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

by Gregory William Mank

  The divine madness was there, but the bookings weren’t. Carradine’s envisioned coast-to-coast tour and Broadway opening never happened as the troupe went bust and the final curtain fell on his lifelong dream.

  John Carradine would pay for it, personally and professionally, for the rest of his life.

  Sonia Sorel and John Carradine

  John Barrymore’s ghost wasn’t only invoked by John Carradine’s repertory company. On December 22, 1943, the Los Angeles Times headlined “Barrymore’s Pet Dog Follows Actor in Death.” There was a picture of Gus the dachshund, profile to profile with John Decker. The story reported that Barrymore had given Gus to Decker after the dog had been lost on the Bella Vista estate, and related:Decker believes the dog was as much the actor as his master. In fact, he thinks the animal’s untimely death may have been suicide — resulting from the frustration of his dramatic talents.

  Each year, it seems, a local production company borrowed the dachshund for a light opera presentation in which the dog was carried under the arm of a woman alighting from a cab. Gus ate it up. He followed the gyrations of the orchestra leader with his head, emulating all the contortions. The audience was convulsed.

  This year, when the producer appeared at Decker’s home, where Gus was idling before the fireplace, the entrepreneur mentioned casually that they had found another dog for the role.

  “Gus got up and ambled out of the house,” said Decker. “A few minutes later a neighbor told us he had been run over by a car. He had never run in front of or after a car before.”

  Decker buried Gus under a tree in his yard.

  As 1943 ended, the Bundy Drive Boys achieved a special distinction: Viking Press published Gene Fowler’s Good Night, Sweet Prince, which introduced the gang to the readership of the bestselling John Barrymore biography.

  The cover illustration, appropriately, was the John Decker Barrymore-as-Hamlet painting that had sold to Tallulah Bankhead. Fowler’s love for Barrymore was evident throughout, yet he delicately presented the demons, limited the sordidness of the final fall, and made John Barrymore a tragic hero. Ben Hecht read the book New Year’s Eve of 1943, and wrote to Fowler January 4, 1944:You made me feel once again the one epic quality in Jack I always admired. Having elected to destroy himself and set the eagle nibbling on his own gizzard, he never cried out — never complained against God or man… The book is much more than the biography of an actor — It is the most moving saga of a stormy, twisted and brave soul I’ve ever read…

  Hecht, guessing that Fowler was suffering post-publication depression (he was), noted “… it is a mood unworthy of your achievement. You should be sitting in the Taj Mahal and planting gardenias in your navel.”

  Ardanelle Carradine was also reading Good Night, Sweet Prince on New Year’s Eve, 1943, as John told her he was madly in love with Sonia and was leaving Ardanelle and their sons to be with her.

  Allen McNeill, Will Fowler, John Decker, Sadakichi Hartmann and Gene Fowler at 419 Bundy Drive

  Chapter Seventeen

  1944: “A Superbly Weird Imagination,” Farewell to Bundy Drive, “Jesus” Walks the Pool, W.C.’s Last Popinjay and the Passing of “Chrysanthemum”

  A true artist cannot be ordered about. He goes his crotchety way, and does as he damn pleases AT ANY COST…

  - — Sadakichi Hartmann, from White Chrysanthemums

  On a cold rainy day in January of 1944, Sadakichi Hartmann sat at the Bundy Drive studio, devoured a ham sandwich, and made his prognostication on the longevity of his fellow Bundy Drive Boys: W.C. Fields would die in two years, John Decker in three years, and Gene Fowler in four years. As for Sadakichi himself, the prophet gave himself less than a year.

  As fate had it, Sadakichi nailed three of four predictions.

  1944 would prove the turning point of World War II; Hollywood was booming and vital turning points were in play, too, for the Bundy Drive Boys.

  Gene Fowler’s Good Night, Sweet Prince had become a national bestseller. There were detractors. Threatening a lawsuit, Elaine Barrie Barrymore claiming the book’s depiction of her ruined her career as an actress and caused her mother to try to jump out a window. Ethel Barrymore, who would win the 1944 Best Supporting actress Academy Award for None But the Lonely Heart, said, “I admire Gene Fowler, and I like his story of John very, very much.”

