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

by Gregory William Mank

  All the while they gleefully made bets as to when his stomach would burst.

  Richmond Reed Carradine was born February 5, 1906 in New York City; his father was an Associated Press writer who died when he was three, and his mother was a physician. At an early age he saw Robert Mantell as Shylock and decided to become a classical actor. He passionately read Shakespeare and, blessed with a remarkable memory, had committed all the Bard’s works to memory. In his prime, he insisted he could play any Shakespearean role with only 24 hours notice, and this incredible ability lasted him late into his life.

  John Barrymore played Hamlet in New York when Carradine was 16 — Carradine professed to have seen Barrymore in the role six times and Barrymore became his idol. He made his own theatrical debut in New Orleans in 1925 in Camille, acted in stock company Shakespeare, and decided to take his chances in Hollywood.

  His trek across the country was shades of John Decker. Carradine traveled as a quick sketch artist, pursuing important-looking folk and selling them a portrait for $2.50.

  I made as high as 10 to 15 dollars a day that way. Then I would move into the best hotel and order the finest dishes its restaurant afforded. By the end of the week, I would be accepted as an eccentric but devout genius and be invited to sing solos in the First Methodist Church.

  Carradine became a “banana messenger” on a train bound for Los Angeles. His job demanded he run across the top of the train in the Texan desert, opening and closing ventilator hatches to keep the bananas at an even temperature. Considering Carradine had already selected his cloak and large black hat as his customary attire, he surely cut quite a figure as he scurried back and forth atop the train. Thus did he arrive in Hollywood in 1927.

  After a brief stint as a scenic designer for Cecil B. DeMille, who canned him for not including Roman columns in his sketches, Carradine became an actor — usually on the street, sometimes on a local stage. He claimed to have played Richard III for the first time in 1929 at USC, and to prepare for the role, he decided it was time he met his beau ideal, John Barrymore. It was one of John Carradine’s favorite stories: toiling up Tower Road to Bella Vista; finding a telephone at the back gate in a niche (“Everything in Hollywood is in a niche, like a saint,” said Carradine); Nishi’s Japanese voice answering and admitting him; Carradine walking under an arbor, and fencing with the veranda doorknob with his cane…

  Presently I saw something out of the corner of my eye and there was Barrymore, in a blue polka-dot dressing gown with his hands stuffed deep in his pockets and his head to one side like a bird — astonished at this apparition! For I was wearing the last of my stock wardrobe — a black braided jacket, striped morning trousers, spats (because I had no socks)… a wing collar, a York puffed tie, a Homburg hat and a cane. He took a step toward me, and I took a tentative step toward him…

  Finally I said, “Mr. Barrymore, I’m going to play Richard III.” And Barrymore said, “Really? Let’s have a drink!”

  Barrymore dispatched Nishi to bring “two tall Tom Collins” and, in a dream come true, Carradine became a crony of his idol.

  It was a ribald relationship. The story goes that Barrymore once arranged for Carradine to make a screen test, for which he was made up as a fantastic fop, with curly wig and lipstick, enjoying a banquet as he delivered a lengthy soliloquy. The speech was to end with Carradine luxuriantly wiping his mouth and exclaiming, in close-up, “Ah! Delicious! The best I’ve ever had!”

  Barrymore, assuring Carradine the test was a star-maker, invited him and a bevy of Hollywood notables to its screening. The star himself introduced it, assuring the assemblage they’d see on the screen evidence of this young man’s “remarkable and uncanny special talent.” The room darkened, the scene began, and Carradine was shocked to see the speech cut down right to his final line and close-up —

  “Ah! Delicious! The best I’ve ever had!”

  — followed by a cut to Barrymore, from the waist down, pulling up his fly.

  The late Henry Brandon, the towering character actor (best remembered as Barnaby in Laurel and Hardy’s Babes in Toyland) recalled trading some badinage with Carradine, and confronting him with that account. “It’s a base canard!” raved Carradine. “It’s a tissue of lies!”

  “The crazier he got denying it,” laughed Brandon, “the more I knew it was true!”

