Of All the Gin Joints

by Mark Bailey

  STERLING HAYDEN HAD A SAYING: “If you’re doing anything for money, you’re going down. If you’re doing anything only for money, you’re going down perpendicularly.” But now Hayden was in London on a five-week deal making a B-movie called Venom for a producer he thought was a “senior-grade asshole” and an angle hadn’t yet been invented for how he was going down.

  Venom was about an insidious criminal plot to kidnap a wealthy couple’s child. The plan goes tragically awry when everyone involved is trapped in the couple’s home with a supremely pissed-off black mamba snake. Clearly, this was to be real Oscar bait. Co-starring was Oliver Reed, a burly English actor with two primary ambitions in life, “to drink every pub dry and to sleep with every woman on earth.” Basically, Hayden was getting paid fifty grand a week to hang out with a drunken Reed, whose main amusement on set (apart from the booze) was calling their other costar Klaus Kinski “fucking Nazi bastard” at every opportunity. Which might have been fun, had Hayden not just gone on the wagon—yet again.

  Hayden had been off the studio radar for some time, though really he’d only ever had one foot in it to begin with. An incurable drifter, he’d only gotten into pictures in the first place as a way of financing a boat he wanted to purchase. He never really bought into the system, and the system, in turn, never really bought into him. But by the 1970s, a new generation of directors—including Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Altman, Bernardo Bertolucci—who knew Hayden from such films as Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove and Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar, and who revered him for his eccentric, bohemian lifestyle (he once lived on a barge on the Seine called the Who Knows?), were eager to hire him.

  * * *

  He also had two books to his name: an autobiography, Wanderer, and a novel, Voyage. But both of those were written in what he called the “alcoholic style of life,” which he’d had to give up for health reasons, and which he now thoroughly missed.

  * * *

  So it’s not as if Hayden needed this Venom thing. He also had two books to his name: an autobiography, Wanderer, and a novel, Voyage. But both of those were written in what he called the “alcoholic style of life,” which he’d had to give up for health reasons, and which he now thoroughly missed. To Hayden, who in WWII had received a Silver Star, a commendation from Marshal Tito, as well as a Bronze Arrowhead for parachuting behind enemy lines, quitting booze “made combat look like going down an elevator.”

  But what the hell—just because he’d written two books under the influence of alcohol didn’t mean he needed it. Besides, what else was he going to do in his London hotel room? So one night, around 3 a.m., he sat down and started writing a new autobiography. He hadn’t had a drink in three or four months, but to his surprise, the writing felt great. So great, in fact, he figured he might as well—nah, he shouldn’t. Well, on second thought, why not—two double shots would be a great way to celebrate his sober literary prowess.

  Three days later, Hayden informed Venom’s director that he was too drunk to continue on the picture. And just like that, he was gone. Venom would be his last film.

  WILLIAM HOLDEN

  1918–1981

  ACTOR

  “I don’t really know why, but danger has always been an important thing in my life.”

  A clean-cut and traditionally handsome (on screen, anyway) leading man, William Holden established himself as a serious talent with the Oscar-nominated starring role in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950). Holden won the Academy Award three years later, for his performance as a prisoner of war in Stalag 17. He headlined numerous war pictures through the 1950s—The Bridges at Toko-Ri (1954), The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)—while also proving himself as a romantic lead. His career hit a lull in the 1960s but was resurrected with his appearance in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969). Holden received his third and final Oscar nomination (for Best Supporting Actor) as a television news executive in Network (1976). He divided his time between Hollywood, a home in Switzerland, and a wildlife preservation in Kenya, of which he was a partner. A dedicated boozer, he was convicted of vehicular manslaughter for a 1966 drunk-driving accident in Italy. And in 1981 he bled to death in his Santa Monica home after cracking his head on a table in a drunken fall.

  FOR ALL SHE KNEW, this was typical. Kim Novak was still new to Hollywood. In the last year (her first in the business) she’d made three pictures, and this one, Picnic, looked like it might be the biggest yet. After all, she was starring opposite William Holden—the same William Holden she and a gathering crowd in Hutchinson, Kansas, could now see some fourteen stories up at the Baker Hotel, dangling from a windowsill.

