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

by Gregory William Mank

  I suppose that when he goes into battle with the pirates at the finish, you’ll probably be having him wear a high silk hat and spats….

  Let him look a little swashbuckling, for Christ sake! Don’t always have him dressed like a pansy!

  Come the great duel, shot at Laguna Beach, Curtiz had the protective knobs removed from the foils; Rathbone fell in the surf, and lightly scarred Flynn’s face. It might have been much worse and, indeed, might have ended Flynn’s career before it had begun. Understandably Flynn became tentative in the duel, and Curtiz took Rathbone (actually a master fencer) aside with a suggestion. Taking his cue from Curtiz, Rathbone taunted Flynn just before the cameras rolled:

  “I’m making forty-five hundred dollars a week more than you are, you dirty little Australian!”

  The math was slightly off, but the “method” worked — Flynn came afire in the duel. Hero and villain clicked, and after Flynn’s death, Rathbone wrote about him in his 1962 memoir, In and Out of Character:He was one of the most beautiful male animals I have ever met. I think his greatest handicap was that he was incapable of taking himself or anyone else seriously. I don’t think he had any ambition beyond “living up” every moment of his life to the maximum of his physical capacity, and making money. He was monstrously lazy and self-indulgent, relying on a magnificent body to keep him going, and he had an insidious flair for making trouble, mostly for himself. I believe him to have been quite fearless, and subconsciously possessed of his own self-destruction. I would say that he was fond of me, for what reasons I shall never know. It was always “dear old Bazzz,” and he would flash that smile that was both defiant and cruel, but which for me always had a tinge of affection in it. We only crossed swords, never words….

  Captain Blood was a triumph, an Academy nominee for Best Picture of the Year (losing to MGM’s Mutiny on the Bounty). A person not thrilled with its success — and Flynn’s overnight stardom — was Lili Damita. Director/writer Delmer Daves went to the opening night party, and remembered:

  Since my lady and I were among the first to arrive, we received the weeping Lili Damita Flynn who begged us again and again, “Don’t … tell him how wonderful he was…” Then more tears as she said over and over (and how true it was), “Tonight I have lost my husband.” I suppose it did happen that night — for when Errol arrived, boisterously happy, exultant, it was easy to see he meant to enjoy this brave new world that brought him stardom that night. And he did.

  Another competitor with Captain Blood for the 1935 Best Picture Oscar was David Copperfield, David O. Selznick’s extravagant production. Heading the all-star cast was W.C. Fields as Mr. Micawber, one of his finest, warmest and best-remembered performances. However, the 1935 film for which Fields himself deserved an Academy award was Paramount’s The Man on the Flying Trapeze. In Alternate Oscars, Danny Peary bestows the prize (that in 1935 went to Victor McLaglen for The Informer) on W.C. for his performance as Ambrose Woolfinger:It’s a pleasure to watch Fields stumble through life and emerge, impossibly, unscathed… A strong candidate for the best moment is when Fields, in bathrobe and pajamas, is thrown into jail for having manufactured homemade applejack, and immediately sees his crazed cellmate come toward him, with twisting fingers aimed at his neck. The loony reveals his crime: “I take my scissors and stick them straight into my wife’s throat.” This prompts Fields to do one of his classic double takes and look for a guard. When the man adds, “I’ve had three wives, but this is the first one I’ve killed in all my life,” Fields responds, “Oh, that’s in your favor, yes, they have no more a case against you than a sheep has against a butcher.” For playing a marvelous character no other comic could conceive, and making us laugh nonstop for 65 minutes, Fields deserves the Oscar.

  The Scoundrel sounds like a title for an Errol Flynn movie. In fact, it was the new 1935 film from writers/directors Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, shot at the Astoria Studios and starring Noel Coward in his film debut (and title role).

