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

by Gregory William Mank

  In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed,

  Stew’d in corruption, honeying and making love

  Over the nasty sty

  As Morrison described the scene, “Hamlet falls to his knees left of the Queen as if unable to support himself. As he kneels he gasps, then he shrieks wildly in terror and hysteria, as though released from the grip of his father’s spirit…”

  Blanche Yurka called the scene Barrymore’s “epileptic fit,” yet she accepted its intensity. During Christmas week, Ms. Yurka sent a card to his dressing room, expressing Yuletide cheer and adding, “To my son, from his mildly incestuous mother.” Barrymore replied with his own Christmas card, a reproduction of his famous Hamlet drawing by John Singer Sargent, noting:

  To my mother with much love from her wildly incestuous son - John Barrymore

  What truly motivated what can be described, without hyperbole, as the most shattering stage performance of the twentieth century?

  “If the dear old schoolteachers, who used to come to the Sam Harris Theatre, knew what was going through my mind while I was saying my lines,” Barrymore remembered, “well, they would have run screaming into the street, either to escape what was going on, or to hunt a sailor.” Gene Fowler later wrote in his private correspondence with Dr. Hayman that he talked with Barrymore about his Hamlet when the actor was “at a sanitarium in Westwood in 1937.” He quoted Barrymore’s inspiration for Hamlet, and his motivation for hating Claudius, this way: “That dirty, red-whiskered son-of-a-bitch! That bastard puts his prick in my mother’s cunt every night.” (From a letter Gene Fowler sent to Dr. Harold Thomas Hyman, January 13, 1944.)

  Was John Barrymore envisioning his own, foul-smelling father, whose raving asylum death tormented him, and whose debauched downfall he possibly could never forgive? In his passion with stage mother Gertrude, was he imagining his stepmother Mamie, and her capricious seduction of him as a young teenager?

  Whatever the motive, it wreaked its toll — and Barrymore found an escape hatch from the eight-shows-a-week torment. After the scene with Gertrude, Barrymore took an early curtain call; actress Josephine Hutchinson, who saw a performance, remembered that Barrymore “told colored jokes” — i.e., jokes about his mulatto dresser, Paul, and his remarks about Barrymore’s performance. The jokes were affectionate toward Paul, mocking toward himself, delightful for the audience — and a relief for an actor who otherwise might have been overwhelmed by his own raging emotions.

  There were a variety of escapes. J. Lark Taylor, who played a variety of small roles in this Hamlet, remembered the burial of Ophelia scene, with Whitford Kane as the First Gravedigger:Barrymore used to “kid” the life out of him, and break him up so he could hardly go on with his lines. On one occasion, Barrymore painted a comic face on the dummy which Kane and the second gravedigger — Cecil Cloville — had to lower into the grave, and Barrymore was a clever enough artist to make the thing resemble Rosalind Fuller [who played Ophelia]. When Kane caught sight of it, he nearly had hysterics. Blanche Yurka also went to pieces, and Barrymore himself was broken up by his own joke. ‘Twas rather a jolly funeral that night, and I wondered what the audience must have thought of it all.

  Taylor also recalled Barrymore smoked constantly in the wings — “One could trail him about the stage by the half-consumed cigarette butts” — and that Michael Strange, Barrymore’s madly jealous wife, had taken both children to Paris and never returned to see her husband’s historic performance. After Barrymore wished him a Merry Christmas, Taylor said he hoped the star’s day had been happy.

  “Yes, I was with the animals,” Barrymore replied. “I spent the day at the Zoo.”

  Then there was the night a replacement for one of the men who bore the dead Hamlet off stage, let the body slip. As Taylor recalled:One of the other fellows grabbed to save him, and evidently tickled him, for Hamlet’s limp, dead body gave a sudden, spasmodic jerk, and the dead lips ejaculated, quite loud enough to be heard in the last row of the balcony: “JESUS!”

  Barrymore played Hamlet 101 times on Broadway — just long enough to surpass Edwin Booth’s 100-performance New York run. He reprised his success in New York the following season and, in 1925, played Hamlet in London — a stunning success for an American actor.