  Holden had always been something of a daredevil. As a boy growing up in Pasadena, he’d once crossed the famed Colorado Street “suicide bridge” (where many local residents jumped to their deaths during the Depression) walking on its outer railings … on his hands. The only thing that ever truly frightened Holden was acting, and for that he had alcohol. Billy Wilder once told a Time reporter that Holden was an “inhibited boy” and that he drank to “pull himself together.” He routinely took two shots of whiskey before a scene. And his office at Columbia was fully stocked at all times with top-shelf liquor, making it one of the most popular hangouts on the lot. Dean Martin, unsurprisingly, was a frequent guest, but there was no shortage of heavy drinkers to chum around with. Sterling Hayden was a dear friend, as was Dana Andrews. Ronald Reagan was a good pal, too, though far more temperate.

  In fact, Dana Andrews tells a story about a night when Holden, Reagan, and he went to dinner following a Screen Actors Guild meeting. All three friends ordered drinks and chatted away. When the waiter returned, Holden and Andrews ordered a second round. Reagan was perplexed, “Why do you want another drink? You just had one.” As Andrews would later point out, “See what happened—Bill and I became alcoholics, and Ronnie became President of the United States.”

  Of course hindsight is 20-20. Novak wouldn’t find out until many years later what Holden was doing dangling up there on the fourteenth-floor windowsill of the Baker Hotel. As a newcomer, she didn’t feel it was her place to question the leading man. But what she would eventually learn was that, on that day, Holden’s natural courage had been amped with a healthy dose of liquid courage—in the form of martinis, to be specific. It seems he and the director of Picnic, Josh Logan, were discussing the film’s final scene, in which Holden’s character, Hal, says good-bye to Novak’s character and jumps aboard a moving train. Holden was trying to convince Logan they could do it all in one unbroken shot—and that he could personally perform the stunt. Logan refused to consider it; it was too dangerous. So to prove his point, Holden jumped out the window of Logan’s suite and hooked his elbow over the sill. Actress Rosalind Russell, who was there, too, begged him to come back inside, but this only caused Holden to hang by his hands. Logan turned away, refusing to look. There were pleas to reenter, as Holden started to lift his fingers one at a time, until he clung by just two. Logan, too, now begged Holden to come back inside. Holden told him he’d only do so if Logan looked. Finally, Logan did.

  CIRO’S

  8433 SUNSET BLVD.

  A FEW YEARS AFTER entering the nightclub business with the ultra-exclusive Café Trocadero, Hollywood Reporter founder Billy Wilkerson cemented his status as impresario of the Sunset Strip with this swank playground for the industry elite. Taking over the space that once housed Club Seville—a garish and ill-fated monstrosity where patrons were wowed (or not) by the prospect of dancing the night away on a glass floor laid atop a pool filled with live carp—Ciro’s opened in January 1940 to the same steady thump of self-generated publicity Wilkerson had employed at the Troc’.

  “Everybody that’s anybody will be at Ciro’s,” his full-page ads in the Reporter said, and from the start the ads were on the money. One could spy Sinatra or Bogart, Marilyn Monroe or Judy Garland, Cary Grant or Spencer Tracy, scattered among the banks of silk sofas lining the club’s perimeter. Xavier Cugat was a regular he
adliner on the bandstand, as were Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis in the years before they became the biggest act in show business. In 1951 a group known as the Will Mastin Trio played Ciro’s as part of an Academy Awards afterparty, launching the career of its youngest member, Sammy Davis, Jr.

  Given Wilkerson’s background in news, it’s no wonder the antics at Ciro’s, real or imagined, often made it into the scandal sheets. One of the most notorious rumors, and likely just that, involved the exquisite Paulette Goddard, film star and one-time wife of both Charlie Chaplin and Burgess Meredith. Supposedly, in 1940 not long after Ciro’s had opened, during dinner with European director Anatole Litvak (The Snake Pit), Goddard’s shoulder strap popped. Some accounts described Litvak as trying to shield Goddard’s exposed chest. Others would say diamonds fell to the floor. Whatever the inciting incident, it caused Litvak to drop under the table where supposedly, in full view of the other patrons, he made love to Goddard in what was described at the time as the “French fashion.” This despite Litvak being Hungarian. The story caught fire and, while nobody was found to have actually witnessed the event, it would plague Goddard for the rest of her life.

