Lionel Barrymore - The Spirit of Christmas Past and Present

Lionel Barrymore was Ebenezer Scrooge for a generation.  For another generation, he became Mr. Potter, perhaps a deeper, more disturbed, and more modern Christmas villain.

In 20 years, he was absent only twice from playing Mr. Scrooge on the radio every Christmas Day; once because of tragedy, and once because of his great generosity.

He began the role on radio in 1933.  He admitted in his crusty fashion that he took the job because radio work paid well, but according to author Hollis Alpert in his biography of the three Barrymore sibling actors: “But it was customary for Lionel to mask the sentimental side of his nature.  Not only did he like Dickens as a writer, but he harbored hopes that Scrooge’s transformation might spark a few good or noble impulses among his hearers.”

In 1936, however, his fortitude was tried and his sentimental side nearly destroyed him.  His wife Irene, to whom he was deeply devoted, died on Christmas Eve. His brother John Barrymore stayed up with him that night to comfort him, and then he took Lionel’s place the next day at the microphone to play Scrooge.  The annual radio event was done live.  Lionel attended Christmas Mass, then collapsed from grief and spent several weeks in isolation at a sanitarium.

It was a horrible end to a bad year.  It was in this year that Lionel broke his hip at home while leaning on a metal drafting board on which he was working, pursuing his other interest and talents as an artist.  The board was heavy, and toppled over, and Lionel fell.  His recovery period was long and painful, but though he managed to walk again with a limp and with a cane, it would be the beginning of his handicap that would eventually put him in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. 

He worried most about his career, expecting this would end it.  MGM studio head Louis B. Mayer, whose reputation for ruthlessness is the stuff of legend, was truly kind and magnanimous to Lionel Barrymore, keeping him on the payroll when the accounting department questioned it, and found him work in movies simply as a wheelchair-bound character, first in the Dr. Kildare series, and then in a number of other major films. Not only did Lionel’s career not end, it actually thrived and he arguably became the most famous and successful wheelchair-bound person in the U.S., especially when we consider the irony that most Americans in the 1930s were not aware how dependent President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was on his wheelchair.

In 1938, Lionel Barrymore had the second accident that was to put him in a wheelchair for good this time.  Once again, Louis B. Mayer came to his rescue and promised that the screen version he intended to make of A Christmas Carol would star Lionel as Scrooge as soon as Lionel was able to do the picture.

Lionel knew there would be no recovery this time.  He also had a generous streak behind his famous crusty exterior, and suggested that MGM go ahead and make the movie on schedule but with Reginald Owen in the role.  Lionel made himself available on set to coach Owen.  To help promote both the film and Owen in the role, Lionel insisted Reginald Owen do the Christmas radio broadcast as Scrooge that year.

The following year, 1939, Lionel was back at the mic for A Christmas Carol and would continue this annual role for the remainder of his life.  He died in November 1954.  

Today, Christmas for classic film fans is more to be identified with Lionel Barrymore in another role:  the evil Mr. Potter in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946).  Unlike Scrooge, Mr. Potter never had an epiphany or change of heart.  Interestingly, author Hollis Alpert’s book, The Barrymores, which is a wonderful collection of research and stories of John, Ethel, and Lionel Barrymore, was published in 1964, long before the annual Christmastime television broadcasts of It’s a Wonderful Life, so the author was just as ignorant as Lionel was of his future importance to classic film fans as Mr. Potter.  The film does not even rate a mention. It was Mr. Potter, and not Mr. Scrooge, that became Lionel Barrymore’s Christmas legacy.

Scrooge embodied a Victorian Christmas, and Charles Dickens is often said to be the creator of the modern Christmas, but Mr. Potter, perhaps, is a figure much more symbolic of our 21^st century era—cynical, greedy, unrepentant, and unpunished, reveling in his meanness and feeling that his very self-interestedness gives him actual omnipotence. It is a veil he dare not drop lest he lose his power.

George Bailey is the one with the epiphany in the movie, and if he does not vanquish Mr. Potter in the old movie fashion of destroying the villain, he does something through his epiphany which is perhaps more realistic—he renders Mr. Potter totally irrelevant. 
Becoming irrelevant is a deeper punishment to someone as power-hungry as Potter than even time in prison.  

