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

by Gregory William Mank

  • The Galloping Cow

  • Three Tit Tillie

  • Wild Ass Nellie

  And more. Gene recovered under their vigil, and became the star reporter for the Denver Post. Assigned to interview the legendary Buffalo Bill, Fowler sat cross-legged at his feet and fired off his first question.

  “Well, Colonel,” asked Fowler, “do you really believe that the girls of 40 years ago were better in the hay than the girls of today?”

  Buffalo Bill leapt to his feet. “An older man demands respect, sir!” he roared. “My hair is hoary!”

  “But not with years, Colonel,” said Fowler.

  Gene Fowler married Agnes Hubbard July 19, 1916 — immediately attractive to Gene, Will wrote, because she so resembled his mother Dodie. They wed in a Red Rock natural amphitheatre, with a gaggle of ne’er-do-wells Gene brought along as witnesses. Damon Runyon had noted Fowler’s talent and invited him to New York, with a mission.

  Fowler spent all his travel money on a party with his Denver reporter pals. An undertaker came to his aid by hiring Fowler to accompany the cadaver of an old crone — “Nellie,” as Fowler named her — to New York for her burial. The trip was fraught with peril. In Chicago, he ran afoul of war veterans when he accidentally threw a bowl of goldfish into an electrical American flag; the veterans beat him to a pulp. It was how he met Charles MacArthur, of the Chicago Herald-Examiner, who was in trouble himself for having stolen from the coroner’s office the stomach of a dead woman whose husband was accused of poisoning her.

  “What annoys me,” MacArthur reportedly said, “is that all they found in the lady’s stomach were the remains of a 75-cent blue plate lunch.”

  MacArthur smuggled Fowler out of Chicago before charges of malicious mischief and insulting the American flag could stick. In Detroit, however, federal detectives arrested him for defiling the Mann Act — transporting an underage girl across state lines for immoral purposes. The purported victim was the cadaver “Nellie.” Fowler had to show the feds that the alleged virgin-in-peril was the aged and very dead Nellie, moldering in her coffin in the baggage car.

  Gene Fowler relocated to New York, the legends continued. One of his most famous involved the demise of J.P. Morgan the elder, who despised the press. As he sickened, reporters kept a deathwatch and learned that a specialist from France was sailing to New York to attempt a medical miracle. The reporters eventually saw a great car deliver whom they believed to be the French miracle man — who was Fowler disguised in a top hat, elegant suit and fake beard. Posing as the doctor, Fowler infiltrated Morgan’s bedroom, shook his head sadly at the financial giant and then ran like hell — the real doctor had arrived, and Fowler scooped his rivals that Morgan was indeed a dying man.

  In 1927, at the age of 36, Gene Fowler became the managing editor of the New York American, the youngest editor of a major paper in the country. As Fowler told the Los Angeles Times over 30 years later: When Mr. Hearst told me he wanted me to be editor, I protested. I told him, “I don’t like editors.” He said, “Neither do I, young man — but they are a necessary evil.”

  At other times, Fowler expressed his opinion of editors a bit more colorfully: “An editor should have a pimp for a brother, so he’d have someone to look up to.” Nevertheless, he and Hearst worked together happily; once when Hearst telephoned late at night in a panic, Fowler reportedly lulled him into serenity by playing the concertina over the coast-to-coast telephone connection. Once, confronted by three hostile executive editors at the American, Fowler gave each a gift-packaged small clay model of William Randolph Hearst, with instructions:Practice while on vacation in order to perfect yourself in the art of kissing the Chief’s foot:1. Always bow to statue on entering room.

  2. Salaam sixteen times to front of statue

  3. Salaam sixteen times to back of statue

  4. Go to far side of room, approach statue slowly and reverently, with a hypocritical smile of obeisance on your face.

  5. Kneel before statue, purse your lips, then fervently kiss statue’s foot.

  Angry editors blew the whistle and informed Hearst, who laughed and told them not to take upstarts so seriously. (This was about 14 years before Orson Welles felt the Hearst wrath for his Citizen Kane.)

  Gene Fowler soon tired of Hearst yellow journalism. He wanted to be a writer of books … novels, primarily. And inevitably, he succumbed to the lure of Hollywood.

