Of All the Gin Joints: Stumbling through Hollywood History
336
Of All the Gin Joints: Stumbling through Hollywood History
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Overview
True tales of celebrity hijinks are served up with an equal measure of Hollywood history, movie-star mayhem, and a frothy mix of forty cocktail recipes.
Humphrey Bogart got himself arrested for protecting his drinking buddies, who happened to be a pair of stuffed pandas. Ava Gardner would water-ski to the set of Night of the Iguana holding a towline in one hand and a cocktail in the other. Barely legal Natalie Wood would let Dennis Hopper seduce her if he provided a bathtub full of champagne. Bing Crosby’s ill-mannered antics earned him the nickname “Binge Crosby.” And sweet Mary Pickford stashed liquor in hydrogen peroxide bottles during Prohibition. From the frontier days of silent film up to the wild auteur period of the 1970s, Mark Bailey has pillaged the vaults of Hollywood history and lore to dig up the true—and often surprising—stories of seventy of our most beloved actors, directors, and screenwriters at their most soused.
Bite-size biographies are followed by ribald anecdotes and memorable quotes. If a star had a favorite cocktail, the recipe is included. Films with the most outrageous booze-soaked stories, like Apocalypse Now, From Here to Eternity, and The Misfits, are featured, along with the legendary watering holes of the day (and the recipes for their signature drinks). Edward Hemingway’s portraits complete this spirited look at America’s most iconic silver-screen legends.
“This book is like being at the best dinner party in the world. And I thought I was the first person to put a bar in my closet. I was clearly born during the wrong era.” —Chelsea Handler
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781616203986 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill |
| Publication date: | 09/30/2014 |
| Sold by: | Hachette Digital, Inc. |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 336 |
| File size: | 8 MB |
About the Author
Mark Bailey is an author and Emmy-nominated screenwriter. His previous books include American Hollow, Hemingway & Bailey's Bartending Guide to Great American Writers, Of All the Gin Joints, and the children's book Tiny Pie. His films have appeared on HBO, PBS, Netflix, and Lifetime. Bailey lives in Los Angeles with his wife and three children.
Edward Hemingway is a writer and artist living in Brooklyn, New York. He has done feature reporting for GQ Magazine, written comics for Nickelodeon, and been featured twice in American Illustration. His artwork has been included in the New York Times, Abercrombie & Fitch Quarterly, and Nickelodeon Magazine, among others. He is the cocreator and illustrator of the book Hemingway & Bailey’s Bartending Guide to Great American Writers, which has been published in three languages. He has also written and illustrated the children’s books Bump in the Night,Bad Apple: A Tale of Friendship, which was selected for the 2013 Society of Illustrators Original Art Show, and Bad Apple’s Perfect Day (August 2014). He is the illustrator of the children’s book Tiny Pie, which has been published in two languages. An undergraduate of Rhode Island School of Design and a graduate of the School of Visual Arts, Hemingway has been a guest on NPR’s Morning Edition, and his artwork has been featured in several shows across the country, most recently at the Brooklyn Public Library.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Part One
THE SILENT ERA
1895–1929
"To place in the limelight a great number of people who ordinarily would be chambermaids and chauffeurs, give them unlimited power and instant wealth, is bound to produce a lively and diverting result."
–ANITA LOOS, screenwriter
* * *
ROSCOE "FATTY" ARBUCKLE
1887–1933
ACTOR AND COMEDIAN
* * *
"The only place in America to get a drink is the police station."
At five foot ten and 275 pounds, Fatty Arbuckle earned his nickname. Of his over 150 films, the best known are The Rounders (with Charlie Chaplin, 1914) and the unconventional Western The Round-Up (character name: Slim Hoover, 1920). Arbuckle also wrote and directed most of his own films. In 1918 he became the first $1-million-per-year movie actor. In 1921 he was implicated in the sexual assault and accidental death of actress Virginia Rappe. Arbuckle was acquitted after three trials, but he did not receive a film contract for the next eleven years. With no means of employment, in 1928 he opened the popular, though short-lived, nightclub Plantation Café, in Culver City. His acting comeback finally began in 1932. A year later, the night before he was to sign his first talkie, Arbuckle had a party to celebrate. He left early, went straight to bed, and died in his sleep from a heart attack.
