Nov. 14, 2025
The Bundy Drive Boys (GT Mini)
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A group of Hollywood hooligans ran wild in the 1940s.
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WEBVTT
00:00.031 --> 00:01.660
[SPEAKER_00]: We can't add bunnies.
00:02.243 --> 00:03.007
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Jason Horton.
00:03.309 --> 00:04.053
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Rebecca Leib.
00:04.495 --> 00:05.923
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is Ghost Town.
00:21.698 --> 00:34.235
[SPEAKER_00]: The Gundy Drive just north of sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, California is a tiny, tutor-style cabin, barely seen between a roof, thick hedges, and larger, multi-million-dollar Brentwood homes.
00:34.916 --> 00:39.762
[SPEAKER_00]: But what this little low-key lodge lacks in Granger, it makes up for in notoriety.
00:40.303 --> 00:50.777
[SPEAKER_00]: At the height of Hollywood's Golden Age, this postage stamp-sized cabin was the unlikely headquarters to a group of Hollywood alisters, who were hell-bent on creative hijinks,
00:50.757 --> 00:57.850
[SPEAKER_00]: wild parties, and an out-of-control weekend at Bernie's Legend Prank to cap their chaotic pedigree.
00:58.532 --> 01:04.142
[SPEAKER_00]: Move over Rat Pack, this episode of Ghost Town is all about the Bundy Drive Boys.
01:05.067 --> 01:09.857
[SPEAKER_00]: In the 1930s, artists John Decker lived in that tiny cabin on Bundy Drive.
01:10.979 --> 01:22.283
[SPEAKER_00]: He was best friends with other elites, including journalist Jean Fowler, art critic set a key-cheat heartman and the legendary W.C. fields, John Barrymore and Errol Flynn, among others.
01:22.263 --> 01:32.518
[SPEAKER_00]: Each were very successful, but also rapidly approaching the ends of their iconic careers, and, as history also reflects, their lives.
01:33.480 --> 01:51.527
[SPEAKER_00]: This might have not been lost on the group, because the house and Bundy drive began to see epic drinking, prank, sexual exploits, hedonism, and in true film and theater nerds style, late night and prompt to Shakespeare's stagings, and kind of an over-the-hill
01:51.862 --> 02:10.424
[SPEAKER_00]: In his 1954 memoir of the group, Minutes of the Last Meeting, Gene Fowler wrote, quote, that Brown-Beamed Studio was a place of meeting for the still-lively survivors of Bohemian times, an artist's alamo where political boars never intruded, and where breast-beating hypocrites could find no listeners.
02:11.005 --> 02:16.992
[SPEAKER_00]: These men lived intensely, as do children, and poets, and jaguars.
02:16.972 --> 02:24.344
[SPEAKER_00]: The group were essentially, according to mental floss, quote, high-society mischief makers, and with mischief comes legend.
02:25.045 --> 02:40.009
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1942, the Bundy drive boys were heartbroken when their compatriots and probably highest profile member, acting powerhouse John Barrymore, died from cirrhosis of the liver and kidney failure, complicated by about of pneumonia.
02:40.811 --> 02:43.435
[SPEAKER_00]: But the party wasn't over quite yet.
02:43.415 --> 03:01.423
[SPEAKER_00]: After Barrymore's death, the Bundy Drive boys supposedly smuggled John Barrymore's corpse out of the morgue for one final ride, taking Barrymore's body back to Bundy Drive, propping him up against a poker table and partying all night with their late friends cadaver.
03:03.209 --> 03:10.760
[SPEAKER_00]: It was like a weekend at Bernies before the movie a weekend at Bernies, a frat party wake in its worst or best state.
03:11.461 --> 03:14.827
[SPEAKER_00]: But as crazy as it sounds, was this legend actually real.
03:15.688 --> 03:30.330
[SPEAKER_00]: The earliest reference to the story of John Barrymore's body being stolen from the local morgue by the Bundy Drive Boys is from Errol Flynn's memoir, My Wicked Book of Ways, great title, published just months after Flynn's death in 1959.
03:30.310 --> 03:38.483
[SPEAKER_00]: Flynn's version of the story is that director Raoul Walsh and two friends persuaded the morgue's caretaker to let them borrow the body for an hour.
03:39.064 --> 03:46.395
[SPEAKER_00]: Lying to them about Barrymore's housebound old aunt, who wanted, quote, a final look at her beloved nephew.