  Above all, he missed his great friend John Barrymore.

  What initially bound John Barrymore with Gene Fowler was a deep love for animals, a trait shared by many of the Bundy Drive Boys. In November of 1918, young Fowler interviewed Barrymore after a matinee of Redemption. Between shows they admired a pug dog, and Barrymore only really became interested in Fowler’s journalistic attentions after. Fowler related that the dog had gone mad, that his uncle had killed him by trapping it under a washtub and tossing in a poison-soaked rag, “my uncle standing there like an elephant hunter being photographed after the kill.”

  Barrymore was eager to learn what happened afterwards. Fowler claimed he said he’d never forgiven his uncle, and told of his grandmother’s displeasure.

  She was a religious woman. She told me what a sin it was not to forgive — anything. She pointed out to me that Jesus had always forgiven, even when nailed to the Cross. I remember how terribly shocked she seemed when I blurted out, “Yes, but Jesus never had a dog.”

  For the first time, Barrymore offered his hand. “Hello!” he smiled.

  Their friendship would last until the night John Barrymore died 24 years later.

  Chapter Seven

  Maloney And Other Vultures

  Why, love foreswore me in my mother’s womb;

  She did corrupt frail nature with some bribe,

  To shrink mine arm up like a wither’d shrub;

  To make an envious mountain on my back...

  To shape my legs of an unequal size,

  To disproportion me in ever y part,

  Like to a CHAOS…

  — John Barrymore as Richard III in The Show of Shows (1929)

  Come 1929, high on his mountaintop, John Barrymore was drinking… heavily.

  His Hollywood career was at a peak. He’d made his talkie debut — a new triumph for the Great Profile. His comic artistry was on dazzling display in The Man from Blakeley’s. Yet his most exciting (if briefest) performance of 1929 was in The Show of Shows, Warner’s all-star revue, with Barrymore reprising his Richard III. He wore his stage makeup of long black wig and his copper armor, made his entrance on a mountain of bodies carrying a severed head, and delivered Richard’s soliloquy from Henry VI (which he’d added to his Richard III on Broadway). He’s magnificently chilling.

  Barrymore, via the magic of the movies, before a curtain in tuxedo, comparing his Richard to Al Capone — pronouncing the long “e” on the gangster’s last name, every bit the dashing, brilliantly mad, World’s Greatest Living Actor. He had signed a new Warners contract — five films at $150,000 per film, plus 10% of the gross. Life seemed rich and fully blessed for “The Great Profile.”

  Barrymore was festering. He was madly in love with his blonde bride. His monkey Clementine had become so dangerously jealous of Barrymore’s passion for Dolores that Barrymore sadly consigned his pet to the Luna Park Zoo. Barrymore was jealous too, concerned about his young wife’s eager sexual appetite, tormented by the knowledge she had posed naked (or nearly so) for James Montgomery Flagg, furious that Flagg had tattled that Dolores sometimes reported to pose in lingerie that was, frankly, not entirely clean.

  Mad Jack and “Jiggie Wink” were lord and lady of the increasingly sinister Bella Vista, with the Barrymore serpent coat-of-arms looming over the gate and his Richard III armor keeping guard at the door. “He and Dolores were photographed in their baronial quarters,” wrote Margot Peters in The House of Barrymore, “looking small and lost.”

  He added to Bella Vista, where, on sad nights, he’d climb up into his tower, alone in the moonli
ght. The new additions featured an aviary, and a beautiful stained glass window, worthy of a cathedral, showing John and Dolores posing à la archangels, looking off to the sea. The angelic window was at compelling odds with the serpent coat-of-arms.

  His behavior with the birds in his aviary, meanwhile, was hardly reverential. Barrymore sat with worms dangling from his lips, attracting the birds to swoop down and pick them from his mouth. In Good Night, Sweet Prince, Gene Fowler wrote that Barrymore overheard his servants discussing this idiosyncrasy:“It ain’t safe,” one of the servants was saying…

  “You mean it ain’t safe for Mr. Barrymore? Like germs or something?”

