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

by Gregory William Mank

  True, Decker received $2,000 from Mitchell — almost five years’ rent on the house/ studio he moved into in 1940. However, the artist allegedly gave $600 of it to Valentiner, and the remaining $1,400 was nothing compared to the $45,000 Mitchell claimed he paid to the Silberman Galleries. Indeed, some believe that the hoax actually boomeranged, and if Mitchell told the truth, the Silberman Gallery realized over 20 times what Decker received.

  Charles Heard, whose Decker paintings decorate his house, has long contemplated the intricacies of this mystery. His theory: Decker and Mitchell were partners in the elaborate hoax, with Mitchell tossing out the name of the Silberman Gallery and the $45,000 tag as “final touches in this elaborate scam.”

  Think about this — Decker’s fees for his paintings at that time in history had a mid-range of about $2,000. I think it’s highly possible that Decker and Mitchell were in collusion to perpetrate an elaborate hoax on the art world. Mitchell would acquire an undiscovered Old Master treasure with global publicity. Decker would replenish the pirate’s chest with a $2,000 fee and both would have an abundance of laughs over the caper.

  Manipulating the art publications and Time magazine into publishing the story and saying that Mitchell had paid $45,000 would have been the final touches in this elaborate scam.

  Decker, in all certainty, never had his hands on $45,000 at any time in his life… Mitchell would have had a great provenance and bragging rights on his Rembrandt painting and a load of inside chuckles for the rest of his life.

  It all happened so long ago, and there are so many riddles remaining, that the mystery will probably never find a definitive resolution. Still, the question of Decker’s overall motivation remains perhaps the most intriguing aspect of all.

  Part III

  1940-1947

  To sing, to laugh, to dream, to walk in my own way and be alone…

  — John Decker’s favorite lines from Cyrano de Bergerac

  Decker, Fowler, Barrymore at 419 Bundy Drive

  Chapter Thirteen

  1940: Bundy Drive

  The Brentwood colony of Los Angeles sits west of Bel Air, and east of Santa Monica and the Pacific Palisades. The area is pocked with bizarre Hollywood history. It was in Brentwood where Joan Crawford allegedly raised Christina in her horrific Mommie Dearest style, and where visitors could recognize the home of Erich (“Man You Love to Hate!”) von Stroheim at Yuletide because it was the only house on its street with no Christmas decorations.

  Tyrone Power, Shirley Temple, Henry Fonda, Jean Arthur, Fredric March, Joan Fontaine, Gregory Peck, Ilona Massey, Robert Preston — all these stars and many more lived at one time or other in Brentwood. A tourist today can see film zealots running about with maps, many below Sunset Boulevard, seeking 12305 Fifth Helena, the hallowed suicide (was it really?) house of Marilyn Monroe. Venture a bit farther south and one finds the murder site of O.J. Simpson’s ex-wife Nicole and her friend Ron Goldman.

  Bundy Drive runs north and south of Sunset. Its northerly sector is about a half-mile east of Bundy Drive South. Both are convenient routes to tragic sites. In 1940, it was pastoral, a run of ranches, farms and cottages. The blonde opera star Grace Moore had bought a home at 225 N. Bundy, calling the property a “dreamland,” writing to a friend about the almonds, fruits and flowers abounding on the property. At 400 S. Bundy, Brian Donlevy, the scarfaced Sgt. Markoff of Beau Geste (“Does he drink tiger blood?” marveled one scribe of the tough-guy actor) had a farm, where he stripped himself of toupee, girdle and lifts, and peacefully splashed in his pool, savored his wine cellar and wrote poetry.

  In 1940, John Decker moved into 419 N. Bundy, a little English Tudor-style cottage, with gables and beams, a stone fireplace and living room balcony, leaded glass windows and towering trees and a small back yard. Its gables and leaded glass evoked a magical fairy tale house, but something about it — perhaps the towering, ancient chimney, the tall dark pine trees, or maybe the black shadows that thrived in its nooks, even in the California sunshine — gave the home an aura of oddly sinister charm.

  The “mad artist” Decker (as he was soon hailed in the leafy neighborhood) quickly added the unicorn coat-of-arms to the door and his Useless. Insignificant. Poetic motto.

