Hollywood's Hellfire Club: The Misadventures of John Barrymore, W.C. Fields, Errol Flynn and the Bundy Drive Boys

by Gregory William Mank

  John Decker, extreme left, postwar Germany

  Chapter One

  The Old Toymaker, “That Red-Haired Whore” and the Master Poisoner

  “We are too big for our bodies. We spring the seams, then blow to pieces.”

  — John Decker

  The wind blows cold off the Irish Sea at sunset on the Isle of Man.

  The Isle, an archipelago, has a fascinating history. Between 700 and 900 A.D., “Mann” was a Viking outpost; today, it’s a self-governing crown dependency. Pop music disciples honor it as the birthplace of the Bee Gees. Motorcycle enthusiasts acknowledge it for the “Isle of Man TT,” an annual cycle race that dates back to 1907. In ancient times, there was the belief one could stand on “Snaefel,” the Isle’s highest mountain, and from its 2,036’-high crest, behold seven kingdoms: Mann, Scotland, England, Ireland, Wales, the Sea — and Heaven.

  What John Decker observed on the Isle of Man was the kingdom of Hell.

  For two years, John Decker, Prisoner-of-War via freakish circumstance, defiantly survived in the Isle of Man’s World War I internment camp. There he watched the sunset from behind the electric barbed wire, feeling the cold and approaching darkness, anticipating the weeping in the night from his fellow prisoners, the wails of hopelessness, the screams from their nightmares.

  Among his fellow prisoners was an old German toymaker. Some of the incarcerated clung to God, others to the vision of the sweetheart at home, but the toymaker’s beatific image was his son. Now grown, the son — the toymaker claimed — would surely write to him, maybe even enter the stockade and visit him. The old man cherished the boy’s frayed picture, until the day that some bitter men, weary of the tales of the wonderful boy, ripped the picture from the father’s hands and spitefully tore it to pieces.

  As John Decker remembered it, the old toymaker cried all day.

  Some time later, the miracle feast day came. A guard brought the man’s son into the stockade — not as a visitor, but as a POW. This didn’t enter the old man’s mind. “I knew you’d come!” he cried, joyfully staggering to the boy who’d been his inspiration to survive. In Minutes of the Last Meeting, Gene Fowler recorded Decker’s climax of the saga:The son just stood there glaring at his father, not making a move. When the old man opened his arms to embrace his son the young fellow began to curse him. It was terrible. He blamed his father for his arrest, saying that the letters written by the old man had been intercepted and had incriminated him. He spat in the old man’s face. And then, my God! The feeble old fellow stood as if stunned by a sudden blow. After a few moments he got some kind of weird strength. He turned, ran, and threw himself against the high voltage wire. He shook in a great spasm. He did not scream. His body turned halfway around, then hung there against the wire and setting sun, like God on the cross.

  “I saw too much and learned too much — most of it degrading,” said John Decker. “Only when I paint or drink can I forget it now.”

  John Decker was born November 8, 1895, in San Francisco — or so went the legend in his lifetime. After his 1947 death, his widow Phyllis told the Los Angeles press that John Decker was actually Baron Leopold Wolfgang von der Decken. The widow Decker (or von der Decken) revealed:None of his close friends — John Barrymore, Errol Flynn, any of them — knew about it. After his reputation as the great American artist grew so rapidly, he just decided to say nothing about it.

  At the outbreak of the second World War, John was quite worried. He destroyed all his German correspondence and papers.

  Of course, his biographers will tell about it and that’s one reason why I decided to go ahead now.

  Phyllis Decker’s words reveal a certain delusion about her husband’s ability to keep secrets from the Bundy Drive Boys. In Minutes of the Last Meeting, Gene Fowler describes a desperate Decker pouring out the true story of his ancestry to his cronies, fearful of yet another wartime incarceration. As for her trust in her husband having “biographers,” Phyllis Decker would live more than 40 years longer than her husband and die long before anyone expressed interest in the life story of “the great American artist.”

  Count von der Decken, John’s father, was a Prussian Guards colonel. His mother was a singer with the Berlin opera. They came to London when the boy was small, and Decker’s nightmare image of his mother was always that of a red-haired, vainglorious diva. The memory took on horrific size after she abandoned her son when he was only 13 years old. His father, heartbroken, soon disappeared too.

