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

by Gregory William Mank

  February 3: It was Geisler’s turn. As for Cochran’s claim that the Defense “would tear the girl witnesses limb from limb and throw them out the window in an attempt to smear their characters,” Geisler was cool: “I say to you,” he addressed the jury, “it’s not the Defense that has tried to smear the character of these girls. Unfortunately, the girls smeared themselves long before I ever heard of them or they ever heard of me.”

  February 6: The jury, after 24 hours of deliberation, returned its verdict. Geisler, himself nervous, squeezed Flynn’s knee as the sentence passed down: Not Guilty. The courtroom cheered. A juror told the press they only took so long to convince the public that deliberation had actually taken place.

  “Oh well, nobody got hurt,” blithely said Betty Hansen’s mother, who insisted Betty was “a clean little Christian girl.” Peggy Satterlee bitterly claimed of Flynn, “I hate him more than anyone else in the world.” She went back to Applegate, CA, where her own father was soon convicted of molesting two underage girls.

  Very few people believed Flynn never had his way with his two accusers. Indeed, the jury even ignored (or forgave) what was very likely perjury on Flynn’s part. The fact was that Flynn had no need to rape them — they were apparently all too willing — and the trial became a dynamic against hypocrisy and self-righteousness.

  Errol Flynn, incorrigible, had meanwhile been keeping 18-year-old Blanca Rosa Welter — later known as movie star Linda Christian (and a Mrs. Tyrone Power) — at Mulholland Farm. He was also attracted during the trial to the tall, red-haired teenage girl working the cigar counter in the courthouse. Her name was Nora Eddington, fated to be Flynn’s second wife. And, as Nora told Charles Higham in Errol Flynn: The Untold Story, come the spring of ’43, and Flynn did indeed commit rape — and she was the victim:I didn’t know what was happening. I was terrified. Suddenly he was thrusting into me. It was like a knife. I felt I was being killed. I screamed and screamed. He went on and on. I couldn’t push him out. There was blood everywhere. It was on the sheets, on the wall…

  Flynn would marry Nora that August, and they lived in separate quarters. If one believes Higham’s book, the actor was also doing espionage as a Nazi spy. The accusation reaped headlines but few believers when the book was published in 1980.

  February 15, 1943: The Film Daily reviewed The Outlaw, featuring Thomas Mitchell as Pat Garrett. Howard Hughes produced and directed this infamous sex saga/ Western, as well as creating “the cantilever bra” for The Outlaw’s female star discovery, 36D-26-36 Jane Russell (who claims she never actually wore the bra — “I just told Howard I did”).

  “How Would You Like to Tussle with Russell?” teased The Outlaw’s promotional copy. To make the sexually bizarre Western ever stranger, Tommy Mitchell’s Pat Garrett and Walter Huston’s Doc Holliday appear to be undeniably gay — two aging, Out-West-style homosexuals, both pining for Billy the Kid (Jack Beutel). The interpretation seems too overt to be denied, and was probably another inside joke reason for this promo for The Outlaw: “SENSATION Too Startling to Describe!”

  Much to Hughes’ delight, The Outlaw faced wildly publicized censorship battles, didn’t have wide release until 1946 and after being banned in New York State finally opened there September 11, 1947. Business everywhere, primarily due to Ms. Russell’s pneumatic talents, was record-breaking.

  April Fool’s Day, 1943: W.C. Fields began his own court case, sued by Harry Yadkoe, a New Jersey hardware store owner. Yadkoe claimed he sent Fields some comedy material, including a snake story that Fields allegedly used in You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man. Yadkoe demanded $20,000 in damages.

  Fields (“his nose bigger and redder than ever,” noted the L.A. Daily News), came to court throughout the trial with a keg, such as a St. Bernard would carry in the Alps, and claimed the “contents of the keg were to be used as a stimulant should the verdict of the action go against him.” The trial found W.C. in fine form, seemingly enjoying himself and apparently confident of victory. On April 7, he told Yadkoe’s lawyer “I fell on my head the other night,” and later elucidated:I was taking a steam bath and a rubdown and was lying on the table. The steam sort of soothed me and I dozed off. All of a sudden I fell right on my noggin. The maid rushed upstairs thinking I had committed suicide over this case. I was a sight, black and blue all over.

