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

by Gregory William Mank

  He married Patrice Wymore (his leading lady in 1950’s Rocky Mountain) in Monte Carlo on October 23, 1950, the same day a 17-year-old French salesgirl accused him of rape. Five years later he sued Confidential magazine for $1,000,000 for claiming he’d left Wymore on their wedding night to romp with whores and drug addicts; he settled for $15,000. Flynn and Patrice had a daughter, Aranella, but Lili Damita was still reaping alimony, and Flynn’s financial storms caused him to sell Mulholland Farm and his Gauguin. He took a stab at independent production in Europe, but a 1953 self-financed production of William Tell, conceived as being a Cinemascope color epic, went bust in the Alps. Bruce Cabot, Flynn’s old “pal” whom he’d cast in William Tell, followed Flynn to Rome and sued him for salary, his lawyers attaching Flynn’s car and Wymore’s clothes. Flynn tried TV, hosting 1957’s syndicated The Errol Flynn Theatre, sometimes guesting on episodes and always looking tired. Even his setting up quarters in Jamaica had its downside — his parents retired there, and Errol once again had to endure mother Marelle, who had not only retained her withering personality over the decades, but now had intensified her religious hysteria. The spiritual ranting hardly soothed her sad relationship with a son whose addictions besides alcohol and drugs now included screwing the native girls he collected in the Jamaican jungle. Flynn did enjoy the torchlit beach parties, singing along with the minstrels, belting out, for example, Conrad Mauge and Sean Altman’s Zombie Jamboree: Back to back, ghoul, belly to belly

  Well, I don’t give a damn ‘cause I’m stone dead already, yeah

  Back to back, mon, belly to belly

  It’s a zombie jamboree

  There was a late-in-life respectability as an actor. Flynn received good reviews for his performance of dissolute Mike Campbell in The Sun Also Rises, 20th Century-Fox’s 1957 version of the Hemingway novel. This led to Flynn’s fortuitous casting as his old idol John Barrymore in Too Much, Too Soon (1958) based on the sordid best-selling memoir of Diana Barrymore (who would die in 1960). Dorothy Malone played Diana and Art Napoleon directed, careful to have Flynn underplay Barrymore. Under Napoleon’s prosaic direction, Flynn avoided the posing, cackling, snorting and various Barrymore eccentricities that he in fact could expertly imitate, but was not allowed to do.

  “They’ve great respect for the dead in Hollywood,” Flynn told writer Charles Hamblett, who visited him on the Too Much, Too Soon set, “but none for the living.”

  It’s an admirable, surely heartfelt performance, but Flynn was in no better shape filming it than Barrymore had been on Playmates. His heavy drinking constantly delayed shooting and ran the film over schedule. In one scene, his chauffeur, confident that Barrymore is on the wagon, was to leave him alone for the night. “You mean, I’m on parole?” Flynn as Barrymore was to say. Flynn kept saying “patrol.” It required 17 takes before he finally said “parole.”

  Flynn disliked his director, and at one time responded to him with a Barrymore-style rant: “Are you, Art Napoleon, telling me how to play a drunk?” Yet his downfall was colossal, and Jack L. Warner — who’d personally offered Flynn the Barrymore role, and had felt magnanimous for having allowed him back into the Warner fold — now couldn’t bear to watch him.

  “He was one of the living dead,” wrote Warner in his memoir.

  Flynn’s real-life Barrymore salute continued in 1958 as he disastrously starred in Huntington Hartford’s pre-Broadway tryout of The Master of Thornfield, an adaptation of Jane Eyre. Flynn staggered through the Philadelphia run relying on Teleprompters, glasses of vodka strategically placed around the stage, and lame ad-libs. The play made it to Broadway without him, but only briefly.

  Flynn was drunk again, on screen and off, in The Roots of Heaven, which 20th Century-Fox shot on location in Africa. Director John Huston remembered native girls coming in the night, and yowling like cats outside Flynn’s hut — their signal that they had come for sex. There was one more film — Cuban Rebel Girls (1959), a semi-documentary embarrassment, memorable mainly for its promotion of Fidel Castro’s revolution and its leading lady: Beverly Aadland, Flynn’s new, blonde 15-year-old lover. Flynn called her “Woodsie,” short for wood nymph. Still mirroring the Barrymore last act in the strangest ways, Flynn not only had a young lover, but the lover (à la Elaine) had a nightmarish mother. Beverly’s mother, however, had her own special accoutrement — a wooden leg.

