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

by Gregory William Mank

  • Tierney claimed that guest Bill Kent (“stepson of the owner of a noted Sunset Strip nightclub,” noted the Evening Herald Express) razzed him, claiming “that anyone who liked Errol Flynn was no good anyway.” Anthony Quinn tried to intervene, but Tierney and Kent battled outside the studio. When Jack La Rue tried to play peacemaker, Tierney claimed that “I pushed him away and he fell and hit his head.” (In fact, La Rue ended up at West Hollywood Emergency Hospital with cuts about the head, nose and lower lip.)

  In her memoir Too Much, Too Soon, Diana Barrymore provided a vivid account of the melee, professing Tierney the villain, supporting the charge that he’d punched both Sammy Colt and Jack La Rue:When I saw blood on Sammy and Jack, I exploded. I rushed up to Tierney — he’d ripped off his shirt and stood like a belligerent Tarzan — “You dreary, dreadful actor!” I cried. “If you want to fight, hit me! You’re punching everyone else, so why don’t you hit a woman?” I slapped him with all my might, half-a-dozen times. I was wearing two rings and they must have hurt.

  A woman egged me on, screaming, “Hit him, Diana! That’s the girl! Tell him where to get off!”

  By the way, the Evening Herald Express claimed Diana had slapped Tierney eight times. In the night and the atmosphere, accurate counting was surely a challenge.

  Diana Barrymore also wrote of the true horror of the party, at least for its host: the notorious battle followed Mona’s symbolic deflowering and decapitation:A great deal of drinking went on; guests came and left. Several abortive fistfights broke out. The statue (sic) was knocked over before it could be unveiled. It crashed to the floor; the head broke off and rolled away. Decker uttered an anguished cry, swooped down and picked up the headless figure, and hugged it to him…

  Surely the sight of Mona, broken, battered, her bald, unwigged head severed from her torso, broke the heart of her creator. As most of the famous guests fled in the night, trying to escape the nasty publicity, Alan Mowbray stood in for the grieving host, loyally taking on the role of spokesman, informing the press that all had been well before the despoiling of Mona.

  “Until then it was a lovely party,” insisted Mowbray.

  John Decker naturally talked with the press, although he claimed he had no account of the battle to offer, for he’d been inside “cleaning up the pieces” of the shattered Mona.

  “I don’t pay any attention to them anymore,” John Decker said of the donnybrook. “Somebody’s always fighting at my parties.”

  The reporter asked if any drinking had taken place.

  “Certainly there was drinking,” replied Decker. “What the hell kind of parties do you think I give?”

  The Bride of Decker horror show had its baroque climax. Mona’s desecration was a lasting shock for Decker — he could never bring himself to restore her to her former glory. John Decker had only a year and a half to live, and as he sensed his approaching mortality, illusion was still necessary, but perhaps harder to sustain.

  In February of 1946, Errol Flynn published his second book, Showdown, the well-written saga of an Irish soldier of fortune who leads a Hollywood film crew into cannibal-infested New Guinea. He dedicates the book to John Decker.

  Spring: John Decker enjoys a new distinction as 12 of his paintings from the film Scarlet Street are displayed at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Decker placed the value of the paintings at $35,000.

  Soon after, Decker and Errol Flynn visit San Francisco, where 64 of Decker’s paintings are hung at a one-man show at the DeYoung Museum. While in Babylon by the Bay, Decker recognizes a genuine Modigliani in an antique shop window, convinces the proprietor the painting was a fraud, buys it for $400, and sends a telegram to Thomas Mitchell (still savoring his “Rembrandt”), claiming he found a true Modigliani and sells it to Mitchell for $2,000. As before, Decker crows to everyone but Mitchell about his latest flim-flam. Ever-forgiving Gene Fowler claims Mitchell “had no cause for complaint,” because he later sells the Modigliani for $15,000.

  June 8: Los Angeles Times reports that Decker hobnobs at the home of multi-millionaire Atwater Kent. Then, on June 23, the Times offers the headline, “John Decker Exhibits His Best Art Yet”:In recent years John Decker, who is peculiarly Hollywood’s own painter, had been creeping out of the theatrical murk that once tinged his work into the upper air where painting can be viewed on its merits. His new exhibit, which opened last week at the Francis Taylor Galleries, Beverly Hills, to July 13, is the best he had yet presented.

