Bad-Movie Double Feature

A long time ago the Siren was asked in the comments to a post on this here blog whether or not she had seen The Legend of Lylah Clare. And she said no, and some of you (the Siren names no names, you know who you are) said “Oh Siren! You should see it!”

So some time later (seven years, but who’s counting) the Siren did sit down and watch Lylah, and now she is back to ask, WHY DID YOU DO THIS TO HER?

The Legend of Lylah Clare is terrible. The Siren issues that judgment after watching it on an impromptu double bill with Where Love Has Gone which is, god knows, also bad, but bad in a fun, watchable, even sociologically interesting way. Where Love Has Gone answers the intriguing question of how the Johnny Stompanato murder would have played out if, rather than a movie star, Lana Turner had been a wealthy abstract sculptor in San Francisco, and its good points include, but are not limited to,

1. Late-period Susan Hayward, yelling at husband Mike Connors “You’re a drunk! A drunk, a drunk, a drunk!” in a slurred voice she probably perfected on the set of I’ll Cry Tomorrow

2. George Macready (second from left) classing up the joint as the family lawyer, as he nears the end of a long movie career spent giving nutcases unheeded advice in a mellifluous voice

3. Bette Davis, in a gray wig, but made up nicely and wearing chic clothes, showing that she still looked good if you weren’t deliberately trying to make her look bad

4. An impressive assortment of 1964 furniture and costumes (by Edith Head) and hairstyles, all deployed to tell a story that begins during World War II

5. Newspaper headlines which are used to remind the audience that though the hair may shriek 1964, V-J Day was back in 1945

6. Joey Heatherton as a brunette, and she spends most of the movie making day-at-the-dentist faces like that

7. Jane Greer in her standout supporting turn as “Recognizable Human Being.” (That's her in the middle, Joey's baring her teeth again on the right.)

Plus, Mark Harris recommended Where Love Has Gone on Twitter, and he wouldn’t steer a Siren wrong.

But...Lylah Clare. Jesus, what IS this movie? Many are the Robert Aldrich movies the Siren has seen and loved, but this one is no Autumn Leaves, hell, it’s not even Sodom and Gomorrah.

For one thing, Sodom and Gomorrah has a clear timeline. In Lylah Clare, the allegedly legendary title character was a German-born movie goddess who, while she was being chased by a lust-crazed fan who was threatening her with a knife, broke her neck in a fall off the building-code-violating banister-less side of the grand staircase of the home of the director she had married that day. (That’s the initial version discernible from one of many flashbacks, anyway.) Now, years later, Lylah's widower and director, Lewis Zarken (Peter Finch), is casting uncanny look-alike Elsa Brinkman (Kim Novak) in a Lylah Clare biopic, because Lewis wants a comeback, and everyone knows that biopics are the No. 1 fastest way to renewed artistic respect.

But: It’s apparently only 20 years, 25 max since Lylah met the mansion floor, and despite many flashbacks, this movie is set firmly in its late-1960s here-and-now. Not just the styles, but even the movie equipment, the cars, the TV sets, you name it. Yet in the slideshow of Lylah’s career that opens the movie, her “nude shot” echoes Marilyn Monroe’s last session with Bert Stern; Lylah’s wedding gown mimics bias-cut early ’30s; and the folks at Lylah’s funeral are wearing everything from a pillbox hat to a cloche. Later we also hear that Lylah slept with the Japanese gardener to console him on the eve of his being sent to an internment camp, which would make Lylah's neck still unbroken in 1942. Do you see that this math could give a person a migraine? Would you, like the Siren, spend much of the running time periodically yelling at the screen, “What the hell year is it?”

OK, given that the movie has a lot of other what-is-reality-anyway affectations, we’ll say it’s fine, and anyway, who doesn’t want to pretend that a few years here and there didn’t happen. That still leaves us with the script. Lylah Clare is supposed to be an excoriating look at the dream factory, well-trod territory for Aldrich (for the record, the Siren loves both The Big Knife and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?). Somehow Aldrich got the idea that what we want here is to have all of the philosophizing and negotiating played in a nice stable medium shot so you can’t miss a word no matter how hard you try, even when Rosella Falk (as Lewis’s lesbian housekeeper, who once loved Lylah) is compressing her lips in a straight line and giving one of her heavily accented speeches about what rats they all are. And what we want from the numerous flashbacks to old Hollywood, and Lylah’s tragic accident, and Lylah’s insatiable sex life, is a bunch of wavery black-and-white floating dream-insets with distorted sound.

There’s no humor in this movie. How can you have a movie about Hollywood without a single laugh? The closest it comes is Peter Finch’s line, addressed to Elsa as she tries to descend the staircase in an elegant manner: “We’re moving like a deeply offended Tibetan yak!” Which doesn’t make any sense, it’s just a collection of words, with royal first-person plural and Peter Finch’s accent used to simulate wit. And without even the saving grace of being funny, Peter Finch’s character is a trial: nasty, conceited, physically abusive, and vulgar, not so much Von Sternberg or Stroheim (supposedly the basis for Lewis) but rather the kind of man they satirized.

Ernest Borgnine is a one-note loudmouth, which, given that he is obviously playing Harry Cohn, lends a touch of historical accuracy, but gets old, fast. At least one of the screenwriters hated Hedda Hopper so much he invented a fictional leg amputation and prosthetic for the Hopper-based character, but even so, Hopper might have loved Coral Browne’s performance, especially because Browne makes her 10-minute scene one of only two good ones in the movie. The scene is a crowded cocktail-party-press-conference-star-unveiling sort of thing at Lewis’ mansion (where even the death of his wife still has not prompted Lewis to put a banister on the staircase). Browne’s gossip columnist pokes at Novak’s Elsa with her cane, and in a voice that would carry to the Old Vic balcony asks whether Elsa is sleeping with Lewis. And Elsa tells her off — in a heavily German-accented voice. Because Elsa is being possessed by Lylah.

The Siren has no problem with that plot development, matter of fact it was what drew her to the movie. But...when Elsa’s voice drops an octave and heads straight for Berlin (or as close a vicinity as Novak can get), none of the hundreds of guests say anything about that. And look, if out of nowhere you suddenly start doing your Marlene Dietrich impression, people say something. The Siren tells you this from personal experience.

And then there’s the way this movie treats Kim Novak, how she spends one scene inexplicably walking around the garden in her brassiere like some kind of dope, gets stripped to her bra every damn time there is a flashback to her death scene, and is made to re-enact at least three or four cut-rate versions of her bell-tower fate in Vertigo. You don’t satirize Hollywood by exploiting an actress, much less by burlesquing an infinitely better film. Also: The nerve of writing Lylah so that only the most blockheaded viewer won’t think of Dietrich as well as Greta Garbo, both of whom were serious professional actresses before coming to Hollywood — then filling the script with references to how Lylah got her big break as the star attraction in a German brothel. Hey there, original authors Robert Thom and Edward DeBlasio and adaptation writers Hugo Butler and Jean Rouverol, who do you think you are? Furthermore, 1968 was a little late to still be doing the sad-nutty-lesbian-in-unrequited-love thing, although admittedly Aldrich did it a lot better that same year in The Killing of Sister George, which the Siren likes better than Lylah Clare. Pull an Aldrich movie out of a hat and you will find one that the Siren likes better than Lylah Clare.

