May 18, 1940—The stage career of John Barrymore, who had electrified audiences only two decades before with performances as Richard III and Hamlet, ended in self-parodying, drunken ignominy, in the last performance of the farce My Dear Children.
Alcoholism took away so much from the great actor: his emotional stability, his memory, his looks. At the end, he was left with nothing but his magnificent voice—seemingly ideal for radio, except that even here, his hands shook so badly that sound technicians complained that rustling script pages interfered with his delivery, so he had to read from chalk boards.
In the 1920s and 1930s, while decamped in Hollywood, which paid him far more handsomely than Broadway, Barrymore pretended he could return to the stage anytime he wanted. But he knew his failing memory would never allow him to achieve the heights he’d once reached. When he did finally go back to Broadway, it was only because bad debts—the result of alimony payments and wild overspending—forced him to do so.
His deterioration was now apparent for all to see.
Set in the Swiss Alps, about an aging actor and his three grown daughters, My Dear Children might not have been the kind of material that made him a matinee idol three decades before. Nor did it measure up to the best silent films (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) and talkies (Grand Hotel, Twentieth Century) that audiences had loved more recently.
But no matter the limitations of the material, playwrights Catherine Turney and Jerry Horwin—not to mention director Otto Preminger—would surely have preferred that Barrymore stick to his lines as written. Instead, he transformed a play with some pathos and rue into a frenetic farce.
When he drew a blank, as all too frequently happened, he simply ad-libbed, cracking jokes (on opening night out of town, in Princeton, to a stage manager frantically prompting him: “Just a little louder, darling, I couldn’t hear you”).
He was also prone to going off on long, wild tangents that gave fellow cast members fits as they waited in vain for cues. Ingenue and future film star Dorothy McGuire quit the tour after Omaha, noting that, despite her admiration for Barrymore’s gifts, she couldn’t watch him continually making a fool of himself.
Another cast member who tired of his act was his fourth and latest wife, Elaine Barrie. At 24, less than half his age, the young woman had met the actor several years before when he was in the hospital, drying out from his latest binge. She had assumed her surname even before she met him because, she thought, it sounded so much like him.
Mrs. Barrymore must have rued the day she got a part in the show, because her antics with her husband provided plenty of fodder for those who speculated how close the actors’ onstage performance reflected their offstage animosity. Addressing her as “you damned selfish brat” was the least of it. So vigorous was a spanking he delivered to his stage “daughter” that, for the next couple of years, spankings by actors with a little too much realism were termed “Barrymore-like.”
Ms. Barrie eventually quit the show. By the end of the year, unsurprisingly, the marriage, too, was over.
Critics were, predictably, unamused by all of this. (George Jean Nathan: “I always said that I'd like Barrymore's acting `till the cows come home'. Well, ladies and gentlemen, last night the cows came home.") Audiences, however, turned out in droves, not just out of town but on the Great White Way. The play could have gone on forever because of its built-in appeal—you wouldn’t be seeing the same show from one night to the next—except that its star got tired of it by the end of its run at the Belasco Theatre.
Perhaps “The Great Profile” knew that time was running out for him. In 1942, he collapsed on a radio show hosted by singer Rudy Vallee. A few days later, he died.
Unlike nowadays, where there’s a good chance that a good play will be taped, much of Barrymore’s best work onstage is unavailable. It has now entered the realm of legend, much like his offstage antics.
One of Barrymore's great movies, ironically, predicted his own sad end. Playwrights Edna Ferber and George S. Kaufman, in their play based on the Barrymore clan, The Royal Family, depicted the actor as a farcical, heavy-drinking womanizer. Several years later, however, their Dinner at Eight--adapted into a 1933 George Cukor film--cut deeper.
This time, Barrymore himself played the role onscreen of washed-up matinee idol Larry Renault. At the end of the play, after his much-put-upon agent advises him that he's ruined his last chance, the camera pulls in on Renault/Barrymore. The Great Profile is now a study in emptiness and devastation, with no way out.
It was the same sad ending experienced by Barrymore's own father, Maurice, and foreshadowing the struggles with substance abuse experienced by daughter Diana, son John Jr., and granddaughter Drew.
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