03:46.375 --> 04:03.355
[SPEAKER_00]: A $200 bribe also helped matters, according to Flynn's book, and the Bundy Drive Boys brought Barry Moore's body to Flynn's house, arranged him in Flynn's favorite chair, and waited for the unsuspecting actor to return from his local hangouts, the bars.
04:03.335 --> 04:05.780
[SPEAKER_00]: Flynn was not happy.
04:06.281 --> 04:11.631
[SPEAKER_00]: Quote, the lights went on and oh my god, I stared into the face of Barrymore, Flynn remembered.
04:12.253 --> 04:15.780
[SPEAKER_00]: His eyes were closed, he looked puffed, white, bloodless.
04:16.321 --> 04:17.683
[SPEAKER_00]: They hadn't in balmed him yet.
04:18.264 --> 04:21.090
[SPEAKER_00]: I let out a delirious scream.
04:21.070 --> 04:27.620
[SPEAKER_00]: Walsh on the other's caught up to flint as he ran out in this version of the story, explaining that it was only a gag.
04:28.121 --> 04:34.692
[SPEAKER_00]: They returned Barrymore's body to the funeral parlor, while Flynn spent the night, quote, shaken and sobered by the prank.
04:35.433 --> 04:39.940
[SPEAKER_00]: Quote, it was no way to remember the passing of John Barrymore, he wrote.
04:39.920 --> 04:51.814
[SPEAKER_00]: While Walsh had his own version of the story, according to his 1974 memoir, they got the body from the morgue, and Walsh recruited Flynn's inebriated Butler to help him put the corpse on the couch.
04:52.655 --> 04:57.640
[SPEAKER_00]: quote, I've never seen Mr. Barrymore so drunk the Butler said, looks like he might be dead.
04:58.682 --> 05:09.454
[SPEAKER_00]: Flynn, after seeing the body reacted similarly in Rowal Walsh's book, running out of the house and retreating behind a bush, shouting that they'd all end up in San Quinton State Prison
05:09.434 --> 05:16.323
[SPEAKER_00]: When Walsh eventually returned the body, according to his book, he told the undertaker that Barrymore had been, quote, out to visit Flynn.
05:17.063 --> 05:23.191
[SPEAKER_00]: The undertaker replied, quote, why if I didn't know you were going to take him up there, I would have put a better suit on him.
05:23.632 --> 05:38.530
[SPEAKER_00]: After decades of hearsay and a couple of, in my humble opinion, dubious, first-hand accounts, actor Drew Barrymore, of course, the granddaughter of John Barrymore, also confirmed the story
05:38.510 --> 05:46.900
[SPEAKER_00]: Quote not only S. Drew answered, but there have been cinematic interpretations of that, a Blake Edwards film called SOB that's just brilliant and fun to watch.
05:47.721 --> 05:55.011
[SPEAKER_00]: In the 1981 film that she's referencing the deceased protagonist, a film producer, is taken away from the funeral home and buried at sea.
05:56.052 --> 06:05.023
[SPEAKER_00]: The host of Hotlons followed up by asking Drew for grandfather's post-mortem festivities, had also inspired the 1989 Black comedy Weekend at Buries,
06:05.003 --> 06:10.369
[SPEAKER_00]: To which she replied, quote, I've heard things but I can't know ever if that's even true.
06:10.689 --> 06:18.918
[SPEAKER_00]: While Drew Barrymore's vote of truth might settle the Bundy Drive Boys last night with her grandfather, it's still possible the story is just perpetuated legend.
06:19.319 --> 06:28.108
[SPEAKER_00]: Agreed upon as a continuous prank by the Bundy Drive Boys and their successors, and John Barrymore's body actually never left the Morgan all.
06:28.088 --> 06:38.502
[SPEAKER_00]: According to Gene Fowler's son Will, he and his father sat visual beside Barrymore's body for the entire night that it was at the morgue, and at no point was a taken by Walsh or anyone else.
06:39.202 --> 06:52.780
[SPEAKER_00]: In a 1977 biography of Barrymore, according to a mental floss article on the prank, author John Kobler alleged that the only visitor was a sex worker who, quote,
06:54.008 --> 07:09.958
[SPEAKER_00]: Also, according to Mental Floss, Gregory William Mank, author of Hollywood's Hellfire Club, the Miss Adventures of John Barrymore, W.C. Fields, Arrow Flynn, and the Bundy Drive Boys, finds Fowler's claim, quote, far more credible than Flynn's or Walsh's.
07:10.580 --> 07:16.772
[SPEAKER_00]: Quote, it was Errol Flynn, I believe, who originally made up this morbid tale, and Rolla Walsh was all too happy to support it.
