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

by Gregory William Mank

  The Monster greeted the news of his son’s birth with joy and hysteria, sending to Bella Vista for a revolver and vowing to stay at the hospital to protect the baby from kidnappers. When business advisor Henry Hotchener arrived at the hospital, Barrymore asked him to keep vigil as he left “for a few minutes.” He returned hours later, drunk, and passed out. Dolores sent for him and wept when told of his condition.

  “I swore that if God would give me a son I would never drink again,” said Barrymore a few days later. “What happens to a man who makes a sacred oath — then breaks it?”

  September 30, 1932: RKO released A Bill of Divorcement, starring John Barrymore as Hilary Fairfield, a madman who escapes his asylum one Christmas, comes home, and prompts the daughter he never knew (Katharine Hepburn, in her screen debut) to forsake her fiancé due to her fear of inherited insanity.

  Not since Hamlet had Barrymore tackled a role so potentially catastrophic — his own terrors of his insanity and his father’s must have given him nightmares during the shoot. That he began work on the film a month after the birth of his son, surely with the fear of inherited madness acute in his mind, seems disastrous, especially as his character is addressed by a doctor as “the man who ought never have had children.”

  As always, Barrymore hid his fears on the set. Despite rumors that he had seduced her in his dressing room and she fled crying, Katharine Hepburn remembered Barrymore as kind, funny and irreverent during the shoot. Come the famous line, “Do you know what the dead do in Heaven? They sit on their golden chairs and sicken for home,” Barrymore altered the line on the first take:Do you know what the dead do in Heaven? They sit on their golden chairs and play with themselves.

  A crocked J.B. in Havana

  George Cukor directed sensitively; Barrymore masterfully gave the impression of being a lost child about to cry, with a few moments of almost frightening madness:When I talk I see a black hand reaching up through the floor. You see that widening crack in the floor to catch me by the ankle and drag, drag…!

  December 2, 1932: The Great Magoo, a ribald play by Ben Hecht and Gene Fowler, produced by Billy Rose and directed by George Abbott, opened at Broadway’s Selwyn Theatre. As MacAdams wrote in his Hecht biography: The play ends with Nicky and Julie leaving her squalid room, Julie exclaiming, “Oh darling, it’s like a fairy tale,” since she has been rescued by Nicky from a sordid fate. Tante, an old woman from Nicky’s show, comes running after them holding up a douche bag, calling, “Hey Cinderella. You forgot your pumpkin!”

  The opening night crowd — including Fannie Brice, Noel Coward, Sophie Tucker and Groucho Marx — roared with laughter but the critics were appalled. Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times wrote:The authors of The Great Magoo are not frugal. In one way or another they manage to peek backstage all the way from Coney Island to rehearsal halls in New York and the flea circus. But the formula of these picaresque slumming parties is now thrice familiar and maggoty talk is no longer a fine theatrical virtue….

  The Great Magoo folded after only 11 performances. Gene Fowler, taking it all in stride, wanted to lie in a coffin at Campbell’s Funeral Parlor and invite the critics to pose as his pallbearers. It was beneath the critics’ dignity, if not Fowler’s.

  The only film to team all the famous Barrymores, John, Ethel and Lionel, MGM’s Rasputin and the Empress, opened on December 23, 1932.

  The shoot had been tumultuous. Charles MacArthur wrote the script as the film proceeded (with uncredited help from Hecht), sometimes turning in his pages the morning the scene was to be shot. Ethel hated her performance as the Czarina (“I look like Tallulah’s burlesque of me”), managed to have Charles Brabin fired as director (Richard Boleslavski replaced him), and lambasted Hollywood in general (“The whole place is a set, a glaring, gaudy, nightmarish set, built up in the desert”).

  Hepburn and Barrymore in A Bill of Divorcement

  In the fraternal scenery gnashing, Lionel plays the Mad Monk, relishing every eye-rolling beard-stroking nuance. John, playing the dashing Prince, pops his eyes at Lionel and plays with a sword during Lionel’s lines; in one scene-stealing moment, he begins to smoke a cigarette, and mugs when he realizes he’s about to put the wrong end in his mouth.

