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

by Gregory William Mank

  “But… but I didn’t,” responded poor Tony.

  “Yes, you did!” shot back the director, “I heard you!”

  Flynn just shook his head. “Shame on you, Tony.”

  Another guy ran up, saying, “We’re getting telephone calls from around the country, wanting to know why Anthony Quinn cursed on the radio!”

  “I’m ruined,” said a distraught Quinn. “I won’t even be able to do a B-picture now…”

  In his book One Man Tango, Quinn offers a different version of the story, claiming Flynn referred to C.B. DeMille on the broadcast as “that sonofabitch,” called Gene Tierney “a real fucking sweetheart,” etc., owning up to his remarks but making Quinn guilty by association. Quinn wrote that he returned to his hotel and received calls from Hedda Hopper, Louella Parsons, father-in-law DeMille, and wife Katherine, until Flynn himself called.

  “Gotcha, Tony!” said Flynn — who then, as Quinn expressed it, “laughed like a madman.”

  There had been no actual broadcast, and the callers from Hollywood had all been in on the joke.

  November 21, 1944: Sadakichi Hartmann, age 77 years, 11 months and 13 days, died at about 11 p.m. at the home of his daughter, Mrs. Dorothea Gilliland in St. Petersburg, Florida, the cause of death: coronary thrombosis. The L.A. Times noted that Sadakichi “had arrived there only two days before from his celebrated shack on the outskirts of Banning.” The obituary called him “The self-crowned ‘King of Bohemia,’” “an incredible figure on the American scene for more than threescore years” and a “quaint genius” who “was a legend from Greenwich Village to Telegraph Hill.”

  His final years had been, due to his German and Japanese ancestry, one of fear and persecution. In their introduction to White Chrysanthemums, Harry Lawton and George Knox wrote:The Riverside County Sheriff’s Department staked out Hartmann’s shack. When his daughter, Wistaria, or his son-in-law drove into town, they often found themselves followed by a patrol car. Indian families at Morongo also banded with the townspeople in the common cause of hatred towards Hartmann. When Sadakichi walked the desert at night, drawing up charts of the constellations, it was rumored that he was making one of his periodical climbs to the top of Mount San Jacinto to signal Japanese bombers off the coast with a lantern.

  Sadakichi and Gene Fowler had been squabbling via letters during 1944, both sides still angry about the aborted biography. Fowler had been promising Sadakichi an overcoat since March. Sadakichi also wanted brandy and still was waging his years-long campaign for Fowler to buy him a coffin, according to Will Fowler, who quotes Sadakichi in The Second Handshake:Sarah Bernhardt used to sleep in one, and I, the great Sadakichi Hartmann, shall be marked down in history more indelibly than that shrieking female. Thank you. Hah!

  A letter from Gene Fowler, dated November 2, 1944, survives in the Sadakichi Hartmann Collection, University of California, Riverside — it came accompanied by the long-promised coat. Perhaps sensing the end was near, Fowler praised Sadakichi in the accompanying letter and expressed how he deeply valued his friendship. Apparently Sadakichi wore the coat on his final trip across the country.

  According to White Chrysanthemums, Sadakichi’s final resting place is “a pauper’s grave surrounded by ancient magnolias heavy with Spanish moss.” In his feature, “John Decker’s Hollywood” in Esquire (December, 1945), Ben Hecht provided a none-too-respectful eulogy for Sadakichi, via analysis of Decker’s painting of the subject:Sadakichi Hartmann was exactly what the Decker brush says he was — a truculent poseur, a battered and dyspeptic ego. Decker’s Hartmann is a mocking valentine to this most pretentious of his Hollywood friends. Sadakichi was part German and part Jap. He was also part faker and part bore. There was enough left over to sneer at his betters and write an occasional line of wild poetry. But chiefly Sadakichi lived and died as an angry light under a bushel. Decker went under the bushel with Hartmann to paint him. He painted a great man, macabre and ridiculous as a poem by Baudelaire.

  The painting is owned by Burgess Meredith, whose bride, Paulette Goddard, gets the hiccoughs every time she looks at it.

  Sadakichi received a far more affectionate tribute in Gene Fowler’s 1954 book Minutes of the Last Meeting. The popular book inspired Wistaria Hartmann to exhume her father’s manuscripts, release his angry spirit, and sue Gene Fowler.

