Hollywood’s Maddest Doctors: Lionel Atwill, Colin Clive, and George Zucco

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Hollywood’s Maddest Doctors: Lionel Atwill, Colin Clive, and George Zucco

© 2018 Gregory William Mank. All Rights Reserved.

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ISBN 978-1-887664-22-6

Acknowledgments: John Antosiewicz Photo Archives, Ronald V. Borst/Hollywood Movie Posters, Betty Cavanaugh, Wayne Shipley, Linda J. Walter, Tom Weaver.

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Table of Contents

Introduction

Lionel Atwill

Colin Clive

George Zucco

Notes

Filmography

About The Author

Acknowledgments

Colin Clive as Henry Frankenstein in Frankenstein (1931).

Lionel Atwill in The Mad Doctor of Market Street.

For Stella

Introduction

They were three English gentlemen, all fated for Hollywood fame — and tragedy.

One was an aristocrat, a London and Broadway matinee idol, who gleefully gave up the stage after marrying a multi-millionairess. This cat-eyed voluptuary reveled in becoming Hollywoodʼs most Satanic villain. In 1933, Lionel Atwill spoke to a female interviewer about his own dramatic heroes:

Richard the Third, that deformed man, with his horrible attitude toward women, his lust for killing and then more killing — and Hamlet, with his pitiful diseased mind, his ability to conjure up nightmare pictures of his mother and uncle…

There was the would-be British soldier, a descendant of the legendary Clive of India (famous statesman and suicide). A Jekyll and Hyde alcoholic destined for an early death, he was described by his Frankenstein leading lady Mae Clarke as the most handsome man I ever saw, and also the saddest, and won notoriety (at least onscreen) as Hollywoodʼs greatest sado-masochist. In 1931, the spectacularly self-destructive Colin Clive claimed his major attraction to the role of Frankenstein was that he died in the end:

…I, in the title role, am killed by the Monster that I have created…producers generally prefer that the play end happily with the hero and heroine clasped in each otherʼs arms.

And the third man was a World War I veteran, severely wounded in France, masterfully disguising his withered arm and crippled fingers as he acted in dozens of plays and nearly 100 movies; a gentleman whose favorite author was Dickens, and who himself was so kind and charming that, as a colleague remembered, He could have played God! He was a loving family man who never made peace with his wicked screen image. As George Zucco lamented in the early 1940s:

Iʼm Hollywoodʼs unhappiest actor, because Iʼm always cast as an evil, bloodletting old man.

Each man won glory on the stage, tasted the pleasures of Hollywoodʼs golden age — and faced bitter finales. Atwill hosted what legend calls a Christmas Eve Orgy, a night that exploded into a scandal of classic proportion and warped what was left of his career. Clive died almost a decade before Atwill, finding his own Frankenstein Monster in the bottle. And Zucco outlasted both his peers, but spent most of his final decade in a sanitarium (which the retellings of Hollywood mythology would dramatize into a madhouse).

Their backgrounds were strikingly similar. Atwill and Zucco were London toddlers when the Jack the Ripper killings terrorized Whitechapel in 1888. Clive and Zucco came to prominence on the same January, 1929 date as a West End opening night audience cheered the curtain call of Journeyʼs End, directed by James Whale (who would partake of his own Hollywood fame and tragedy). Each of the three men was a highly praised stage star; indeed, Atwill was second only to John Barrymore as the most acclaimed Great Actor of Broadway in the 1920s.

Each approached Hollywood villainy in his own distinct, colorful way. For Lionel Atwill, the leer was the thing; he was rather the thinking manʼs horror star, keen to suggest all variety of sex and depravity. Thus, Murders in the Zoo, a wild and woolly 1933 pre-Code shocker in which Atwill feeds his (implied) nymphomaniacal wife (Kathleen Burke) to a pool of highly appreciative alligators, might be his definitive performance. (More famous is his wonderful one-armed Inspector Krogh of Son of Frankenstein, but thatʼs a sympathetic portrayal — at least for Atwill.)

For Colin Clive, his apocalyptic Itʼs Alive!, exulted over Karloffʼs moving hand in Frankensteinʼs Gothic watchtower, is one of the great magic moments of the movies. Mae Clarke of Frankenstein claimed Clive had the face of Christ, and he gave his portrayals a crown-of-thorns intensity and anguish that made him almost painful to watch; always we felt the torment. In History Is Made at Night, one of his final films, the dying Clive gives his role of the demonically jealous husband a baroque zeal thatʼs remarkably chilling. The true angst that spilled into his performances make him an icon of obsession, and thereʼs a small (but wildly devoted) cult out there which reveres him with a passion that exceeds even the most out-on-the-edge Lugosi covens.