  The film’s assassination vignette has the two stars let rip over-the-top acting. Lionel’s Rasputin, having glutted on poison cakes, is a demonic monster who will not die; John, cackling and leering, virtually becomes Mr. Hyde as the assassin, spitting out a glob of vomit, smashing his victim’s skull with insane glee, making the sign of the cross as Lionel’s Rasputin, a bloody pulp, rises yet again from the floor to prophesy “the great day of wrath.”

  “Get back in hell!” shrieks John.

  The finale of the scene — John drowning Lionel in an icy river — originally went awry as John, screaming, lost his balance and fell into the icy water, leaving Lionel glowering on the turf.

  “It achieves one feat which is not inconsiderable,” reported the New York Herald-Tribune . “It manages to libel even the despised Rasputin.” Maybe so, but it was Prince Felix Youssoupoff (on whom John’s character was based) and his wife Princess Irina who actually sued for libel, claiming the film inferred that Rasputin had raped Irina. The damages allegedly amounted to $750,000, but MGM’s loss was a slight one — Rasputin and the Empress was a major hit and audiences flocked to see the three Barrymores in flamboyant form.

  Ben Hecht began the New Year of 1933 with uncredited scripting work (with Charles MacArthur) on RKO’s Topaze starring John Barrymore in goatee and pincenez. In a letter dated February 8, 1933, Hecht wrote to Gene Fowler:I received a request from some cheap cocksucker getting up a literar y magazine asking me for contributions and warning me in the same breath, not to write anything pornographic ... I mailed him back a large hand-drawn picture of a cunt — as I remember it — with the suggestion that he use it for a cover.

  For all his success in the movies, Hecht had not mellowed in his feelings for Hollywood. As he added in this missive: You and your God damn Hollywood trollops with their quiff hair hanging like batches of seaweed from a stinking derelict!

  Following their joint Broadway flop The Great Magoo, Hecht and Fowler decorated their office at MGM to resemble a whorehouse, hiring a voluptuous blonde named “Bunny” to perform her secretarial duties in only a pair of high heels. Some eyewitnesses to Bunny’s charms also recall her wearing at times a blazing red dress. Visitors to the Hecht and Fowler office were voluminous, with Clark Gable a regular, wide-eyed caller.

  The two writers kept busy producing Bunny-inspired drafts for Farika, the Guest Artist, to star W.C. Fields and Marie Dressler. It was never produced.

  May 26, 1933: Paramount released International House — a mad comedy featuring such sensations as W.C. Fields, real-life gold-digger Peggy Hopkins Joyce, Rudy Vallee, Burns and Allen, Bela Lugosi, and “Girls in Cellophane.”

  W.C. Fields had arrived in Hollywood the previous year, with a car, cash, and a Paramount contract. He then starred in Million Dollar Legs (1932), followed by his guest spot in the all-star If I Had a Million. He settled in Toluca Lake, just down the street from Boris Karloff, hardly sharing the affection that Karloff had for the swans that sailed on the lake and eventually came to land to seek food.

  “Shit green or get off my lawn!” roared W.C. Fields to his swan neighbors.

  While Karloff made peace with the swans, Fields declared open war on them, including their “leader,” a hostile swan with a seven-foot wingspan whom Karloff had named “Edgar.” In his book, W.C. Fields: A Biography, James Curtis relates that Fields eventually attacked the swans with a golf club and a baseball bat — and the swans retaliated so savagely that W.C. fled Toluca Lake and moved to a ranch in Encino.

  It’s in International House that W.C. makes a spectacular entrance, his auto-gyro-helicopter crashing through a hotel ballroom roof in the village of Woo-Hoo, China:W.C.: Hey Charlie, where am I?

  Franklin Pangborn (as a prissy hotel manager): Woo-Hoo!r />
  W.C. (throwing away the flower in his lapel): Don’t let the posey fool ya.

  International House is packed with ribald humor, weird songs and pre-Code daring. W.C. wanders through the show in top form (pausing to peek through a keyhole, he muses, “What will they think of next?”). As the climax neared, the audience watched W.C. (as Professor Quail) and Ms. Joyce (as herself) preparing to escape Lugosi (as Peggy’s ex-husband) in a car:Joyce: I tell you, I’m sitting on something. Something’s under me. What is it?

