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

by Gregory William Mank

  “Did John say mean things about me?” she asked with wide-eyed, well-registered innocence in parrying a reporter’s question. “Why, I’m surprised. Really, I am!”

  Did she really play “Capt. Bligh” to cause Decker’s “Mutiny on the Zaca”?

  “Why, I’m surprised you’d ask such a thing!” she smiled sweetly.

  Flynn, she said, will sail the yacht from Acapulco to Tahiti and then fly home “about the last of February” when Nora is expecting a second youngster.

  Errol Flynn accepted an offer in Acapulco to rent the Zaca to the company of Lady from Shanghai, directed by Orson Welles, and starring Welles and his then-spouse Rita Hayworth. The Decker vs. Nora clash signaled the end of his friendship with Errol Flynn.

  During Decker’s Zaca trip, his rapacious pet parrot had escaped its cage and terrorized Phyllis and Mary Lou, who remembers:One night the bird opened up the cage and got out into the room, a combination den/dining room/kitchen. We had to close the doors to the den because the parrot was out, and we were scared to death!

  Publicity still of the man who hated Christmas

  Decker believed the bird must be ill, and he concocted a cure: he’d give the parrot one of his insulin shots.

  He buried the parrot in the garden.

  As Philip Paval (a goldsmith and silversmith artist, who spent much time with Decker at this point) remembers, Flynn came over for the parrot’s funeral. However, after the Zaca debacle, the Decker-Flynn friendship was dying. On January 29, 1947, John Decker presented a new art show, “Moods of Tropical Mexico Painted on a Recent Trip on Errol Flynn’s yacht Zaca,” in Los Angeles. When the Flynns tossed a big party upon Errol’s return to Los Angeles after his Acapulco sojourn, Decker was pointedly uninvited. Paval recalled that he and Decker crashed the party, with unhappy results:When Errol saw us, he grabbed John by the collar; John said, “Hit me and I’ll sue you for everything you’re worth.” I went out to the garden, got myself a drink and talked to some nice chicks in swimsuits. When I went back into the living room John said, “Let’s get out of this damn dump away from this stupid jerk.” I did not see the Flynns again until Decker’s funeral.

  Flynn considered evicting Decker from the Alta Loma studio. As the friendship was dying, so was a friend.

  I direct my executors immediately upon the certificate of my death being signed to have my body placed in an inexpensive coffin and taken to a cemetery and cremated, and since I do not wish to cause my friends undue inconvenience or expense I direct my executors not to have any funeral or other ceremony or to permit anyone to view my remains, except as is necessary to furnish satisfactory proof of my death.

  — from W.C. Fields’ will, signed April 28, 1943

  By the close of 1946, W.C. Fields had spent 14 months, the last several drinking only ginger ale, at Las Encinas Sanitarium in Pasadena. The end came as “The Man in the Bright Nightgown” (as W.C. referred to death) paid his call 12:03 p.m. on Christmas Day, 1946. Fields, a hater of Christmas since age eight, was 66 years old.

  The death certificate lists the cause of death as “Cirrhosis of the Liver” (duration, five years), due to “chronic alcoholism” (duration unknown).

  Carlotta Monti later claimed that she had comforted the old man to the very end, and that the dying words of W.C. Fields were, “Chinaman… Goddamn the whole frigging world and everyone in it but you, Carlotta.” Ronald J. Fields is convinced by his own research that Carlotta wasn’t there — she was, he claims, with a lover that Christmas day in Santa Barbara. Only W.C.’s secretary Magda Michael and a nurse were present at the time of W.C.’s death.

  “He brought his forefinger to his lips to signify quiet,” wrote Ron Fields, “winked, then closed his eyes; and ‘the Man in the Bright Nightgown’ took him away.”

  It was a cold, rainy Christmas, and restaurateur Dave Chasen and casting director Billy Grady had gone to Las Encinas to visit W.C. with a case of whisky and some delicacies. Gene Fowler was planning to come later. As Chasen and Grady arrived at the patio gateway, two men left W.C.’s cottage, carrying W.C.’s corpse in a basket. “The rain of the gray Christmas,” wrote Fowler, “beat down upon the men and upon the basket.”

