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

by Gregory William Mank

  Born in London November 11, 1887, Roland Young was a character player and scene stealer par excellence, best remembered for his unctuous Uriah Heep in David Copperfield (1935) and his portrayal of Cosmo Topper, capering with the ghosts of the Kirbys (Cary Grant and Constance Bennett) in Topper (1937), for which he received a Best Supporting Actor Academy nomination. Mustached and monocled, with the look of an elegant mouse, Young had enjoyed such Broadway hits as Beggar on Horseback (1924), The Last of Mrs. Cheyney (1925) and The Queen’s Husband (1928) before settling in the film colony, where his charm, and ribald humor made him a charter member of the Bundy Drive Boys. As John Decker stated:Roland Young is another dear friend. One of my closest. I think the one thing that has forever fascinated me most about him is the way he talks without ever moving his upper lip. Moreover, he is a most mild soul. Yet, you always know what he is thinking, though in all his years, except once, I never heard him say a nasty thing or lose his temper.

  That one lapse occurred at a party, when a dowager, in the midst of real intellects, spouted off for two hours on the subject of Art. Her opinions were worth nothing. Roland Young sat in a corner, buried in a newspaper. And after the dowager finished her second loud hour of blah, Roland Young suddenly rose, pecked his face into her, and blasted two words:

  “Madame! Rubbish!” And he walked out!

  Young enjoyed one of his finest roles (a starring one) in England, playing George McWhirter Fotheringay, the timid clerk who suddenly has the power to do anything he wishes in H.G. Wells’ fantasy The Man Who Could Work Miracles (1936). Young himself was a talented caricaturist and a writer of verse — mainly “naughty” verse. During one of his plays, Young was supposed to scribble royal edicts. He in fact was writing racy poetry. His friends later persuaded him to publish the poems. The title: Not for Children.

  I think I’m lucky. I was born with very little talent but great drive.

  — Anthony Quinn

  He was the youngest of the Bundy Drive Boys, and in a way, the most successful.

  He wasn’t nearly the actor John Barrymore was, but he won two Academy Awards, including 1964’s Zorba the Greek. He wasn’t an artist on the level of John Decker, but his paintings and sculpture won international exhibitions, commanded high prices and added to a personal fortune Decker never remotely approached. He wasn’t the writer Gene Fowler was, yet he wrote his memoirs, twice. He was the last of them to die, tallying the most years of any of them, becoming the father of the last of his 13 children when he was 81 years old.

  Anthony Quinn had more talent than he was comfortable admitting and a seething anger and ambition that perhaps was the major reason he became a notable man.

  Born Anthony Rudolph Oaxaca Quinn on April 21, 1915, in Chihuahua, Mexico, his Irish/Mexican father and Mexican mother were involved in Pancho Villa’s revolution, and when it failed the family crossed the border into El Paso, where Quinn’s sister Stella was born. The Quinn family moved to Los Angeles, where Quinn’s father found work taking care of the animals in the Selig studio zoo, eventually becoming an assistant prop man. It was the work of his zookeeper father for Hollywood that launched Anthony Quinn’s dream of becoming an actor.

  His father died when Anthony was nine. He grew up in a ghetto and worked jobs ranging from fruit and vegetable picker to saxophone player at the revival meetings of Aimee Semple McPherson. He worked as a janitor at an acting school, where a sympathetic teacher gave him speech lessons, and in 1936 won his big break — lampooning John Barrymore.

  The play was Clean Beds, produced by Mae West at the Hollytown Theatre in Hollywood. The role of an aging alcoholic actor, clearly based on Barrymore, was a plum and many actors auditioned for it — allegedly including John Decker, so tickled by the prospect of imitating his idol that he seriously considered resuming his acting career that so disastrously ended in New York in 1922. Quinn later wrote that Mae West tried to seduce him in her hotel suite, but “the paint on her face and the thick perfume” turned him off; nevertheless, she awarded him the role. With age makeup by actor Akim Tamiroff and a salary of $10 a week, Quinn scored a triumph, and as he was removing his makeup, there was a caller at his dressing room. As Quinn wrote in One Man Tango, there, “absolutely larger than life, was John Barrymore himself.” The star seeing how young Quinn actually was, asked to see his father, whom he presumed had played him that night. “My father’s dead, sir,” said Quinn. Barrymore was puzzled:

  “And who played me out there tonight?”

