“A great many people have come up to me and asked how I manage to get so much work done and still keep looking so dissipated.”
Robert Benchley cut his teeth at The Harvard Lampoon and cemented his reputation with his contributions to Vanity Fair, Life, and the New Yorker. Along with Dorothy Parker, he was a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table. His comic routine, “The Treasurer’s Report,” part of the Round Table theatrical revue was adapted as a short film in 1928, launching Benchley’s Hollywood career. He would write and star in nearly fifty shorts over the next fifteen years, including The Sex Life of the Polyp (1928) and How to Sleep (named Best Short Subject at the eighth annual Academy Awards, in 1935). He penned more than two thousand essays and reviews, in addition to film credits. To celebrated peers like James Thurber, Benchley had no equal.
MAYBE IT WAS BECAUSE he got a late start? A fervent Prohibitionist and strict teetotaler, Benchley did not have his first drink until he was thirty-one. This was at Tony Soma’s speakeasy, right across from Jack and Charlie’s (later renamed the 21 Club). On a side note, Soma was the grandfather of actress Anjelica Huston and, in the days before Rockefeller Center (before television, period), his was a literary joint.
Benchley was in the company of Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald and his best pal Dorothy Parker that night. The story goes, he turned to Parker and cracked, “Let’s find out what all the fuss is about,” then ordered an Orange Blossom. Benchley would make up for lost time.
Like so many East Coast intellectuals, he was soon lured out to Tinseltown by the promise of easy money and … well, easy money. He holed up with his great friend Charles Butterworth, and by the 1930s no one was more closely associated with the Garden of Allah than Benchley, the hotel’s unofficial master of ceremonies. He once quipped, “Drinking makes such fools of people and people are such fools to begin with, that it’s compounding a felony,” and yet stories of his own exploits would soon pile up. Like the time he bet Errol Flynn a thousand dollars he could swim all the way to Catalina Island, then dragged everyone within earshot down to Long Beach. Benchley paddled all of twelve feet before calling for a rope. Or the time he phoned for his doctor, complaining of side effects from a new prescription. When the doctor arrived, he pulled up his shirt, revealing a mess of feathers he’d glued to his body.
He once quipped, “Drinking makes such fools of people and people are such fools to begin with, that it’s compounding a felony.”
But as pianist Oscar Levant famously said, “Strip away the phony tinsel of Hollywood and you find the real tinsel underneath.” And this was true for Benchley, who came to loathe the town. Respected and beloved by his friends, he considered himself a fundamentally lazy man who had wasted his talents—a hack and a sellout. Arriving at a party once, he spied an old buddy from New York, playwright Robert Sherwood. Benchley pointed at Sherwood and exclaimed, “Those eyes—I can’t stand those eyes looking at me! He’s looking at me, and thinking of how he knew me when I was going to be a great writer.”
Years later, at his bungalow at the Garden of Allah, Benchley would convey his feelings about life and booze to his dear friend F. Scott Fitzgerald. Checking his watch, Benchley saw that it was indeed the cocktail hour and, consequently, time for a pitcher of martinis. At this point, Fitzgerald had moved out to Hollywood himself. He was separated from Zelda, dating columnist Sheilah Graham, and trying his hardest to stay on the wagon. Fitzgerald tried to talk Benchley out of it. “Don’t you know drinking is a slow death?” he said. To this, Benchley just tasted his martini and replied, “So who’s in a hurry?” Apparently, Benchley was lazy even in his despair.
Easily the studio era’s most frank look at the ravages of alcohol, The Lost Weekend had everyone concerned when the script arrived. Was the story too bleak and repellant? Who would want to see it? So cowriters Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett made a couple of concessions: for one, they added a love interest; for another, they made Ray Milland, one of Paramount’s biggest stars, their first choice, hoping some of his inherent likability would rub off on the film’s lead character—Don Birnam, an alcoholic writer from New York.
When Milland first read the book (which his agent sent along with a note that said “Read it. Study it. You’re going to play it”), he knew the part could be a game changer for him. But still, he had reservations. He wasn’t sure he had the acting chops, for one thing. Mostly, though, the guy just didn’t drink very much. His only previous experience with acting and drinking had been on the set of DeMille’s Reap the Wild Wind.