  On December 26, Gene Fowler naturally held a wake, appropriately at Chasen’s, where the mourners sat near the John Decker portrait of W.C. as Queen Victoria. Ben Hecht was there, as well as directors Eddie Sutherland and Gregory La Cava, sports writer Grantland Rice and Gene’s son, reporter Will Fowler. Gene Fowler telephoned a full-page tribute to the Hollywood Reporter:The most prejudiced and honest and beloved figure of our so-called “colony” went away on a day that he pretended to abhor — Christmas. We loved him, and — peculiarly enough — he loved us. To the most authentic humorist since Mark Twain, to the greatest heart that has beaten since the middle ages — W.C. Fields, our friend.

  Gregory La Cava was a bit less florid about it all. “Bill never really wanted to hurt anybody,” said La Cava. “He just felt an obligation.”

  W.C. Fields, who wanted no funeral, got three of them, all running consecutively on January 2, 1947. The formidable Hattie Fields and her lawyer son Claude — who were living together in Beverly Hills, and both of whom had inspired so much of W.C.’s comic misanthropy — had suddenly shown up, with an agenda and a vengeance. Funeral no. 1 was a private service at Forest Lawn’s Church of the Recessional. Among the 50 mourners were John Decker, Gene Fowler, Ben Hecht, Leo McCarey, Jack Dempsey, Eddie Cline and Earl Carroll. Edgar Bergen gave the eulogy, somehow managing without benefit of Charlie McCarthy: It seems wrong not to pray for a man who gave such happiness to the world, but that was the way he wanted it. Bill knew life, and knew that laughter was the way to live it. He knew that happiness depended on disposition, not position.

  We simply say farewell…

  Also among the mourners — and getting her picture in the Los Angeles Times — was Carlotta Monti, in black bonnet and widow weeds, bringing along her father, sister, nieces, and Mae Taylor, “a Hollywood spiritualist,” noted the Times, “through whom Carlotta said she spoke with Fields after his death.” As Will Fowler put it, Carlotta “represented a modern pieta, now that she had finally lost her intimidating sugar daddy.” Carlotta claimed Fields’ ghost had commanded her to attend “the three-ring circus” and to “get a front seat.”

  For Funeral no. 2, the Fields family moved to Forest Lawn’s Great Mausoleum, final resting place of the remains of Jean Harlow, Carole Lombard, et al., for a Catholic ceremony. Ignoring Fields’ dictate for cremation, the Fields family escorted the flower-covered casket to the crypt — commanding that Carlotta and company stay away, across the mausoleum. The Times reported:When the family departed Carlotta tried to go to the crypt. A cemetery attendant stopped her. On orders of Mr. Fields’ son, she was not to be admitted until the crypt was sealed. She waited, and while she waited she announced that a wristwatch she was wearing — a gift from Mr. Fields — had stopped the moment the actor’s body had entered the tomb.

  After the sealing of the crypt, the black-clad Carlotta and her coterie visited the grave, and there came Funeral no. 3, Mae Taylor officiating. There was a heart of white chrysanthemums and scarlet roses on an easel by the crypt, and Carlotta took three roses before departing the Great Mausoleum.

  All the while, a former vaudevillian, claiming he was part of “Duffy and Sweeney” and had known Fields in those bygone days and nights, roamed about the funeral site and asked to pay his respects at Fields’ crypt. The Forest Lawn attendant refused to show him where it was.

  “Well, I guess it was all right that I just came here anyway,” said the teary-eyed old man, and he left.

  It is true W.C. Fields’ will included this bequest: Upon the death of my said brother, Walter Dukenfield and my said sister, Adel C. Smith and the said Carlotta Monti (Montejo), I direct that my executors procure the organization of a membership or other approved corporation under the name of the W.C. FIELDS COLLEGE for orphan white boys and girls, where no religion
of any sort is to be preached. Harmony is the purpose of this thought. It is my desire the college will be built in California in Los Angeles County.