Here’s wishing you all a very happy holiday season and in the happy new year to come, may all the villains become rendered irrelevant.

Listen here for Lionel Barrymore's final radio performance as Scrooge.

*********

Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Memories in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century. Her newspaper column on classic films, Silver Screen, Golden Memories is syndicated nationally.

That's All There Is. There isn't any more. -- The Barrymores as Pop Culture Icons

 Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Carl Van Vechten Collection, 

[reproduction number, e.g., LC-USZ62-54231] , 1937

Ethel Barrymore appeared as a guest on Bing Crosby’s radio show on December 21, 1949.  It was his annual Christmas show, usually devoted to the singing of carols.  Miss Barrymore joined him for amusing patter about the new artificial Christmas trees that came in white and in pink, and they spoke wistfully of all the Christmases Barrymore spent on the road with her children as she played in theaters across the country.  

Announcer Ken Carpenter teased Bing on his wearing a suit and tie, getting all spruced up in honor of their esteemed guest, whom Bing respectfully addressed as “Miss Barrymore.”

They might speak with equanimity on baseball (she was a fan), but there was no chumminess with this famous guest, yet Ethel Barrymore deigned to do something the dignified thespian never would in her younger days: she parodied herself.

When Bing asked her opinion of his pseudo-rival Bob Hope, she replied, “Well, there’s his childlike simplicity.”

“And?”

She answered, “That’s all there is.   There isn’t anymore.”  

She hardly got the line out before cracking up, and the audience roared with laughter also.  It was a line from a play she had done almost fifty years earlier – a line that made her famous.

This post is part of The Barrymore Trilogy Blogathon hosted by In the Good Old Days of Classic Hollywood.  Please have a look at the other participating blogs for some terrific posts.

The “trilogy” in this case, of course, comes from the dynamic trio of siblings who dominated theatre in the early decades of the twentieth century, and came to have a prominent place in film—most especially becoming icons of pop culture in a way entertainers had never been before, or perhaps since.

We have a great book on the trio by theatre critic Hollis Alpert, The Barrymores (NY: The Dial Press, 1964), which dramatically demonstrates the siblings’ dominance of art and culture in the U.S. with an introduction that drops us down on Broadway in the first week of March 1920.

There, at the Plymouth Theatre, John Barrymore, the youngest of the trio at about 37, made his Shakespearian debut in Richard III.

Ethel, the middle child and the reigning grand dame of theatre at 40 years old played over at the Empire in the smash hit, Déclasée.

Lionel, the eldest at 41, known for being a versatile character actor, played at the Criterion in The Letter of the Law. 

These three siblings were stars on Broadway at the same time.  The media took note and around about this time began to refer to the Barrymores as “the royal family of theatre.”

The Barrymore boys have facing pages in 
Stars of the Photoplay, 1930

They became so well known by this moniker that when playwrights George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber wrote their comedy, and rather wicked parody, of the Barrymores, they titled it The Royal Family.  It opened at the Selwyn Theatre in 1927.  It poked fun particularly at John, known as a heavy-drinking womanizer; and Ethel, for being a prima donna of the stage.  John saw it when it played in Los Angeles (Fredric March played the character Tony, which was based on John, and March also appeared in the film version in 1930) and reportedly thought it was funny, but Ethel was not happy.  She had yet to learn to laugh at herself or shrug off the innumerable imitators of herself and her brothers.

Library of Congress

One of the first instances of being imitated occurred in 1904 over her famous “There isn’t anymore” line.  She was playing in a comedy called Sunday on Broadway where her role was a young orphaned woman raised by rough miners in the West, who comes to London to meet her aunts.  Charles Frohman, famous theatrical producer of the day, sat in on the rehearsal.  In a pivotal scene, she is supposed to read aloud a letter from her rough miner guardians to her genteel aunts, but she stops herself because there is a part that is too personal for them to hear.  She just runs offstage.