  “I did, sir.” I could not tell if he wanted to rip into me or collect me in his arms. His glower could have meant anything.

  He looked me over carefully. “Christ, you’re just a kid,” he said softly. There was a long pause. I was dying to learn what would happen next. Then a grin creased Barrymore’s face, and his stare softened. “You cocksucker!” he bellowed in his grand blast of a voice. “You shit!”

  This, I was to learn, coming from John Barrymore, was high praise indeed.

  Barrymore invited him to Bella Vista, where he encouraged Quinn to train in England, and taught him the secret of acting — “Caress the word.”

  “I loved him enormously, from the first,” wrote Quinn of Barrymore. The star’s “saber like wit” and “flair for storytelling” enchanted Quinn, and he soon met John Decker:John Decker was a talented painter, with a special gift as a knock-off artist. Decker could do Picasso better than Picasso. He turned everything he painted into a kind of joke, almost always at someone else’s expense, and his talents were a particular delight to Barrymore’s crowd. At one time, half of Hollywood was decorated with Decker’s deft imitations, and most of the stuffed shirts who bought his paintings had no idea they were not the real thing.

  How Decker loved selling forgeries to these snobs! He would bring the stories of his duping to Barrymore’s table and leave us howling…

  And so the Bundy Drive Boys gained their youngest member. Meanwhile, Quinn made his film debut: a 45-second bit in a Universal potboiler called Parole (1936). It was, however, as a Cheyenne in Paramount’s The Plainsman (1936), starring Gary Cooper and Jean Arthur and produced and directed by the illustrious Cecil B. DeMille, that Quinn made his mark. Chanting a Cheyenne song, Quinn was to come across a campfire built by Gary Cooper. Quinn ad-libbed a bit of business — bolting behind a tree. DeMille fired him on the spot.

  Quinn recalled his confrontation with the almighty C.B.:One hundred sets of eyes were on me. “Look,” I said, “you fired me and it’s all right, but I’m not an idiot and I am not a stupid Indian. I’m an actor. I know what I’m doing. I don’t care about your fucking 75 dollars. You can shove the money up your ass. But I can’t walk out of here without telling you that you’ve got the scene all wrong… You think an Indian doesn’t know the difference between a white man’s fire and an Indian’s fire… What kind of an Indian would just stand there, waiting, without hiding to protect himself?”

  The great man stared at the young actor, holding his breath, expecting the tirade of tirades. “The boy’s right,” said DeMille finally. “We’ll change the setup.”

  Quinn left Paramount that day with DeMille’s begrudging respect and an offer of a $250 per week contract. He admitted that emboldening him in his confrontation was the presence on the set of a beautiful young actress with “the most piercing eyes I have ever seen.” She was Katherine DeMille, one of C.B.’s adopted children. With no aid or encouragement from her father, Katherine had begun as an extra, eventually playing the featured role of Princess Alice of France in her father’s 1935 epic The Crusades. She was visiting the set of The Plainsman that day, and Quinn claimed he virtually fell in love with Katherine at first sight.

  She was, as Quinn remembered late in his life and hers, “rarely as she appeared. There was a hidden girl: frightened, insecure, timorous.” Yet he pursued her, and many claimed the Mexican-born aspiring actor was opportunistic as he romanced the daughter of one of Hollywood’s most powerful men. On the night of October 2, 1937, 22-year-o
ld Quinn wed 26-year-old Katherine at All Saints Episcopal Church in Hollywood. DeMille gave his daughter away — against rampant speculation that he would not — and Quinn admitted that no wedding invitations went to his own mother, sister or friends.

  Yet it was the honeymoon, as Quinn wrote, that was truly “a nightmare.” Quinn discovered his bride was not a virgin. He slapped her and ordered her to take a train to Reno. Then, haunted by “her sad, beautiful eyes,” he got in his car, raced the train, caught up with it 50 miles from Reno, and found Katherine sobbing in a compartment. They reconciled.