Some people like the fadeout; it struck the Siren as the biggest, most annoying cheat since The Strange Love of Uncle Harry. For the record, the other good scene in the movie is an early one of Elsa walking down Hollywood Boulevard just before dawn, and she can see all the stars, some that she recognizes, some that she’s hardly even heard of. There’s even a marquee for The Dirty Dozen, Aldrich’s previous (and as you know, much better than Lylah Clare) movie.

Anyway, want to shut out the world with a fun bad movie? Where Love Has Gone. As for The Legend of Lylah Clare: Last year Kim Morgan asked Quentin Tarantino about it, and he responded, “Even I can’t get through that one, and I love Aldrich.”

Chicago (1927)

(The unabridged and updated version of a Siren column about the 1927 silent version of Chicago, first published behind a paywall at the now-defunct Nomad Widescreen.)

Nothing guarantees immortality for a murderer quite like getting away with it, as Lizzie Borden could have told you. So could Beulah Annan, the woman who, in 1924, shot a lover foolhardy enough to threaten to leave her — and who walked out of a courtroom 13 months later, a free woman. The story so captured her city and era that a play, a musical and two movie versions bear only the name of her town as a title: Chicago.

The 2002 Oscar-winner was a hashhouse mess that threw the Broadway musical revival's greatest asset — its Bob Fosse-inspired choreography — into a whirling Cuisinart of cuts. Director Rob Marshall demonstrated an uncanny instinct for slowing down the numbers that needed to sizzle, and cranking up the ones that needed some quiet. Trust the Siren, it’s a much better idea to turn to the 1927 silent and see how delightful this little cyanide pellet of a story remains.

Based on a 1926 hit play by Maurine Dallas Watkins, who covered both Beulah and a similar murderess for the Chicago Tribune, the film unspools the simple tale of a simple woman with two simple needs: fortune and fame, in that order. Roxie Hart (Phyllis Haver) is married to Amos (Victor Varconi). Amos works at a news-and-candy stand; he is poor, honest, hardworking, and loves his wee girly with all his handsome, sappy heart. Roxie, naturally, is sick to death of him, and has been carrying on with Rodney Casely (Eugene Pallette), who provides her with all the niceties.

In this silent movie Pallette is of course bereft of his famous voice, which sounded like a bullfrog trying to climb out of a tuba. But Pallette is young(ish), virile, many pounds lighter than in My Man Godrey nine years later and, more to the point, his character Casely has money. Money that he has been spending on Roxie, and money that he has decided, it transpires, to spend on something else. What that something else may be we are destined never to know, for when Rodney arrives at a tryst and rudely announces he's giving Roxie the air, she airs him in return, with a couple of bullet holes.

Amos, once over the shock of discovering Roxie isn't the true-blue sweetie he thought, attempts to take the rap for her, but is foiled by a wily, ambitious assistant district attorney (Warner Richmond). Roxie lands in jail and encounters the Matron (May Robson) plus an assortment of other female murderers, including Two-Gun Rosie (Viola Louie) the tragic Teresa (who isn't billed) and "The Real Lady,” later called Velma Kelly in the musicals, here played by a skinny, menacing and altogether fabulous Julia Faye. (Faye even bears a spooky resemblance to Bebe Neuwirth, who played Velma in the 1996 Broadway revival of Chicago.)

The rest of the film is taken up with watching Roxie scheme and feud from jail cell to courtroom, while Amos slides further into chump-dom as he attempts to rob the jailhouse lawyer (William Flynn) who's promised to get Rosie an acquittal. The idea is to pay the crooked shyster with his own money, and it’s a pretty good scheme for someone capable of doing it competently, which needless to say Amos is not.

Notice there has been so far no discussion of the director. That's because, well, pull up a chair. The name on the credits is Frank Urson, but Flicker Alley's excellent DVD edition includes a liner-note essay, "Who Directed Chicago?," indicating that even at the time of the movie’s release, producer Cecil B. DeMille was widely believed to have done most of the directing. But the essay muddles things further by noting that DeMille took over direction after seven days of photography. Then, in the next sentence, it asserts: "Urson seems to have directed much of the film." In his biography of DeMille, Empire of Dreams, Scott Eyman says the producer wound up "stepping in and directing a fair amount of the picture himself."

All clear then? No? Then it's best to look at Chicago itself, which is studded with moments that fairly screech DeMille, like the lingering shots of the opium-den splendor of the lawyer's lair. Who knew jailhouse work could inspire a highly developed taste for chinoiserie, down to an elegant marble inkwell where you can stash your cash payoffs? There's also the major role played by Roxie's garters, which have little tinkling bells attached to them. A catfight between Roxie and the Real Lady is shot in a lip-licking style any viewer of DeMille's ancient-world epics will recognize, and Fritzi of the wonderful Movies, Silently, believes that’s another thing that indicates DeMille was in charge: Julia Faye was C.B.’s mistress at the time. Plus,

DeMille kept every film he directed in his personal film vault. Of all the dozens of films released as programmers and specials under the DeMille banner, there was only one movie found in that personal vault that did not have DeMille as the credited director. You guessed it, that movie was Chicago.

Frizzy-haired, sulky-sexy Phyllis Haver was one of Mack Sennett's original Bathing Beauties at age 16, earning a salary of $12 a week before moving on to DeMille's production company and performances in The Way of All Flesh (which is now, sadly, a lost film), What Price Glory?, and this picture, her biggest and best role. "I wasn't much of an actress," she told Sennett in his memoirs, but he begged to differ, and so will anyone watching Chicago. Her Roxie is a study in comic venality, dismissing flashes of conscience in the time it takes to powder her nose — which she does in the mirror that’s just been shattered by one of the bullets she fired at her lover.

Roxie makes little moues at Amos and at strategic moments she deploys baby-talk, helpfully spelled out in the intertitles. Judging by this movie and Booth Tarkington's novel Seventeen, as well as boop-a-doop singer Helen Kane and others, there was a near-epidemic of female baby-talk in the Jazz Age, and it threatened the sanity of many an otherwise stable man. Haver plays Roxie like a child in other ways, whether she's chewing energetically while Amos embraces her or giving him a kittenish look of apology when he accuses her of faithlessness.

Even the intertitles, not always a boon to a good silent movie, are funny — the Siren's favorite is the matron rebuking her charges with, “This is a decent jail, you can't act the way you do at home!” Despite some late-stage concessions to conventional morality, Chicago is a rambunctiously cynical film.

Madam Satan (1930)

(About five years ago the Siren had a column at a doomed little webzine called Nomad Widescreen, and she was in the habit of posting excerpts and links at her own place, you know the drill. Now that Nomad is long-gone she’s been going back and posting the columns in full, and whaddya know, she hadn’t gotten around to this one. So here, enjoy a slightly spruced-up version of the Siren’s musings on Madam Satan.)

“You’ve never seen anything like it,” proclaims the tagline for the 1930 Cecil B. DeMille musical Madam Satan. But for the first fifty-five minutes or so, it isn’t true, unless you have magically avoided all bedroom farces about neglected wives and straying husbands.

Around the hour mark, however, it’s time for Madam Satan et Cie to put on some Adrian costumes and start partying on an insanely large zeppelin, pausing only for an interpretative dance depicting the wonders of electricity. From that point on, Madam Satan justifies its publicity.

