There came the night at Tower Road that John Barrymore, as Diana helped him into his bed, asked his daughter to telephone a whore to come to the house. Diana protested. They fought.
“Don’t be so goddamn finishing school, Miss!” snarled Barrymore.
Diana made the call. The whore came — “blonde and pretty,” as Diana recalled. She had been there before and knew the way upstairs. Diana left and slammed the door. “How could he do that!” she ranted in Too Much, Too Soon. “How could he ask his own daughter! How could he!”
They were, as Diana put it, “strangers again.” Then, two weeks later, Diana received an after-midnight call from John Decker.
“Your father’s here. He’s asking for you.”
Diana had no affection for Decker. She drove to Bundy Drive, where a “bleakly silent” Decker stood at the fireplace. Paper, drawings and liquor bottles littered the table, where “two heavily made-up blondes,” whom Diana regarded as “common as cat-meat,” sat purring.
Barrymore, in a drunken stupor, sat on the sofa.
“You’re supposed to be his friend,” Diana scolded Decker. “You know he’s not to have sex or liquor. Why do you get girls for him?”
“Well, as I live and breathe,” wheezed Barrymore mockingly as Diana took his arm. “If it isn’t Miss Newport.”
He walked, Diana recalled, like a man going to his grave, and she got him in her car to drive him home. They drove silently in the after-midnight darkness up Tower Road, ascending to the ruins of Bella Vista. Diana had once considered it “a fairy tale castle,” but now virtually everything about it was dark and sinister. The accursed totem pole loomed in the night (on a recent visit, Decker had noted a raven roosting in its top head). The now-mocking stained glass window of an angelic John and Dolores, the unkept aviary with its stuffed animals and crocodile… everything about the site seemed nightmarish. The pool, which Barrymore had filled for Diana, was empty again, and a single spotlight was shining on it.
In Too Much, Too Soon, Diana related that she suggested to “Daddy” that they not see each other for a while. He invited her in to “check up” — “Maybe your old Daddy’s hidden a young lady to diddle with.”
“You bore me,” she said, close to tears.
“You bore me as much as I bore you,” said the father to his daughter. “Good night.”
This was only the public version. Diana later told Gene Fowler that, on that horrible night up at Bella Vista, John Barrymore tried to lure Diana to go to bed with him.
Presumably she didn’t.
The final collapse of alcoholic, incontinent, impecunious John Barrymore came on Tuesday evening, May 19, 1942, at a rehearsal for the Rudy Vallee show. There are at least two versions. Gene Fowler wrote in Good Night, Sweet Prince that Barrymore, ill and wandering lost in the NBC Studios after the rehearsal, by chance landed in the dressing room of John Carradine. Fowler reported that Carradine had opened the night before in The Vagabond King as King Louis XI, that he had asked Barrymore’s advice on playing the role, that he brought the newspapers with the reviews to the studio, and that Carradine himself had just completed a guest spot on Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy’s The Chase and Sanborn Hour.
“You could get away with anything, you lean, cadaverous bastard!” Carradine remembered Barrymore telling him. “You could play…” And he broke off, gasping.
There are several problems with this account that ace newspaperman Gene Fowler should have checked. Carradine had opened in The Vagabond King at the Los Angeles Philharmonic May 11, not May 18; also, the night of Barrymore’s collapse was a Tuesday and The Chase and Sanborn Hour aired on Sundays, and a review of the May 19, 1942 radio programming shows no special episode of Bergen and McCarthy on that date. John Decker later protested to Fowler that he shouldn’t have written that Barrymore had fallen in Carradine’s dressing room because Carradine was too unimportant, and his dressing room was an unworthy site for the ultimately fatal collapse of a titan such as Barrymore. Neither Fowler nor Decker apparently suspected that John Carradine, whose flair for fanciful tales would confound many a film historian, had made up the story — along with Barrymore’s salute to his acting ability.
More believable is the account that Barrymore, hamming it up at rehearsal, had just recited Romeo’s “Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon” when he collapsed into Rudy Vallee’s arms. “I guess this is one time I miss my cue,” said Jack, tears running down his face. Dr. Hugo Kersten, always on call at NBC just in case Barrymore collapsed at the studio, drove the star to Hollywood Hospital, where John Barrymore was admitted. He had $.60 in his pocket.