  “Hell no! I mean safe for the birds … Lookit,” the first voice said. “I mean it’s the booze on Mr. Barrymore’s breath. It gets the worms drunky when he holds them on his lip. Then the birds eat the drunky worms, and then they get booze in their own system. Get me? The birds get dullened in their system.”

  There was a pause, then the second voice said, “By God, you’re right! I noticed how some of the birds flies sideways after he feeds ‘em off his lip.”

  Barrymore said that he promptly went on the wagon for 24 hours.

  Mad Jack’s new favored pet was Maloney, a king vulture. The great hissing creature, whom Fowler described as having a “torpid malevolence” and the look of “a cynical mortician,” would sit on Barrymore’s knee, preening his master’s hair and mustache. When Barrymore suffered a serious attack of influenza, he moved his beloved Maloney into the bathroom, where it lurked, chained and hissing all the while, as if encouraging Barrymore’s recovery. A vengeful nurse, suffering a bite from Maloney’s wickedly hooked beak, unlocked his chain, opened a window and allowed Maloney’s exit. As Barrymore put it, When I roused from my fevered state, I asked where Maloney was. I received evasive answers. I was sad as I looked out of my window. I was weak as the devil, but I started straight up in my bed. There, soaring in slow circles in the sky, definitely waiting for me to knock off, was Maloney!

  The ungrateful bastard! Predicting my death, anticipating it, wishing it! That’s why he had been hissing so happily in the bathroom. Well, I recovered just to spite him…

  Barrymore retrieved Maloney and gave him to a zoo. Still, he missed his scavenger pal, and sometimes nostalgically sent him a nice piece of carrion.

  “Never let him know where it came from, of course,” said John Barrymore.

  John Decker, meanwhile, was earning some Lotusland fame as “The Poison Pen Caricaturist of Hollywood.”

  One of Decker’s first big battles erupted with actor/director James Cruze. Part Ute Indian, Cruze had begun his show business career selling “snake oil” in a traveling patent medicine show, had played the title roles in the 1912 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, directed 1923’s The Covered Wagon, and, in 1929, was in legal trouble for an accident on one of his films in which a man was killed and various others injured. Cruze decided it was time he had his portrait painted by John Decker. The portrait caught Cruze with his mouth open and looking like a lout. Cruze, appalled by what Decker wrought, refused to pay for the portrait.

  “So I was left with the oil,” recalled Decker “You can’t eat oil.”

  Decker explained his terrorist response to Cruze’s recalcitrance in his Liberty magazine installment co-written by Irving Wallace:I decided that, even though artists had been kicked around for years, I wouldn’t submit. I’d shame Cruze into paying me what I earned. So I had some prison bars built in front of Cruze’s portrait, attached a large sign beneath reading “James Cruze in Prison for Debt!” and displayed the result in a prominent photographer’s window at 6070 Sunset Boulevard.

  Claiming he was the overnight laughing-stock of Hollywood, Cruze sued Decker for $200,000. He erupted to the press:I had heard of Decker’s notorious poison-pen caricatures, but when I hired him to do a portrait of me, I didn’t think he’d try any of his poisonous tactics. I intended to have the portrait made for my wife, Betty Compson. But, Good Lord! If I ever showed her the picture Decker painted of me, it would scare her to death. I was the most surprised man in the world when I saw it. Mouth like a gargoyle; face like a frog! It made me look like an Apache or something worse!

  The “Apache” to which Cruze referred meant one of those Spanish fellows in caps and scowls who toss their female partners around the bar. At any rate, Decker, relishing a good fight, delivered his own riposte to Cruze’s tirade:If Cruze wanted some wishy-washy, sloppy, sentimental portrait of himself, he could have had a photograph taken, or hire a two-bit painter to do it. I gave him a work of interpretive art!

  Realizing the artist was a pauper, Cruze finally withdrew the suit, but refused to pay Decker. The artist claimed a triumph: “I felt I had scored a moral victory on the side of honest artistry against overly sensitive and unfair clients.”

  Then there was the night Decker ran afoul of Emil Jannings, the German actor best remembered as the masochist schoolteacher upon whose balding pate Marlene Dietrich cracks eggshells in The Blue Angel. Jannings soon returned to Germany, where he eventually allied himself with Hitler. Decker told Irving Wallace in “Heroes with Hangovers”:I recall when I was summoned to meet Jannings at the studio and discuss the possibilities of doing a humorous painting. He told me to be at his home that evening at seven.

