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

by Gregory William Mank

  “One thing about O. Henry,” said Mitchell, “he could drink more than I can. But — I try!”

  Thomas Mitchell died of cancer at 1:30 p.m., Monday December 17, 1962, at his home, 1013 North Roxbury Drive in Beverly Hills. He was 70 and survived by his wife and daughter, who were at his bedside when he died. A peculiarity about his death: Mitchell was cremated December 19, 1962 at the Chapel of the Pines in Los Angeles, and his ashes placed in “Vaultage” below the building. They have never been claimed, and remain there in rather celebrated if forlorn company — H.B. Warner (Christ in 1927’s The King of Kings) and Helen Chandler (the heroine of 1931’s Dracula) are among the “cremains” in Vaultage at the Chapel of the Pines.

  Ben Hecht stayed prolific and hotheaded. Constantly racking up major screen credits — Kiss of Death (1947), Monkey Business (1952), Miracle in the Rain, based on his novel (1956), A Farewell to Arms (1957) — as well as uncredited work on everything from 1951’s The Thing to 1963’s Cleopatra. Hecht was also an outspoken champion of Irgun Zvei Leumji’s terrorist organization for an independent Israel. In a 1947 newspaper advertisement, Hecht had written: Every time you blow up a British arsenal, or send a British railroad train sky-high, or rob a British bank, or let go with your guns and bombs at the British betrayers and invaders of your homeland, the Jews of America make a little holiday in their hearts.

  When Britain retaliated and exhibitors refused to show his films, Hecht offered an apology — sort of: “The English are, with cavil, the nicest enemies the Jews have ever had.” Indeed perhaps no honor (and surely not his Oscars) pleased Hecht more than the fact that Israel named a battleship The Ben Hecht.

  He published his memoir, A Child of the Century, in 1954. His passion for the Israeli cause climaxed in 1961’s wildly controversial Perfidy, in which he attacked Israel’s “ruling clique.” Perfidy accused Jewish leaders of “moral corruption,” including Nazi collaboration and failure to stop the Holocaust. As he wrote in Perfidy:In my own time, governments have taken the place of people. They have also taken the place of God. Governments speak for people, dream for them, and determine, absurdly, their lives and deaths.

  This new worship of government is one of the subjects in this book. It is a worship I lack. I have no reverence for the all-powerful and bewildered face of Government. I see it as a lessening of the human being, and a final looting of his birthright — the survival of his young. I see it as an ogre with despair in its eyes.

  David Ben-Gurion, outraged, denied Hecht the right to be buried in sacred ground in Israel.

  Ben Hecht hosted a New York talk show in the 1950s/1960s and had just completed work on a musical based on his Academy Award-winning Underworld when, on the morning of Saturday April 18, 1964, Hecht died of a heart attack at his 14th-floor apartment, 39 West 67th Street in New York City. He was 70, and reportedly reading e.e. cummings when he suffered his fatal attack. Due to his political alienation from the “clique that ruled Israel,” there were rumors of assassination.

  He was survived by his wife Rose and daughter Jenny, an actress. In Ben Hecht, The Man Behind the Legend, William McAdams quotes Rose as saying she talked to him all the while she tried to revive him: “I talked to him while I tipped him backward, his head on the floor, his birthday pajama top of soft dark silk around his still warm body. I talked while getting him smelling salts and while beginning to work on his chest with respiratory rhythm. I only stopped talking to force my tongue into his mouth still sweeter than wine to me and then I breathed into him while keeping on with the artificial respiration....” Later, after the police had placed Hecht’s body on the bed and Jenny and guests had come, Rose went back and told her husband in Yiddish how much she loved him.

  “Except for a lullaby I used to sing to Jenny, I had never spoken of love in the mother tongue,” said Rose Hecht. “I felt these words would reach his soul. I guess that is what it means to be a Jew.”

  The funeral took place at Temple Rodeph Sholom on West 83rd Street. The several hundred mourners included Helen Hayes to “Maurice,” then New York’s “Prince of Bohemia.” George Jessel and Luther Adler provided eulogies, as did Mendham Beige, leader of Israel’s Hero party (and formerly of the Argon terrorist organization), Samuel Tamer, leading Israeli lawyer, and Peter Bergson, investment broker and former chairman of the Hebrew Committee of National Liberation, who said:Ben attacked and derided the tinsel gods of his time. Ben’s life was a permanent revolution against the errors of today and for a better tomorrow.