  W.C.: It’s a pussy!

  The last line said as the oft-wed Peggy Hopkins Joyce moves her used-and-abused fanny and reveals she is indeed sitting on … a cat and her kittens. The censors weren’t buying it, and W.C.’s exultant pussy line lit the censorship firestorm of 1933. As for the “pussy” bit, Simon Louvish reports in Man on the Flying Trapeze: The Life and Times of W.C. Fields, that the script had said “cat,” but W.C. had changed it to “pussy,” and the word somehow escaped the Breen office censors. Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) secretary Carl E. Milliken was fit to be tied when he reported to his boss Breen on the pussy matter:The elimination referred to above apparently escaped the notice of our office and of the public group reviewers. The dirty-minded lout who put it in the picture knew perfectly well, however, what he was doing…

  The dirty-minded lout went on to a great 1933 at Paramount, following up with Tillie and Gus, his first film with the redoubtable Baby LeRoy. It was the fount of one of John Decker’s favorite stories:W.C. Fields, who passionately hates kids and thinks they’re brats, had to do a picture with Baby LeRoy when that youngster was the rage of Hollywood. Day after day he had to play a scene with the kid on his arm. And every day, after the kid had his orange juice, he wet his diapers on Fields’ arm! Finally, Fields decided to take a vacation from this annoyance. One afternoon, while the orange juice was being prepared, Fields dropped a slug of gin in it. It was fed to the baby, who promptly passed out — and Fields had a three-day vacation!

  Sadakichi by Decker

  Fields capped 1933 as Humpty Dumpty in Paramount’s Christmas release, the all-star Alice in Wonderland. There’s still the familiar .W.C. glint in this Egg Man’s eyes; one keeps waiting for him to leer at Charlotte Henry’s Alice from atop the wall.

  July 16, 1933: “Sadakichi Hartmann, ‘Ex-King of Bohemia,’ Still a One-Man Show,” headlined the Los Angeles Times. Sadakichi tossed a benefit for himself, inviting the world at large to a lawn party off the Cahuenga Pass, with admission 50 cents a head. “For years now he has ruled Hollywood’s arty coteries,” noted the Times’ Arthur Millier, “adored by the ‘lunatic fringe’ and some who are not so loony.” The story went on:Sadakichi is a literary legend to which he is one of the most enthusiastic contributors. Perhaps Li Po, China’s greatest poet who drowned while leaning from a boat attempting to kiss the moonbeams on the water, looked like this aging Eurasian.

  Like Li Po, he deserves an emperor to give him money and an edict should procure him free wine.

  By this you gather that Sadakichi Hartmann is a one-man show, something to be seen; but what you see is the mask, what you hear issuing from his throat in strange gutturals are notes of wit and malice from a hidden soul. Under this graying crust is deep-rooted sweetness, and equally deep despair. It is not easy to be a “Man Behind the Mask” (which you cannot take off) and write exquisite English, too. “He makes Frankenstein look like a pansy,” said a high school girl — yet Sadakichi seems to think that all women love him!

  Sadakichi told the Times he had recently lectured in New York, providing a bonus act — he danced.

  “They ado-o-red it,” drawls Sadakichi, then breaks out in that amazing barked laughter, like laughter from the grave.

  “One thing marred my life,” he said, pouring another. “I arrived in Munich three years too late. King Ludwig was already quite mad. Three years earlier he would have provided for me.”

  For a sage always boasting of being ahead of his time, Sadakichi was truly now a visionary, with plans to advance himself via a new technology:Always dreaming, he has a new dream. Television is to make his fortune. He will appear for just three minutes at a time — “one must catch the swift tempo of today — a few sharp words, a few steps of my dancing, one of my laughs — it will be wonderful. The people will adore me!”

  Alas, Sadakichi as the first TV evangelist never came to pass. The Gray Chrysanthemum told the Times of his plans to take his future television fortune and set himself up at No. 2 Fifth Avenue, “so that I can receive friends properly,” with his daughter Wistaria as hostess. Then, for a finale, he’d head for a hermit’s nest atop the Maritime Alps — “there to spend the last years of my life living beautifully.” The Times wrapped up its feature with one of Sadakichi’s poems:Nothing has changed

  Since the Dusk of the Gods

  Drift of water

  And ways of love!

