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

by Gregory William Mank

  Also in September, Decker, Gene Fowler and his son Will, concerned about Barrymore’s increasing misery with Elaine, kidnapped him from the Bellagio Road house in Bel Air that the couple shared and took him back to Bella Vista. On September 23, Barrymore filed once again for divorce, claiming Elaine had caused him “grievous mental suffering and great bodily injury” — not specifying the nature of the latter. His lawyer also secured a court order to “protect” Barrymore from Elaine, restraining her from “harassing, annoying or interfering with the peace, quiet or personal freedom” of Barrymore and from “entering or attempting to enter the premises at No. 6 Tower Road.”

  On November 26, the divorce came through, dissolving the marriage of the 58-year-old Barrymore and 24-year-old Elaine. The fourth Mrs. Barrymore, described by the Associated Press as “smartly dressed and still wearing her wedding band and her 8 ½-carat diamond engagement ring,” said in court that John had caused her a “great deal of anguish, sleeplessness and loss of weight.” John, meanwhile, stayed safely in the office of his attorney.

  John Barrymore had just launched a new career — as himself, mocking his image as a regular on Rudy Vallee’s radio show. He was, in the words of the New York Times, “radio on a spree,” and the steady salary held at bay his many besieging creditors.

  Decker enjoyed telling the story of a “famed Russian sculptor” who visited him and Phyllis and Barrymore one evening at Bundy Drive. “ We began drinking,” relayed Decker:The Russian held up his drink and said, “Look how I drink. Yet, a couple years ago, I couldn’t drink at all. It made a beast of me. I would get drunk and then I would beat and hit and slap my wife. Finally I went to a doctor. He operated on my ear and I’ve been fine ever since. I can drink gallons and never get wild. Barrymore, you should have an operation on your ear, too.”

  We drank for ten more minutes in silence, and suddenly, after his seventh drink, the Russian let out a howl, bounded across the room and slugged his wife on the jaw with a right uppercut and beat her on the head. Then, at once, red-faced, he caught himself and turned apologetically to Barrymore.

  “You see,” he gulped with fine restraint. “That’s the way I used to be!”

  Christmas Eve, 1940. Barrymore, John Decker and Gene Fowler paid a visit to W.C. Fields, who — even considering his hatred for Christmas — was in an epic foul mood. The director Gregory La Cava was there, and told the visitors that the Filipino houseboy of a neighboring woman had come to call. For a long time the woman had beseeched Fields to visit her, and the old misanthrope had steadfastly refused. The houseboy was so fervent this time that Fields actually went to the lady’s house, only to suffer a shock. The lady’s wish to meet W.C. Fields had been her last wish — she was now dead, laid out in a coffin in her flower-filled parlor.

  Barrymore on The Rudy Vallee Show

  “I just don’t like dead people!” ranted Fields.

  “You don’t even like live ones,” said Gregory La Cava.

  Decker and Barrymore took Fowler home, and returned to 419 N. Bundy to find that the congregated Yuletide celebrants had drained all the liquor. The host went out for more, and on the way home, a policeman pulled over Decker and saw the many bottles in the car. He took Decker into the station for a sobriety test. The doctor who checked him was a very short man.

  “Do you think,” asked the doctor, learning of Decker’s profession, “that you would be able to paint a portrait of me in your present condition?”

  “No,” said John Decker. “I don’t paint miniatures.”

  The fine was $300.

  As always with the Bundy Drive Boys, the mask of comedy hung with the mask of tragedy.

  As Anthony Quinn recalled, it was just after Barrymore’s divorce that he had “one of the most beautiful moments I have ever experienced.” The site was Bella Vista, and that night the gang sat in Barrymore’s “dressing room” and talked of their favorite literary passages. “Everyone in that room had experienced success, except myself,” wrote Quinn in The Original Sin, “and they all knew the emptiness of success without love.” Decker recited Baudelaire. Roland Young delivered Shakespeare. Fields pantomimed.

  “But it was all sad in a way,” wrote Quinn, “because they were negating love.”

  Barrymore recited from T.S. Eliot:No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;

  Am an attendant lord, one that will do

  To swell a progress, start a scene or two…

  At times, indeed, almost ridiculous —

  Almost, at times, the Fool.

