Exhibit Review: ‘The Royal Family’ of Broadway, Hollywood—and Fort Lee, NJ

In the late 1920s, when the George S. Kaufman-Edna Ferber comedy The Royal Family played to packed audiences at the at the Selwyn Theater, audiences knew that the group in the title were not Britain’s Windsors but an American acting dynasty strongly resembling the Barrymores. When Paramount Pictures adapted the play for the big screen in 1930, the studio felt it best, considering the many non-theater aficionados outside the Big Apple, to tack “of Broadway” at the end of the title.

Over the last century, with siblings John, Lionel, and Ethel filming one classic after another—and with John’s granddaughter Drew making her own contribution to the industry as an actress-producer—the Barrymores could just as easily be called “The Royal Family of Hollywood.” Now, with an exhibit about the multi-generational thespians now running in a film center named for them in northern New Jersey, they could also be labeled “The Royal Family of Fort Lee.”

In a late January blog post of mine that related my discovery of the Barrymore Film Center, I promised that I would discuss a first-floor exhibit on the family that runs through the end of March. It really is must viewing for anyone interested in film and theater history—even, more broadly, New Jersey and Fort Lee history.

The exhibit curators have scoured far and wide for photos, posters, sculptures, props, and other materials associated with John, Lionel, and Ethel Barrymore. Separate walls tell the story of each sibling—all loaded with talent, looks, and money, but also with more than the normal share of offstage drama that actors often encounter.

The dynasty started not with this trio but with John Drew, who became an actor and theater manager after emigrating from Ireland in the 1830s. In turn, his daughter Georgiana, herself an actress, wed Herbert Blythe, an Indian-born British stage actor professionally known as Maurice Barrymore. It is he who, in effect, became the patriarch of “The Royal Family.”

A talented comic actor who became one of the first Broadway stars to star in vaudeville, Maurice did well enough financially to buy a summer cottage in what is now the Coytesville section of Fort Lee, several blocks from the film center. (Despite ardent efforts by film buffs, that house was demolished 22 years ago.)

As the museum chronicles, Fort Lee, because of its proximity to Broadway, the Hudson River and Palisades, became the de facto birthplace of the American film industry. It’s appropriate, then, that three of Maurice’s acting progeny, all of whom spent much of their youth in the town—Lionel, Ethel, and John Barrymore—came as close as you can get to being present at the creation of this narrative art form.

(Oddly enough, though the three had more than 300 screen appearances among them, they only appeared together once on the big screen—the 1932 film Rasputin and the Empress. A poster for that movie, part of the exhibit, is the image accompanying this post.)

Moviegoers of the past few decades are likely to be familiar with the four decade career, as actress, producer, talk-show host, and gossip-page fixture, of Drew Barrymore. But her triumphs and travails pale in comparison with the great sibling triumvirate who dominate the Barrymore Center exhibit.

Still, you’ll likely be in for something of shock when you first enter the exhibit room to see a photo of a young woman who bears a startling resemblance to the current best-known member of the family. But it’s not Drew but Ethel Barrymore—a similarity all the more surprising because Ethel was Drew’s grandaunt rather than, more directly, her grandmother.

Among the items that depict Ethel here are a photo, a portrait, a bust of the actress, and a poster from her first movie, The Nightingale, shot in 1914 right in Fort Lee.

Unlike her brothers, “The First Lady of the American Theater” worked primarily on the stage, as she followed in the tradition of her grandfather, John Drew, as star and manager of Broadway’s Ethel Barrymore Theater, which the Shubert Organization created as a vehicle for her.

A guide at the museum told me that her favorite member of the family was Lionel Barrymore, and the artifacts on display make a compelling case for his versatility.

Then in their toddler stage, films in the silent and early talkies era left Lionel and many other denizens of Hollywood skeptical about their cultural potential—even when, as in his case, he went behind the camera to direct, rather than his usual position in front.

(He is best known, of course, for his performance as miserly Mr. Potter in the Yuletide classic It’s a Wonderful Life—a kind of American counterpart to his annual radio broadcasts over two decades as Scrooge in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.)

