mitch_waldow's Blog

Before Britney, Lindsay, Paris, Amy and Andy -- in fact decades before these talented celebs were born -- there was another group of wayward stars, whose alcohol-fueled antics make those of our current band of bad boys (and girls) seem tame.  I refer to a group that was known as "The Bundy Drive Boys," whose exploits are detailed in a new book, my first bit of summer reading.  The book is called Hollywood's Hellfire Club -- The Misadventures of John Barrymore, W.C. Fields, Errol Flynn and the Bundy Drive Boys.  It's written by Gregory William Mank and published by Feral House.

Barrymore, arguably the greatest American male stage actor of the early 20th century, had a long film and radio career, and his family carries on in the business today.  Fields, a big star in Vaudeville, became an even bigger name in the movies.  And Flynn, Anthony Quinn, John Carradine and some of the other "boys" also had big film careers.  In the early 1940s these guys hung out in a little cottage on Bundy Drive, north of Sunset Boulevard in the Brentwood area of L.A.  It was the rented home of Hollywood artist and professional old masters forger John Decker.  The rent was paid by journalist, author and screenwriter Gene Fowler, who served as the group's unofficial scribe.

The amount of alcohol that these men consumed, combined with their flamboyant public images, led to wild and sometimes violent scenes involving spouses, strangers and underage women.  Nudity and public urination, nightclub brawls -- just like the good stuff we see today -- were hallmarks of this boys club, whose coat of arms and motto was painted on the door of the Bundy Drive home: "Useless.  Insignificant.  Poetic."

For many years I was friends with Fowler's youngest son, Will, whose journalistic claim to fame was that he was the first reporter to discover the scene of L.A.'s most infamous murder -- that of Elizabeth Short, also known as the Black Dahlia.   At one time, Will was the news director of KTTV, which today is located on Bundy Drive.  How's that for useless coincidence?  When Will was a young man, he spent many an hour with the Bundy Drive boys.  In fact, he lived with Barrymore for several months, taking care of the ailing actor and driving him to the studio for his weekly radio gig.

One weekend some years ago, a friend and I talked Will into taking us on a guided tour of the Bundy Boys' old haunts.  We drove up to what was left of Barrymore's old estate in Beverly Hills.  It had been subdivided many years earlier, but the main entrance and courtyard were intact.  On Will's urging, we drove inside.  Will got out of the car and rang the bell.   There was no response, so Will called up, "Hey, is anyone home?  I used to live here with Barrymore in 1940!" 

Fortunately, there really was no one at home, else they might have called the cops.

We drove on, soon arriving at the Bundy Drive house.  The coat of arms and motto were still on the front door, more than 50 years after the Bundy Boys were gone.  The home's current residents told us they were proud of the history of the place, and planned to keep that door just the way it was.

Alas, a couple of years ago the little cottage was sold, torn down and replaced with a new, much larger house.  But before the place was razed, the old owner had the illustrious door removed and took it with her.  So the legend lives on, unhinged perhaps, but more or less intact.

You never know what you'll find at a Hollywood garage sale, or at a Beverly Hills garage sale, for that matter.  Take the cast-offs of these two locales and place them in a historic show biz setting, and you've got  "The Great Friars Club Garage Sale," which I attended recently.  It was at the former west coast clubhouse, just across the street from the Beverly Hilton Hotel.

The Friars Club of Beverly Hills, founded as a West Coast refuge for the entertainment fraternity,  has passed into history.   Although the club closed, remnants of it, in the form of art and artifacts, were available for cash.  Inside the old clubhouse were tables full of old photos, menus, recorded tapes of famous Friars Club celebrity roasts and even Christmas decorations.  Leaning against some of the red tufted banquets were large framed paintings of Friars Phyllis Diller, Danny Thomas and others.  They wanted $500 each for the paintings.  Most everything else was a lot cheaper.

Something in a dark corner caught my eye.  It was the framed typewritten set of house rules.  A very sentimental find. 

For many Friars, the clubhouse was a place to shmooze and play cards.  And there were some real card players in that club.   In fact, for several years back in the 1960s, the mob ran a couple of high stake gin-rummy games there.  After the FBI busted the scam, it was revealed that there were peepholes in the ceiling over the tables.  Crooks in the crawlspace electronically signaled playing instructions to their confederates in the games.  Friars were fleeced of at least $400,000.   My great-uncle was one of the victims. 

So now I've got the original Friars Club House Rules.  Here are a few of them:

RULE #1

IF A MEMBER IS DESIROUS OF PARTICIPATING IN A GAME IN PROGRESS WHICH HE KNOWS OR SUSPECTS THAT ONE OR MORE OF THE PARTICIPANTS WILL OBJECT TO HIS PLAYING IN THE SAME GAME, HE SHOULD TRY TO FIND ANOTHER GAME, AND THUS AVOID POSSIBLE EMBARRASSMENT TO HIMSELF AND THE OTHER BROTHER FRIARS.  (Do you think the mob would have approved of this?)