  Quinn was shocked to see what Barrymore felt about himself. He had not yet recited, and the Bundy Boys began clapping in rhythm, goading him to perform. “Barrymore looked at me as if to say: Have the courage to stand up among these monsters,” remembered Quinn, and he recited the Gettysburg Address for what he called “the most frightening audience I have ever faced.”

  “Oh shit,” said Decker, while Fields, as Quinn put it, “made some derisive gesture as if I had just spoken about the Holy Trinity at a Jewish wedding.” But Barrymore was crying.

  “The only trouble is that the little shit believes it; he believes in those fucking words,” said Barrymore. The room hushed.

  “Well, kid, I hope they don’t disillusion you,” said the very disillusioned John Barrymore.

  Anthony Quinn recalled that his wife Katherine didn’t approve of his friendship with the Bundy Drive Boys — indeed, few of the wives of these men admired the gang. The drinking, the cynicism, the self-destructiveness — all were actually frightening in a colony which was already frightening in so many ways.

  Chapter Fourteen

  1941: A Match for “All the Tribes of Hell”

  Thus went Sadakichi’s letter from Banning in the spring of 1941, a colorful and in some ways deeply tragic year for the Bundy Drive Boys.

  As Gene Fowler admitted, John Decker was suicidal, vowing “to hang himself from one of the brown crossbeams of his studio.” Instead, Decker poured his torment into a new painting: The Royal Vagabond, based on a still of John Barrymore in clown makeup from 1927’s The Beloved Rogue. Barrymore, naturally, had made himself a rather creepy clown, but Decker embellished the grotesquerie. The satanic merrymaker with a tiny top hat and a cabbage head atop his scepter now smiled wickedly at the Bundy Drive studio, and rather than take his own life, Decker had created a new masterpiece.

  The Bundy Drive Boys hailed The Royal Vagabond as Decker’s latest triumph, and Phyllis — with a certain reluctance, based on her expression — agreed to pose for a photograph beside it. The surviving photo is striking, for the Barrymore clown seems to be eyeing and leering at the lovely blonde lady who shares the photo. “Everybody wanted to fuck Phyllis,” recalls Phil Rhodes.

  John Barrymore’s films had descended a long way from the epic magnitude of The Beloved Rogue. January of ’41 saw the release of Universal’s The Invisible Woman, with John as a comic mad scientist, performing a grand lampoon of Lionel. Later in the year came Paramount’s World Premiere, a pale shadow of Twentieth Century, with Barrymore as Duncan DeGrasse, head of Miracle Pictures (“If It’s a Good Picture, It’s a Miracle”).

  As David Carradine tells the story, it was during the filming of one of Barrymore’s final films — he isn’t sure which one — that the producers came up with a novel idea to keep him sober for shooting. They engaged a dazzling hooker, arranged for her to entertain Barrymore at a cabin in the Malibu mountains for the weekend, and directed her to provide him with all variety of sex — just keep him away from alcohol so he’d be able to work Monday morning. Friday night in the mountain cabin, Barrymore told the lady he was into bondage and asked if he might tie her up. Once he did, he got in the car, drove 30 miles back to Hollywood and hit the bars. Sunday night, a producer saw Barrymore at a watering hole — the actor’s short-term memory had wiped away any recall of his obliging prostitute. The producer sped out to the cabin in Malibu, where he found the outfoxed hooker still tightly bound, and shrieking colorful prof
anities.

  Anthony Quinn, fiercely ambitious, had moved to 2045 DeMille Drive in Los Feliz, near the homes of his father-in-law Cecil B. DeMille and Bundy Drive Boy crony W.C. Fields.

  Anthony Quinn was at 20th Century-Fox, working on Blood and Sand as Tyrone Power’s rival in the ring and boudoir. Quinn’s wife Katherine had gone to a beauty salon and a dressmaker to prepare for a screen test. While they were away on this Ides of March, their two-and-a-half-year-old son Christopher escaped the attention of his nurse and wandered outside the house. The blond boy managed to toddle down the hill to the W.C. Fields estate where he saw a toy sailboat floating in the fish pond. Police later assumed the sailboat had attracted the delighted child, who played with it on the water until a breeze blew it beyond his reach. When Christopher tried to retrieve the boat, he lost his balance, fell into the pond, and drowned.

