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

by Gregory William Mank

  “Oh, Mr. Barrymore!” she exclaimed, soon turning the attention to her son and escorting Barrymore across the room to meet him. “My son Laird so appreciated your letter. His studio is so impressed with his work — they all think he’s going to be a major star. I know you two have never actually met, so let me introduce you both. Mr. Barrymore, this is my son, Laird Cregar. What do you think?”

  The 5’9” drunken Barrymore looked up and up at the towering, 300-pound giant smiling before him, and shook his head in wonderment.

  “Madame,” said Barrymore, “that must have been some fuck!”

  The joke had its dark side. Cregar was so upset by the evening that he could be heard sobbing in his dressing room at the studio the next day. Best remembered as Jack the Ripper in The Lodger (1944), the young actor — an unhappy homosexual, fearful of becoming typecast as a hulking villain and plagued by his own demons — underwent a merciless diet that reduced him by 100 pounds and resulted in a fatal heart attack December 9, 1944. He was only 31 years old.

  Gene Fowler, having racked up another writing credit via MGM’s 1941 picture Billy the Kid, was 51 years old and at a crossroads. He took no joy in his screenwriting and wanted to write books. He considered a trip to Tahiti and meanwhile, sought the advice of John Barrymore.

  “I am doing the work of a whore,” said Barrymore sadly, citing his radio and cinema work, his salaries going to his creditors. He continued:There is nothing as sad in all the world as an old prostitute. I think that every artist somewhere along the line should know what it is to be one, a young one, but reform. Please, my friend, don’t keep on working in pictures, where you most certainly don’t find any real satisfaction. Get out now!

  Gene Fowler sailed to Tahiti and never again labored as a screenwriter. (MGM’s 1949 Wallace Beery vehicle Big Jack was a revamp of a project he’d fashioned in the early 1930s for W.C. Fields.)

  After Fowler returned to L.A. in late June of 1941, he visited Bundy Drive to check up on his friends. Decker now had a pet parrot that roosted on his shoulder. It gave him the look of a pirate, and the bird was worthy of one, as Mary Lou remembers:The parrot hated mother [Phyllis] — it absolutely hated her, because it sat in its cage on a big coffee table and every morning mother drank her coffee, smoked her cigarettes and played solitaire. And the bird hated all that! At first nobody could get close to the cage to feed it — I’d have to try to push the food in with a broom handle.

  Eventually the rapacious parrot took a peck at his master’s eye, but missed, only to bite Decker’s already broken nose — ripping away a morsel and warping his proboscis even more. Always the animal lover, Decker forgave the transgression.

  Come Fowler’s return, Decker prepared a celebratory meal of veal. “We have killed a fatted calf. Something appropriate to welcome home the prodigal son.” Unfortunately, due to his diabetes, Decker couldn’t savor a bite of the meal. Sadakichi Hartmann lambasted Fowler for forsaking his biography to enjoy “a pleasure cruise,” while W.C. Fields opined that Fowler wasting his time on a book on Sadakichi would be akin to “digging your own grave with a quill.”

  “Hah!” cackled Sadakichi.

  “Hah yourself!” volleyed W.C. “In fact, a double hah! And also drat!”

  Errol Flynn had an eventful 1941. On May 31, his son Sean was born in Beverly Hills. As “Tiger Lil” gave birth, Flynn was sailing his yacht the Sirocco, “deliberately distancing himself from the happy event,” wrote Errol and Sean Flynn biographer Jeff rey Meyers in his book Inherited Risk.

  Fatherhood did nothing to tame the “magnificent specimen of the rampant male,” as David Niven later described Errol Flynn. 1941’s Dive Bomber would be his final film with Michael Curtiz. Flynn recalled why:I grabbed Mike by the throat and began strangling him. Two men tried to pr y me off. They succeeded before I killed him. That was the end of our relationship. I deemed it wiser not to work with this highly artistic gentleman who aroused my worst instincts.

  Raoul Walsh, mustached, eye-patched (a jackrabbit had crashed through his windshield one night in the desert, causing the loss of his right eye), and fated to become one of Flynn’s most loyal pals, took over They Died with Their Boots On, starring Flynn as Custer. The cast also included Olivia de Havilland (as Mrs. Custer in her final film with Flynn) and Anthony Quinn as Crazy Horse.