Ethel suggested to producer Mr. Frohman that it would make more sense for her to say something, in an awkward and embarrassed manner, before she runs off.  He asked what, not given to interference by young ingénues.  

She is reported to have said, “Oh, maybe something like, ‘That’s all there is.  There isn’t anymore.'”

He left it in.  She said it on stage, and because of situation in the plot, and undoubtedly her delivery, it brought the house down.  Author Mr. Alpert notes, “…that line of added dialogue became virtually her trademark—to a degree that annoyed her.” (p.111)

She began to be imitated by comics on the vaudeville stage with this line.

However, though she had a brief foray into silent films in the teens, she preferred the theatre, where she remained, for the most part, until the late 1940s and a string of films, one of which earning her an Academy Award.  We covered her work in The Spiral Staircase (1945) here and Portrait of Jennie (1948) here.  She and her brothers all appeared in Rasputin and the Empress in 1933, which we discussed in this previous post.

Library of Congress

Her brothers took to film early and remained there, Lionel as a character man who appeared in over 200 movies, including his long gig in the Dr. Kildare series.  As versatile in real life as he was in acting, Lionel was also an artist, a composer, a director, and a novelist.  He is also reported to have claimed to have invented the microphone boom for the movies when he suggested a mic be put on a pole above the actors when sound issues were a major problem in the early days of the talkies.

Lionel also was known to a generation for playing Mr. Scrooge on the radio every Christmas in A Christmas Carol.  And like Ethel, he was also parodied in pop culture.   According to author Mr. Alpert, “So familiar was his drawling voice that an imitation of it turned up every other week on the Major Bowes Amateur Hour.”  He is also lampooned in cartoons and the movies, including by his fellow MGM star, Mickey Rooney.

John, of course, was The Great Profile, who played romantic leads until his own dissipated lifestyle and his casual attitude toward his work led him to parody himself far more effectively than another comic probably could.  We discussed his Twentieth Century (1934) here.  He starred in The Great Profile (1940) as a famous actor who drinks heavily.  Two years later, John Barrymore was dead.

They were descended from a long line of actors on both their paternal and maternal sides of their family, the Drews,  and as children they watched the great Edwin Booth and Helen Modjeska and Fanny Davenport on stage in the theater in Philadelphia that their grandmother ran.   None of the trio were ambitious for theatrical careers despite this, but it pulled them in by circumstance and there they outshone all their contemporaries and their famous thespian ancestors.   John did not take his work seriously.  Lionel had other interests as compelling for him.  Ethel had no desire as a child to be on stage, and indeed, spent every opening night of her life nearly paralyzed with stage fright, and yet by the end of her career, her life, she was the most beloved actress the theatre had never known. 

Library of Congress

In 1901, she was appearing at the Garrick Theatre on Broadway in Captain Jinks, and staying at Mrs. Wilson’s boarding house on 36^th Street, in walking distance.  She was about 22 years old.  Her brother John came to escort her to the theater that evening, and when they came in sight of it, she gasped at the her name lit up in the new-fangled electric lights.  She cried.  It became more than the family trade to fall back on then, it was something personal. When she died in 1959, the last of her siblings, the lights dimmed on the marquee and inside the house of the Ethel Barrymore Theatre.  She had appeared there when it opened in 1928, as the first leading lady on that stage.

The children of these Barrymores enjoyed varying degrees of success in their own acting careers (or not).  It seemed serendipitous for John’s granddaughter to be named Drew Barrymore after both sides of the acting family.   Though she has climbed the ladder of fame in a way her preceding generation did not,  it is unlikely that anyone in any acting family will achieve the kind of critical respect, and also pop culture fame of John, Lionel, and Ethel Barrymore. Today, we have celebrity, which is not the same thing. Those three were truly greats, we can neither replicate their brand of greatness or the times in which it shone.  Because...

That’s all there is.  There isn’t anymore.

Kindly have a look at the other posts on The Barrymore Trilogy Blogathon hosted by In the Good Old Days of Hollywood.