The creative instinct that Lionel couldn’t display, even as a well-compensated contract player for MGM Studio, he satisfied by picking up a paintbrush or playing the piano and oboe. While walking through the gallery, you’ll hear his First Piano Concerto and Memoriam on the Death of John Barrymore.

Although Ethel and Lionel displayed more self-discipline, John Barrymore has always fascinated me the most of the trio. His talent was matched by an appearance that gave rise to the nickname “The Great Profile.”

Unfortunately both were exceeded by a raucous lifestyle that spawned a million anecdotes—most, remarkably enough, true. (When asked if the very young Romeo and Juliet had a physical relationship, he cracked, “They certainly did in the Chicago company.”)

Committing his father to Bellevue in 1901 was a searing experience for John, but he could not escape the family propensity for substance abuse—and he seems to have passed this genetic inheritance to children Diana and John Drew Barrymore and the latter’s daughter, Drew.

By the early 1930s, John was having trouble showing up on time for studio work and memorizing his lines. Within a decade, as a has-been Shakespearean actor in the stage comedy My Dear Children, he verged close to self-parody.

But the exhibit also includes evidence that John at his best was an electrifying, even pioneering, actor, such as the chair and dagger he used in a 1920 stage production of Hamlet (proclaimed for years as the best many had seen) and the suit of armor he donned for Richard III.

If you have a chance, see the Barrymore exhibit before it closes March 26. Both aficionados of this legendary family and those with only the slightest inkling of what they once meant to the early film industry will come away with greater appreciation for this trio who left their unmistakable marks on American entertainment.

Quote of the Day (Robert Louis Stevenson, on a First Encounter With Edward Hyde)

“Mr. Hyde was pale and dwarfish, he gave an impression of deformity without any nameable malformation, he had a displeasing smile, he had borne himself to the lawyer with a sort of murderous mixture of timidity and boldness, and he spoke with a husky, whispering and somewhat broken voice; all these were points against him, but not all of these together could explain the hitherto unknown disgust, loathing, and fear with which Mr. Utterson regarded him. ‘There must be something else,’ said the perplexed gentleman. ‘There is something more, if I could find a name for it. God bless me, the man seems hardly human! Something troglodytic, shall we say? or can it be the old story of Dr. Fell? or Is it the mere radiance of a foul soul that thus transpires through, and transfigures, its clay continent? The last, I think; for, O my poor old Harry Jekyll, if ever I read Satan’s signature upon a face, it Is on that of your new friend.’”— Scottish fiction writer Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” (1886)

The creation of Edward Hyde, the embodiment of pure evil in the physical ugliness so vividly portrayed above, is what has led so many to view this “Strange Tale” as a horror story.

But there is another horror that, to Dr. Henry Jekyll, might be just as dismaying: Hyde’s creator and opposite is not a saint, but the same old Jekyll: a proper, basically decent Victorian gentleman who cannot banish his primal urges—“that incongruous compound of whose reformation and improvement I had already learned to despair.”

According to a fascinating Huffington Post piece by Melanie Kendry, “When Does a Man Become a Monster?”, the original draft by Robert Louis Stevenson indicated that the crime of the “ordinary secret sinner” Jekyll was not murder (or even the consorting with prostitutes shown in so many cinematic versions) but homosexuality. 

It was an anticipation of a later, wittier, but equally horrifying story of a double man in Victorian society, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Such were the taboos of the time in England, however, that even in the latter, more daring case, Gray’s secret sexuality could only be implied.

(The image accompanying this post shows John Barrymore, in the classic 1920 silent film version of Stevenson’s novella. Remarkably, Barrymore depicted the violent and disturbing physical transformation into Hyde without benefit of special effects. As fine as the 1933 Fredric March performance was—worthy enough of an Oscar---I still prefer Barrymore’s. I may be the only person I know who still recalls Kirk Douglas’ performance in a 1973 TV musical adaptation of the tale by composer Lionel Bart. That production was a horror story all its own!)

Quote of the Day (‘Hamlet,’ on Acting As the 'Mirror Up to Nature')

"Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance, that you o'erstep not the modesty of nature: for any thing so o'erdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold as 'twere the mirror up to nature: to show virtue her feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure."—Hamlet, in William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 3, scene 2, 17–24

The photo accompanying this post shows one of the great Hamlets of all time: John Barrymore, in the 1922 production.