  I appeared at his home on time. His butler came to the door, told me Jannings was still eating, advised me to return in twenty minutes and slammed the door in my face. Well, I wanted the commission, so I hung around for twenty minutes, and finally was admitted.

  Emil Jannings was still at the table, huge and gross, wiping his mouth. He peered at me, and then, with a lordly air, said:

  “Ah, Decker, yes, I remember. So you wish to paint my picture, eh? Well, I’ll tell you what. You go back to the studio, get some photographs of me in all the roles I’ve done, study them carefully, then sketch each one and bring the sketches to me. If I like one, I might let you paint me.”

  “My dear Jannings,” I answered, suppressing my anger. “To be honest with you, I was just going downtown to see one of your latest movies. But if you’ll kindly stand up and do a few scenes from it right now — well, I’ll be able to decide whether or not I want to go!”

  And I never saw him again, thank God!

  John Decker painted Charlie Chaplin 12 times, who adored (and purchased) all dozen paintings. Decker enjoyed Chaplin’s famous imitation of John Barrymore, contrived to show the man’s sordid side. Phil Rhodes, who later worked with Chaplin, witnessed the lampoon.

  “Chaplin would begin, ‘To be, or not to be,’” says Rhodes, “and all the while, he was picking his ears and nose and scratching his balls!”

  The Stars in Old Master-style paintings became a craze, and before long, Decker had painted Garbo as the Mona Lisa, Fatty Arbuckle as Falstaff, Lew Cody as Rembrandt, and even apparently made good with James Cruze, painting Cruze as Henry VIII and Cruze’s wife Betty Compson as Queen Elizabeth.

  The always adventurous artist took whatever came, and squeezed it for whatever publicity it was worth. On August 8, 1929, the Los Angeles Times reported that Decker was putting his “finishing touches” on his new creation, Beauty and the Beast. He had visited Gay’s Lion Farm, where he painted Marie Romano, a showgirl at Hollywood’s Pom-Pom nightclub, posing with Numa, “famous motion picture lion star.” The daring painting attracted much attention, resulting in Decker’s picture in the Times (along with Ms. Romano and Numa), inclusion in Fox and Universal newsreels, and bookings to appear in Decker’s Hollywood studio, the Waldorf Gallery in New York and The Regent Art Forum in London.

  Decker was also already perpetrating his forgeries, seeing the almighty poohbahs of Hollywood as wonderful targets for harpooning. Now and then the ruses backfired.

  “I once bought a long-coveted Modigliani, sight unseen,” related Decker, “and found out it was one I’d done myself!”

  Besides Maloney, there were other vultures hovering over the men who’d become the Bundy Drive Bo
ys. Come Black Friday, October 1929, the Stock Market came crashing down, bringing on the Great Depression. These remarkable men were in a way immune from the disaster, and their gifts gave them a sanctuary from the woes of the commonality.

  Yet they paid for their blessings with torment. Barrymore suffered nightmares about his father, and his increasing fear of ever returning to the stage. John Decker, still horrified by sunsets. Gene Fowler, second-guessing whether he should have fallen off that hotel ledge on that snowy night in Denver. W.C. Fields, bitter about his father, estranged wife, son, and most of the world in general. Ben Hecht, guided by his savage misanthropy. And Sadakichi Hartmann, greeting much of 1929 life with a contemptuous laugh.

  The terminal passion play of the Bundy Drive Boys would soon begin.

  Part II

  The 1930s Hollywood

  “Hollywoodus in Latrina”

  — John Barrymore’s sobriquet for the movie colony

  Barrymore and friend with the notorious totem pole at Bella Vista

  Chapter Eight

  The Glory Days and Nights

  In 1930, John Barrymore amassed more baroque art for Bella Vista. Below Mad Jack’s crowned serpent coat-of-arms passed a treasury of religious artifacts — icons, triptychs, and silver candelabra from the Georgian Knights. There was a 13th-century Book of Hours, described as a “hand-executed, illuminated Catholic doctrine which chronicles the story of Jesus.”