  Fields was eventually cremated, as he had requested, several years after his entombment. The marker reads:W.C. Fields

  1880-1946

  The ashes rest in the Columbarium of Nativity (another irony for the man who hated Christmas), Hall of Inspiration, Holly Terrace, at Forest Lawn Glendale’s Great Mausoleum. But the years-later cremation was just part of the battle that began waging six months after his funeral. Fields had named a long list of personal beneficiaries, including Carlotta ($25 per week until $25,000 had been paid, plus his 16-cylinder Cadillac Limousine), Magda Michael ($2,500), and various family members, including Hattie and Claude ($20,000 to be divided between them). But Hattie, knowing she was the inspiration for every sourpuss harridan who ever terrorized his comedies, was out for blood and money. She filed for a hearty chunk of the Fields estate (originally estimated at over $700,000).

  The case would go on for eight years, until Hattie — then 75 — scored victory, winning legal distinction for her contribution to California law regarding spousal inheritance.

  Uncle Claude as Queen Victoria, courtesy of Decker

  Chapter Twenty

  1947: Raphael’s Angels

  What is real in me are the illusions which I create.

  — John Decker, 1947

  The old gang was disintegrating.

  Barrymore, Fields and Hartmann were dead. John Carradine had fled to New York to escape jail for alimony contempt. Gene Fowler was scheduling time in Manhattan to write the biography of Mayor Jimmy Walker. Ben Hecht also was away from Hollywood and at home in Nyack. Anthony Quinn was so desperate about his career that he produced his own star vehicle movie, Black Gold, and persuaded his wife Katherine, who’d not worked in a while, to co-star with him. Thomas Mitchell, Alan Mowbray, Roland Young and the now-loyal Paval were about all that was left, along with recent member Vincent Price, whose humor, intellect and great knowledge of art made him a vital young presence.

  Yet life simply wasn’t the same. There were still splashes of the old madness and chicanery, such as the day Philip Paval came to Alta Loma and found Decker groping about in the toilet bowl:

  “Oh Christ, I lost my uppers!” lamented Decker.

  Paval contacted a dentist, Dr. Vernon Swall, and made a quick deal; Decker would provide the dentist a painting if the dentist made him a new set of teeth. Decker tried to bilk Dr. Swall and his wife by offering them a print of Stanley Barbee’s Clown with a Watch. Paval blew the whistle on him and the couple returned to Alta Loma, selecting, as Paval recalled “a still life with eggs.”

  He enjoyed his family. As Mary Lou Warn remembers:John was very good to me. I started maturing young — I was attractive at 14, the Hollywood High type, the California Girl — tall and tan. Once there was an Earl Carroll party, and mother didn’t want to go (I think she’d get partied out). So John took me. It was a big, big party — Earl Carroll had hired divers who jumped into a swimming pool with waterfalls! We didn’t stay long, but it was written up in a column the next day — “John Decker was seen with a very attractive young girl at Earl Carroll’s party!”

  Yet for Decker, life was rather hollow without his pals, despite the loving and loyal Phyllis and Mary Lou. He was ill — diabetes and cirrhosis of the liver — and at age 51, it seemed unlikely he’d be able to battle his old demons as long as John Barrymore had survived his own.

  Meanwhile, there was, perhaps, one final forgery caper.

  William Goetz was the son-in-law of Louis B. Mayer, having married Mayer’s imperious daughter Edie. He became head of Universal-International Pictures in 1946, pledged to produce primarily films of artistic merit, and likely would have run the studio into bankruptcy had it not been, ironically, for the 1948 release of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (which Goetz abhorred). At any rate, Goetz won far more note for his lavish art collection than his producer acumen, and in 1947 acquired what he believed to be a Van Gogh, Study by Candlelight. According to Leslee Mayo, Goetz bought the painting from art dealer Reeves Lewenthal, who was cryptic about its provenance — “It is a business secret,” he said. J.B. de la Faille authenticated Study by Candlelight, but others cried “Fake” — including Van Gogh’s nephew, who’d never even seen it. “Goetz threatened to sue him,” notes Ms. Mayo, “and this began THE art story of 1949-1950.”

  The Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, a Van Gogh committee in Amsterdam and the U.S. Treasury Department all investigated — and failed to agree. The experts have never agreed over the decades and their discord over the picture’s validity has consigned Study by Candlelight, as Leslee Mayo says, to a “state of artistic limbo.” Christie’s auctioned the Goetz family art collection in 1988, but cautiously declined to offer Study by Candlelight. The year that the picture appeared on the L.A. scene, its mysterious provenance, and the fact that if it is fake it’s still fine enough to fool many Old Masters experts, all point to….guess who.