Quote of the Day (John Barrymore, on How Movie Lenses Treat Faces)

“If you stay in front of the movie camera long enough, it will show you not only what you had for breakfast but who your ancestors were.”—Stage and screen actor John Barrymore, quoted in Peter Hay, Movie Anecdotes (1990)

The last couple of days, like much of America, I absorbed the nonstop coverage of Whitney Houston’s death. Aside from the changes in the once-glorious voice before her passing, I pondered her altered looks in the last decade, including a TV appearance late last year on Access Hollywood. Her face--once thin, then downright gaunt--had grown heavier. Did her more-mature hairdo set off the face differently? Did she appear fleshier because she was (temporarily) healthier? Or, as was rumored at the time, had she undergone Botox treatments or more radical plastic surgery to camouflage the cumulative effects of aging, alcohol and cocaine abuse, and violence at the hands of ex-husband Bobby Brown?

We don’t know, and even with the saturation coverage of all things medically related to her now, I’m not sure we ever will. But something had happened to the once-radiant face that burst on the music scene in videos for “Saving All My Love for You” and “How Will I Know?” It signified the abuse of a talent as much as the snuffing-out of joy.

With John Barrymore, born on this date in 1882, there was no need to speculate. The stage and screen idol knew just what he was talking about in the quote above. He might have been one of the consummate substance abusers of all time, but he was also as skilled at every aspect of his craft as they came. (Laurence Olivier, who went an Oscar for his own interpretation of Hamlet in 1948, recalled decades later the electrifying effect of seeing Barrymore in the role of the melancholy Dane onstage in the 1920s.)

Barrymore never felt the need to resort to Houston's pitiful evasions and denials of substance abuse. It would have been pointless to do so. After all, in the decade before his alcohol-hastened death in 1942, the camera had been recording the deterioration in the austere good looks that had once earned him the nickname “The Great Profile—and the art of plastic surgery, still in its relative infancy, could not camouflage, let alone reverse, the relentless damage.

In his silent films, Barrymore’s face is still unlined. By the 1930s, however, he was seguing into character roles by necessity. His eyes often pop--no surprise, perhaps, as he was consulting cue cards more frequently because of his failing memory. By the time he played Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet (1936), the face looks puffy and tired, and he appears by far the senior even in a cast notoriously older than their characters.  By Midnight (1939), the lines crowd around the eyes.

Two films made earlier in the decade forecast where matters were headed for The Great Profile. In A Bill of Divorcement (1932), his eyes fill with anxiety as he describes the madness he dreads. The actor might have been channeling his own worst terrors: his father’s insanity had resulted from venereal disease, and Barrymore worried that his alcoholism would produce the same result.

Dinner at Eight (pictured here), made only a year later, was, then and even now, one of the most nakedly terrifying self-portraits an actor ever put on screen. The original George S. Kaufman-Edna Ferber play modeled the character of alcoholic matinee idol “Larry Renault” on Barrymore. (The script even refers to the actor’s nickname.)

It’s impossible to resist the conclusion in his final scene, after Lee Tracy’s cynical publicist has scolded him as "a corpse," that Barrymore is peering into his own abyss. His features slackening, the actor pulls on his face, as if to disprove Tracy’s contention that he is “sagging like an old woman.”

But terrible self-knowledge has overcome Renault/Barrymore, and there’s nothing for him to do, once he’s turned his gas-jets up, than to arrange himself so that when his body is found, “the Great Profile” will manage to look, once again, to its best advantage.

Bonus Quote of the Day (Horace, Anticipating Charlie Sheen by Two Millennia)

Ne, quicunque Deus, quicunque adhibebitur heros,
Regali conspectus in auro nuper et ostro,
Migret in Obscuras humili sermone tabernas:
Aut, dum vitat humum, nubes et inania captet.