  John Carradine made his first film Tol’able David, in 1930. He played mainly bits in the early 1930s — such as a Christian martyr in DeMille’s The Sign of the Cross (1932), and a hunter who crashes the peaceful idyll of Karloff ’s Monster and O.P. Heggie’s saintly hermit in Whale’s delirious zenith of Universal horror, The Bride of Frankenstein (1935).

  It was The Prisoner of Shark Island, released in early 1936, which awarded John Carradine his fame. The actor played Sgt. Rankin, the Lucifer of a jailer who rules over the hellish Dry Tortugas, making life a Hades for his prize convict Dr. Samuel Mudd (Warner Baxter). With wild eyes, a satanic smile and a dash of Shakespearean bravado, John Carradine was the movie villain of the season.

  “Hi’ya, Judas!” crows Carradine at the hapless Baxter.

  Come the Hollywood premiere of The Prisoner of Shark Island at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, and Carradine realized how effective he was in the role. He took his new wife Ardanelle, and the departing crowd recognized him and booed him, causing his aghast bride to weep in mortification.

  Overnight, John Carradine was a 20th Century-Fox contract player and a member of John Ford’s stock company. Columnist Jimmie Fidler saluted Carradine’s “rococo theatrical-ism,” the fact that he attended premieres in his Duesenberg, with chauffeur and footman:An opera cape, top hat, ebony stick and glittering diamond studs set John apart in a town where a tuxedo is considered formal dress. At intermission, he stands gracefully in the lobby, smoking a long Russian cigarette and twirling his cane… It is the kind of exhibitionism that made Hollywood, in its colorful beginnings, the most talked-about town on Earth.

  Now famous in his own right, Carradine could enjoy his frolics as a Bundy Drive Boy, gaining his entrée via Barrymore. As Errol Flynn told Charles Hamblett in his book The Hollywood Cage:Barrymore, John Carradine and I used to go three or four days without sleeping. We’d start out in some bistro at noon and a week later find ourselves in Mexico or in a yacht off Catalina with a dozen bottles on the floor and a gaggle of whores puking their guts up all over the place … that’s how we were then — so intoxicated with the sheer zing of existence, we were half-mad when we were technically sober…

  In Mary of Scotland, (RKO, 1936), Carradine played Mary’s confidante, David Rizzo, a role that provided him the chance to sing, as well as a moving death scene. Katharine Hepburn, who played the title role, failed to impress him.

  The Decker painting that appalled Hepburn

  Day after day Kate kept saying she really wanted to play both Mary and Queen Elizabeth (played by Florence Eldridge). We all got tired of hearing it. So one day I told Kate, “If you played both parts, how would you know which queen to upstage?” She walked off the set, and didn’t speak to me for 20 years!

  Meanwhile, John Decker painted Hepburn’s portrait as Mary of Scotland. Once again, the “Poison-Caricaturist” had his wicked way and Kate emerged looking like a red-haired succubus. She was so appalled she vowed never to sit for another portrait and gave away the painting, which only emerged again in 2006 after years in an attic in the Hollywood Hills.

  If every producer were to drop dead today, show business still would go on. Seriously, if a bomb hit Hollywood it would only be a matter of time before someone was squatting amid the ruins telling stories.

  — Alan Mowbray

  “Flamboyancy is neither word nor gesture,” said Alan Mowbray, who always evoked a penguin pretending to be Oscar Wilde, or vice versa. “It’s in the mind.” Imposingly British, sardonically suave, he was a man of great wit, considerable talent and actually little ego — so hating the sight of his own face onscreen that he avoided his approximately
150 films and dozens of TV appearances.

  Born August 18, 1896 in London, Mowbray later claimed he got to New York City by stoking a ship. He checked into the Webster Hotel and fled the bill two weeks later, exiting, as he recalled, wearing “two shirts, two compete sets of underwear, assorted extra garments stuck into his jacket pockets and razor, toothbrush, etc., cached elsewhere on his person.” Life was so precarious that he slept on “a big, black smooth rock” in Central Park and ate leftover rolls at the Automat — “beating the bus boys to it,” Mowbray later smiled, “with great skill.”