  The adulation did little to exhilarate the moody Fowler. Early in 1944, he wrote to W. C. Fields:Dear Uncle Willie,

  Thank you for your note. I am passing through a period of slight melancholia, and my recourse to the bottle only heightens it.

  I hope to see you soon and join you in your old Crow’s Nest so that we can sit and look out at the world and despise it thoroughly.

  Meanwhile, the best to you,

  Gene Fowler

  January 30, 1944: Sadakichi Hartmann put on his old camel’s hair overcoat, headed to a bar in Banning and was almost hit by a car. The penitent driver gave him a lift — which eventually took him all the way to Bundy Drive, just in time to disrupt plans for Phyllis’ birthday. It was there he made his predictions of longevity of the various Bundy Drive pals. Fowler, given four years, had agreed to finance Sadakichi’s planned trip east if the prophet gave him 10 more years.

  “I’ll even make it 12,” said Sadakichi, weighing the offer.

  “This is blackmail,” said Fowler, “but it’s a deal.”

  During his Bundy Drive stay, Sadakichi had observed Decker’s recent paintings. Now in his letter, Sadakichi saluted Decker as “a full-fledged artist,” said his new output was “so far away and beyond the shystermagoria of your ‘Old Masters’” and continued:What has suddenly come over and into you? Your sickness, isolation, loneliness, abstention from drinking? The departure of Barrymore must have something to do with this transformation. What I admire first of all is the vigorous groping for a new technique — fluency of expression and a devil-may-care nonchalance toward the medium. What I like best is the row of houses in the ghost town; the distortion and strange combination of anatomical structures; and what you call “clowns,” those gruesome bastard derelicts that I would not like to meet in life… They are so uncouth that they are the great and uncanny inventions of a superbly weird imagination.

  Yes, John Decker, you are a great painter — if you can keep it up.

  John Decker considered the missive his greatest honor. And it came at a fitting time. Decker was about to give up Bundy Drive (Fowler had been paying the rent) and move to a new home and studio at 1215 Alta Loma Drive, on the Sunset Strip, just behind the Mocambo nightclub. It would be known as the Decker-Flynn Galleries, and now Errol (who had acquired a Gauguin under Decker’s tutelage) took up the subsidy of the living expenses of John Decker and family.

  As for Sadakichi, he was about to vacate his shack in Banning and depart on his trip east, his final Odyssey. John Decker would never see Sadakichi Hartmann again.

  March 18, 1944: John Decker won a prominent art prize — the John Barton Payne Medal for his painting Circus Strong Man in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts’ exhibition of contemporary American painting. The round, bronze medal gave him great pride — although not as great as Sadakichi’s letter.

  April 7, 1944: Uncertain Glory, Errol Flynn’s only release of the year, opened at Broadway’s Strand. The saga: French criminal Errol, en route to the guillotine, escapes due to a British bombing. Pursued by detective Paul Lukas (1943’s Best Actor Oscar winner for Watch on the Rhine), he scores a heroic victory for French patriotism. Archer Winsten in his New York Post review got off the best critical crack: he wrote that Flynn rescued Faye Emerson in the film “almost before you can say ‘Geisler.’” Directed by Raoul Walsh, Uncertain Glory featured a strong performance from Flynn, but was not a box office hit.

  April 23, 1944: It was Shakespeare’s 380th birthday. John Carradine’s dream had been to premiere his “John Carradine and his Shakespeare Players” on Broadway this very night. Alas, the company had gone bust, and come the feast day of the B
ard, Carradine was set to report to Universal City, California to play Count Dracula in House of Frankenstein.

  It was “a monster rally,” with mad doctor Boris Karloff resurrecting Carradine’s bloodsucker, along with the Wolf Man (Lon Chaney) and Frankenstein’s Monster (Glenn Strange), all the while assisted by a homicidal hunchback (J. Carrol Naish). The censors were at least as concerned about Elena Verdugo showing a flash of her black panties in her Gypsy dance as they were with the film’s eight violent deaths.