  More on that later.

  Chapter Eighteen

  1945: End of a War, The Paintings of Scarlet Street And “The Five Million Virgin Cunts from Heaven”

  Decker’s studio-gallery in Hollywood is full of his potential sitters. It is unlike any painter’s studio I have ever known. In it famous and fabulously wealthy people sit constantly eating and drinking at Decker’s expense.

  Movie stars, society leaders, literary Pooh-Bahs and rogues of every hue and accent occupy the couches and sprawl in the corners. It is the only spot in Hollywood where you will never hear movie or money talk. The Decker bar at one end of the studio is a sort of confessional to which the Famous bring their insecurities and humilities. Decker of the broken nose, Byronic collar, hangover eyes, rhapsodic chuckle and slyly delicate hands is himself as strange a figure as ever paced an atelier. He looks like a composite of all his celebrities on canvas — a feline fellow full of grace and disintegration, elegant and unconvincing as a con man and turning thirty years of anarchy and derision on his come-lately disciples.

  A contempt for the shams around him lies under (and sometimes over) his swashbuckler humors. And the celebrities who haunt his one-man Bohemia for free eats and drinks, sit and stare for hours at the things they have forgotten and that keep banging out of the Decker canvases — the mysteries of lonely places and the enchantment of the unimportant out of which Art is made.

  — Ben Hecht, “John Decker’s Hollywood,” Esquire, December, 1945

  Germany surrenders May 8, 1945. Following two atomic bomb blasts, Japan surrenders August, 1945. World War II was over, and a blast of postwar euphoria explodes in the United States, especially in Hollywood.

  None of the Bundy Drive Boys had actually fought in the war. As it approached its end and its conclusion, the surviving members were still at war with their demons, experiencing both victory and defeat.

  Errol Flynn became the father of daughter Deirdre January 10, 1945; he also rode the rumors of a divorce from new wife/mother Nora and, in April, engaged in an epic fight with John Huston (supposedly over Flynn’s remarks made about Olivia de Havilland) that provided Flynn broken ribs, Huston a broken nose and put both in the hospital. Sensitive about accusations of winning the war on a Hollywood back lot, Flynn endured his most relentless pounding for Warners’ 1945 Objective Burma, which brought Flynn an especially hot roasting by the British press.

  John Carradine married Sonia Sorel March 25, and they cut the wedding cake with Hamlet’s sword. Ex-wife Ardanelle pursued her ex-spouse for alimony contempt and, come the summer, had John arrested — the actor, in slouch hat, dramatically posing for the press from behind bars. He got out in time to reprise John Barrymore’s unworthy vehicle My Dear Children with Sonia at Coney Island, and came back to Hollywood to play Dracula again in Universal’s House of Dracula, once again sharing the screen with Lon Chaney’s Wolf Man and Glenn Strange’s Monster, as well as a female hunchback (Jane Adams sporting a plaster-of-Paris hump).

  Thomas Mitchell was still racking up credits, including Adventure, which MGM sold with the famous teaser, “Gable’s Back and Garson’s Got Him.” Roland Young had one of his best film roles as Detective Blore in And Then There Were None, based on Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians.

  Anthony Quinn co-starred with John Wayne in Back to Bataan. Ben Hecht scripted the Alfred Hitchcock hit Spellbound, produced by David O. Selznick, starring Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman, and featuring a dream sequence filled with paintings by Salvador Dali.

  A sadly ailing W.C. was failing, but still his feisty self. James Curtis writes of a hot day in the summer of 1945 when Gene Fowler, his daughter Jane (then 24
years old) and clarinet virtuoso/bandleader Artie Shaw all visited W.C. at Los Feliz. Curtis quotes Shaw as saying,

  Fields was seated at a table in what appeared to be the living room, going over some household reports. He was wearing a straw hat — a boater — and it appeared as if he was wearing shorts but no shirt. When he saw Jane, he immediately stood — he was a very courtly man — and it was then that we realized he was absolutely stark naked. Fields acted as if it was perfectly natural to receive friends that way. Jane burst out laughing, and the conversation ensued as if nothing happened.

