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John Barrymore’s biographer refuted a rumor that the legendary Golden Age actor’s body was stolen from the morgue by his friends in 1942 so he could join them for one more party.
Drew Barrymore, the “Grand Hotel” star’s granddaughter, even confirmed the story six years ago, saying “Not only yes, but there have been cinematic interpretations of that.”
Terry Chester Shulman, who wrote the biography “Barrymore: The Spectacular, Tumultuous Life of America’s Prince of Players,” about John Barrymore told Fox News Digital: “I would like nothing more than to tell you that it’s true, because it’s such an outrageous story, but it isn’t, and it couldn’t be because both of the participants, Raoul Walsh, the director, and Errol Flynn, who the trick was supposedly played on, told totally different stories.”
He continued, “In their autobiographies, you think they would have gotten their story straight. But, you know, in one story … Raoul Walsh’s story, Flynn runs out of the house screaming and hides behind an oleander bush, and Flynn’s story, he does something else: He runs out into the porch.”
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John Barrymore’s biographer refutes a story about his corpse that Drew Barrymore once confirmed. (Michael Loccisano/Getty Images; Warner Bros./Archive Photos/Getty Images)
He added that in one account, Barrymore’s body is propped in a chair in front of a door and in another it’s on a sofa.
“The other thing is that Walsh says that he asked Malloy, the owner of Malloy’s funeral home, if he could borrow Jack’s body,” Shulman said. “And Malloy said, ‘Yes.’”
But Barrymore’s body was actually at the Pierce Brothers funeral home, not Malloy, he added.
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“So, I hate to dispel that great story,” he lamented. “And finally, Jack’s great friend Gene Fowler and his son Will sat up with Jack’s body all night and said it absolutely wasn’t true. So I’m sorry to be a killjoy.”
Barrymore was an alcoholic, which contributed to his death at 60 years old.
WATCH HERE: BIOGRAPHER OF DREW BARRYMORE’S GRANDFATHER DISPELS RUMOR ABOUT HIS BODY BEING TAKEN FROM MORGUE
But Shulman noted that while drinking “destroyed” his personal life, it actually helped his career.
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Golden Age performers such a W.C. Fields and Jack Benny often created a signature caricature of themselves they would portray in movies, Shulman explained, saying that Barrymore’s was “kind of boozy Shakespearean ham that was hugely successful. He was a huge star on radio, and it kept him working right up until his death.”
But his drinking ruined his marriages, he said.
John Barrymore and Errol Flynn were close friends. (Getty)
“He was married four times, and this horrible combination of his alcoholism with pathological jealousy made for some very bad marriages,” Shulman said. “He would interrogate his wives like it was a police interrogation, have a light on them because he was — some man may have smiled at them, but he just went ballistic.”
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Barrymore had a really “destructive childhood,” Shulman explained, saying that he had lost his virginity at 15 to his stepmother after his mother died at 11 and his grandmother, who was his “emotional rock,” also died.
“He was suspicious of women,” Shulman said, “and I think perhaps mostly because of his sexual abuse from his stepmother. I mean, imagine the guilt that he would feel about his father. He was cuckolding his father with his wife. So that and the combination of his alcoholism and all of this really created a really destructive person to be married to.”
Still, despite his personal problems, Barrymore “changed the world” of theater and was incredibly “innovative in film.”
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“Serious drama died during World War I, and he brought it back to life with these four smash hit Broadway plays, which opened the door for Eugene O’Neill and kind of lit the spark for this great age of American drama and dramatists and great dramatic actors that followed,” he explained.
“If he’d just done that, it would have been incredible,” he continued. “But then he reintroduces Shakespeare to the 20th century … It’s not an exaggeration to say that he taught the British how to play Shakespeare in a modern way.”
Drew Barrymore once confirmed that her grandfather John Barrymore’s body was removed from the morgue by his friends. (Raymond Hall/GC Images)
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Shulman said when Barrymore brought his production of Hamlet to London, John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier — who went on to be great Shakespearean actors — were there as young men “and they were just transformed.”
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Barrymore “tried” to spend time with his kids — including Drew Barrymore’s father, John Drew Barrymore – but Shulman said that his exes had seen him at his worst, and they were afraid of him being alone with the children.
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“It did terrible damage to Drew’s father,” he said. “You know, he would tell the story that he met his father, remembers being with his father several times. He wasn’t.”
He agreed that Drew had succeeded in softening the image of the Barrymore family.
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“Arguably, I was going to say she’s been the most successful [Barrymore], but in a modern context, but they were known as the royal family of the stage and screen,” he said. “Because of her, people are aware of the Barrymore name, It’s still in the public eye and it’s still current. So yeah, I think she’s done wonderful things for their legacy and I think they would think so.”
Fox News Digital has reached out to Barrymore for comment.
“Barrymore: The Spectacular, Tumultuous Life of America’s Prince of Players” will be released on July 21.