  Anthony Quinn and John Decker

  Will Fowler also claimed Study by Candlelight to have been a forgery by John Decker. As noted, Will was an avowed believer in “poetic license,” and the mystery lingers.

  Decker now became fascinated with the death masks in his studio. They were the masks of Beethoven, Sir Walter Scott, and — most precious to Decker — the Madonna of the Seine. In Minutes of the Last Meeting, Gene Fowler quoted Philip Paval on the Madonna:Oh yes. She was very real. She was a young and beautiful girl, and she drowned herself, oh, maybe a century ago; and when she was taken from the water she had a beautiful soft smile on her face, just like the Mona Lisa, and that’s why they called her the Madonna of the Seine. She was a Paris girl. Nobody ever knew just who she was; but she was beautiful, and sad, and virginal. And they made a death mask, and it became a must when you went to school in Paris; to learn how to draw you had to make a sketch of the Madonna of the Seine…

  It was the Madonna of the Seine who now haunted this hell-raising artist, who seemed to find a strange comfort in the death mask, which he’d touch up time and time again. Gene Fowler, noting the obsession, asked Decker her story. Yet raconteur John Decker — perhaps sensing his own time was very short and reflecting on his own tragedies — never would take the time away from the mask to tell his friend the Madonna’s own sad tale.

  Decker also found time to pursue a different obsession. He kept recording lines from Cyrano de Bergerac on his tape recorder, which struck him as deeply personal:To sing, to laugh, to dream, to walk in my own way, and to be alone…

  In the spring of 1947, Warner Bros. released The Two Mrs. Carrolls, starring Humphrey Bogart, Barbara Stanwyck and Alexis Smith. The melodrama cast Bogie as a mad artist who, before trying to kill his wife Stanwyck, paints her as “The Angel of Death.” Naturally, Decker relished his job of creating the Angel of Death for Warners, even if it seemed that such an angel would soon have a date with him. It was his final contribution to a film.

  Decker and Philip Paval had a joint art show at the Pasadena Museum. It was a mutual triumph. The Pasadena Star News reported: Visitors found Mr. Decker’s works to be in the mood of the present day and his technique direct enough to elicit spontaneous enjoyment by the casual observer. Much of the artist’s own emotion radiates from his paintings as noted in his painting of the late John Barrymore, his personal friend.

  Decker was too ill to attend the joint show opening at the County Museum and Paval attended the dinner with the owner and Francis Taylor (Elizabeth’s father and an art gallery owner). Paval came home and received a call from Phyllis, asking him to come to Alta Loma — Decker had suffered a stomach hemorrhage. They had great trouble getting the stretcher down the studio steps and the ambulance took the critically ill man to Cedars of Lebanon Hospital.

  Naturally, the scene at Cedars became black comedy. “Phil, I’ll never get out of this goddamn place alive!” roared Decker to Paval, who found Decker on a
stretcher in a hallway — the hospital had originally refused him a room because of his lack of money and insurance. When they finally provided him a room, it was a double, and his terminally ill roomie was in pitiful shape. Philip Paval recalled,Very macabre. The guy was lying there. He was dying. And he had some kind of — he must have had cancer — because it’s so vivid in my mind, and he had a drain in his back, and it went pop! pop! You could hear the damn thing.

  “Jesus!” wailed the old dying man. “I won’t be here another minute!”

  “Get me out of here!” howled Decker. “I can’t depend on this man’s promise. He might live a whole hour!”

  Paval stayed the first night, during which time Decker once again quoted Cyrano de Bergerac: “It is much finer to fight when it is no use.”

  Fannie Brice, who’d provide a wing to Cedars, pledged the finances for Decker’s care. Treatment began, Cedars providing morphine, blood transfusions and a suite with a private sitting room. Phyllis was there constantly. Fannie Brice brought homemade broth. Gene Fowler, meanwhile, had suffered a severe heart seizure in New York. He demanded to come home to Los Angeles, but was too ill to visit Decker, or even receive his telephone call.