Vital Viewing (That's All There Is, There Isn't Any More Edition)

 

Actress Ethel Barrymore, sister to Lionel and John, great-aunt to Drew, was born on this day in 1879 (she died in 1959, her life having spanned the horse-and-buggy to Cadillac-with-tailfins.) Dubbed "The First Lady of the American Theatre", she had been a star for just about the entirety of the 20th century up to that point when, in 1936 at age 56, she decided to call it quits: 

If you're curious about that civil war, Ernest Hemingway turned it into a novel. Getting back to Ethel Barrymore, that retirement was a short-lived one, so short that it's not even mentioned on her Wikipedia page, her IMDb page, her Turner Classic Movies page, her Find a Grave page, or any of a half a dozen websites devoted to celebrity horoscopes. Finally, I found mention of it in her New York Times obituary. The retirement lasted a year. More like an extended leave of absence. Before giving notice, Ethel had appeared in at least 55 stage productions. After she came out of retirement, she starred in six more plays, including what turned out to be her greatest success, The Corn is Green, which ran on Broadway in three different theaters between 1940 and 1942 for a total of 477 performances. A year later, she returned to the role of Welsh schoolteacher Miss Moffat for an additional 56 performances. After that crowning achievement, there was one more Broadway production, Embezzled Heaven (sounds like The Donald Trump Story) which ran for 52 performances. By the time it ended, Ethel was almost 65. Though she was now the right age for retirement, she chose to keep on working. Unlike when she first went on stage at about age 15 in the final decade of the 19th century, there was now more options available to an actress, as long as one was reconciled to the fact that cameras don't give applause, which the reportedly no-nonsense Ethel didn't seem to mind.

 

Odd thing about those Barrymore siblings. We're told they dominated the Broadway stage for the first few decades of the 20th century, but that doesn't do those of us ensconced in the first few decades of the 21st much good. It's not like we can readily hop on a horse-drawn streetcar to the Garrick Theater and watch Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines. As with Sarah Siddons and Edwin Booth, we have to take it on the word of contemporary critics that Lionel's, Ethel's, and John's stage performances were all that they were cracked up to be. However, unlike Siddons, who died in 1831, or Booth, who departed this life, somewhat embarrassed by his brother's antics, in 1893, the Barrymores lived well into the 20th century, which means of course that we have their later films to give us some idea of their past glories. Actually, the stage glories and the movie glories sometimes ran parallel to each other, especially in the case of John. The youngest of the three, he became a bona fide movie star just a few years after becoming a bona fide Broadway star (by playing Hamlet.) Though his stardom came last, he was really the only one to achieve equal and simultaneous success on both stage and screen (to celebrate, he broke open the champagne, and anything else he could find in the liquor cabinet.) Lionel's film stardom is a bit more qualified. He was never quite the leading man in movies, at least not in talkies, as he had been earlier on stage. Quite handsome when he was young, he got increasingly craggier with age. If a voice can be called craggy, Lionel had that, too. Certainly it was one of the most recognizable in talkies, and that arguably made him the preeminent character actor of his day. If brother John played a dashing jewel thief in Grand Hotel and a dashing former silent screen star in Dinner at Eight, then Lionel was nonetheless was put to good use as a dying accountant in the former and a dying industrialist in the latter. Ironically, his characters are still alive at the end of each movie while John's characters are not! Lionel does die in A Free Soul (which also happened to be Clark Gable's breakthrough film), netting him an Oscar, a prize that eluded John. At awards time, it's sometimes better to have a craggy face than a great profile. So in demand was Lionel for character parts, usually supporting roles, that eventually wheelchairs were written into screenplays to accommodate his increasingly crippling arthritis.   