  That fall, the 65-year-old W.C. Fields gave up his Los Feliz house and entered Las Encinas Sanitarium in Pasadena.

  A pencil-written letter survives in one of the Decker scrapbooks — it’s undated, but the allusion to his being “near fifty ” dates it to circa 1945. In handwriting that becomes increasingly distorted, a clearly drunken Decker scrawls page after page, eight in all, some of it on his “Decker and Flynn Galleries” letterhead, pouring out his misery to Phyllis, bemoaning his sexual impotence and avowing his love for her:My dear Phyllis and wife —

  It seems very difficult to think and also get over the thoughts one has — and more difficult to be great… in my opinion you are much greater than I am… I swear to you… nobody else could interest me outside of you!

  I love you very much and just as I don’t answer letters and important things I don’t seem to tell you about such things enough — I know I am at fault — but God knows I do not go out or react to anybody but you… I do love you so much and if you ever left me, that would be the end of everything… I am not potent or [sic] I have been to a doctor for that purpose. I only find alcohol stimulating. I shall go and find out about that — I am near fifty and shall try to find something that does things for me to be able to satisfy your desires for me… my lack of potency does not refer to an old bag such as Gene Fowler’s wife — because you are as alluring as I met you — it is me that finds no Glamour in female of any sort young sophisticated or cunt of any sort… I don’t know why people laugh when people become impotent at fifty… if five million virgin cunts droped [sic] from heaven you still would be my only love — I’ve done so many things to hurt you and you’ve done the same but you and I are the same sort of people — please don’t destroy you and me!!!

  Yes — I am selffish [sic] but I will only live for a few years.…

  The rest of the letter is written under such obvious distress that it is difficult to decipher. Decker seemingly refers to his daughter Gloria, and possibly their allegedly incestuous situation, losing control with words such as “…son-of-a-bitch ex fuck swine… I hate her gutts (sic)…” He writes “I dug my own grave,” concludes “I am so sick and tired about blackmail,” and finishes off with “I love you and nobody else in the world.”

  He signs the letter to his wife in full, “John Decker.”

  Was Gloria blackmailing Decker? Had her trip to Los Angeles been for the purpose of seducing her own father, and making him pay? Was his surrender to her charms (or their mutual seduction) been the “grave” he had dug? Did Phyllis know about the alleged incest? Was the entire l’affaire Gloria threatening Decker’s sanity?

  Chapter Nineteen

  1946: Mona, Peeing in the Wind, A Female Captain Bligh, And the Passing of the Great Charlatan

  I demand a creature of another sex, but as hideous as myself… It is true, we shall be monsters, cut off from all the world; but on that account we shall be more attached to one another… O! my creator, make me happy…!

  — Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818)

  It was perhaps right and proper that John Decker — after a garish court battle with “ghost wife” Ellen, his Freudian escapade with his alluring, long-lost daughter Gloria, and amidst a mid-life crisis with Phyllis — would create his own woman.

  Of course, the miracle was doomed, and Decker’s God-emulating role became less of a Pygmalion, and more of a Dr. Frankenstein. At any rate, the artist’s stab at black magic spawned one of his most aberrant misadventures, climaxing in what L.A. papers proclaimed Hollywood’s “Battle of the Century” and providing John Decker some of his most spectacular publicity.

  It was the saga of… Mona.

  She was beautiful. She was a heartbreaker.

  She was a mannequin.

  Gene Fowler remembered that Decker and Errol Flynn discovered Mona while shopping in downtown Los Angeles for furnishings for the Alta Loma studio. She was sporting only a strawberry blonde wig, and as Mona posed seductively in the store window, she enchanted her two famous admirers, enjoying an instant conquest. Notoriety was immediate as Flynn and Decker drove Mona to Alta Loma in Flynn’s convertible — fellow motorists believed that Flynn and pal, in their wicked, wicked ways, were taking a naked strawberry blonde for a joyride.

  While Decker didn’t create the original mannequin, he instilled the personality. Mona, in all her glory (and the eyes of her admirers), was a diva, a voluptuary, a fetishist’s dream girl. In his column “Bits and Pieces” (November 1945), Alan Mowbray, despite his jocular tone, could barely disguise his own personal infatuation with Decker’s “blessed event”:

  Decker at his Alta Loma gallery/house with a probable Modigliani forgery

  Mona, there’s a real girl. Somewhat of a shock when you first see her, because she is completely uninhibited, brazenly displaying her charms to all and sundry.