RULE #5

ALL MEMBERS OF THE CLUB ARE PROHIBITED FROM ENTERING THE KITCHEN OR BEHIND THE BAR AREA.  MEMBERS DESIRING FOOD OR REFRESHMENTS MUST BE SERVED BY EMPLOYEES.  NO SELF-HELP WILL BE CONDONED.  (In other words, don't try to stiff the help or steal the food.)

RULE #8

IF A MEMBER'S LANGUAGE, ATTITUDE OR BEHAVIOR GOES BEYOND THE LIMITS OF GOOD TASTE, THIS SHOULD BE REPORTED TO THE HOUSE COMMITTEE AND APPROPRIATE ACTION MAY BE TAKEN. (Coarse language at the Friars Club?  Never!)

These rules must have been left in a closet somewhere.  By the amount of the dust and dirt on them they could not possibly have been on display in a prominent place. 

I left the sale thinking that another bit of entertainment history has been cast to the wind.  As I drove away, I looked back at the building and saw a sign posted on the side: "Now Available."

I've always been interested in how public officials relate to the public, that is, I'm curious about their interactions with private citizens -- especially in everyday, non-campaign settings.  In recent years I've witnessed several such encounters, and have been a participant in a couple of them, both involving Calfiornia governors.

Just before he was recalled, my cousins club had a quirky run-in with then-Governor Gray Davis.  It was in the patio of a restaurant in Beverly Hills.  At the time, the state was in the midst of an "energy crisis" that was driving up electricity rates.  Davis was getting a large share of the blame for this, though as it turned out  energy giant Enron and a slew of other energy companies, speculators and even a few nasty politicos were given final responsibility for cooking up the disaster.

 Anyway, my family group was sitting in the restaurant's patio early that summer evening.  It was past twilight, but all of the outdoor lighting was turned off to conserve energy.  During our dinner, Governor Davis and a small security detail walked through the patio to the take-out counter.  After a few minutes, Davis and his entourage returned.  By now it was pretty dark in that patio.  As they approached our tables on their way out, I called out, "Say Governor, can't you do something about the lighting in this place?" 

In just a beat, Davis replied, "Why don't you try candles?  It's more romantic."

Everybody laughed, and we snapped a few pictures. I must admit that my opinion of Davis as a humorless political animal changed that night.  It takes someone with a sense of humor, and perhaps humility, to handle a friendly barb the way he did.  With his political career in jeopardy, Davis was amazingly relaxed and comfortable among strangers in public -- though I'm sure he figured that some of them wanted him recalled.

I was thinking of that incident after a brief meeting with current Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.  Again, the scene was a restaurant, or rather the parking lot of a restaurant.  We were on vacation, and I was playing with a new video camera.  When I got out of the car, I had the camera in hand.  I looked up and there, 15 feet in front of me was the Governator himself.    He was chatting with the driver of a fancy new sportscar, and I could hear that he was very impressed with the car's performance.   While he was involved in conversation, a line of cars waiting to get into the lot had backed up into the street.  Not one to miss an opportunity, I turned on the camera and walked over to him.

While continuing to shoot, I introduced myself and my son.  Brief handshakes and then Arnold turned away.  One of the plainclothes officers approached me.

"Hey, that's enough.  You've got enough shots.  Can't you see he's having a private conversation?"  With my camera still running, I reminded the officer -- as if he needed reminding -- that a governor is a public figure and this was a public place. 

"Right," he answered, "but how would you like it if you were out for a meal, having a private conversation, and someone tried to interrupt you?"

"But I'm not a public figure, and he's an elected official," I said.  I should have added, "Besides, he's not eating a meal, he's walking through a parking lot." 

In very lay terms, it's well established that a public official (or public figure, for that matter) cannot expect the same right to privacy as a private citizen.  Like it or not, that's why news crews and pushy reporters don't get thrown into the jug whenever they approach a politician -- even when that politician wants to be left alone.  To be fair, in this encounter I did not identify myself as a journalist.  To the Governor and his security men I was a private citizen; a member of the public.  Sometimes the public gets the same brusque treatment as reporters.

Schwarzenegger is a very public figure.  As an actor he must have been used to having the public approach him.   From what I understand, he's a personable fellow.  As Governor, his security team is doing a darned good job of keeping the public at arm's length.  I realize that his personal safety is always an issue.  Yet as an elected official, the Governor must accept the fact that people in public will toss him questions, and that not every  conversation will be about cars.

After leaving the restaurant, I remembered that when I met Davis he was in the middle of a  crisis that, whether real or manufactured, eventually brought him down.  Nevertheless, he didn't seem too bitter at the time, at least not in public.  And here, just a few minutes earlier, I met the guy who succeeded him, and now is dealing with a huge budget mess -- a very real crisis of his own.  As this drama evolves, it will be interesting to see how the Governor handles the pressure in a public setting.   That is, if anyone gets close enough to document it.