That leaves Ethel. Of the three she had the biggest Broadway career over a longer stretch of time. By her late 40s she was already considered enough of a legend to have a theater on the Great White Way named after her (it's still there today.) Yet when it comes to film she kind of lagged behind John and Lionel, partly because she didn't care all that much about being a movie star, always holding Hollywood a bit in disdain. Not that she boycotted motion pictures altogether. Her first film, now believed lost, was 1914's The Nightingale. Thirteen more full-length movies followed, all made in the 1910s. With the exception of a single short, Camille, Ethel didn't appear on screen at all in the 1920s. Finally, in 1932, she starred with her two brothers in Rasputin and the Empress (which I wrote about way back when.) This was the second and last movie the three siblings appeared in together (the first, 1917's National Red Cross Pageant, a World War I morale booster, is believed lost.) After that, Ethel stayed away from moving picture cameras for another twelve years. After which it seemed like she couldn't get enough of them. I don't know what changed exactly. Maybe the Broadway workload was a bit much for a woman closing in on 70. Ethel moved to Hollywood, a place she once compared to a "Sixth Avenue peepshow", worked in Hollywood, and eventually died in Hollywood. The first film she made after moving to the West Coast was 1944's None But the Lonely Heart, starring Cary Grant, which won her an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. She also received Academy Award nominations for The Spiral Staircase, The Paradine Case, and Pinky. She wasn't nominated for anything, but I strongly suggest you see her in Portrait of Jennie. She's excellent as a self-described "old maid" who seems to have an unconsumated crush on a much younger Joseph Cotten (who himself has a crush on a ghost he meets in Central Park.) These movies and one or two others are Ethel's film career highlights. She also appeared in many lesser films, as money was thrown at her by producers hoping her presence in a movie would give the thing a touch of class. It was always money well-thrown. In the last fifteen years of her life, Ethel made 21 pictures.

By the late 1950s, Ethel Barrymore had survived both her brothers, and was still around to watch a nephew of hers take his own stab at stardom. Oh, well...

...these things sometimes skip a generation.

Here's Ethel and Bogie:

 Now you know why she came out of retirement.

 

Vital Viewing (Runs in the Family Edition)

 No, not him.

Not him, either. It's a female I'm looking for!

You don't understand--a living female!

That's more like it! Actress Drew Barrymore was born on this day in 1975. The granddaughter and great-niece of a trio of once-famous thespian siblings (and today more well-known than any of them), Drew first achieved fame when she was only seven years old as one of three children who helped a homeless alien from outer space get back to the mother ship in 1982's E.T. the Extraterrestrial. That sudden debut led to a lot of hard partying (not that there aren't persistent failures who also do that), and a kind of breakdown, which she talks about in the following interview:  

I must admit, I'm usually quite cynical about these Hollywood rehab-with-a-happy-ending stories. There's been so many over the years that I'm beginning to wonder if it's because of some clause in famous people's contracts. I normally would have posted a far different clip in celebration of Drew's birthday, except this is Howard Stern she's telling all this to. Say what you want about the man, but once he decides to keep his considerable snark in check (and sometimes even when he decides not to), he's an excellent interviewer, and certainly not one to be bamboozled by celebrity phoniness. So, Drew, if Howard buys your story, then I buy your story, for whatever the latter transaction is worth (a pack of chewing gum, perhaps?)

Of course, even if she went in rehab a bad girl and came out a good girl doesn't mean she can't still play a bad girl in a movie. Here's Drew in what, after E.T., is probably her most famous film role, the title character of 1992's Poison Ivy:

I was surprised to learn this film tanked at the box office. Everyone I know seems to have seen it or at least heard of it. But what happened is it later became a hit on cable, video, and DVD, and is now regarded as a latter-day noir classic, thanks in large part to Barrymore's performance as a teenage femme fatale.

Barrymore said in the Stern interview that after she got out of rehab, she went to stay with, of all people, David Crosby. But I found out that this was after Crosby's own stint in rehab (as well as jail), and the stay came about because he and his wife were both committed to sobriety. Barrymore also mentioned that she met Neil Young while there. So it's only appropriate that we finish with this ode to the domestic life by Crosby, Young, and two other dudes who may also have also paid a visit from time to time:

Stern forgot to ask Drew about the two cats in the yard.

Quips and Quotations (Name Recognition Edition)

Half the people in Hollywood are dying to be discovered. The other half are afraid they will be.

--Lionel Barrymore

Romanov á Clef

I'd like to take you back to the days when Russia was ruled by a Czar. Or Tsar. Take your pick. I prefer czar, as tsar sounds like that little electrical device that the police use to subdue unruly drunks.

However you spell the word, Nicholas II was the man who held the title at the beginning of the 20th century. He and his wife, Alexandria, had four daughters, Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia, and one son, Alexei. Alexei was heir apparent to the Russian throne, but it looked like he might not live long enough to become Czar as he suffered from hemophilia, which ran rampant in Queen Victoria's family. What in the world does Queen Victoria have to do with Russia? Genetically speaking, the old royal families of the various European countries had much more in common with each other than they ever did with their own subjects. Such blue blood inbreeding tended to exacerbate inherited diseases such as hemophilia. The Czarina sought out doctor after doctor hoping to find a cure for the young prince, but to no avail. Finally, she turned to religion. She turned to Rasputin.