  Here are huge still lifes of glassware — “The Cognac Drinker,” “The Absinthe Drinker” — of astonishing depth, clarity and brilliance. The human significance that carries a picture beyond its esthetic values is present, too, but it is translated into fine form, color, line and textures.

  There are city scenes with a curious timelessness — the peculiar beauty of old brick shining from a church, the spell of a lighted street at night. Tiny pictures of lemons and strawberries are gems that attract the eye and fascinate the mind. And, one of the show’s finest, there is the tiny picture of a herring. Decker’s brown-reds are something to note and remember.

  His power to convey the drama that is life, unweakened by sentimentality, is seen in the three death mask paintings, one being of Beethoven. One large painting, charged with pathos, is that of a gravestone upon which is written, “Ici repos Vincent Van Gogh.” A real tribute from one artist to another.

  With his triumphant art show, John Decker was faring better in 1946 than some of his fellow Bundy Drive pals.

  John Carradine was performing a wild John Barrymore take-off, complete with cocked slouch hat and loud nose-snorting, in Down Missouri Way, a musical from Poverty Row’s PRC Studios. He explodes in Twentieth Century-style battles with his leading-lady-from-hell (Renee Godfrey):Carradine: My dear Gloria, the true artiste can rise above her role, if she but possesses the divine madness!!

  Godfrey: Madness, my eye! I wasn’t born yesterday!

  Carradine: How true! But with the proper makeup, I think we can effectively conceal that from the camera!

  Down Missouri Way bore the strange distinction of having its world premiere in the Missouri State Prison auditorium in Jefferson City. Shortly after its shoot, Carradine and wife Sonia flee L.A. — ex-wife Ardanelle was about to have him jailed again for alimony contempt. The Carradines settle in New York, where they made their Broadway debuts in The Duchess of Malfi (October 15, 1946). Life wasn’t ideal. As Sonia remembered: “We moved to the Ritz Towers in New York. We had a lot of hopes then. But they didn’t last long. Broadway producers knew that John couldn’t go back to Hollywood. It put him in a bad bargaining position.”

  Anthony Quinn was experiencing career and financial troubles. “The war years may have been a boon for the industry,” he wrote in his book One Man Tango, “but they were a bust for me.” When offered a supporting role in Paramount’s Western California starring Barbara Stanwyck and Ray Milland, Quinn demanded $15,000 for a week’s work. As he proudly noted in One Man Tango, he got it.

  Ben Hecht had scripted Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious, rating another Academy nomination. Alan Mowbray won the role of Shakespearean actor Granville Thorndyke in John Ford’s My Darling Clementine, and recited Hamlet’s great soliloquy, possibly Mowbray’s finest moment in films. Thomas Mitchell, too, played one of his best-remembered roles: the eccentric, pitiful, bespectacled Uncle Billy, who has a pet bird on his shoulder (and who loses the money) in Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life.

  Errol Flynn had a new yacht, the 120’ Zaca. David Niven wrote about coming home from the War and Flynn showing him Mulholland Farm and the Zaca, which he called his new “wife”: “And let me show you the house flag,” he said as he unfurled a symbolic crowing rooster. “A rampant cock, sport, get it? That’s what I am to the world today — goddammit — a phallic symbol.”

  He didn’t smile as he said it.

  August 8: “Flynn’s Scientist-Father Ready for Fish Study” headlined the Los Angeles Times. Dr. T. Thomson-Flynn, “in
ternationally known authority on marine life,” was a zoologist, as well as dean of Queen College’s School of Science in Belfast, Ireland. He would join his famous son on Flynn’s new yacht the Zaca, sailing the seas of lower California and Mexico. As Dr. Thomson-Flynn told the Times:Eventually the big fish follow the smaller ones to the area, and a run is on. If we can learn what controls the density and movements of plankton, we will be able to accurately forecast a run of commercial fish.

  Flynn made a reported $76,000 worth of renovations on the Zaca for this voyage, and gathered a crew for the adventure including Errol’s wife Nora (who was several months pregnant), champion archer and underwater photographer Howard Hill, Prof. Carl L. Hubbs of Scripps Institute of Oceanography, sportsman photographer Teddy Stauffer (then planning a National Geographic feature), motion picture cameraman Jerry Courmoya, Flynn stand-in and secretary/manager Jim Fleming … and John Decker.

