"Benedick Forever"

He hadn't wanted to be an actor, particularly he hadn't wanted to be dubbed "Ethel's baby brother"; he had wanted to be an artist. His father taunted him: "Do you want to be an artist and daub all your life--or do you want to be an actor and make loooove?"

John Barrymore, it eventually turned out, wanted to be an actor. He liked living in glass houses--and in a way was concealed by their glare. The world saw all his poses, heard all his wisecracks, without ever really knowing what he was like. He called himself "Punchinello today, Melpomene tomorrow, Benedick forever."

On Stage. In 1903, when he was 21, he went on the stage, following the footsteps of his father, mother, sister and older brother and Uncle John Drew and grandparents and forbears for over a century. Jack plugged away for a dozen seasons in comedy.

At 34 he found himself, and fame, in Galsworthy's Justice. Seven great years followed: Peter Ibbetson, Redemption, The Jest, Richard III; and then a Hamlet that ten years later was legendary. At 43 John Barrymore was the greatest actor on the English-speaking stage. He never, except once long after, appeared on the stage again.

In the Wings. Playboy he had been from youth--a youth that coincided with the fabulous playing fields of the Naughty-Naughts: Rector's and hansom cabs, magnums of champagne, women with Arabian Nights figures, the balls of the Four Hundred. He fell in love with beautiful Evelyn Nesbit, who turned him down for Harry Thaw. The San Francisco earthquake stranded him with nothing to wear but a tailcoat. He was commandeered for a rescue squad, and his Uncle John remarked: "It took a convulsion of nature to get him out of bed, and the U.S. Army to put him to work." In a tailcoat again--this time at an Astor ball--he met blonde Katherine Corri Harris, a Newport belle, wooed and won her against her father's wishes. After she divorced him, he married another Newport beauty, Charles Oelrichs' daughter, Blanche, who wrote under the name of Michael Strange. She divorced him also.

By 1928, when he married Cinemactress Dolores Costello, Barrymore was fully launched on his movie career. Jumping from Hamlet to Hollywood ("The stage is work. In pictures I can loaf."), he played or misplayed, often at $175,000 a throw, many a famous and romantic role: Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Jekyll, Beau Brummell, Don Juan, Arsene Lupin, Franc,ois Villon, Svengali. Among his other famous pictures were: Grand Hotel, Dinner at Eight, Twentieth Century.

He went Hollywood with a bang. There were great parties, great Barrymore flare-ups. "All the Barrymores," said John once, "have tempers. What do you think we are, book ends?" In any encounter, he usually got in the last word. "Thank God," said Katharine Hepburn to him when they finished a picture, "I don't have to act with you any more." Cooed John: "I didn't know you ever had, darling."

Slowly The Bottle began to win out over The Profile; even what Barry more called "the left, or money-making side of my face" stopped throwing women into dithers. His last marriage, with Schoolgirl Elaine Barrie (nee Jacobs), was a howling coast-to-coast farce. After their divorce, Barrymore sighingly described his wives as "gallant women all."

John v. John. Concerning the battle between John Barrymore and John Barleycorn he was least reticent of all. He might quip that he was "just an ingenue about booze," but he also boasted that Chaliapin was the only drinking companion who ever laid him out.

In 1939 Barrymore made his only return to the stage, in an embarrassing burlesque of his own life, My Dear Children. After My Dear Children, Barrymore went on the air, majestically insulting himself on the Rudy Vallee hour. Shattered in health, he often could not go on, lived in & out of hospitals. Fortnight ago he turned up, staggering with pain, for a rehearsal, finally said: "I guess this is one time I miss my cue."

Rushed to a Hollywood hospital, he lay mostly in a coma, suffering from myocarditis, chronic nephritis, cirrhosis of the liver, gastric ulcers. When his great friend, Author Gene Fowler, visited him, Barrymore stage-whispered weakly: "Come closer, Gene, and hold my hand . . . lean over, Gene, I want to ask you something. ... Is it true that you're an illegitimate son of Buffalo Bill?" During a later lucid interval he was received back into the Catholic Church. Last week, at 60, with only his brother Lionel at his bedside, John Barrymore died.

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