  Realizing the child was missing, the nurse called the police. An hour search ensued until DeMille’s gardener, Frank Richards, saw the white shirt of the boy in the pond. The Fire Department rescue squad, headed by Chief Ralph Watson, raced to the site and worked for two hours trying to revive the child.

  The Los Angeles Times, reporting the tragedy the next day (with a photograph of the sailboat in the pond), noted that Katherine could not be reached at the time of the drowning. But Anthony Quinn was:The father… was not spared the crushing blow. For friends reached him by telephone at the studio and he rushed to the boy’s side in time to see a doctor place his stethoscope in his pocket, shake his head and turn away.

  “He is dead.”

  The words stunned Quinn, who stood speechless. Then the 180-pound actor fell on his knees, his body shaking violently as he sobbed.

  “God, how I worshipped that boy!” Quinn wrote in his 1995 memoir, One Man Tango. He wrote he had never spoken of Christopher’s death in over 50 years, even to therapists, but now in his book he recalled the horrible day:Some of the details I do not even remember. Others are etched into my every waking moment… When they came to get me I thought it a cruel hoax. No! To my own son? No! I lashed out, vowing to kill the fucking nanny we had hired to look after him. I would kill her with my own hands. I would see her deported, or fired, or left to suffer the way she had left us to suffer. I screamed for revenge.

  Cecil DeMille had come to the scene, watching the resuscitation efforts with tears in his eyes. After the boy was pronounced dead, his grandfather, according to the Los Angeles Times, “reached under the blue blankets which were placed over the body and took the boy’s head in his hands.”

  Quinn raged, and then he shut down. His denial was so complete that he didn’t go to Christopher’s funeral and admitted in One Man Tango that he had never been to the cemetery, Hollywood Forever, where Christopher Quinn is buried below a flat marker a few yards away from the lakeside mausoleum of Cecil B. DeMille and his wife. Quinn (who fathered many more children) wrote that, over the years, he had created an entire mythos for his late son — that Christopher was a San Francisco architect, married with children of his own.

  Katherine — as Quinn wrote — was “never the same.” Quinn’s Bundy Drive friends offered their condolences, but Quinn would not accept them. Most devastated of all the friends was W.C. Fields, who had been away at the time of the accident but arrived home in time to witness the terrible scene of grief. According to James Curtis’s W.C. Fields: A Biography, “the image of the boy’s lifeless body haunted him.” A very drunk Fields told his friend Eddie Dowling at Romanoff’s, “Imagine a little kid. Imagine him drowning in my pool,” and that Fields saw Christopher Quinn’s death as some sort of cosmic punishment — “I kind of feel it’s because of some of the things I’ve done.”

  “I want to get out of this cesspool!” a distraught Fields suddenly exclaimed in the midst of Romanoff’s, and as Dowling remembered, “he gets up and he screeches and yells and carries on like mad, calling everybody names…”

  W.C. Fields drained his fish pond and never refilled it. As Ronald J. Fields says:Magda Michael, my grandfather’s secretary, remembered that he kept rose bushes. When he left DeMille Drive, the last thing W.C. did was cut off one of the roses and toss it into the empty pond.

  If a residue of bitterness added itself to Anthony Quinn’s characteristic rage after Christopher’s death, he found comfort and amusement via his friends at Bundy Drive. John Barrymore’s sardonic spirit was especially inspiring.

  One of Quinn’s favorite sagas involved the night he accompanied John Decker, Gene Fowler and Barrymore — shortly before the latter’s 1942 death — to Earl Carroll’s nightclub in Hollywood. Barrymore was almost denied admittance due to not wearing a tie, and borrowed one from the nightclub captain. As the foursome sipped champagne down front by the stage, a spotlight suddenly hit the table and the M.C., announcing a surprise, lured the ailing Barrymore to the stage.

  “Mr. Barrymore,” smiled the M.C., “the highest honor we can pay you is to let you dance a waltz with the most beautiful Earl Carroll girl.”

  The girl made her entrance — described by Quinn as “one of the ugliest, most clownish apparitions ever seen,” complete with blacked-out teeth and fright wig. The audience howled with laughter.