EARLY ONE MORNING IN 1920, housekeepers at the Sunset Boulevard mansion of actress Pauline Frederick heard a commotion outside. They emerged to discover a car blithely parked in the middle of the front lawn and three utility workers digging toward a leaky gas pipe. The housekeepers screamed for the workers to stop; Frederick had just paid an enormous sum to have the 150-foot lawn perfectly manicured, and now her flawless grass was being destroyed. The workers were unmoved. There could be an explosion, for God's sake. Finally, Frederick herself dashed out of the house in a bathrobe, shouting and weeping. But as she neared the truck, her screams abated and something entirely unexpected occurred: Frederick broke into laughter.
Two of the "gasmen," it turned out, were none other than superstar Fatty Arbuckle and his newest partner in crime, Buster Keaton — both well in their cups.
Arbuckle's unquenchable thirst for good scotch was already legendary inside Hollywood. He threw lavish parties on any occasion, however slight. One such party was for the wedding of two dogs. The basement of his Tudor mansion on West Adams was stacked floor to ceiling with expensive wine and scotch. He owned a custom $25,000 Pierce-Arrow phaeton car with a bar and toilet inside. Perhaps that is worth repeating: He had a toilet inside his car.
* * *
Arbuckle's unquenchable thirst for good scotch was already legend inside Hollywood. He threw lavish parties on any occasion, however slight. One party was for the wedding of two dogs.
* * *
A typical Arbuckle night involved lobster, scotch, a party (his or someone else's), and the occasional orgy. It was thus that he ended up on Polly Frederick's front lawn. The idea for the prank had been born several weeks earlier, when Arbuckle drove past Frederick's home and deemed the front lawn insultingly well kept. Resolved to do something about it, he hatched the gasman plan, enlisting best friend, Keaton.
For her part, Frederick was gracious about the entire affair. After explaining to her housekeepers what was happening, she scolded the pranksters with a smile and invited them inside for breakfast.
* * *
the HOLLYWOOD HOTEL
NORTHWEST CORNER OF
HOLLYWOOD AND HIGHLAND
* * *
BUILT ON A THREE-ACRE strawberry patch fronting the dusty, unpaved road that would become Hollywood Boulevard, the Hollywood Hotel was the town's first proper nightspot. Stucco, Moorish style, it was a mecca for arriving talent, as well as the early giants of the industry: actors, directors, producers.
Originally named the Hotel of Hollywood, but always called the Hollywood Hotel, the establishment had two watershed moments within its first decade. The first came in 1906, when sixty-three-year-old heiress Almira Hershey (of the chocolate dynasty) rode up fromher Bunker Hill mansion to eat lunch at the hotel and ended up buying the place. Apparently things like this actually did happen, once upon a time.
The second was in 1910, when New York's Biograph Studios sent director D. W. Griffith to shoot three films in Los Angeles, and he discovered the charms of its suburb (Hollywood) — and its freedom from the expensive patent licenses required to film in New York. Within five years, most of the film industry had relocated to Hollywood, and virtually everyone's first home was the Hollywood Hotel. Its registry is now in the Smithsonian.
During those early years, it was the only acceptable hotel in Hollywood in which to reside, with a Thursday night dance that became quite the scene — the city's very first "place to be seen." Hershey didn't allow drinking or cohabitation, but she was the only person who enforced those rules — and she was in her seventies and nearly blind. The result, to read contemporary accounts, was some combination of a frat house and an insane asylum, with ill- behaved actors drinking openly in the very dining room she policed. A besotted Fatty Arbuckle was known to use his napkin to catapult butter packets onto the ceiling, which then melted and dropped down at the next seating.
