“Like every dog, I’ve had my day.”
Renowned eccentric and patriarch of an acting dynasty, John Carradine was nicknamed “Bard of the Boulevard” for his habit of wandering Hollywood Boulevard dressed in a cape and bellowing Shakespeare. He studied art in the Northeast as a youth and later hitched through the South peddling portraits of people he encountered along the way. First major acting job: a New Orleans production of Camille (1925). First major movie: DeMille’s Sign of the Cross (1932). His good standing as a member of John Ford’s stock company (see his major roles: Stagecoach (1939), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), among others) was nearly overshadowed by late-life status as a B-movie icon. Carradine played Dracula three times, replacing Bela Lugosi in Universal’s House of Frankenstein (1944) and House of Dracula (1945) and reprising the role for a final time (ludicrously) in Billy the Kid vs. Dracula (1966). The money from such schlock went to fund his own repertory theater company. Married four times, he had five sons, of whom David, Keith, and Robert became film actors. The exact number of films Carradine appeared in remains in dispute, but most sources put it at close to three hundred.
CARRADINE WAS OFFICIALLY IN. John Barrymore, the King of Hollywood Lushes, saw in the young actor all the makings of a Bundy Drive Boy, and he was soon initiated into the club. Carradine was the right blend of brilliant, drunk, and crazy, and on top of that, he openly worshipped Barrymore, which never hurt … well, most of the time. It was definitely not cool when the young sycophant, who had taken to publicly reciting Shakespeare (as if Barrymore didn’t own that trick), drummed up the nerve to reveal to the legend, “I’m told you are very much impressed with me.”
“Sure,” Barrymore said. “In fact, I know a screen test you’d be perfect for.”
This could not be happening. Carradine had worshipped Barrymore since he was sixteen, after seeing him in a New York production of Hamlet. It was Barrymore’s performance—which Carradine attended six times—that sparked the younger man’s lifelong love of Shakespeare. When Carradine had landed the role of Richard III in a production at the University of Southern California in 1929, he decided it was time to meet his idol. He drove to Barrymore’s estate, rang the house from a telephone at the back gate, and somehow talked his way onto the property. Barrymore met him outside. “Mr. Barrymore,” Carradine said, “I’m going to play Richard III.” “Really,” Barrymore replied with a smirk. “Let’s have a drink!”
And so it began, specifically with two Tom Collins cocktails, and thousands more drinks to follow in the coming years. Errol Flynn, who became their Third Musketeer, later recalled that they’d “start out in some bistro at noon, and a week later find ourselves in Mexico or on a yacht off Catalina with a dozen bottles on the floor and a gaggle of whores puking their guts all over the place.”
Still, Carradine had to know his place. If he strayed too far from the role of young apprentice, Barrymore might stop calling him “shithead” (Barrymore’s highest compliment). And if he got too cocky, Barrymore might teach him a lesson.
Which brings us back to the screen test. Carradine would be auditioning for a supporting role in a movie that Barrymore was set to star in. The screen test required him to dress up “like a fop” and give a long soliloquy at a dinner banquet. Never mind that the soliloquy was a total piece of crap, Carradine played it like Shakespeare—after all, he wanted to make his idol proud.
And proud Barrymore was. So much so that he celebrated by screening the clip to a select group of friends. He introduced the clip by assuring those gathered that it would demonstrate Carradine’s “uncanny special talents.” But to Carradine’s surprise, the test had been drastically edited down and now contained only two scenes: a close-up, in which he wiped his mouth with a napkin and delivered the soliloquy’s final line: “Delicious! The best I’ve ever had!”
Cut to: A shot of Barrymore from the waist down, zipping up his fly.
THEY FIRST MET at Bella Vista, John Barrymore’s legendary Beverly Hills estate, named after the spectacular view of the city below. A 7,000-square-foot Mediterranean villa built for director King Vidor, the estate included two guest houses, as well as a pool and stone cabana. Pleasant to think of John Carradine and Barrymore each enjoying a Tom Collins. This was 1929, out on the veranda. Barrymore was wearing a blue polka-dot dressing gown, as perhaps one does on one’s estate. Carradine sported striped morning pants, spats (to distract from the fact that he had no socks), a wing collar and York puff tie, topped off by a Homburg hat and cane.
A pair of freaks, or master thespians—depending upon your point of view—each with a Tom Collins in hand.