And perhaps the zero-to-90mph structure is meant to offer a provocative metaphor for life. Yes, life. For aren’t we all, in some sense, just waiting to party on a zeppelin? No? OK, maybe it’s just the Siren.

The story is a variation on the Johann Strauss warhorse Die Fledermaus. In Madam Satan, wife Angela (Kay Johnson), tired of the infidelities of her randy husband Bob (Reginald Denny), decides to get him back by disguising herself as a captivating guest at a masquerade ball. Bob falls for the wanton masked woman, and then she reveals her identity. After the shock has worn off, Bob returns to his newly interesting wife and declares, as all erring husbands in early comedies must, “I’ve been such a fool.”

The movie is one half-hour too long, that half-hour is right at the beginning, and it’s almost all scenes of the female lead, Kay Johnson. Scott Eyman, in his DeMille biography, calls Madam Satan’s three main characters (the other being Roland Young as the husband’s sidekick, Jimmy) “sexless.” That’s pretty much incontestable. Denny could deliver a quip, but he's too controlled for you to buy him as a lust-hound. Roland Young’s specialty was looking fretful, not a quality one associates with a red-hot lover. Johnson, at least in the first half, is an elegant blonde with a nice line in reproachfulness and the sex appeal of a bowl of tapioca. She was 26 years old, but she looks much older and, more important, she acts much older. Angela droops around planning to cook broccoli for dinner, complaining to the maid, picking out delicate melodies on the organ, and casting wounded looks that display her aristocratic profile. Hell, the Siren would cheat on her, too.

So during this long, long opener the main pleasure is the elegant way DeMille frames Cedric Gibbons and Mitchell Leisen’s art decoration; a particular bit of beauty is an all-glass shower stall with stunning Art Deco water fixtures. Otherwise, despite some bright dialogue (Johnson: “Bob has gone out;” Young: “By the door or the window?”), it’s standard stuff, even when the maid unexpectedly gets the first song — all about love being something you have to seize with both hands, or some such bit of sublety.

Then, thank goodness, we shift to the apartment of Bob’s bit on the side, Trixie, played by Lillian Roth. For later generations, Roth’s claim to fame would be writing the first major recovery memoir, I’ll Cry Tomorrow, about how she plummeted into alcoholism and degradation and reclaimed her life through Alcoholics Anonymous. By the time Roth published it, in 1953, her movie career was so long over that for most folks Roth was a dim memory of a cute kid playing it straight with the Marx Brothers in Animal Crackers. Her brief performance in Madam Satan shows just how big a shame it was that she flamed out. Roth could dance, she could sing and she was sexy beyond belief. When she flings off her rumpled satin robe and twitches her pelvis to the “Low Down” number, the vaudeville energy of this rather plump, frowsy jazz baby ignites the entire movie. The other actors catch fire around her, from the accompanist calling, “Put some pepper in it, Papa wants to sneeze” to Roland Young snapping, “I wouldn’t marry you to keep warm on an iceberg.”

And thereafter, at long last, we’re on the zeppelin, and everything else starts to cook. It’s a ravishing bunch of sets, like the unholy mating of Metropolis and The Hollywood Revue of 1929 — big ramps and shiny Bakelite staircases angling up and down. The guests mill about in costumes as unapologetically tasteless as anything MGM ever did. Worth waiting for: the woman whose symbolic “fish” costume has her attached to a toy fisherman, and another dressed as “the call of the wild,” complete with a stuffed elephant and leopard and a yard-wide white-wool wig.

And there’s that lightning/electricity dance number, which begins and ends without explanation of any kind. One minute the guests are hanging around the zeppelin whooping it up, the next minute a large group of people are dancing around an electrified pseudo-god and you’re agog at the costumes that crawl right up the chorus girls’ backsides — or the Siren was, anyway. Then, just as abruptly, it’s back to the arriving guests.

Johnson acquits herself better in the second half, vamping her husband in a “flames of hell” costume and affecting a passable French accent: “Who vants to go to ’ell weeth Mad-AM Say-TAN?” Still, the moment when Johnson has a sort of dance-off with Roth is a mistake — tart or no tart, Roth wipes the floor with her.

Johnson and Denny have a rather dull tryst and then, as if sensing this won’t suffice for dramatic action, DeMille unmoors the zeppelin and everyone has to parachute off. He has great fun filming the panicked guests and their landings in and around the Central Park reservoir. At times it’s so close to the rescue sequence in The Towering Inferno that I wondered if Irwin Allen had ever seen Madam Satan.

It is, as Eyman put it, a “movie that no one but DeMille could have directed--or would have wanted to: a musical comedy-romance-drama-disaster film.” With a zeppelin, yet. Still, if someone asked the Siren for reasons to see it, you'd better believe she'll mention the moment when a six-armed Hindu goddess lands in the middle of a craps game. But she’d start with Lillian Roth.

Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941)

The Siren's essay for the Blu-Ray release of Here Comes Mr. Jordan, the immortal supernatural comedy made at Columbia in 1941 and directed by Alexander Hall, is now online at the Criterion Collection site. The story of Joe Pendleton (Robert Montgomery, in one of his best performances), a boxer whose soul is snatched too soon from a plane wreck, and the efforts of the Unmentioned Almighty's recording angel Mr. Jordan (Claude Rains) to restore him to a body (and life) that's "in the pink," stills plays like a charm.

The movie was released, as the Siren points out, during a year that was wall-to-wall with perfectly terrible news. And it was a huge hit. After watching Here Comes Mr. Jordan several times for this essay, the Siren can tell you that its restorative powers endure. The essay can be read in its entirety here. The Blu-Ray can be purchased at Criterion or wherever fine physical media are sold.


Excerpt follows:

The much-loved Here Comes Mr. Jordan has spawned two direct remakes and a sequel, but the 1941 original retains a snap and a vigor—and a unique charm—that no other version has been able to duplicate. Why does it keep such a hold on our affections? Perhaps it’s the way it mixes elements in a way unique to its era—screwball comedy, slapstick farce, boxing fable, supernatural romance. Directed by Alexander Hall and released by Columbia Pictures, it boasts a just-crazy-enough premise—angels try to return the soul of a boxer, who has been mistakenly snatched by an overeager apprentice, to a ring-ready body back on Earth—yet has enough real-world pathos to leave a lasting emotional impact. The rollicking dialogue and gleefully complex plot, the film’s belief in friendship, destiny, and true love, and even—or perhaps especially—its indifference to theology and the permanence of death, are as irresistible as ever.

The movie has two bona fide stars: Robert Montgomery as boxer Joe Pendleton, showing off a convincing accent straight from New York’s outer boroughs, and Claude Rains and his heavenly voice as Mr. Jordan, the executive angel who must fix his underling’s mistake. The endless complications of the story arise from the early twist of Joe’s grief-stricken manager, Max (James Gleason), having Joe’s earthly remains cremated. Eventually Joe is deposited in the body of Bruce Farnsworth, a rich layabout whose wife (Rita Johnson) and secretary (John Emery) have just teamed to bump him off, or so they think. Joe isn’t keen on being a dissipated millionaire—he wants to regain his shot at the boxing championship with a body that’s “in the pink,” a phrase he repeats so often that even the serene Mr. Jordan tells him it’s “obnoxious.” But then Joe lays eyes on dewy Bette (Evelyn Keyes), a young woman whose father has been swindled by Farnsworth. To help her, Joe becomes Farnsworth, and settles for hiring a baffled but cooperative Max to train the body he’s got.

