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

by Gregory William Mank

  The first thing I remember figuring out for myself was that I wanted to be a definite personality. I had heard a man say he liked a certain fellow because he always was the same dirty damn so-and-so. You know, like Larsen in Jack London’s Sea Wolf. He was detestable, yet you admired him because he remained true-to-type. Well, I thought that was a swell idea so I developed a philosophy of my own, be your type! I determined that whatever I was, I’d be that, I wouldn’t teeter on the fence.

  — W.C. Fields, interview with Maude Cheathamn, 1935

  His birth date is a mystery, probably January 29, 1880; his birth name was William Claude Dukenfield. His father, James Lyden Dukenfield, had arrived in the U.S. from England at age 13 in November, 1854. A Civil War veteran (he had two fingers shot off in the Battle of Look-out Mountain, and still dressed up in his uniform in his old age), James wed Kate S. Felton on May 18, 1879. Doing the math, one deduces Kate was already expecting bundle of joy William Claude the day they married at Philadelphia’s St. George’s Methodist Church.

  “I was the oldest child,” said W.C. “We were all very poor, but I was poor first.”

  It is poetically proper that Fields grew up above a saloon, where his father tended bar. As Jon Winokur wrote in The Portable Curmudgeon: His mother was a strong woman, bitter about her lot in life, and he probably inherited his wisecracking, side-of-the-mouth style from her. She would sit on the porch with her young son and entertain him with a snide, running commentary about passing neighbors.

  Father and son clashed violently. “His Dad was a reformed alcoholic,” says Ron Fields, “and a really pissed-off one! He and his father fought an awful lot.” His father also enjoyed raising his voice in bellowing song (with his surviving Cockney accent); W.C claimed he had a lifelong hatred of music. He also harbored a hatred of Christmas. As he told Gene Fowler:Well, it was this way: I believed in Christmas until I was eight years old. I had saved up some money carr ying ice in Philadelphia. I was going to buy my mother a copper-bottom clothes boiler for Christmas. I kept the money hidden in a brown crock in the coalbin. My father found the crock. He did exactly what I would have done in his place. He stole the money. And ever since then I’ve remembered nobody on Christmas, and I want nobody to remember me either. Is that clear?

  The animosity reportedly reached the point where W.C.’s father once smashed him over the head with a shovel. Fathers are loathsome villains in the Bundy Drive Boys sagas.

  Amazingly, considering his career-fueling rage, W.C. made peace with his hostile papa, who later came to see him in his stage appearances. In fact, W.C. would erect grave markers in honor of both his parents: he had “A Great Scout” inscribed in the granite of his father’s marker, and “A Sweet Old Soul” added to his mother’s.

  He made his show business debut as a juggler at age 14, appearing as “Whitey the Boy Wonder” at the Plymouth Park Pavilion near Norristown, Pennsylvania. In Atlantic City, he performed as “W.C. Fields, the Tramp Juggler,” as well as a “drowner” — a sideshow ruse designed to lure the crowds into a beer garden. As W.C. described the gig:My work was very simple. All I had to do was swim far out in the ocean, then flounder and scream for help. Lifeguards who worked for shows nearby would rescue me. Once I was brought to a pavilion, a crowd would gather. The waiters would immediately begin to yell their wares.

  “The Eccentric Juggler” made his vaudeville debut at age 18 in New York, played the Orpheum circuit, and performed at London’s Palace Theatre. His New York Times obituary reported: It is recorded that he went abroad and performed juggling acts in Europe, Asia, South Africa, Australia and even at Pago Pago in the South Sea Islands. He was in Johannesburg while the guerrilla end of the Boer War was still on, juggling clubs and other sundry articles.

  A pivotal day in the life of W.C. Fields and all lovers of irreverent comedy came April 8, 1900, as W.C. wed chorus girl Harriet “Hattie” Hughes in San Francisco. Hattie joined W.C.’s juggling act on a popular European tour, and on July 28, 1904 gave birth to their son, William Claude Fields, Jr.

  W.C. made his Broadway bow in The Ham Tree on August 28, 1905, in which the star immortalized his ever-popular expression, “Mogo on the Gogogo.” He scored a smash hit and went on tour in the show.