  On April 9, the verdict came back: Fields was told to pay $8,000 to Harry Yadkoe. He was also appalled and angry. “It is outrageous and ridiculous,” he snarled, promising an appeal. Jubilant at the verdict, Yadkoe jumped to his feet, made an attempt to shake Fields’ hand and was rejected as Fields took a draught from his keg.

  “I’ve been seeing snakes all night,” Fields told the Evening Herald-Express on the morning of April 10:I thought the writer was just some poor guy when I got the letter. I thought I’d be kind and answer it. But I had a feeling I was going to get the works. Never do a kind deed — it’s likely to turn around and bite you in — look!… Avaunt, grim monster! Snakes — snakes — SNAKES!

  On the night of June 28, 1943, the final artifacts of John Barrymore — his personal clothing — went up for auction. Most of the major relics had gone on the block the previous August, and now the Los Angeles Times reported the sale of such items as Barrymore’s flamboyant silk pajamas with coronet, his battered black Homburg hat (“that WAS John Barrymore,” quoth the Times), a pair of green wool socks, and:Even the pink girdle which once supported the sagging paunch of the Great Profile was sold. Edward Molen, a business man with a stomach he thought would fit the garment, paid $4.50 for the elastic belt.

  “Just a memento,” said Molen as he walked through the crowd of 300 curious with the girdle under his arm.

  There was more, including Barrymore’s pearl-gray fedora. The Times reported that John Decker was present, watching “in a retrospective mood,” as was Errol Flynn “with a dark-haired girl on his arm.”

  “And when the shelves were cleaned,” concluded the Times, “there was nothing left of John Barrymore in this world, nothing but a memory.”

  July 2, 1943: John Decker starred in his own newspaper headline court case — with a co-star who likely had a devastating impact emotionally on him for the remainder of his life.

  Thomas Mitchell and Walter Huston in The Outlaw

  To Decker’s surprise, his first wife, Mrs. Helen Decker, who had left him July 15, 1928, and whom he had not seen since the summer of 1929, had suddenly shown up in Hollywood. In tow was their 20-year-old daughter, Gloria, who claimed she read a magazine feature about Alan Mowbray and his paintings by John Decker:We were living in New York and I told mother I would like to see and know my father. Shortly after that we came to California.

  Result: John Decker suddenly had two spouses. In fact, he possibly had three — there’s no evidence he ever divorced wife #2, who had mysteriously disappeared and whom no reporter was apparently aware of during the news coverage of this “Enoch Arden” situation. As Decker explained it: In 1928 we were living here and one night when I came home from work I found my wife and daughter gone. That night I phoned all our mutual friends but found no trace of them. The second day after she left I met a friend who told me my wife and child were living on La Brea Avenue. I went to see her and asked her to come back but she said she wanted to live alone.

  In less than a week after I located her she left town and I heard nothing from her. Several months later I learned she was in New York and I went there to ask her to come back. Again she refused and I returned to Los Angeles.

  My letters were returned and I heard nothing more from her until my daughter contacted me.

  Mary Lou Warn, Decker’s stepdaughter, offers a different version of the events that led to this headline story:Helen, John’s first wife, had been hit by a truck while crossing a street in downtown New York. I remember she talked in a whisper — she had lost her voice and had sued the trucking company and she got, I suppose for those days, a lot of money. So she took Gloria and just left John. John went to California
, and I don’t recall any details that Helen and Gloria had ever been in California with him.

  So Helen had gone through the money from the truck accident, and she and Gloria started reading about how successful John was, so they decided to pack up and go to California and see good old John, because they figured he probably had a lot of money now. Which he didn’t — he just had a wife! So it was an interesting little fiasco.

  The Los Angeles Times reported Decker’s big day in court, before Superior Judge Jess E. Stephens:“I took advantage of the legal procedure which states that a person who disappears for more than seven years, leaving no trace, is legally dead,” the artist testified.

  He said he made every effort to find his first wife before he remarried.

