BARRYMORE!
I can’t think of a better subject for a one-man show than John Barrymore. Brilliant, beautiful, flamboyant, haunted by personal demons of which alcoholism was only the most obvious, Barrymore led a life characterized by early success and premature dissipation. He enjoyed friendships with figures as colorful and diverse as W.C. Fields, Winston Churchill, Errol Flynn, Albert Einstein, and Krishnamurti; he suffered tortured relationships with his drunken, syphilitic, finally insane matinee-idol father and a drug- and sex-addicted daughter; he battled his way through a long series of tempestuous, sometimes ludicrous romances, marriages, and divorces. He was the first truly modern Shakespearean actor, using the controversial new insights of psychoanalysis to create the greatest Hamlet of his time and perhaps of our century; he was a sublime light comedian, a heart-fluttering leading man, a formidable character actor, and–finally, tragically–a weirdly willing accomplice in his own self-debasement as the star of a series of lowbrow entertainments designed to exploit his image as a befuddled has-been, a “sugar-cured . . . old half-baked Hamlet,” as Rudy Vallee once called him in a radio skit.
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To a contemporary audience aware of such depressing examples of celebrity self-destruction as John Belushi and Richard Burton, Barrymore’s case seems at once familiar and confounding. Why did he throw it all away? Alcoholism was certainly part of it: he was diagnosed as “a chronic drunkard” by the age of 14. But there were other factors too. Seduced at age 15 by his own stepmother, he wrestled the rest of his life with oedipal guilt, sexual compulsiveness, and a deep mistrust of women. (“The way to fight a woman is with your hat,” he once said. “Grab it and run.”) The product of two families whose prominence in the theater stretches back to the 18th century (and extends today to 14-year-old movie star and recovering alcoholic Drew Barrymore, John’s granddaughter), Barrymore found acting boring, if inevitable. A gorgeous man aptly nicknamed “the Great Profile,” he took perverse pleasure in distorting his graceful face and form behind a series of grotesque roles; in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and as Sherlock Holmes disguising himself as the fiendish Professor Moriarty, he seemed intent on flaunting his own conflicted self-image as lover and monster. In his mid-30s, he made the transition from comedy to serious drama, modern and classic; yet after a scorching Richard III and a world-acclaimed Hamlet, he left the stage for more than a decade, returning only to parody himself in a tacky comedy about an old actor. Why?
The main problem is Palles’s extensive reliance on John Kobler’s 1977 biography Damned in Paradise: The Life of John Barrymore. Though Kobler is unacknowledged in the program and press material for the play, some of Palles-Barrymore’s descriptions of people and events sound startlingly similar to corresponding passages in Kobler’s book–his stage debut with his father and his seduction by his stepmother, among other sections that I happened to read just before seeing the play. As a result, much of Palles’s script rings false and hollow. His Barrymore talks about himself in the tone of a distanced observer, not the voice of a man who’s experienced the losses and shames described here.
