John Barrymore

Vanity Fair August 1925

flashback

Alas, poor Barrymore—his Hamlet was both his triumph and his downfall. In 1922, Ethel Barrymore had propitiously handed her baby brother the haunted prince's soliloquies to help ease him through a sodden marital spat. But could the Great Profile really cut it as the great Dane? That was the question. "I want him to be so male that they can hear my balls clank," Barrymore proclaimed. Accordingly, he wore middleweight champ Kid McCoy's neverwashed boxer shorts under his tights, choreographed duels with Douglas Fairbanks, and smoked in the back hallways of Elsinore (above). Barrymore played Hamlet to packed Broadway houses for 101 nights, upstaging Edwin Booth's record by one performance. Yet only eight years later, in Hollywood, the actor of infinite jest could no longer remember Hamlet's lines, and was forced to bid the sweet prince good night. The following year in London, John Gielgud, then 30, directed and starred as what James Agate called "the best Hamlet of our time." Gielgud's stage notes are recorded in a memoir, Acting Shakespeare (Robert Stewart/Scribner's), which should be a hit, a very palpable hit.