For Montgomery, this film marked a shift from the sophisticates he had played for much of his career. “The directors shoved a cocktail shaker in my hands and kept me shaking it for years,” he once remarked. He’d been permitted to put down the martinis for an acclaimed role as a Cockney serial killer menacing Rosalind Russell in 1937’s Night Must Fall. And in 1940, in something of a warm-up for Mr. Jordan, Montgomery had been an American bootlegger who somehow winds up inheriting a British title in The Earl of Chicago. But Joe Pendleton was the role that let Montgomery fully combine his comic abilities with a macho quality he’d rarely been allowed to display.

"Steel and Silk": A 100th Birthday Tribute to Olivia de Havilland, at Sight & Sound

The Siren is proud to announce that she was asked by the venerable Sight & Sound to write a tribute to Olivia de Havilland on the occasion of that great lady's 100th birthday, which will occur on July 1. With their permission, she is posting an excerpt. You can purchase Sight & Sound here; if you want to know about all the goodies in the latest issue, click right here.

One thing you won't find in the Sight & Sound tribute, if you pick up a copy (and of course the Siren hopes you do): a discussion of the famous feud with Olivia's sister, Joan Fontaine. This was de Havilland's show all the way. For many years, even as she wrote about Fontaine, the Siren has insisted that she has fully as much admiration for de Havilland. Now, patient readers, the Siren has 2500 words in print to prove it.

The Snake Pit

And this was a pleasure to write. It entailed revisiting films ranging from The Snake Pit (de Havilland's personal favorite), to her Oscar winners The Heiress and To Each His Own, to de Havilland's marvelous work with Errol Flynn, to lesser-known gems like My Cousin Rachel. They all left the Siren more impressed than ever with the delicacy and emotional breadth of de Havilland's acting.

Dodge City

As part of her research, the Siren was permitted to listen to a recording of an extensive talk that de Havilland gave at the British Film Institute some years back. She discussed her entire career, and by the time she took questions from the audience, they were (of course) eating out of her hand. She spent a lot of time discussing the landmark "De Havilland decision" that finally cracked the ironclad legal agreements that kept some actors chained to a studio, unable to turn down lousy roles unless they wanted to serve out the missed time on the back end of the contract. She remembered every detail, and no wonder. It wasn't simply a matter of de Havilland calling in some hotshot lawyers and turning them loose. The Siren wanted this article to make clear that the case took two years, and demanded a great deal of personal sacrifice. De Havilland's famed graciousness and charm come along with a strong, ambitious and determined character.

The excerpt follows.

Hold Back the Dawn

By May 1943 her contract was up, and she happily anticipated a new phase. Now she could seek out more parts like the lovelorn schoolteacher betrayed by Charles Boyer in Mitchell Leisen’s Hold Back the Dawn (1941) – a film she loved, and another Oscar nod, achieved on loan to Paramount. Not so fast, said the brothers Warner. She had to serve out the additional six months she had accrued on suspension.

De Havilland contemplated the studio offering she’d just completed, a third-billed turn in a Brontë sisters’ biopic called Devotion (1946), playing a bizarre version of Charlotte Brontë who flounces around in dainty clothes, steals Emily’s fiancé, and is never glimpsed holding a pen. De Havilland sued.

The lovely Livvy was tilting at windmills, was the consensus around town. Asked in her BFI interview if she garnered support from her colleagues, she said, without rancour, “I was rather by myself, because nobody thought I could win.” Her lawyer thought she could, however, by invoking an old California ‘anti-peonage’ (debt slavery) law which forbad contracts that extended past seven years. In November 1943 the case went to trial.

As soon as she filed suit, Jack Warner wrote to every studio in town to remind them that she was still effectively under contract. In court the studio didn’t hesitate to fight dirty, insinuating that an affair was the real reason the actress had turned down one movie. The Warner attorneys, however, hadn’t reckoned on the de Havilland sang froid. She had spent years on set with Michael Curtiz, one of the most notorious yellers in the business; these guys were nothing. So when one lawyer thundered, “Is it not true, Miss de Havilland, that on the morning of January 16, you wantonly refused to show up for work on Stage 8?” “Certainly not,” came the reply in that musical de Havilland voice. “I declined.”

Dinah Shore, Orson Welles, Frances Langford, Walter Huston and Olivia de Havilland 

The judge ruled for de Havilland, but not until March 1944. Warner Brothers appealed, Jack Warner dropped producers another line to say the matter was far from over, and for the rest of the year de Havilland stayed, as Otto Friedrich put it in City of Nets, his portrait of Hollywood in the 1940s, “unemployed and unemployable”.

On tour with the USO

For two years de Havilland made no movies, from the age of 26 to 28, vital years for an actress. Her legal bills mounted; she drew on her savings and, after the first ruling in her favour, found some work on radio. She refused to give in, and she refused to stay idle. She travelled to Alaska to visit soldiers, and such was Warner’s pettiness that according to Friedrich, he wrote to General Hap Arnold seeking to blackball the actress to stop her entertaining the troops. Arnold, unlike Hollywood, told Warner to mind his own business. The court of appeals ruled in de Havilland’s favour, and Warner Brothers appealed to the California Supreme Court. She went to the South Pacific, visiting the wounded and contracting pneumonia so severe that she coughed blood and her weight dropped to 90 pounds. De Havilland was convalescing in the hospital in the Fiji Islands when word came that the Supreme Court had refused to hear the studio’s appeal. She’d won.

Years before, Bette Davis had failed in her attempt to challenge her contract. Jack Warner had just found out that his all-purpose flower-like ingénue was tougher than Jezebel.

What I Think About When They Say Donald Trump Cannot Possibly Become President

... From The Past Is Myself, the memoir of an Englishwoman named Christabel Bielenberg. In the early 1930s she fell in love with a German law student named Peter Bielenberg, married him in 1934, and stayed with him in Germany throughout the war, even as he was arrested and sent to Ravensbruck for involvement in the July 20, 1944 plot to kill Hitler.

The year is 1932, and Christabel is trying to understand German politics.

Hitler was himself was to speak to an open-air rally, and the venue was — not inappropriately as Peter did not fail to point out — Hagenbeck's Zoo. A huge area had been cordoned off, and rows of burly Storm-troopers wedged the milling crows into orderly rectangles. Peter survived the community singing, the rolling of the drums, the National and the Party anthems, but his reaction to the usual reverberating start was unequivocal. My ears were hardly attuned to the Leader's Austrian accent, before I found myself being marched out of the enclosure. Up against the giraffe house, well within earshot of and successfully silencing some Party stalwarts in brown pillbox hats who were rattling collection boxes under the noses of luckless late-comers, Peter delivered himself of one of his rare political pronouncements.

"You may think that Germans are political idiots, Chris," he said very loudly and very firmly, "and you may be right, but of one thing I can assure you, they won't be so stupid as to fall for that clown."

(More about Christabel here.)

In Memoriam: The Ziegfeld Theater, 1969-2016

Last week the Siren was in Midtown, meeting a friend for drinks, and she passed the Ziegfeld Theater, Manhattan’s most glorious movie venue. And she saw that The Force Awakens was playing there, and thought, “Hey, that one’s practically a license to print money. I know the Ziegfeld's had some problems, but I bet Star Wars is helping a lot."

