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

by Gregory William Mank

  A massive whore named “Tiny” (“obese with an infant’s face”) falls in love-at-first-sight with Hecht and provides the vanity case. Back at the jail, Fred Ludwig makes himself up with the rouge, powder, mascara and lipstick, confessing to the murder, relating he could only sleep with his wife after kissing his male lover’s picture under his pillow. After Irma laughed at this discovery, he slaughtered her, and the man who bit into the wedding ring in the sausage was Fred’s lover, to whom he sent the sausage, and who, revolted, had turned against him. The death march begins, and Fred Ludwig falls through the trapdoor in his makeup, white robe and hood….

  It was no moan or guttural cry. Out of Fred’s throat came his true voice — a high-pitched, feminine wail. I shivered because I felt something triumphant in its drawn-out falsetto note.

  I wrote a lead on a piece of copy paper — “Fred Ludwig lived as a cowardly man but he died as a brave woman.”

  Hecht was the star reporter on “The Ragged Stranger Murder Case” — army hero Carl Wanderer claimed a ragged stranger had attacked him and his wife, with the wife and stranger killed in the struggle. Hecht broke the story that Wanderer, a homosexual, had actually hired the stranger, drifter Al Watson, to kill his pregnant wife. Wanderer, convicted of the murders, went to the gallows March 19, 1921.

  Hecht was also a crony of the visionary Polish-American artist Stanislaw Szukalski, himself a future guest at Bundy Drive, who’d allegedly learned about anatomy by dissecting his own father. In his Zanies, Jay Robert Nash writes of the time Hecht brought several art critics to Szukalski’s walk-up studio: One of the art critics carried a walking cane and, as he inspected an enormous Venus executed by Szukalski, he posed and jabbed at the statue, commenting, “That’s nice… That’s fine.”

  “Excuse me,” Stanislaus said, stepping up to the critic. He snatched the cane from the startled critic. “One does not poke the art of Szukalski.” He broke the cane over his knee.

  “Who do you think you are?” cried the offended critic.

  “The greatest artist in the world,” responded Szukalski in a calm voice, and, with that, grabbed the critic by the collar and the seat of the pants and ran him over to a long flight of stairs leading downward, hurling him into the air. Fortunately the critic was only bruised in the long fall, but Ben Hecht never again invited critics to appraise Szukalski’s work.

  And in 1922, the year John Barrymore played Hamlet, Ben Hecht was in trouble with the federal government for obscenity, defended by no less than Clarence Darrow, and loving every minute of it.

  Hecht’s Fantazius Mallare, A Mysterious Oath, was a macabre mix of spiritualism, metaphysics and pornography, its hero a mad painter/sculptor/recluse who believes he should be a God, and that a woman is essential to his deification. In his dedication, festooned with a Wallace Smith cartoon (in Aubrey Beardsley style) of two men trapped in a maze of briars, where a giant penis is about to enter a thorny vagina, Hecht addressed his “enemies”:... to the moral ones who have relentlessly chased God out of their bedrooms… to the prim ones who fornicate apologetically (the Devil can-cans in their souls) … to the reformers (patience, patience) the psychopathic ones who seek to indicate their own sexual impotencies by padlocking the national vagina, who find relief for constipation in forbidding their neighbors the water closet (God forgives them, but not I) … to the smug ones who walk with their noses ecstatically buried in their own rectums … to these and to many other abominations whom I apologize to for omitting, this inhospitable book, celebrating the dark mirth of Fantazius Mallare, is dedicated…

  2,000 copies of Fantazius Mallare circulated privately, a limited edition eventually confiscated by the Federal government for obscenity. Darrow won Hecht an acquittal, and the writer, delighted, proceeded with a sequel, The Kingdom of Evil.