  The premise: a smarmy, womanizing New York publisher (Coward, who professes proudly, “I’m never nice”) woos a sweet poetess (Julie Haydon) away from her fiancé (Stanley Ridges), then tosses her aside to chase a voluptuary — and has Ridges arrested for trying to shoot him. He dies when his plane crashes into the ocean near Bermuda and since “there’s no rest for those who die unloved, unmourned,” Coward has a month to find someone to shed a tear for him and save his soul. Of course, he seeks the poetess to plead for her forgiveness. Danny Peary writes of The Scoundrel in his book Guide for the Film Fanatic:A Paramount release, The Scoundrel (with gag cameos by Hecht and MacArthur as Bowery flophouse bums) was too avant-garde to have been a box office hit. Nevertheless, come the 1935 Academy Award night, The Scoundrel competed for Best Original Story with MGM’s Broadway Melody of 1936 and Fox’s The Gay Deception — and won. It was Hecht’s second Academy Award and MacArthur’s first and only.

  Meanwhile, Hecht composed a poem — “Hecht’s Prayer for his Bosses.” Here are a few passages, the first dealing with traditional film heroines:My heroine must be so nice,

  So full of dainty tweedledums -

  Her gimlet ass a cake of ice -

  So delicate she feasts on crumbs

  And full of smirking sacrifice

  Farts bonbons and shits sugar plums

  This Venus of cliché and slop

  Must nary imbecile affront,

  Must suffer and come out on top,

  Must love and die and bear the brunt

  While Will Hays like a traffic cop

  Barks signals from inside her cunt.

  And what about the dreary hick -

  My hero, with his marcelled hair -

  So noble, cute and politic,

  So winsome - Holy God is there

  In all of lit’rature a prick

  As flaccid and a mind as bare.

  He must be fashioned without juice

  No thinking must disturb or shock

  This last pale drop of self abuse -

  This human cipher run amok -

  Whose balls are full of Mother Goose

  With Bo Peep tattooed on his cock.

  Ben Hecht made sure that Louis B. Mayer got a copy of the poem, and the Hecht and Fowler whorehouse office soon became the quarters for other talent. There’s no report of what happened to Bunny.

  William Powell by John Decker

  Errol and Arno

  John Decker still boisterously marketed his artistic versatility, and a flyer Decker produced reads:FOR YOUR WIFE: A painting of herself or yourself (no laughs!)

  FOR YOUR HUSBAND: A painting of yourself (still no laughs!)

  FOR YOU BOTH: A painting of your child (I’m perfectly serious!)

  FOR YOUR FRIENDS: A caricature of himself, herself or yourself

  (Now, laugh!)

  Paintings or DECKER-ations suitable for the Living Room,

  Library, Den or Bar.

  FOR YOUR ENEMY: Let our conscience be your guide!

  As Decker noted “No sittings required. Pick a favorite photograph.” And he listed the styles he could provide:Rembrandt

  Gainsborough

  Van Dyck

  Whistler

  Sargent

  Picasso

  Or any other artist… living or dead Including John Decker

  The man would do it all — Christmas cards, place cards, bookplates, letterheads, newspaper cartoons…

  In the spring of 1936, W.C. Fields made the film version of his Broadway hit Poppy for Paramount. During the shooting he received a tribute, as reported by the Los Angeles Times (April 23, 1936):He was presented with an oil painting of himself as Shakespeare’s “Melancholy Dane” done after the style of the old masters by John Decker, noted portrait painter and cartoonist.

  Spending a day on the set at Paramount where Fields is making Poppy, Decker did a dozen sketches of the incandescent-nosed comic, and polished off the afternoon making a few linear notes for the painting.

  Yesterday he deliv
ered the portrait to Fields.

  Publicity still for Romeo and Juliet in which Barrymore played Mercutio under duress

  “As I live and breathe,” exclaimed the subject regarding the work, “I’m in the wrong end of the business. As Hamlet I’d be a sensation. It never occurred to me I’d look so well in tights.”

  He also seemed to be very much taken with the sword hanging at his side in the painting.

  Errol Flynn followed Captain Blood with Warners’ The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936), again with Olivia de Havilland, whom he tormented with practical jokes, such as sneaking into her dressing room to place a snake in her underwear (accounts disagree as to whether the snake was alive, dead, or rubber). The despised Michael Curtiz directed again, and David Niven, Flynn’s new pal, had a featured role. Flynn had a truly violent streak, and was challenged to prove his manhood time and again, which he had no trouble doing. One day on location for The Charge of the Light Brigade, as the British ambassador and guests watched the shoot, an extra stuck his rubber-tipped lance tip up the tail of Flynn’s horse. As Niven wrote in The Moon’s a Balloon:The animal reared up and Flynn completed the perfect parabola and landed on his back. Six hundred very muscular stunt men roared with laughter.