The death watch began.
Lionel camped across the hall, moaning “Why in God’s name can’t I do something for him?” He filled in for Jack on the May 21st Rudy Valle Sealtest Show. (“He should have told Sealtest and Vallee to go to hell,” wrote Barrymore biographer Margot Peters.) John Decker and Gene Fowler were at the hospital day and night. Thomas Mitchell and Alan Mowbray kept vigil; Anthony Quinn visited, having bought Jack a Chinese carved ivory boat he knew his friend had wanted (“You little shit, how did you know?” asked Jack, weeping). W.C. Fields sent a wire: “YOU CAN’T DO THIS TO ME.”
Dolores called. Diana came to the hospital, where only once did her delirious father seem to recognize her, saying “Treepee.” And Elaine Barrie came back, telephoning daily and sending flowers — although Lionel blockaded her from actually laying eyes on her ex-husband.
Phil Rhodes, 65 years after Barrymore’s death, still marvels at the “positive energy” the man radiated. There was a remarkable spirituality within him, always at war with the self-destructiveness, and now, on his deathbed, he received the Last Rites of his Catholic faith. The sacrament, administered by old family friend Rev. John O’Donnell, supposedly came at the urging of Lionel. Still, it’s significant that Jack accepted it, and that he rallied later enough to joke with his priest.
“Father,” moaned Jack, “I have carnal thoughts.”
“About who?” marveled Fr. O’Donnell.
“Her!” said Jack, indicating his old, plain nurse — who blushed.
Fields and Barrymore IV the Bombay, by Decker
Thursday, May 28, was Barrymore’s tenth day in the hospital. He asked for Gene Fowler — “Will you hold my hand while I sleep?” asked the dying man. He lapsed in and out of consciousness, spoke incoherently, talked of his children, and murmured “Mummum, Mummum” over and over - — the love for his grandmother, without whom he had never felt safe, still fervent. Then, as Fowler wrote in Good Night, Sweet Prince:“Lean over me,” he said quite clearly. “I want to ask you something.”
I was unprepared for other than some last request by a dying man. I should have foreseen that this mighty fellow would not surrender with a sentimental, prosaic statement. The cocked-up eyebrow should have warned me that mischief never sickened in his soul.
“Tell me,” he asked, “is it true you are the illegitimate son of Buffalo Bill?”
Come his final agonies, John Barrymore was indeed “The Monster.” He so ripped at his eczema-inflamed skin that nurses put white mittens on his hands - “It was as though he had put on the boxing gloves to meet the dark foe,” wrote Fowler. He fought so manically, with such mad spirit that the nurses had to restrain him. His breathing, as Fowler wrote, “came like the sound made by a knife-blade being ground on a stone wheel.” Fowler couldn’t look at him any more. He sat across the hall, hearing Barrymore deliriously crying out, and at one point Lionel hobbled into the room.
“What did you say, Jake?” asked Lionel.
“You heard me, Mike,” said Barrymore, presumably his last coherent words.
His real-life death scene, as it had been in Richard III and Hamlet, was epic. At nine o’ clock on the night of Friday, May 29, John Decker entered the room and caught the majesty and horror in his famous deathbed sketch.
“Mummum,” he cried, time and again.
At 10:20 p.m., John Barrymore die
d. The causes of death were acute myocarditis, due to chronic nephritis, due to cirrhosis of the liver. He had lasted, quite amazingly, 60 years, three months and 15 days.
In John Barrymore’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the moving fade-out showed the diabolic Hyde morphing in death into an angelic Jekyll. In his own life and death, John Barrymore’s corpse underwent the Jekyll and Hyde redemptive magic.
Diana Barrymore, on the night of her father’s death, was at Hollywood’s Pantages Theatre and the premiere of Eagle Squadron. A motorcycle escort delivered her to Hollywood Hospital after word had reached her that the end was near, but she arrived too late to see her father alive. Fowler, Decker and her Uncle Lionel had all left their vigil, and Diana accepted the doctor’s invitation to see her estranged father in death. She remembered in Too Much, Too Soon that she went into the room “by myself and closed the door and looked down at my dead father”:Mother had once said, “When he was young, your father was the most beautiful man that ever lived. He looked like a young archangel, divinely beautiful.”
