“Looks like it’s going to get drunk out tonight.”
Wit and wingman first class, Charles Butterworth rarely received top billing in his films, but his natural charm made him an ideal supporting actor. His best-remembered role: Eddie Dibble in This Is the Army (1943), though he’s also known for being the inspiration for the voice of Cap’n Crunch as well as the sidekick of writer Robert Benchley. Butterworth studied law at Notre Dame, then worked as a reporter for a time, but soon quit to take up acting. He moved to Hollywood in 1930 and had a fourteen-year, forty-two-film streak of unqualified success. Because of Butterworth’s gift for improvising funny dialogue, screenwriters often provided him with fragmentary scenes, expecting him to come up with better lines on his own. (Most famous: “You ought to get out of those wet clothes and into a dry martini,” Every Day’s a Holiday, 1937.) He had only begun to display his marquee talents when he died in a car accident on Sunset Boulevard—six months after Benchley passed away.
CHARLIE BUTTERWORTH AND Bob Benchley were inseparable. As in “could not be separated.” If you even glanced at the Garden of Allah in the 1930s, you saw Benchley, and if you saw Benchley, you saw Butterworth next to him. They were like a ventriloquist and his doll, always arguing who was the real dummy. And they had a way of making their presence known.
One night, while drifting to sleep in the room beneath Benchley’s, screenwriters Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich could hear the two men drinking and talking upstairs. When they woke up at 8:30 a.m., Benchley and Butterworth were still at it. A typical early morning conversation would go like this: “Look Charlie, we can’t have martinis forever. We must have something to sober up with. Let’s have three vodkas.”
Another time, director Elliott Nugent had come to the Garden for a peaceful vacation with his wife and kids. When it was over, Nugent left a note: “When I hear laughter coming from Bungalow 16, I know it’s coming from comedian Butterworth and literary wit Benchley. But my children, who have never heard of you, regard you as a couple of drunks.”
A typical early morning conversation would go like this: “Look Charlie, we can’t have martinis forever. We must have something to sober up with. Let’s have three vodkas.”
Benchley had even told his wife that Butterworth was practically living with him. In fact, it was due to their incessant giggling and carrying on—they were “like a couple of pansies,” according to singer Kay Thompson—that the rumor spread: The Garden of Allah is being infiltrated by homosexuals.
In response, the bar at the hotel instituted a new policy—every male patron had to be accompanied by a woman. A bouncer was put in place to enforce it, a Pinkerton nonetheless. But when Benchley and Butterworth got wind of the rule, they not only knew why it had been instated, but how to get around it: Butterworth simply dressed as a woman.