John Decker in The Master Poisoner
Barrymore as Hamlet
Chapter Two
Mad Jack’s Travelin’ One-Man Freak Show
That dirty, red-whiskered son-of-a-bitch!
That bastard puts his prick in my mother’s cunt every night!
— John Barrymore, musing on Hamlet’s motivation
The world hailed him as “The Great Profile,” but his most remarkable feature was his eyes.
John Barrymore had mad, bright, distant eyes — the eyes one sees in portraits of saints and photographs of serial killers. In Svengali (1931), perhaps his greatest cinema performance, Barrymore’s eyes chillingly dilated as he bewitched Marian Marsh, the blonde-wigged heroine. Warner Bros. added primitive contact lenses for intensity.
Barrymore didn’t need them.
It was his eyes that inspired John Barrymore — whose most profound nightmare was to die mad in an asylum, as had his own father — to prefer showcasing his left profile. His right side, he claimed, had “all the nuance of a morbid deep-sea fish.” Those tell-tale eyes, directly gazing out into an audience from a giant screen, risked far too much exposure … possibly gave away too many secrets of a man whose Paradise Lost fall surpassed that of any Golden Age star, both in its spectacular sordidness, and the man’s masochistic revelry in his own ruin.
On the night of November 16, 1922, on the stage of New York’s Sam H. Harris Theatre, John Barrymore exposed his tormented spirit and made theatre history. As John Corbin reported the next morning in the New York Times:The atmosphere of historic happening surrounded John Barrymore’s appearance last night as the Prince of Denmark; it was unmistakable as it was indefinable. It sprang from the quality and intensity of the applause, from the hushed murmurs that swept at the most unexpected moments, from the silent crowds that all evening long swarmed about the theatre entrance. It was nowhere — and everywhere. In all likelihood we have a new and lasting Hamlet.
The Hamlet of 1922 was a new model, one for the era. Barrymore’s melancholy Dane was sly, demonic, garbed all in black, a fallen Lucifer.
“Here, if ever, was a scurvy, mother-loving drip of a man!” Barrymore exulted of his Hamlet at his final birthday party in 1942. “A ranting, pious pervert! But clever, mark you! Like all homicidal maniacs! And how I loved to play him. The dear boy and I were meant for each other.”
The most striking aspect of Barrymore’s Hamlet was the Dane’s incestuous love for his mother, Queen Gertrude, played by Blanche Yurka as a voluptuary in cascading fair hair and alluring scarlet gown.
John Barrymore provided the awed Broadway audiences another of his “spiritual striptease” performances (an expression coined by Chicago historian Lloyd Lewis) flashing his personal torments and obsessions wide and far..
Mad Jack had a laugh, a wild cackle that his late-in-life crony Phil Rhodes likened to “a mad insect.” There was his cry when he sexually climaxed — a banshee scream that not only saluted that evening’s lady, but often succeeded in making her forget that she herself had not yet climaxed. There was his rapier-sharp wit. One night in 1920, as Barrymore’s Richard III howled “My kingdom for a horse!” a heckler dared to whinny.
“Hold, make haste,” volleyed Barrymore, staring and pointing at the heckler, “and saddle yonder braying ass!” The audience cheered.
Audiences loved John’s brother Lionel, chuckling appreciatively at his grab bag of mannerisms that in time reduced the stage and cinema’s top character star to a wheezy cliché in a wheelchair. They revered his sister Ethel, who late in life overcame her own sins to become a saintly First Lady of the Cinema, professing off-screen that suffering was desirable, for it brought one to his or her knees. (“And isn’t that the best place from which to pray? On your knees?”) But audiences feared Jack. He was the Mad Genius, so much so that Warner Bros. starred him in a 1931 film of that title. Candid pictures of Mad Jack in the 1920s frequently reveal him in stylishly cocked hat and flowing coat, almost always with a cigarette, posing in a mix of vanity and mockery, seemingly radiating the “half-crazed actor” pejorative used to describe John Wilkes Booth. In his most beautiful era, Barrymore truly resembled, as his second wife once sighed, “an archangel,” but gave the startling impression of being an archangel taunted and possessed by a demon.