  Yet it was, aside from his 1940 return to Broadway in the shoddy comedy My Dear Children, his final stage work. Hamlet told the players to “Hold the mirror up to nature,” and Barrymore, as Hamlet, held up a mirror to himself, a mad, funhouse mirror that reflected all his demons and tortured spirit.

  The World’s Greatest Living Actor

  — Warner Bros. Publicity for John Barrymore, 1925

  The HOLLYWOODLAND sign loomed like a pagan god atop Mount Lee, its 50’-high letters glowing in the night, exalted by its 4,000 light bulbs.

  The Hollywood of 1925 had a population of 130,000. There were big, booming, classic films that year, such as The Gold Rush, in which Charlie Chaplin ate his boots (actually made of chocolate), and Ben-Hur, in which Ramon Navarro’s title hero defeated Francis X. Bushman’s Messala in the classic chariot race (filmed by 42 cameras on 200,000 feet of film — 750’ of which appeared in the release print).

  There was an unbridled, Barnum & Bailey-style showmanship in Hollywood, and the accent, of course, was on sex. Erich von Stroheim was directing MGM’s The Merry Widow, his genius fashioning minimal operetta, maximum sex spectacle. Anielka Elter, once publicized as “The Girl with the Wickedest Eyes in the World,” played the masked musician in The Merry Widow’s famous seduction scene. Almost 40 years later, Ms. Elter told the Los Angeles Times:

  Barrymore as Captain Ahab in The Sea Beast

  What a shame that one gets to be old and the wicked eyes are not so wicked any more. I was a Hollywood girl when the going was good and the most interesting or the craziest people were always interested in me. Stroheim saw me as a temptation of evil. I wore what in those days we used to call “a couple of flowers and nothing to pin them on.” He shot a cigarette out of my mouth in that picture. I was insured at Lloyds for one day but the scene wasn’t shown.

  The corset of restraint, the gleeful crushing of genius by moguls and front-office lackeys — not to mention Will Hays — was already in play. Moguls, moralists and the prejudices of the great unwashed would soon have their own wicked way with the movies.

  John Barrymore, originally rejoicing in this “God-given, vital, youthful, sunny place,” had arrived in style, complete with a Warner Bros. contract promising $76,250 per picture, story approval, and train traveling expenses for himself, his English valet Blaney, and Clementine — his adored pet monkey. He had his own ideas as to the roles he’d portray on film, and as film historian James Card wrote:As a person, John Barrymore seemed to some of his admirers to be a living synthesis of Lord Byron and Dorian Gray: an embodiment in one player of all the mysteries and excitement of Gothic romanticism. And the Gothic in Barrymore that leered out of the wings to mock the classic beauty of the famous profile, led him gleefully into such wild excesses…the cauterized amputee of Melville, a supernatural Svengali, and of course, the progressively more nauseatingly monstrous Mr. Hyde. One forgives Mr. Barrymore, the actor, for these frenetic digressions, remembering that he was an actor reluctantly and would have preferred to have indulged his Gustave Dore nature as an illustrator.

  It was “the cauterized amputee of Melville” whom Barrymore first played on his new Warner pact — Captain Ahab of Moby Dick, here retitled The Sea Beast. Barrymore made Ahab the fallen angel beautifully, almost divinely handsome pre-loss of leg, with a pet monkey (played by Clementine herself). After Moby’s big bite, Mad Jack’s Ahab is a peg-legged Lucifer scuttling about with Hyde-like leers, wild eyes, lanky hair and even a Gothic top hat.

  Captain Ahab was an appropriately classic role for “The World’s Greatest Living Actor,” but Warner Bros. saw one big problem: no love interest!

  Barrymore, amused by this prosaic concern, made a suggestion typical of his humor — he’d play m
ad love scenes with the whale. His artistic contempt abandoned ship when he saw the screen test of blonde Dolores Costello, whom he instantly proclaimed “the most preposterously lovely creature in all the world!” She became The Sea Beast ’s ingénue, included to provide Ahab with a Happy Ending and fated in real life to be Barrymore’s third “bus accident” (as he referred to his marriages).

