The notorious history of drunken Hollywood

By the early 1930s, Herman J. Mankiewicz was a screenwriting genius who had secretly helped construct classic films such as “Monkey Business” and “Duck Soup” by the Marx Brothers and “The Wizard of Oz.”

He was also, according to a new book by author Mark Bailey, a raging drunk who picked fights everywhere he went and insulted everyone from studio execs to actors in his films.

Mankiewicz had once been friends with newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst and attended many a party at San Simeon, the publisher’s infamous mansion. The relationship ended, however, when Hearst banned Mankiewicz after the screenwriter kept trying to get Hearst’s mistress, Marion Davies, drunk.

Mankiewicz sought revenge. He began writing a script about a newspaper mogul and used everything he knew about Hearst to humiliate him, including basing one character on Davies in a harshly negative portrait and even appropriating what he knew to be Hearst’s special nickname for Davies’ clitoris: Rosebud.

The script, of course, was “Citizen Kane,” which would become a cinematic landmark and win Mankiewicz an Oscar.

Hearst, though, got his own revenge several years later. After Mankiewicz crashed into another car while drunk — a non-story, since no one was hurt — it became front-page news in all of Hearst’s newspapers, destroying the writer’s reputation.

An alcohol siege

Throughout Hollywood’s history, booze has been as prevalent and influential as ego. “Of All the Gin Joints” gleefully dishes many of the wildest tales of excess, sharing stories of insane incidents and outsized drunken personalities.

Raymond Chandler was fired from his job as an oil industry executive at 44 due to his overenthusiastic alcohol consumption. From there, he became a top-notch fiction writer, which led to a contract with Paramount.

But Chandler never lost his love for drink. Before writing “The Blue Dahlia” — which needed to be written, filmed and completed in just three months — Chandler assured producer John Houseman he was sober.

In the middle of production, though, he told Houseman he’d been felled by writer’s block and could only complete the script in a “continuous alcohol siege.”

He drank nonstop and ate no solid food for the next eight days, as Paramount “provided a doctor to inject glucose into his arm twice daily.” He finished the script on time and was nominated for a Best Original Screenplay Oscar. It was later revealed that the whole thing had been a ruse to fool Houseman. He had never stopped drinking and used the writer’s block story to gain leverage.

Bela and boilermakers

Hollywood’s massive alcohol consumption also led to violent behavior.

For his directorial debut, 1955’s “Not as a Stranger,” A-list producer Stanley Kramer made the mistake of casting “four of the most fearless drunks in the business” — Lon Chaney Jr., Broderick Crawford, Robert Mitchum and Frank Sinatra.

Kramer would later refer to the film as “10 weeks of hell.”

“They quickly proved uncontrollable,” Bailey writes. “Sets and trailers were demolished. Stars [tore] phones from walls. ‘It wasn’t a cast,’ Mitchum said, ‘so much as a brewery.’ ”

Perhaps the worst, and most surprising, turn of events came when Crawford, who had previously played the “mentally handicapped” Lenny in “Of Mice and Men” on Broadway, found Sinatra teasing him one too many times, as Ol’ Blue Eyes liked to mock him by calling him “Lenny.”

Crawford “held the singer down, tore off his toupeé, and proceeded to eat the damn thing.” Mitchum tried to separate the two but Crawford lashed out at him, and then they fought until Crawford, his throat filled with toupee hair, began to choke and “one of the film’s medical advisers had to rush over to help him puke it up.”

Bailey describes horror star Bela Lugosi as, toward the end of his life, a morphine addict and a terrible drunk. During one of their films together, director Ed Wood went to bring him his requested scotch and found him hiding behind a curtain.

When Lugosi emerged, there were “tears streaming down his face” and a gun in his hand, pointed straight at Wood.

“Eddie, I’m going to die tonight,” he said. “I want to take you with me.”

Wood — a fellow drunk — realized what it would take to appease the now-out-of-his-mind actor: Boilermakers, Lugosi’s favorite drink.

Lugosi put the gun down and drank himself to sleep.

‘The Tracy squad’

During the filming of “The Night of the Iguana,” Richard Burton — whose drinking biographer Robert Sellers called “one of the wonders of the 20th century” — would start with beer at 7 a.m., finish off a case, then switch to hard liquor. His wife, Elizabeth Taylor, would have begun drinking at 10 a.m., starting with vodka before shifting to tequila. Burton was so in need of constant booze, he forced the production to build a bar at both the top and the bottom of a staircase he needed to climb to get to the set.

Once sloshed, the couple went at it like “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” was a documentary.

“When Taylor paraded around set in ever-more-revealing bikinis, Burton would comment that she looked like a tart,” writes Bailey. Once, when Taylor was trying to help fix his hair, Burton grew so agitated that “he poured an entire beer over his head and asked, ‘How do I look now, by God?’ ”

Spencer Tracy, one of the most dashing leading men of Hollywood’s golden age, was also secretly “a self-flagellating, self-immolating, utterly filthy drunk,” writes Bailey, who says that Tracy would hole up at the Hotel St. George in Brooklyn Heights for weeks-long binges, during which he was “downing bottle after bottle of whiskey while sitting naked in a bathtub,” never rising “even to use the toilet.”

Tracy was perceived as such a possible danger that MGM, which had him under contract, assembled “the Tracy Squad: an ambulance driver, a doctor and four security guards dressed as paramedics” who were on call 24/7.

Every bar within 25 miles had been given a dedicated phone number, with instructions to call if Tracy ever entered. Once that happened, the squad rushed to the scene, where, sure enough, Tracy would have by then caused some sort of drunken trouble. He was then whisked to his home, under the guise of medical care, where the squad stood guard until he sobered up.

Liquorous ladies

The men of old Hollywood had no monopoly on drunken behavior, as young starlets of the time could make Lindsay Lohan seem like a rank amateur.

Clara Bow, a Brooklyn teenager whose “mother was insane” and whose father was “a lecherous hanger-on,” was the first to be christened an “It” girl after her most popular film, 1927’s “It.”

With her fame came license to shock the world, as Bow, who loved “drinking, gambling, swearing and screwing,” was “so licentious she could shock even jaded old-Hollywood types.”

B.P. Schulberg, the president of Paramount, held a fancy dinner and invited Judge Ben Lindsey, who had recently lost his judgeship after publicly advocating for premarital sex. The judge, in a new career, was there to interview Bow for Vanity Fair. But when she arrived, soused, she introduced herself to the judge “with a French kiss” — never mind that his wife was right beside him — and then “wrangled him into a dance,” during which “she deftly unbuttoned his shirt, then, arriving at his pants, she didn’t hesitate and began to unzip them, too.”

The judge jumped back, and Schulberg quickly removed Bow. Later, she expressed confusion at all the fuss. “If he likes all that modern stuff,” she said, “how come he’s such an old stick-in-the-mud?”

Natalie Wood, writes Bailey, was a wild child who was already drinking wine with Sinatra at age 15.

A few years later, she found herself with her “Rebel Without a Cause” co-stars Dennis Hopper and Nick Adams. They decided to have a threesome, but Wood would only participate if she could “bathe in champagne first — like Jean Harlow.”

Hopper and Adams bought several cases of champagne and poured it all into the bathtub. Once full, Wood disrobed and submerged herself, ready for her new sexual adventure — until she began screaming.

“As soon as her most sensitive areas came in contact with the alcohol, she shrieked in pain,” Bailey writes. “Thus was the orgy extinguished.”