Given her prophetic abilities as they stand currently revealed, you can take the Siren’s theory about what killed the Ziegfeld for whatever it’s worth. But dead the Ziegfeld most certainly is. A "high-end event space"? Thank you so much, O Titans of Business! We were running out of those in Manhattan!!

Here's the Siren's theory, anyway. Take it or leave it.

Real estate killed the Ziegfeld.

But not in the way you may be thinking (i.e., the theater's own rent). Real estate killed the Ziegfeld's audience.

Movies, as the Siren wrote in her novel, are the people’s art form. For all the glitzy premieres held at the theater, like any other venue it needed people who could attend regularly. And as the years went by, fewer and fewer working-stiff film lovers lived within striking distance of the Ziegfeld. It is at 141 West 54th Street in Manhattan, between 6th and 7th Avenues. It’s close to a lot of subway trains. But the Ziegfeld is a long-ass haul from much of Brooklyn. It is a shlep from much of Queens, where a lot of shallow-pocketed cinephiles also live. From the Bronx or Staten Island, fuggedaboudit. Combine that with the rise of ever-more-pristine home video versions of the crowd-pleasers that once were the Ziegfeld’s bread and butter, and, well.

You can call it laziness, if you want to be a scold. But when you’re scraping by, as so many ordinary New Yorkers are, time is money. An hour to get there, an hour to get back, after long hours of however you’re earning a living — that isn’t a small physical and mental consideration. If you are paying a sitter a typical NYC rate, it’s a pretty large monetary factor as well.

Who does live close to the Ziegfeld these days? Well, there’s this charming edifice, which casts a shadow like a middle finger raised to Central Park, and is filled with condominiums bought as investment properties, many of them empty for large blocks of the year. (More are on the way.) When these owners are in town, the Siren suspects they spend more time at expense-account restaurants and the offices of personal shoppers than they do in the red-velvet seats of the Ziegfeld.

There are many hotels in the immediate vicinity, full of tourists on the phone to the concierge, begging for tickets to Hamilton. When you spend New York money for a visit here, a ticket to a movie seems like awfully weak tea. “The Force Awakens? Really? C'mon honey, we can see that back in Phoenix. If we can’t swing Hamilton, let’s try The Book of Mormon.”

The Ziegfeld was a swell location for the Siren when she lived on Avenue A, and even better when she lived on 125th Street and Broadway. She can remember when they still allowed smoking in the balcony. She can remember standing on 6th Avenue, very far back on the line to see a dazzling 70mm version of Vertigo. Such was the space at the Ziegfeld that even though it was sold out, she had a great view. The Siren can still hear the sympathetic groan that went up from the audience after a certain tragic death in Lawrence of Arabia.

Probably the last time the Siren went to the Ziegfeld was for the Turner Classic Movie Film Festival, god bless ’em. It was All About Eve. The great Elaine Stritch introduced the movie and took questions afterward. A Bright Young Thing asked a question about “back in your day.” There was a pause of terrifying length. And then The Goddess Elaine responded, “This IS my day.”

Oh my god, how the Siren will miss the sound of more than a thousand film fans bringing down the house.

But here is the memory of the great Ziegfeld that the Siren will carry forever, the way a besotted fan remembers every syllable a star uttered while signing an autograph.

It was perhaps one month after 9/11. The Siren’s BFF, a film editor, talked her into getting on the subway and coming uptown to see Funny Girl at the Ziegfeld. This man doesn’t like musicals. He’s no Barbra Streisand fan. If he loves William Wyler as the Siren does, he has yet to elaborate on it. But insist he did, and thus did the Siren haul her cookies up to West 54th Street.

The movie was preceded by a preview for Ice Age, which involved a squirrel precipitating an enormous, thunderous, crashing avalanche of massive fragments from an infinitely towering wall of ice. The squirrel runs like crazy to avoid being crushed.

Why this struck anyone as a fine-and-dandy preview to run on a gigantic screen, in October 2001, in New York City, the Siren will never know. She sat in horrified silence, and her BFF managed only to mutter, “Jesus fucking Christ.”

Mercifully, Funny Girl began. And on the screen at the Ziegfeld, that film bloomed. The streets of New York, whether on the backlot or on location, beckoned. Streisand’s blazing talent never seemed more apparent. Up comes this number.




At about 2:30 Brice is boarding the ferry and you get a glimpse of lower Manhattan — without the World Trade Center, a view that until recently, the Siren had never known and her friend only vaguely remembered. We watched this on the screen at the Ziegfeld, with that sound system wrapping us in Streisand’s eternally New York voice. Streisand/Brice stood on the ferry's deck, belting out Jule Styne and Bob Merrill's anthem as the boat pulled across the harbor. The Siren started crying. She looked at her friend, and he was touching the corners of his eyes.

We glanced at each other some minutes after the number was over, and started to laugh. Because we were both such saps, because this film was so much better than we had ever given it credit for being, because the city was beautiful in 1968, and by God, it would be again. We were probably annoyingly loud, very much the sort who could inspire a blog post about bad movie manners, had blogs been more of a thing in 2001. But it didn’t matter much, because we were sitting more or less dead center, and there were only about a dozen other people in the Ziegfeld.

Truly, Madly, Deeply; Alan Rickman; and Loss

The Siren starts by admitting that she rented Truly, Madly, Deeply some twenty-odd years ago only because she had a raging crush on the late Alan Rickman. (How the Siren hates having to put “the late” in front of that name.) She’d flipped for him, like most of the women and a good many men in the film-watching world, in Die Hard. That lean face, that lustrous voice, that walk that made you yearn to see him cross a room, headed straight for you. OK, he was playing an armed robber, and a notably ruthless one at that. But he was the biggest dose of dangerous cinematic swoon since the likes of Basil Rathbone (to whom Rickman was often compared).

The Siren’s father had died not long before she saw Truly, Madly, Deeply. So, inevitably, the movie wrecked her. The Siren’s beloved, movie-watching mother died suddenly in November, and at the moment, it’s an effort to revisit this film even in memory. But the Siren's going to do it anyway.

The story concerns a London-based translator, Nina, played by Rickman’s lifelong friend Juliet Stevenson, for whom director Anthony Minghella wrote the part. Her lover Jamie (Rickman) died some months earlier. He woke up one morning with a sore throat, and within days, he was gone. Now Nina is trying to get on with it, but in most ways, she can’t. She's a blubbering mess every time she sees the shrink. She has a new flat, but she hears Jamie’s voice echoing through it.

Then one day Nina is playing a Bach sonata on the piano, one that she and Jamie used to play together. A note from a cello sounds, and slowly the camera moves to show you that Jamie is there, playing his old instrument. At first it’s hard to tell whether the camera is showing us Nina’s daydream. And then she turns, and together with Nina you realize, no. He’s there.

The Siren often dreams about the people she’s lost. In these dreams, she always knows that her father and mother are dead, yet somehow they are back, and she accepts it in the way a dream makes you accept everything. There’s no big reunion, seldom even any discussion. The emotions come when the dream is over. When Nina turns and sees Jamie, she embraces him, weeping so hard she can scarcely see, clutching to make sure this is him, this is his body. That moment has everything the Siren would feel if she found her parents when she awoke, if she could say, “You’ve come back to me.” She would weep and clutch at them the same way. We all would.