He seemed dangerous. One of the reasons audiences laughed so raucously at John Barrymore in his pitiful final act was that his danger seemed safely drowned in deep seas of alcohol and long-lost women — or as Barrymore called them, “twittering vaginas.” Yet even in the dregs, he at times would rally, resurrect his old demonic splendor and be ominous to behold.
John Barrymore also possessed talent as a visual artist and a lifelong fascination with the strange and the bizarre. His first dream was to illustrate the works of Edgar Allan Poe. A drawing he made of himself as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is hauntingly good. Much later, in California, he sketched John Decker’s “Astral Self” — a slavering, pinheaded, leering monster.
The Barrymore family can trace its dramatic tradition to 1752. It was also a family of addictions — with various inspirations for the dependencies. His father was Maurice Barrymore, the handsome stage star, born of English parents in India in 1847; the legend goes that he was suckled there by a goat, and the joke went that he spent the rest of his life proving it. In a letter dated January 12, 1943, Dr. Harold Thomas Hyman, M.D., wrote to Gene Fowler, aware of the coming Barrymore biography Good Night, Sweet Prince. Hyman claimed “many illuminating conversations” with Barrymore, writing that he... had a hatred of his father that was not erased by the passage of time. One of the things that impressed him in this animosity was the hairiness and smell of his father, who was apparently a very hirsute individual who was addicted to tobacco and had a combination stink of masculine secretion and the noxious weed.
To add to Jack’s disgust, his father was apparently fond of embracing him and this would almost make him sick to his stomach.
Above, Barrymore’s illustration of Jekyll and Hyde; right, Barrymore’s Mr. Hyde, with finger extensions
The memory of Maurice Barrymore’s death in 1905 at the Long Island Home for the Insane at Amityville haunted his son mercilessly. Wracked by syphilis, strapped down to a table in an asylum, hopelessly, wildly insane, so ravaged that his corpse was unrecognizable, Maurice Barrymore had played a real-life death scene that forever terrified his son, who had nightmares of suffering the same fate.
The demons had come early. John’s mother had died when he was 10, and his father remarried Mamie Floyd, a young sensualist who, so the legend goes, had a taste for exotic sex. Phil Rhodes, actor and Marlon Brando’s longtime makeup man, had met Barrymore in the twilight years, and says:Barrymore was in love with his father’s second wife, a very young actress. She had turned him on to sex. As soon as Maurice would come home from a play, John could hear him as he fucked this young girl. The father had picked up all kinds of diseases, and he was dirty and filthy now, and Barrymore would hear them, his father grunting and jerking her around the bedroom…
Yet Barrymore loved his father. There is a photograph of him kissing his father’s picture. And he wanted to be buried with him in Philadelphia.
Another major trauma came at age 15 with the death of his grandmother, Louisa Drew, “Mummum,” probably the only adult with whom he had felt safe and secure. When Barrymore died 45 years later, “Mummum” was his final utterance. Yet, by the time of Mummum’s death, John was already twisted — Dr. Samuel Hirshfeld wrote in a 1934 medical report that Barrymore “since the age of 14 has been more or less a chronic drunkard.”
John Barrymore ascended as an actor, at his best with brother Lionel. Peter Ibbetson (1917), based on George du Maurier’s novel, saw matinee idol John in the lushly romantic title role and a climax in which John’s Peter, learning from Lionel’s Colonel that Peter’s mother had been the Colonel’s mistress, and that he is the Colonel’s natural son, kills the villain, beating him to death with a cane. It overwh
elmed the audiences; a woman was hospitalized for “an unaccountable weeping hysteria.”
John was underwhelmed, describing his Peter Ibbetson as “a marshmallow in a blonde wig.”
Even more awe-inspiring was The Jest (1919). The play was set in the era of Lorenzo the Magnificent in Renaissance Florence, with John as Gianetto, a spiritual yet kinky painter of Madonnas, costumed in fire-red wig and green “symmetricals” (padded tights), singing “Madrigal of May.” Lionel was Neri, a mustached, glowering bully, who has “pricked grotesqueries” into Gianetto’s skin and tossed him into the Arno River. John’s Gianetto tricks Lionel’s Neri into killing his own brother, and Neri goes horrifically mad.