  He joined a Theatre Guild tour of Shaw’s The Apple Cart, acted from 1923 to 1929 with New York stock companies and made his Broadway debut in Sport of Kings, which opened May 4, 1926 at the Lyceum Theatre. He loved to write and come August 15, 1929, Dinner is Served premiered on Broadway, written, directed and starring Alan Mowbray. The New York Times was appalled:When an actor writes a play for himself, as Alan Mowbray has done in Dinner is Served, now at the Cort Theatre, you expect him to do as well by himself as possible…. But Mr. Mowbray, being a glutton for punishment, has given himself a dull part in a dull comedy — nor has he spared his colleagues… speaking empty lines and walking through an endless succession of silly situations. Your heart might bleed for Mr. Mowbray, if he were not responsible for his own calamity.

  Dinner is Served lasted four performances.

  Mowbray and his wife Lorayne decided to try Hollywood. First he had to escape another bill, this one from New York’s Algonquin Hotel, managed by the noted Frank Case. Mowbray told reporter Mel Heimer in 1954:I left the Algonquin, where I had a lovely room — 1002 — owing $750. Later, when I had a bit of success in Hollywood, three or four years after that, I paid the bill — and, I believe, thus gave Case his first heart attack.

  He played George Washington in Warners’ Alexander Hamilton (George Arliss in the title role, 1931) and soon settled as one of the movie colony’s busiest character actors, supporting such stars as James Cagney, Jean Harlow and John Barrymore — who became good friends with Mowbray and dubbed him “a worthy adversary.” A rare star role came in Universal’s bizarre fantasy Night Life of the Gods (1935), with Mowbray as an inventor who changes Greek statues into living beings at a New York museum; hilarity only intermittingly ensues.

  Mowbray was both character actor and character. In January of 1933, he was arrested and charged with drunk driving after crashing his car into another at 5110 Los Feliz Boulevard. He pleaded guilty, paying a $200 fine and agreeing to his license being revoked for 90 days, but told the judge he was only doing so because he was busy working on a movie and simply wanted to “dispose of the matter.” Yet Mowbray’s most compelling work in the early 1930s wasn’t on the screen, or in traffic court, but as a courageous founder of the Screen Actors Guild.

  In the summer of 1933, a rebellious bunch of Hollywood actors, including Ralph Morgan, Boris Karloff and Alan Mowbray, had recognized the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences as a dupe, all too ready to sell them down the river. On June 30, 1933, the Screen Actors Guild articles were filed. On July 10, Mowbray, who at the time had $60 in his checking account, wrote a check for $50 to retain Larry Beilenson as the SAG counsel. (According to Valerie Yaros, SAG historian, the Guild never reimbursed Mowbray for his expense.) Two days later, Mowbray became the first vice president of the SAG, with Ralph Morgan as president.

  In October of 1933, 14 major actors, protesting a proposal for a salary control board, quit the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. With the new influx of members to the SAG, both Ralph Morgan and Alan Mowbray voluntarily gave up their offices to make way for stars with big name power. Eddie Cantor became president, and Adolphe Menjou was first vice president, Fredric March became second vice president and Ann Harding was third vice president. Ralph Morgan became one of the directors and Alan Mowbray joined the Advisory committee.

  Come the late 1930s, Alan Mowbray lived at 1019 Chevy Chase in Beverly Hills, and played in such popular films as Mary of Scotland and My Man Godfrey (1936). He was twice elected president of the Masquers Club, was a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and a popular lecturer, toastmaster and after-dinner speaker. He was a friend with many of the British actors, even the most aloof and mysterious ones; when Colin Clive, the monster maker of Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein died in 1937, Mowbray was one of the pallbearers.

  He had enormous fun in his profession, even if he couldn’t bear to witness his own work in it. And he made a fat salary, allowing him to own, at one time, 32 of John Decker’s paintings.

  A man looks bigger in the bathtub than he does in the ocean.

  — Thomas Mitchell

  A film critic once suggested that Thomas Mitchell, in every film role he ever played, was drunk, or at least pretended to be. He did a terrific, barnstorming drunk, no doubt, but the generalization is unfair to the man who, for moviegoers of the 1930s and 1940s, was a dynamic mix of legitimate character actor and high-spirited hell-raiser.

