Entertaining at the party: John Carradine performed for the guests — à la John Barrymore — Gene Fowler poems such as “The Cowboy’s Lament:”O! Bessie Bond, the vicious courtesan,
‘Twas she who wrecked the noble Ku Klux Klan.
Each knight who flipped her garter
Became a crippled martyr —
Oh! God-Damn old Bessie Bond, the courtesan!
And, of course, “The Testament of a Dying Ham”:
To the poseurs who simulate talent —
The nances, the Lesbian corps,
The cultists, the faddists, the blustering sadists,
The slime of the celluloid shore…
Carradine’s Barrymore impression was a remarkable show, and as Bill Wickersham reported, “His most delighted listeners were John and Lionel Barrymore.”
There was, of course, mockery of Hollywood in Carradine’s mad mimicry, Fowler’s sardonic verse and Decker’s brilliant art — but if the guests realized it, they didn’t mind. It was a raucous, wonderful night. Flowing liquor. Beautiful, laughing women. Famous, admiring men. Striking art. A smiling, triumphant artist.
John Decker had fully and officially arrived in Hollywood — just in time for World War II.
December 7, 1941: Pearl Harbor. Most of the Bundy Drive gang, of course, were too old to be soldiers.
Errol Flynn, the prime specimen, was also 4-F, due to an early bout with malaria and a touch of tuberculosis — a considerable embarrassment to Warner Bros. and to Flynn himself. John Carradine, 35 at the time, very much wanted to fight, but was rejected (according to son David) due to his teeth. “I’m not planning to bite the Japs!” protested Carradine, who sailed his yacht Bali as part of the coastal patrol.
The youngest Bundy Drive Boy — Anthony Quinn, 26 at the time of Pearl Harbor — was not a U.S. citizen (he became one in 1947) and hence was exempt from the draft.
Home Defense called for any man under 60 to sign up, and the Santa Monica registration site had a surprise one day when in came 59-year-old John Barrymore (wracked by alcoholism and a repertory company of ailments), 51-year-old Gene Fowler (who had cardiac trouble and still walked with a stick two years after his near-death car accident), 45-year-old John Decker (gaunt from his diabetes) and 61-year-old W.C. Fields (prepared to lie about his age). W.C. was especially picturesque — looking “like the wrath of John Barleycorn,” as Fowler put it — complete with a wad of cornplaster on his bulbous nose after it had blistered and exploded during a fishing trip to Catalina. The “sweet-faced young woman” who handled registration eyed this incredibly motley crew.
“Gentlemen, who sent you?” she asked. “The enemy?”
Barrymore painting praising the spiritual ascendancy of women that he later destroyed in an Elaine-inspired fit
Chapter Fifteen
The Death of John Barrymore
I direct my executors to take all necessary steps and for this purpose to employ such doctors or other skilled persons as they may think proper and to pay any bills incurred by anyone otherwise interested in any way whatsoever and to cooperate fully with any such person who may wish to do so for the purpose of ascertaining that I am in fact dead and not in any other state having the semblance of death, in order so far as possible to avoid all risk of my being buried alive…
— From the Last Will and Testament of John Barrymore, December 30, 1941
John Decker’s deathbed sketch of John Barrymore is perhaps his most famous work, and likely his most heartfelt. Magnificent and nightmarish, it evokes a fallen god, or ravaged demon. The sketch (originally done on brown wrapping paper) captures, naturally, Barrymore’s left profile, but Decker also does magical things with the one mad, visible eye, almost rolled up into the head, the shadows so black as to seem the garish makeup of a whore, and seemingly glaring defiantly at the heavens.
Yet perhaps the most startling thing about the deathbed sketch is Barrymore’s Is right hand, resting below his chest. The actor had despised his stubby, ungraceful hands, and Decker makes a monster of the hand, as if it’s some awful deep sea creature… or a spider, grossly parasitic, horribly vigilant on the dying man’s torso and impatient to gobble up the corpse. One remembers the vignette in the 1920 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in which a giant spider crawls up into Jekyll’s bed, evaporates into him, and causes Jekyll to awake as Hyde. Barrymore’s hand in the Death Bed sketch chillingly reminds one of that spectral spider, no longer playing a symbolic Hyde, but Death itself.
