Good Night, Sweet Prince
By
ALIMONY,” Jack Barrymore once said, “is the most exorbitant of all stud-fees, and the worst feature of it is that you pay it retroactively.” Asked what he thought of prohibition, he replied: “Fortunately, I don’t think of it.” I quote these two extracts from Gene Fowler’s excellent biography of the greatest actor of our time, in order that you may be sure it is no stained-glass treatment. Nor is it a circus piece.
Good Night, Sweet Prince is, in fact, the most moving theatrical biography I have come across since Nijinsky’s Diary. But it is not a sad book. It is a strong book, fluently and sympathetically written, yet pulling no punches. Two factors stand out as determinants of Barrymore’s erratic character and career: his amatory initiation, at fourteen, with a young woman of whom his father was enamored, and his later fear that he might lose his reason and be committed to an institution for the insane.
Of the earlier factor he apparently spoke little in later life but, as Fowler perceptively points out, it may well have had a bearing on his unsurpassed interpretation of Hamlet. Barrymore’s fear of insanity he did confide to his closest friends; and it certainly did not fail to contribute to his drinking. But — perhaps mistaking the effect for the cause — Barrymore tried, heroically, to cure himself of alcoholism, even going so far as Madras, India, where he underwent Hindu therapy. It was no use. Back in America, his last seven years were emotionally cyclonic and economically desperate. In Fowler’s indignant words, these years were filled with “fair-weather leeches and foul-weather bleeders who drank at the veins of an impaired memory.” What Ashton Stevens called Barrymore’s “clownish crucifixion” was duly and bravely played, and the curtain fell.
Incidentally, Fowler’s firsthand reporting of Barrymore’s death has the simplicity of great writing. Good Night, Sweet Prince is highly recommended for the general reader as well as the theatrically inclined. Viking, $3.50.
SCHUYLER WATTS