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

by Gregory William Mank

  (stands for one moment transfigured as the incarnation of lust, then throws herself upon Jeshua, who disarms and forces her to the ground. A groan comes from Zenobia’s lips, she murmurs)

  Forgive!

  Seventy-five years later, this might have been incorporated into a rock opera; 110 years later, it might have become a historic bestselling novel. As it was in 1893, Christ was banned in Boston, burned in public and caused its author to be convicted of obscenity and tossed into the Charles Street jail, just in time for Christmas. “Worst food I ever ate,” recalled Sadakichi. (His 1920 novel version, The Last Thirty Days of Christ, would ignite its own firestorm of religious censorship.) He also wrote plays about Moses, Buddha and Mohammed.

  His irreverence remained boundless, and almost a holy cause.

  He lost his job as an architect for the famed Stanford White after publicly declaring that White’s drawings were “to be improved upon only by the pigeons, after the drawings become buildings.” He published an essay in defense of plagiarism, and actually made it stick:I have always endorsed Heine’s defense of plagiarism, that it is permissible to steal entire columns and porticoes from a temple, providing the edifice one erects with their aid is great enough to warrant such violent proceedings…

  One night at Carnegie Hall, Sadakichi watched world-famous pianist Moriz Rosenthal, who had studied with Liszt, flamboyantly add a series of rapid scales to the Hungarian Rhapsodies.

  “Is this necessary?” bellowed Sadakichi from the balcony. “I am a man needed but not wanted!” protested Sadakichi as they tossed him into the street.

  His own theatrical career, especially the night of November 30, 1902, had been epically disastrous, as this New York Times headline suggests:PERFUME CONCERT FAILS

  Scoffers Spoil It with Tobacco Smoke

  And Facetious Remarks - Esthetes

  And Deaf-Mutes Disappointed

  Sadakichi had promised “A Trip to Japan in Sixteen Minutes, Conveyed to the Audience by a Succession of Odors.” Hellbent on making his mark as a theatrical impresario, Sadakichi, using the stage name “Chrysanthemum,” was pioneering a new type of entertainment, a precursor to the later cinema debacle known as “Smell-O-Vision.” Promising to whisk away the audience on a tour of the world via the olfactory sense, Sadakichi installed two formidable fans to blast the smells of the Orient right up the noses of the Broadway crowd. To spice up the act, Sadakichi hired the Meredith Sisters — two wild-eyed, leggy New York dancers, whose true specialty was a high-kicking Can-Can — Geisha girls and twitter about the stage amidst the music and “A Melody of Odors.”

  The Times reported that the opening night house was crowded, including a section of deaf-mutes, as well as “a man with a Cyrano de Bergerac nose, who was all eagerness for the entertainment.” There was even a “hay-fever contingent,” happily anticipating flowery smells that would cause no allergies. But the “Perfume Concert” was just one act on the vaudeville entertainment bill that night, and a large segment of the crowd had come (as the Times noted) “to be amused with horseplay, ragtime, dancing, and singing soubrettes. They had no faith in the perfume recital…”

  “A Trip to Japan in Sixteen Minutes…” began with a musical overture titled “The Sadakichi March.” Enter Sadakichi, wearing a chrysanthemum on the left lapel of his evening coat as he took the stage. The audience promptly began giggling, started, as one newspaper account put it, by “a lady in the right hand box” who “stopped chewing gun long enough to titter.” The Geisha Girls fluttered on stage, loaded the beehive-like ovens, and the fans smelled the evening’s introductory odor — a fragrance of roses, such as those tossed to first-class passengers as a steamer to the Orient.

  There was “faint applause” from those folks in the front rows who could actually smell the roses. The man with the de Bergerac nose shouted “Bravo,” while the deaf mutes, in the words of the Times, “stamped their feet and slapped their hands.” Audiences farther back couldn’t smell a damn thing.

  Chrysanthemum carried on, with a stop in Germany. “Have you ever gathered violets on a Sunday morning in the outskirts of a village on the Rhine?” Germany was not popular with the 1902 assemblage, and it was, as one newspaper expressed it, a “Fatal Question!”