I began to cry. I was looking at the man she had described. Perhaps I wouldn’t have cried then had he looked old and withered. But he looked young! Lying there, his hands crossed on his breast as they had been placed by the priest who gave him the last rites, he looked like the young Hamlet, the young, dead Hamlet… All my life I had seen my father’s photographs, and now it seemed I saw him as he must have looked in the roles he made immortal. For death had done something subtle and wonderful to him: his chins were gone, his jowls were gone, everything of age and dissipation was gone… He lay in death like a beautiful young man!
Thank God, I thought, Death took him that way, not as the old, broken shell of a man he used to say he was. He used to tell me, “I’m an old gadzooks — I’m nothing any more.” And I used to say to him “Oh, no, Daddy, don’t think that way!” But he had no confidence, no anything, about his own soul, his own heart, his own destiny. But when he was dead, he was beautiful!
Diana became hysterical. Screaming, she had to be dragged from the room.
When Gene Fowler realized Barrymore would very likely die this time, he planned to set the hands of an old cuckoo clock that Barrymore had liked, and that had been broken for two years, at the time that his friend died. He wrote in his foreword to Good Night, Sweet Prince that, as he moved to set the hands of the clock that morning at the tributary time, it wasn’t necessary: “The hands of the clock,” he wrote, “had stood for more than two years at ten-twenty.”
Dr. Hugo Kersten had been Barrymore’s final physician, and Dr. V.L. Andrews performed the autopsy. Dr. Andrews concluded his findings jocularly; he wrote that the case was an equation of “WINE WOMEN SONG,” noting “A recent comment which I heard was to the effect that this particular individual was not buried after his death, he was just poured back into a bottle.” The doctor also added some mathematical statistics, based on 40 years of drinking (very conservative in Barrymore’s case):40 years of drinking with an average minimum of 10 two ounce drinks daily.
One year — 7,300 oz — 249 qts. — 80 gal.
40 years of life — 292,000 oz — 10,000 qts. - — 3,200 gals. or 640 barrels.
The Pierce Brothers Chapel, 720 W. Washington Boulevard, would prepare the body and host the wake. The death of Barrymore spawned one of the great apocryphal tales of Hollywood lore — the kidnapping of his corpse by Raoul Walsh and the Bundy Drive Boys, who claimed to have taken the cadaver to Errol Flynn’s Mulholland Farm house for one last drink. Flynn himself included the saga (and apparently originated it) in his memoir, My Wicked, Wicked Ways. Yet there was no abduction. The only abnormality was that, during the viewing, Gene Fowler and his son Will kept an all-night vigil, and Jane Jones, the aforementioned 300-lb. hooker, paid a middle-of-the night call. As Margot Peters wrote of Jane Jones in The House of Barrymore:She asked to spend ten minutes before the bier, where she knelt with difficulty and prayed. Jack was a great patron of prostitutes. He would have appreciated one praying over him.
The morning after Barrymore died, Gene Fowler received a phone call from Sadakichi Hartmann who began arguing that Holbein had been left-handed. He said nothing about Barrymore’s passing. Fowler hung up on him. Later, in his usual compassionate way, Fowler regretted his rudeness, believing that Sadakichi’s “cynical show of indifference at the death of a friend had meant to conceal a real sense of personal loss.”
Maybe.
The John Barrymore funeral was, of course, a Hollywood spectacle.
“Camera-armed spectators stalk film stars at John Barrymore’s funeral,” headlined one L.A. paper. The locale was the Catholic Calvary Cemetery in Whittier, east of Los Angeles. The Rev. John O’Donnell, who had administered the Last Rites to Barrymore, led the casket into the chapel, and the pallbearers included Bundy Drive habitués John Decker, W.C. Fields, and Gene Fowler, as well as E. J. Mannix, C.J. Briden and Stanley Campbell. Fields served under protest. Fowler came to his home the morning of the funeral, found Fields in a virtual crib with slatted sides to keep him from falling out during the night; “lying there in his nightclothes,” recalled Fowler, “he resembled nothing so much as a wicked baby.”
“The time to carry a pal,” said Fields, “is when he’s still alive.” Nevertheless, he reluctantly agreed, but only if he could drive there in his chauffeured 16-cylinder Cadillac, fully stocked with his “necessary tonics.”
