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

by Gregory William Mank

  “You know what this is?” shouted Flynn. “It’s panther piss!”

  Curtiz screamed. Flynn threw the “panther piss” in Curtiz’s face.

  The Adventures of Robin Hood, all $2,033,000 of it (Warner Bros.’ most expensive production to that time), premiered in April of 1938. It was one of the year’s Best Picture Academy contenders, losing to Columbia’s You Can’t Take It With You. The swashbuckling classic survives as a testimony to the magic that Golden Age Hollywood could create with its full-blown resources — and Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood is the cinema’s greatest all-time costume hero.

  The tribute, unfortunately, would have only found derision in the actor himself.

  As David Niven remembered, Flynn and Lili had a separation about this time, and the two actors set up temporary bachelor quarters at 601 N. Linden Drive. The men nicknamed the house “Cirrhosis by the Sea,” although the house (rented from Rosalind Russell) was in Beverly Hills. There Flynn and Niven experimentally chewed “kif,” later more popularly known as marijuana. Flynn’s early dope experiments eventually became far more serious.

  Of course, David Niven enjoyed sailing with his screen-hero crony on weekend trips to Catalina, aboard Flynn’s 65’ Sirocco. There was always a squad of female “crew members” along, as Niven wrote in The Moon’s a Balloon:Normally, the arrangement was that we provided the booze, and the girls, whoever they were, brought the food. There was one lady who had made a habit of showing up only with a loaf of bread and a douche bag.

  In Bring on the Empty Horses, Niven wrote that “Flynn was never happier than when witnessing the discomfiture of his friends.” He remembered mixing drinks below deck of the Sirocco, chopping up a large block of ice with an ice pick:Sirocco gave a violent lurch, and I found that I was unable to remove my left hand from the ice. Looking down, I noticed with a sort of semidetached interest that I had plunged the ice pick right through my middle finger.

  I yelled to Errol to come and to get ready with the first-aid kit. He was delighted at what he saw.

  “Hey, that’s great, sport,” he said. “Don’t pull it out yet, we must show this to the girls!”

  Impaled on the ice block, I waited below while Flynn rounded up the “crew.” Much to his delight, one of them fainted when she saw what had happened.

  So Errol Flynn didn’t always have the off-screen charm of Robin Hood — but who did?

  W.C. Fields was haplessly starring in Paramount’s The Big Broadcast of 1938, best remembered for Bob Hope singing (with Shirley Ross) “Thanks for the Memory.” As W.C. took on Paramount, he also battled with Carlotta Monti.

  “CARLOTTA MONTI PLANS $200,000 DAMAGE SUIT AGAINST W.C. FIELDS,” headlined the October 15, 1937 Los Angeles Evening Herald Express:Just what really took place during that mysterious midnight episode at the Bel Air mansion of W.C. Fields, film and radio comedian, three weeks ago, may be disclosed in the courts.

  So said attorneys today in revealing that Carlotta Monti, beautiful actress/secretary of Fields, intends to file a $200,000 damage suit against the comedian.

  Miss Monti, Fields and Harold, the butler, were the three principals in the episode on Sept. 23, an episode that baffled Los Angeles radio police who made two futile trips to the Fields mansion.

  According to her attorney, Clifford A. Rohe, Miss Monti will tell her version of what took place in a complaint to be filed in Superior Court late today or tomorrow. She will allege, he said, that Fields broke a walking stick over her head, belabored her with a rubber hammer and used abusive language.

  “If Miss Monti makes such charges they will be false,” Fields said today, “for the only thing that happened was that Miss Monti and the butler quarreled and I tried to pacify them so I could get some sleep. Anyway, she can go ahead and sue — I’ve been sued by experts and I know my way around.”

  W.C. eventually paid over $6,000 to make Carlotta go away, but she’d be back. Meanwhile, the comedian hoped to co-star in a film with John Barrymore, Things Began to Happen, at Paramount. W.C. even promised Barrymore top billing, and the two posed for publicity stills, one of which has Mad Jack coaching W.C. on transforming from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde!

  Alas, the film was never made. John Barrymore carried on at Paramount in the studio’s Bulldogg Drummond series, but his big 1938 film was MGM’s long-awaited Marie Antoinette. Always interested in the mystic and spiritual, he had an idea of making a film based on Buddha, and even had talked to the famed guru Krishnamurti about playing the title role.