  The shadows were darkening. Flynn completed his memoir, My Wicked, Wicked Ways. Fateful, philosophical, and at times still commanding, in September of 1959, Flynn talked with Vernon Scott of the Los Angeles Herald-Express:I’ve squandered seven million dollars. I’m going to have to sell the Zaca. I need the money, old bean. But don’t grieve for me when I go. The way of a transgressor is not as hard as they claim...

  Years ago it was a matter of choosing which road to travel. After all, there is only one road to Hell, and there weren’t any signposts along the way…

  “I hope I manage to face it all with a brave front,” Flynn told Scott. “You shouldn’t distress your friends or have them feel the disasters.” Perhaps realizing he was speaking eulogistically, Flynn assured his interviewer, “I never felt better.”

  Nor had he ever looked worse. On September 29, 1959, he guest-starred as the “Gentleman Hobo” on The Red Skelton Show, clowning it up with Skelton’s Freddie the Freeloader. There were jokes about the 1943 rape trial — Skelton notes a piece of junk is a “porthole,” and Flynn replies, “Ah, memories, memories!” Even allowing for the hobo makeup, Flynn was so bloated he was almost unrecognizable. He played a guest star role on Ronald Reagan’s General Electric Theatre, “The Golden Shanty.” He couldn’t remember the lines, and was so ill that director Arthur Hiller thought Flynn’s agent wrong for even sending him out on a job. In a barroom sequence, as Flynn danced with his leading lady, Hill had several teleprompters so Flynn could read his lines from any angle. “He was hopelessly confused,” said Hiller:After several minutes of this he put his head down on the bar, and when a few moments later he looked up at me he had tears in his eyes, and he said, “Arthur, I can’t do it, I can’t do it. I just don’t know what I’m doing.”

  From Too Much, Too Soon. Errol Flynn plays John Barrymore and Dorothy Malone is Diana Barrymore

  By the time “The Golden Shanty” was telecast November 9, 1959, Errol Flynn was dead.

  Before heading to Vancouver, Flynn met with Nora, and advised her and their daughters that he had, according to a New York doctor, only a year to live. Nora said:I hadn’t seen him in about a year and he looked like an old, old man, absolutely terrible, and I didn’t think he could last six months. But he was strutting like a cock and trying to be debonair. He knew he was dying but he wasn’t going to scream and yell about it. I started to cry and he said, “Don’t be unhappy; you know I’ve lived twice and I’ve had a marvelous life.”

  In Vancouver to sell the Zaca, Flynn and Beverly stayed as houseguests of George Caldough. On Wednesday, October 14, 1959, they left to return home via Vancouver International Airport. Flynn was suffering from pains in his lower back and legs and asked Caldough to summon a doctor. Caldough took Flynn to the apartment of Dr. Grant Gould, where Flynn propped himself against a door and gallantly entertained, telling the assemblage about his days and nights as a Bundy Drive Boy. It was Errol Flynn’s last performance.

  Feeling worse, he lay on the floor and suffered a coronary. As Beverly became hysterical, an ambulance arrived, and Flynn was pronounced D.O.A. at Vancouver General Hospital. Post-mortem findings: Myocardial Infarction, Coronary Thrombosis, Coronary Atherosclerosis, Fatty Degeneration of the Liver, Portal Cirrhosis of the Liver and Diverticulosis of the Colon. The popular zinger that circulated was a coroner’s observation that Flynn had the body of a “75-year-old man.”

  He was 50 years old.

  As with John Barrymore, the funeral and burial were not precisely what the dearly departed had desired. Patrice Wymore, the official widow, took over the arrangements. Rather than have Flynn cremated and h
is ashes scattered in Jamaica as he had wished, she opted to bury him at Forest Lawn, Glendale. Flynn had mocked and despised Forest Lawn, but not as vehemently as he’d mocked and despised the man Patrice selected to deliver his eulogy — Jack L. Warner! Dennis Morgan sang “Home is the Sailor,” and the pallbearers were Raoul Walsh, Mickey Rooney, Jack Oakie, Guinn “Big Boy” Williams, restaurateur Mike Romanoff and Flynn’s lawyer Juston Golenbock — none of the surviving Bundy Drive Boys was in evidence. Patrice was the only Mrs. Errol Flynn to attend the funeral, and Beverly was also conspicuous by her discreet absence. There was no marker for 20 years — only in 1979 did daughters Rory, Deidre and Aranella place a tombstone over their father’s grave in Forest Lawn’s Garden of Everlasting Peace.