(Translation:

“But then they did not wrong themselves so much,
To make a god, a hero, or a king,
(Stript of his golden crown, and purple robe)
Descend to a mechanic dialect;
Nor (to avoid such meanness) soaring high,
With empty sound, and airy notions fly.”—Horace, Ars Poetica, translated by Wentworth Dillon, Earl of Roscommon

I don’t know about you, Faithful Reader, but I’ve given up tracking the daily pronouncements and news surrounding Charlie Sheen. He’s not only put out of business the crew of his own show, but also late-night comics, prime-time entertainment journalists and bloggers such as myself who hoped to say something definitive that would not be superseded by each successive news cycle involving the (now former) star of Two and a Half Men.

Heck, he’s even trying to sideline the editors of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations: the number of catchphrases he’s minting with each Tweet and TV appearance (“tiger blood,” “bi-winning,” etc.) has grown so ridiculously immense that he now requires not just a few pages, but an entire CD unto himself.

When did Sheen transform from a bratty, limited-talent son of a Hollywood star into the highest-paid actor on TV, hellbent on taking down his long-running show? In other words, when did this example of garden-variety Tinseltown megalomania become a tale of not-so-ordinary madness?

Sheen likens himself to “a total freakin’ rock star from Mars.” Indeed, in our current culture, it takes only a nanosecond to morph from a rock star to a rock god. (And doesn’t a god deserve “goddesses,” like the twentysomething women from the adult-entertainment industry in his pad?)

You have to go back a long way to find people who thought they had so many divine powers—the Roman emperors, to be exact. My guess is that Sheen knows only one phrase from the centuries of Roman domination of the world: Horace’s Nunc est bibendum (“Now we must drink”).

But the great poet of the Augustan Age, in Ars Poetica, has some things to say apropos of the descent of gods into the common muck.


Fundamentally, Sheen has to watch out. It’s not just because the world outside his hermetically sealed, “bi-winning” environment shows signs of tuning him out (even the witches of Salem became so offended by his use of “Vatican assassin warlock” that they performed a “magical intervention”).

It’s also because that same public is emitting increasing signs that, though it is willing to forgive the worst—and repeated excesses—of stars, it expects repentance. Mental illness only goes so far to excuse someone who endangers his life and his family members, then goes on a 24/7, seven-days-a-week, ad hoc reality show, then sues the creative powers that tried to use tough love to save his life. The crowd, as Horace shrewdly observed, scorns performers prancing around “With empty sound, and airy notions fly.”

Far more talented actors than Sheen have come a cropper, especially for excesses eerily reminiscent of his. Had he opened his paper or turned on his TV this week, he might have seen someone in his corner, Oscar winner and past box-office star Mel Gibson, pleading guilty to a misdemeanor assault charge for battering the mother of his child, with a career grounded for the last five years after a drunk-driving incident that included an anti-Semitic rant as out-of-left-field as Sheen's own. (See last month’s Vanity Fair article on the roots of Gibson’s decline.)

But, if Sheen really wants a glimpse of his frightening future, he would do well to rent or catch on TCM the 1933 golden oldie, Dinner at Eight—and, in particular, concentrate on John Barrymore, in a role based on his persona and in a performance as emotionally naked and terrifying as any Sheen can ever hope to see.

“The Great Profile” was just a little more than a decade removed from his electrifying Broadway turn as Hamlet, but he was already headed straight for his sorry career finale—an inebriated has-been whose failing memory--and consequent need to improvise anything on the spot--led to the pathetic spectacle of audiences laughing at his expense.

In Dinner at Eight, the situation faced by Barrymore’s character Larry Renault should strike a chord of recognition in Sheen: a star in the grip of substance abuse, abandoned at last by a press agent exhausted from covering for his endless excesses Before his lonely end, Renault/Barrymore looks in the mirror and finds only exhaustion and emptiness. Like Sheen, he finds himself, in Horace’s words, “Stript of his golden crown, and purple robe”—and the discovery shatters him.

Quote of the Day (John Barrymore, on Romeo & Juliet)

“They certainly did in the Chicago company."—Actor John Barrymore (1882-1942), noted authority on Shakespeare and women (not necessarily in that order), when asked if Romeo and Juliet had a physical relationship, quoted in Peter Hay, Broadway Anecdotes (1990)

This Day in Theater History (Barrymore Stage Career Comes to Sodden End)

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.