Grigori Rasputin was a priest or a monk or a mystic or a psychic or a soothsayer or--well, people then and now couldn't quite decide what exactly he was. The Mad Monk is one common moniker, but he was rarely called that to his face. Mad or not, he had a following in St. Petersburg, the Russian capital at the time, and soon came to the attention of the Czarina, who sought his help. Rasputin agreed to treat the little prince, and Alexei was soon rid of Grandma Vicky's genetic booby prize. For a while, anyway. But whenever the hemophilia flared up again, Rasputin was called, and the disease subsided. He once cured the prince by telegram! What was Rasputin's secret? Some say hypnosis. Others say the earlier doctors, well-meaning as they may have been, were quacks by today's standards, and did things such as prescribe that new wonder drug, aspirin, which we know now is the wrong thing to give a hemophiliac, as it exacerbates bleeding. Rasputin may have just given common sense advice, like get plenty of bed rest. Rasputin may have just been lucky.

If you had asked Rasputin, he would have told you it was God. If so, that same supreme being had some odd things in store for Russia in the coming years.

Rasputin soon went from being a palace doctor to a trusted advisor on all matters domestic and foreign. He became a familiar figure in the Russian court, where he spread his religious doctrine of "salvation through sin", that God couldn't very well forgive you until you've done something that needed forgiving. In Rasputin's case, this meant huge orgies with the ladies of the court, after which they all sought redemption. In layman's terms, that's having your cake and eating it, too.

Along came World War I. Russia declared war on Germany. Rasputin suggested that the leader of the Russian army, who, by most accounts, was very good at his job, be replaced by Czar Nicholas II himself, a man with no previous military experience. While Nicholas was busy losing battles abroad, Rasputin replaced all the Czar's ministers with his own handpicked cronies, whose botched-up policies increased turmoil at home. Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky took notice.

Not everyone thought Rasputin was doing God's work. He made his share of enemies, and these enemies plotted to kill him, and kill him, and--Well, I'm getting ahead of myself.

A group of disgruntled nobles lured Rasputin to a house on the pretense that there would be some pretty young things there in need of salvation. Once he had arrived, the nobles served him poisoned cake and poisoned wine. I don't know about alcohol, but Rasputin could certainly hold his cyanide, consuming enough to kill five men.

Seeing this wasn't getting them anywhere, one of the nobles pulled out a gun and simply shot Rasputin.

Rasputin fell. And then got right back up.

Rasputin was shot again, fell again, and then got right back up again.

This scene repeated itself a couple more times.

Obviously, shooting wasn't getting the nobles anywhere either, so they all ganged up on him and began pounding away. Rasputin fell. And then got right back up. So they beat the hell out of him some more until he was finally unconscious, after which they castrated him (no more salvation with pretty young things for this guy.) They then tied him up and threw him into an icy river.

Rasputin's body was found three days later. His arms were untied and in an upright position. He had apparently tried to claw his way through the ice before finally drowning.

The Russian monarchy wasn't nearly as hardy. Soon thereafter it fell to the Bolsheviks. The Czar, Czarina, and their children were executed.

But our story does not end there. Let's jump ahead about fifteen years and a half a world away to a place called Hollywood. In 1932, MGM made a movie of the events I've just described called Rasputin and the Empress starring John, Ethel, and Lionel Barrymore (but not Drew; she wouldn't be born for another 42 years.) Lionel played Rasputin, Ethel played the Czarina, and John played Prince Paul Chegodieff, a fictional character who finally kills Rasputin. You may be wondering how someone who actually lived could be killed by someone who didn't. So did Prince Felix Yusupov.

Yusupov was the ringleader of the gang that plotted to kill Rasputin, and, in fact, it was in his house where the murder, or whatever it was, occurred. Yusupov, having escaped the revolution and now living in London, believed the John Barrymore character was based on him, and sued MGM for libel. Yusupov's beef wasn't that the film depicted him as killing Rasputin in cold blood; he was proud of that. What bugged him, and was perhaps an insult to his manhood, was that the movie showed his wife being seduced by Rasputin. The missus said it didn't happen, and he believed her. MGM lost, and the Prince and his wife were awarded $120,000, millions in today's money. Plus the scene was cut.

As a result of this lawsuit, Hollywood studios began inserting a disclaimer in the credits of every film, one that soon spread to books as well:

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Rasputin may be dead, but Prince Felix Yusupov lives on.