  Scandalous indeed—but the nightclub’s crowning moment wouldn’t come until years later, on April 8, 1947. No rumor, this was the night Frank Sinatra punched Hearst columnist Lee Mortimer outside the club. Mortimer had written a series of widely read columns alleging that Sinatra was a communist and a supporter of fascist dictators. This insanity had been brewing since 1945, when Sinatra began speaking out against segregation, racism, and religious bigotry. And not just speaking out in some canned magazine story; he sang about it in the Oscar-winning short film The House I Live In (1945), he wrote high-profile letters to newspapers, and he performed at a high school in Indiana white students were boycotting due to a recent order of integration. In House, he said anyone who couldn’t see these fundamental truths was either an idiot or a Nazi.

  Eventually, someone decided it was time to shut him up. And Mortimer, a red-baiting Hearst stooge, almost succeeded in destroying Sinatra’s career: The name “Sinatra” was uttered during at least a dozen HUAC hearings. MGM Pictures, Columbia Records, Sinatra’s radio station, and his agent all dropped him within months.

  Then he clobbered Mortimer at Ciro’s. When Mortimer filed a lawsuit, Sinatra claimed that Mortimer called him a dago. But it was Sinatra’s reputation that took a beating, and a jury trial looked sure to make things worse. Even though he settled the case, everyone in Hollywood, with the exception of his friends, thought Frank’s career was over. And for the next four years, it was.

  JOHN HUSTON

  1906–1987

  DIRECTOR, SCREENWRITER, ACTOR

  “I prefer to think of God as not dead, just drunk.”

  A director of rare breadth and impeccable taste, John Huston helmed an impossible number of Hollywood classics: The Maltese Falcon (1941), The African Queen (1951), The Misfits (1961), and at least a dozen more. His father, Walter Huston, was an actor, and Huston initially followed in his footsteps but turned to writing in his twenties, selling two short stories to H. L. Mencken for publication in the American Mercury. He landed a writing contract with Warner Bros. and earned two Oscar nominations for Dr. Erlich’s Magic Bullet (1940) and Sergeant York (1941). His next script, High Sierra (1941)—which launched Humphrey Bogart’s career—convinced Warner Bros. to allow him to direct his first feature, an adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (1941), with Bogart as the lead. It proved to be a huge hit, garnering Huston Academy Award nominations for Best Picture and Best Screenplay. Huston went on to direct the majority of his screenplays from that point forward. Against Hollywood tradition, he rarely gave his films happy endings; the journeys his heroes undertook usually ended in failure. He turned to acting in the 1960s, with notable appearances in Otto Preminger’s The Cardinal (1963), for which he received a Best Supporting Actor nomination, and Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974). In 1985, at age seventy-nine, Huston became the oldest person to receive a best director nomination, for Prizzi’s Honor—his fifteenth nomination overall.

  IT WAS A HANGOVER only a bullet could cure. That’s how John Huston described it. He’d spent the night at Bogart’s house because, during a party that climaxed with a game of indoor football, he’d gotten as drunk as he’d ever been in his life. Now it was morning, late morning, and he was waking up to the sound of Bogart in the other room on the phone. “Yes, Sam, he’s here.”

  Sam? Shit. Sam Spiegel. The MGM meeting.

  Huston, fresh off Key Largo and the expiration of his contract with Warner Bros., had recently agreed to partner up with German émigré Sam Spiegel to form a production company called Horizon Pictures. Spiegel, an independent producer whose biggest credit in the U.S. thus far was Orson Welles’s The Stranger, had set up a meeting with Louis B. Mayer and other MGM bigwigs to pitch Horizon’s first project: We Were Strangers, a feature-length adaptation of a story by New York Mirror reporter Robert Sylvester. Huston was slated as the writer-director, but in his drunken stupor, had forgotten all about the meeting. Spiegel had spent the entire morning on the phone looking for him before finally striking gold with Bogart.