  Cheating managers and agents ransacked his money, spawning a lifelong fanaticism for financial security. Meanwhile, his marriage toppled. Life became a domestic nightmare. Hattie, a Catholic, refused to divorce W.C.; in time, he was also alienated from his son. It all became grist for his act, which in turn became an outlet for his angst. As Ron Fields relates,W.C. used his pet peeves and all this stuff in his stage and screen persona, which came from a real inner feeling, his true life and his true thoughts. Hattie, was of course, very important, in a negative sort of way. Again, “A Life on Film” — his wives are always harridans. And that’s how he viewed Hattie! And she was, pretty much… well, very mean…

  Now, in all of his movies, if he has a son, or if there’s a younger generation person, they’re usually lousy people. Like Claude in The Man on the Flying Trapeze… That’s the name my father (W.C.’s son) went by, and in Trapeze, the stepson, “Claude,” is played by Grady Sutton as kind of a sissy. That’s kind of what W.C. saw in his own son… and it was interesting that he called him “Claude,” because my father went by the name W. Claude Fields Jr.

  Also, whenever he has a daughter in a show or film, she’s always a lovely daughter, like Constance Moore in You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man — a loving, supporting daughter. In one of W.C.’s letters to Hattie he says, “You’ve turned my son against me… If we’d have had a daughter, she would have seen through your perfidy, Hattie.” That reveals how he portrays his fictional sons and daughters in his films. So Hattie, and his belief that his son was turned against him, was part of “his life on film.”

  The Dentist

  Now and then a revisionist tries to reassess W.C.’s relationship with the redoubtable Hattie, but letters — such as this one from 1944 — do little to support the argument for surviving affection, at least in W.C.’s case:Can you imagine my surprise when I read your letter and you said we had gone through life doing nothing for each other? Sixty smackers a week, year in and year out, for forty years ($124,800.00) you consider nothing. Heigh-holackaday. Surprises never cease.

  Hattie would haunt W.C. all his life, and beyond. After his 1946 death, she contested his will and won a large piece of his $1,000,000-plus estate.

  As Winokur wrote in The Portable Curmudgeon, “He was naturally undemonstrative and easily hurt, so he affected a phony manorial demeanor to conceal his vulnerability … He strove to be a part of the world but was an outcast.”

  June 21, 1915: The new edition of The Ziegfeld Follies opened at the New Amsterdam Theatre. The stars were Bert Williams, Leon Errol, Ina Claire, Ed Wynn, and W.C. Fields. Taking in a performance was John Barrymore, who’d fallen for Nora Bayes, a musical comedy star. Barrymore had heard that Miss Bayes was the paramour of one W.C. Fields, and had come to glare at his competition, whom he prematurely described as a “trivial mugger.” Ethel accompanied John. After the curtain, and witnessing Fields’ comic genius, Barrymore turned to his sister.

  “Ethel, he’s one of the greatest artists of all time. I’m not in love with Miss Bayes now. Hell! I’m in love with W.C. Fields!”

  W.C. became the headliner of The Ziegfeld Follies from 1916 through 1921. He wrote much of his own material and developed routines that became classics: the pool table routine, the croquet game, the golf specialist. He shared the stage with such stars as Will Rogers and Fannie Brice. In the 1921 Follies, there was lampooning of the three Barrymores, presenting them in a Camille burlesque, with Raymond Hitchcock as Lionel, Fannie Brice as Ethel and W.C. as “Jack.” Meanwhile, he made his film debut in Pool Sharks (1915), a one-reeler for Gaumont-Mutual, performing his celebrated pool table skit.

  Come 1922 when as John Decker and John Barrymore made their own contributions to New York theatre, Fields jumped ship from Ziegfe
ld to star in George White’s Scandals of 1922. In the show’s chorus as an “English tea girl” was Dolores Costello — soon to be Mrs. John Barrymore. W.C. added to his laurels as Professor Eustace McGargle in Poppy, which opened September 3, 1923, ran for 300 performances, and offered the spectacle of W.C. singing “Kodoola, Kodoola.” It was at this time that John Decker, who’d previously met W.C. in England, became reacquainted when he sketched Fields’ caricature for the Evening World.

  It was a trademark portrayal, and by now, his self-creation was complete. Abused by his father, cheated by his managers, despised by his wife (whose religious zeal prevented her from divorcing him), estranged from his own son, W.C. Fields defensively became the Great Charlatan — the Olympian Con-Man, the Shyster Supreme, a carnival rogue in a top hat and lapel flower, hating children, making fools of women, eyes twinkling as he merrily cheated much of the world at large, self-righteously forgiving himself, for, as Fields put it, You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man.