  “That red-haired whore!” John Decker would roar in his Bundy Drive studio over 30 years later, often as the night approached. The Bundy Drive familiars surely knew a variety of bastardly whores, but they were distinctly aware of whom he spoke. The sunset conjured up not only the dead, hanging toymaker on the Isle of Man, but the red tresses of his monstrous mother.

  The Boys knew when it would be another rough night for John. Such nights came frequently — even though Phyllis vigilantly closed the curtains every evening, in hopes of sparing her husband the agonies of his tormenting reminder.

  Life as an orphan was suddenly Dickensian, as Baron Leopold scrambled for survival in the London streets. He painted scenery at His Majesty’s Theatre, and studied at the Slade School (where John Barrymore had once studied) with noted artist Walter Sickert. In her 2002 book, Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper Case Closed, Patricia Cornwell names Sickert (who died in 1942) as the Ripper himself. “By age five,” wrote Cornwell, presenting Ripper motivation, “Sickert had undergone three horrific surgeries for a fistula” — a genital deformity. Ms. Cornwell goes on:Sickert’s early boyhood was traumatized by medical violence… it can create fears of castration. Sickert’s operations would have resulted in strictures and scarring that could have made erections painful or impossible. He may have suffered partial amputation.…

  John Decker, early ‘20s, New York

  If Walter Sickert was the Ripper, Decker would have been his student a quarter-century after the Ripper’s 1888 reign of terror.

  Decker was soon to meet his Fagin. He was a London art forger, and under the rapscallion’s tutelage, Decker learned to dash off Old Masters. By now, Decker was an adult — lean but powerfully built, handsome profile with prominent nose, and a mane (to his distress) reminiscent of his mother’s auburn hair. It’s easy to conjure Decker and his old forger tutor, buying old frames from sooty antique shops to brace the “Van Gogh” or “Gauguin” or “Modigliani” one or the other had dashed off the previous night. The tourists proved easy prey, and many would bequeath the paintings to their families or favorite museums who, to this day, believe they possess genuine Old Masters paintings.

  John Decker, with a voracious appetite for hedonism, celebrated his success with ample samplings of liquor and prostitutes. Punishment would follow, but not for the expected reason. A sandy-whiskered patron of Decker’s talent had been buying his paintings, only to include espionage messages inside the canvas and send them to the Fatherland. Authorities denounced John Decker as a German spy, and off he went to the Tower of London — and from there to his horrific two years on the Isle of Man. Nightmares abounded. John Decker later told Dolores Costello, John Barrymore’s wife, that he and his fellow POW prisoners only survived because they ate the bodies of those who had died from malnutrition.

  The Armistice. Freedom. John Decker, painter/forger/former POW, traveled the world, much of which was in a dizzying postwar spiritual free-for-all. “I painted my way through France, Germany, Austria, Italy and Africa,” said Decker. His cavalier attitude about life battled with a desire (and genius) for survival, and some of what Decker saw in his travels had lasting impact on the impressionable man.

  First he went to his birthplace Germany, just in time for the Weimar era and the rise of such attractions as Anita Berber, “the Priestess of Depravity,” who — as noted by her biographer Mel Gordon — “scandalized Weimar Berlin, appearing in nightclubs and casinos, radiantly naked except for an elegant sable wrap, a pet monkey hanging from he
r neck and a silver brooch packed with cocaine.”

  In 1921, Decker sailed as a stowaway to the United States on the La Lorraine. New York City offered its own fascinations. It was the era of the “Jazz Baby.”

  The Roaring ’20s, the Big Apple, Prohibition — it was a time fascinating for the stylistics of its fashion, the brazenness of its entertainment and the ferocity of its amusements. For a night in New York, the Jazz Baby might adorn herself in a Netheralls corset (a beauty secret of the Follies girls, or so the advertisement promised), black silk $1.75-per-pair stockings, a Paris frock, a string of pearls, black satin “opera pump” high heels, and to crown it all, a “Chapeau Nouveau de Paris,” worn with the brim up in the front, like a pirate female impersonator.

  Thus did the Jazz Baby, resplendent in all her stylistic fashion, prowl New York at night for sensation.

