Posted on 02/25/2007 1:33:56 PM PST by Millee
THE MIXTURE OF LIQUOR AND FAME has produced many tragedies, some exceptional, such as Fatty Arbuckle's notorious 1921 party that left one woman dead and his career in ruins. And then there are the more quotidian tragedies, actors and directors who thirsted too much, drank too frequently, and died too young as a result. Their names are legion: Peter Lawford , Ed Wood, Oliver Reed, Elisa Bridges, Natalie Wood. Hollywood is a town that adores a tragedy, and too much money, fame, and liquor are the ideal ingredients for an appalling contretemps.
But we are not here to beat our chests and mourn those who have drunk and fallen. Like all worthwhile adult activities -- including driving and sex -- drinking carries with it both great responsibility and great risk. Hollywood has had its share of those who risked and lost, but it has also produced more than its share of truly great drinkers, who drank deeply and well. Frank Sinatra, who made it to a respectable 82, closed almost every bar in Vegas, swilling his favorite bourbon, Jack Daniel's. Robert Mitchum was rarely without a drink in his hand, and celebrated the bootlegger in his 1958 film "Thunder Road." Mitchum lived to 80. Even such minor-league stars as Fred MacMurray managed to find a place in drinking history. The "Father Knows Best" star was a member of a group of rowdy Hollywood drinkers led by John Wayne and including Lana Turner, a group dubbed "The Team." This group claims to have been present for the creation of the Margarita. This claim is, of course, disputed, but nobody disputes The Team's importance in popularizing the beverage. Next time you enjoy the tequila cocktail, remember that you wouldn't be drinking it were it not for Fred MacMurray's love for the drink.
But this is the day of the Academy Awards, and so we are not here to celebrate your everyday Hollywood drinking, we're here to celebrate the best. This list of of the five drinkers for whom the act of consuming alcohol was part of their art, essential to their character. Some drank gladly and died well, some drank greedily and died as an eventual result, but all of them created award-worthy personas as drunks. Some were comical, some were elegant, but in each case it was hard to separate the onscreen drunk from the offscreen drinker. With such recent Tinseltown drinking catastrophes as Mel Gibson's boozy antisemitism and Britney Spears' humiliating intoxications, its worth remembering actors for whom drinking was an art.
1. W.C. Fields: The legendary comedian looked every bit the drinker he was, with his portly body, his bulbous red nose, and his genially cantankerous persona. Fields played a lot of characters, from scowling misanthrope to put-upon everyman, but they all seemed to share a few common characteristics. For one, every role he played seemed to give him opportunity to express a sort of general disgust at children. For another, he always seemed ready for a hard drink. In "My Little Chickadee," he regales fellow card players of his adventures with alcohol. "During one of my treks through Afghanistan, we lost our corkscrew," he tells them in mock horror. "Compelled to live on food and water for several days."
Offscreen, he was rarely seen without a drink, and once stormed out of a dressing room in a rage after someone had inadvertently spilled his bottle of whiskey, crying out "Who took the cork out of my lunch?," a line that was later used in the film "You Can' Cheat an Honest Man." He refused to drink water, and would dismiss it curtly, explaining thusly : "Fish fuck in it." And yet Fields had an extraordinary ability to hold his liquor, and was almost never seen drunk, which he once explain with this elegant turn of phrase: "When you woo a wet goddess, there's no use falling at her feet."
Fields died at age 66 of a stomach hemorrhage, often attributed to his drinking, and, in fact, his death certificate lists "cirrhosis of the liver" as his cause of death. On his deathbed, Field's is reported to have wondered aloud to friends how far he could have gone "if I had laid off the booze." But Fields was a comedian, and frequently opined that there is nothing funny that was not also terrible. This is not to excuse Fields' drinking, which was suicidally excessive, but merely to explain how it might have been that he mined his drinking so effectively for laughs. After all, Fields explained comedy in this way: "If it causes pain, it's funny; if it doesn't, it isn't."
2. Dean Martin: For much of his early career, Dean Martin was primarily known as the straight man to a lunatic beanpole named Jerry Lewis, a job he handled with exceptional grace. The job of a straight man is to let audiences know how to respond to a comedian, and Martin set an example of tolerant affection, which gave permission to the audience to feel the same toward Lewis. Otherwise, the spasmodic man-child Lewis portrayed might have been a little too much to take. When the team broke up in 1956, Martin was left to his own devices; although his lone purpose in films up until that point had been to be a pretty boy accomplice who enjoyed a few songs every film, suddenly Martin turned in a few terrific dramatic performances in films like "The Young Lions" and, especially, as a boozy loser in Howard Hawks' 1959 film "Rio Bravo."