  Rarely would such bitterness transform into such humor, and W.C. Fields’ comedy, in its true essence, was as much a heartbreaking self-exposé as John Barrymore’s Hamlet. W.C. Fields made his feature film bow in 1924’s Revolutionary war epic Janice Meredith , playing a soused British soldier. But his big cinema splash was Sally of the Sawdust (1925), D.W. Griffith’s version of Poppy. W.C.’s highlight: selling a fraudulent talking dog. Carol Dempster had the title role, as she did in Griffith’s That Royle Girl (1926), with W..C. as “Dads” Royle. As Fate had it, Miss Dempster also happened to be Griffith’s lover, and persuaded D.W. to cut down W.C.’s role so to build up her own.

  Fields career went merrily along: The Ziegfeld Follies of 1925 (including his famed Drug Store skit), a series of Paramount comedy films with Chester Conklin, and a new Broadway hit in Earl Carroll’s Vanities (August 6, 1928). which featured two of W.C.’s all-time funniest skits: “Stolen Bonds,” in which he sings the title song to a crying Canadian Mountie and says “It ain’t a fit night out for man or beast, and it’s been a stormin’ for over a fortnit!” Which is followed by a splash in the face with fake snow. Equally memorable and considerably more racy was “An Episode at the Dentist,” in which W.C. (“Have you ever had this tooth pulled before?”) yanks the tooth of a willowy young lady whose legs entwine themselves about the dentist until the scene resembles a hardcore stag loop. The humor survives in the 1932 Mack Sennett short The Dentist (highly censored in its original release).

  Ben Hecht

  Chapter Five

  “The Devil Can-Cans in Their Souls…”

  A hanged man dies in a few seconds if his neck is broken by the drop. If his neck isn’t broken, due to the incorrect adjustment of the noose, he chokes to death. This takes from eight to fourteen minutes.

  While he hangs choking, the white-covered body starts to spin slowly. The white-hooded head tilts to one side and a stretch of purple neck becomes visible. Then the rope begins to vibrate and hum like a hive of bees. After this the white robe begins to expand and deflate as if it were being blown up by a leaky bicycle pump. Following the turning, vibrating, spinning, humming, and pumping up of the white robe comes the climax of the hanging. This is the throat of the hanging man letting out a last strangled cry or moan of life.

  — Ben Hecht, Gaily Gaily (1963)

  8 p.m., May 19, 1929. It was the very first Academy Awards Banquet, held at the Blossom Room of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel.

  Louis B. Mayer, grand poobah of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, hatched the Academy Award concept. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was open to anyone who “had contributed in a distinguished way to arts and sciences of motion picture production.” Others saw it more cynically. The Academy came to life as a rabid industry watchdog, giving Hollywood bigwigs the power to attack and devour any labor dispute upstarts in its own formidable way. The Academy planned to hop in bed with Will Hays’ censorship office and host annual membership-only, let’s-slap-each-other-on-the-back banquets.

  There was a message/warning implied in the Academy’s formation: behave yourself, stay away from those goddamned unions, and you, too, might win a prize.

  As for the prize itself… Cedric Gibbons, MGM’s handsome, mustached art director, then happily settled into a sado-maso marriage to Dolores del Rio, designed the statue: a naked man, jabbing a sword into a reel of film. There were five holes on the reel for each of the Academy branches. As Mason Wiley and Damien Bova wrote in their book Inside Oscar: The Unofficial History of the Academy Awards:For the production of the statuette, the Academy gave $500 to an unemployed art school graduate named George Stanley, who sculpted Gibbons’ design in clay. Alex Smith then cast the 13 ½-inch, 6 ¾-pound statuette in tin and copper and gold-plated the whole thing. The Award was ready; now it was time for the first winners.