  And the story concluded, “... that deep organ music comes up from the soul of this strange ‘Man Behind the Mask.’” The feature came complete with a caricature of Sadakichi, drawn on the back of a dinner check from Henry’s Restaurant.

  John Barrymore’s best-known performance of 1933 was in MGM’s all-star Dinner at Eight, which had its gala Broadway premiere on the stormy night of August 23, 1933. The star constellation was magnificent: Marie Dressler, John Barrymore, Wallace Beery, Jean Harlow, Lionel Barrymore, Billie Burke — all directed by George Cukor in a sterling David O. Selznick production.

  The dramatic punch of Dinner at Eight is John Barrymore as Larry Renault, an alcoholic has-been star known for his profile. His meltdown as he drunkenly insults a producer (Jean Hersholt) in front of his agent (Lee Tracy) still can make a viewer squirm.

  “You’re through, Renault,” sneers Tracy as the star’s fed-up agent. “You’re a corpse and you don’t know it. Go get yourself buried!”

  There follows Barrymore’s suicide scene, almost too painful to watch: drunk, crying, tearing up the picture of his lover (Madge Evans) and tossing the scraps out the window into the night, and seating himself — after turning on the gas — so that his famed profile will be on display when authorities find his body. It’s yet another of John Barrymore’s spiritual striptease performances, as if prophesying the nightmare he’s soon to become.

  Dinner at Eight did good box-office, taking in over $2 million in rentals. Those who saw Barrymore in the film surely numbered many who believed his painfully convincing performance. Perhaps he even shocked MGM — at the time the studio considered dropping his services. But David Selznick interceded, and Jack started work on Night Flight, another Selznick-produced Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer all-star free-for-all with Helen Hayes, Clark Gable, Myrna Loy, Robert Montgomery and the Barrymore brothers. Based on the Saint-Exupery 1931 novel Night Flight, the story of pilots flying medicine over the Andes, Jack was cast as Riviere, the head of the airlines. He was so drunk on the set that director Clarence Brown tried to sack him and replace him with an unknown. Lionel, always subservient to L.B. Mayer (the widely-circulated story claims that Mayer financed Lionel’s drug addiction) reportedly pleaded Jack’s case, and he remained in the film. However, Jack kept drinking, and when time came for retakes, he fled with Dolores and the family once again to Alaska with his yacht The Infanta.

  Thereafter MGM decided to dispense with his services.

  After Barrymore came home from his Alaska journey, he ended 1933 impressively in Universal’s Counsellor-at-Law, a rapid-fire, non-stop, totally natural performance.

  During the Counsellor-at-Law shoot, Barrymore had a day in which he forgot a particular line and William Wyler spent many retakes trying to get it right. Shaken and frightened, the star went home that night having never mastered the line, and was a portrait of despair. At home he learned his Tower Road neighbor John Gilbert was contemplating suicide. Barrymore sat up with Gilbert all night, went to the Counselorat-Law set the next morning and nailed the line on the first take.

  Ye
t the worry was there. The memory lapse had its horrible effect. More than ever before, John Barrymore feared of losing his mind.

  W.C. Fields carried on with his Paramount sojourn, starring in Six of a Kind (as Sheriff “Honest John” Huxley), You’re Telling Me! (as Sam Bisbee, inventor of a keyhole finder for drunks), The Old-Fashioned Way (as The Great McGonigle, providing Baby LeRoy an audience-pleasing kick in the tail), Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch (as Mr. C. Ellsworth Stubbins) and best of all, It’s a Gift, released November 17, 1934. The last, with its story by Fields (under the pen name of “Charles Bogle”), has Fields playing store-owner Harold Bissonette (“pronounced Biss-o-nay”), dreaming of a new life amidst a California orange grove. Among its choice offerings is its blind man scene, as Mr. Muckle (Charles Sellon), the horrible old coot with his black, snake-like ear trumpet and rapacious walking stick, invades Fields’ grocery store — smashing the glass door, upsetting various boxes of glassware, and destroying a table full of light bulbs.