“Ave Maria gratia plena! ” climaxes the triumphant Madonna painter, reveling in his nemesis’ insanity.
The Jest was a sensation, and a panel of 12 women voted John Barrymore the second most fascinating man in the world (with first place going to the Prince of Wales). Yet he was contemptuous of his own handsomeness and called his Gianetto a “decadent string bean.”
Barrymore was starring in silent movies too, such as Raffles, the Amateur Cracksman, (1917), but was cynical about his work there as well:In the silent days, I found myself continually making frantic and futile faces to try to express unexpressable ideas — like a man behind a closed window on a train that is moving out of a station who is trying, in pantomime, to tell his wife, on the platform outside, that he forgot to pack his blue pajamas and that he wants her to send them to him care of Detweiler, 1032 West 189th Street, New York City!
In March 1920, John Barrymore opened at Broadway’s Plymouth Theatre as Richard III. Always fascinated by animals, Barrymore based his “foul lump of deformity” on a red tarantula with a gray bald spot, which he admired at the Bronx Zoo:I have oft heard my mother say
I came into the world with my legs for ward…
The midwife wonder’d, and the women cried,
O! Jesus BLESS us, he’s BORN with TEETH!
And so I was; which plainly signified
That I should snarl and bite
And play the dog…
Barrymore’s Richard III was a cackling Prince of Darkness, and surviving photographs of him in the role are fascinating. Spidery, yes, but demonic, sporting a long black wig with bangs, a vulture’s smile and a come-hither stare. His black copper armor became so hot under the stage lights that the crew had to spray it with a hose before the star could remove it. He performed an acrobatic death scene, and on opening night, Barrymore became a bit too acrobatic — his wig went flying. Yet nobody in the Plymouth Theatre laughed.
Nobody dared to.
John Barrymore captured the warped, tortured soul of Richard III. He later claimed in a rare mood of artistic reflection, that it was his finest performance. “It was the first time I ever actually got inside the character I was playing,” he told Gene Fowler. “I mean I thought I was the character, and in my dreams I knew that I was he.”
His star kept rising. And then on Sunday, March 28, 1920 — while Richard III was still playing — Barrymore inspired sensation worthy of a rock star: Paramount’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde premiered at New York’s Rivoli Theatre. So hell-bent was the crowd to see the film that hysteria erupted outside the theatre as the crowd broke the Rivoli’s door and shattered two windows.
Barrymore had vowed to transform into the horrible Hyde as Richard Mansfield had done on stage in 1887 — with no makeup. After his Jekyll (handsome as an archangel) drinks his unholy elixir, he suffers manically (and again, acrobatically) then aims his leering, hideous face at the camera. Camera cuts and trickery actually allowed makeup: a conical skull, a scraggly wig, large horse teeth, and long skeletal fingers (a special delight for Barrymore — his own fingers were stubby and he hated them).
Perhaps the most evocative word-picture of Barrymore’s Hyde transformation came via the actor’s vampy fourth and final wife, Elaine Barrie Barrymore, in her 1964 memoir All My Sins Remembered. The notorious “Ariel” to his “Caliban” in the scandalous headlines (and whose own infamy included the star role in the 1937 short subject How to Undress in Front of Your Husband) remembered a pre-divorce night in Hollywood when she promised Barrymore a beer if he’d “do Jekyll and Hyde for me.” Barrymore’s Jekyll posed at the fireplace, downed his elixir from an empty glass, wildly clutched his throat and heart — then turned to Elaine:My blood ran cold. There wasn’t a feature that was recognizable. His face was contorted by the presence of sheer evil. No! It wasn’t even evil. This was no cliché of cruelty or bestiality… This was utter amorality. The smile made you crawl with its obscenity. The secrets of hell were unlocked… I sat frozen in terror as he slowly hobbled toward me like a giant crab. One wasn’t frightened of death at this monster’s hands but of the unknown. The look of lechery did not spell rape or violence but something unheard of, so loathsome that man had still to articulate it. I almost fell into a faint….