By 1942, “Mad Jack,” AKA “The Monster,” was free-falling into either the snake pit or the grave.
His film career was over, his personal life was in ruins and his Hollywood reputation that of a fun-house mirror grotesque. The cinema colony now noted him less for his Hamlet, more for his prodigious pissing in public. His fear of ending his days and nights in an asylum à la his goat-suckled father was now merciless.
It was the compassionate Gene Fowler who tried to allay his friend’s deepest fear. Fowler pointed out, cynically but truthfully, that a crazy man with no money was likely heading for the psycho ward, but a crazy man earning $2,000 a week, as Barrymore continued to do via his raucous weekly humiliations on The Rudy Vallee Show, was safe. His creditors simply couldn’t afford to surrender him. Of course, Fowler, with his love for Barrymore, tried to persuade him that, whatever the situation, he personally would never allow his friend to suffer what had always promised to be the climax of his lifelong torment.
Yet the fear wouldn’t go away. It had been haunting him for too many years. The self-destruction continued. As Barrymore told John Carradine, he wasn’t a good enough Catholic to go to Mass every Sunday, but he was too good a Catholic to commit suicide — at least instant suicide.
For a man whose greatest acting achievement and most agonizing personal torment lie rooted in incest — a new tragedy, masquerading as a blessing, came to enflame his final days and nights.
Diana Barrymore, with less self-ravaging genes, might have been a major star. Everything was slightly off in her packaging. She almost had a great “look” — the face and mane of a classical actress — but the jaw was too thick, the hair usually pinned up. She had an attractive figure — her slightly full hips and plump legs were typical of the ladies of the early 1940s, yet she photographed portly. She had talent, but the underplayed style of 1942 movies doused her fire, making her seem merely haughty and affected. The lady herself was immediately aware the camera wasn’t in love with her at the preview of her first film, Eagle Squadron.
“… under Stanley Cortez’s lighting magic,” she remembered in her famed 1957 memoir Too Much, Too Soon, “my crooked nose remained crooked but a railing emerged as a work of art.”
She had come to Hollywood for Universal Studios in January of 1942, following her success in Broadway’s The Land is Bright. Bramwell Fletcher, “Little Billee” in 1931’s Svengali , had proposed to her the day before she left for the West Coast, and Diana accepted. John was at the railroad station to greet her as she disembarked holding her puppy Moko.
“Are you going to be good?” Diana whispered into her father’s ear as the press took pictures.
“Of course not,” said Barrymore.
“Good,” smiled Diana. “Neither am I.”
During her first day in the movie colony, Diana drove with her famous father and Karl Steuver up to Bella Vista, which she described as “a castle out of a fairyland hanging from the crest of a precipitous mountain.” It disturbed her, however, that Barrymore and Steuver were the only inhabitants of the “castle, aside from John’s beloved afghan Viola. Diana was moved that Barrymore had been up all night preparing her room, filling it with fresh flowers. He’d also refilled the pool. She had not moved in (at least not yet); her mother, Michael Strange, perhaps sensing the debacle that would indeed eventually come, had forbidden her to stay with her father.
That evening, Diana met her first “Bundy Boy.” Father and daughter dined at Romanoff’s, and John Carradine came to the table, kissing
Diana’s cheek, she recalled, “with almost Victorian politeness.” Diana wanted to meet her Uncle Lionel, and Carradine, in what Diana called his “ancient Packard,” drove them out to the ranch in Chatsworth. Lionel received them upstairs in bed. They drank champagne, and John requested that Carradine recite “The Testament of a Dying Ham” for Lionel. Carradine “shot a glance at me,” remembered Diana, “decided I didn’t shock easily, and immediately launched into a long, ribald and enormously witty poem.”
To the wenches who trumped up a passion
And held a first lien on my cot,
To the simpering starlets and gleet-ridden harlots
Whose sables were masking their rot…
Many in Hollywood considered Diana Barrymore “a simpering starlet,” with only a flash of her father’s talent and just enough of his madness to be a nuisance. She was in place for the fireworks and burlesque antics of John Barrymore’s Last Act, a color-ful featured player in the tragedy, with both father and daughter, despite an originally benign reunion, sadly inspiring the worst in each other.