  Outside the temple, Helen Hayes spoke about Hecht’s friendship and professional relationship with her late husband, Charles MacArthur. “It is very curious,” Ms. Hayes told the New York Times. “Their collaboration was so acute. It was nine years ago today that Charlie died.” Denied burial in Israel, Ben Hecht was interred at Oak Hills Cemetery in Nyack, New York, near the grave of MacArthur.

  “They are side by side again,” said Helen Hayes.

  Hecht’s final book, Letters from Bohemia, which included a section on Gene Fowler, was published after his death. Several of his films have spawned remakes, including the 1983 Scarface, which director Brian De Palma dedicated to Ben Hecht.

  Alan Mowbray remained a busy character player to the end of his life. He played in such films as Wagon Master (1950), Blackbeard the Pirate (1952), and The King and I (1956), and had his own 1953 TV series, Colonel Humphrey Flack — his role described by the New York Times as “a modern-day Robin Hood who outslicks swindlers and aids their innocent victims.” The 39 episodes, originally aired live from New York, were kinescoped and played in syndication for years. He also was a regular on the 1960 TV series Dante.

  On February 22, 1962, the 65-year-old Mowbray was jailed on a drunk charge after smashing a pane of glass in a Hollywood home. On the night of August 15 of that same year, he was arrested again, this time pleading guilty to drunken driving charges after driving into a curb at Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue and blowing out a tire.

  Come March 13, 1963, and Alan Mowbray, at age 66, enjoyed what had eluded him in his youth — a Broadway hit. The play was Enter Laughing, a comedy by Joseph Stein based on Carl Reiner’s novel. Mowbray played Marlowe, a ham actor gone to seed who runs a fly-by-night drama school and fleeces aspiring young players. Directed by Gene Saks, the play also starred Alan Arkin, Vivian Blaine, and Sylvia Sidney. The show ran for a year, and if there was any disappointment for Mowbray, it was that Jose Ferrer played Marlowe in the 1967 film version.

  Mowbray died at Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital on March 25, 1969, from a heart attack. He was 72 years old. His survivors included Lorayne (his wife of 42 years), a son Alan Jr., a daughter Patricia, two brothers and two grandchildren. There was also a son-in-law — Douglass Dumbrille, the veteran Hollywood heavy and an old friend of Alan’s. Dumbrille was five years older than Mowbray and, as a 70-year-old widower in May of 1960, wed 28-year-old Patricia.

  John Carradine continued pursuing acting as a holy cause, carrying his thespian cross though many hills and valleys. He had colorful roles in The Ten Commandments and Around the World in Eighty Days (both 1956), acted for John Ford again in The Last Hurrah (1958) and Cheyenne Autumn (1964), and enjoyed a long Broadway run as Lycus, “a buyer and seller of courtesans,” in the 1962 musical comedy A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Pocking his reputation were dozens of low-grade horror films, perhaps none so infamous as 1966’s Billy the Kid vs. Dracula.

  His personal life was always rocky. He and Sonia, his “Ophelia” from his 1943 Shakespeare company, divorced in 1957 amidst sensational headlines; the marriage produced three sons, including actors Keith and Robert. His third wife Doris (whom he wed in 1957) died in a fire in 1971 and his fourth wife Emily (whom he married in 1975) became ill, prompting Carradine — old, desperate and gnarled by arthritis — to lament to the National Enquirer that he was virtually destitute and unable to pay medical bills. The Enquirer’s calls to his sons as to why they weren’t helping the old man went unanswered. />
  Come the final years, John Carradine’s life resembled a horror movie — reportedly living in a quonset hut in San Diego, represented by a deformed manager who delivered the venerable actor in a van to play in films such as Death Farm (1986, as the Judge of Hell). Fearing he’d go mad if he ever retired, Carradine would go anywhere to act, including South Africa, where, in 1988, he made Buried Alive, appearing in a few flashes of screen time as a cackling old geek in a wheelchair. Traveling back home he stopped in Milan, where, the story goes, the 82-year-old actor insisted he visit the Duomo, the medieval cathedral. There one can take an elevator to the top of the Gothic tower, where, in olden days, religious zealots performed penance by climbing the 328 steps on their knees as they flagellated themselves. When Carradine arrived, he learned the elevator was out of order.

