Two years ago in Hollywood I was supposed to be “through.” There were many producers, a lot of my public, and most of my relatives who thought it was about time.

I had the chilling suspicion that perhaps it was about time, too. Whenever I could avoid looking into a mirror no longer, I would see that I was becoming undeniably antiqued. For years, for decades practically, I have admitted to being forty. I was even and with ghastly speed getting to the point where forty seemed like dewy adolescence. In fact, when, upon my arrival in Chicago in the fall of 1938 to play in My Dear Children, my good friend the drama critic Ashton Stevens revealed that he was ten years my elder, I marveled how any creature that old could be outside the Egyptian Room of some museum.

Yet it wasn’t alone my wrinkles that were making me “through” in Hollywood. It was, more importantly, my insistence upon having a little gay home in the West. Or, more exactly, what was disturbing the film moguls was my life with Elaine, the latest of the Mrs. Barrymores.

Actually, you see, Hollywood is quite allergic to love lives. What it likes stars to do is give the impression that their greatest off-screen happiness comes from feeding four-leaf clovers to cows.

I have always and quite openly preferred pleasures that are more personal. To be boldly explicit, I prefer being in love, a state which I regard as a continual, or at least a recurrent, male hypnosis. I might even go so far as to say that love is my hobby, even though I never anticipated that I could go so far as to marry four women.

As a matter of fact, I haven’t gone that far. Four women have married me.

That is a very different thing, as every woman knows.

In all sincerity, however, I do say that until Elaine married, and re-married, me I did not know what marriage was all about. Now I do. As all the world that can read is aware, the course of our love has been as smooth as a roller coaster, but it has been a vivid and glorious excitement and one for which I have been only too willing to pay the price.

But there lay my second trouble in Hollywood two years ago. In the place where my bank account had once been there was only a void – a void and a snowstorm of bills all marked “Please remit.” Nothing would have pleased me more than remitting, but the chance of doing it seemed discouragingly slight. I had sunk—“sunk” is Hollywood’s verb and not mine own—to being a mere “featured player” in such epics as True Confession and Hold That Coed. Upon their release, I realized that these were really not my meat and most certainly not my bacon.

I had to do something speedily. It was right at this moment, and providentially, that the script of My Dear Children was delivered to me.

My Dear Children was an extremely dizzy farce about a man who had married five times and who had produced as many sets of children. Its plot, briefly, concerned his attempt to keep a romantic rendezvous with a new young woman and his children’s attempt to prevent him from doing just that.

I took the play to Chicago for its debut, fully aware that the theatrical world in general and Hollywood in particular regarded my return to the stage in such a vehicle as John Barrymore’s last stand or Hamlet to ham in one generation.

Not that the latter bothered me. I have always known that I am a ham. Any actor who says there is no ham in him is either a liar or simply a stock-broker who should go back to his own profession. But if the practitioners in my trade and the world in general wanted to call me mad for returning to the footlights, I had no complaints. There was a method in my madness.

Naturally, I hoped for some success; but the factor that turned My Dear Children into a hit was unexpected. From the opening line night I began “ad-libbing” lines, putting in whatever speeches came to me. The fault was not with the play and I most certainly was not boldly trying to improve upon it. I thought originally and I still think that it is an excellent and very funny play. The reason I kept putting in my own spontaneous lines was that I could not remember the ones that the original authors had written for me.

I can remember the entire role of Hamlet, which is the longest ever written, but I can’t for the life of me recall any contemporary part. Of course, some of this may be due to the fact that the lines of Hamlet are worth remembering. At any rate, in movies I have a faithful helper who crawls around, out of camera range, holding up within reading distance of my flickering sight a blackboard on which are written the speeches I am to say.

But this trick being obviously impossible in the theater, I often had to fill in speeches until the right cues came back to me. It was sheer acting survival, but if such a trick served to attract and amuse audiences, it was fine by me. Applause I dote upon to such an extent that I have warned my relatives that if I receive so much as one handclap I shall sit up at my own funeral and take a bow.