  “Was that before you arrived as a painter?” Judge Stephens asked.

  “An artist never arrives until after he is dead,” retorted Decker.

  Gloria Decker Smouse — in a large picture bonnet — took the witness stand, cooed her story, and persuaded Judge Stephens to grant the interlocutory divorce de-cree. The Judge, probably amused by Decker, got into the spirit of the trial by explaining it might constitute “cruel and unusual punishment under the Constitution to make a man go through life with two wives.”

  Portrait of Decker signed to Will Fowler

  However, the true fireworks of the trial weren’t in the words — they were in the pictures.

  Newspaper photos of father and daughter are intensely startling: Baby-faced, brunette Gloria, in her big movie-star hat, seemingly making goo-goo eyes at a father who looks alternately lustful and lovesick.

  There came the day that Mary Lou came home early from school:Gloria was very young, and I was just so infatuated with the fact that, all of a sudden, I had a sister! I was an only child, and everybody else had brothers and sisters, and I thought Gloria was wonder ful.

  Right after Gloria and her mother arrived from New York, I came home early from school one day — I was in about the fourth or fifth grade. Mother was out for the afternoon. In our Bundy Drive house the bedroom was downstairs off the bathroom and when I came home I saw John and Gloria in bed together. It was kind of “Wow!” and I dashed out and upstairs to my room, and nothing was ever said about it again.

  I heard that John had promised Gloria a car — God knows what he was going to buy her a car with, he never had any money. But that might have been what was luring her.

  It was not a one-afternoon stand. The 48-year-old Decker and his 20-year-old daughter began visiting a hotel to continue their affair. Phyllis presumably never knew — indeed, she and Gloria became good friends. After Decker’s death, they even opened an art gallery together in the Del Mar Hotel, which was short-lived (“Mother was not a business person,” says Mary Lou).

  Decker gave Gloria a self-portrait that hung in Gloria’s home in Laurel Canyon until she destroyed it before her death.

  As for Barrymore incest, Phil Rhodes tells this story:My wife and I lived for a time in the 1950s with Johnny Barrymore, Jack’s son, up in Laurel Canyon, near Errol Flynn’s house. Johnny had no rent money and we were helping him. Diana was in town. Dolores’ daughter Dede (Johnny’s sister) had a baby and Dolores wanted Johnny to be godfather and Diana to be godmother. Johnny hated Diana — “I won’t be godfather if she’s godmother!” But everybody thought it would sober up Diana, so Johnny agreed, but said, “I’m doing it under duress!”

  Later one night up at the house, I heard the window open in Johnny’s bedroom and Johnny yelled, “Diana! What the fuck are you doing here?” There was a long silence — quite long — and then I heard Diana sigh, “Oh, Johnny… Daddy would have loved this!”

  In 1943, a new member entered the Bundy Drive fold — Vincent Price. The future King of Hollywood Horror had scored on Broadway as the villain of Angel Street, and 20th Century-Fox had signed him to a film contract, commencing with The Song of Bernadette . “Being a religious film,” wrote Price in his 1959 book, I Like What I Know, “the studio approached it with typical lugubrious reverence. It took nine months to make, and the boredom of waiting for a call from the studio began to pall.”

  So Price and actor friend George Macready opened their own art shop, “The Little Gallery,” in Beverly Hills. As Price recalled, the shop was “between a bookstore and a very popular bar,” and they had figured correctly “that we’d catch a mixed clientele of erudites and inebriates.” As such, Price soon met, as he expressed it, “the delightful, tragic, and genuinely Bohemian John Decker.”

  One of Price’s favorite buyers was Barbara Hutton, the famed heiress and the second wife of Cary Grant. As Price wrote:We had an exhibition of [Decker’s] paintings, the best and least eclectic he ever did, and we sold many of them. “Ghost Town,” which Thomas Mitchell bought, is to my mind his best work. Miss Hutton loved the pictures — and Decker — but just couldn’t find the one that said hello to her. In the gallery one day she told Decker of her love for Venice. He allowed as how there was one picture he just didn’t have time to finish for the show, but he thought it would be finished the next day and that she might like it. She promised to come back.