  “Rot!” shouted a Philistine, starting the stampede up the aisle.

  “Back the rathskeller!” howled another heckler.

  “Reminds me of the time the gas meter leaked!” cried yet another, as the scoffers, in rising hilarity, began filling the theatre with tobacco smoke.

  “People fell over each other in their haste to get out,” noted one reporter. Sadakichi, shouting that the crowd would have been more appreciative if he’d wafted out onions and cabbage, fled the stage in a rare retreat.

  “I guess I’ll quit,” he said in the wings.

  The Meredith Sisters, valiantly trying to salvage the night, belted out their songs (“with shrill soprano defiance”), accompanied by some impromptu Geisha bumping-and-grinding, but all to no avail. As the New York Times (tempering mercy with justice) concluded its postmortem:The deaf mutes filed out, with their fingers busy telling their disgust with the audience and sympathy for the performer. The man with the big nose shoved his way through the crowd, whom he termed “pigs,” and the esthetic people and the hay-fever crowd scattered like frightened sheep caught nibbling in flower-beds.

  Another newspaper, less sympathetic than the New York Times, was considerably more blunt:New York last night took its first sniffff (sic) at a “perfume concert.” After its second sniff it got caught in the door trying to get out.

  As Sadakichi conservatively wrote of his experiment with the commonality:1902. Originated the Perfume Concert. Tried it on the dog at New York Theatre, November 30. The dog barked.

  Bloody but unbowed, Sadakichi eventually and defiantly revived his Perfume concerts, usually to the same disastrous reception. The story goes that, during one of his abortive plays, he ventured to the lobby after Act I to hear what the critics had to say. When they denounced his effort, Sadakichi vowed to have the last word: he set fire to the theatre. “The blaze was extinguished,” reported the Los Angeles Times, “and the play went on.”

  Sadakichi found more success with his writing. In 1901, he authored Shakespeare in Art; in 1902, he produced the textbook History of American Art, which covered such then-unknown painters as Winslow Homer and gave America its first serious analysis of photography as a true art form. In 1904, he published the milestone book Japanese Art (under the nom de plume of Innocence De La Salle); in 1910, he wrote The Whistler Book, based on the painter, who was Sadakichi’s crony. In The Whistler Book, Sadakichi, AKA “Chrysanthemum,” addressed his fondness for chrysanthemums quite beautifully:Whenever I gaze at a white chrysanthemum, my mind becomes conscious of something which concerns my life alone; something which I would like to express in my art, but which I never shall be able to realize, at least not in the vague and, at the same time, convincing manner the flower conveys it to me. I am also fond of displaying it occasionally in my buttonhole; not for effect, however, but simply because I want other people to know who I am; for those human beings who are sensitive to the charms of the chrysanthemum must hail from the same country in which my soul abides, and I should like to meet them. I should not have much to say to them — souls are not talkative — but we should make curtsies, and hand white chrysanthemums to one another.

  “Artists must not become too respectable,” opined Sadakichi, “because their mission is to teach the play phase of life.” By 1917, he was a widely-traveling lecturer, “a maverick of the seven arts,” offering his predictions and observations — some pithy, some funny, some unforgivable:• It pays to be a snob.

  • Americans don’t know how to drink.

  • California will eventually secede from the rest of the union.

  • Lynching Negroes in the South is very horrible, but quite necessary.

  • All is money in this country.

  • Peace is only
a dream.

  Sadakichi Hartmann (right) In The Thief of Baghdad

  • The Germans and the Japanese make me tired.

  • Life should consist of one new sensation after another; otherwise we might as well commit suicide.