On his own, Martin demonstrated considerable comedic chops, and he quickly fell in with Frank Sinatra's Rat Pack. During the 60s, the Rat Pack took over Vegas for extended periods, lensing a few movies (including the original "Ocean's 11") while performing extemporaneously at The Sands Casino. There, Dean Martin began to develop a reputation as a hard-drinking womanizer, borrowing equally from his "Rio Bravo" role and from the antics of hard-drinking comedian Joe E. Lewis, who was always a favorite with the Rat Pack crowd (so much so that Sinatra played him in a 1957 biopic called "The Joker is Wild.") Lewis, who once quipped "I always wake at the crack of ice," tacitly gave his blessing to Dean Martin's persona, regularly saying "I don't drink any more than the man next to me, and the man next to me is Dean Martin."
In the late 60s and 70s, Martin really came into his own playing the soused playboy, which he turned into an international superspy in the Matt Helm films, as well as hosting his own television variety series, "The Dean Martin Show," in which he staggering around the set, singing a few phrases of a song, working overtime to make his guests and costars lose their composure, and always clutching a cocktail. He had a vanity license plate at the time that read "DRUNKY," and was often charged with alcoholism. However, Shirley Maclean once sipped from Martin's ever-present cocktail when he wasn't looking, and discovered it contained apple juice. In fact, Dean Martin's private life was considerably different than his public one. He was a loving family man, and spent his free time either watching Westerns on television or playing golf. Nonetheless, Dean Martin produced some of Hollywood's best one-liners about drinking, including this sage bit of wisdom: "You're not drunk if you can lie on the floor without holding on."
3. Barry Fitzgerald: A diminutive, scowling Irishman, Barry Fitzgerald got his start at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, originating roles in the plays of a former roommate, Sean O'Casey's; In fact. O'Casey wrote "The Silver Tassle" specifically for Fitzgerald. It was O'Casey's work that brought Fitzgerald to the screen, first in Alfred Hitchcock's 1930 adaptation of "Juno and the Paycock " and later in John Ford's 1936 lensing of "The Plough and the Stars." From that point on, Fitzgerald was Hollywood's go-to actor for exaggerated Irishness, and was often found in films playing characters with names like Thady O'Heggarty, Denno Noonan, and Stooky O'Meara . He naturally spoke with the sort of "ta ta tee tee ta" cadence that stage actors affect to parody the Irish, and he could often be found in films leering lustfully at a bottle of whisky. His most celebrated role was as Father Fitzgibbon in 1944's "Going My Way," playing a mock pious prasih priest who relentless scorns the progressive attitudes of his assistant, played by Bing Crosby, while sneaking "a drop of the craiture" before bed. Fitzgerald was so popular in this role that the Aacdemy nominated him for both best actor and best supporting actor, the first -- and only -- time this has happened.
Fitzgerald was actually more fond of golf than he was of drink, but he produced one absolutely seminal performance as a great Irish drinker. In 1952 he was cast opposite John Wayne in John Ford's "The Quiet Man," playing Michaleen Oge Flynn, a carriage driver and matchmaker in the Irish coastal town of Inishfree . When Flynn isn't helping The Duke scheme to win the heart of neighbor Maureen O'Hara, he's drinking -- and, whenever he can, he combines the two activities. He frequently appears at O'Hara's house dressed in the uniform of the matchmaker, including top hat and tales, but the belabored formality he affects is undermined by the fact that he is either already drunk or soon will be, and can be quite sharp about the subject: When O'Hara offers him water for his drink, he snaps back at her "When I drink whiskey, I drink whiskey; and when I drink water, I drink water." He seems to have an infinite variety of ways of pleading for alcohol, crying out "me mouth is like a dry crust and the sun is that hot on me pate!" In fact, Michaleen Oge Flynn is so regular a character at the nearby pub that his mule automatically stops there when they pass, out of sheer force of habit. Fitzgerald's expressive face rapidly moves from vexation to contemplation when this happens, and he quickly allows that his mule has the right idea, he could go for a drink at this moment. And then off Fitzgerald goes, top hat and all, into the pub.