TOM COLLINS
2 OZ. GIN
¾ OZ. FRESH LEMON JUICE
¾ OZ. SIMPLE SYRUP
CLUB SODA
ORANGE SLICE
MARASCHINO CHERRY
Pour gin, lemon juice, and simple syrup into a cocktail shaker filled with ice. Shake briefly. Strain into a Collins glass filled with ice cubes. Top with club soda and stir gently. Granish with orange slice and cherry. Serve with two straws.
Nobody thought it could be done. Teaming the three Barrymore acting siblings—Lionel, Ethel, and John—in one motion picture? No way. Too many ghosts, too much ego. You couldn’t cast Ethel as the romantic lead. Opposite her brothers? Or as the mother. Of her siblings? Not to mention how John’s insane alcohol consumption made him dangerously unreliable. Or how Lionel’s alleged morphine addiction made him dangerously uninspired. Seriously: Forget it.
Yet one man in Hollywood wouldn’t; he alone believed it could work brilliantly. Fortunately, he was John Barrymore himself. “It’s like a circus with three white whales,” he once declared. (White whales at a circus? Never mind.) If John would do it, MGM’s Irving Thalberg knew that the other dominoes would fall. Ethel owed thousands in back taxes, and though she’d made her name on Broadway, she desperately needed a film gig. And Lionel needed money for his morphine habit. Now all they needed was a script. Languishing in MGM’s story vault were the rights to Alfred Klabund’s 1927 novel Rasputin, about the notorious Russian mystic whose sway over Russian Czar Nicholas II and his wife, Alexandra, led in part to the October Revolution. Ethel could be Alexandra; Lionel, Rasputin; and John, Prince Felix Youssoupoff, a triggerman at Rasputin’s 1916 assassination. Done.
A demi-script was cobbled together, but only hours into principal photography, the crew began to rue the day that Ethel had ever signed on. She’d never made a sound movie before and was completely lost on set. When a crew member asked aloud if “Grandma was ready” (“Grandma” being the nickname of the sound blimp on the camera), Ethel blew her stack, assuming she was Grandma. Ten days later, she personally saw to the firing of director Charles Brabin and to his replacement by Richard Boleslavski, a Stanislavski alumnus.
Lionel had an entirely different issue, and it wasn’t even morphine: John was trying to upstage Lionel’s own chin-stroking, scenery-eating performance as the villainous Rasputin. Things got so bad that the crew started referring to the movie as Disputin. And that was before the real problem emerged—the script.
According to biographer Mark Vieira, everyone had a different take on what film they were making. Screenwriter Charles MacArthur wanted a movie that revealed the true reason Rasputin had succeeded in duping the powerful Romanoffs: because the powerful Romanoffs were dumb. Thankfully, Thalberg vetoed it, though his grounds for doing so had nothing to do with so-called “artistic merit.” Rather, the Czarina was the granddaughter of Queen Victoria, and England was a vital market. Nobody complained.
Thalberg had his own solution: There should be a scene, he insisted, in which Princess Natasha, the wife of Prince Paul, gets raped by Rasputin. Okay. But for starters, Princess Irina and Prince Felix (the real-life models for Natasha and Paul) were very much alive, and thus had certain legal rights. There was also the minor issue that such a rape had never occurred. No matter. It had been decreed, so off everybody went to make their movie in which the hero never bathes because he’s too busy raping and murdering dumb royals.
Ethel wrapped in mid-October, but the production dragged on until December 12, with MacArthur sometimes turning in scenes the morning they were to be shot. The premiere (an event so ridiculously star-studded that it was lampooned in a 1933 Mickey Mouse cartoon) took place a week and a half later. Reviews were surprisingly favorable and the movie took in $1 million at the box office. And so it ended.
Until 1934, when Princess Irina sued MGM for $700,000 in libel damages because, as it turned out, she didn’t want everyone thinking she was raped. MGM argued it was fiction. The royals scoffed. Their evidence? A press release from Thalberg’s office, sent to John Barrymore when he first signed onto the film. The release stated that he’d be playing the role of “Youssoupoff”—Prince Felix’s real name, not the character’s. Case closed.
The loss spooked the studio so badly that you can see its fingerprints on every film and television show made today: “All characters and events portrayed in this film are entirely fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, either living or dead, is coincidental.” The disclaimer was put into use shortly after and as a direct result of Rasputin.