  The throttling of Curtiz certainly wasn’t Flynn’s only brawl of the year. In July of 1941, Flynn’s beloved dog Arno died. His master had taken him on the Sirocco, where Arno delighted in leaping and snapping at the flying fish. In one of those leaps and snaps, Arno fell overboard and drowned.

  Columnist Jimmie Fidler, meanwhile, had maneuvered himself onto Flynn’s bad side, testifying before a Senate committee that Warners should never have made Dive Bomber (Fidler was an isolationist and resented British attempts to draw the U.S. into WWII). But the last straw came as Fidler denounced Flynn for not retrieving his dead, washed-up-to-shore Arno. Actually, Flynn couldn’t bear to see his dead drowned dog, but in Fidler’s words, the star “didn’t even bother… that’s how much he cared for him.”

  It was dangerous to accuse a Bundy Drive Boy of not caring for his pet.

  Saturday night, September 22, 1941: Errol Flynn entered the Mocambo and saw Jimmie Fidler. The columnist, as Flynn recalled, tried to hide under his chair but Flynn caught him and KO’d him with one punch. The spectacle included Lupe Velez as a screaming cheerleader, exhorting Flynn “Geev it to heem, big boy!” and Fidler’s wife, defending her husband by stabbing Flynn in the ear with a fork. Flynn later joked that Mrs. Fidler used the wrong fork — “a dreadful solecism.”

  FIDLER-FLYNN FRACAS TO BE AIRED BY JUDGE, headlined the September 30, 1941 Evening Herald-Express, reporting:The session was called by Judge Cecil D. Holland of Beverly Hills Justice Court, to whom Fidler complained that Flynn had punched him in the face. Flynn, who declared Mrs. Fidler punctured his ear with a fork during the hostilities, denied he punched Fidler and said he only slapped him; that a slap is more of an insult in Ireland, where his forebears come from.

  John Barrymore’s consolation prize for losing a role in The Man Who Came to Dinner was RKO’s Playmates. The top-billed star: Kay Kyser, “the old Professor” of radio’s Kollege of Musical Knowledge. Barrymore’s role: John Barrymore.

  Playmates is surely his most whorish 94 minutes.

  The scenario: Barrymore, strapped by debt, agrees to coach Kyser in Shakespeare to land a contract and avoid bankruptcy, jail or both. Lupe Velez played Barrymore’s fiery ex-wife Carmen (sort of a south-of-the-border Elaine Barrie), Patsy Kelly acted his wisecracking agent Lulu, and the whole farrago climaxed with a “swing” version of Romeo and Juliet, as Velez chases Barrymore (in Shakespearean doublet and tights), yanking off his costume wig.

  Barrymore cackles, shrieks, spits out coffee, clowns with “Ethelbert” (his padded tights, clearly based on the “symmetricals” he wore in the 1920s), gives an autograph to a pretty girl who thinks he’s Adolphe Menjou, fights a sword duel with Kyser and performs a nightclub dance with old May Robson. There’s even a Kay Kyser nightmare vignette, almost phantasmagoric, that must be seen to be believed — Kyser a matador, fighting a bull (two men in a suit) with a Barrymore head (complete with horns), as all the while Velez cheers and tosses roses.

  Yet Playmates’ most amazing moment comes as Barrymore first coaches Kyser (who laments that he himself reads Shakespeare “like a Ubangi”). Barrymore sits down, murmurs “It’s been a long time,” and doesn’t require the blackboards as he begins:

  To be, or not to be,

  That is the question…

  He recites the soliloquy beautifully — and the tears are pouring down his face. Barrymore of course could cry on cue (“It’s not acting, it’s crying!” he’d quip), but the tears appear all too real here. The sight of this fallen, weeping man, amidst all the silly cornpone and slapstick, is mesmerizingly tragic. Apparently even the irreverent Barrymore, at this stage of his life, couldn’t shake the shadow of Sha
kespeare’s lines about heartache and the fear of death, nor the horror of his own downfall.

  He finally breaks off in a jarringly edited moment. “These tears taste like vodka,” Barrymore joked after the camera stopped, trying to spare himself and the others embarrassment. Still, he’d given director David Butler and the company far more than they bargained for, and Barrymore’s Hamlet recitation and tears bequeath a tragic and disturbing moment.

  Steve Beasley, producer of the DVD documentary Kay Kyser, The Ol’ Professor of Swing! shared a few anecdotes about Playmates:During a lunch break on the RKO lot, Kyser happened to walk past Barrymore’s dressing room, where Barrymore was taking a nap on his couch with the door open. Kay could see there was a hole in the bottom of Barrymore’s shoe, so he gently slipped it off, took it to the lot shoe repair, had it fixed and slipped it back on Barrymore’s foot and never told Barrymore a thing about it.