****************************

Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. 
by Jacqueline T. Lynch

The first book on the career of actress Ann Blyth. Multitalented and remarkably versatile, Blyth began on radio as a child, appeared on Broadway at the age of twelve in Lillian Hellman's Watch on the Rhine, and enjoyed a long and diverse career in films, theatre, television, and concerts. A sensitive dramatic actress, the youngest at the time to be nominated for her role in Mildred Pierce (1945), she also displayed a gift for comedy, and was especially endeared to fans for her expressive and exquisite lyric soprano, which was showcased in many film and stage musicals. Still a popular guest at film festivals, lovely Ms. Blyth remains a treasure of the Hollywood's golden age.

The eBook and paperback are available from Amazon and CreateSpace, which is the printer.  You can also order it from my Etsy shop. It is also available at the Broadside Bookshop, 247 Main Street, Northampton, Massachusetts.

If you wish a signed copy, then email me at JacquelineTLynch@gmail.com and I'll get back to you with the details.

**************************
My new syndicated column on classic film is up at http://www.go60.us/govoice/advice-and-more/item/2025-ccc-movie-fan, or check with your local paper.

Update - "Twentieth Century"

Today a brief update on our post from January (see here) about “Twentieth Century” (1934) and the train called “The 20th Century Limited”, and our lovable ne’r do well, John Barrymore.

Author John Kobler writes in his biography of John Barrymore, Damned in Paradise - The Life of John Barrymore (Athenaeum, NY 1977) of the eastbound trip on The 20th Century Limited Barrymore took for the re-opening of "Hamlet" on Broadway, around 1924, I think. Barrymore, of course was noted for his portrayal of Hamlet, but evidently never so cocky that he neglected to rehearse.

In a scene that might be straight out of “Twentieth Century”, author Kolber writes, “Ensconced in his stateroom aboard the eastbound Twentieth Century, John sent for two Pullman porters, old friends from previous trips. Handing one of them a book, he explained, ‘Now, this is really the skull of Yorick and you are the grave digger.’ And to the other, ‘You are Polonius.’ Fed his cues in this fashion, he rehearsed himself all the way across the continent.”

Actually, that would have been halfway across the continent, only from Chicago to New York, but the story proves both John Barrymore’s whimsical approach to his art, and the indispensability of the noble Pullman porter.

Twentieth Century (1934)

This post is part of the Howard Hawks Blog-a-thon over at Only the Cinema. Please have a look at the other interesting posts on this very talented director's early career.

Adapted from a Broadway play, Twentieth Century (1934) is at once a postcard from the past, a world of luxury train travel and screwball comedy, and is also a timeless valentine to screwballs and eccentrics of every stripe.

There are plenty of them in this movie.

John Barrymore plays a delightful egomaniac theater impresario, who discovers in a shy and clumsy Carole Lombard his latest project of self glorification, to turn her into a star. This he does, with much coaching, bullying, and jabbing her in the bottom with the pin from her corsage to make her scream to his satisfaction at the appropriate moment in the script.

From the flies of the theater, the catwalk above the stage, he watches her on opening night perform to thunderous applause. In her dressing room afterwards, he declares on his knee, his adulation for her as an artist. She returns his humble tribute by showing him how, with gratitude, she has enshrined the pin with which he assaulted her, on a heart-shaped cushion. Every scene, nearly every line from then on is a parody of the effusive natures in the world of theatre.

After a few years of hits, Miss Lombard, now Mr. Barrymore’s lover, bristles under his obsessive control, takes her own now considerable ego out of their elegant Manhattan digs and heads for success in Hollywood. After a few years of failure without her, Mr. Barrymore catches the same train she is taking to return to New York to woo her, or trick her, whichever works, into signing a new contract with him.

Walter Connolly and Roscoe Karns are terrific as the king’s bumbling courtiers. Also appearing are Charles Lane, who as previously mentioned on this blog had a part in every movie ever made, I’m pretty sure, and Etienne Girardot as the nutty reformer who plasters “Repent” notices on the train windows, on the backs of detectives, and on the unfortunate Mr. Connolly’s hat.