  Barrymore whispered something to his partner. She looked startled, stopped the clowning, straightened, and the waltz began. “She was transformed,” recalled Quinn, and she danced elegantly, as if Barrymore in his old role of Svengali, had hypnotized her. As the “strange, macabre dance” continued, the audience sensed the magic — as Quinn remembered, “It was like watching something terribly personal happening before your eyes.”

  The waltz ended, Barrymore kissed the lady’s hand, and she walked proudly into the wings. Barrymore moved to the microphone.

  “And as for you, ladies and gentlemen,” said John Barrymore, “you can all go fuck yourselves.”

  Following a brief stunned silence, the crowd — having witnessed a Barrymore miracle — stood and cheered the man who had cursed them.

  Thomas Mitchell may very well have been enjoying his “Rembrandt” at his Hollywood home, but 1941 was a near-fatal year for him. On April 21, Mitchell, playing Daniel Webster in RKO’s The Devil and Daniel Webster, was in a terrible accident as the buggy in which he was riding overturned. Mitchell suffered a concussion, and there was concern he might not survive. In time, Mitchell recovered, but not fast enough for RKO — the studio replaced him with Edward Arnold. (The sharp-eyed can still glimpse Mitchell in some of The Devil and Daniel Webster’s long shots.)

  Throughout 1941, John Barrymore continued as a regular on Rudy Vallee’s radio show. Lionel, whose own financial situation was ever precarious despite his MGM contract, sometimes joined the hilarity as Vallee goaded on their insult volleys. From the May 1, 1941 broadcast:Vallee: Lionel, they call your brother the Great Profile. What do they call you?

  Lionel: Nearest responsible relative who owns property!

  This particular show climaxed with a ghost from the past — John’s Richard III, in a scene with Lionel as the Duke of Clarence. They played it sincerely and powerfully; John’s cackling “Crookback” still sent a chill up the spine, and the audience gave the Barrymore brothers an ovation.

  In May, 1941, John tested for the role of Sheridan Whiteside in the film of the Broadway hit The Man Who Came to Dinner. The screen test survives, showing John playing the acerbic Whiteside in a wheelchair, with different hairstyles and dialogue selections. Lee Patrick (who in 1941 played Bogart’s girl Friday in The Maltese Falcon) appears in the test with Barrymore, who delivers his dialogue from the now always-present blackboards.

  “I may vomit,” announces Barrymore, intoning Whiteside’s opening stage line (cut from the film) with all his sardonic charm. Bette Davis, set for the female lead, begged Jack Warner to cast Barrymore. But the actor’s reputation had preceded him, the blackboards were a nuisance, and risks too high. After testing such candidates as Fredric March, Charles Laughton and Laird Cregar, Warner signed Monty Woolley, who’d created the
role of Sheridan Whiteside on Broadway.

  A postscript on The Man Who Came to Dinner and the aforementioned Laird Cregar: the 6’3”, 300-lb. Cregar had triumphed on the Los Angeles stage in Oscar Wilde in 1940, winning a 20th Century-Fox contract and scoring in such 1941 films as Blood and Sand and I Wake Up Screaming. Barrymore had seen Oscar Wilde and in the fall of 1941 attended an L.A. revival of The Man Who Came to Dinner, in which Cregar played Whiteside. Barrymore hadn’t met Cregar personally, but he wrote the young actor a fan letter on his personal stationery, with his coat-of-arms crowned serpent:Laird — my Boy —

  I’ve said it to the Masquers, and there is no possible reason why I shouldn’t repeat it to you — I may jest about the absurdities of life, but Acting is a sacred subject to me and I say this in deadly earnestness:

  You are one of the truly great young actors our stage has produced in the last ten years.

  I have watched with vast enjoyment your work in Oscar Wilde — and The Man Who Came to Dinner and saw with delight and humility — the quality that makes great actors.

  Believe me

  Most sincerely

  John Barrymore

  Laird Cregar was overjoyed. He decided to host a dinner party for Barrymore, hiring a caterer, inviting guests and engaging his mother to be hostess. Come the night of the party, Barrymore failed to show up. The food was ready. The waiting and hungry guests were drinking too heavily. Cregar was in a panic. Then, very late, John Barrymore at last arrived — completely plastered. The host was too awed to speak, and Mrs. Cregar took matters into her own hands.