  The night I first met her, she was leaning nonchalantly against the bar in a corner of the studio, wearing a John Frederics hat, a pair of very expensive stockings of black net held up by a pair of very saucy and ornate French garters, and a mink coat draped becomingly, but loosely and revealingly, over her shoulders.

  Like most beautiful girls, she is a little on the dumb side… in fact she is a dummy, but I warn you not to take your maiden aunt into the Decker studio, because Mona looks all too real, and all too naked, in the careful high light in which she resides.

  Decker apparently had a longtime fantasy of just such a “Mona.” In his story “Asylum Soliloquy,” Decker had written a virtual horror tale in which the narrator searches for a woman named Mona who had driven his friend into an asylum. To quote a passage: I was restless. I had just finished reading a morbid book entitled Alruane by Hanns Heinz Ewers, a story about a girl who had been born through a strange unnatural way to the parents: the father a lust-murderer; the mother a frigid whore. It had been the experiment of a mad scientist. The girl had been born without human feeling or emotions of love and destroyed all men who came in contact with her. There was Mona again…

  As the ever-resilient Phyllis learned to live with Mona, the mannequin’s perverse allure captivated not only Decker but other Bundy Drive Boys as well. “Mona became an important part of the scene at the new studio,” wrote Gene Fowler in Minutes of the Last Meeting. “Indeed, she was the cause of a fistfight between two gentlemen who grew overzealous about having the next dance with her.”

  “Decker is giving a shower for her,” wrote the ever-ardent Alan Mowbray (who one suspects wanted to rumba with Mona), “and in the very near future she will be one of the best-dressed women in town.”

  And there came the night of Thursday, January 17, 1946.

  It wasn’t promoted as a “shower” for Mona — it appears Decker saw the big night as rather a coming-out party. Diana Barrymore later remembered that Decker had promised “to unveil a new statue,” but none of the Los Angeles papers that covered the debacle to come would report this raison d’être for the party. They would report the presence of Mona.

  The guest list at Alta Loma was impressive. Besides Decker familiars such as Errol Flynn (and wife Nora), Ben Hecht, Anthony Quinn, and Alan Mowbray, there was Paulette Goddard and husband Burgess Meredith, David O. Selznick and Jennifer Jones, Ida Lupino, Merle Oberon, Harpo Marx, Constance Collier, Raoul Walsh, Lon Chaney Jr., Diana Barrymore, Jack La Rue and Lawrence Tierney. It was a volatile assemblage. Flynn, of course, was a lightning rod for fistfights. Chaney, Unive
rsal’s Wolf Man, was fond of drunken brawls. But the real dynamo of the guests was Tierney, who played the title role in 1946’s Dillinger for RKO Studios and was one of the most violent, profane, out-of-control personalities in postwar Hollywood.

  The festivities began. Mona was apparently veiled until the Cinderella fairy-tale moment that Decker would remove the veil and — voila! — introduce her to Hollywood society. How they would react to his show window dummy was anybody’s guess, but Decker was surely ready to relish any shock and welcome any adulation.

  However, the unveiling never happened, at least not how Decker intended it, and the result was a disaster.

  “HOLLYWOOD BRAWL” headlined the Los Angeles Evening Herald-Express, (January 18, 1946) which reported:It’s been a long — long — time —

  Since Hollywood has had as interesting and mysterious a brawl as climaxed at a glamorous party before dawn today in the home of John Decker, noted artist and bosom pal of the late John Barrymore…

  Among the Hollywood stars reported as principals in the slugfest, which started over indignities done “Mona,” a mannequin who was smashed to pieces, were Jack La Rue, film “heavy” player Lawrence Tierney, who played Dillinger “in the films,” actress Diana Barrymore, and actor Anthony Quinn.

  There were at least two versions of the fracas that night at Alta Loma:• Sammy Colt, Ethel Barrymore’s son (and Diana’s cousin), accidentally knocked over Mona, so Lawrence Tierney punched Colt in the face. When Jack La Rue came to Colt’s defense, Tierney punched La Rue in the face.