The lines fly fast and furious, and most are not so topical that they cannot be easily understood today. Silliness has no expiration date. However, younger audiences might not catch the significance of “The 20th Century Limited,” which was the name of the train. It was the top of the line in train travel in an era where everybody took the train. Film stars habitually took "The 20th Century” from New York to Chicago, and then took the Chief or Super Chief the rest of the way to Los Angeles.

The train left each city in early afternoon, took about 20 hours to reach either New York or Chicago the following morning. It was the most elegantly appointed, had the best food, and was the most expensive. It was a world unto itself.

John Barrymore was called The Great Profile in his day, and either to take advantage of his still handsome looks or to play upon this nickname, he is seen in profile for most of this movie. This was probably John Barrymore’s best performance in films, and perhaps partly due to his own penchant for mockery. Never seeming to completely take himself seriously, this notoriously heavy drinking, womanizing bad boy of the theater also represented the prestige of America’s theatrical “royal” family, and was himself the Hamlet of a generation. Barrymore could not seem to reconcile the two, and brought his sardonic edge and his boyish humor to a role he understood very well.

Five years after this movie was made, when his drinking took his health and his fortunes, and his acting to new lows, John Barrymore gave another theatrical performance mocking both the theater and himself. He toured in a play called My Dear Children where he began to seem to forget lines, ad libbed obscenities, and appeared to be drunk on stage. According to The Barrymores by Hollis Alpert (The Dial Press:NY, 1964), young ingénue Dorothy McGuire left the show, complaining to director Otto Preminger, “I had great admiration for John Barrymore when we started, but I cannot watch this man making a fool of himself.”

Here is an interesting clip of a radio interview Mr. Barrymore did in Omaha, Nebraska referring effusively both to Miss McGuire and her mother. If Barrymore’s stage drunkenness was an act, he continued it here.

Audiences began to flock to the play, not to be thrilled by the great John Barrymore, but expecting to watch him in a (no pun intended) train wreck of a performance. Otto Preminger rebuked him, and when Barrymore performed perfectly the next night, Preminger asked why he didn’t perform this way every night. Barrymore is quoted as replying, “Bored, dear boy.” He is Oscar Jaffe on the skids, playing with the whole notion of the theater as art and as an occupation, like a bored kid with a paddle ball.

Mr. Alpert’s book also refers to Howard Hawks’ 1963 interview in Cinema magazine where both Hawks and Barrymore were initially disappointed in Carole Lombard in the role of the temperamental actress, finding her too stiff. But when she was encouraged to let go and be more natural and really fight with Barrymore, both men were pleased with her comedic timing.

One of the best scenes is when Barrymore tries to entice her back to his company by promising her the lead in a new production of the Passion Play. This one, however, is all about Mary Magdalene, and all about her. His eloquent and over-the-top descriptions of getting real camels, as he imitates the way camels chew, and getting real sand from the Holy Land, is hysterical. At first she is swept away by his fantasy, and then we see she sees right through him. He leaps away from her kicks.

Another superb scene is when he is accidentally shot, and though the wound is superficial, he plays a grand death scene, savoring it, and almost seems to believe it himself. This is the true genius of the way Barrymore plays the role. Like a man who knows the theater, knows himself, and knows how to manipulate reality, he sometimes is so swept away by what he himself is making up, he almost thinks it real.

The script is literate and silly, but Howard Hawks brings even more to the script by following this fine line of believing the silliness. Lombard’s role is not just a shrewish diva. She believes in theater, and in Barrymore. They know it is artificial, and a touching scene reminds us they know. But like children, they believe because they very much want to believe.

Barrymore’s character could just be a loud-mouthed conman, but he isn’t. He’s an artist, every lie, every exaggeration is art. He continually creates the work of art that is himself. Just as the real John Barrymore did.

Ironically, we lost both Carole Lombard and John Barrymore a few months apart in 1942. "The 20th Century Limited” train was discontinued in 1967. Younger old movie buffs know or will learn about the talent of Carole Lombard and John Barrymore because film makes actors immortal. They’ll probably never understand how significant for both a title and a setting was the train, “The 20th Century.”

*********

Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Memories in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century.