Nina’s love has returned, and the movie traces the goofy joy that has come back with him. They play music, sing off-key serenades, talk, even make love. He stays for days, then weeks. Jamie is amusing, attentive, he’s always around. But he complains ceaselessly of feeling cold. He eats strange food. He fills the flat with pale, badly dressed friends from the afterlife who lounge around the TV, argue about whether to watch Annie Hall or Fitzcarraldo, and scatter crumbs all over everywhere. ''I don't know who these people are,'' Nina protests, to no avail. ''I don't even know what period they're from.''

And so Nina gradually recalls the things she pushed out of her memory when Jamie was still gone. He has a snobbish streak and a tendency to drone on about the Tories. He’s controlling, too. Even on loan from the hereafter, Jamie nags his girlfriend about how she brushes her teeth. He maxes out the thermostat and rearranges the furniture without asking. It isn’t that Jamie is secretly a jerk; he’s artistic and loving, and besides, all his rebukes and suggestions are uttered in that sinuous Rickman voice. But soon we realize that this scenario is wrong, that no matter how badly she wanted him back, Nina can’t be with Jamie anymore.

What isn’t as apparent, at least at first, is that Jamie hasn’t returned to comfort Nina. He’s here to show her how to do that herself. And then, he will leave.

The shot of Alan Rickman as Jamie, watching Nina through a window as she walks into what will be the rest of her life, is the Siren’s favorite in all his films. (And brother, the Siren has seen a lot of Rickman. That crush is still with her, and always will be). Rickman was never maudlin. He isn’t prompting the audience to pity Jamie or marvel at his sacrifice. In his face, and his wave, and when he turns back to his ghostly friends, Rickman plays the truth of this supernatural, impossible moment: Jamie still loves Nina, and from wherever he will spend eternity, he wants to know she is fully living while she’s alive.

Most of us believe art isn’t didactic, much less therapeutic. And yet there are movies like Truly, Madly, Deeply that tell us things, or perhaps affirm truths that we already know. That whatever plane the dead move to, no matter how cruelly or how soon, that is where they have to stay. That even if we could call them back, in a deeper sense, we couldn’t. When she first saw this film, the Siren thought of Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider, and how the heroine Miranda faces the pitiless finality of death:

If I could call you up from the grave I would, she said, if I could see your ghost I would say, I believe…‘I believe,’ she said aloud. ‘Oh, let me see you once more.’ The room was silent, empty, the shade gone from it, struck away by the sudden violence of her rising and speaking aloud. She came to herself as if out of sleep. Oh no, that is not the way, I must never do that, she warned herself.

Anthony Minghella’s film makes the same point as Porter’s tragedy, only with comedy and hope. Surely the people who knew Minghella turned to Truly, Madly, Deeply after he died of a brain hemorrhage, age 54.

Alan Rickman, so precise and intelligent an actor, must have known Truly, Madly, Deeply was both catharsis and comfort. But it isn’t a good one to see when grief is fresh, or at least the Siren won't do that. After time has passed, and you’re trying to find your way forward, the film is beautifully and exactly right.

Maybe next year, Mr. Rickman.

Get Your Man (1927): Restoration Plays MoMA on Nov. 15 and 19

Back in 2000, David Stenn’s biography of Clara Bow, Runnin’ Wild, changed the way the Siren looked at this star. Years of scurrilous gossip about Bow, combined with films that were seldom screened (the glorious It and Wings being exceptions) had obscured her talent. Stenn used careful research to debunk every rumor, to blow the dust off Bow’s image, and to show the appeal of her acting and the courage with which she faced life.

On Sunday Nov. 15 at 1 pm at the Museum of Modern Art, Stenn is introducing a restoration of Bow’s 1927 vehicle Get Your Man. Carefully pieced together via the Library of Congress from rediscovered nitrate stock, stills and intertitles, this is the most complete version of the film we have, or are ever likely to get. Stenn’s dedication to his subject, 15 years after his biography was published, may be judged from the fact that he helped fund the restoration.

Directed by Dorothy Arzner, Get Your Man is absolutely charming, made when Bow’s stardom was at its height. The story is an excuse for freewheeling Bow to up-end the lives of the upper crust, as was often the case. She plays Nancy Worthington, a New Yorker in Paris for the first time, who encounters Robert Albin (Charles “Buddy” Rogers), the handsome son of a French duke (Josef Swickard) and falls for him when they must spend the night together in a wax museum. Trouble is, Robert was betrothed in childhood to Simone (Josephine Dunn, with some truly terrible ringlets), the daughter of a neighboring marquis (Harvey Clark). Nothing can stand in Nancy’s way, however. She manages to fake her way into the Albin family chateau, the better to fulfill the movie’s title.

The first part of the film, showing Robert’s betrothal to the infant Simone and a series of scenes where he and Nancy bump into one another in Paris, is more or less intact, with a few scenes showing obvious nitrate decay. (The Siren, with her love of fragrance, was entranced with a segment where Nancy visits a perfume shop, and the shopgirl hands over a scent sample that has been sprayed on a silk rose. Beats paper blotters any day.) Midway through Robert and Nancy’s encounter in the wax museum, the still-based reconstruction begins — but it’s been done in a way that manages to preserve some of the wit and verve of the rest of the movie.

Once Nancy takes advantage of a taxi accident to “convalesce” chez d’Albin, the movie truly gets underway. (The Siren’s favorite Bow moment comes when Nancy is preparing to fake injury next to the crumpled taxi. She arranges her chic little case next to her, stretches out, then has a second thought, and pops up back up for a moment to powder her nose.) Like Mabel Normand, Bow is best appreciated in motion: the smiles, the knowing glances when someone’s back is turned, the way her face registers delight every time some man is about to play into her hands. And they all do, sooner or later.

Rogers is amazingly handsome, Swickard and Clark are often very funny, but it’s Bow who dominates, and Arzner seems to know that wherever Clara lands in the frame, that’s where our eyes will go, as well. It’s not just her beauty, or even her sex appeal; there is intelligence in Clara Bow, and a vivid and irresistible sweetness. In Stenn’s book, he quotes Arzner: “They all called Clara the ‘It’ Girl, the outstanding flaming youth. Well, she was all that, but I think she was also the one flaming youth that thought.”

Screening along with Get Your Man is the MGM convention reel from 1937 that led to a rape case, which David Stenn worked long and hard to bring to light both in a Vanity Fair article and in his documentary Girl 27.

Finally, there is a newsreel called Movie Star Nights in Paris, showing Ingrid Bergman, Rita Hayworth and recent Google Doodle honoree Hedy Lamarr at the height of their fame and glamour, working a UN benefit for children in 1948. The Siren’s longtime readers know about her ties to France and her deep love for Paris. It has been a hard 24 hours. But perhaps these scenes of Paris not long after a terrible war will serve as a reminder that la Ville Lumière is nothing if not resilient.

(The complete program will also screen at MoMA on Thurs. Nov. 19, at 4 pm, but Stenn is introducing only Sunday's screening. Get Your Man is part of MoMA's annual festival of preservation, To Save and Project, one of the cinephile events of the year in New York.)

"Hello, Elaine? ... I Am Going to Kill You": The Tale of Elaine Barrie and John Barrymore

The curtain parted swiftly with a clang of rings on rod.

