Barrymore: The Spectacular-Tumultuous Life of America's Prince of Players, by Terry Chester Schulman
John Barrymore, one of the most admired stage actors of his day, is remembered mostly for one film role. In director Howard Hawks’ Twentieth Century (1934), he played a version of himself as an unhinged thespian struggling with the competing demands of art and commerce. Reading Terry Chester Shulman’s new biography gives rise to an idea: Maybe John was also channeling the ghost of his father, Broadway leading man Maurice Barrymore, whose life and career unglued under the stress of alcohol and syphilis.
Shuman expends many pages on Maurice and John’s thespian siblings, Lionel (It’s a Wonderful Life’s Mr. Potter) and Ethel (who stuck mostly to the stage). None wanted to pursue acting, a profession found on both sides of the family, yet all three were impelled by circumstances and the doors that opened to the Barrymore name.
John wanted to be an illustrator, and Shulman, thanks to digitized periodical archives, unearthed many examples of his work. He was talented with the pen, and although he flopped his first time on stage, his inborn charm and meticulous preparation enabled his new career. He even designed the armor and sword he wore as Richard III. Shulman thinks Barrymore absorbed the teachings of Konstantin Stanislavski, probably by rumor more than reading or hands on experience. In keeping with Stanislavski’s Method, the author thinks, Barrymore sought to grasp the soul of his characters and meld them with his own. In Shulman’s brief review of A Bill of Divorcement (1932), he remarks that Barrymore “shocks the modern viewer with just how much he has in common with later Method actors Brando, Clift, and Dean.”
Shulman is focused more on Barrymore’s troubled life than his film roles. He devotes only two pages to the pace-setting screwball comedy Twentieth Century; Barrymore’s starring role in the first important American horror film, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920), receives the same brevity. However, Shulman does good work in debunking the legend that Barrymore wore no makeup or prosthetics as Mr. Hyde, countering claims that he achieved the monster’s hideous visage through facial contortions. No, Shulman insists, Barrymore applied his own makeup and probably designed his own prosthetics. His exquisite performances as the debonair but doomed aristocrat in Grand Hotel (1932) receives even fewer words, yet they are perceptive. Barrymore was “the fulcrum around which the other characters revolve.”
Spendthrift and alcoholic, Barrymore died in 1942 after a slew of unmemorable pictures, sometimes playing a buffoonish version of himself. Shulman draws no conclusions and offers no theories as he presents a detailed picture of a life.
Barrymore: The Spectacular, Tumultuous Life of America’s Prince of Players is published by University Press of Kentucky.