  Dolores Costello (“Jiggie Wink”) in The Sea Beast

  Released in January of 1926, The Sea Beast was a box office smash. Despite his lovesick sellout acceptance of Dolores as leading lady, he makes the White Whale his true co-star — madly riding atop it come the climax, wildly harpooning it, flashing his crazy eyes, screaming (he appears to be screaming in this silent film), reveling in the whale’s blood spraying in his face. Barrymore’s climactic revenge seems more like an insane rape — very likely what he had in mind the day he played the scene. Sadly, poor “Moby Dick” himself looks like a giant, glistening prophylactic, a sea-going phallus of incredible size and conceit.

  More cinema triumphs followed, the most notable ones featuring dashes of baroque Barrymore flourish. There was Warner Bros.’ Don Juan (1926), a lavish costumer and the first fully-synchronized music Vitaphone sound feature, complete with Mary Astor (a former lover of Barrymore’s), Myrna Loy (who, padded for her vamp role, recalled Barrymore slyly sticking pins into her false bosom between scenes) and a vignette in which the star, à la Hyde, transformed himself (with no makeup) to resemble the film’s axe-faced villain (Gustav von Seyffertitz). There was The Beloved Rogue (1927), which Barrymore did as one of the original “United Artists” (with Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and Charlie Chaplin), playing a dashing François Villon, especially vivid in his “King of the Fools” makeup, resembling a decaying clown from Hell.

  There was also a reprisal of sorts of Mr. Hyde. Seeking a house, Barrymore feared the sale price would inflate if the seller knew the famous identity of the buyer. Hence, Barrymore and his business manager Henry Hotchener visited the for-sale hacienda of King Vidor at 6 Tower Road, high above Beverly Hills. Their roles that day: maniac and his keeper. Barrymore dressed in his old Hyde hat, wig and cloak, hid on the car floor as Hotchener met the real estate agent at the grounds, and then leeringly peeked out the car window at the agent — rolling his eyes, cackling madly, and kissing his monkey Clementine.

  “Have to humor him with pets,” said Henry Hotchener.

  The agent, doubting if maniac and keeper were men of means, cut $10,000 off the price, and Barrymore now had his mountain estate — which he christened “Bella Vista” — complete with a tower with trapdoor and ladder, and a view of the ocean.

  Life was seemingly idyllic. John Barrymore wed Dolores Costello November 24, 1928. They honeymooned on his yacht, The Mariner, along the coast of Panama. Barrymore called his new bride “Jiggie Wink.” He wrote in his diary during the honeymoon, “The small egg is very happy I think — I love her more and more every day…” Bella Vista had a pool with a giant antique sundial in its midst, an $8,500 pink Meissan chandelier, a mahogany Klondike bar, a trout pond, Italian cypresses…

  It was his own, personal, Hollywood-financed Paradise. Yet most tellingly, as John Barrymore, whose real name was Blyth, created a Barrymore “coat-of-arms,” hanging it on the gates and walls of Bella Vista, he self-designed his own symbol — a snake, wearing a crown.

  The serpent was loose in Barrymore’s Garden of Eden.

  Meanwhile, the man whom many would come to see as John Barrymore’s devil had come to Hollywood, shortly before the star’s marriage to Dolores Costello.

  John Decker had met Barrymore in New York during the run of Hamlet. His own marriage had crashed in New York City and in 1928 he came west to seek his fortune. He was still a young man — only 33 — and apparently arrived with a new wife, Julia, without benefit of any legal divorce from Helen.

  Decker’s plan: sell his services to the movie industry and the layman/laywoman. He’d paint anything … for anybody … in any style … and for any purpose.

  Meanwhile, there was another future prominent “Bundy Drive Boy” also in California by 1928, but he was rarely in Los Angeles. He was, quite literally, “a voice in the desert” — Beaumont, California, to be precise — and had summed up the year of 1927 in three words: “Wrestling with Fate.” His 1928 summary: “Started to write book on esthetics.”

  The affection John Barrymore and John Decker would have for the brilliantly eccentric Sadakichi Hartmann would be lasting and profound.

  Sadakichi Hartmann

  Chapter Three

  The First Hippie

  Sadakichi Hartmann, who once told his friend, John Barrymore, that he was a lousy actor, and on another occasion procured a gun for a penniless sculptor who wanted to kill himself — and did — is dead.