At any rate, my return to what is so fondly called, for no reason I have ever been able to fathom, the legitimate theater turned out to be a box-office success. We had a long run in Chicago and decided to invade New York.

The opening night in New York was also the night that Elaine and I were reconciled. That even caused the reporters to pounce upon me with such questions that next morning, when I savored the full intimacy of their stories, I felt that the boys had gone down my throat and wandered around inside me with a lantern.

Now, right up until that blast of publicity, Hollywood had been getting more friendly toward me. The slightest touch of box office makes that whole world spin; but those headlines gave it the jitters, the cinema center still being officially in the class with the nameless gentleman who fondly believed that the safest way to make a fire was to rub two Boy Scouts together. It is really the bane of Hollywood that vitality is seldom conventional.

Petulantly, official Hollywood prophesied that even if I wasn’t already professionally dead, this publicity would finish me. In didn’t worry about it myself. I was too happy to be concerned with it.

Life, however, is much more generous and charming than people five it credit for being. Apparently, the whole world does love a lover, even one like myself who is a bit eroded around the edges. Elaine, whom I genuinely consider a fine actress, came into the play as one of my daughters, and we had a wonderful romp. I used to lie awake nights trying to think of gags to break her up in her lines of the play. Once I had her maid walk across the stage right in the middle of the action. Another time I tried to get the doorman of our hotel to appear in a bit, just to surprise her. The doorman refused, however. He said acting was beneath his dignity.

When My Dear Children persisted in being a Broadway hit too, Hollywood really melted. My indiscretions had won me what my discretions could never even have imagined. I was offered the starring role in The Great Profile, a role that is a burlesque of me. The very thought of such a part enchanted me. I have seen so many actors do very fine imitations of me that I wanted to see if I could so a creditable job of it myself. That, anyhow, was the artistic part – if I may call it that – of the transaction. My creditors were the main reason I signed up. I am, most completely, making The Great Profile for them. After this I hope to make a film for myself.

They had let me leave Hollywood without so much as a tear; but they brought me back by plane, with publicity men meeting me at airports, asking for ideas for getting headlines in the papers. I finally suggested our dropping Elaine over Hollywood by parachute, with a running commentary by me.

Fortunately, they didn’t demand that I make good on that.

Imagine my surprise, if not horror, when I discovered that I was to dress—and what’s more, to undress—in the bungalow which had but recently been vacated by a much greater star, Miss Shirley Temple. I was completely bemused to find myself in an atmosphere of swings, dollies, and a parade of pink elephants that went straight across the mantel above the open fire place. I had thought until then that I was old enough to be put in the boys’ dormitory, and it wasn’t until I went and touched those elephants and discovered that they were Shirley’s toys and not products of my ginger-ale-soaked imagination that I felt quite safe.

Immediately after that, when I found that they had cast Mary Beth Hughes, a most pillowy blonde, and Gregory Ratoff, the acting director, or the directing actor, to play opposite me, my cup began running over. Greg is just as scenery-chewing an actor as I am. In fact, in our scenes together we look like a dance between St. Vitus and Epilepsy, and I started off hamming so consistently that Walter Lang, our director, said to me after I did my own death scene several times:

“Now, John, you’ve died for yourself, and plenty. Would you mind just dying quietly for me?”

Later, in the projection room, watching myself play dead, I knew I had never been more alive. By playing—even by being—the fool, I was back having fun and, I hope, giving fun.

Whether people laugh at or with you, laughter itself remains a good and healing thing, and when you get to be practically a human sequoia, as I have, you also learn to laugh at yourself.

So there is the real method in my madness. I want to have laughs and produce laughs, or, if you prefer, to be happy and to produce happiness. That may not be the worthiest of human motives. I know, of course, that it is very frivolous.

Yet I do feel that if several prominent gentlemen in Europe of whom we are all too aware had had this ambition rather than that of power, the world these later summer evenings would be listening to nothing more serious than the song of larks against the twilight sky, instead of hearing, as it is, the whine of bombs bearing destruction.

Publication Date: September 7, 1940