The most famous room, 264, was the honeymoon suite out of which Jean Acker locked Rudolph Valentino on their wedding night, afraid to tell him she was a lesbian. Legend has it that Miss Hershey paid a visit to one bed-hopping actress every night to assure that no untoward activity was taking place. The actress always timed her trysts accordingly, until one night Hershey caught her. She was evicted at dawn. Two hours later, the actress returned with a new hairstyle, fake accent, and a pseudonym. Miss Hershey checked her right in.
Inevitably, stars bought mansions, and new hotels and nightclubs emerged; by the time Hershey died in 1930, at age eighty-seven, the Hollywood Hotel had become a quaint relic. It was torn down in 1956, and today the location houses an abominable megamall, the only graceful note of which is the Dolby Theatre, which hosts the Academy Awards on the same plot of land that sprouted the film industry a century before.
* * *
JOHN BARRYMORE
1882–1942
STAGE AND SCREEN ACTOR
* * *
"You can't drown yourself in drink. I've tried; you float."
John Barrymore was universally considered by peers and critics to be greatest actor of the early twentieth century. A theater legend, his 1922 turn as Hamlet (on Broadway and in London) is still considered the definitive performance of the role. Barrymore was perhaps the most prominent member of the multigenerational Drew-Barrymore acting dynasty. His father Maurice, grandmother Louisa Lane Drew, and uncles John Drew, Jr., and Sidney Drew were all thespians. His brother Lionel, sister Ethel, daughter Diana, and granddaughter Drew were all film actors. Working exclusively on the screen after 1925, Barrymore hated film but loved the money. Of his fifty-seven movies, he is best known for his leads in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920), Don Juan (1926; the first film to use sync sound), A Bill of Divorcement (1932), and a comic turn in Grand Hotel (1932). From 1933 through to his death in 1942, Barrymore's acting ability and looks crumbled due to excessive drinking; his final roles were painful self-parodies. But even his worst work would not tarnish Barrymore's eulogy: greatest actor of his time.
THE NURSE COULD NOT BE TAMED. Three months prior to his death, the great John Barrymore was bedridden in his Tower Road home, and his few remaining friends wanted desperately to see him. But Barrymore's nurse, an unyielding and apparently quite large woman, simply would not allow it. Painter John Decker tried a ladder; she pushed it over. Actor Errol Flynn tried to wrestle her and lost. The nurse had been sternly advised that anyfriendly visit would involve the smuggling of alcohol, and that, she couldn't have. Alcohol, after all, was the very thing that had brought him to death's door.
Now we all know that each Hollywood generation has its most handsome leading man, its most admired acting talent, and its most raucous party animal. John Barrymore had the distinction of holding all three titles at once — for twenty years. His striking good looks earned him the nickname "The Great Profile," and his Broadway version of Hamlet alone would have assured his place in the acting pantheon: Freud had recently published his theory of Hamlet's Oedipal desire, and Barrymore embraced the idea, giving the doomed prince an unusual touch of sex appeal.
Barrymore's success with the gambit was no accident: As a teenager, he had lost his virginity to his own stepmother, Mamie Floyd, a tryst that saddled Barrymore with a mistrust of women and a guilt that accelerated his growing fondness for booze. Both the mistrust and the fondness would last the rest of his life.
Although Barrymore would arguably never fully translate his stage magic to the silver screen, Warner Brothers and their $76,250 per picture kept him in Tinseltown. And once he got over the feeling of slumming it, he was just simply bored. "On a movie lot," Barrymore once said, "you're nothing but a bloody stooge, a victim of some inept director who doesn't know his ass from a Klieg." By the time sound arrived, he was known as much for his off-screen antics as for his acting. His nicknames reflected the shift; The Great Profile had become, among his acquaintances, "The Monster."