“I repeat, Madam, what would you do if I tried to throw you off the terrace?”

The scene is a twentieth-floor apartment on East 79th Street, Manhattan, the year 1940. “Madam” is Elaine Barrie, aka Elaine Barrymore, and the speaker is her husband, John Barrymore.

And no, he wasn’t rehearsing.

Those are the first two lines of Elaine’s autobiography, ripely titled All My Sins Remembered. Her ghost writer, given due credit on the jacket, was Sandford Dody. As was the style back in 1964 when it was published, All My Sins Remembered reads more like a novel, with florid descriptions and elaborate conversations no one could possibly recall in such screenplay detail.

It’s structured like a script, too. Just before the curtains part in the first line, Barrymore has been in a coma, a not-infrequent occurrence as late-stage alcoholism kept nudging him toward the grave. Once he awakens, and sees the handsome male nurse assigned to keep him from dying, Barrymore terrorizes the man into leaving and begins to circle Elaine, accusing her of hiring a male hooker in disguise: “These bastards have a million disguises. Window cleaners, doormen, elevator boys, radio repairmen.”

After several pages of ranting and circling, Barrymore drags his wife to the terrace: “My dear. You wanted me to give you all New York. There it is out there. You are going to get it all in one fell swoop!”

“Was this really the great John Barrymore threatening to kill me?” wonders Elaine, from twenty stories up.

Aaaaand … flashback, in the next chapter, to young Elaine’s girlhood worship of the Great Profile, how she kept a still of him as Svengali over her bed (how’s that for bizarre teenage sex objects?), and how she interviewed him for Hunter College’s paper when he was 52 years old and hospitalized for “severe flu." That phony flu was a flashing yellow light that 19-year-old Elaine drove straight through, on her way to becoming Barrymore's fourth and final wife.

The Siren bought this long-forgotten book off a sidewalk card table, took it home and gobbled every page like a plate of french fries. When she had the chance to buy Sanford Dody’s own autobiography, deliciously titled Giving Up the Ghost, she seized it, just to find out if he believed all the things he'd put in his own book. Dody's handiwork included Helen Hayes' On Reflection, First Person Plural with Dagmar Godowsky (that one's delightful), and The Lonely Life by Bette Davis (she rewrote the whole thing at the last moment, and Dody never forgave her).

And Dody didn't buy everything Elaine told him, no. Dody didn’t believe, for example, that Elaine fell instantly in love with the wreck that Barrymore had already become by 1934. The writer considered Elaine starstruck and self-deluded about her motives for the marriage. But Dody didn't entirely see her as the gold-digger portrayed in the 1930s press and indeed by most John Barrymore fans to this day. He gave Elaine credit for striving to keep Barrymore sober and working, and for trying to look after her husband's health.

Certainly she yearned to become an actress, and was eager for Barrymore to help her. In that regard, landing Barrymore was a Pyrrhic victory. She got plenty of space in the gossip columns, sure. But aside from a series of small parts in plays, a short called How to Undress for Your Husband (which somehow she doesn't mention in her book) and one small role in Midnight, Elaine's acting career never amounted to much. By the time Dody met her, Elaine was a businesswoman dividing her time between Haiti and Manhattan, producing woven-rattan baskets and placemats in the one place, to be sold at Bloomingdale’s in the other.

But one thing Sandford Dody did believe was that John Barrymore, right after coming out of an alcoholic coma, dragged his wife to their terrace, bent her over the railing, and came close to pushing her over. Dody believed that, and quite a bit more. All My Sins Remembered is the memoir of an abusive marriage, published 14 years before Mommie Dearest.

All Hollywood autobiographies are exercises in unreliable narration. It isn’t so much that they deliberately lie (although some of them do that, too), it’s that they are in a business that is fundamentally about tale-spinning. Add the literary efforts of a ghostwriter, and boy, do they spin. What makes this book such a temple-rubbing astonishment is that Elaine's spin isn’t vengeful, à la Christina Crawford. Her message isn't, “You should hate this great actor I married, because he was an insanely jealous and at times violent drunk.” No, these stories are meant to prove that theirs was a doomed, but genuine, romance. It was tempestuous. He called her Ariel, she called him Caliban, get it? “If only we had really been young together,” reads one of the picture captions, and another adds, “but it was too late for anything.”

Dody says that after many sessions of charming and/or wistful little anecdotes, Elaine let her guard down one day: “Up to now there had always been a tolerant smile about the drinking, a smugly raised eyebrow concerning the jealousy. But this session was different. With chilling eloquence, Elaine came through for me."

So this is the tale told by Elaine and Sandford:

Born Elaine Jacobs, soon after that hospital meet-up she'd changed her name to Barrie, "as close to Barrymore as I dared." She wanted out of her middle-class life on the Upper West Side, and she dreamed of becoming an actress. Barrymore, for his part, liked her bookishness, her youth, and her looks, which were more Modigliani than Hollywood.

John and Elaine’s courtship was a staple of the gossip columns, especially one episode when John broke it off with Elaine and boarded a country-country train. She pursued, egged on by the newspapers that in turn pursued her, and when Ariel and Caliban caught up, they reconciled. It was to be the pattern of their time together, “tender reconciliations after spectacular quarrels,” as Barrie’s 2003 New York Times obituary put it.

According to Elaine, those “quarrels,” if you want to call them that, and the Siren doesn’t, were there almost from the beginning. Before their marriage John took Elaine to Havana on board his yacht, the Infanta, for a romantic getaway. She had already slept with him, but for appearances’ sake Elaine took along her mother, Edna. (Edna was quite a character, as omnipresent in her daughter’s life as Lela Rogers was in Ginger's. When Dody met them years later, Edna and Elaine were living together, still joined at the hip.)

Elaine arrived at the Cuban hacienda of John's brother-in-law Arturo “Mussie” de Barrio and was greeted by Mussie’s good-looking younger brother with “En esta su casa.” Whereupon John slapped Elaine’s face with a force that knocked her hat askew.

And everyone ignored it. Even Edna, who was standing right there. Elaine says her mother greeted the other guests, saying, “How do you do, señor?” then, under her breath, “Please don’t look at my daughter...Gracias, señor — don’t notice her...” Once they were alone, Edna tried to get her daughter to leave. Elaine said, “Oh, for God's sake, John’s sorry. He couldn’t help it, dear.” And later he apologized. Then John proposed, and Elaine accepted, although it took them a while to get hitched.

On the beach, John berated Elaine for wearing swimsuits that were too sexy. On board the boat returning from Havana, a man smiled at Elaine, and John tried to throw him overboard. John then chased Elaine into her stateroom, swung hard at her face, and missed only because Edna’s fist had just connected with his jaw. ("He's lucky I didn't hit his nose," said Edna later. "That would have been the end of the Great Profile.")

Back in Hollywood, where Elaine and Edna had moved to be with him as he filmed Romeo and Juliet, John invited Irving Thalberg and Norma Shearer to Elaine’s birthday dinner. A thrilled Elaine dressed up and worked like crazy to charm them. Midway through the dinner, John waited for a quiet moment and asked Shearer, “Tell me, Norma, I’m curious. I can’t stand whores — can you?” As Elaine, her mother and the Thalbergs tried to regain their composure, John filled his wineglass to the rim and, to make sure the point couldn’t be missed, added, “The world has certainly changed. Tarts were never countenanced at a gentleman’s table, amongst such a lofty congregation, unless, of course, they were served as a sweet.”

