Hollywood's Hellfire Club: The Misadventures of John Barrymore, W.C. Fields, Errol Flynn and the Bundy Drive Boys by Gregory William Mank

Author:Gregory William Mank [Mank, Gregory William]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Feral House
Published: 2007-10-01T04:00:00+00:00

Decker at the Alta Loma gallery

It was at the Bundy Drive cottage where Decker, Flynn and Fowler devoted themselves one evening to bottles of absinthe. The spirit, widely banned internationally, had the sobriquet of “The Green Fairy” and an historically sinister reputation — Van Gogh allegedly drank absinthe before slicing off his ear. After the trio imbibed, they passed out, left their ears intact, and Decker recovered to paint the empty bottle. His painting Absinthe survives today in the Carmel, California home of actress Joan Fontaine.

Sometimes Flynn and Decker left Bundy for a new favored hobby — visits to the morgue by night. Decker might sketch a corpse that he found especially odd or intriguing. Ida Lupino, then a rising Warner Bros. star through such films as They Drive by Night (1940) and High Sierra (1941), was a close friend of Flynn, and through him met Decker. Ms. Lupino told Charles Higham of a birthday when a large wooden crate arrived at her house and she and her mother opened it. It was a series of increasingly smaller boxes — “like a Chinese puzzle,” she remembered — and finally there was a small box with a note: “Happy Birthday, and don’t let this happen to you. John Decker.” Inside was “a perfectly wonderful painting” of a young Mexican beauty.

“There was only one strange thing about it,” said Ida Lupino. “Her throat was cut.” Decker had sketched the Mexican girl’s cadaver at the morgue. According to William Donati’s Ida Lupino, the actress “was fascinated by stories of murder and enjoyed the thrill of being frightened,” and “wondered how it felt to kill. “ As such, she loved Decker’s painting, but felt obliged to exhibit it in an upstairs corner. “Lots of people can’t stand looking at the picture,” said Lupino. “Seems to give them the willies. Personally, I like it, but I have to keep it in seclusion.”

W.C. Fields, of course, came to call, bellowing, “That nitwit doctor! The nefarious quack claimed he found urine in my whiskey!” Fields arrived in his 1938 Cadillac with bar, from his new home at 2015 DeMille Drive in Los Feliz, across the street from the formidable C.B. DeMille. W.C. was annoyed at having such a pooh-bah for a neighbor, but the low rent ($250 per month) was irresistible, and he enjoyed shooting the birds that came to devour the fish in his lily pond. In 1940, an election year, Fields ran afoul of the FBI. According to Curt Gentry’s J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and his Secrets, Hoover himself paid a call on W.C. for a bizarre reason:Fields… was so flustered by the FBI director’s unexpected visit to his Los Feliz home that he kept calling him Herbert.

Finally Hoover got around to the purpose of his visit. “I understand you have some interesting pictures, eh?”

Fields did. His friend John Decker had painted three miniatures of Eleanor Roosevelt, whom Fields despised. Viewed upside down they depicted, in grossly exaggerated anatomical detail, a woman’s sex organs.

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