  The Bundy Drive residents soon beheld the parade of stars arriving at 419 day and night. John Barrymore was back in Hollywood, bloody but unbowed after My Dear Children, which had finally opened in New York on January 31, 1940 at Broadway’s Belasco Theatre and ran 117 performances. Elaine, who showed up opening night wrapped in gold lamé, red fox, her lips and nails painted scarlet for the kill, seduced Barrymore into sharing again her bed and the stage; when she resumed her role of Cordelia during the run, the New York audiences hissed and booed her.

  Mad Jack would hold court on Bundy Drive, sitting in an antique chair once owned by Valentino, or reprise his Hamlet to Decker’s Laertes as they fenced before the roaring fireplace. Errol Flynn, W.C. Fields and Thomas Mitchell all became regular callers — a passerby might see Robin Hood, The Bank Dick and Scarlett O’Hara’s mad father all arriving at the unicorn-adorned door at the same time, and might have to pull an all-nighter to see them leave.

  John Decker, in his maroon jacket and mascara-darkened mustache, loved playing host.

  Gene Fowler called the Bundy Drive studio “an artists’ Alamo, where political bores never intruded and where breast-beating hypocrites could find no listeners.” Naturally, 419 soon became a “Den of Iniquity,” the lights burning all night as the gang roistered, recited, sang, and, of course, drank the cases of booze the neighbors saw constantly loaded into the cottage. Aghast snoops saw it as an opium den in the country, a snakepit north of Sunset. The house truly seemed to have a personality, an energy, a dynamic all its own.

  The men were at their most supercharged, and the house seemed to inspire their madness.

  Decker at the Alta Loma gallery

  It was at the Bundy Drive cottage where Decker, Flynn and Fowler devoted themselves one evening to bottles of absinthe. The spirit, widely banned internationally, had the sobriquet of “The Green Fairy” and an historically sinister reputation — Van Gogh allegedly drank absinthe before slicing off his ear. After the trio imbibed, they passed out, left their ears intact, and Decker recovered to paint the empty bottle. His painting Absinthe survives today in the Carmel, California home of actress Joan Fontaine.

  Sometimes Flynn and Decker left Bundy for a new favored hobby — visits to the morgue by night. Decker might sketch a corpse that he found especially odd or intriguing. Ida Lupino, then a rising Warner Bros. star through such films as They Drive by Night (1940) and High Sierra (1941), was a close friend of Flynn, and through him met Decker. Ms. Lupino told Charles Higham of a birthday when a large wooden crate arrived at her house and she and her mother opened it. It was a series of increasingly smaller boxes — “like a Chinese puzzle,” she remembered — and finally there was a small box with a note: “Happy Birthday, and don’t let this happen to you. John Decker.” Inside was “a perfectly wonderful painting” of a young Mexican beauty.

  “There was only one strange thing about it,” said Ida Lupino. “Her throat was cut.” Decker had sketched the Mexican girl’s cadaver at the morgue. According to William Donati’s Ida Lupino, the actress “was fascinated by stories of murder and enjoyed the thrill of being frightened,” and “wondered how it felt to kill. “ As such, she loved Decker’s painting, but felt obliged to exhibit it in an upstairs corner. “Lots of people can’t stand looking at the picture,” said Lupino. “Seems to give them the willies. Personally, I like it, but I have to keep it in seclusion.”

  W.C. Fields, of course, came to call, bellowing, “That nitwit doctor! The nefarious quack claimed he found urine in my whiskey!” Fields arrived in his 1938 Cadillac with bar, from his new home at 2015 DeMille Drive in Los Feliz, across the street from the formidable C.B. DeMille. W.C. was annoyed at having such a pooh-bah for a neighbor, but the low rent ($250 per month) was irresistible, and
he enjoyed shooting the birds that came to devour the fish in his lily pond. In 1940, an election year, Fields ran afoul of the FBI. According to Curt Gentry’s J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and his Secrets, Hoover himself paid a call on W.C. for a bizarre reason:Fields… was so flustered by the FBI director’s unexpected visit to his Los Feliz home that he kept calling him Herbert.

