http://www.nj.com:80/entertainment/tv/index.ssf/2009/05/a_huge_talent_..._a_mess
A huge talent -- and a mess of a man -- John Barrymore at last gets
his due
by Stephen Whitty/The Star-Ledger
Friday May 29, 2009, 5:40 PM
Madmen and drunkards, bankrupts and rakes -- from the turn-of-the-
century brawls of matinee idol Maurice (once shot in a Texas saloon)
to the 20th-century meltdowns of club-kid Drew (a rehab veteran at
13), the Barrymores have been famous and infamous at once.
And no one was more tortured -- or talented -- than John.
Yet for an actor once hailed as the greatest of his generation, he's
mostly a memory now. If casual moviegoers think of him, it's as some
pompous thespian or extravagant drunk. Even serious fans would be hard-
pressed to name more than a few of his films.
The man, and the career, deserve better.
Kino is about to release a four-DVD collection of his silent classics,
including a restored print of the once-lost "Sherlock Holmes." And
there are two recent, competing books -- Gregory William Mank's
"Hollywood's Hellfire Club" and Stephen C. Jordan's "Hollywood's
Original Rat Pack" -- about Barrymore's loose-knit gang of cronies and
acolytes.
But even they don't illuminate the full genius -- and catastrophe --
of the man.
John Barrymore was born in 1882 in Philadelphia, where his
grandmother, Louisa Lane Drew, had been an accomplished performer and
theatrical manager. (She had acted not only with John Wilkes Booth,
but with his father.) To Barrymore, however, she was Mum Mum, and a
constant in his young life.
He needed one. His father, Maurice Barrymore, had studied law (and
boxing) at Oxford before turning to acting and scandalizing his
family. Upon arrival in America, he married the actress Georgiana
Drew, and scandalized again with a busy schedule of stage tours,
barroom brawls and affairs.
The couple's three children would eventually follow them to the stage,
but baby brother John's first love was art.
After a few years at Seton Hall Prep, he took drawing classes in
Manhattan. Briefly, disastrously, he was an illustrator for the
Evening Journal. ("Jack," his friend Gene Fowler later wrote, "did not
seem to realize that newspapers had to be published on time.") His
life was beginning.
His own tragedies had already begun.
For by the time he was 15, Barrymore had already lost his grandmother
(and lost his virginity to one of his father's lovers). A teenage
romance with the great beauty Evelyn Nesbit resulted in pregnancy and
a proposal; it ended when Nesbit's mother insisted she reject him (and
Nesbit's other, richer lover, Stanford White, paid for an abortion.)
Two years later, Barrymore's father died raving -- probably from
advanced syphilis.
Is it any wonder his son had begun to drink? Or view women with a
mixture of adoration and distrust?
By the early 1900s, Barrymore was on the stage, coasting through light
comedies. But some of his friends -- and his staunchest defender,
sister Ethel -- knew there was more to him than his nickname, "The
Great Profile." He began tackling serious work. His "Richard III,"
first performed in 1920, was a triumph. When "Hamlet" followed, two
years later, he was hailed as the greatest Shakespearean of the age.
His approach -- as recounted by his daughter, Diana Barrymore, in "Too
Much, Too Soon" -- was to believe "Shakespeare had written the play
for me. The part had never been acted before.
.... There's no precedent to follow. The first time those lines will
have been read before an audience will be when you read
them." (Publicly, he jokingly described his method as "a lot of
talent, a glass, and some cracked ice.")
It's the magic -- and heartbreak -- of theater that it is both
immensely alive and immediately gone; Barrymore's stagework is as
vanished as his first-night audiences.
Yet some snippets are preserved. A portmanteau curiosity from 1929,
"The Show of Shows," features him playing Richard III in a scene from
"Henry VI," and while there's a bit of eye-rolling, the voice is
gorgeous and his textual command precise. It was, indeed, as if
Shakespeare had him in mind.
Barrymore's early film work was problematic -- closeups exaggerated
his theatricality -- but entertaining. His Mr. Hyde was a loathsome
monster, with skeletal fingers and an enormous, egg-shaped skull. In
the film's most striking sequence, he literally becomes a human-headed
spider. And while his Sherlock Holmes might infuriate purists -- at
the beginning of the film, he's a love-struck student -- it showed him
at his most dashing.
Yet the movies turned out to be a fatal detour. By 1925, Barrymore had
left the stage -- and with it, its steadying discipline of rehearsals
and curtain times. His alcoholism worsened -- his second wife, the
eccentric socialite Blanche Oelrichs, once caught him trying to drink
her cologne -- and soon that marriage ended in divorce, too.
He moved permanently to Hollywood, where the excess of his salaries --
$30,000 a week, in 1930 dollars -- almost matched his appetites.
And if he was at the very top of his profession, it only made the fall
ahead that much steeper.
If, for many silent stars, the boom mike was an unpitying monster --
revealing the too-boyish tenor of he-man John Gilbert, the Brooklyn
honk of impish Clara Bow -- it was Barrymore's greatest ally.