  There were many ironies after Flynn’s demise. And come February 27, 1961, Beverly Aadland and her mother sued the Flynn estate for $5,000,000, claiming that Flynn:… had led Beverly along the byways of immorality, accustomed her to a life of frenzied parties, subjected her to immoral debauchery and sex orgies… and roused within her a lewd, wanton and wayward way of life, and deep unripened passions and unnatural desires…

  Judge Samuel Hofstader got into the spirit of the trial, responding in prose that surely had the ghost of “Satan’s Angel” howling with joy:Doubtless, the unfortunate young woman has been victimized — but by whom? To be sure, Flynn was the immediate occasion for her degradation. But was he the sorcerer’s apprentice who evoked a demon in her — or, was he not himself the issue of an evil spirit — one of the creatures which “never remains solitary (because) every demon evokes its counter demon” in an endless moral chain reaction? For we live in a climate of physical violence compounded by moral confusion…

  In short, Judge Hofstader tossed out Beverly’s claim. Beverly’s mother was later charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor after Beverly was raped at gunpoint, during which time the gun discharged a bullet into the rapist’s brain. Florence allegedly watched while Beverly had sex and served the rest of her sentence in jail after attacking her janitor and shattering his shinbone with her wooden leg.

  Sean Flynn, who’d worked a couple of episodes of The Errol Flynn Theatre and had a bit part in Where the Boys Are (1960), starred in The Son of Captain Blood (1962). He acted in some European films and gave it up to become a photographer for Time-Life. In April of 1970 he disappeared while on assignment in Viet Nam. Lili Damita, who had remarried three years after Flynn’s death, spent great sums searching for her son, to no avail. In Inherited Risk, Jeffrey Meyers writes:Two months after Sean disappeared, Lili “received word that her son had been captured, tortured, executed and thrown into a ditch by the Vietcong.” Rory Flynn, who noted that many other photographers had also died in captivity, heard that he was held for a year and, after going on a hunger strike to secure his release, was executed by a hoe that severed his neck.

  Lili died in 1994 at age 89; Nora died in 2001 at age 77. Patrice Wymore, Flynn’s widow, never remarried and turned 80 in 2006. Her daughter with Flynn, Arnella, died in 1998, the victim of drug abuse. Beverly “Woodsie” Aadland married three times and reportedly lives in North Hollywood.

  Phil Rhodes’ favorite Errol Flynn story involves taking a sexy female singer up to Mulholland Farm one time to meet Flynn — who answered the door stark naked. Sensing the young lady was agog and “a nice girl” — “I’d just like to talk with you,” she sincerely insisted — Flynn decided not to have his wicked way with her. However, a carouser friend of the actor arrived, eyed the lady lasciviously and arranged to take her home.

  The great star gave his on-the-make pal a warning:

  “Listen, I want you to take this girl home. If you touch her, she will tell me. And as a result, I would fuck your wife — and you know I can do it!”

  Gene Fowler never returned to the studios. He wrote the 1949 biography of Mayor James Walker of New York, Beau James (which became a 1957 movie, starring Bob Hope as Walker). In 1950 he received considerable attention when he was baptized a Roman Catholic at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in his hometown of Denver. In 1951, Fowler published a biography of comedian Jimmy Durante, Schnozzola.

  Minutes of the Last Meeting, Fowler’s affectionate account of the Bundy Drive Boys, awarded the star spot to Sadakichi Hartmann, whose biography he had never completed. Predictably, Fowler’s well-meaning gesture backfired. Harry Lawton, in his introduction to The Sadakichi Hartmann Papers catalogue for the University of California, Riverside, wrote about visiting “Catclaw Siding” in the Morongo Indian Reservation in 1954, after reading Minutes of the Last Meeting:I studied the shack, carefully jotting down descriptive notes for my story. Then I walked away from it and knocked on the door of a nearby adobe house. The door was opened by a hauntingly beautiful woman with coal-black hair framing an olive-hued face.

  She listened suspiciously as I explained that I was a reporter and wanted to do a story on her late father, Sadakichi Hartmann. Then she slammed the door in my face.

  That was my introduction to Wistaria Hartmann Linton, who was to become a close friend and future collaborator with Professor George Knox and me in research on her father.