4. Tallulah Bankhead: Here we have one of the great amoral legends of Hollywood. The beautiful daughter of the speaker of the US House of Representatives and niece to two senators, Bankhead was the original rich girl gone wild -- which she did with considerably more wit and class than her modern counterparts. A peripheral member of the Algonquin Round Table, she specialized in provocation, her humor rooted in crying out inappropriate pronouncements at inopportune times. Any list of Bankhead quotes are lists of brilliantly wicked mots, such as her explanation that " my father warned me about men and booze but he never said anything about women and cocaine." At a wedding, she was reported to have declared, in a stage whisper, that she'd had both the bride and the groom, and neither were any good.
Bankhead was better known as a character than an actor -- although studios tried to promote her as "The Next Dietrich," she was widely regarded as a rather flat actress, unable to translate her indomitable personality to the screen. Instead, she found her success mostly through stage work, although she did turn in a superlative performance in Alfred Hitchcock's "Lifeboat." Despite her limited success in motion pictures, she was a perennial on the Hollywood scene, throwing parties that lasted for days, pouring copious quantities of Kentucky Bourbon down her throat, and pulling off her clothes during conversations,prompting one friend to query " Tallulah dear, why are you always taking your clothes off? You have such lovely frocks!" It was, in fact, her predilection for nakedness that would be her undoing: her death from pneumonia was rumored to have been caused by a nude stroll in a rainstorm. Her last words were perfect, a final, lustful cry from a woman who had made an art of both vice and epater le bourgeois: "bourbon . . . codeine. . . "
5. William Powell: The greatest drinker in film was Nick Charles, the gadabout former detective and tipsy cynic at the center of the "Thin Man" movie series. Nick has married well, to the ditzy but adorable Nora Charles, and has married her fortune along with it, but his plans of enjoying a semi-retirement of sleeping, drinking, and throwing cocktail parties is endlessly interrupted by crimes. Dashiell Hammett's breezy, semi-autobiographic original novel benefited in its screen adaptation from a coup of casting. William Powell was hired to play Nick Charles, and Powell was perfect. Powell specialized in playing urbane characters; he was cheeky, droll, and surprisingly rough around the edges. He already had a successful run playing sophisticate detective Philo Vance in a series of films, but the gentlemanly Vance was much less an interesting character than Nick Charles.
We first meet Charles in a New York hotel, where he is glibly explaining to a group of interested bartenders the proper techniques for shaking cocktails, with the Manhattan shaken to fox-trot time. "a Bronx to two-step time," he continues, "a dry martini you always shake to waltz time." Charles consumes heroic amounts of alcohol, in part because he loves the stuff, and in part, one suspects, because if he is drunk enough his wife, who wants him to investigate the disappearance of a family friend, will leave him alone. Most of the important scenes in the film take place at cocktail parties, with Nick Charles porting liquor down his throat, but he's never too drunk to ask a revealing question or act quickly when things turn sour -- in once scene, he manages to knock his wife unconscious and disarm an intruder in a single motion, despite having drunk enough liquor to kill a hobo. When she wakes, he explains that he had to knock her out -- she was in the line of fire. Most of us wouldn't be able to think so clearly when sober.
William Powell would play Nick Charles in six more films, but, even when playing other roles, he blended a cynical intelligence with a love of drink -- he starred as an elegant derelict in "My Man Godfrey" and played a sodden bohemian in "Double Wedding." In his last film, 1955's "Mister Roberts," he plays a genial navy doctor whose primary responsibility is to tend to sailors with hangovers. In a bravura scene, Powell assists a lazy, wolflike ensign, played by Jack Lemmon. The junior officer is looking to intoxicate an attractive nurse, and so Powell concocts a passable facsimile of scotch using medicinal neutral spirits, Coca Cola, and iodine. It was Powell's last screen appearance, and it was a fine adieu: His performance called to mind an older and less reckless Nick Charles, sober-minded and cautious but still wry and mischievous, and still showing a connoisseurs taste for hard liquor. If Nick Charles was an elegant drunk, at the end of his career William Powell showed us something even finer: An elegant drinker. (SPARBER)
--who was a teetotaler--IIRC,
How do you leave out Errol Flynn
or
the original ( Bogart, Tracy etc) rat pack...
Is there Awards that anyone would ever watch?
O'Toole--can't believe O'Toole hasn't been mentioned.
Here's a funny Spitting Image of O'Toole:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=jspfr4mEImE
"The Quiet Man" and "Mr. Roberts" are two of the most underrated movies of John Wayne and Henry Fonda's careers.
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