  He was back with Elaine, who was still leeching and whining for a film career, and finally Jack went to bat for her and landed her a featured role in his next cinema opus.

  Unfortunately, the film was Hold That Co-ed, a 20th Century-Fox football satire, with John as a top-hat-sporting governor who builds a million-dollar stadium.

  To add insult to injury — and to the euphoric delight of the Bundy Drive Boys — Fox cut Elaine out of the picture.

  Fields and Barrymore. Photo courtesy of Michael Morrison

  Chapter Twelve

  The Greatest Year of the Movies, “The Spiritual Striptease of Gypsy Rose John,” And John Decker’s Biggest Caper

  1939 was Hollywood’s Greatest Year, distinguished by the release of a big parade of all-time classic films: Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Stagecoach, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Gunga Din, Wuthering Heights, Love Affair, Goodbye Mr. Chips, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Of Mice and Men, Jesse James, Union Pacific, Dodge City, Son of Frankenstein, Dark Victory, The Roaring Twenties, Drums Along the Mohawk, etc.

  At the time, John Decker was living, as Gene Fowler remembered, “in a hillside studio that once had been a sanitarium for tuberculosis sufferers.” He still survived primarily by painting Old Masters takeoffs and an occasional forgery.

  John Barrymore would appear in two 1939 films. RKO’s The Great Man Votes gave John a lead as Gregory Vance, a drunken schoolteacher with two children, and whose vote is crucial in an election. Director Garson Kanin recalled Barrymore’s total reliance on blackboards, even to say the simple line, “Yes.”

  “I might say ‘no’,” Barrymore explained to Kanin, “and then where would you be?”

  According to Kanin, Barrymore also violently erupted one day, cursing and hurling 12-year-old actress Virginia Weidler across the set because he thought she was scene-stealing from him. The other child actor, eight-year-old Peter Holden, spooked by Barrymore’s rage, began laughing hysterically and had to be slapped by his mother.

  Sadakichi Hartmann, Gene Fowler and John Decker visit Barrymore backstage at My Dear Children

  Paramount’s Midnight co-starred Jack with Claudette Colbert and Don Ameche, provided a nice featured role for Jack’s old mistress Mary Astor, and is the one legitimate film in which Elaine appears (as “Simone”). The screenplay was by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett, and in his 1977 book Billy Wilder in Hollywood, Maurice Zolotow records the popular saga of Jack wandering into the ladies’ room on the Midnight set:He was pissing away when a lady opened the door. “This is for women!” she cried in outrage. “And so is this,” Barrymore replied, shaking his tool at her.

  Jack had debts, Elaine had dreams, and on March 24, 1939, My Dear Children opened at the McCarter Theatre, Princeton, New Jersey. The sorry excuse for a farce starred Jack as Allan Manville, gone-to-seed former Hamlet, complete with a painting of himself as the Melancholy Dane staring at the audience to remind them how the mighty had fallen. Holed up in a Swiss castle with his mistress (played by Tala Birell), Manville receives a visit from his three daughters. The best of the daughter roles, Cordelia, was nabbed by Elaine Barrie Barrymore.

  Come opening night in Princeton, Albert Einstein was in the audience. “Give those cues a little louder, sweetheart. We can’t hear you,” Barrymore ad-libbed to his offstage prompter. The audience roared, and as John Kobal writes in Damned in Paradise:Nobody laughed more heartily than Einstein. It was the first of innumerable ad libs which together with clowning, mugging,
grunts, snorts, rumbles, yawns, bleats, belches, leers, sneers, smirks, ogles, roars, squeaks, eye-rolling, eyebrow twitching, strutting, mincing, pouncing, staggering, hop-skip-and-jumps, profanity, obscenity and general horseplay, would turn the vapid farce into a freakish smash hit unique in theatre annals.

  There was a show-stopping scene in which Manville puts Cordelia over his knee and spanks her. But the Barrymores were battling for real. Elaine’s latest dream of stardom went up in smoke as Barrymore vowed to kill her and demanded she be fired. As the company traveled to St. Louis via train, Otto Preminger, the hapless director, awoke in his train berth to find Elaine and mother Edna. Edna crowed that, if Elaine were fired, she’d tell the world that John Barrymore had raped her — several times.