Barrymore played up the sexuality of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with his two leading ladies — “virginal” Martha Mansfield and “voluptuous” Nita Naldi. Ms. Mansfield was fated for a terrible real-life death; in 1923, on location in Texas filming The Warrens of Virginia, her dress caught on fire from a carelessly tossed match and she burned to death. Yet watching her most famous performance in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, one imagines her near-desecration at the claws of Barrymore’s Hyde might have been an even more horrible fate.
The Beloved Rogue is burned alive
Audiences applauded thunderously at the finale of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and left the Rivoli stunned, as if they had truly witnessed a miracle. John Barrymore, characteristically, was unimpressed by his own virtuoso triumph:The critics said my portrayal of the horrible Hyde was something magnificent. All I did was put on a harrowing make-up, twist my face, claw at my throat, and roll on the floor. That, the critics said, was acting. And, may my worthy ancestors forgive me, I began to agree with them!
The words, again, hid the truth of the actor’s passion. Richard III closed a few days after Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde opened, and Barrymore — exhausted from playing Hyde, Richard III and battling his second wife, poetess Michael Strange — suffered a breakdown, entering a sanitarium in White Plains to recover. Surely there he remembered his father’s downfall, and despaired about his own potential fate.
Barrymore’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde stage performance remains, 87 years later, an astounding piece of acting, and poetically prophetic of the sordid variation of the roles he’d play offscreen in his tragic later life. Even before his 1922 Hamlet, it was his first great public “spiritual striptease.”
Barrymore’s Hyde spooked not only wife number four, Elaine Barrie, but their dog Timmy, who barked so hysterically that Elaine feared it would go mad. As Elaine screamed at Barrymore to stop, he turned off his Hyde like a man turning off a light and hugged Timmy.
“Best audience I ever played to,” said Barrymore, consoling the dog.
‘Tis now the very witching time of night,
When churchyards yawn, and hell itself breathes out
Contagion to this world: now could I drink hot blood,
And do such bitter business as the day
Would quake to look on…
— Hamlet, Act III, Sc. ii.
Shakespearean incest: Blanche Yurka as Gertrude, John Barrymore as her devoted son
The John Barrymore Hamlet was sure to be the apogee of Broadway’s legendary 1922. As with Richard III, the illustrious Arthur Hopkins would direct the production, and the esteemed Robert Edmond Jones would design Castle Elsinore.
The real show, naturally, was its star.
“… so paralyzing was the intensity of the wild-eyed Hamlet, so compelling his biting scorn, so poignant his pathos…” recalled Blanche Yurka, who played a very alluring Queen Gertrude. The 35-year-old actress was vain about playing the mother of a 40-year-old Hamlet, and thusly glamorized herself, as she expressed it, “striving to look as much as possible like a candidate for Ophelia … a
silly thing to do.” Perhaps, but it sensually suited the Oedipus angst of this production. In rehearsal, Barrymore told Yurka how he envisioned the first scene:A hunt dinner is in progress; it’s a drunken orgy … tankards roll off the table… slabs of meat are thrown to great hunting dogs… court ladies loll with their shoulders and bosoms half bare… it is to be a sensuous, dissolute court, dominated by a lecherous king. In the midst of it, Hamlet sits, a mute black figure, bathed in firelight…
“I expect it was the frustrated painter in him speaking,” wrote Ms. Yurka. “It sounded marvelous. It never happened.” Arthur Hopkins wasn’t daring enough to stage the orgy his star wanted, but he allowed Barrymore his own way. As Yurka noted, “Certainly Jack’s own passionate, bitterly humorous reading of the part, his almost incestuous handling of the closet scene, bore out what he had told me of his concept of the play.”
In his book John Barrymore, Shakespearean Actor, Michael A. Morrison, based on far-flung research of prompt books, reviews, and reminiscences, writes that the star played part of the “closet scene” with Gertrude as if the Ghost had possessed him — in “a beam of sharp-greenish light from above,” “rigid, trembling and transfixed,” eyes “wide and staring,” hands “stiff at his sides,” speaking “in a strange, deep, hoarse, measured voice like that of the Ghost.” Thusly did Barrymore attack his stage mother with some of Shakespeare’s most vile and daring language:Nay, but to live
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