He not only had a beautiful voice but a trained one, slipping from a
purr to a snarl in a sentence, gilding even the flattest prose with
rhythm and melody.
His work in the early talkies was exemplary. He struck sparks on-
screen with a brand-new Katharine Hepburn on "A Bill of
Divorcement" (and even more off-screen, when he crudely pursued her).
In 1932's "Grand Hotel," he's not only charming as the penniless
Baron, but chameleon-like, playing opposite three co-stars -- the down-
to-earth Joan Crawford, the diva-ish Greta Garbo and his own hammy
brother, Lionel -- and meeting their very different acting approaches
with calm, centered confidence. (Insouciance, too -- watch for his
hallway scene with Crawford, which he ends by quite obviously, and
fondly, patting her rump.)
He's funny, too, in 1933's "Dinner at Eight," although the best lines
go to Marie Dressler and Jean Harlow. But there's already a shiver of
foreboding in his casting as Larry Renault, a fading star fueled by
ego and alcohol.
Writers George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber had already lampooned the
Barrymore clan in "The Royal Family," but these stings drew blood. A
more sober man would have seen a warning.
The self-mockery continued in the next year's screwball "Twentieth
Century." The character of impresario Oscar Jaffe came from memories
of Broadway titan David Belasco -- but it was no secret that the
character on-screen owed much to the film star's own outsized
emotions.
When he asked Howard Hawks why he wanted him, the director replied,
"It's the story of the biggest ham on earth and you're the biggest ham
I know." Barrymore took it as a compliment.
Yet the film -- Barrymore's favorite -- grows to match that mammoth
personality, and eventually leaves self-parody behind to become a
frantic French farce of comic-opera caricatures and feverish
theatrics, with Barrymore and the luminous Carole Lombard the two
sacred monsters at its heart.
It's a last high point in Barrymore's Hollywood career, already
dissolving rapidly in alcohol.
His third marriage, to silent-screen star Dolores Costello, had
already collapsed; so did an attempt to mount a film adaptation of
"Hamlet." (To be asked to screen test was humiliating; to then flub
the lines was crushing.) In the next two years, he made only one film.
Barrymore's wit had always been cutting. ("Don't point at me, please,"
he once admonished a nouveau-riche mogul. "I remember that finger when
it had a thimble on it.") Now it was his victims' turn to twist the
knife.
By 1937, there was nothing left but B-movies. Worse, his memory -- due
to years of alcohol, or early dementia -- frayed faster, as prop men
now stood out of camera range holding blackboards with his lines.
Radio was a boon at first, because he could work from a script, but
soundmen complained his hands shook so much they couldn't hear him
above the rattling pages. Eventually those parts were written out on
cardboard.
He still had charm, and devoted friends. John Carradine, another
theatrical Shakespearean, was something of a protege; Errol Flynn
idolized him.
But Barrymore's fourth marriage, to the young gold-digger Elaine
Barrie, was worse than a scandal -- it was a cliche.
Meanwhile, his attempt to rebuild bridges to his daughter Diana was
rocky, at best -- and irresponsible right from the start, as he
immediately introduced the high-schooler to Brandy Alexanders, and her
own downward trajectory.
He was a spendthrift and a roue -- but he was also a Barrymore, and a
trouper. The show went on.
He played variations of himself, the grandiloquent drunk, in pictures
like "The Great Man Votes" or "Playmates" (which -- sadly -- allowed
him a few lines from "Hamlet.") He even made a brief return to the
stage in the farce "My Dear Children."
It was during a radio appearance that Barrymore -- already suffering
from cirrhosis of the liver, kidney disease and chronic edema --
finally collapsed, and was rushed to the hospital.
He drifted in and out of consciousness before dying, at age 60, in
1942.
Lionel chose the epitaph: Good night, sweet prince.
There was, however, one last, gruesome, curtain call. Barrymore's
friends were holding a barroom wake when director Raoul Walsh took his
leave, telling Errol Flynn he was simply too distraught.
He then, according to his own biography, bribed a morgue attendant to
"borrow" Barrymore's body, which he then posed in the actor's living
room. When Flynn got home, he wrote in his memoirs, "I let out a
delirious scream."
It was the sort of story that Barrymore himself would have reveled in.
Better to be the source of prankish fun than to calcify into legend.
It would happen soon enough, anyway -- memorialized in Fowler's "Good
Night, Sweet Prince," fictionalized in "The Bad and the Beautiful,"
excoriated in his daughter's "Too Much, Too Soon," impersonated by
Flynn in the subsequent movie version, and, finally, caricatured in
"W.C. Fields and Me" and "I Hate Hamlet."
No, Barrymore would have appreciated the outrageousness of the
mortuary gag.
For it treated his death as he, "a rogue and peasant slave," had grown
to treat life itself -- as a great and cruel and unpredictable joke,
whose final and funniest punchline was ourselves.
Stephen Whitty may be reached at swhitty(at)starledger(dot)com or
(212) 790-4435.
--
Bruce Calvert
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