During that picture, Milland’s agent had dragged him to a party where he downed way too much champagne. Early the next morning, Milland’s car was found parked out on his front lawn. With the help of his butler, Milland made it to the set on time, but immediately wardrobe shoved him into a diving suit. He had a scuba scene that day.
In desperation, Milland turned to his fellow cast members and asked for their favorite hangover remedies. John Wayne offered him two enormous green pills he said had to be taken with gin. Ummm, OK, thanks. An actor named Lynne Overman handed over three black pills that Milland consumed with tomato juice. Finally, Robert Benchley told Milland the only surefire cure was a wine glass full of Worcestershire, mixed with a raw egg. (A Prairie Oyster, to you and me.) And whoa, what do you know, but Benchley happened to have one right there!
The day mercifully ended for Milland around five. When he emerged from the flotation tank, he was mortified to find DeMille waiting for him. The director wanted to give him something. Apparently, in the mid-thirties, DeMille had purchased an entire lot of specially minted half-dollars, which he handed out on rare occasions to anyone he felt had displayed tremendous fortitude or courage in the line of duty. And as wardrobe stripped away Milland’s diving suit, DeMille placed one in Milland’s hand, saying it was one of the best jobs of acting he’d ever seen.
For Milland, it was like being given an Academy Award. But if he had any hope of winning a real Oscar with The Lost Weekend, he knew his research would have to be more methodical. So Milland invited his in-laws to a dinner at his home, explaining that he intended to get very tipsy, then attempt to act out the two scenes in the movie where Don Birnam is at his drunkest. That night they all got ripped on Mammoth Cave whiskey, then convened to Milland’s library, where after twenty hilariously inept minutes of acting, Milland raced to the bathroom. It took six months before he felt ready for another drink.
Then, shortly before filming, Milland had another inspired thought. He checked himself into the psychiatric ward at Bellevue Hospital for a night, just to see what it was like for alcoholics to suffer through withdrawal. The staff at Bellevue accommodated him, issuing him the standard hospital robe and assigning him to a bed. But within a couple hours—once patients started screaming and fighting with attendants—Milland decided he’d had enough. Not bothering to change out of the robe or even put on slippers, he slid out the door of the building and was immediately stopped by a policeman, who noticed the Bellevue Hospital stamp on the robe and tossed him right back into the psych ward. The night nurse spent a half-hour convincing the cop it was okay for Milland to leave the building.
It wasn’t the last time Milland was mistaken for a drunk on the streets of New York. During filming of the famous scene where Birnam stumbles down Third Avenue looking for a pawnshop, Milland passed an old friend of his wife and another woman—some flirt he’d once asked the management of a hotel in Mexico City to remove from his room. So believable was Milland’s appearance and manner (cameras were hidden, so there wasn’t an immediate tip-off) that word of his public drunkenness started to filter into the gossip columns.
Back on set at the Paramount lot, shooting was less eventful, if not less amusing. As Milland tells it in his autobiography, interiors Stage Five had been rebuilt into an exact duplicate of the popular New York writers’ bar P. J. Clarke’s. No detail of Clarke’s was spared, from the stools to the bottles to “the dusty stuffed cat on the top of the telephone booth.” Every day during shooting, at around five, the stage door would open and a strange man would walk onto the set. Whether film was rolling or not, the man would head to the bar and order a whiskey. The bartender, being played by Howard da Silva, would indulge him by pouring a real bourbon from a real bottle. The man would gaze about the bar and tip back his whiskey, maybe make some banal comment about the weather. He would finish the glass, put down fifty cents and leave. Apparently, Robert Benchley was working at the studio—and he was homesick for New York.
The Lost Weekend was finished in December 1944, only two months after production began, but long enough for Paramount to once again get cold feet. Some say the liquor lobby was offering the studio millions of dollars in an effort to stop its release. It wouldn’t see the light of day until the following year; but when it did, it became an instant classic, winning Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Writing, as well as for Best Actor. The likeable Milland had succeeded in showing that humanity remains even in our darkest moments.