  John Decker

  Katherine DeMille limited her acting career, per her husband’s request, and in 1939 gave birth to their son Christopher, the first of their five children. But Quinn learned of her pre-marriage lovers (including Clark Gable and director Victor Fleming) and, late at night, his jealousy masochistically demanded she tell him details. Almost 60 years after his marriage and 35 years after Gable’s death, Quinn, in his memoir One Man Tango, was still revisiting this torment. He claimed he had lived recently in Gable’s old house, and would converse with his ghost:Gable... He haunted me throughout his life, and now he haunts me in death. His spirit permeates the house. He comes to me late at night, an apparition, when he cannot find peace. He is a drunken old fool. He knows what he has put me through. “Look at me,” he says. “What is there to hate?”

  “I hate you for what you were,” I answer. “Not for what you are.”

  “And what was I? I was a pathetic actor, a burlesque. I had false teeth and big ears.”

  “You were the king of Hollywood. You were a giant. You had it all.”

  “Ah, that was just the columnists. I never thought of myself as the king of everything.”

  “You were a king to Katherine. You were first with Katherine.”

  He weeps, and I feel sorry for him….

  Barrymore coached Quinn as an actor, reciting Walt Whitman’s poem, “Two Strangers from Alabama,” about two birds that, after their eggs hatch, are separated and never find each other again. By the time Barrymore masterfully finished reciting the poem, both he and Quinn were weeping. As Quinn wrote in his 1972 book The Original Sin:When he saw that, he laughed sardonically and said, “Well, kid, if you can read that poem in front of a mirror and while you’re sitting on the toilet, you’ll be an actor. Seated on your throne, naked, performing your maleficent duties, recite that poem. If you can forget that you’re defecating and get lost in the beauty of the words, then you’re an actor.”

  Barrymore also provided Quinn his opinion of women — “They’re all twittering vaginas.”

  Elaine Barrie Barrymore gets punished in My Dear Children

  Chapter Eleven

  The Last of the Twittering Vaginas

  She was the first of John’s four wives to use the Barrymore name professionally, and the first Barrymore to undress onstage.

  — The New York Times obituary for Elaine Barrie Barrymore, March 4, 2003

  For the Bundy Drive Boys, she was the vilest villainess of them all.

  In Elaine Barrie Barrymore’s own words. Gene Fowler would describe her in Good Night, Sweet Prince as “a combination of Lilith and the inventor of diphtheria.” Lilith, so the legend goes, was the paramour of Satan, the mother of all incubi and succubi, and was painted by 19th-century artist John Collier as enjoying a giant snake entwining itself around her naked body.

  Frankly, she looked the part. Sly, heavily made-up sloe eyes, tinted red hair, a voracious, heavily scarlet-lipsticked mouth, the toothy smile of a hungry shark — Elaine Barrie Barrymore evoked a 1930s vampire, part bloodsucker, part cocksucker. Her so-so figure received a coming-out party via her slinky star turn in How to Undress in Front of Your Husband, an infamous 1937 short subject she defiantly filmed during her stormy marriage to John, and much to the horror of the Barrymore family. Fiercely ambitious, assuredly seductive, she was one of John Barrymore’s most spectacular torments, and certainly at times one of his great passions.

  The “Ariel and Caliban” nicknames that Elaine and John Barrymore won from the press might have come from Shakespeare’s The Tempest — Ariel the sprite, Caliban the monster — but the act they tortuously played before the public was cheap burlesque, and the Bundy Drive Boys reviled her.

  Jack and Elaine bring on the clowns

  She hated them at least as viciously. In her 1964 memoir All My Sins Remembered, Elaine let fly at the Bundy gang. They were “senile delinquents,” “parasites,” “erudite morons.” She was eloquent in her condemnation:Perpetuating the image of a sinking giant seemed to please the fancy of his friends who wept copiously and pushed him down a little further, like the mourners at a funeral who contor ttheir faces in a grief meant to mask their elation at outliving the beloved. There was even a kind of revelry in John’s fall from grace. When during our separation, he fell in with [the Bundy Drive Boys], he drank himself into a caricature, dancing to their tune, and laughing more cruelly than they at himself…

  She did have “oomph,” as the word went in the 1940s, and a flash of talent, and was at least partially on Barrymore’s level. The first time he showed her Bella Vista, Elaine delighted in climbing up into the tower with him — Dolores was never interested and daughter Diana later thought the tower silly. Elaine also recognized the house (and loathed it) for what John, in his darker moods, had surely designed it to be: “the setting for Torquemada’s grimmer pursuits.”