And as for George Zucco…if he were Hollywoodʼs unhappiest actor, one never would have guessed it in his horror films. How those eyes lit up like possessed pinballs whenever he did his best/worst in the movies! Unlike Atwill (who seemed to get a kinky kick out of his more aberrant villains), or Clive (who likely saw his own self-immolation in them), Zucco managed to be Machiavellian via Olympian professionalism. His best villains had a depth, a sophistication; his mad Dr. Morris of The Mad Ghoul, motivated by unrequited love for Evelyn Ankers, might be his finest hour of villainy (even if heʼs best remembered by many as the smoldering old high priest of Universalʼs Mummy series). One can ride up lovely Mandeville Canyon in Los Angeles, where Zuccoʼs ranch used to be, and imagine the actor happily leaving all his movie mayhem behind as he looked forward to seeing his beloved wife and daughter and the familyʼs many pets.

Their paths would cross in bizarre ways in Hollywood. Atwill would replace Clive in films twice in his career, including taking over for him in Lancer Spy, which Clive was making at the time of his death. Just so, Zucco would replace Atwill in Scared to Death, a film Atwill had reportedly signed for (but was too ill to begin) at the end of his life.

All are long gone. Their old houses still stand in the hills of Hollywood. The ashes of the cat-eyed voluptuary have been in vaultage below a Los Angeles crematorium for over 50 years, never claimed by his last wife or son. The ashes of the man with the tormented Jekyll and Hyde nature reportedly were never claimed, and now might be lost. Only the ashes of the third man, once Hollywoodʼs unhappiest actor, rest in a niche in a Los Angeles cemetery. Some say all three spirits haunt Hollywood.

They certainly haunt film history.

Gregory William Mank

December, 1998

Lionel Atwill.

Colin Clive.

George Zucco.

Lionel Atwill

I shall say this much: I believe that I am a good Man, but I break loose on Fridays and this — this is Friday! — Lionel Atwill, Motion Picture magazine, 1933

In 1933, he was Hollywoodʼs Lucifer.

In The Vampire Bat, Atwill was a gloriously mad doctor who terrorized a European village, sadistically draining victims of their blood. In Mystery of the Wax Museum, he maniacally lusted to make a wax-coated Marie Antoinette out of Fay Wray, who cracked his own wax mask and screamed at the hideously burned face behind it. In Murders in the Zoo, he gleefully killed any man he suspected of making love to his wife Kathleen Burke, and tossed his hysterical spouse into a pool of jaw-smacking alligators. In The Song of Songs, he was the lecherous old baron, with shiny monocle and wicked leer, who treated Marlene Dietrich to a nightmarish wedding night…

He was Lionel Atwill — and the New York theatre world was in shock. Was this man their Lionel Atwill? Was this the great British legitimate actor whose 1920 Broadway portrayal of Deburau ranked as one of the legendary stage performances of the decade? Was this the matinee idol who had played so dynamically opposite such great actresses as Lillie Langtry, Katharine Cornell and Helen Hayes? Could this be that distinguished actor and director? If so, why was he a Halloween bogey man in the bastard art of talking pictures? Yes, it was the same man — Lionel Pinky Atwill, The Maddest Doctor of Them All, who abandoned matinee idol glory on Broadway in favor of whipping, shooting, torturing and transplanting in the cinema. Atwill always appeared to have a strange, unnerving attraction to the wicked and the bizarre; indeed, no Hollywood villain ever grinned so obscenely, chuckled so lecherously or leered so diabolically as this plump, cat-eyed, aristocratic Englishman. Many believed that he enjoyed admiring himself in the dark mirrors of screen villainy, and felt they found a clue to this complex manʼs fascination with evil when, in the 1940s, Atwill splashed into a pool of sensational publicity after allegedly hosting a wild orgy in his Pacific Palisades hacienda. This tawdry scandal crippled the career of one of the generationʼs finest actors, haunting Atwill until his death in 1946 and beyond — indeed, almost 50 years later, Parade magazine remembered him as a notorious Hollywood sex fiend.

His personal life was almost as rich in melodrama as his films.

And Lionel Atwill was a fascinating man and a powerhouse actor, whose prodigious talent raised movie villainy to a stimulating art.

