Flickread: Of All the Gin Joints: Stumbling Through Hollywood History

Author: Mark Bailey

Screenwriter, filmmaker and author Mark Bailey has collected a trove of entertaining and engaging Hollywood tales of benders, binges and salacious behavior in his new book Of All the Gin Joints: Stumbling Through Hollywood History. If you're looking for journalistic gravitas, your train just left the station. If you're curious about the drinking habits of the Hollywood gods and goddesses of yesteryear and their particular means of getting f'ed up, you've come to the right place.

Like a potent and delicious cocktail recipe, Bailey's book is one part feats of inebriation, a splash of Hollywood legends' cocktail recipes and a dash of famous watering holes and hotels where all manner of raging and carrying on took place. We also learn how film sets were often troubled by an actor or director's excessive drinking and in one case, during the filming of John Huston's Beat the Devil, the director actually encouraged drunken revelry on the set. Gin Joints is a quick read but a heady one and it knows when too much of a good thing is too much; it refuses to wear out its welcome by leaving the party gracefully.

The book's structure is concise; brief biographies of actors and actresses precede narrative-like stories relating to a star's prodigious imbibing habits, which are followed by said recipes and finally, histories of famous establishments frequented by stars, directors and screenwriters. The book is divided into Eras', beginning with the personalities of silent films, then continuing on through the studio, post-war, the swinging 60s' and hedonistic 70s'. I suppose Bailey could have let the book run to the present day but by the time we reach Natalie Wood's partying habits, I felt quite sated.

Written with a casual, conversational informality, Bailey is given to crafting sentences with eccentric beginnings like, "So yes, the liquid did provide courage for his arrival at Columbia," or "You see, Odets was in Hollywood working on a film..," or "Funny thing is..." In a book with an earnest approach to biography or history, such quirks might grate but in Bailey's writing it comes off as idiosyncratic and not inappropriate.

And of course the tales are juicy and yes--often scandalous.

And what amazing things we learn! Silent film legend John Barrymore could not only drink prodigiously, he also found it necessary to relieve himself wherever and whenever he could. Bailey writes:

The volume of fluid he could consume was untouchable, as was, accordingly, his need to relieve it. (Barrymore) was famously indiscriminate in his choice of urinals. First it was sinks. Then it was windows. Soon it became anywhere-elevators, cars, the sandbox at the Ambassador Hotel (which banned him), nightclub draperies.

Barrymore was also given to affectionately assigning the name "Shithead" to those close to him, particularly John Carradine, who made up part of a gang of industry drunks who terrorized the town; the others being W.C. Fields, Errol Flynn, John Decker, and screenwriter Gene Fowler. The group was known as the Bundy Drive Boys, with Barrymore as the ring-leader. We also learn Barrymore's favorite drink was Pimm's Cup, whose recipe is provided within the book.

Another relates a fun story involving silent screen siren Louise Brooks, whose partying exploits included downing tsunamis of gin and having sex with both men and women. She once had a two-month fling with Charlie Chaplin and enjoyed regaling people with a story about his "glowing red penis." In Bailey's words:

Chaplain had heard that a drop of iodine on your penis could prevent venereal disease. During a three-day sex bender with Brooks and another couple, he decided to be extra cautious. He emerged from the bathroom naked, with an erection, his storied "eighth wonder of the world" penis completely covered with red iodine. He proceeded to chase the screaming girls around the suite.

Not enough for you?
Ava Gardner, yet another champion drinker, actually detested the taste of alcohol but enjoyed getting drunk and the faster, the better. Her favorite drink was something of her own design called Mommy's Little Mixture, which called for pouring every type of alcohol one could find into a jug, pitcher or punch bowl before serving. British actor Oliver Reed enjoyed something similar he called Gunk, which was essentially an ice bucket full of every kind of liquor he could coax from a bartender. Apparently the hell-raising, hard-drinking Reed found a kindred spirit in Who drummer Keith Moon, whose wild antics and Olympian drinking made him a worthy companion. One game the two invented involved Reed running through fields outside his estate while Moon tried to run him down with his car.

Hollywood's past is rife with drunks, each with his or her own drinking tales: Robert Mitchum wed his bouts of drinking to an 8-joints-a-day marijuana habit; John Wayne once drank with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, and asked the communist leader a question that elicited a fascinating and almost unbelievable response; Richard Burton's daily liquid diet of 3 bottles of vodka ("If you can't do Hamlet straight through with a hangover, you ought to get right off the damn stage."); Dennis Hopper's early 80s' daily substance consumption of a half-gallon of rum, twenty-eight beers and three grams of coke; Steve McQueen's love for Old Milwaukee, peyote, hash, cocaine and amyl nitrate and Sam Peckinpah's excessive drinking on movie sets, which prompted actor James Coburn to say, "Peckinpah was a genius for four hours a day, the rest of the time he was a drunk" are but a smattering of the movie factoids and quotes found in Bailey's book.

Bailey never wags a finger or assumes a moral high ground when recounting stories and facts. He (like me) merely views the stories matter-of-factually and with a healthy sense of humor. As Elizabeth Taylor once said "The problem with people who have no vices is that generally you can be pretty sure they're going to have some pretty annoying virtues."

The book is very thorough in its history of the famous and infamous bars and hotels where Hollywood royalty frolicked. A few of the many mentioned: Romanoff's, Hotel Bel-Air, The Troubadour, Whiskey A Go Go, The Brown Derby, are characterized in detail with unique features that made them hot spots for the hot and famous.

Of All the Gin Joints is an enjoyable book and a quick read, even at 303 pages. It will titillate cinephiles and the casual lover of Hollywood lore and provide some laughs along the way.

One of my favorite chapters, which is reason enough to read Bailey's book, is of Richard Harris and Peter O'Toole's mythic drinking bouts, which often led to hilarious high jinks and misadventures. During theatrical performances, O'Toole and Harris would often visit a local pub at intermission, always being mindful of the clock. During a break in one performance, the two puckish thespians lost track of time. As Bailey tells it:

...And so the two Irishmen slammed back their beers and took off for the theater. Just as Harris hit the stage door, he heard his cue and frantically scrambled toward the stage. His entrance, however, did not go as planned. Right as he was about to appear on the set, he tripped over a wire, sliding all the way down to the footlights, where his head landed practically in the lap of of a woman in the front row. Catching the scent of alcohol on his breath, the woman shouted, "Good god, Harris is drunk!"
"Madam," Harris replied without missing a beat, "if you think I'm drunk, wait until you see O'Toole."