  Also, one of Kyser’s musicians told me that they were looking for Barrymore one afternoon to shoot a scene, and couldn’t find him. Someone located Barrymore sitting in a cab on Gower Street, down the block from the studio, drinking with the cab door open.

  Playmates was John Barrymore’s final film.

  Decker had been painting the murals — sketches of stars around the bar — for the gala premiere of the new Hollywood cabaret of John Murray Anderson, and his new stage show Silver Screen, “a musical glamorama of the movies,” at the New Wilshire Bowl. It was Anderson who had engaged Decker to create the sets for The Greenwich Village Follies of 1922. Barrymore had been tagging along to ogle the chorus girls, and Decker feared another misadventure. Whenever Barrymore eyed a chorine too closely, Decker drew a mercilessly nasty caricature of the lady and showed it to Barrymore, who’d moan, “Hmm. I see what you mean.”

  As Phyllis Decker expressed it, “The girl was saved.”

  The Bundy Drive Boys appeared at the Anderson club opening in September, 1941. The star-studded evening was colorful — Barrymore proposed playfully to Mae West, and the two traded ribald zingers. W.C. Fields suggested they have a similar evening out “say in about 90 years,” and Decker, Barrymore and Fowler returned to Bundy Drive — where, as Fowler recalled, Decker desperately poured out the story of his German birth. He was terrified that his ancestry would result again in incarceration these war days and the nightmares of the Isle of Man came back more horribly than ever.

  On October 10, 1941, Universal released Never Give a Sucker an Even Break, W.C. Fields’ trouble-plagued star vehicle. The film (its title lifted from Poppy) features Fields as the “Great Man,” with the ideal fantasy daughter in Universal starlet Gloria Jean. As Ms. Jean told Gregory Lewis in Films in Review (November, 1973):After working with Mr. Fields, I always remembered the color of his nose. It was like a multicolored popsicle. It’s said he didn’t like children, but he tried to get along with me. I do recall I annoyed him when I tried to offer him something to eat. He liked what was in his glass better! All in all, working with him was a great experience.

  The framework found W.C. trying to sell a story to “Esoteric Studios” producer Franklin Pangborn. Playing Pangborn’s secretary, Carlotta Monti spews her wrath at some anonymous male:Carlotta: You big hoddy-doddy! You smoke cigars all day and drink whiskey half the night! Someday you’ll drown in a vat of whiskey!

  W.C.: Drown in a vat of whiskey… Death, where is thy sting?

  As Danny Peary writes of Never Give a Sucker an Even Break:It’s the film where the surrealistic nature of Fields’ comedy is most evident. Fields plays himself… he leaps from an airplane to retrieve his whiskey bottle and falls thousands of feet before landing safely on rich Margaret Dumont’s mountaintop estate, where she lives with her pretty young daughter (to whom he teaches “Post Office”), a gorilla, and Great Danes with fangs….

  “He didn’t get that nose from playing ping-pong,” says the grand Madame Dumont, the Marx Brothers’ famous stooge, of W.C. in Never Give a Sucker an Even Break. The film suffered pre-shoot censorship trouble (W.C. tells the audience a scene in an ice cream parlor was supposed to take place in a saloon), as well as a major cut — the death of Gorgeous, the trapeze artist (played by the sad-eyed Anne Nagel). Once again, W.C. had hoped for a depth in the film that the studio wasn’t prepared to allow. Still, Never Give a Sucker an Even Break is erratic but personal to its star — and it was the last film in which W.C. Fields starred. His remaining films would offer him only specialty acts. The Christian Science Monitor cared little for Never Give a Sucker an Even Break and the star fired off this letter to the Monitor, dated February 7, 1942:Dear Editor:

  On January the 28th in the Year of our Lord 1942, The Christian Science Monitor printed:

  “Never Give a Sucker an Even Break: W.C. Fields acting out a story with results that are by turns ludicrous, tedious and distasteful. There is the usual atmosphere of befuddled alcoholism.”