Mr. Atwill was born in Croydon, England, and at an early age set out to make something of himself. In his colorful life he has seen nearly everything worth seeing, done everything that a gentlemanʼs elastic code permits, and known nearly everyone who is anybody. — Picture Play magazine, July 1934

I happened to come from a family unconnected with theatricals. My grandfather was an architect and I was properly educated and played cricket like any other English boy, said Lionel Alfred William Atwill, born in Croydon, on Sunday, March 1, 1885. However, Lionel was actually not the typical English boy. Of a wealthy, patrician family, the handsome Lionel possessed a dynamic personality noted by his private tutors and professors at Londonʼs Mercer School. This magnetism, as well as a fascination with the offbeat world of the theatre, inspired Atwill to forsake his original vocation of architecture and cast his fortune on the stage.

After Shakespearean recitals in the London suburbs, Atwill made his professional bow at Londonʼs Garrick Theatre as A Footman in The Walls of Jericho. Opening night: Halloween, 1904. He trained in Ibsen with the H.V. Neilson Company, then toured with English troupes in such plays as The Bondman, The Flag Lieutenant and The Prisoner of the Bastille. For five years I toured the provinces, recalled Atwill, working like a dog for that success which would give mean opening in the London theatres… After a 1910 to 1912 tour of Australia, with the J.C. Williamson, Ltd. Company, Atwill auditioned for Londonʼs more prestigious producers. He won the part of Arthur Preece in Milestones, which opened in March 1912, at Londonʼs Royalty Theatre and ran over 600 performances. In subsequent London plays he portrayed Michael Doyle in Years of Discretion (September, 1913), the Father in Poor Little Rich Girl (December, 1913), Paul Romaine in The Story of the Rosary (April, 1914) and Captain Halliwell in The Little Minister (September, 1914).

July of 1915. The legendary Lillie Langtry (she was nearing 60) engaged the rising young Atwill (he was 30) to co-star as Dick Marsden in her new play, Mrs. Thompson. The play died a quick and ignoble death in London, so Miss Langtry coaxedAtwill to accompany her to America to revive Mrs. Thompson before a stimulating New York audience. However, Mrs. Thompson flopped again and Miss Langtry and Atwill took to the vaudeville houses in a piece entitled Ashes. After a lengthy tour with Miss Langtry, Atwill gave notice in hopes of making a name for himself on Broadway. Alfred Lunt became the new young co-star of The Jersey Lily.

Monday night, January 8, 1917: Lionel Atwill premiered at New Yorkʼs Maxine Elliott Theatre in The Lodger, based on Marie Belloc-Lowndesʼ popular novel about Jack the Ripper. Atwill portrayed the title role, but the play was a comedy and his Lodger was more lovesick eccentric than butchering fiend. The New York Times reported:

[It is] well-enough played, except by one Lionel Atwill and one Phyllis Relph…Mr. Atwill is pleasant in person and possesses a fine, dynamic vitality, but he drives in his every point as if he were bound that no defective in the last row of the gallery should miss one of them. It is acting of the hammer-and-tongs school…

The critique insulted Atwill doubly: The equally panned Phyllis Relph was his wife. They had married in Bloomsbury, England, in 1913, the nuptials officiated by Lionelʼs cousin, the Reverend Herbert King. The couple (who had a child, John Anthony Atwill) cared neither for the review nor for the fact that frumpy Beryl Mercer won the major ovation at the curtain calls throughout The Lodgerʼs 56 performances.

Lionel Atwill got his revenge. On October 13, 1917, the young star opened at the Playhouse Theatre in Eveʼs Daughter — and was a sensation. Although the play lasted only 36 performances, Lionelʼs portrayal of the Man-Siren who lasciviously seduced star Grace George became the talk of Broadway. LʼElevation (Playhouse Theatre, November 14, 1917, 38 performances) and The Indestructible Wife (Hudson Theatre, January 30, 1918, 22 performances) won Atwill such lavish praise that the famed Nazimova chose him as her leading man in an Ibsen revival. From March to May 1918, Nazimova and Atwill starred together at the Plymouth Theatre in The Wild Duck, Hedda Gabler and A Dollʼs House. He joined Australian star Elsie Mackay in Another Manʼs Shoes (39th Street Theatre, September 12, 1918, 20 performances) and then signed with the legendary David Belasco to star in Tiger! Tiger!