The famous deathbed sketch by John Decker
In fact, there’s some evidence that the sexual aberration that would drive them apart was reciprocal. Perhaps more memorable than any of her eminently forgettable movies was a candid shot taken of father and daughter together at this time. A voluptuous Diana, her hair loose, mouth sensual, perversely sits on her father’s lap, arm around his shoulder, her cheek against his forehead, with a seeming sense of naughty awareness. Barrymore, his “fried egg” right profile to the camera, his face just above her breasts, sits sadly but smolderingly, the aged, debauched star — tormented most of his life by incestuous memories and urges — seemingly scenting a new temptation.
The reunion would end, as many had predicted, sadly and sordidly.
In 1942, Barrymore visited Errol Flynn’s “Mulholland Farm,” and stayed for a time. He also came and sojourned at John Carradine’s house, 5433 Ben Avenue, on the outskirts of North Hollywood. Other times he crashed at Bundy Drive. It was truly Mad Jack’s travelin’ freak show now, and at each stop, he had the habit of pissing out the windows.
“He’ll soil your best carpets and send women screaming out of the room!” lamented the usually unshockable Decker, who recalled a night at a hamburger stand where Barrymore, feeling passion for the waitress (“a blowsy bitch with a wart on her nose,” quoth Decker), crawled after her over the counter, shrieking, “My last Duchess! Hoist your dresses, Madam, and let me see Epping Forest again!” As Decker put it, “We had to run for it.”
Ben Hecht was in Hollywood again, working profitably on such 20th Century-Fox scripts as Tales of Manhattan and The Black Swan. He found Barrymore restlessly napping on the couch at 419 N. Bundy and shouting for the host. “Goddam your arsehole of a couch, Decker!” roared the awakened Barrymore. “This shambles of a couch is not fit for a pair of midgets to fuck on! Out of what swill barrel do you furnish your disgusting habitat?”
He fell back to sleep and Hecht proposed to Decker the idea of a spectacular Barrymore birthday party.
“In some sewer, I hope?” asked Decker.
The site was Hecht’s expensive rented home, and the only way to get the major Hollywood names there was to be mysterious about the party’s purpose. When word leaked about just who the guest of honor was, prior to his arrival, there was much grousing. “They’ll crucify him!” warned Dr. Samuel Hirshfeld, the actor’s physician. Decker, uncharacteristically cowed by the potential disaster of the night, had the job of delivering Barrymore to the party, and arrived “red and squinting with tension.” Barrymore, in a tuxedo, appeared perfectly composed.
The night proceeded quietly, until Louis B. Mayer threw down the gauntlet. He taunted Barrymore about his bad behavior at MGM, noting that it surely had caught up with him. One wishes Barrymore had launched into a verse from “The Testament of a Dying Ham”:To the mountebank clan of producers,
Who hang their dull stars in the skies,
Who rifle the pockets and gouge the eye-sockets,
But never look higher than thighs…
Diana and Daddy
Instead, rather than responding directly to the almighty Louis B., Barrymore talked of his pilgrimage to India — “Have you never in your life yearned to meet a saint?” he asked Mayer — and proceeded to reminisce about a Calcutta whorehouse, the Kama Sutra (“which teaches that there are 39 different postures for the worship of DingleDangle — the God of Love”), and how he had opened in London as Hamlet drunk and besotted from an afternoon tryst, and, between soliloquies, vomited in the wings. All in all, the evening was a strikingly touching mix of spirituality and sordidness, intellect and irreverence that characterized John Barrymore. Mr. Hyde peeked out again, as Barrymore even took a shot at Decker:Yes, I was a triumph in London. I have never kept a scrapbook of my questionable activities as a man of grease paint. But there’s one set of dramatic notices I have saved. I still have them, unless my good friend Decker here has sold them to keep himself in liquor.
As Ben Hecht wrote, “He glared at poor Decker, who was sharing his few desperately earned dollars with his idol.” If it had been meant as joke, neither Decker, nor the assemblage, was laughing.