  By noon the next day Decker was back and so was Barbara, and more importantly, so was the painting — a three-foot-long, two-foot-high painting of… Venice. Palaces, gondolas, the Canal shimmered from the canvas with the authentic light of Venice. Sold to Barbara Hutton… one painting of Venice by John Decker … as wet as the Grand Canal, having been done from start to finish in 12 hours’ time.

  Decker now received coverage from the two major news magazines in the U.S. two weeks in a row. On September 13, 1943, Time ran a profile, “Hollywood Headsman,” with a picture of Decker and a shot of the Fields Queen Victoria painting. The following week, September 20, 1943, Newsweek published “Double Decker,” with a picture of the Harpo Marx Blue Boy painting and a shot of Decker with a painting of Barrymore as Hamlet framed on his wall.

  Decker had based this Barrymore painting on a photograph from Hamlet, in which John exposed his “bad” side right profile. Adding dark shadow, Decker provided an especially haunting depiction of his tormented friend, and the actual painting eventually ended up for sale in Vincent Price’s “The Little Gallery.” As Price wrote in I Like What I Know, the greatest of all Barrymore fans, Tallulah Bankhead, bought it.

  In celebration Decker gave a bang-up party for Tallulah. There were 50 guests, and, more surprisingly, there were four huge roasts of beef and lamb. No one could have that many ration tickets, but on inquiry as to how he got the meat [during War ration days], Decker led us all into his studio and unveiled an enormous canvas of a rather handsome, overblown blonde, entitled “My Butcher’s Wife.”

  Sunday night, October 24, 1943: “John Carradine and his Shakespeare Players” opened in Hamlet at the Geary Theatre in San Francisco. Carradine — producer, director, star and owner of the company — naturally played the melancholy Dane, and would follow at the Geary as Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, and as Othello.

  “If this goes over,” Carradine vowed to the press, “I’m through with Hollywood forever!”

  It was, as Time magazine reported, “the city’s biggest Shakespeare premiere of modern times,” and the opening night house included one empty seat, reserved by Carradine for the ghost of John Barrymore.

  The dream had come true, but at a cutthroat price. To finance his company, Carradine had mortgaged his North Hollywood house and sold his yacht. He’d acted in films such as Monogram’s Voodoo Man, playing a bongo-playing geek who fetches female zombies for Bela Lugosi. Carradine had been acting in Voodoo Man at Monogram by day while by night fulfilling a pre-San Francisco tryout of his Shakespeare company at the Pasadena Playhouse. The quick-money movie jobs, taken to pay for his repertory company, permanently scarred his cinema reputation.

  He also fell in love. The lady was Sonia Sorel, a blonde beauty who’d play Ophelia, Portia and Desdemona in the Carradine company. Dean Goodman, an actor in the troupe (and later a San Francisco
film critic) wrote in his book Maria, Marlene, and Me, “Carradine was determined to bed this lady or die trying.” His marriage to Ardanelle, who was at the mortgaged home with their two sons, was doomed.

  “John Carradine and his Shakespeare Players” began a tour of the Pacific coast. Playing the great classical roles, madly in love, John Carradine was at his rococo best, as Dean Goodman wrote:John was a character, to say the least. Fancying himself as an actor-manager of the old school, he dressed accordingly — in a wide-brimmed black fedora with a long flowing black cape. He also sported a walking stick which he flourished extravagantly at every opportunity. He was hardly inconspicuous as he walked down the street… Those of us in his company regarded John and his shenanigans with amusement. He was a lot of fun, and we enjoyed being part of his traveling circus.

  The company played Seattle and Portland and, in December of 1943, the Biltmore Theatre in Los Angeles. All the while, Carradine was a show in himself, on and off the stage. Dean Goodman wrote:I recall one incident which illustrates John’s bawdiness, his ribald sense of humor and a flamboyance which sometimes bordered on bad taste. He, Sonia and I were having lunch at a restaurant in Portland. When the waitress brought his entrée, John took one look at the plate in front of him and grunted, with a curl of his lip, “Am I supposed to eat this — or did I?”