  “I’ll walk up!” he announced.

  So John Carradine, defiant, adventurous and still gloriously mad, made the ascent. He reached the top, looked at the view — and collapsed.

  Various observers of the late-in-life Carradine find this account difficult to believe. (Director Fred Olen Ray, who loyally used Carradine whenever possible, told me he never filmed Carradine walking across a room — “I didn’t have that much film!”). Whatever occurred, Carradine ended up in a pauper’s ward in a Milan hospital. David and Keith flew to be at his side. Keith couldn’t stay — he had to start a film — but David remained to read to his father his beloved Shakespeare. John Carradine died Sunday November 27, 1988 as David held him in his arms, heard the death rattle and closed his father’s eyes.

  In his final years, Carradine told David:Son, I’ve done everything I ever wanted to do. I have a few regrets, but I’ve had every woman I ever wanted. I played Hamlet. I skippered my own 70-foot schooner and I’ve raised a bunch of fine boys. Like every dog, I’ve had my day. I’m ready to go.

  The funeral took place at Saint Thomas Episcopal Church in Hollywood, where Carradine had been a founder and where David had been baptized. A weeping David read Shakespeare and the words “Good Night, Sweet Prince, and may Flights of Angels Sing Thee to thy Rest.” There was pomp and pageantry, the church was SRO and the funeral concluded with the hymn Onward Christian Soldiers.

  Then came a postscript wake, worthy of the Bundy Drive Boys and almost a homage to them. As David (familiar with the kidnapping of Barrymore’s corpse and “one final drink” story) wrote in his book Endless Highway:Afterward we carted the coffin over to our house and opened it up. I looked down at him and the undertakers had put a demonic, artificial grin on his face — like nothing I had ever seen him do in real life, except in a horror film. I reached out and using the sculptural skills I had learned from him, I remodeled his face to be more naturally him. Then I poured a half a bottle of J&B Scotch (his favorite) down his throat and we had the wake.

  John Carradine was buried at sea — his activity in the 1941 coastal defense system allowed him this honor — complete with a 21-gun salute, a bugler playing taps and what David calls “the largest gathering of the Carradine clan that I can remember.” A sailor tipped the coffin over the side into the Catalina Channel, where John Carradine had loved sailing his yacht The Bali in his glory years. David, as the eldest son, received the flag.

  Phyllis Decker’s choice in men had become more questionable when, on September 16, 1949 in Los Angeles, she married Jim Fleming, Errol Flynn’s right-hand man. For a time things seemed rosy — they opened an art gallery in Del Monte, but as daughter Mary Lou Warn told me:Mother married this horrible, horrible person, Jim Fleming, Flynn’s stand-in and — as I always said — procurer. He was terrible. What little Mother had, he blew. She was very jealous with him and got a little louder during those later years.

  They parted four years later, but it wasn’t until January 9, 1958 that finally received a divorce decree. She claimed that Fleming was content to live off the sale of John Decker’s paintings (about $15,000 worth) and only worked about a fourth of the time. As Phyllis told the press:Mr. Fleming just sat around the house and drank whisky — a fifth a day. When I had to go to work, I thought it silly to carry him along and, besides, he had beaten me so severely that my front teeth were knocked loose.

  Backing Phyllis’ sad story was no less than Gloria Decker, John Decker’s mysterious daughter by his first wife. A picture of Gloria and Phyllis made the Los Angeles Times, with both ladies looking as hard as actresses in a “B” women’s prison melodrama, and Gloria actually appearing older than Phyllis. The divorcee settled with Jim Fleming for a token $1-per-month alimony. For a time, Thomas Mitchell and his family took Phyllis into their home in Beverly Hills.

  Phyllis did marry again — for the fifth and final time — not to Marcel Grand, but to a nebbish. As Mary Lou remembers:I was married and traveled with my husband, a career Marine. We were always in these remote areas, and mother would come to visit. She had tough times after Jim, and went back to visit my aunt in Toledo, and this man who had just adored her for years from afar, a meek little man, five or six years younger than Mother, came along, and she married him for security. Every time anybody refers to him, it’s as “Poor Louie” — it was never “Louie,” it was just always “Poor Louie!”