  Her legend is familiar to most Barrymore fans. She was Elaine Jacobs, a New York Jewish girl (whose race might have been another reason for her unpopularity in a nation which still had large pockets of anti-Semitism). She had seen Barrymore as Svengali at age 15 and fallen madly in love with him. When, as a student at Hunter College, she learned that Barrymore’s marriage to Dolores had fallen apart, she confessed “turning faint with exultation.”

  In 1935, Barrymore, back from India, was in New York Hospital. Elaine paid a call on her idol. He shortly thereafter moved into the Jacobs family apartment. They cruised on The Infanta to Cuba, where John bought her a diamond ring so beautiful that Elaine, truly dramatic, felt the stone had “a soul.” John’s failure to claim it as they returned to the U.S. eventually cost him $8,000. The Hotcheners, Barrymore’s advisors, tried to free him from Elaine and put him on a train for Hollywood. Elaine followed, Mrs. Jacobs in tow.

  The Ariel and Caliban sideshow began.

  For a time, Elaine had been with John during the calamitous shoot of MGM’s Romeo and Juliet (1936). One night at dinner with Norma Shearer and Thalberg, Barrymore called Elaine a whore. She and mother went back to New York; Barrymore, now addicted to the sado-maso relationship, fell apart without her — it possibly contributed to his first visit to Kelly’s Asylum. Thalberg called Elaine in New York and enticed her back to Hollywood with an MGM contract — he needed her so John could play the villainous Baron de Varville in Camille, with Greta Garbo in the title role, Robert Taylor as Armand and Lionel Barrymore as Armand’s judgmental old father. Elaine came back and found Barrymore, per MGM’s orders, drying out again in Kelly’s Rest Home in Culver City.

  Elaine wrote of Mr. Kelly taking her to see her demon lover:We then walked into the corridor and into a Hogarth print. To me this simply wasn’t a hospital, it was a madhouse and its inmates were wild animals. Now I knew what alcohol could do to people. Delirium tremens en masse was bedlam... Ogling, unkempt, pitiable creatures who were once men and women… The noises grew as we walked — simperings, groans and screams. As a door quickly opened and closed, I caught sight of an elderly woman, her hair in disarray, her cat’s eyes staring in dumb reverie as she sat embracing herself. She was a grisly portrait of self-love and then our eyes met for a terrifying instant as she tried to shake loose of her straitjacket.

  “The nightmare had no end,” said Elaine, and she found John’s small room with an iron-barred window. He had no tie — there was fear he’d hang himself with it. “Don’t be revolted, Elaine, my Binky, my baby,” she quote
d John as saying, falling at her feet, claiming he’d die if she didn’t want him, smothering her hand with kisses — at which time they heard “a shrill, cackling laugh,” and realized some lunatic was playing Peeping Tom. Elaine ran outside to the car.

  “Don’t ever leave me!” she claimed John was screaming as she ran — “don’t ever leave me!”

  John Barrymore didn’t get the role of the Baron de Varville in Camille — Henry Daniell played it, superbly — but he did get Elaine. They eloped by plane to Yuma in November of 1936, Elaine’s parents in tow. Come New Year’s Eve, and a violent battle at the Trocadero, they split. Elaine took a role in the play The Return of Hannibal, complete with a dance. It died in San Francisco, lasting one week. Variety’s famous pan of Elaine: “She looks like Salome, acts like Salami.”

  Elaine’s revenge: she starred in the short subject How to Undress in Front of Your Husband , parading about in her lingerie and high heels. New York State banned it and John, Ethel and Lionel all sued to have the Barrymore name removed — unsuccessfully.