The Thalbergs finished the meal and departed as fast as manners would permit. John drove the guests home and phoned Elaine later. His greeting was, “Hello — Elaine?...I am going to kill you.”

When they finally got married some months later, in Yuma, Ariz., on Nov. 9, 1936, the following night John accused Elaine of sleeping with the bellboy and threw a glassful of Dubonnet, as well as the decanter, at her head. He missed and ruined the satin drapes, not her face.

Towards the end of their marriage they toured in a play together, by all accounts a misbegotten thing, called My Dear Children, directed by Otto Preminger. Barrymore played an aging matinee idol, and Elaine played his daughter; she picked the property herself. At that point, people were attending a John Barrymore performance mostly to see if he'd go up on his lines or possibly even pass out, but for a while attend it they did. Above is a photograph of the play’s purported comic highlight. John went onstage drunk, would execute the spanking with all his strength, and Elaine worked every night in fear. She said she decided to leave, and accosted John in his hotel room to give him the news (by this time their rooms were separate). He yelled, “You aren’t going anywhere, you bitch,” unzipped her dress so hard it tore, twisted her arm and struck her face. Elaine called for the nurse who was on Barrymore guard duty, but she'd already locked herself in the bathroom. Elaine ran down the corridor in little more than her underwear and yelled for help until actor Lloyd Gough, who was in the play’s cast, pulled her into his room.

The producer persuaded Elaine not to walk out. On the company’s arrival in St. Louis, Preminger in turn coaxed Elaine to attend a luncheon with 300 of the city’s social and political elite. As Elaine walked to her chair, John kicked her in the shin in full view of the assembly. “You could hear the collective gasp in Chicago,” she said, but once again, everything proceeded as though nothing had taken place. That is, until John, drunk to the point of near-incoherence, rose on his hind legs and gave a rambling speech that embarrassed everyone into silence.

Elaine left the show, more or less by mutual agreement, before it hit Broadway. They were soon divorced, but the terrace incident actually happened after that, when John had temporarily moved back in with Elaine. That in turn was after she had returned to My Dear Children, now on Broadway, and started padding her backside for the spanking scene. When John still managed to hurt her, she'd revenge herself by biting his hand. Again they separated, and this time Elaine didn't go back.

"What was it that definitely decided me to leave?" she asks, rhetorically. "His last threat to kill me?" I don't know, Elaine, but I sure as hell hope so.

Elaine hadn’t remarried when the book was written, and never did. All My Sins Remembered ends abruptly with Barrymore’s death in 1942. Even given a short time frame to cover, Dody had a hard time putting this one together. He complained that Elaine spent most of her day on the phone to Bloomie's about her “goddamned mats” and never offered him so much as a bowl of mixed nuts, no matter how long he was at her apartment. He’d accepted the assignment because he saw it as a book that was really about John Barrymore, whom he worshipped — as an actor.

I pitied both Mr. and Mrs. John Barrymore. The great star whose glow had attracted Elaine and died light-years before she’d ever come on the scene. She and her mother were late arrivals at the tragedy but they still got into the act….

I knew Elaine much better and I now knew Barrymore too well. As keeper of the flame, Elaine played with fire and couldn’t complain about her burns. But as awed as I was by the enormous gifts of Barrymore, his descent into the bathetic and his wallowing self-indulgent disregard of others — especially his daughter, Diana, with whom I had once worked in Hollywood — were unattractive in the extreme.

...I pitied the great actor, but I found it difficult to adore him, and this was creating a problem since Elaine still did despite her stories.

The book sold poorly. "The public no longer cared about Ariel and Caliban and their dusty shenanigans,” says Dody. All My Sins Remembered is a hell of a read, but (or do I mean because?) the dialogue is like a crazed mating dance between Jerry Wald and Noel Coward. In his own memoir Dody cheerfully admits to having written lines for Barrymore that the man never said in his life. Admits, hell, Dody brags.

You can feel Dody straining to lighten the mood. Mother Edna is used extensively for comic relief, and many of her lines have a whiff of the Ghost. After she socks John in the jaw, Edna announces, “We are leaving the Good Ship Lollipop, my dear, and right now!” Even the worst marital episodes tend to end with either Elaine or John coming up with some witticism. When John throws a full decanter at her, Elaine looks at the ruined drapes and supposedly cracks, "Let all Hollywood use William Haines. For the the ultimate in interiors give me that unmistakable Barrymore touch."

The scene on the terrace, however, ended with Elaine telling John go ahead, kill her. He burst into tears and let her go, and then she began to sob with him. That, Dody admits in his book, is the way Elaine said it usually ended.

Barrymore’s forlorn childhood is covered, sympathetically. On a personal level he never had a chance, not with his alcoholic and/or neglectful parents, and adults around whose idea of how to comfort the child Jack, when his mother failed to show for a dearly anticipated lunch, was to ply him with cake and gin. As for Ethel and Lionel, Elaine admired them as artists, especially Ethel. But they despised her, and she was not fond of them: “They were hypocrites, especially Lionel, who was guilty of excesses that revolted even John. They both drank more than he did though that may seem impossible.” (It does, actually, but who knows.)

Hollywood books are replete with the hell-raising adventures of John Barrymore and his mates, such as journalist Gene Fowler, Ben Hecht, Charles MacArthur and poet/critic Sadakichi Hartmann. The Bundy Drive Boys, they called them, a proto-Rat Pack who drank, wenched, gambled, made for great copy and were probably fun, if you were one of them.

Elaine wasn’t one of them. To her, they were an unrelenting pain in the neck, the men who would coax or push her husband off the wagon every time. They, in turn, took posterity's revenge. In Gene Fowler’s biography of Barrymore, says Elaine, “I emerged as a combination of Lilith and the inventor of diptheria.”

Some may have seen things a bit differently. From All My Sins Remembered, this is Elaine's account of Christmas 1935.

John took me up to Nyack to week-end with his old friend, Charles MacArthur and his wife, Helen Hayes. It was not only exciting for me but most pleasant. During the evening, while John and MacArthur were at their brandy and reading poetry aloud, I helped my hostess trim her Christmas trees.

He eyes glowed as she spoke of her adored husband. She then became silent as she studied me. It was obvious that she had something on her mind and didn’t know how to say it. She decided to take a stab at it. “Elaine, I’m always grateful when Charlie does his heavier drinking at ‘21.’ When he passes out, they put him in a little room upstairs they’ve told me about — I know he’s safe and I can stop torturing myself. It isn’t always that comforting. Sometimes I’m worried half to death!”

This rush of confidence astonished me, until I realized it was more a veteran’s subtle warning to a novice. How kind she was, and how unnecessary her concern.

“It’s going to be different with me, Miss Hayes. John has promised to stop that kind of drinking — and anyway I’m going to see to it that he does.”

She looked at me with that familiar and sad little smile.

“I’m serious, Miss Hayes. You’ll see. It’s all going to be different with us.”

I could almost hear her sigh as she busied herself with a frosted ornament.

(This post is a late-breaking contribution to Crystal Kalyana Pacey's The Barrymore Trilogy Blogathon, at her blog, In the Good Old Days of Classic Hollywood. Many great contributions can be found at the links page.)