  Wistaria (and some others) saw Fowler’s depiction of Sadakichi as a caricature. Surely, Fowler had realized that 1954 I-Like-Ike America was never going to take seriously a Japanese/German, truss-sporting savant who was infamous for pissing his pants. Nevertheless, on March 30, 1955, Wistaria, as administrator of Sadakichi’s estate, sued Gene Fowler and Minutes publisher Viking Press for $300,000 each, claiming Fowler had “substantially copied, embodied and appropriated” material from Sadakichi’s Autobiography , which he completed prior to 1940. Fowler, who was just recovering from another bout with serious illness, declared his innocence.

  “But holy smoke, they’re asking $300,000,” chuckled Gene Fowler. “I’m deeply honored.”

  On August 28, 1955, Wistaria and her lawyers dropped the suit, releasing a statement that Minutes of the Last Meeting was entirely Fowler’s original work and that he had full and exclusive rights to everything in it. Wistaria eventually donated her father’s papers to UC Riverside, which awarded Sadakichi the respect he deserved.

  Another blow for Fowler came after a film production of Minutes of the Last Meeting , set to star Red Skelton as W.C. Fields, crashed and burned after W.C.’s son Claude threatened a lawsuit.

  Gene Fowler and wife Agnes lived at St. Helena Street, in Brentwood below Sunset. He was writing a new book, Skyline, about his years as a New York newspaperman, with a cat at his side whom he named “Frank Moran” (after the boxer turned character actor); Fowler was ill after years of serious heart trouble, and was sitting in his garden, having just read the proofs on the 19th chapter of Skyline when he suffered a fatal heart attack on Saturday, July 2, 1960. He was 70 years old, and survived by his wife of 44 years, Agnes, son Gene Jr. (who edited such films as It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, and directed 1957’s I Was a Teenage Werewolf), son Will (a reporter who had covered the famous Black Dahlia murder, a comedy writer for Red Skelton’s TV show, and an author who wrote about the Bundy Boys in such books as The Second Handshake and Reporters), and daughter Jane, as well as seven grandchildren.

  Before the undertakers removed the body, Agnes kissed him. “I want your lips to be the last to touch mine,” he told her.

  The Rosary was recited Tuesday night, July 5, at St. Martin of Tours Church in Brentwood, and a solemn Requiem Mass celebrated there the next day. The pallbearers included Bundy Boys Ben Hecht and Thomas Mitchell, as well as such celebrities as Jimmy Durante, Leo McCarey, Jack Dempsey, Westbrook Pegler and Red Skelton. Mourners included Pat O’Brien, Adolphe Menjou, Hedda Hopper and John Ford. Bishop Timothy Manning presided and delivered the final absolution, and the Rev. Edward Carney celebrated the Mass, calling Fowler a “genius” and a “lovable man” who was “masterful with words.” He was buried at Holy Cross Cemetery, and his grave bears the words, “That Young Man from Denver.”

  Gene
Fowler’s will left his estate to his widow. He noted in the will that he had “missed opportunities for financial gain” so that he could “achieve my lifelong aspiration to write for my own soul’s satisfaction instead of the possible applause of the larger audience.” And he wrote to his children, “Remember me with a smile and never a tear. May God bless you in every way and help you keep our great country forever free and in the right.”

  Gene Fowler with Decker self-portrait hanging on his office wall

  Gene Fowler funeral with family annotations

  The phrase “in the right” might not be purely symbolic: Fowler, particularly in his late years, held very conservative political views, as did his good friends Pegler, Menjou and right-wing radio blowhard George Putnam.

  Thomas Mitchell’s career prospered in films such as High Noon (1952) and Pocketful of Miracles (1961). Broadway successes included replacing Lee J. Cobb as Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman (1949) and winning a Tony Award for the 1953 musical Hazel Flagg (based on Ben Hecht’s 1937 film Nothing Sacred — Hecht wrote the book for the show, with music and lyrics by Jule Styne and Bob Hilliard). On television, he won the 1952 Best Actor Emmy Award and landed guest star roles on such shows as Tales of Tomorrow (as Captain Nemo in a two-part “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea”), Climax! (as the King in “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” with John Carradine as the Duke), and The 20th Century-Fox Hour (as Kris Kringle in “Miracle on 34th Street”). He also starred in his own series, 1955’s Mayor of the Town and was host and occasional guest star on 1957’s The O. Henry Playhouse.