  — “Hartmann, ‘King of Bohemia,’ Taken by Death,” Los Angeles Times, November 23, 1944

  Thus did the Los Angeles Times lead off its obituary when Sadakichi Hartmann finally gave up his profane ghost at the Florida home of his daughter Dorothea — just one of his 12 or 13 children (accounts vary) most of whom he’d named after flowers. He was, according to his death certificate, 77 years, 11 months and 13 days old. The L.A. Times gave his age as 78, but John Decker had no faith in either number.

  “He must have been at least 178,” Decker told the Times. “He’d been knocking years off his age at every birthday for years.”

  “HA!” was the battle cry of Sadakichi, the tall, tousle-haired half-German, half-Japanese scholar/critic/author/poet/artist/actor/dancer/moocher/pickpocket/Peeping Tom/pants-wetter/Renaissance Man, hailed by many pre-World War I savants — and by some disciples to this day — as the patron saint of the American avant-garde. The canonization is no joke; indeed, the University of California in Riverside, which houses the old boy’s archival collection, reverently includes in its 46 boxes of Sadakichi material a bust of his head and a lock of his hair.

  Of all the Bundy Drive Boys, Sadakichi was farthest out on the perilous edge and perfectly delighted to roost there. John Barrymore proclaimed Sadakichi “the last of the Pharaohs, and nicely mummified at that….” Gene Fowler, who awarded Sadakichi the star role of his 1954 book, Minutes of the Last Meeting, made valiant stabs at a proper evocation — an “eerie Jack-of-all-arts,” an “aged warlock,” a “fugitive from an embalming table” and “the most prodigious sack of sticks ever faggoted by the Almighty.” John Decker said in his review of Minutes, that Sadakichi was “a worshipper of the God of perversity.” The L.A. Times book critic wrote of Sadakichi:He seems to have inherited the worst of physical characteristics. In appearance he was tall, gaunt, wraithlike, looking less like a cornfield scarecrow than a caricature of all the scarecrows in the world. But one must admit that he was, in motion, a graceful scarecrow.

  Known to all who encountered him, Sadakichi always sported a self-made truss, a virtual hammock, that not only provided support to his oft-siring genitalia but gave it a pronounced accent. The protuberance once caused Sadakichi to be tossed out of a debutante ball when the host saw Sadakichi doing the Bunny-Hug with his coming-out daughter. It was also this truss that inspired John Barrymore to proclaim that Sadakichi Hartmann, and not he, truly deserved the title “The Great Profile.”

  Of all the purple prose heaped upon him, the appellation that Sadakichi probably would have most approved was the title Richard Hill used in a Swank magazine profile in April of 1969: “The First Hippie.”

  Born on November 8 (a birthday he shared with John Decker) on Deshima Island near Nagasaki, 1867, he was disowned by his German industrialist father Carl Herman Oscar and Japanese mother Osada Hartmann, who exiled him to a great-uncle in Philadelphia (“not apt to foster filial piety,” he said). He was freelancing stories for Boston and New York newspapers at age 14, serving Walt Whitman as a teenage secretary at 18, apprenticing in the Royal Theatre of Munich, Germany at 19, and settling in Greenwich Village at 23, where he soon wore the crown of the Bohemian King —
even though he only lived there sporadically.

  Come Yuletide of 1893, the 27-year-old Sadakichi penned his first play, Christ. The drama presented Mary Magdalene as the sister of Jesus (or “Jeshua,” as Sadakichi calls him). Jeshua is in love with a pilgrimess named Hannah - “we feel the burning passion of all mankind, and the body becomes as sacred as the soul!” they chorus, kissing as meteors shoot across heaven. Jeshua faces temptation via harlot queen Zenobia, who tries to seduce him, and that failing, kill him: Jeshua: Let me go! Inordinate love can gain no power over me.

  Zenobia: Behold me as I am!

  (rends her garments)

  This god-like form is yours!

  Jeshua (yields for one moment, then suddenly frees himself): I still resist!

  Zenobia: What woman’s son are you? — I see my efforts to conquer you are in vain; but in my body lives a sea of blood. Now I give vent to all inhuman feelings that find shelter in my belly’s flame!

  (seizes her dagger)

  I’ll limb and laniate the body of my wayward suitor; lacerate his selfish heart, and amidst writhing, mutilations and smoking sloughs of blood, I shall stand triumphant!