  “But who would believe you, Mrs. Jacobs?” sneered Preminger.

  Elaine got canned. She stayed a while as a replacement learned her role. Come her last performance, Jack spanked Elaine so violently that her ass sprang welts. She retaliated by biting his wrist until it bled.

  My Dear Children became a freak show sensation, running 33 weeks in Chicago as part of its pre-Broadway tour. It was Lloyd Lewis, Chicago historian, who so aptly described the debacle as John Barrymore’s “spiritual striptease, with himself as a kind of Gypsy Rose John.”

  He was brilliant, even in his devastation. One night a siren of a passing fire engine wailed outside the theatre.

  “My God, my wife!” ad-libbed Barrymore.

  Immediately afterwards, a truck backfired.

  “And she’s got her mother with her!”

  The star decayed during the long road trip. The management provided him three whores on call at all time; still he fondled his female co-stars. (Dorothy McGuire quit on the road.) As the play neared New York, Barrymore went on one night in Pittsburgh and vomited into the footlights.

  Fields gets bitten by Charlie McCarthy.

  Barrymore was not present for the occasion when, at Gene Fowler’s office at RKO, the writer unveiled John Decker’s latest painting. Fowler had bought this original work, and as Decker told Irving Wallace:He unveiled it, amid mock fanfare, in his studio writing office. While two puzzled extras, attired handsomely as British sailors, hauled a Union Jack off the painting — revealing W.C. Fields as Victoria Regina — a third extra stood by and fired a one-gun salute, which almost killed director Leo McCarey in the next room.

  This oil of W.C. Fields as Queen Victoria was probably the most widely publicized I ever put to easel. Dave Chasen immediately ordered a copy for the lobby of his renowned Hollywood restaurant. Sir Cedric Hardwicke demanded a miniature copy, framed in white and gilt case, bearing the inscription, “W.C. Fields as Victoria Regina by Sir John Decker, R.A.” You see, I was so pleased with the work I even knighted myself!

  Fields, of course, was delighted — “Sabotage! Decker has kicked history in the groin!”

  Although W.C. had been MGM’s first choice to star as The Wizard of Oz, he opted to go to Universal for You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man, co-starring Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. W.C. wrote the story, casting himself fortuitously as Larson E. Whipsnade, circus proprietor and con artist supreme. In the course of the comedy, Fields’ Whipsnade also appears as “Buffalo Bella,” bearded lady crack-shooter on horseback, and — in an apparent parody of Bergen — a ventriloquist sporting a big mustache and buckteeth to hide his moving mouth as he makes his grotesque dummy sing.

  Fields and Bergen had been a sensation on radio’s Chase and Sanborn Hour with their Olympian feuds. What radio audiences heard was mild compared to the badinage swapped for real on the Universal lot. Animosity between Fields and Bergen became so hot that the company actually split into two production units: George Marshall, the original director, continued with Bergen, his dummy and the featured players while Edward Cline took over the Fields scenes. The company met each morning to wing the script, with Fields and Bergen battling for one-upmanship. Constance Moore, who played Fields’ lovely daughter in You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man, told me about the mayhem of the shooting and the ultimate showdown between the two stars:It was so wonderful … Every morning at 9 o’clock, everybody was on the set, to plan the day’s shooting. We met in a semi-circle, with our names on the chairs, and we’d have the old script, and the new script, and Bergen had his rewrites, and Fields had his rewrites! Bergen would use Charlie McCarthy — who, by the way, had his own chair — to confront Fields. And Fields would take great offense!

  So there would be this little creature, attacking Fields. Bergen was really a terrible ventriloquist — oh, he was so awful! — but the illusion was such, and things grew to such proportions, that Fields finally struck Charlie — the dummy — from the set!

  “Take that little bastard,” Fields shouted, “and throw him out! Throw him out, chair and all! He’s banned from this set!” And an assistant came, and off the set went Charlie!

  Bergen said, “Banned? He’s banned?”

  “He’s banned!” roared Fields. “Banned! And if you don’t like it, you can drop dead as far as I’m concerned!”