  Flynn picked himself up. “Which one of you sons of bitches did that?”

  “I did, sonny,” said a huge gorilla of a man. “Want to make anything of it?”

  “Yes, I do,” said Flynn. “Get off your horse.”

  Nobody could stop it and the fight lasted a long time. At the end of it the gorilla lay flat on his back. After that everyone liked Errol much more.

  According to Charles Higham, the “gorilla,” after Flynn got through with him, had two black eyes and a broken leg.

  During the shooting of The Charge of the Light Brigade, Flynn disappeared midproduction and sailed his yacht, the Sirocco, toward the West Indies, landing on the island of Cat Cay. Warner Bros. had to dispatch a studio representative on a seaplane from Miami to find Flynn and renegotiate his contract. The Warner Brothers knew Flynn had them by the short hairs; by the time he returned to Hollywood and The Charge of the Light Brigade, the despairing studio had doubled his salary. Apparently the strike wasn’t entirely self-serving — Flynn was sickened by the killing and crippling of horses on location, and demanded it stop.

  Flynn took little real joy from his wife Lili, who, fiercely jealous, intimidated and mocked him. In March of 1937, during a trip to Paris, Lili took Flynn to La Silhouette, a lesbian niterie, and made Flynn watch as she sensually danced with another woman. Enraged, Flynn walked the streets of Paris all night, later writing in My Wicked, Wicked Ways that he knew if he stayed with Lili, “I would have to kill her or get killed.”

  There were separations, but the torturous marriage continued.

  Perceiving his overnight stardom and wealth as ridiculous, agonized by his Marelle memories, taunted by Lili, Errol Flynn found three life-saving escapes. One was his yacht, the Sirocco, which indulged his deep love of sailing and the sea. The second was a dog, Arno, whom he probably loved more sincerely than Lili or any of his whores.

  The third was the band of “brothers” in drink — primarily John Barrymore.

  As Flynn grew to know Barrymore, he quickly came to idolize him. He related to Mad Jack’s love of the sea, his yacht, his animals; Flynn even got a pet monkey, “Chico,” shades of Barrymore’s lamented “Clementine.” David Niven said he never understood Flynn’s “hero worship” of Barrymore, who now, as Niven wrote, “seemed to go out of his way to shock and be coarse.” Perhaps Flynn recognized the genius and perceived the torment. Via the Great Profile, Flynn would soon become a member of the gang destined to be known as the Bundy Drive Boys.

  The Barrymore emulation was touching and finally tragic as Errol Flynn eventually aped the very Jekyll/Hyde decay that plagued his idol. The result, pitifully, was both emotional and physical. Not long before Flynn died, Olivia de Havilland felt a man kissing her neck at a party. She wheeled on the man and said, “How dare you!” Only after a moment did she recognize that the kisser to be Errol Flynn.

  “He had changed so,” said Olivia de Havilland. “His eyes were so sad. I had stared into them in enough movies to know his spirit was gone.”

  Errol Flynn claimed he first met John Barrymore when the latter was working on MGM’s Romeo and Juliet.

  Barrymore had come back to Hollywood after his pilgrimage to India, where he had spent most of his time in a sacred whorehouse. Metro Boy Wonder Irving Thalberg saw Romeo and Juliet as a valedictory to his wife, Norma Shearer. Leslie Howard was a wan Romeo, and it was Barrymore’s job — as Mercutio — to provide some of Shakespeare’s fire to the handsome but flaccid epic. His 1933 walkout on MGM was forgiven. To evoke the old Hollywood cliché, MGM had vowed to never let the son-of-a-bitch back on the lot, until they needed him.