  Carradine in House of Dracula

  Carradine, in flowing cape and stylishly cocked top hat, naturally gave Dracula his own mad flair — quite different from Bela Lugosi’s:My attitude would be definitely Shakespearean, with a nod to Richard III. Dracula is a tragic figure — a monarch of the undead, in some respects like Lear, his kingdom gone, forced to live among inferiors, an outcast. I added my own ideas to personalize the role — I wore the top hat at an angle because this man could afford to be debonair. I used my eyes like weapons since Dracula could, of course, bend one’s will to his own…

  It sure wasn’t Shakespeare on Broadway, but House of Frankenstein gave Carradine one of his great all-time cinema death scenes — screaming as his vampire falls and decays under the rays of the dawn. It became his most famous horror role and, ironically, is the reason many fans remember John Carradine.

  At the time, Carradine was “living in sin” with Sonia Sorel at the Garden of Allah, 8152 Sunset Boulevard, the colony of haciendas built around a pool shaped like the Black Sea. It had once been the home of Alla Nazimova, the legendary Silent Screen star, who now lived at her former showplace in a single apartment. The liquor flowed freely, John and Sonia had many fights, and Sheilah Graham’s The Garden of Allah provided the baroque imagery of Sonia chasing her lover around the pool, waving a wickedly spiked high heel as a weapon as Carradine “recited Shakespeare to the adjacent hills.” As Ms. Graham continued:Carradine could be serious, but mostly he was eccentric. He had a bust made of himself and took it to the swimming pool while he swam. The bust was made of bronze and he believed it would get a nice patina in the sun.

  Then there was the night that Carradine decided he was Jesus and tried to walk across the swimming pool. [Playwright] Marc Connelly, always a gambler, was betting on John to make it. He lost his bet.

  Carradine, who desperately wanted to fight in the War but was rejected, managed one heroic act. Edgar Ulmer, who directed Carradine (and Sonia) in PRC’s Bluebeard in 1944, visited the couple one day at the Garden, along with his wife Shirley and little daughter Arianne. As the adults chatted by the pool, Arianne, in the pool in her water wings, sank. It was Carradine who noticed her plight and dived in to save her.

  April 24, 1944: EGG BOPS ERROL FLYNN IN BATTLE OF BEAUTIES headlined the Los Angeles Evening Herald-Express. It seems Errol was enjoying a Mocambo catfight between Miss Toby Tuttle (“23-year-old entertainer”) and Miss Virginia Hill (“wealthy southern girl whose parties have made more or less a splash in Hollywood”). Toby admitted throwing the egg — she felt Flynn should have done something to break up the fight — “so I grabbed an egg from the tray of a passing waiter and let fly at him.” Flynn’s pal Freddie McEvoy helped him get the egg out of his hair and, as the Evening Herald-Express put it, “The two then left the battlefield to the ladies.”

  April 25, 1944: Universal’s morale-booster Follow the Boys had a big Broadway opening at Loew’s Criterion Theatre. It featured such acts as Orson Welles sawing Marlene Dietrich in half, Jeanette MacDonald singing “Beyond the Blue Horizon,” Sophie Tucker, Dinah Shore, Arthur Rubinstein, four orchestras, virtually the entire contract roster of Universal Studios in guest appearances, etc., including, as the New York Times noted, “W.C. Fields doing his delicious pool table act.” It was a patriotic show for armed services morale, and as the New York Herald Tribune reported:When you see W.C. Fields running through his elliptical billiard cue routine before a group of inductees, for example, there is no question that Follow the Boys is in a great tradition of showmanship.

  W.C. made two more 1944 film appearances. On June 6, D-Day itself, United Artists’ Song of the Open Road opened at Broadway’s Loew’s Criterion, and the New York Herald Tribune gave thanks that it was “almost pure escapist entertainment.” Fourteen-year-old radio personality Jane Powell was the star, and the show included a W.C. Fields vs. Charlie McCarthy donnybrook. In truth, the old hearty fighting form was failing; Fields was making more and more visits to the Las Encinas Sanitarium in Pasadena, plagued by cirrhosis of the liver. On July 6, United Artists’ Sensations of 1945 premiered at Loew’s State Theatre. Eleanor Powell was the star, and W. C. Fields was one of the “sensations,” along with Sophie Tucker, the acrobatic Cristianis, the Pallenberg Bears, Cab Calloway and Woody Herman and their orchestras, the Flying Copelands, et al. As the New York Sun put it:At the end W.C. Fields appears in a singularly unfunny scene, Sophie Tucker sings loudly and Miss Powell dances with a high school horse as partner. This dance is the best part of the picture.