Last month at the L.A. Press Club I attended a gathering of former employees of the now-defunct Los Angeles Herald-Examiner.  The purpose was to mark the near-20th anniversary of the paper's final edition.  Most of the ex-Her-Ex ex-patriots worked there in the 1970s and '80s.  They were reporters, editors, columnists and pressmen.  I worked for the Herald long before most of them got there.  And yet I'm younger than most of them.  How could this be?  Here's how: I was in distribution.  I was a newsboy.

I didn't deliver Herald-Examiners house-to-house on a bicycle.  I stood on street corners and hawked them car-to-car.  In L.A.'s MacArthur Park there's a statue of a newsboy.  It's a sculpture by Italian artist Paolo Troubetzkoy, and it dates to 1920.  Aside from the subject's knickers and cap, that bronze figure pretty much is what a newsboy looked like when I sold papers on the street.  I'd stand on the corner with a dozen papers under one arm,and with the other extended, I'd hold the latest edition for all to see.  I wore an apron change bag (which I still have) and a coin changer tucked under my belt.

Until the 1960s paper vendors were common sights on busy street corners in L.A.  The Herald often used kids to sell its afternoon editions on the streets.  We were "independent contractors" and got to keep three cents for every dime paper that we sold.  Sometimes I'd make as much as two dollars in an afternoon.  Not bad money for a kid.

The paper corners  were at heavily-travelled intersections.  In the three years that I hawked Heralds I had four West L.A. corners.  Some were better than others.  Like they say, "location, location, location."  My worst corner caught drivers on their way home to more affluent  parts of town.  Most of these people did not read the Herald, which was a Hearst paper known for its screaming headlines and arch-conservative editorial slant.  At my best corners, I sold to customers who did not read the Herald for its rhetoric, but instead for its race results.   I figured that most of these bettors rarely won, because I almost never got tipped.  Yet one of my pedestrian customers tipped every day, but not with money.  This guy was a comedian who used to work in burlesque.  Each day when he bought a paper he'd tell me a dirty joke.  I still remember some of them, but I won't relate them here.

At one of my corners there was a music school nearby.  It was a small school.  A fellow gave piano lessons.  He was a big man, and I'd see him a few times a week as he walked to the corner drugstore.    He never spoke to me, though, and he seemed very stern.  As a kid I had a habit of whistling, and I used to whistle a lot while I was selling papers.  I guess I was a top 40 nuisance, because one day this piano teacher  walked over to me -- I thought he finally was going to say hello -- and said, "If you don't cut out that  whistling I'm going to break your neck."

My tenure as a Herald-Examiner newsboy ended on afternoon in December, 1967, when the paper's employees went on strike.  Although I was not technically an employee, there was a lockout which affected all of the distributors.  And that pretty much marked the end of adolescent newsboys on L.A. streets.  Whenever I drive by MacArthur Park and see that old statue I wonder if there would be more newspaper readers today if kids still sold them on corners.


 

This is the first entry of the first blog I’ve ever written. I can’t promise it’ll be historic, but it will have a bit of history in it.

I’m going to tell you how the place where we tv folks work has a connection to surfers and the movies. And there’ll be an archaeological angle to it. – sort of. We’ll visit a place that exists in only two locations: peoples’ memories and archivists’ vaults.

I work at Fox Television Center, near Bundy Drive and Olympic Boulevard in West Los Angeles. If we were to set the ‘Way Back Machine to 1972, my desk would be about 20 yards from the back fence of a drive-in movie theater. Not just any drive-in, but the Olympic Drive-In, with its 775 parking spaces facing that Bundy and Olympic intersection. With a giant screen in front of them, of course.

On the traffic side of that screen, drivers saw a painting of two surfers, a man and a woman, perpetually riding a stucco wave.



Ahh, the Olympic. Never the ideal venue for critical moviegoers, but little ones and teenagers sure loved it. I must have gone there at least 100 times. The drive-in experience was just that – an experience. I think the last pictures that played there were hot rod flicks. Didn’t matter. They could’ve been running The Greatest Story Ever Told and at the Olympic it would still seem like a car flick, because through half the picture all you’d hear were engines. But that’s a key part of the drive-in experience.

In November, 1972 it was announced that the Olympic would be closing. The real estate was just too valuable for a drive-in. I had to take some pictures for posterity. I especially wanted to get some tight shots of that big mural. When the photos came back, I noticed how oddly proportioned the surfers appeared. It was the way they looked on their boards. I’m sure our own Rick Dickert, Carlos Amezcua and a few of our other resident surfers might have some thoughts on that.



I took those pictures because I realized that drive-in theaters in Southern California were on their way out. I wanted to document as many of them as I could. Especially this one. Little did I know that more than 35 years later I’d be sitting at a desk, at close to the same location where my car would have been – somewhere in the far back row – writing about it.

And the archaeological angle? Several years ago I picked up a couple of pitted, banged-up drive-in speakers – the kind you’d hang on your car’s window. Now they’re hanging on a wall in my garage. Every time I see them I think of the Olympic.