  Wallace Smith’s erotically-charged illustration from Ben Hecht’s perverse novel, Fantazius Mallare

  Hecht edited (with Maxwell Bodenheim) Chicago’s influential The Literary Review . He joined the Chicago Daily News and wrote 1001 Afternoons in Chicago, which survives as classic journalism, with pen drawings by Herman Rosse (who would later design the Universal horror classics Dracula and Frankenstein). Hecht came to New York City in 1923 and later wrote in his 1954 book A Child of the Century, “I had arrived in New York in time to join a wild and premature fin de siècle party.” His collaborations with Bodenheim continued, including 1924’s Cutie: A Warm Mamma, in which part of the “First Canto” reads:Cutie gave St. Peter writer’s cramps before she was eighteen. After she was eighteen St. Peter crossed her name out of the Judgment Book. Not taking any chances, he also threw away her telephone number…

  Cutie (whom her infatuated authors claim “was as evil to look at as a spring morning”) runs afoul of Herman Pupick, “a prude with one glass eye and splintered pieces of glass in what passed for his heart.” When he confesses he’s sinned with Cutie, Mrs. Pupick, his sex-fearing wife, kills him. Cutie takes a good look at herself in the mirror, and drops dead.

  “Rest in peace, Mrs. Pupick,” write the authors. “No white slaver can get you now.”

  Ben Hecht — always attacking prudery, censorship, the self-righteous, always in love with the outcast, the renegade.

  Hecht soon joined the famed “Algonquin Round Table,” it was his fame as a reporter that was his greatest celebrity. In Letters from Bohemia, Hecht remembered his pal and writing partner Charles MacArthur, and wrote:The stories we covered were part of our friendship. They remained a world out of which neither of us entirely emerged. We interviewed thieves, swindlers, murderers, lunatics, fire bugs, bigamists, gangsters, and innumerable sobbing ladies who had taken successful potshots at their married lovers.

  For all such evil-doers Charlie had sort of a collector’s enthusiasm. Crime and disaster allured him, socially. Hangings, death beds, 4-11 fires, protracted gun battles between cops and loonies, mysterious corpses popping out of river and swamp, courtrooms and jail cells loud with deviltries, were a sort of picnic ground for MacArthur. For me, also.

  Hecht and MacArthur made theater history in 1928 as the playwrights of the volcanic newspaper melodrama, The Front Page, in which ace reporter Hildy Johnson (Lee Tracy) is tempted away by editor Walter Burns (Osgood Perkins) from his new marriage on the night of a big hanging. An anarchist murderer is hidden in the pressroom desk, a sad but gallant whore takes a suicide leap out of the window, and at the end Walter Burns sends off Hildy for a life of middle-class joys, and even gives Hildy a gift — his watch — which sets up a great curtain line. After Hildy and his bride leave, Burns calls the authorities and orders them to nab Hildy on the departing train’s first stop:

  “The son of a bitch stole my watch!”

  Opening at the Times Square Theatre August 14, 1928, produced by Jed Harris, directed by George S. Kaufman, The Front Page ran for 276 performances, climaxing a roaring decade for Ben Hecht.

  Hecht’s screenplay for Underworld, directed by Josef von Sternberg, presents a gaudy star trio: “Bull” Weed (George Bancroft), a smilin’ stud of a gangster whose mantra is, “Nobody helps me — I help them!,” Rolls Royce Wensel (Clive Brook), a literate drunken derelict whose life changes after Bull hands him a stash of money, and “Feathers” McCoy (Evelyn Brent), Bull’s vampy moll who has a sartorial taste for feathers.

  Underworld, in the words of Paramount co-founder Jesse Lasky, “was so sordid and savage in content, so different from accepted film fare,” that the studio considered shelving it. Ben Hecht, naturally, protested that the film was not sordid and savage enough, due to “a half-dozen sentimental touches” provided by von Sternberg. “I still shudder remembering one of them,” Hecht recalled. “My head villain, after robbing a bank, emerged with a suitcase full of money and paused in the crowded street to notice a blind beggar and give him a coin before making his getaway.”

  As the Roaring ‘20s neared its disastrous close, Ben Hecht had conquered the world of newspapers, Broadway theatre and motion pictures. His t
rue genius was in his irreverence, and his eventual membership as a “Bundy Drive Boy” was inevitable.

  Among his controversial offerings, the book A Jew in Love:One of the finest things ever done by the mob was the crucifixion of Jesus. Intellectually it was a splendid gesture. But trust the mob to bungle. If I’d had charge of executing Christ, I’d have handled it differently. You see, what I’d have done was have had him shipped to Rome and fed to the lions. They could never make a Savior out of mincemeat!