  On Broadway, 1922 was the Year of the Voluptuary. Jeanne Eagels slinked and vamped as immortal tropics hooker, Miss Sadie Thompson, in Somerset Maugham’s Rain. David Belasco, the “Bishop of Broadway” (who dressed the part in black suit and clerical collar) was offering his sexpot attraction Lenore Ulric as Kiki (“Miss Ulric outdoes all expectations — even the wildest,” reported The New York Times).

  The musical revues also took a racy tone. Florenz Ziegfeld glorified the American girl via The Ziegfeld Follies, starring Will Rogers, while George White promised a “Rare Collection of New Beauties” in his Scandals, with headliner W. C. Fields.

  There were horror melodramas — The Cat and the Canary, The Monster, The Bat. John Barrymore would climax the 1922 season as Hamlet, spicing up Shakespeare’s Melancholy Dane in a virtuoso display of sex, perversity and horror.

  Then there were the movies, offering the same “hot” sell — a smoldering Rudolph Valentino in Blood and Sand, an athletic Douglas Fairbanks as Robin Hood. There was Erich Von Stroheim’s Foolish Wives, a sex spectacle advertised by Universal Studios as the first million dollar picture, starring “Von” (“The Man You Love to Hate!”) as a depraved count, flanked by two female villains, and featuring a climax in which the star, in a final flash of perversity, tries to rape a retarded girl.

  At least as titillating as the films were the 1922 headlines from Hollywood. There was the February murder of William Desmond Taylor, shot in his Los Angeles bungalow; the never-solved homicide wrecking the careers of “Female Chaplin” Mabel Normand (seen leaving the bungalow shortly before the shot) and Mary Miles Minter (whose lingerie and at least one love letter were found at the murder site). Then there was Fatty Arbuckle, who in April of ’22 won a “Not Guilty” verdict (after three trials) in the charge of his rape/murder of starlet Virginia Rappe. He even received an official apology for the accusation. Nevertheless, the movie fans remembered more vividly the popular account of a giggling Arbuckle leaving Rappe’s bedroom at San Francisco’s Saint Francis Hotel, wearing his pajamas and Virginia’s hat, complaining that the screaming woman in the boudoir whom he had allegedly squashed under his 320-lb. girth (and, again allegedly, violated with a Coca-Cola bottle) “makes too much noise.” And there were reports that “the sad-rum-and morphine-wracked body” of movie star Wallace Reid was slowly rotting away, strapped down in a padded cell in a Los Angeles sanitarium, where he died in 1923.

  There were racy books such as James Branch Cabell’s Jurgen, a Comedy of Justice and Ben Hecht’s Fantazius Mallare — both Medieval fantasies banned for obscenity. All in all there was plenty to savor, and to make one forget or ignore entirely such facts of life as Mussolini marching on Rome, or the unleashed “curse” of King Tut’s newly-discovered tomb, or Henry Ford warning workers that any of his employees caught with liquor on their breath faced immediate firing.

  And there were the speakeasies, the on-the-rise gangsters, the temptations of what Frederick Lewis Allen purple-prosed as “champagne baths, midnight revels, petting parties in the purple dawn … white kisses, red kisses, pleasure-mad daughters, sensation-craving mothers … the truth — bold, naked, sensational.”

  The era rivaled the 1960s and in many ways was more exhilarating and dangerous. Enter into the exotic arena 26-year-old aspiring actor/scenic designer John Decker, who relished a story that captured the mad, Barnum & Bailey atmosphere of the U.S. 1920s:Two Englishmen, in London, were standing outside a store looking at some bottled merchandise. Near the goods was a sign reading, “Buy Snyder’s Vinegar.”

  Said one Englishman to the other, “Here in England we don’t know how to advertise. Look at that tiny sign, ‘Buy Snyder’s Vinegar.’ Now in America it’s different. If they were advertising the same product, they’d rent space atop a building at Times Square. Have a huge cross, a hundred feet high, in neons, and on the cross, in electric bulbs, outlined the crucified figure of Christ. Beside him, forty feet high, also in dazzling electric bulbs, a Roman soldier holding a spear with a sponge dipped in vinegar at the end. And a huge flashing sign, illuminated, with Christ saying, ‘Take it away. It ain’t Snyder’s!’”

  At first, Fate was kind.