  He had a potato face, the look of an over-age Irish delinquent, making him ideal for rowdy newspapermen (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington), Gypsy kings (The Hunchback of Notre Dame), gone-to-seed-and-madness aristocrats (Gone With the Wind) and drunken frontier doctors (Stagecoach). All of these came in 1939, and the last performance won him the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.

  He was a first-generation American of Irish immigrants, born July 11, 1892 in Elizabeth, New Jersey. For a brief time he followed the family into journalism, but in 1913 became an actor, joining the company of Charles Coburn and training in Shakespeare. He made his Broadway debut in Under Sentence (Harris Theatre, October 3, 1916) and in 1918 appeared with John Barrymore in the play Redemption. As the future Bundy Drive Boy later told Gene Fowler in Minutes of the Last Meeting:

  Alan Mowbray

  I didn’t come on-stage until ten o’clock each evening. I had a long scene with Jack, a very important one for the understanding of the part he was playing. One night I was amazed when he began to cut his own lines and to speed up the scene with me. No matter how careless he may have been with his life, he was a martinet on-stage, and if anyone was in the least deficient in a scene with him, slow with the cue lines, or slovenly in delivery, he would blast that person as only he knew how to do. But tonight he left out great chunks of dialogue and kept whispering to me, “Are you all right, old man?” After the final curtain he came to my dressing room to ask again if I was feeling all right. I said of course I was, and what the hell? And he seemed greatly relieved as he said, “I thought I smelled booze on your breath as we began our scene.” I told him I had had exactly one martini before going on, no more, no less. He smiled. “Oh, I was afraid you were drunk; and that’s the only fault I can forgive in an actor. I merely wanted to take the strain off you.”

  Mitchell made his film debut in Six Cylinder Love (1923), which featured two of his future Stagecoach co-players — bald Donald Meek (also in his film bow) and florid Berton Churchill. Meanwhile, on Broadway, he did it all — produce, direct, write act. Among his credits: starring in and co-writing Little Accident (Morosco Theatre, October 9, 1928, 303 performances), starring in, directing and co-writing Cloudy with Showers (Morosco Theatre, September 1, 1931, 71 performances), directing and starring in Honeymoon (Little Theatre, December 23, 1932, 76 performances), directing Tallulah Bankhead in Forsaking All Others (Times Square Theatre, March 1, 1933, 110 performances), co-producing and directing Twenty-Five Dollars an Hour (Masque Theatre, May 10, 1933, 22 performances), directing and starring in Fly Away Home (48th Street Theatre, January 15, 1935, 204 performances), and directing the dialogue scenes of the musical review At Home Abroad, starring Beatrice Lillie, Eleanor Powell and Ethel Waters (Winter Garden Theatre and later Majestic Theatre, September 19, 1935, 198 performances). Between 1916 and 1935, he was involved one way or another with two dozen Broadway productions.

  In 1936 Mitchell made his mark in Hollywood in such films as Theodora Goes Wild. He was impres
sive as banker/embezzler Henry Barnard in Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon (1937) and as boozy Dr. Kersaint in John Ford’s The Hurricane (copping a Best Supporting Actor Academy nomination).

  Thomas Mitchell was a rip-roarer, and in life an art lover. The combo made him a natural to find his way to John Decker and the gang.

  Roland Young as Uriah Heep in David Copperfield (1935)

  While I consider a good expanse of black silk stocking quite alluringly shocking, I have frequently said to myself and others, girls with small brains wear ankle chains.

  — Roland Young

  In 1922, John Barrymore had starred in the film Sherlock Holmes. His Dr. Watson was British actor Roland Young, and Barrymore remembered:When the modest, self-effacing Roland appeared on my horizon, I took a great liking to him; so much so that I began to feel sorry for him during our scenes together. For once in my life, I decided to be somewhat decent toward a colleague. I suggested a little stage-business now and then, so that such a charming, agreeable thespian might not be altogether lost in the shuffle. When I saw the completed film, I was flabbergasted, stunned, and almost became an atheist on the spot. That quiet, agreeable bastard had stolen not one, but every damned scene! This consummate artist and myself have been close friends for years, but I wouldn’t think of trusting him on any stage. He is such a splendid gentleman in real life, but what a cunning, larcenous demon when on the boards!