  Did Hecht have any of the Oedipal lusts/father complexes that so profoundly affected Decker, Barrymore, Hartmann and Fields? His parents had been nurturing, and come the late 1920s, he was settled into a lasting happy marriage with his second wife, Rose.

  In his 1980 book The Second Handshake, the late Will Fowler (Gene’s son) remembers an early 1930s Fourth of July at Hecht’s home in Nyack. There had been fireworks, Hecht had blown up his small boat landing as a finale, then all retired, and young Will was sent to sleep in the library. In the night he noted a secret door that led to a fully-lighted, incredibly detailed doll’s-house bedroom, complete with vanity table, four-poster bed with canopy, and revelers. As Fowler wrote,What set this display apart from being an ordinary doll’s house were two well-fashioned nude figures on the bed, locked in sexual embrace. In each cubicle were two or more dolls in several venery positions. One even displayed an adult woman enjoying her pleasures with two pre-teenage boys. But the little box I was unable to understand exhibited a female doll lying in bed, her feet touching the floor. And the male doll looked as if he had tripped on the way to greet her. He had fallen, his face landing on her stomach.

  I was so entranced by these ravishing displays that I rose a half-dozen times during the night to re-inspect my discovery.

  From then on, each time we visited Ben’s house, I always insisted on sleeping in the library.

  Gene Fowler in The Senator was Indiscreet

  Chapter Six

  Father Confessor

  “Writing is easy,” said Gene Fowler. “All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.” According to his son Will (the first reporter on the murder site of the Black Dahlia), Fowler was a mix of “angels and demons,” a spiritual toss-up whom key people in his life saw as worth saving. He in turn saw possible salvation for the Bundy Drive Boys he knew and loved so well, serving them as part Boswell, part father confessor.

  Fowler would have enjoyed being labeled fellow sinner, and he’d tallied his share of transgressions. He had affairs with such movie stars like Ann Harding and Mary Astor and even, so the story goes, Queen Marie of Rumania. This excerpt from a letter a flu-suffering Fowler wrote to John Barrymore in Hollywood from the Hotel Delmonico in New York, circa 1941, gives evidence of his Rabelaisian humor:Charlie MacArthur, the Laird of Delancey Street, called on me … I told him that you had been trying to lay a midget at Earl Carroll’s, and that you claimed that any venereal disease procured at such a Lilliputian source would only be half as bad as blue balls from a normal lass.

  Ben Hecht also called, and brought the most interesting news since the burning of Harper’s Ferry. He has discovered a woman who disports four legs and two pelvic grottoes. She has had a child from either trench. One of these slits of ecstasy is a mite (not the widow’s) smaller than the other. Also, the gap on the starboard beam is hairless — probably because of her Chihuahua bloodstream. Mr. Hecht is writing of this blessed damsel, and I shall forward you a clipping. As a scientist, I am always glad to examine — for a nominal fee — the cavities of a lady …

  Despite the foregoing, Gene Fowler’s image was always one of respectability. He had the tall, noble, American eagle handsomeness, a colorful background as a gritty New York reporter who covered sports and executions, the distinction of having once been the youngest managing editor of a major U.S. newspaper. A man with a solid work ethic, a lasting marriage (and forgiving wife), a good track record as devoted father of two sons and a daughter, a Catholic conversion and a passion for writing that kept his spiritual ship seemingly safely on course.

  His maxims were, in a way, brilliant:• Money was meant to be thrown from the backs of trains.

  • Man is an accident born of an incident.

  • Men who deserve monuments do not need them.

  • Success is a greased pig.

  Gene Fowler had a bull-in-a-china shop quality. In Letters from Bohemia, Ben Hecht wrote of the time Charles MacArthur had introduced his wife Helen Hayes to Fowler:The meeting had taken place in Fowler’s managing editor’s office… During it, Fowler had gallantly addressed Helen Hayes as Miss Menken; Helen Menken was co-starring with Miss Hayes in Mary of Scotland. He had also disarmed an angry gambler, come to shoot the editor for some misstatements about him in the paper. Fowler removed the indignant reader’s .45 from his hand with a judo-chop, while continuing his social talk with the MacArthurs — “By God, Charles, you never told me your wife, Miss Menken, was not only a genius but a woman of staggering beauty.”