Rasputin and the Empress (1932)

Rasputin and the Empress (1932) is a watershed film in a couple of different respects. First, it unites on film for the only time all three of the Barrymores. Secondly, due to Hollywood’s (or, at least in this case, producer Irving Thalberg’s) penchant for changing history in a movie about a historical subject to suit the needs of script, a lawsuit gave us the immortal movie words, “All the characters in this film are fictitious. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental,” or words to that effect.

In the first case, bringing all three famous Barrymore siblings together in a film was a treat for filmgoers of the day and a gift to posterity. Before their film careers, they represented the next generation in America’s pre-eminent theatrical family. A dynamic, tempestuous, and talented generation it was. Since this blog is about the history of film and not theatre, it is enough perhaps to say that the names above the title of Rasputin and the Empress were listed simply, and boldly, as:

John - Ethel - Lionel
BARRYMORE

The audience needed no explanation. This was an all-star lineup, the dream team.

Younger son John, the longtime matinee idol, played Prince Paul Chegodieff, friend of the royal Romanov family. Middle girl Ethel plays the Czarina Alexandra, and oldest child Lionel plays the monk Rasputin, a rapacious and slovenly mystic whose ambition leads him into hypnotizing members of the royal family when he is not engaging in debauchery. Ethel is the heartsick mother of little Czarevitch Alexis, who suffers from hemophilia. Rasputin’s influence over the mother as he works, so he says, miracles with the son will bring down the Russian nobility.

The performances, particularly Ethel’s, are theatrical, and there is quite a bit of newsreel footage of czarist peasants and soldiers to attempt a documentary feel despite obvious errors in the telling of the story. Czar Nicholas’ autocratic administration of his country is glossed over, and this instead becomes the story of how John as Prince Paul, a good guy, has to get rid of his brother Lionel, the mad monk in whom his sister Ethel has so much faith.

The siblings’ scenes together are fun to watch, as they are clearly masters at stagecraft and that is what we are seeing here more than scene stealing. In a scene with John and Lionel, as their characters spar psychologically, Lionel as Rasputin declaring, “I will be Russia!” while John listens thoughtfully, his back turned to him, playing with a rapier. Both brothers are strong actors, neither giving an inch, but also respectful of each others talents.

“There’s something clammy about him,” John says of Rasputin, and describes him, “Like a man-eating shark with a Bible under his fin.”

Lionel does some impressive just-short-of-scenery-chewing here. He clearly has the meatiest role. He is disgusting and creepy. There is a particularly unsettling scene where he forces the young czarevitch, played by Tad Alexander, to watch an ant and a fly at combat under a microscope. The audience is forced to watch as well with intense close-ups as the ant attacks and eats the fly, which Rasputin uses as a teaching tool for political theory.

Another creepy scene is when he gets one of the royal daughters aside and places a locket on her, touching her, like a molesting uncle, and she squirms with discomfort but utter helplessness. Like the cavalry, the lady in waiting played by Diana Wynyard comes to her rescue. An early fan of Rasputin, she begins to change her opinion of him and chases him away from the daughters, when he also tries to hypnotize her so that he may have his way with her.

This, evidently, was the sticking point for the lawsuit against the film. A scene, removed later, suggesting she is raped by Rasputin was decried as false by the real-life counterparts of Prince Paul and her character, who was his wife. He sued; he won, and now we are told that the movie we are watching is fictional. Even if all the names and places and events are real, it’s still fictional, that way we can still make up stuff.

An impressive and realistic fight scene between John and brother Lionel illustrates the death of Rasputin by gunshot, poisoning, beating, and finally drowning. Rasputin was like the Energizer Bunny, but he finally succumbed, and John is the only Barrymore sibling to survive the Russian Revolution, as sister Ethel is massacred with the rest of the Romanovs.

There are a lot of character actors to pick out, and many were uncredited in the film, including Anne Shirley as Princess Anastasia, who later came to life as Ingrid Berman in another film, and Mischa Auer as a waiter. Movies depicting historical events and real people always seem to walk a fine line between creativity and accuracy, but this film that gives us the three Barrymores together is a historical document all by itself.

*********

Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Memories in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century. Her newspaper column on classic films, Silver Screen, Golden Memories is syndicated nationally.