He was booked by his agents, MCA, to appear at the opening of the New Frontier Hotel, Las Vegas, at $50,000 a week. In preparation he forced himself once more on to a heroic diet, worked out religiously with bar bells and exercise machines, submitted to hours of pounding on the massage table, then took off for Vegas with Betty, their children, and his trainer, Terry Robinson, in a total entourage of twelve. The staff at the New Frontier had strict instructions not to let Mario start drinking, come what may. The town’s gamblers anticipated trouble; the wise money was eight to five against.
On the afternoon of the opening Louella Parsons went looking for him. Ben Hecht, who was writing a new picture for him, also sought him out. He found Mario in his suite, pale with nerves but dry as a bone. Ben felt like a drink, and a waiter arrived with champagne.
I tried to reach Mario that afternoon but couldn’t get near him. I went to his suite and knocked and knocked. I could hear voices inside, but nobody let me in. “I did all the drinking,” Ben said later. “When he left me at six o’clock he was O.K. to walk out on any stage and do handsprings. Whether he had desert dust or goofy dust in his throat, I don’t know.”
He added: “I’ve never seen a guy suffer so because of what he was doing, whatever that was. Does he always have those soul agonies, or doesn’t he give a damn?” And then: “I’ve listened to his story—some of it funny, most sad. I’ve heard this same story in this town for thirty years. The minute a guy gets big, people start sitting on his head. I still have complete confidence in the guy.”
After he left Ben Hecht in the hotel, Mario disappeared. Half an hour before the show, he staggered back to the New Frontier. There were panicky efforts to revive him. But he passed out cold. A star-flecked audience, including Sonja Henie, Ann Miller, Jack Benny, George Burns, Robert Young, and 150 newsmen, waited for him in vain. The management canceled his contract and sued him for $125,000.
The rest was all exclusively downhill. Beatrice, the Lanzas’ colored housekeeper, paid some of the bills out of her salary to hold things together. He desperately tried for work at other studios, but nobody would take a chance on him. So he took up a deal to make a picture in Rome, to give concerts there and elsewhere in Europe, taking his family along. In Rome he rented the fabulous Villa Badaglio, where crystal chandeliers gleamed on statuary and marble floors and old masters decorated the walls.
In London he failed to appear at the Albert Hall concert that had been arranged for him; same thing in Hamburg, where crowds jeered his name. He died in Rome, aged thirty-eight, suffering from phlebitis and a blood clot in a coronary artery. His enormous bulk created some macabre problems for the undertakers. Not long after, when Betty Lanza had brought her children back to Beverly Hills, her mother tried to get her committed for psychiatric care. Betty would listen to no one, any more than she’d listened when Mario’s sanity was at stake. There were five more months left before drugs took Betty’s life. Love for the man she’d lost? Desperation? The verdict simply said: cause unknown.
All of us, within ourselves, carry the seed of our own destruction. But in some there is an inner core beyond our powers to destroy. Jack Barrymore was one of these. I watched him try to pull himself down. He was a man embittered, disillusioned, broken in health and finances, burlesquing his own genius with a devil’s grin. He saw the same public that idolized him in The Jest, Richard III, Hamlet shriek with sadistic laughter over his antics on and off the camera.
During a lull on the set one afternoon, some jokester said to him: “Come on, Jack, give us one of your old tear jerkers.” He agreed, with a shrug; started hamming Mark Antony’s lines from Julius Caesar. “Friends, Romans, countrymen.... My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar, and I must pause till it comes back to me.”
After the first few lines something had happened. As the voice steadied and deepened the set grew quiet. Grips, carpenters, electricians, extras approached, soft-footed. When Mark Antony finished, Hamlet took his place. The years fell away and there, on the cluttered sound stage, stood the young Hamlet, the greatest any theater ever knew.