Great Profilactor

John Barrymore lived all his brilliant, violent, much-married life in glass houses. No biography can hope to pull up any blinds; it can only poke under carpets and rummage in desk drawers. In Good Night, Sweet Prince (Viking; $3.50) Barrymore's lusty pal Gene Fowler (The Great Mouthpiece, The Great Magoo) has done just that. Gaudy, gossipy, with a sob-sister lining to its Rabelaisian hide, Good Night, Sweet Prince honors Barrymore without emasculating him. From it the Great Profile paradoxically emerges both more tarnished and more dazzling, more fantastic and more real.

Fowler gives new spin to Barrymore's overadvertised failings by making figures speak louder than words. In his first ten years in Hollywood, Barrymore earned $2,634,500, squandered almost every cent of it. A steady drinker at 14, in his last 40 years--a doctor estimated--Barrymore swallowed "640 barrels of hard stuff." Once, while suffering from extreme fatigue, he tackled a script 56 times, could never recite it through. Otherwise he was seldom at a loss for words. Good Night, Sweet Prince offers many a fresh example of Barrymore's under-the-table talk.

P:Once Barrymore's yacht frantically signaled a tanker. Queried the tanker: "Do you need water?" "God, no!" Barrymore signaled back, "we need booze."

P:Barrymore once summed up his married life: "When archeologists discover the missing arms of the Venus de Milo, they will find she was wearing boxing gloves."

P:"Don't point at me," Barrymore told a Hollywood producer (an ex-tailor) who started to bawl him out: "I remember that finger when it had a thimble on it."

P:Leaving a cemetery where he had just buried a friend, Barrymore was seated in a car with a crotchety old stranger who objected when John took a nip from a flask. "If you have no respect for the surroundings," chided the oldster, "you might have some for me--I am 97 years old." Jack gazed out at the graveyard, murmured: "There doesn't seem to be much point in your leaving the place."

But Sister Ethel could tell him off. Once when Jack was a little hazy about a Ziegfeld actor, she remarked: "You should at least know about The Follies. They were named after you."

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