A number of Bundy Drive Boys were “honorary pallbearers”: Ben Hecht, Thomas Mitchell, Alan Mowbray and Roland Young. Also marching as honorary pallbearers were playwright Edward Sheldon, Charles MacArthur, Herbert Marshall, George M. Cohan, newspaper editor Herbert Bayward Swope, and writer/director Arthur Hopkins, as well as Diana’s fiancé, Bramwell Fletcher.
There were either 1,000 to 2,000 people at the funeral (newspaper accounts varied). Diana, all in black, never resembled her father as strongly as she does in news photos from the funeral; the mourning daughter attended with her Uncle Lionel, who — ever stoic — abandoned his crutches to stand with Diana. “Well, it’s a nice day for Jack,” said Lionel as he emerged from the car — the first time he had spoken to Diana during the trip to Calvary Cemetery.
There was Elaine — the fourth Mrs. John Barrymore and the only ex-wife to attend the funeral. “Ariel” attended with her mother Edna, who had insisted Jack had preferred her in bed to Elaine; considering his Freudian hang-up, perhaps he had. Both women wore (in the purple prose of the Los Angeles Examiner), “unrelieved black.” They were among the last to arrive, and as Elaine walked up the chapel steps, clinging to Edna’s arm, a strangely appropriate accident happened: her dress rose up on the right side, almost above her knee, as if heralding one last peep show for the star of How to Undress in Front of Your Husband.
The members of the public battled for camera vantage points and, as the hysteria soared, some of the Circus Maximus crowd broke through the rope barriers, forcing security to subdue them. Inside the chapel, which could seat only 75 guests, a Bundy Drive Boy was providing his own show, as producer/writer Nunnally Johnson remembered:The first thing I saw when I walked in was old John Carradine sitting there, rocking back and forth and keening so you could hear him all over the church.
Anthony Quinn was in the chapel, as was Helen Costello, Dolores’ sister, and her father Maurice Costello (whom Jack had called “my favorite ex-father-in-law”). Louis B. Mayer attended, and Cecil B. DeMille, but Jack would surely have been happier to note the presence of Mark Nishimura, his Japanese gardener, who had been sent with his family to the internment camp at Manzanar. The Los Angeles Times reported that Lionel Barrymore had arranged “Nishi’s” temporary release to attend the rites.
Although John Barrymore was a death-bed Catholic, there was no Requiem Mass, but simply a prayer service. Two towering crosses of white flowers loomed on the altar, and three tall candles burned on either side of Barrymore’s silver-plated copper casket, which was covered by a fern blanket with a huge spray of orchids. The Rev. O’Donn
ell intoned the ancient prayers:Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord. Let perpetual light shine upon him.
There was no eulogy, but had there been, it was ironically Elaine Barrie Barrymore who captured John Barrymore with the most insight and forgiveness: “You couldn’t really hate him because he was such an abomination to himself.”
The burial site was in the Calvary’s Main Mausoleum, block 352, but before the body was sealed into the bottom-row crypt, W.C. Fields had reached the end of his stamina. “Let’s blow,” he whispered in Gene Fowler’s ear. Their departure from Calvary Cemetery was not without incident. Some children, recognizing Fields, darted under the restraining ropes and pursued him for his autograph.
“Get away from me, you little bastards!” shouted Fields. “For two cents, I’d kick in your teeth! Back to reform school, you little nose-pickers!”
En route back to the movie colony, Fields and Fowler saw Earl Carroll in one of the funeral limousines. They invited him to join them and Carroll obliged. He accepted a martini from Fields, and then noted the glasses. The label on them read “Earl Carroll’s” — Fields had pilfered them from the impresario’s nightclub.
The mourners all left Calvary Cemetery with their own private emotions.
Lionel, on his way back with Diana, stunned her when he made the comment, “Yes, Miss Barrie knew him better.” His remark, which Diana found “cryptic” and “rebuking,” seemingly inferred that a monstrously ambitious young shrew had known John Barrymore better than his own daughter. Margot Peters believes that Lionel (who eventually carved “Good Night, Sweet Prince” on his brother’s crypt) was talking about himself, regretful that he hadn’t been the brother he should have been.
Hollywood's Hellfire Club: The Misadventures of John Barrymore, W.C. Fields, Errol Flynn and the Bundy Drive Boys Page 23