  Surely due at least partially to his rather sinister handsomeness, Decker landed a plum part in which he would portray the title role of “The Master Poisoner,” a Grand Guignol playlet by Ben Hecht and Maxwell Bodenheim — a team of irreverent rebels who were soulmates with their newly-discovered star. As Chicago newspaper reporters, Hecht and Bodenheim were already carving their legends — one of which was a debate they once waged for the Chicago Book and Play Club: “Resolved: People Who Attend Literary Debates Are Fools.” Hecht, taking the affirmative, stood up, stared silently at Book and Play clubbers in their tuxes and evening gowns, then turned to Bodenheim.

  “I rest my case,” he said.

  Now Bodenheim stood, stared at the crowd silently for a full minute, and turned to Hecht. “You win,” he shrugged.

  “The Master Poisoner” told a terrible tale, as described in William MacAdams’ Hecht biography:… the play’s master poisoner … has created his masterpiece, a poison he believes will arrest Death. He administers the poison to his wife Fana, who becomes inhumanly beautiful but doesn’t die as expected. Death takes the master poisoner instead….

  It came complete with richly morbid dialogue such as:Your last poison of moth blood produced an effect so exquisitely monstrous that even death was appalled. Ah, the bones of an old woman, dissolving within her, left her body a loose grimace…

  Bodenheim (fated to be found murdered with his wife in 1954 in a cheap Bowery room, after being reduced to begging with a bogus “I Am Blind” sign around his neck) allegedly based his villain on poet Sherwood Anderson, whom he despised. “The Master Poisoner” was just a part of A Fantastic Fricassee , “A New Sparkling Revue,” which was set to open at the Greenwich Village Theatre September 11, 1922. A grab bag of bizarre skits and songs, the offerings included young baritone Jimmie Kemper performing a Japanese dirge as he faked hara-kiri — an act so tastelessly creepy that it was dropped during the show’s run. Then there was the climactic “Virgins of the Sun,” a near-nudity spectacle (with scenery by Decker) featuring (as Alan Dale of the New York American described it) “sinuous young women” who “wiggled their shapes, tossed their manes, and behaved altogether like sufferers from delirium tremens.” The … Fricassee won a splash of New York infamy Sunday, November 19, 1922, after the company visited Sing-Sing to perform the show for prisoners — only to have the warden cancel the show after fearing what effect those wiggling, mane-tossing Virgins of the Sun would have on the restless inmates.

  Lasting 112 performances, A Fantastic Fricassee is notable in theatre history primarily for the presence of Jeanette MacDonald, MGM’s super diva of the 1930s, who joined the show after its opening in October of 1922. Decker was still in the show when ‘The Iron Butterfly’ arrived, but later editions of the ... Fricassee program fail to list his name as an actor, or The Master Poisoner playlet. As Newsweek reported:One night, after five or six bourbons, he walked on the stage and fell flat on his face. After that, as he tells it, he g
ave up the theatre and took up drinking.

  Inevitably, the accident took on mythic proportions — the yarn eventually spinning that Decker toppled over the footlights, fell head-first into the orchestra pit and landed with his face in a tuba. A Fantastic Fricassee was John Decker’s only New York stage appearance.

  Truly strange is the fact that The Greenwich Village Follies of 1922, for which Decker claimed to have been set designer, opened September 12, 1922 — exactly one day after the premiere of A Fantastic Fricassee! How Decker juggled his Follies scenic duties with his Fricassee rehearsals is baffling.

  The Greenwich Village Follies of 1922 was a hit, with the redoubtable Alexander Woollcott of The New York Times praising the show “as festive and good-looking and entertaining a revue as these eyes have seen.” The production ran an impressive 209 performances.

  Decker’s apparent double-dipping, along with his falling-face-first-into-a-tuba saga, effectively blackballed him from any major future Broadway assignments. In 1922, he had married 18-year-old Helen McChesney. Considering that their daughter Gloria (soon separated from her father, only to pursue him 20 years later in Hollywood) was born May 19, 1923, the Deckers must have been expecting during his Broadway misadventures.

  Soon he turned to sketching. For a time he did drawings for Walter Winchell on the old New York Graphic. John Decker also devoted himself to caricature work for the New York Evening World, working at the desk next to famed critic Heywood Broun.

  Decker was creating his Evening World sketches just in time for the most historic theatre event of the 1922 season. The star of the play was a man John Decker hailed as “brilliant” and “profane.” “I have never had a better friend nor known a human more thoroughly nor enjoyed one’s comradeship more,” said John Decker of John Barrymore.