  If the chosen people decide that The Christian Science Monitor is expressing the thoughts of the majority of the people in the United States, it is possible they would bar me from their studios and bar my pictures from their theatres, which would force me into the newspaper business. And if I used your tactics I might say:

  “The Christian Science Monitor: Day in and day out the same old bromides. They no longer look for love or beauty but see so many sordid things that Mary Baker Eddy did not see in this beautiful world she discovered after trying her hand at mesmerism, hypnotism, and spiritualism before landing on the lucrative Christian Science racket.”

  When I play in a picture in which I take a few nips to get a laugh (I have never played a drunkard in my life) I hope that it might bring to mind the anecdote of Jesus turning water into wine.

  And wouldn’t it be terrible if I quoted some reliable statistics which prove that more people are driven insane through religious hysteria than by drinking alcohol.

  Yours very truly.

  A subscriber,

  W.C. Fields

  Late in 1941, Errol Flynn began building his famous “Mulholland Farm,” 7740 Mulholland Drive, with its spectacular view of the San Fernando Valley and a master bed with a mirror in the ceiling. According to Charles Higham, “The house bristled with sexual jokes. On Flynn’s instructions, John Decker designed an obscene mural for the fish tanks which ran high along the walls of the first-floor den: the painted fish behind the real ones boasted enormous pendulous testicles.”

  Flynn hosted cockfights at Mulholland Farm. There were plenty of other animals, too — dogs, cats, lambs, horses, and Flynn’s monkey Chico. The door was always open to John Barrymore, who loved the zoo.

  It was in November of 1941 that John Barrymore, apparently desperately lonely, took a desperately lonely final stab at a reunion with Elaine. She had sent him flowers during his latest hospital stay, and now he desired a reconciliation.

  He restored Elaine’s picture to a silver frame, prepared a formal dinner, ordered wine and flowers. Still almost touchingly vain despite his self-mockery, he cleaned up, and put on his girdle and formal dress. Finally, he barred the gates of Tower Road from the Bundy Drive Boys who, as he accurately predicted, had planned to crash the lovefest.

  Fowler, Decker and various members waited at the brothel of 300-lb. prostitute Jane Jones, where Nishi telephoned them half-hour bulletins.

  Elaine never showed.

  Come midnight, Nishi called that Barrymore was violently raging: “The Monster” had gone mad. He ripped Elaine’s picture from the frame, threw the flowers into the fire and drank all the wine himself. The last call from Nishi came at 2 a.m. as the Monster still roared about Bella Vista — “King Lear was declaiming on the Heath,” as Gene Fowler put it.

  The rage lasted for some days and nights and climaxed with a violent desecration. Barrymore had illustrated his second wife Michael Strange’s 1921 book of poems, Resurrecting Life. The color frontispiece showed Barrymore’s painting of a divine female, naked and beatific, rising toward a golden, flower-circled chalice, ascending above fallen m
ales caught in the tendrils of horrific monsters. He had saved the original painting at Bella Vista, and if it was Barrymore’s tribute to the superiority of womanhood, he now thought better of it. As Gene Fowler watched, Barrymore bitterly painted over the ascending woman, obliterating her and replacing her with a rapacious, nightmarish, predatory male bird, beak sharp and wings outstretched.

  For the Bundy Drive Boys, 1941 climaxed on Friday night, November 21, 1941, as the Frank Peris Gallery hosted John Decker’s new art show. As Bill Wickersham wrote in his “Hollywood Parade” column:Among the celebrated Hollywoodites rarely seen at social events, Lionel Barrymore and Joel McCrea are second only to Garbo. But, indicating John Decker’s popularity and the great admiration with which the film colony regards his artistry, both actors attended the cocktail party and private preview of the Decker exhibition at the Frank Peris Gallery.

  In fact, the event provided a veritable field day for autograph seekers and, aside from the superb exhibit, it became one of the gayest parties of the month for the illustrious guests.

  Phyllis was there, as was Hedy Lamar, Charles Boyer, Gloria Vanderbilt, Charles Laughton, Fannie Brice, Lionel Atwill, Reginald Gardiner and almost the whole Bundy gang: John Barrymore, W.C. Fields, Thomas Mitchell, John Carradine, Gene Fowler, Ben Hecht, Roland Young, Sadakichi Hartmann, and Alan Mowbray — his wife Lorayne “looking as colorful as a Decker canvas herself” (wrote Wickersham) in a Kelly green suit and hat with “dashing red gloves.” Mowbray told a reporter: “Pshaw, this isn’t a representative Decker exhibit. Why, there are only 20 paintings and I have 24 Deckers hanging in my house alone!”