  Decker’s presence, according to the Times, was “to sketch specimens encountered.” One suspects Flynn also enlisted Decker and fellow hell-raiser Jim Fleming to ensure against the sea expedition being too dry. They set sail from Balboa August 12, 1946, and John Decker — a splendid white captain’s cap cocked back over his hair — was delighted to join the crew.

  In 1952, six years after the voyage, five years after Decker’s death and four years after Flynn’s divorce from Nora, Warner Bros. released a documentary short subject, The Cruise of the Zaca. The documentary has some great color photography and fun moments, as when a fully-clothed Flynn falls from a seaplane’s pontoons while filming and splashes into the ocean. Decker appears in a number of shots, and Flynn speaks of his “old pal” with affection and admiration:Decker’s crayons and brushes were always moving… His reproductions were lifelike and technically almost perfect…

  The Cruise of the Zaca gives absolutely no indication of the madness that truly transpired during its fitful voyage. For a time, all sailed merrily, the Zaca crew enjoying the beauty of the sea. In his book Forever Is a Hell of a Long Time, Teddy Stauffer, later known as “Mr. Acapulco,” wrote:John Decker turned into an unusually funny man on this trip and provided many laughs day and night. He made every attempt possible to act and look like John Barrymore, a close pal of his, and these imitations were something to behold…

  Decker, our pseudo-Barrymore, provided us a few yuks as he struggled to prove his seaworthiness, but he needed his entire box of matches to light one cigarette, and, even in moderate seas, he would turn green, hurry to the fridge where he kept his pills, taking several which he chased with straight gin. So poor John continued on, constantly seasick, drunk, vomiting, or slugging gin down his gullet.

  He often offered to help out sailing the Zaca. Any Gordian knot he tied came untied or could only be opened with a sail maker’s awl or a knife. He couldn’t hold a course and was always ten to fifteen degrees off. He couldn’t help weigh anchor or set a sail, much less start the auxiliary engines or run a line.

  And drunk or sober, he always peed in the wind.

  As Stauffer remembered, Decker fooled experts Professors Flynn and Hubbs by presenting a dead fish, which, at first examination, seemed a remarkable discovery:This was little wonder for John had dried a common sea perch, cut its fins into exotic designs, and painted it all colors of the rainbow. As he was a famed artist, the result was spectacular. The paint dried, and then John wet the fish, innocently announcing that he had just “scooped it in” from the sea.

  Errol’s dad practically died of mortification that evening at dinner when the story was told. The rest of us split our sides.

  Yet a battle of wills rapidly developed between Decker and Nora. Decker was hellbent on making the cruise — to paraphrase David Niven’s old remark — “Cirrhosis on the Sea.” Nora, distinguished father-in-law aboard and herself cautiously pregnant, was equally fervent in safeguarding against any such nautical high jinks. As Decker later lamented to Will Fowler: Just as soon as Nora got her sea legs, she took over command of the boat and started shoving everybody around… This was the first time she started playing the role of Mrs. Errol Flynn and it has gone to her head… It’s too bad this little mosquito came between Errol and myself. Hers was a constant pin-pricking process calculated to wear me down.

  Decker, in Nora’s eyes, was a prick. As Teddy Stauffer wrote:Decker continued his antics, wandering around the ship with brush and paint. He painted a huge face on the side of the cabin’s wall around a scrub brush, a perfect caricature of Groucho Marx. He tidied up the tips of all the broom handles, painting them to resemble long, flesh-colored phalluses, and on the wall inside the dining lounge he did a full-length painting of Nora, who was quite pregnant, and every day he increased her pregnancy by several inches until the work of art became so ludicrous that Flynn made him paint it out.

  At one point, Dr. Hubbs discovered a small fish (with camouflaged eyes at its tail, an evolutionary trick to confound predators) and named the discovery after Nora. One might have sensed insult in her name being attached to a fish with eyes in its ass, but Nora was thrilled.