  “Poor Louie” was a nice, sweet, quiet, little drunk. A beeraholic. We were living in Laguna Niguel, and our kids would all try to run and hide when they heard Grandpa Louie was coming, because he would just talk and talk — I mean, you’d go to the bathroom and shut the door in his face and he’d stand right there and he’d still keep talking!

  Louie was a chemist for Union Oil in Toledo, which transferred him to Long Beach. His alcoholism was so severe that the company sent him as a patient to, as Mary Lou puts it, “the grand opening” of the Betty Ford Clinic. Louie died in 1988, and just before his death, Phyllis learned she had cancer. Mary Lou moved her to Bermuda Dunes, a golf course community near Riverside, California, where she managed an apartment complex. “She hated it,” says Mary Lou. “She felt she was in prison. The end is very bad for cancer victims.”

  Phyllis died on her 72nd birthday, Wednesday, January 25, 1989.

  Of all the Bundy Drive survivors, it was the youngest, Anthony Quinn, who most did the old gang proud.

  He played Stanley Kowalski in the road company of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, later replacing Marlon Brando on Broadway. He won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Viva Zapata, winning the same year his father-in-law Cecil B. DeMille finally won his Best Picture Oscar for The Greatest Show on Earth. Quinn won the Venice Film Festival award for his unforgettable sideshow strongman of Fellini’s La Strada (1954), received a second Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Lust for Life (as Paul Gauguin, 1956) and won a Best Actor Academy nomination and the National Board of Review Best Actor award for his most famous performance, Zorba the Greek (1964). The actor’s personal favorite, however, was his performance as Mountain Rivera in Requiem for a Heavyweight (1962).

  There were also tepid efforts — as Quasimodo in 1957’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame (with a script by Ben Hecht), directing 1958’s The Buccaneer (the remake of De-Mille’s 1938 film — Quinn claimed DeMille recut his work and ruined the film) and co-starring as Henry II to Laurence Olivier’s Becket in Broadway’s 1960 Becket (with Olivier thoroughly intimidating him onstage). A 1971 TV series, The Man and the City, lasted one season.

  Quinn was aware of his overpowering screen image. “I never get the girl,” he joked. “I wind up with a country instead.”

  While starring in the title role of Barabbas (1962), Quinn met the 27-year-old costume designer Jolanda Addolori, and she bore him a son in March of 1963 (he was still married to Katherine), Quinn acknowledged his paternity and had the boy baptized at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. “I want him to be loved,” said Quinn, “and not to have to go to a psychiatrist at the age of 41 because he wasn’t wanted.” After Jolanda bore him a second son in April of 1964, Quinn bought a villa in Rome for his second family, and he and Katherine finally divorced (“for the good of
all the children,” said Katherine). In the early 1990s, after 30 years of living primarily in Italy, Quinn, nearly 80 years old, made another acknowledgment: his former secretary, Kathy Benvin, approximately 50 years his junior, had given birth to a daughter Antonia, and he was the father. Jolanda only reluctantly provided the divorce Quinn sought, and Quinn and Kathy became parents of son Ryan in July, 1996, three months after Quinn’s 81st birthday. All in all, Anthony Quinn fathered 13 children.

  An insight into Anthony Quinn came when, in 1982 at age 67, he began a four-year tour (including a Broadway engagement) in the musical Zorba. The show’s anthem song, “Life Is,” contained the lyric, “Life is what you do, while you’re waiting to die.” Quinn demanded the line be changed to “Life is what you do, till the moment you die.” The producers granted his request.

  Undoubtedly affected by John Decker and John Barrymore, Quinn became a fine visual artist, his paintings and sculptures winning exhibitions internationally.

  1995 saw the publication of Quinn’s memoir One Man Tango. The premise was interesting: Quinn, in Italy, had received a box from ex-wife Katherine, ill with Alzheimer’s in the U.S. Quinn alternately probes into the box and bicycles around the Italian countryside, revealing his life story. His jealousy about Katherine was still seething, his sensitivity about C.B. DeMille still acute, his love for the Bundy Drive Boys was still strong. He couldn’t resist boasting of his love affairs with Carole Lombard, Ingrid Bergman and Rita Hayworth, or bragging that his little daughter Antonia already had artistic talent.