Bogart & Tracy, Real Tough
Few people, except Spencer Tracy, could ever compete with Humphrey Bogart in the ferocity of their drunkenness or in the noise of their hangovers. Both coincided in Río Arriba (1930) and recognized each other as equals. At that time, Bogie was a good professional. Later, he went into his dressing room, where the hairdresser had prepared the whiskey for him, and, from there, he went to visit all the clubs. Something that could end in anger. Dave Chasen, the owner of one of the star's favorite watering holes, said: "Humphrey is a great guy until 11:30 at night. Then he thinks he's Bogart." For something, they banned him from the mythical Morocco.
Returning from a holiday in Italy, he declared: "I didn't like pasta, so I've been eating whiskey and soup." That alcoholic diet freed him from being bitten by mosquitoes and suffering from his consequent illnesses during the filming of The African Queen. Something that always amazed his partner Katharine Hepburn, she was precisely Tracy's great love.
The protagonist of Adam's Rib just like Bogart was a Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde of alcohol. Courteous and kind, drunk he could destroy a set by himself. He could even hurt the ones he loved the most. Sober he adored his brother, but once drunk he wanted to strangle him for trying to calm him down and throw him off the sixth floor of the Beverly Wilshire. The hotel manager prevented it.
Tormented, Catholic, and full of inner demons, Tracy was not a social drinker like Bogart. He would lock himself in a hotel and sink his elbow until he lost consciousness. The sophisticated Hepburn meekly followed him around the bars when he went out to get drunk. All this did not prevent him from being considered the best in his trade. His secret: "Knowing the dialogue and not tripping over the furniture."
Monty Clift, Hollywood's Longest Suicide
Alcohol literally destroyed the life of this screen myth. After a party at Liz Taylor's house, with a few drinks on top of her, he took a wrong curve with the car and transformed her beautiful face into a shapeless mass of flesh and blood. The actress saved her life by pulling her teeth out of her throat. Later, came years of plastic surgery, and also addiction to painkillers, barbiturates, amphetamines, and even flirting with heroin. For something, they said that he had been the longest suicide in Hollywood.
Before that, something was already wrong in the soul of this tortured homoS- ("I have my deepest relationships with women but it is men who give me pleasure in bed") who drank during the filming of From Here to Eternity. One-on-one with Sinatra. Burt Lancaster often went to find them and tuck them into bed. Sometimes he couldn't protect them and Clift ended up waking up the entire hotel with his bugle. With Brando in Paris, he scored a tango of 15 gin martinis. He ended up collapsing on a car. But his favorite cocktail was vodka and pills. The sadist Hitchcock, who directed him in I, Confess, detected his weakness. One day he saw him drunk and challenged him to drink a glass of brandy in one gulp. Clift agreed and, after complying, passed out. When he found out about his death, the director said: "He always walked with an angel of death next to him."
Ava Gardner, one in a million
Among the great gallery of drunks in The Smirnoff Method, there are only four women: the ill-fated Frances Farmer (she ended up with psychiatric problems), the wayward flapper Louise Brooks, the femme fatale Veronica Lake and the inimitable Ava Gardner, the most beautiful and funniest drunk. from Hollywood. As Tejero explains, this small share of women is because "alcohol was not the problem for them, but they had other problems that they tried to fix with alcohol. For example, Vivien Leigh or Rit Hayworth drank a lot to calm their mental problems".
There are a million anecdotes about the festivities of the most beautiful animal in the world, many of them in Chicote, but perhaps the best, especially if heard from her own voice, is one told by Geraldine Chaplin. "We had gone to a party at his house and it was lovely. But at one point in the night, his temper changed. He insisted that we all get out of there but he closed the door. He wanted us to go out the window! And he was a second!". You had to love Ava Gardner.
Richard Burton, Right up there with Liz Taylor
During a scene on the set of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Burton had to down a whiskey in one go. They gave him ginger ale, ginger beer, the concoction that usually replaces whiskey in the movies, but the actor refused it: he only wanted the original product. The scene required forty-seven takes. "Go figure, honey," Burton bragged to a reporter years later, "47 whiskeys." This anecdote reflects well the character of Burton, who during his marriage to Taylor applied the following diet: "He greeted his first Bloody Mary at ten in the morning, and by early afternoon he was already on his second bottle of vodka".
During those years he drank a lot with Liz and without her, her rows were legendary, on a par with her ability to drink alcohol. "When you're sober, you're a roll," the diva once snapped at him. But the public adored them together: it is estimated that their films produced, between 1962 and 1966, 200 million dollars in profit. In the end, the viewers got tired and so did they. Alcohol didn't affect Liz that much. "She was a bottomless pit," she said of herself. But Burton couldn't keep up with his dipsomaniac pace. I had to give up the rum because it made me imagine that she was capable of facing Muhammad Ali and George Foreman. Or both, on an intense day. He died at the age of 58.