  To save time, Bogart’s driver dropped Huston off at Spiegel’s place, where he quickly showered, shaved, and dressed—in a suit borrowed from the much shorter Spiegel. The sleeves of the jacket rode up to Huston’s elbows. “Sam, I can’t do it!” Huston implored, his head pounding. “I don’t even remember what the hell the story’s about!” But Spiegel convinced him they at least had to show up. It wasn’t wise to stand up Louis Mayer.

  Huston was useless during the meeting. Apart from a “How do you do?” at the beginning and a “Good-bye” at the end, he kept his mouth shut, watching Spiegel wing the entire presentation on his own. It was, Huston said, “one of the finest demonstrations of pure animal courage I’ve ever witnessed.” Mayer, however, didn’t see it that way. He found Spiegel too “streetwise” for his taste. Huston, on the other hand—so wrecked he could barely speak—struck him as the sort of calm, cool, and collected gentleman with whom he could do business.

  MGM did eventually make an offer on We Were Strangers, but not before Columbia made a better one. Mayer still landed Huston, signing him to a two-picture deal that resulted in The Asphalt Jungle and The Red Badge of Courage. As for Spiegel? As the producer of The African Queen, On the Waterfront, The Bridge on the River Kwai, and Lawrence of Arabia, he and his upstart company did just fine.

  BEAT THE DEVIL (1953)

  John Huston’s Beat the Devil was a total disaster almost from the start. Maybe total disaster is a little strong, since by some miracle nobody actually ended up dead. The film, directed by Huston and featuring Humphrey Bogart, Jennifer Jones, Peter Lorre, and Gina Lollobrigida was to be shot largely on location in Ravello, Italy, a picturesque mountain village high up on the Amalfi coast.

  There were some early warning signs: First, the sexy Italian actress, Lollobrigida, had never been in an English-speaking film before. This, most likely, was because she could barely speak English. Second, traveling into Ravello, the Italian chauffer driving Huston and Bogart got into a car accident. Huston was fine, but Bogart was pitched forward, cracking some teeth and badly gouging his tongue. So even before shooting commenced, the female lead couldn’t speak English and the male lead couldn’t speak at all. And third, to complicate things even further, neither Lollobrigida nor Bogart—nor the rest of the cast—had yet to see any of their lines. Reason being, Huston had thrown a party the weekend before the start of principal photography during which he tore up the entire script. It was a tearing-up-the-script party. Apparently, the original draft, written by Anthony Veiller and Peter Viertal, had run into trouble with the Motion Picture Production Code and besides, nobody liked it much anyway.

  At the recommendation of renowned producer David O. Selznick, Huston had flown novelist Truman Capote over to Italy to write the new script on a day-to-day basis, as they shot. It should b
e noted that Selznick was not officially involved with the film. However, since his wife Jennifer Jones was one of the stars, he was unofficially involved—in a Selznick kind of way. Selznick happened to be one of Hollywood’s most prolific memo writers. After receiving a number of such memos, Huston sent him a three-page reply. Huston numbered the pages one, two, and four. This so that Selzick would spend the rest of production looking for page three. And so the filming of Beat the Devil began.

  Capote would work through the night and pages would be handed out to the cast in the morning. Lollobrigida would learn her lines phonetically. Bogart, until his mouth healed, would mime his lines, which would later be dubbed. Conceivably, it could have worked, had only the cast and crew not decided to embark on a bender of legendary proportions. Capote (or “Caposy,” as Bogart had begun to fondly call him) soon began to feel that Bogart and Huston were trying to kill him with their dissipation. He described everyone as “half-drunk all day and dead-drunk all night,” noting that “once, believe it or not, I came around at six in the morning to find King Farouk doing the hula-hula in the middle of Bogart’s bedroom.” It seemed Huston had not created a very productive work environment.

  In Yiddish folktales, the Russian city of Chelm is depicted as a city of fools. Jennifer Jones’s character in Beat the Devil was named Mrs. Gwendolen Chelm—an insider’s wink, some believe, at what the production had become. Certainly, Huston seemed self-aware. In an interview years later he would say, “It was a bit of a travesty—we were making fun of ourselves.” Some critics would see the picture as one of the first examples of camp, arguing that Huston and Bogart were hell-bent on parodying the noir classics (The Maltese Falcon, Key Largo) they themselves had crafted. But that didn’t mean the mayhem wasn’t real.