  Basil Rathbone, who won a Best Supporting Actor Academy nod as Tybalt, wrote in his 1962 memoir In and Out of Character of Mad Jack’s antics the day director George Cukor tried to film Mercutio’s “Queen Mab” speech. “There was that wild look in his eyes!” wrote Rathbone:… the scene went smoothly enough until the line, “He heareth not, he stirreth not, he moveth not”; as he approached this line Barrymore took a deep breath, flexing his eyebrows and bulging his eyes. Then he said, “He heareth not, he stirreth not.” Long pause, then with much relish, “He pisseth not!”

  George groaned, “Jack, please.”

  “Strange how me heritage encumbereth my speech,” was Jack’s reply. “Dear Mr. Shakespeare, I beg you hear me yet awhile. I am but an improvident actor [pronounced actor-r-r] and yet I would beg you to consider an undeniable fact, I have improved upon your text. ‘He moveth not’ is not so pertinent to the occasion as ‘he pisseth not.’”

  And so it went until nearly lunchtime. Thalberg was sent for and came onto the set. Very gently he pleaded with Jack to speak the line as it was written.

  “Very well,” rejoined Jack, “just once I will say it that thou mayest see how it stinketh.” And he did, and that’s the only “take” they got from him that day and of course the one that appears in the picture. Jack was furious at the trick played upon him and vowed bloody vengeance on all who had so vilely betrayed him!

  Thalberg (“a nice guy, but he could piss ice water,” said MGM executive Eddie Mannix) eventually decided to replace Barrymore with William Powell, but Powell — a fan of the actor, and grateful to him for an early break in the business — refused. And so MGM, Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg agreed to keep pisseth-not Mercutio on Romeo and Juliet under one condition:

  To avoid any costly drunkenness, John Barrymore, every night of the shooting, had to stay in an asylum.

  The asylum was named “Kelly’s,” conveniently close to MGM in Culver City. The home reeked of paraldehyde and housed screaming lunatics, as well as hopeless alcoholics. Barrymore, fearful of a possible permanent incarceration if he couldn’t work, agreed to this temporary one. Nightly he allowed himself locked in with the screams and the stink, facing his most severe, almost lifelong nightmare. He ranted without his liquor, and one night in the throes of delirium tremens fought with Mr. Kelly so viciously that he tossed his “keeper” through a plate-glass window.

  Gene Fowler came to the rescue, if by rather unorthodox means. As cohorts Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur distracted a guard on the grounds with booze and patter, Fowler — aware Barrymore’s room was one without bars on the window — tied a bottle to a bedsheet, allowing Mad Jack to pull up the brew to help him make it through the night.

  Fowler probably thought he was being compassionate. Then again, a Bundy Drive Boy to the bone, he also believed 100% in a man’s God-given right to destroy himself.

  John Carradine in Drums Along the Mohawk

  Chapter Ten

  The Featured Players

  I remember a recurrent dream that scared the hell out of me: my Daddy, dressed up in a Dracula cape and a black hat, coming at me on a red tricyc
le with wings.

  — David Carradine

  Hollywood’s first impression of John Carradine was that he was a stark raving madman.

  In the late 1920s and early 1930s, the gaunt, longhaired Carradine terrorized Hollywood Boulevard parading in rakishly-cocked Homburg and flowing cape, roaring out the great Shakespearean soliloquies. Legend claimed that Carradine scared away Peter the Hermit, a bearded old soul who had previously staked out the boulevard as his own runway for preaching apocalyptic repentance. The story goes that, after Peter glimpsed Carradine’s demonic shade howling out Richard III —Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time into this breathing world half-scarce made up…!

  The Hermit fled to the hills, surrendering his turf to the cadaverous usurper.

  Visiting the Hollywood Bowl after midnight Carradine was wont to bellow classical verse to the 20,000 empty seats. Eventually the police chased him away and only years later did Carradine learn who had sicced them on him — John Ford, who later directed the actor in Stagecoach and The Grapes of Wrath.

  “He lived up in the hills,” said Carradine of Ford, “and said I was keeping him awake.”

  The mad Shakespearean eventually became one of Golden Age cinema’s top character players, but not until after many grim memories. One of the worst was the night Carradine, near-starving, sat in his cloak and slouch hat outside a boulevard restaurant and looked woefully at the diners inside gorging themselves. A party by the window shrieked in laughter at the sight of him, and ordered food thrown out to the scarecrow on the sidewalk.