It was a fine match: Belasco, the Bishop of Broadway, who dressed in black suit and white clerical collar, supposedly had a peep hole in the womenʼs dressing room (his ghost supposedly still haunts the old Belasco Theatre on 44th Street); and Atwill, with his sleek style, his impeccably trimmed mustache, his eyes like sensual marbles. Lionelʼs breathtaking lover of Tiger! Tiger! first slinked across the stage of the Belasco Theatre on the night of November 12, 1918, for the first of 183 acclaimed performances. He was such a hit that rumor claimed Atwill was in line for knighthood by King George V for his hailed histrionics on both sides of the Atlantic.

Motion Picture Classic magazine interviewed Atwill — entitling the piece The Exquisite Villain.

Indeed, in the evolving movie industry, Lionel Atwill had been making his mark — as rather a male Theda Bara. He starred in several New York-filmed silents: Paramountʼs Eveʼs Daughter (1918), in which he reprised his Man-Siren and set his wicked cat eyes on Billie Burke; Patheʼs For Sale (1918); and Paramountʼs The Marriage Price (1919), with Elsie Ferguson. Motion Picture Classic dispatched Barbara Beach to interview Atwill at his New York home, fashionably one door from Fifth Avenue. A Japanese valet escorted her into the sunlit living room, where the elegant, chain-smoking matinee idol, lighting each new cigarette from the glowing butt of its predecessor, offered his philosophy:

America offers a greater sense of promise than any other country. I prefer London for one reason only. The social position of the actor. In London, he is accepted in the best society, over here he is considered more or less a bounder…In America, actors are regarded as a curiosity, as a something to be gaped at, to do odd and eccentric things that no one else would do — to be idolized perhaps, but never regarded as human beings…

The lady asked about the future of motion pictures, and Atwill replied:

I honestly think pictures have possibilities, but not until some of these old-fashioned ideas are combed out of them. For instance, to the picture director, a character is either a hero, who is all good, or a villain, who is all bad…No one is wholly good or evil…I, for one, will never play in pictures again until I am assured that the director is broad-minded enough to present a villain who has lovable qualities, or a hero who has a few weaknesses…

They were words that the actor, in years to come, would eat — with relish. In the same interview, Atwill expressed his dislike for women who prattle about virtue, chaperones and double standards. Shortly afterwards, in 1919, Phyllis Relph divorced Atwill.

The Belasco Theatre, December 23, 1920: Lionel Atwill climaxed his stage stardom. The play was Deburau, by Sacha Guitry. Lionel starred as Jean-Gaspard Deburau, the legendary French pantomimist/clown, whose heart is broken by courtesan Marie Duplessis (Elsie Mackay, whom Lionel had married in 1920). Attempting a comeback late in life, Deburau is hissed; he puts his son in his place, and watches from the wings as a new and greater Deburau wins cheers. "Great Performance by Lionel Atwill in Deburau," headlined Heywood Broun, drama critic of The New York Tribune. Indeed, Mr. Broun became quite passionate about it all, comparing Deburau to a ghost that could strike awe to all beholders:

If it had lasted until cockcrow, and for a time we thought it would, we havenʼt a doubt that with a shriek of anguish play and players would have disappeared. And yet for its little time it trod the earth with surety and confidence, and passion soared on outstretched arms and folk spoke verse and souls were seared and hearts broke in rhymed couplets.

There are, we have heard, no actors now living who can play these parts in the drama of the old school…Then it must be that Lionel Atwill is also a visitor who has been away in some island of the Hebrides, for it seemed to us he was surely one of the magnificents whose names we hear when playgoers of fifty-odd thump upon the flagstones in the chimney corners and chide the young, saying, Ah, but then you never saw — But now we can answer, "Why, grandpa, how you do go on. You forget that we watched Lionel Atwill in Deburau."

Broun continued:

…Lionel Atwill, without question, gives a great performance, a performance, it seems to us, which is second to nothing seen in New York in recent years except the Richard III of John Barrymore. Atwill is always graceful, eloquent when opportunity is offered, and in the final scene, above all others, profoundly and deeply moving…The greatest glory of the evening belongs to Mr. Atwill…

The New York Times, less rhapsodic but still impressed properly, praised Lionelʼs portrayal as a performance of distinguished beauty, one full to the brim of charm and eloquence and understanding. In Deburau, incidentally, was Fred Bickel, who became Atwillʼs understudy — and who later became Fredric March. It was top stardom for Lionel Atwill, and he spoke of Deburau with all the flowery eloquence of an adored matinee idol:

There is a great deal, a great deal of satisfaction too, in knowing that the man you are playing really lived, really loved, really suffered…but I must say that the way the people respond is a constant revelation. The tears of the audience actually rise up to my very boots, and all that I can see are rows upon rows of white patches. The house fills with pitiable sniffs of vicarious woe…To depict suffering is, at once, pleasure of a poignant, paradoxical nature for the artist and profit for the auditors. It touches the hearts of the people…it eases. It never mocks.