Barrymore ran with a group of fellow revelers and derelicts — W. C. Fields, Errol Flynn, John Decker, John Carradine, and screenwriter Gene Fowler — christened the Bundy Drive Boys. According to Fowler, they showed up at the draft office in 1941 sloshed and anxious to serve; the registrar looked them over and asked, "Who sent you? The Enemy?"
The other Bundy Drive Boys worshipped Barrymore, whose most affectionate nickname for someone was "shithead." They all drank like devils, but even Fields was no match for him. The volume of fluid he could consume was untouchable, as was, accordingly, his need to relieve it. The Great Profile was famously indiscriminate in his choice of urinals. First it was sinks. Then it was windows. Soon it became anywhere — elevators, cars, the sandbox at the Ambassador Hotel (which banned him), nightclub draperies. (Decades later, Robert Mitchum would demonstrate a similar proclivity.)
One story goes that, while out on a binge, Barrymore accidentally walked into a women's restroom. Finding no urinal, he proceeded to relieve his bladder in a potted plant. A woman standing nearby reminded him that the room was "for ladies exclusively." Turning around, his penis still exposed, Barrymore responded, "So, Madam, is this. But every now and again, I'm compelled to run a little water through it." Roughly fifty years later, the incident made its way, verbatim, into the film My Favorite Year.
It was not surprising that, over time, such debauchery started catching up to Barrymore. And thus, by 1942, did he find himself confined to bed in his Tower Road home, forbidden all drink, with a quite large nurse barring all visitors. The only exceptions were his brother Lionel, his daughter Diana, and doctors. Then there was the insurance adjuster who showed up one day dressed in the black flannel suit of a pallbearer and introducing himself as Harleigh P. Wigmore. The nurse led the man into Barrymore's room. No sooner had she left, than poor, haggard Barrymore brightened, "What is this, a dress rehearsal for my obsequies?" The adjuster smiled back and pulled something out of his briefcase: an ancient bottle of Napoleon cognac. The man was, in fact, Barrymore's close friend, director Raoul Walsh, who'd concocted the ruse to get past the nurse.
* * *
The nurse had been sternly advised that any friendly visit would involve the smuggling of alcohol, and that she couldn't have. Alcohol, after all, was the very thing that had brought him to death's door.
* * *
"Ingenious," Barrymore told him, as they sat sharing a bottle for what would be the very last time. Barrymore was now more animated than ever. He told Walsh that he'd be donating his liver to Smithsonian, "for their Civil War display." When the nurse suddenly returned, Barrymore alerted her as to exactly who the "insurance man" was. Then he blew a kiss, exclaiming, "If only I were ambulatory, I would spring from this bed of thorns and pay you my praise in the coinage of rapture." The woman left, blushing, and Barrymore raised the bottle of cognac to his friend. "My farewell performance as Don Juan," he toasted.
H. L. MENCKEN ONCE DECLARED, "I'm ombibulous: I drink every known alcoholic drink and enjoy them all." A nice sentiment, but John Barrymore put Mencken to shame, such was the breadth of his taste for alcohol. When Barrymore's second wife broke every bottle in their house, he drank all of her perfume. When he embarked on a 1935 boating trip with their daughter and discovered (once at sea) that the ship had been stripped of booze, he siphoned a pint of the engine's coolant. Two wives later, he drank a goblet of boric acid intended to soothe his sunburn.
Perhaps Barrymore mellowed as he aged, though the stories argue otherwise. For the last two years of his life, he was a permanent guest on the radio show of singer Rudy Vallée. And every day at 4 p.m., on his way to the studio, he'd stop at St. Donat's Bar on Sunset and order his favorite drink: a Pimm's Cup. You can't get more civilized.