  And come 1922/1923 — the lofty era that saw John Decker falling into an orchestra pit and John Barrymore groping his stage mother — we find the first of the Decker and Hartmann sagas. The tale goes that Decker and Hartmann met, crashed the Washington Mews studio of (in Decker’s words) “a would-be sculptress… one of those wretched beings with one-nineteenth of a talent and lots of alimony.” While the guests (“the usual coterie of half-assed sycophants and poseurs who think that by rubbing up against bad art they can become good artists”) savored the bootleg booze, Decker and Sadakichi crept upstairs to the studio, where Decker found a veiled sculpture — a giant clay hand. Decker found some plasticene in the studio and added, in the grip of the hand, an impromptu penis. Sadakichi rewrapped the aborning art.

  “Now quiet, everybody, please,” announced the sculptress after finally rounding up the drunken guests to behold the unveiling. “I felt truly inspired as I modeled this. And I hope you will experience the same wonderful thrill when you look upon it.” She unveiled the statue.

  “I call it ‘The Hand of Friendship!’” she proclaimed, unveiling the penis-brandishing statue.

  The guests laughed. When the sculptress looked away from their faces and saw the phallus looming in her Hand of Friendship, she nearly fainted. “Sadakichi was all for staying on,” recalled Decker, “but I dragged him away when I heard someone mention the police.”

  By Sadakichi’s own records, he was away from New York much of this era, traveling to towns in New Jersey, Alabama and Florida, pursuing his fleeing health.

  Then in 1923 Sadakichi went Hollywood.

  He moved his family to the desert town of Beaumont, worked on a script for Don Quixote (which was never produced) and landed the juicy role of the Court Magician in the classic The Thief of Baghdad, starring Douglas Fairbanks. His fee: $250 per week and a case of whiskey. The legend goes that he walked off the set after several weeks when the latest case of whiskey failed to meet his standard, and that Fairbanks had to reshoot the scenes at a cost of $65,000. (Some sources go as high as $250,000.) In fact, Sadakichi survives in the release print — looking like a mix of Poe and Fu Manchu, and seemingly enjoying his one and only film credit. Douglas Fairbanks’ final estimation of Sadakichi: “An intelligent spittoon.”

  Sadakichi had his own insight, naturally, into the cinema: The motion picture comes nearest to the two conditions which are destined to be the main characteristics of all future art expression: being used on a principle of motion and dependent on composite efforts. It is the youngest in the family of arts and presents the cumulative result of mechanical efficiency and economic power, guided and shoved into place by mob predilection. It is one of the best time-killing soporific entertainments the world has ever known … a welcome narcotic sent by the Zeitgeist to mankind suffering from twentieth-century boredom.

  Hartmann had a face that John Decker called “a painter’s dream.” There was a dignity in that mummy face, a nobility, a saintliness — and if ever a face reflected the inner soul, thus did Sadakichi’s. He was, with all his eccentricities, a brilliant man, and his poetry that survives is powerful, such as this verse from his My Rubaiyat (1913):If youth would refuse to obey

  To die without cause of reason,

  If youth would refuse to bear arms

  Against brothers they do not know,

  Then like Chaldean shepherds,

  We might greet a great white dawn.

  So Sadakichi Hartmann disciples survive, many in Japan, and 46 boxes at University of California, Riverside contain not only a relic of his hair, but the sheet music to “The Sadakichi March.” In the eyes of his worshippers, Sadakichi had a radiant arrogant brilliance that could truly be inspiring and (yes, for some) a sexual adventure to be remembered. Gene Fowler, locating one of Hartmann’s wives after his death, asked what made her forgive his many most grievous faults.

  “Sadakichi,” she said solemnly, “was capable.” Presumably with or without his truss.

  Fated to be remembered primarily as the cherished mascot of the Bundy Drive Boys, Sadakichi had his dissenters. One of the gang despised him, calling him (among other things) “Itchy-Scratchy” and “Catch-a-Crotchie.” W. C. Fields was not an easy man to impress.

  Chapter Four

  The Great Charlatan

  Even in his own family, W.C. Fields was persona non grata!

  — Ronald J. Fields, interview with the author, 2006

  W.C. Fields hated dogs, he said, “Because the sons-of-bitches — and they really are, you know — lift their legs on flowers.”