  Finally Hoover got around to the purpose of his visit. “I understand you have some interesting pictures, eh?”

  Fields did. His friend John Decker had painted three miniatures of Eleanor Roosevelt, whom Fields despised. Viewed upside down they depicted, in grossly exaggerated anatomical detail, a woman’s sex organs. But fearing he was in danger of being arrested on a charge of possessing obscene materials, Fields affected a pose of uncomprehending innocence.

  W.C. at his Los Feliz residence

  “No ladies’ pictures?” his visitor persisted. “Maybe you can dig up a small one, or maybe even two studies of a certain lady in Washington?”

  Fields pulled one out of his desk drawer and apprehensively handed it to the FBI director. To Fields’ great relief, Hoover’s laughter proved he was obviously no fan of the lady in question. When Hoover asked him if he would make him a present of the painting, Fields magnanimously gave him all three, in return for a jocular promise that he wouldn’t display them unless “there’s a change in the administration.”

  As Gentry added, “Although male visitors to Hoover’s basement recreation room were invariably shown the cameos — the showing was a highlight of the FBI director’s private tour — they are not listed in the itemized inventory of the late J. Edgar Hoover’s estate. Rumor has it that a certain former assistant director now has them.”

  At 419 Bundy Drive, Fields hurled Olympian insults at Sadakichi Hartmann, who naturally found his way to the studio in his flowing camel’s-hair coat and a virtual halo of dirt. Philip Paval, an artist who specialized as a silversmith and goldsmith, wrote in his 1968 memoir Paval that Sadakichi... hated everything and everybody. He never kept himself clean and his foul pipe would stink to high heaven. One time he was sitting at John’s bar and was too lazy to go. He emptied his kidneys right there with it running down his pants and forming a large pool under the stool, looking nonchalantly around as if nothing had happened. When someone said, “Hey what is that?” he said, “I spilled my drink.” He did spill it all right, but after it had gone through his filter system...

  John Carradine, wearing his slouch hat like a buccaneer, would come to call, proclaiming his greeting as Decker looked out the festive door’s peep hatch, staying late into the night, roaring Shakespeare as if he were telling the entire neighborhood a classical bedtime story.

  Gene Fowler was working at MGM on what proved to be his final script credit, MGM’s Billy the Kid. His favorite work on Billy the Kid was a poem he wrote, The Cowboy’s Lament — the saga of “God damn old Bessie Bond, the courtesan,” that could never be used, of course, due to censorship and became, naturally, a Bundy Drive Boys favorite. To quote a verse:

  Phyllis Decker

  Oh! Bessie Bond, the shameless courtesan.

  She’s been the death of many a healthy man.

  She demands the biggest fees, sir,

  Then spreads the French disease, sir.

  Oh! God damn old Bessie Bond, the courtesan!

  Thomas Mitchell was a regular visitor, inviting the gang to come to his house and see the Rembrandt above his fireplace. Roland Young enjoyed the role of “Uncle Willie” in Katharine Hepburn’s new film hit The Philadelphia Story. Ben Hecht had performed a sex change on his and Charles MacArthur’s play The Front Page via the movie His Girl Friday, with Rosalind Russell as reporter Hildy Johnson and Cary Grant as editor Walter Burns. Bundy Drive provided a reunion for Hecht and a pal from Chicago, the visionary Polish-American artist Stanislaw Szukalski, who’d allegedly learned about anatomy by dissecting his own father.

  Down the cellar, Decker kept his “treasure chest” — which contained the modest sums he saved temporarily, eventually ramsacked time and again for booze, food and more sybaritic joys.