Barrymore spoke of “the foolishness of fame — and the lunacy of life in general — ‘a song sung by an idiot running down the wind.’” Then he suddenly shut his eyes, and after a cold, unnerving silence, turned to Decker.
“You better take me off, Johnny,” whispered Barrymore. “I’ve gone up in my lines.”
John Decker and Ben Hecht helped him to his feet and escorted him from the room, one on each side, like guards. As Hecht wrote, “A few minutes later, the birthday cake with which I had refused to interrupt Barrymore’s storytelling was brought in. Its many candles blazed like a triumphant row of footlights.”
March 3, 1942 was Diana’s 21st birthday. She had forgotten it, busy at Universal, but Barrymore remembered, inviting her to Bella Vista for dinner and celebration. Instead, he had Karl Steuver stop at Decker’s. As Diana recalled in Too Much, Too Soon: John Decker, the artist, was one of Daddy’s great friends; he looked like an aged, incredibly decrepit Adolphe Menjou. When we arrived at his house, I walked in to find a tree and a blown-up photograph of me and under it a cake with 21 candles! Daddy was like a little boy, so delighted with his surprise. “Well, Treepee?” he asked. “How do you like your cake?”
“Oh Daddy,” I said and cried. It was the first birthday my father had ever spent with me.
Barrymore was still a regular on Rudy Vallee’s radio show, and father and daughter performed the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet together. Lionel joined them March 5, 1942 for a scene from Julius Caesar — Jack as Brutus, Lionel as Caesar, Diana as Calpurnia. Diana encouraged her father to star with her in Emlyn Williams’ The Light of Heart — he as a ravaged has-been matinee idol forced to play Santa Claus in a department store, she as his crippled daughter. Diana wanted to do it as a play, Barrymore as a film. There was no interest. “Treepee, you are going on to great things,” said Barrymore. “I am already dead.”
“I cried myself to sleep that night,” remembered Diana, “the first time in Hollywood.”
Learning Diana was engaged to Bramwell Fletcher, Barrymore personally invited him to come to Los Angeles, and put him up at Tower Road. Embarking on a camping trip to Mount Baldy, he even offered his bedroom to his daughter and her lover. As Diana remembered, 16 hours later, there came a pre-dawn pounding at the bedroom door, and Barrymore roaring, “You monsters! What are you doing in there? Get out!” When they unlocked the door, Barrymore said, “I forgot — I thought there were two other people in there.”
“For all I knew, he had,” said Diana. “You could never be sure with daddy.”
On April 7, 1942, W.C. Fields wrote to Elise Cavanna, his loose-limbed partner in The Dentist sketch and short:Dear Elise:
Pardon this long silence on my part. It was not due to remissness but I have been bus
y writing and performing in a sequence of The Tales of Manhattan . Then I got an infected great toe which the doctor says was due to kicking those Jews in the can over at Fox…
Tales of Manhattan, concerning a coat as a “hook” of various stories, starred Charles Boyer, Rita Hayworth, Henry Fonda, Charles Laughton, and Edward G. Robinson (who always wanted to be a Bundy Drive Boy, but was never admitted, according to Errol Flynn, because he took himself too seriously). Thomas Mitchell and Roland Young were in the film too, but come its release, Tales of Manhattan did not include W.C. Fields. 20th Century-Fox cut his skit (with Margaret Dumont and Phil Silvers) from the release print — possibly due to time consideration, possibly due to his battles with director Julien Duvivier, maybe both. The Fields sequence was restored a half-century later to the video release.
The day after Fields wrote his letter, April 8, Errol Flynn and Lili Damita finally divorced. “Tiger Lil,” after seven years of ravaging Flynn’s manhood and self-confidence, sashayed away with a bloodsucking financial settlement. Flynn carried on, starring in 1942 in Desperate Journey and Gentleman Jim, flashing his same old fuck-you smile. It gallantly and sensitively concealed the fact that the screen’s great cavalier had been so hurt and reduced by his first wife and by his own mother.
Hollywood's Hellfire Club: The Misadventures of John Barrymore, W.C. Fields, Errol Flynn and the Bundy Drive Boys Page 22