In the same interview (unsourced in the University of Wisconsin Atwill file), Lionel spoke of his personal philosophy of life:

It is the individual every time…Whenever a great epoch is achieved; a great triumph of nations; something revolutionary and history-making, it has been under the domination of some one strong man, stronger than the others. I am against mob rule and mob intelligence. I am for a survival of the fittest because the fittest must and will survive. Why not acknowledge it?

Deburau ran 189 hailed performances at the Belasco Theatre. During its run, Atwill also won bravos in an Actors Benefit, playing a scene from Hamlet, enacting the very moody Dane to Laurette Taylorʼs very fragile Ophelia.

I learned from that great old man a meticulous passion for everything I do, said Atwill of Belasco, who starred him at the Lyceum Theatre in two more acclaimed productions: The Grand Duke (November 1, 1921, 131 performances) and The Comedian (March 13, 1923, 87 performances). In the latter, his wife Elsie Mackay was his leading lady. Between New York triumphs he toured in vaudeville, acted in Detroit in The Heart of Cellini (October, 1923) and accepted lucrative bids to play in two more New York-made silents: Pioneerʼs The Eternal Mother (1920) and Goldwynʼs The Highest Bidder (1921).

Atwill now reigned as Broadwayʼs beau ideal. With John Barrymore savoring the tastes of Hollywood, Atwill enjoyed first choice of the most dramatic roles opposite Broadwayʼs greatest leading ladies. The Outsider (the 49th Street Theatre, March 3, 1924, 91 performances) cast Atwill as Anton Ragatzy, a medical quack who tries to cure a crippled Katharine Cornell on his miracle rack. Percy Hammond of The New York Tribune exulted:

I am going to see it again and again…Mr. Atwillʼs gorgeous as the quack doctor…Miss Cornellʼs realization of the passionate lame girl seems to me to be a perfect thing.

So shatteringly powerful were the performances of the two stars that, as George S. Kaufman reported in The New York Times, they …succeeded in holding the first New York audience in its seats for some five minutes after the final curtain.

When Broadwayʼs new Guild Theatre opened on April 13, 1925 the play was Shawʼs Caesar and Cleopatra, the stars were Lionel Atwill and Helen Hayes, and President Calvin Coolidge himself raised the curtain. The great supporting cast included Henry Travers, Rose Hobart and Helen Westley. The play ran 128 performances. In the fall of 1925, the Broadway community honored Atwill at a dinner celebrating his first decade on the American stage.

Offstage, Atwill, known to his cronies as Pinky (I think it was because he had red hair when he was young, said Josephine Hutchinson, who would act with Lionel in Hollywood in 1939ʼs Son of Frankenstein), lived lavishly. The star resided in a $40,000 mansion, Douglas Manor on Long Island, rode about in a chauffeured limousine, sported a gold-topped cane and — late in 1925 — survived the first ugly scandal of his life.

HOW LIONEL ATWILL SAW ELSIEʼS LOVE FADE, headlined the December 17, 1925, Daily Mirror. To showcase his beautiful wife Elsie Mackay, Atwill was directing Deep in the Woods, a play featuring a young unknown named Max Montesole. During rehearsals, Atwill suspected that Elsie and Montesole were falling in love; four nights before the play was to try out in Baltimore, Elsie didnʼt come home to Douglas Manor. Atwillʼs friend Claude Beerbohm, nephew of the great British thespian Max Beerbohm, and Sir Herbert Tree spoke to the Daily Mirror — which titillatingly regaled readers with the melodrama:

[Atwill] prowled through the house. He found two revolvers. He fingered them nervously. He fondled them.

He spoke of shooting Montesole, said Beerbohm. He spoke of throttling him. He was furious. But gradually he grew calm. He decided not to put his hands on the man who had stolen his wife. He wanted to kill him. But what good would it do?…Was a woman who left her husband worth dying for? Dying in the chair? And, would it bring Elsie back to him — his killing Max?

Instead, Atwill invaded the love nest. Elsie swooned that Lionel came crashing into her 59 West 68th Street apartment:

Elsie in her affidavit, denying the least unfaithfulness, declares that Max was there merely to help her pack her trunks in readiness for her trip to Europe…She declares that Atwill brought not only the two detectives for witnesses, but also his colored chauffeur. And she declares that, under threat of arrest, she