and ran away from home as a teenager to join a troupe of acrobats. His first big break came when Mae West chose him as her leading man in She Done Him Wrong and I’m No Angel (both 1933). Grant’s career skyrocketed after signing with Columbia in 1936 and starring in such films as The Awful Truth (1937), Bringing Up Baby (1938), Only Angels Have Wings (1939), and His Girl Friday (1940). Later he was known for his seminal work with Alfred Hitchcock (Suspicion, 1941; Notorious, 1946; To Catch a Thief, 1955; and North by Northwest, 1959). A savvy businessman, he was the first major star to break away from the studio system and hire himself out as an independent contractor. Grant founded his own production company in the mid-fifties, through which he made a number of his later hits, including Operation Petticoat (1959). Although he received two Academy Award nominations during the first half of his career—Penny Serenade (1941) and None but the Lonely Heart (1944)—he didn’t take home an Oscar until 1970, when he was presented with a lifetime achievement award. Grant was married five times but hounded by rumors of homosexuality throughout his life, largely due to his close relationship with actor Randolph Scott. He was also an outspoken proponent of LSD.
FOR FIVE DECADES, CARY GRANT played Hollywood’s consummate gentleman. His dashing looks, combined with his grace and humility, became the standard by which debonair leading men have since been judged. Add to that the slightly continental accent, the final coat to Grant’s patina of real-life aristocracy.
But as we know, there’s most always a gap between the person and the persona. And for Grant that gap was a yawning chasm—the pedigree behind that upper-crust accent being far less than blue blood. Grant was born Archibald Leach and raised in Bristol, where his clinically depressed mother was committed to an institution when he was ten. At the time, Grant was simply told she had gone on a long holiday. Already his father had abandoned the family for a new wife and a new baby. So adrift was young Grant that for the next twenty years he believed his mother was dead, until he found her living in an institution in the late 1930s. By then, Archibald Leach had changed his name from the one his parents had given him to his stage name, Cary Grant, and his transformation—from the goofy, insecure orphan into the avatar of worldly confidence—was nearly complete.
* * *
As he once confessed, “I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be until finally I became that person. Or he became me.”
* * *
But what few would ever know, perhaps even Grant himself, was exactly who the real Cary Grant was. As he once confessed, “I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be until finally I became that person. Or he became me.” Still, it’s remarkable that Grant managed to overcome such childhood trauma, to stitch himself up and live the rest of his life as a movie star. Though he didn’t do it alone. Rather, the threading Grant used was an unusual blend of psychotherapy, psychedelics, and good old-fashioned booze.
Having arrived in the United States at only sixteen, Grant took to drink early. In New York City, while juggling and performing acrobatics in vaudeville, he bartended at a speakeasy with his roommate, the future costume designer Orry-Kelly. Some say they owned and operated the speakeasy out of their little apartment—and that they were lovers, too (there was similar speculation regarding Grant’s later “roommate” actor Randolph Scott). But Grant’s sexuality is just another part of the mystery, even in those early days, when he would walk on stilts in the morning and get legless at night, drinking bootleg beer across not much more than an ironing board. He would later claim, “a man would be a fool to take something that didn’t make him happy.” And perhaps for him, it was a happy time.
Jump-cut thirty years later to Grant as the elegant advertising executive Roger O. Thornill in North by Northwest. Sitting across the table from Eva Marie Saint in that famously impeccable gray glen check Savile Row suit, sipping a Gibson martini. He was still a mystery—one of the few consistencies being his thirst. Though now, even in the throes of celebrity, he would say, “You know what whiskey does when you drink it all by yourself—it makes you very, very sad.” Had Grant become a fool? On set, he would hide his liquor in his coffee cups. On the streets, he had already been extricated from two drunken-driving incidents. Soon he would wake up in the hospital with alcohol poisoning, having been discovered unconscious in the bedroom of his home. Acknowledging that he had “spent the greater part of my life fluctuating between Archie Leach and Cary Grant, unsure of each, suspecting each,” he started seeing a psychiatrist in search of answers.
Unexpectedly, it would be through therapy that Grant was first exposed to LSD. This as far back as 1957—LSD something not then or since to be found in a gentleman’s handbook. Grant was striving to better understand himself and, through the Psychiatric Institute of Beverly Hills, was let into early experimental trials. Some of the other patients supposedly included Aldous Huxley, Jack Nicholson, Rita Moreno, and musician André Previn. He would go on more than a hundred acid trips, lauding the drug for its therapeutic benefits. “I was an utter fake … until one day, after weeks of treatment, I did see the light.”
But what did that light reveal to our consummate gentleman star? In an interview nearing the end of his life, Cary Grant would point out, “Everybody wants to be Cary Grant.” To which he added, “So do I.” And so the question still remains—just who was he?
CARY GRANT’S TASTE for alcohol reflected both his lower-class upbringing and his upper-class screen persona. Among his favorite drinks were such British classics as a Shandy Gaff, a mixture of beer and ginger ale (basically, a poor man’s Half and Half) and a Black Velvet, a mixture of beer and champagne (basically, a rich man’s Half and Half). Like Archibald Leach and Cary Grant, both cocktails have something to offer.
SHANDY GAFF
6 OZ. LAGER BEER OR AMBER ALE
6 OZ. GINGER ALE SODA
Pour beer into a chilled beer mug or pint glass, add ginger ale. Stir.
BLACK VELVET
6 OZ. CHILLED STOUT
6 OZ. CHAMPAGNE
Pour stout into a chilled Collins glass, add champagne. Stir.
Note that both these cocktails can also be served layered. To create that effect, you pour the lighter beverage (ginger ale or champagne) first. Then pour the beer in slowly, over the back of a spoon. Do not stir.
STERLING HAYDEN
1916–1986
ACTOR
“Let’s face it—alcohol has a million good functions.”
Best-known roles: Jack D. Ripper in Dr. Strangelove (1964) and the corrupt police chief in The Godfather (1972). Sterling Hayden dropped out of high school
in Maine to work as a mate on a schooner and spent the next several years sailing. He cashed in on his good looks and towering stature (he stood six-five) with modeling jobs. This led to a contract with Paramount in 1941. Hayden made just two pictures—with the studio promoting him as “the most beautiful man in the movies”—before the onset of World War II. He enlisted as a Marine and served as an OSS agent in Yugoslavia and Croatia, then returned to Hollywood after the war. He received accolades for starring roles in John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (1950), Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar (1954), and Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing (1956), but had more success as a character actor. Hayden had briefly been a member of the Communist party, and he did name names before the House Un-American Activities Committee, an action that haunted him the rest of his life. In the 1970s, he enjoyed something of a resurgence playing smaller parts for auteur directors: Coppola cast him in The Godfather; Altman in The Long Goodbye (1973); Bertolucci in 1900 (1976). Hayden divided his time between an apartment in Sausalito, a home in Connecticut, and a barge in Paris. In later years, he grew a long gray Ahab beard and frequently wore a biblical robe.