  Meanwhile, Decker also emulated John Barrymore’s hygiene, or lack thereof. As Charles Higham wrote in his Errol Flynn book, the entire crew had become “disgusted by Decker’s smell”:A hasty conference was held and Errol decided to have him keelhauled: thrown overboard in a net and dragged behind the vessel until he was thoroughly washed, a variation of a technique used by Captain Bligh of the Bounty. Swearing and screaming and throwing his arms around, the unfortunate artist was picked up by his arms and legs and with three hefty swings tossed into the sea. When he was dragged out several minutes later a long brown puddle at his feet indicated how long it had been since he last took a bath.

  Nora Flynn laughed at Decker’s keelhauling. A showdown — or actual mutiny — was in the air.

  The plot thickened as crew member Wallace Beery (no relation to the MGM star) pursued a shark in a Sorocco lagoon, panicked as the shark stared him down and retreated. Climbing onto the Zaca, he accidentally shot himself in the foot with a double-pronged harpoon, and pinned his foot to the deck. The men unpinned the screaming Beery and performed emergency surgery. Decker encouraged Flynn to sail 1,000 miles to Acapulco to secure proper medical care for Beery. Nora, still incensed by Decker’s grotesque pregnancy painting, phallic broom handles, fake fish, peeing in the wind, etc., claimed Decker wanted to reach Acapulco only to go drinking and whoring. By the time Errol agreed to head for Acapulco, a hurricane was forming, the crew had mutinied, and Nora — aware that Decker was diabetic — was frighteningly vindictive.

  “So the bitch locked all my insulin in the refrigerator and hoped I would lapse into a diabetic coma!” Decker told Will Fowler.

  Nora had her own side of the story, of course; one of the mutineers had cut off the water supply, and Errol had told her to lock the refrigerator to save ice in case the hurricane blew the ship off course.

  At any rate, Decker’s mocking of Nora as “a female Captain Bligh” had a violent impact on Flynn — for the nickname surely reminded him of his horrible mother, whose family owned Captain Bligh’s sword. Based on Flynn’s consequent actions, he hated Decker for giving Nora the nickname and hated Nora for earning the nickname.

  Under its “rampant cock” flag, the Zaca sailed into the hurricane, and as the sea and storm raged day and night, so did the onboard melodrama. Decker attacked Nora and gave her a black eye. She received no protection from her husband — Nora had told Prof. Flynn that Errol was taking drugs and begged his help, so enraging Flynn (“a monster under the influence of the drug,” wrote Higham) that he kicked his pregnant wife in the stomach and knocked his father down a companionway, worsening the man’s bad leg. Nora then attempted suicide by sleeping pills. When Flynn finally came out of his dope fit and realized what he’d done, he attempted suicide and, as Prof. Hubbs remembered, “wanted to throw himself into the wild sea.”

  John Decker eventually smashed the lock on the refrigerator, rescuing his insulin and grabbing so
me bottles of booze besides. The Zaca somehow survived the hurricane and the demons of its crew and docked at Acapulco. Prof. Hubbs summed up the cruise of the Zaca thusly:Drunkenness, two men with broken ribs, wife beating followed by a frustrated suicide, mutiny, virtual running out of water (with tanks of water closed off somehow), engine stoppage, a very close escape from shipwreck here at Acapulco, something wrong with almost everything mechanical about the ship were among the highlights.

  In Acapulco, Decker jumped ship. The redoubtable Jim Fleming reportedly left with him, as did Professor Flynn. Decker ended up paying to fly home to Los Angeles, joining Prof. Flynn in an open cockpit plane. En route, Decker found a new joy — peeing out of the cockpit.

  Nora Flynn arrived in Los Angeles October 28, 1946, via considerably more elegant means — a Pan American Airways transport. Decker’s laments had preceded her, and the L.A. Times covered her return:Nora Eddington Flynn, tall, tanned and tactful, didn’t look much like a “female Capt. Bligh” when she swept her small daughter Deirdre into her arms yesterday on arriving here from Mexico City…

  Wife of Film Actor Errol Flynn, Nora recently was characterized by Artist John Decker as the arbitrary skipper of Flynn’s yacht Zaca, during a cruise to Acapulco, Mex., where the painter said he jumped ship “because she wouldn’t even let me flick cigarette ashes on the deck.”