  He hated water, he explained, “because fish fuck in it.”

  Then there was Fields’ story of Ziegfeld Follies’ Hans Kunt (“one of the German Kunts; not to be confused with the Italian Cunts”). Once while Hans was rehearsing with the Ziegfeld girls, Fields came down the center aisle of the New Amsterdam Theatre and shouted, “Hello, Kunt!”

  As Fields told it, the Follies girls all smiled and replied, “Hello, Mr. Fields!”

  There was his letter to a Jewish Hollywood producer, with the salutation, “Dear Christ Killer,” his reference to polio-stricken President Roosevelt as “grim legs.” And it was Fields who inspired not only John Decker’s classic Fields-as-Queen Victoria portrait, but also one of Decker’s most infamous works, never exhibited in public, of W.C. and Carlotta Monti, his one-time secretary and mistress. Charles Heard, a Dallas-based Decker historian and collector, remembers the painting vividly:As for the naughty Decker painting at Chasen’s… I visited there in 1974 and saw the famous Queen Victoria painting and the pencil Decker sketch of W.C. and Barrymore in the same hospital room together — both are hooked up to alcohol IV’s. When we entered the restaurant, I made it known to the maître d’ that I was a big Fields fan making a Chasen’s pilgrimage — and after dinner, he approached my table and invited me to accompany him to the Chasen’s office. We walked into this richly paneled office and he said, “I’ll show you something that not many have seen that used to hang in W.C. Fields’ home.” He then pulled out a couch from against the wall and removed a long horizontal painting of Carlotta in the buff with W.C. in miniature on her muff, with top hat on and holding a martini glass high!

  If John Barrymore seemed to carry his pet devil in his eyes, W.C. Fields appeared to transport his in his nose — a red, bulbous, and seemingly ready to explode violently (indeed, it once did). What Fields got away with saying in public made him a comedy icon, a modern wit, a rebel to 1960s radicals.

  • I am free from all prejudices. I hate everyone equally.

  • Start every day with a smile, and get it over with.

  • What a gorgeous day. What effulgent sunshine. It was a day of this sort that the McGillicuddy brothers murdered their mother with an axe.

  • What fiend put pineapple juice in my pineapple juice?

  • If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then give up. No use being a damn fool about it.

  • Children should neither be seen nor heard from… ever again.

  • A woman drove me to drink, and I never even had the courtesy to thank her.

  • Once, during Prohibition, I was forced to live for days on nothing but food and water.

  • I always keep a supply of stimulant handy in case I see a snake, which I also keep handy.

  • My illness is due to my doctor’s insistence that I drink milk, a whitish fluid they force down helpless babies.

  Was the man really the dog-hating, child-despising misanthrope that legend has cranked him up to be? Ronald J. Fields, the Great Man’s grandson, author of W.C. Fields: A Life on Film, says: W.C. was split, really split! There were contradictory things. For example, in his will, he donated most of his money for an orphanage, but being very antireligious
, he stipulated it had to be an orphanage where no religion of any kind could be taught!

  As for “Anyone who hates children and dogs can’t be all bad” — well, Baby LeRoy was “over the hill” in Hollywood because he was three or four and W.C. fought cats and dogs with the studio to have him in his movie The Old-Fashioned Way. He basically got Baby LeRoy out of retirement at the age of four! At the same time, Ray Bradbury remembers that he’d ride his bike over to Paramount and wait outside for the stars to come out and here comes W.C., coming out in his limousine. “Mr. Fields, Mr. Fields, can I have your autograph?” W.C. grabs the book, signs it, and “There you go, you little bastard!” For just about every kind thing I could say he had for children, I could tell you something else he wasn’t so kind about! It’s kind of a mixed bag on that one.

  As with his Bundy Drive confreres, W. C. Fields definitely had his demons — all of which had an impact on his artistry. As legendary screen beauty Louise Brooks perceived, “W.C. Fields stretched out his hand to Beauty and Love and they thrust it away.”

  The rejection ironically inspired one of the great comic performers of all time.