  W.C.’s partner in the skit is Louise Currie, a blonde actress perhaps best remembered as the heroine who lashes Bela Lugosi with a whip in The Ape Man (1943). Ms. Currie oomphs on a railway set as the great man tries to get her into a train compartment. Drunks show up and fight as W.C. offers a running commentary (“Oh! That’s terrible — I must try that on my wife”). He was, in truth, very ill. Ms. Currie remembers that W.C.’s memory (and eyesight) were so bad that he had to use huge blackboards — à la the declining John Barrymore — to read them, and that multiple takes were necessary. The skit concludes:W.C. Fields: Yeah, aren’t drunks repulsive? Come, my little popinjay.

  The repulsive drunks joke was, ironically, W.C.’s last line in a movie, and Sensations of 1945 was W.C. Fields’ final film.

  July 9, 1944: The Los Angeles Times noted the Decker-Flynn Galleries was hosting a show of 50 Decker canvases:His portraits of clowns have a room to themselves. The larger gallery features a portrait of Earl Carroll, looking saintly under a spotlight in his theater, one of Decker’s wife against a background of Paris, and a beautiful “Grand Canal, Venice,” loaned by Mrs. Cary Grant (Barbara Hutton).

  A large twilight picture entitled “Pigs in Clover” was painted looking out the gallery’s side window. It shows the junky back end of a Sunset “Strip” nightclub. In the windows guests are eating.

  The nightclub that the Times was careful not to name was, of course, the Mocambo — which sat right in front of the new Decker-Flynn Galleries. Charlie Morrison, the Mocambo’s owner, learned about the painting that showed the rear of his glamour Strip niterie littered with bottles and garbage and, rather than raise hell, proceeded to correct the conditions. Decker thought Morrison such a good sport that he gave him the painting “Pigs in Clover,” and Morrison, delighted, presented Decker with a free pass for drinks, food and entertainment at the Mocambo — all he had to do was tip the servers.

  It was drinks on the house 24/7 for John Decker. Christmas had surely come early.

  October 17, 1944: W.C. Fields wrote a letter to Fowler, which proved neither time nor tide was reducing his Olympian wrath:You will note by the gentleman who lived to be 104 that the panacea of all ills is tobacco and “demon rum.” Longevity can only be reached by the use of these stimulants….

  Did you read that son-of-a-bitch Truman’s speech and did you glom his store teeth. What a deceitful bastard he must be…

  October 31, 1944: Harrison Carroll reported in the Los Angeles Evening Herald-Express what he described as “Positively the funniest of the one punch brawls,” with the hero Anthony Quinn. At the Beverly Hills art gallery of Vincent Price, a big lout greeted Quinn with, “Hello, Mr. DeMille.” When Quinn ignored him, the antagonist asked, “So, since you’ve married into a big family, you won’t talk?” — and gave Quinn a shove. As Carroll wrote: Tony let him have it and the screwball hit the floor, where he sat rubbing his cheek and muttering, “Well, well, well.”

  “I hated to do it,
” says Quinn, “but I still have a little of the common touch even if I did marry into a distinguished family.”

  Quinn played in four 1944 releases, including the Technicolor Buffalo Bill, as Chief Yellow Hand. (Buffalo Bill also featured Thomas Mitchell, going strong in 1944 in five major releases.) Quinn was still a character actor — stardom appeared to be far away.

  Meanwhile, Quinn joined Errol Flynn and Gene Tierney on a bond tour. In his book My Days with Errol Flynn, Buster Wiles (Flynn crony and stunt man) wrote:Flynn was scheduled to do a Red Cross radio broadcast in the Chase Hotel, and we schemed an elaborate gag with Tony Quinn as the victim. We had sent a script to Tony and asked if he would kindly participate in the show.

  The radio personnel were all in on the joke, playing it straight as Flynn and Tony began rehearsing their material. The director gave notice that the live broadcast was about to begin. Once underway, Flynn suddenly blurted out some very foul language, then in a shocked voice, he exclaimed, “Why, Tony! Why did you say that?”

  Tony turned white and tried to continue. More foul language from Flynn. The director stormed from the control booth, indignantly yelling at Quinn.

  Errol in a shocked tone, said, “Tony, you shouldn’t talk like that.”