  John in the Bundy Drive backyard, Phyllis and Mary Lou, and Decker and Barrymore near Banning

  The house seemed a lasting inspiration to the Bundy Drive Boys’ manic energy, and it was here that Decker took a stab at writing — the story, perhaps appropriately, entitled “Asylum.” (Alternate title: “James Felton, Insane.”) To quote a passage:The inside was, for some reason, intensely familiar to Felton. He never hesitated but ran frantically up the spiral staircase leading to the attic door. A dim light glowed from under the sill. Cautiously he opened the door. There in the dim flickering candlelight lay an immense black coffin. It was at last ten feet deep. A ladder leaned against it, and the lid lay crosswise on top of it. On a small dusty table fluttered a half-burnt candle. It was red, and the tallow had dripped from the table. But before reaching the floor, it had caught itself in a web that a spider had spun between the legs of the table, and it looked like a drop of blood suspended in mid-air. Felton eagerly seized the candle, scrambled up the ladder, and gazed down into the coffin. There at the bottom lay Mona, silent, white, and beautiful. A great force like a magnet seemed to draw him into the coffin. Suddenly an unseen hand hurtled him into the coffin. A horrible hollow laugh rose above him. Felton looked up. He saw the hideous grinning face of Granville. In his hand he held a heavy hammer, and with frantic blows was nailing down the lid of the coffin…

  That night they took Felton away to the asylum.

  For all the high jinks and hell-raising, there was also a very definite aura of domesticity. For John Decker had moved to Bundy Drive with his new drop-dead alluring wife Phyllis, her little daughter Mary Lou, and their cocker spaniel Ginger.

  My mother was a very attractive lady, blonde, pretty. In fact, in the later 1940s, publicity agents asked her to go to functions and parties in Hollywood, and pose as Rita Hayworth, or Lizabeth Scott. But you can’t believe what she could look like out in the garden at Bundy Drive! She’d be full of mud, and she’d al- ways wear little bitty-shor t-shorts, and sometimes she’d have big heavy white socks on — because she’d put cream on her feet — and she’d go out in these big heavy white socks! And she’d wear white gloves, with cream inside them. No hat, because she was always trying to get tanned. She was a chain-smoker — everybody was in those days — but she’d be walking around with these cigarettes and the ashes would get longer and longer and she’d come in the house and flick them on the carpet and rub them in, saying, “Keeps the moths out!” I’d be so embarrassed when I’d bring my friends home!

  She was a quiet person in those days — I think she was a little intimidated. John was an intimidating personality!

  — Mary Lou Warn, John Decker’s stepdaughter

  When Phyllis McGlone married John Decker in 1940, he was 44, and she was 25. There had been a lot of living in those years, however, as Mary Lou Warn remembered in a 2006 interview:When my mother was 16 she met my father — a gambler, quite a bit older than she was, who had been born in Leone, because his father was the ambassador from Spain to Mexico. He was half-French and half-Spanish, and as far as my Irish grandfather (a railroad engineer from Toledo) was concerned, my mother might as well have married a black man in those days. After they got married and she was pregnant with me, my father went back to Mexico to his mother’s funeral, and while he was gone, my grandfather declared him as an undesirable alien! My mother never saw him again, and I never saw my real father.

  Errol Flynn on the Zaca.

  So after I was born in Toledo, mother headed to L.A. with me — I was always getting shuffled around [laughing] and probably slept in dresser drawers! During a stop-off on her way to Hollywood, she was at the Chez Paris in Chicago, as one of the “All-Blonde Chorus Girls,” all beautiful blondes. In L.A. she married briefly a young man who managed a big downtown hotel — I probably was only about two at the time — and he died of appendicitis. Then Mother got a job at a nightclub, and
through a friend named Audrey Higer, whose father owned the club, she met John.

  I was in boarding school when she married John, her third husband, and they brought me out to Bundy Drive.

  And how did Mary Lou, then in the second grade, regard her new stepfather?Oh, he scared me! I was very meek, and I came from that old school of children who were to be seen and not heard. John treated me very well, but he wasn’t demonstrative and he wasn’t wild about children. He had to put up with my friends, and it was probably a little shocking to him to have little kids running through the house!

  Although Decker’s friends were probably at least as initially shocking to Mary Lou as her friends were to him, she soon became used to the men fated to be known as “The Bundy Drive Boys”:It was just very natural to me to come home and the house would be full of these characters. W.C. Fields would be in and out, and you could always tell when Roland Young was there — he had a big black limousine that always waited for him. I’d go to bed at night, up in my room off the balcony, and when I got up in the morning, they were still down there!