Royal Family

By Stefan Kanfer

THE HOUSE OF BARRYMORE

by Margot Peters

Knopf; 596 pages; $29.95

In 1890 a 10-year-old reminded her brothers, "It's about time we were doing something in the theater." As Ethel Barrymore saw it, they were already years behind schedule; Grandma had made her New York City debut at eight.

The children wasted little time in catching up. Ethel became an adolescent star. Lionel and John followed in her footlights, and for half a century the trio dominated the American stage and screen. The story of the siblings has provoked innumerable books, plays and films -- including one appropriately titled The Royal Family. But none approaches the work of Margot Peters, biographer of Charlotte Bronte and professor of English literature at the University of Wisconsin. The House of Barrymore brims with insight, scandal and anecdote; even in death, Ethel, Lionel and John cannot stop entertaining the audience.

The Barrymore gift was an animal magnetism that could project to the second balcony; the Barrymore curse was a belief that nothing in life could approach the grand scale of the theater. In her youth, Ethel was so radiant that Winston Churchill begged her to marry him. "I was so in love with her!" he later confessed. "And she wouldn't pay any attention to me at all."

But she lost her figure early and settled into imperious-dowager parts. Alcohol served as consolation. She and her co-star once tried to alternate boozy evenings. When Ethel's memory failed, he covered for her; when he forgot his lines, she proceeded glibly, "I know what I would say in your position," and delivered his reply. One night when both were drunk, the voice of the prompter filled the air. "We know the line," Ethel growled. "We want to know who says it!"

Lionel developed into one of the most versatile character actors of the 1930s and '40s. But he was afflicted with physical ailments and marital woes. Trapped in Hollywood, he turned to morphine. John outdid them both. Peters theorizes that the Great Profile was "androgynous . . . To mask his vulnerability, he adopted a supermasculine pose: hard-drinking, profane, whoring, cynical. He lived in terror of being unmasked." Yet drunk or hung over -- which was most of the time -- John became a matinee idol, a superb comedian and the most celebrated Hamlet of his era.

Each came to a tragic end. John spent his last years caricaturing himself in films. Lionel was ignored by the studio he helped build. In 1954, when he was terminally ill, his unused dressing room came to the attention of Metro- Goldwyn-Mayer. "There was a shortage: James Cagney needed quarters for his current film. Consent to dismantle Lionel's suite, store his belongings and reassign the bungalow was granted in a memo of November 15." Lionel died that evening. Peters notes dryly, "MGM couldn't even wait for its most durable star to stop breathing." In old age Ethel lived in reduced circumstances. Katharine Hepburn recalled frequent visits to her longtime friend: "I never knew the number of the street she lived on because it seemed such a silly little neighborhood for Ethel Barrymore. It didn't have any connection with Ethel . . . but then I don't think I'd ever associate anything with Ethel but a castle on the moon."

The curse afflicted the next two generations. Not long before her death in 1960, John's daughter, actress Diana Barrymore, raged, "Damn Daddy for the crazy, mixed-up life he led and the daughter he never gave a damn for, and damn Uncle Lionel for treating me like the boarding-school bitch I am, and ( damn Aunt Ethel who doesn't even know I'm alive, and damn me for being a silly, arrogant, affected schoolgirl! God damn us all! We deserve everything we get!" More recently, Diana's niece Drew Barrymore, star of E.T., went into therapy after admitting that she had used marijuana from the age of 10 and cocaine two years later.

Obviously, Ethel, Lionel and John were wrong. The epic drama they sought was there all the time, too close and too painful for acknowledgment. Peters' work underlines the irony: only a biographer could relate this family saga. The playwright who attempted to describe the turrets, basements and closets in the House of Barrymore would never be believed.