Hollywood's Hellfire Club

Hollywood’s Hellfire Club- The Misadventures of John Barrymore, W.C. Fields, Errol Flynn and “The Bundy Drive Boys”

By Gregory William Mank with Charles Heard and Bill Nelson

When I was a teenager, my best friend was cinephile who idolized the late Errol Flynn and W.C. Fields for their antic self-destruction. Taking his passion to extremes, my friend sociopathically immitated his heroes, drunkenly tearing up hotel rooms, treating women with abusive contempt, indulging in public tantrums, chronically lying his way in and out of bad situations and pranking anyone who crossed his path. I was a well-read, simmering young man, very cynical, late-blooming and only recently hatching out of a shell of chronic shyness. Wherever my friend went, there was sure to be excitement and this was something I sorely craved. So I studied his sociopathology and incorporated much of it into my teenaged skill-set. It was during this time that I read two books by Errol Flynn, My Wicked Wicked Ways and Beam Ends. I carefully considered Flynn's higher level of mayhem and soon came to the sound conclusion that indulgences like his were symptomatic of the dissolution and disgust that often accompanies fame, wealth and power. With this epiphany came the recognition that my friend was a son of wealth and power, if not fame, whose position insured that he was never really punished for the many transgressions he committed. I had no such safety net and, a few days after my 18th birthday, was jugged for "criminal mischief" committed by my friend. I spent the night in jail and was retrieved by my folks who brokered an agreement for us to repay damages. My friend brokered an agreement with my parents that they wouldn't tell his parents, a testament to his sociopathic abilities considering how angry my mother and father were. In the long run, my friend alienated almost everyone he knew and, when he ran out of rubes, he betrayed me and I ended the friendship sadder but a lot wiser. The last I heard of my erstwhile friend, he was burning out fast, in the grip of hard substance abuse problems, possessed of few friends, and suffering from paranoia. There is a pattern here that today's book considers at some length among my friend's ideological mentors.

Hollywood's Hellfire Club, despite the abundance of incredibly humorous anecdotes, is a very dark read, particularly toward the end. It is a rogue's gallery of conflicted artists, including the half-Japanese, half-German performance artist Sadakichi Hartmann,the wickedly satirical artist and forger John Decker, and writer Ben Hecht, collectively known with their cronies as the Bundy Drive Boys. There is an abundance of scandal in these pages: alleged rape, incest, violence, sexual hijinx, art forgery, statutory rape allegations against Flynn from a necrophile, and melodrama on the high seas. This meticulously researched book is a glimpse of Hollywood Bohemianism that, as the writers suggest, eclipses most wildness committed in the free-love 1960s. Many of these celebrities, afflicted with childhood father problems, relentlessly sought the kind of self-destruction that only wealth and booze can confer. And in the end, they alienated those who loved them and most of them died relatively early.

If you are looking for a read that will make you laugh until you shudder, this is it. As the story closes, the darkness gathers around pathetic alcoholics, actors who can no longer act, human liabilities and self-involved stars. While I have read no book that so excellently showcases the hedonistic depravity of Golden Age Hollywood, the writers are to be commended for not avoiding the consequences of such desperate living. Despite this, there is a closeness and cameraderie here that is quite genuine, a league of misanthropists who took solace from each other's company. There may very well have been a few errant hearts of gold in this tortured boy's club, as quite a few touching moments suggest. And much of the mischief recounted was afflicted on some very deserving targets.

In the wake of trash icons like Britney and Paris, the older school of celebrity dissolution and insanity seems positively dignified. There is so much to admire and even love about these men that their inevitable downfalls seem so much more tragic. And like them, Hollywood's Hellfire Club walks a fine line between inspired decadence and the darker corners of human anguish.

It is a journey well worth taking.