  Yet perhaps his most outstanding quality was compassion. The story goes that, one Christmas, when Fowler was a reporter, his newspaper gave him $500 to distribute to needy families — and Fowler spent it all on the first family. In his feature story “Rabelais of the Rockies,” Charles Samuels, who himself had been financially saved by Fowler early in his career, wrote: He can find as many reasons for forgiving people’s derelictions and mistakes as can the most gentle and understanding clergyman. Fowler hates only the vengeful, the spiteful, and the holier-than-thou crowd.

  Born Eugene Parrott Devlin March 8, 1891 in Denver, he was the child of a beloved mother Dodie and an abandoning father Charlie who, shortly after Fowler’s birth, deserted the family and stayed a hermit for over 30 years. Fowler’s filial feelings were in the bitter league of Barrymore, Hartmann, Fields and Decker, but when the old man actually appeared once again after all those decades Fowler embraced him.

  Will Fowler wrote of his father in The Young Man from Denver, published in 1962, but he pulled his punches since Fowler’s widow (and Will’s mother) Dodie was still alive. In later years, after his mother’s death, Will wrote Odyssey of a Spring Lamb (the title comes from a chapter in Good Night, Sweet Prince) — a more racy, revealing, and intimate account of his father’s early traumas and torments. It was never published. Odyssey relates that Dodie, divorcing her errant husband, remarried Frank Fowler, a handsome jock ne’er-do-well, when Gene was eight. They moved to a new house, and:It being his first night in a new environment, the child arose in the dark. He had forgotten to put his pee-pot under his bed. He was disoriented. He brushed against strange objects and furniture. And while trying to paw his way to the stairs — and eventually to the privy outside — he blindly wandered, only to find himself in another room where a beam of moonlight shone in. There he saw his stepfather in Pilgrim-position atop his mother. Frank was pumping his body up-and-down like a twin-backed monster. And when Eugene brushed against their bed, the grunting and St. Vitus motion paused long enough for the boy to hear the awful voice of the man growl, “Get the hell out of here and go back to your bed!”

  “Your bed! … your bed!” Eugene mumbled as he traced his way back to his room. The words bruised his soul.

  The following Sabbath morning, the “ogre in the child’s eyes” was performing calisthenics in his “long nightgown,” standing on his head against the wall…

  “… his crotch augmentation hung out like a vulture’s limp neck from its hairy nest…”

  And Gene ran away, to the home of his Granny Wheeler, and (according to his son’s account) “sobbed as though in a fit of hiccoughs: ‘I … I … I don’t want … want to … ever see that man again!’”

  He lived for a time with his grandmother, secretly reading the classics she’d forbidden (his favorite was Mark Twain). Will wrote that “Eugene would now lay his head on his Dodie’s tender breast when they were alone on few occasions; in the hills beneath the rustling leaves of the aspe
n trees, with only the birds and the squirrels watching.” But Dodie soon died of peritonitis. “This time,” wrote Will Fowler, “he felt betrayed by God.”

  By age 20, Gene was the top reporter of the Denver Republican. He was an ace sports reporter, a prize fight referee (a childhood pal had been heavyweight boxing champion Jack Dempsey) and the suitor of a wealthy socialite he called “Gloria,” whose father nixed the union when he learned that Gene’s reporter salary (now on the Rocky Mountain News) was only $30 per week.

  And so, on the night of a blizzard, Gene Fowler checked into Denver’s Windsor Hotel, opened a bottle of rye, stepped out of the window in the snowstorm and began walking around the Windsor’s top floor ledge. Will Fowler called it his father’s “gamble with life,” and the always melancholy Gene Fowler, years later, would tell Ben Hecht:To this day, after I stepped back inside, I don’t quite know if I had won or lost.

  His recovery from delirium tremens came via Madame Jennie Rogers, “the Queen of the Denver Red Lights,” at her House of Faces and Mirrors in Denver. The Victorian-style mansion boasted sculptures of famed doxies, chiseled from stone and framed at each corner by granite penises.

  • Bertha the Adder

  • Glass-eyed Nellie

  • Josephine Icebox