BBL[PIMM'S CUP
2 OZ. PIMM'S NO. 1
3 OZ. FRESHLY SQUEEZED LEMONADE
1 LEMON-LIME SODA SUCH AS 7UP OR SPRITE
2 CUCUMBER SLICES
1 MINT SPRIG ASSORTED FRUIT OPTIONAL: ORANGE SLICE, APPLE SLICE, STRAWBERRIES
Pour Pimm's and then lemonade into a chilled highball glass filled with ice cubes. Top off with soda. Stir. Garnish with cucumber and mint, additional fruit may be added. Serve with straw.
* * *
the AMBASSADOR HOTEL
3400 WILSHIRE BLVD.
* * *
FIRST OPENING ITS DOORS on New Year's Day 1921, the posh Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire quickly overtook the Alexandria as the ne plus ultra destination for Hollywood elites, visiting dignitaries, and clandestine lovers.
The hotel would host six Academy Awards ceremonies and the first Golden Globes. Marilyn Monroe got her start at the poolside modeling agency, Blue Book, and the jury for the Charles Manson case stayed there during his trial.
So frequently was the hotel used as a set in both films and television, it was nicknamed the "Ambassador Studios." Some titles include: A Star Is Born, The Graduate, Rocky, Pretty Woman, Hoffa, Apollo 13, and Forrest Gump.
But in real life, the Ambassador's most storied parties took place in the tropically themed supper club and dancehall, the Cocoanut Grove. Decorated by palm trees inherited from the set of the Valentino silent The Sheik, the Grove was unique among hotspots because it hosted constant performances. These eventually became de facto auditions. Bing Crosby and Merv Griffin first sang there. Judy Garland recorded her comeback album there. And a host of young female superstars were first discovered dancing there: Carole Lombard, Loretta Young, and Joan Crawford (who won over a hundred dance trophies). Years later, the Rat Pack adopted it as their haunt of choice, and in 1963 Sammy Davis, Jr., even recorded a live album there.
But over time the Ambassador Hotel would earn its place in history more through tragedy than celebration. In 1968 presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, fresh from his victory speech in the California primary, was shot in the pantry area of the hotel's kitchen.
The death of Kennedy, along with the deterioration of the surrounding neighborhood, marked the beginning of the end for the hotel. Drugs and gang warfare, already on the rise, would soon flood the area. In 1971 an attempt was made to renovate the Cocoanut Grove, overseen by none other than Sammy Davis, Jr., himself, but the effort only led to such seemingly incongruous bookings as the Grateful Dead and Sly Stone. The credits were already rolling.
The Ambassador heaved its final sigh and closed its curtains in 1989, then languished behind weeds and chain-link fences as a movie location for more than a decade longer. In 2006, it was demolished. The only bright note to its unhappy demise was that the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools rose out of the ashes, a complex of six public schools in downtown L.A. Designed loosely on a modern interpretation of the hotel, a 582-seat school theater now stands in the footprint of the original, a showplace for a new generation of performers.
IT WAS PERHAPS the most glamorous nightclub ever. Beneath the palm trees and coconuts, watched by the mechanical monkeys with their glowing eyes, the world's biggest stars laughed and danced and above all else drank.
There is the story of a young Tallulah Bankhead enamored with a much older John Barrymore. After a night at the Grove and one too many, she sneaked into Barrymore's Ambassador Hotel bungalow and hid under the sheets to wait for him. Back from the club and three sheets himself, upon discovering the naked starlet, Barrymore just groaned "Tallu ... I'm too drunk and you're too awkward." It was a hell of an offer to turn down. Their cups truly overflowed.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Of All the Gin Joints"
by .
Copyright © 2014 Mark Bailey.
Excerpted by permission of ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
People,
Places,
Films,
Recipes,
PART ONE THE SILENT ERA, 1895–1929,
PART TWO THE STUDIO ERA, 1930–1945,
PART THREE POSTWAR ERA, 1946–1959,
PART FOUR 1960S & NEW HOLLYWOOD, 1960–1979,
Acknowledgments,
Sources,
Index,