A Fabulous Hollywood Quintet
WOLFE, ANN F.
A Fabulous Hollywood Quintet Minutes of the Last Meeting. By Gene Fowler. Viking. 277 pp. $3.75. Reviewed by Ann F. Wolfe Contributor, N. Y. "Times Book Review," "Saturday Review" The minutes...
...Fowler to a fare-thee-well for his services as biographee, roundly abusing him the while...
...The defection cost Fairbanks over $250,000...
...Within a short space of time, John Barrymore, W. C. Fields, John Decker and Sadakichi Hartmann exchanged the spirited and spirituous bull-sessions at Decker's studio for whatever ghostly form conversational Walpurgisnachts take in the life hereafter...
...Now, in this merriest of merry epitaphs, survivor Fowler doffs a nostalgic hat to the memory of four cronies who had "lived intensely, as do children and poets and jaguars...
...The misanthropic Fields wrote Hartmann off as "a no-good bum...
...In the course of his outrageous career, he had known acclaim as poet, dramatist and critic, reigned as King of Bohemia in turn-of-the-century Greenwich Village, and survived innumerable evictions from cities and mansions...
...Reviewed by Ann F. Wolfe Contributor, N. Y. "Times Book Review," "Saturday Review" The minutes are here recorded by the only one left to record them, the last of a fabulous Hollywood quintet and himself a living legend...
...He smoked a pipe that Barrymore described as "Vesuvius with halitosis"??a characterization that suited the old wraith's insults as well as a good many of his reminiscences...
...was trying to poison me with inferior whiskey...
...The Rabelaisian din that drew from the West Los Angeles police a telephoned order to "pipe down, or else" was a smoke screen for a gallant last stand...
...Even the time that these blithe spirits were living on was borrowed...
...The other four were allergic to bills??even Fields, who was thoroughly solvent...
...Fowler's having made it the vehicle for a biography of Sadakichi Hartmann...
...That this memoir turns out to be less a feast of reason than a flow of wit, potables and raillery is due in considerable measure to Mr...
...Fowler, derided by Fields as "the perfect type for blackmail...
...If he had been Don Quixote, whom he resembled structurally, he would have sold the windmills a dozen times over...
...but Decker was pathetically eager for the old fellow's approbation of his pictures...
...In the racy badinage that enlivened the nights at Decker's studio, the venerable Hartmann neither got nor gave quarter...
...Though dying on his feet, he could do the tarantella and the Cossack dance...
...Each of the four in his wav was gravely ill...
...An "eerie Jack-of-all-arts," Hartmann was almost 80 years old, a toothless, unfragrant, asthmatic enigma of a man, half German and half Japanese...
...If at times the laughter sounded a little too fierce, it was because four men of courage were shouting down death...
...He rooked the compassionate Mr...
...The exception, of course, was Mr...
...kept going only by a strong heart and a passion for life...
...He was a cad and a scrounger, hut Augustus Saint-Gaudens once wrote to him: "What you think of matters of art I consider of high value...
...was paying him a handsome salary and a weekly case of whiskey to act in The Thief of Bagdad, Hartmann walked out on him...
...After all, this was World War II and Hartmann's reputation as a critic had been established not too long after the Civil War...
...In 1924, when Douglas Fairbanks Sr...
...but Hartmann complained: "He...
...The list was something of a swindle sheet, for it was the basic principle of Hartmann economics to bite the hand that fed him...
...Hartmann's reminiscences included stories of his relations with Walt Whitman, William Morris, W. R. Rossetti, Emerson, Whittier, Verlaine, Mallarme, Whistler, mad King Ludwig, Anatole France and Douglas Fairbanks Sr...
...Especially in matters of finance, the group spoke the same language...
Vol. 37 • May 1954 • No. 19