  Fields had banned a little piece of wood from the set! Chair and all! It was so ridiculous! The dummy had to go to the prop room, and there he stayed until he was called into the scene. And now, without his dummy, Bergen never said a word — never a word — because he was obviously speaking through Charlie, his alter ego.

  On October 4 of that same year, Fields wrote to Gene Fowler’s daughter Jane at National Park College in Forest Glen, Maryland:Dear Jane:

  Some months ago, I met your drunken father in a beer parlor where I had gone to hear the results of the baseball game. He informed me that you had married. I was stunned. Knowing you as a very smart girl, I could not understand how you could let me slip through your fingers. I had bought you a mink coat and a string of black Romanoff pearls as an engagement present.

  Last night I again met your Da-da and was he ga-ga! I checked up again with him and I find out it is your brother that is married. This is all too late for I have given the mink coat and the pearls and the cabochon ruby to a titled Ethiopian lady in appreciation for her assisting my chauffeur in washing the cars. I might add that I also had purchased for you some Royal Catherine of Aragon cigars and eighty pounds of Jolly Tar Chewing Tobacco.

  When you next return to our Hollywood, what about a little swing-around — a day with the bangtails, lunch in the stand, dinner at Chasen’s and after that, a rip through Chinatown or to see Buster Keaton and Chester Conklin in their latest movie, Hollywood Cavalcade.

  Everyone knows now what your Mother went to Europe for. Her flimsy excuse that it was merely to get the autographs of Hitler, Goering, Stalin and Mussolini does not hold water. We know now why she screwed out of London just two days before the fireworks started… Now she is back in peaceful Hollywood, God help us.

  An old fashioned hug, a hearty hand-clasp, and my warmest love,

  From

  Fieldsie Old Boy to you

  Errol Flynn’s ’39 films — Dodge City and The Private Lives of Elisabeth and Essex Errol Flynn’s ’39 films — Dodge City and The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex — were both directed by the despised Michael Curtiz. Both also co-starred Olivia de Havilland, although in the latter, Bette Davis played the title role of Elizabeth and Errol was Essex. She had wanted Laurence Olivier for the part, and even later claimed she had tried to imagine Olivier in place of Flynn in their scenes together. Flynn, meanwhile, had little rapport with his imperious co-star Davis, who by now had collected two Academy Awards.

  In My Wicked, Wicked Ways, Flynn told the story of Bette Davis, in a take, slapping him hard — and wearing heavy costume rings at the time. He retaliated by slapping the Queen of Warner Bros. on her ass so hard that she flew up in the air in her heavy Elizabethan costume and fell right on the floor in front of every actor and crewmember on the soundstage.

  She never spoke to him again.

  John Ford’s Stagecoach, released by United Artists in March ’39, was a mil
estone film for two of the Bundy Drive Boys. John Carradine enjoyed one of his richest roles as Hatfield, the mysterious Southern gambler in black cloak and white Stetson. It was Thomas Mitchell, however, who would reap the most benefit from this film by winning the 1939 Best Supporting Actor Academy Award for his alcoholic Doc Boone. It was, as Carradine said with justifiable pride, the “absolutely perfect” Western, with Claire Trevor’s prostitute, John Wayne’s Ringo Kid, Donald Meek’s whisky drummer and the rest all battling their demons and the savages. The film made a star of John Wayne and Monument Valley, which became Ford’s favorite location locale.

  Stagecoach was Mitchell’s second film for John Ford and Carradine’s sixth. Carradine considered Ford a “sadist” who often terrified actors into giving good performances and the Stagecoach shoot was no exception. Sometimes Ford arbitrarily picked an actor from the cast to be his patsy — and on Stagecoach the patsy was Thomas Mitchell. Ford mercilessly taunted Mitchell until the day the actor retaliated, “That’s all right, Mr. Ford. Just remember — I saw Mary of Scotland.” Ford, sensitive about Mary’s failure, stormed off the set and the bullying of Mitchell ceased.

  The two Bundy Boys have great, antagonistic chemistry early in Stagecoach. In one scene, Carradine’s Hatfield protests Mitchell’s Northern Army-sympathizing Doc Boone smoking his cigar in proximity to the Southern aristocratic (and pregnant) passenger Lucy Mallory (Louise Platt):Carradine: Put out that cigar … A gentleman doesn’t smoke in the presence of a lady.