  There were no surprises on Academy Award night; the winners had been announced three months before the ceremony. Douglas Fairbanks, Academy president, presented all the awards. Among them: Best Picture, a tie: The Last Command and Wings. Best “Artistic Quality of Production”: Sunrise. Special Award for “the outstanding pioneer talking picture”: The Jazz Singer. Best Actor: Emil Jannings of The Last Command (Jannings was spooked by the “Talkie” phenomenon had received his award previously, and took it home to Germany). Best Actress: Janet Gaynor, for three films: Seventh Heaven, Street Angel and Sunrise. Best Director: Frank Borzage for Seventh Heaven. Best Comedy Direction: Lewis Milestone for Two Arabian Knights. Best Writing (Adaptation): Benjamin Glazer for Seventh Heaven.

  Best Writing, Original Story: Ben Hecht for Underworld.

  Hecht wasn’t there. Suspicious of the Academy, publicly accusing director Josef von Sternberg of ruining his story, Hecht boycotted the Academy Awards, Charlie Chaplin, winner of a special Academy Award for producing, writing, directing and acting in The Circus, was skeptical too, and stayed away the big night. The Academy sent the absentee winner his “Best Writing, Original Story” gold-plated, naked-man-with-sword prize.

  Ben Hecht used it as a doorstop.

  Daredevil reporter, novelist of sex-charged fantasies, and arguably the most influential screenwriter of all time, Ben Hecht, as Budd Schulberg nailed it, was all about “animal pleasure.” John Decker was the artistic chameleon, and Hecht could write in any style, with the same passionate, hard-hitting flair.

  Born on the Lower East Side of New York February 28, 1894, Ben Hecht claimed he was born in a toilet — as MacAdams reports in his Hecht biography, it was Ben’s cousin who was born, prematurely, in a toilet. At age eight, he was riding an open streetcar when a runaway horse crashed through the car, killing a man, and the child went home and wrote his eyewitness account of the carnage. At age 13, he received a most influential gift — 167 books from his father, including the works of Shakespeare, Dickens and Twain. The boy devoured them all and moved on to Poe, Dumas, Gogol....

  At age 14, Ben and brother Peter toured as a trapeze act in a circus, hailing themselves as the “Youngest Daredevils in America.”

  It was as a swashbuckling reporter, however, that Ben Hecht first made his mark. In his Gaily, Gaily, Hecht wrote of his pre-World War I days and nights, covering news for the Chicago Daily Journal, living in a river-view apartment, working for editor Mr. Mahoney and with photographer Bunny Hare. All variety of sordid, sensational assignments came his way, as Hecht remembered it:Mr. Mahoney would say to me at 7 a.m., “Here’s something in your line, professor. A honeymooning banker from Cedar Rapids has kept his nude bride chained to a bedpost in the Morrison hotel for a week, feeding her only salted peanuts and whipping her hourly with a cat-o’-nine-tails. The zebra-striped bride is in the Passavant Hospital unable to speak. But the groom is holding forth in Captain Strassneider’s office on the sanctity of marriage. See what you can dig up out of the financier’s soul. And take Bunny Hare along.”

  An example of Hecht’s gloriously politically incorrect sagas in Gaily, Gaily is “The Fairy.” Fred Ludwig, a butcher, faces the Chicago g
allows for having murdered his wife Irma by grinding her up into sausage; a man breakfasting on his sausage bit into her wedding ring. On the night before the execution, as a blizzard paralyzes the city, the sheriff begs Fred to confess. The butcher agrees, with a last request proviso:

  “I would like a lady’s vanity case, with everything complete. Face powder, lipstick, and a cake of mascara.”

  Hecht ventures out into a blizzard to Queen Lil’s whorehouse in quest of the vanity case. Queen Lil, her coal-warmed brothel hellishly warm in the snowy night, answers the door in bare feet and kimono, so amused by the request that she wakes up her girls (all without customers on this snowbound night) to hear the request.

  Eight girls came shuffling sleepily into the parlor. Five of them were nude. The other three wore bloomers. They were variously shaped, from skinny blondes with stringy breasts to Turkish delights with watermelon udders. Two of them were startlingly attractive. They looked more like sleepwalking princesses than five-dollar whores…

  When Lil finished telling my story they started whooping and slapping each other with a mysterious kind of joy. One of the sleepwalking princesses obliged with a song in a piercing soprano, “Oh, it’s up the rope he goes, up he goes…”

  I sat dizzily in this sudden Witches’ Sabbath of nudes rolling on the floor with delight, kicking each other’s bare behinds. Queen Lil, herself, seemed the mistress of the baffling revelry… her Chinese kimono unbelted and her antique flesh exposed….