07:17.253 --> 07:20.018
[SPEAKER_00]: After all, it's a hell of a story, make told mental floss.
07:20.680 --> 07:28.174
[SPEAKER_00]: Quote, Flynn worshipped Barrymore, and he created this wacky corp swiping saga to give his idol a resurrection of sorts.
07:28.194 --> 07:30.158
[SPEAKER_00]: Temporary though it was.
07:30.138 --> 07:40.723
[SPEAKER_00]: True or not, the Bundy drive boys really were early versions of the rat pack, the rat pack, and hey, even the pussy-posse, down for a night out, a joke, or of course something a little bit darker.
07:40.763 --> 07:48.822
[SPEAKER_00]: It's of course the great stuff of Hollywood legend, but there's also something kind of sad about the Bundy drive boys.
07:48.802 --> 07:57.453
[SPEAKER_00]: They're of course, aging stars, geniuses, of course, but unsure of their own futures and by extension their own legacies.
07:58.194 --> 08:09.668
[SPEAKER_00]: Mank himself describes the group as quote, brilliant, sensitive men plagued by demons and tormented by the way they destroyed most of their meaningful relationships and squander their remarkable talent.
08:10.429 --> 08:17.678
[SPEAKER_00]: The, we once stole Barrymore's body for one final party story, was one of their ways of laughing at their own misery.
00:00.031 --> 00:01.660
[SPEAKER_00]: We can't add bunnies.
00:02.243 --> 00:03.007
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Jason Horton.
00:03.309 --> 00:04.053
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Rebecca Leib.
00:04.495 --> 00:05.923
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is Ghost Town.
00:21.698 --> 00:34.235
[SPEAKER_00]: The Gundy Drive just north of sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, California is a tiny, tutor-style cabin, barely seen between a roof, thick hedges, and larger, multi-million-dollar Brentwood homes.
00:34.916 --> 00:39.762
[SPEAKER_00]: But what this little low-key lodge lacks in Granger, it makes up for in notoriety.
00:40.303 --> 00:50.777
[SPEAKER_00]: At the height of Hollywood's Golden Age, this postage stamp-sized cabin was the unlikely headquarters to a group of Hollywood alisters, who were hell-bent on creative hijinks,
00:50.757 --> 00:57.850
[SPEAKER_00]: wild parties, and an out-of-control weekend at Bernie's Legend Prank to cap their chaotic pedigree.
00:58.532 --> 01:04.142
[SPEAKER_00]: Move over Rat Pack, this episode of Ghost Town is all about the Bundy Drive Boys.
01:05.067 --> 01:09.857
[SPEAKER_00]: In the 1930s, artists John Decker lived in that tiny cabin on Bundy Drive.
01:10.979 --> 01:22.283
[SPEAKER_00]: He was best friends with other elites, including journalist Jean Fowler, art critic set a key-cheat heartman and the legendary W.C. fields, John Barrymore and Errol Flynn, among others.
01:22.263 --> 01:32.518
[SPEAKER_00]: Each were very successful, but also rapidly approaching the ends of their iconic careers, and, as history also reflects, their lives.
01:33.480 --> 01:51.527
[SPEAKER_00]: This might have not been lost on the group, because the house and Bundy drive began to see epic drinking, prank, sexual exploits, hedonism, and in true film and theater nerds style, late night and prompt to Shakespeare's stagings, and kind of an over-the-hill
01:51.862 --> 02:10.424
[SPEAKER_00]: In his 1954 memoir of the group, Minutes of the Last Meeting, Gene Fowler wrote, quote, that Brown-Beamed Studio was a place of meeting for the still-lively survivors of Bohemian times, an artist's alamo where political boars never intruded, and where breast-beating hypocrites could find no listeners.
02:11.005 --> 02:16.992
[SPEAKER_00]: These men lived intensely, as do children, and poets, and jaguars.
02:16.972 --> 02:24.344
[SPEAKER_00]: The group were essentially, according to mental floss, quote, high-society mischief makers, and with mischief comes legend.
02:25.045 --> 02:40.009
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1942, the Bundy drive boys were heartbroken when their compatriots and probably highest profile member, acting powerhouse John Barrymore, died from cirrhosis of the liver and kidney failure, complicated by about of pneumonia.
02:40.811 --> 02:43.435
[SPEAKER_00]: But the party wasn't over quite yet.
02:43.415 --> 03:01.423
[SPEAKER_00]: After Barrymore's death, the Bundy Drive boys supposedly smuggled John Barrymore's corpse out of the morgue for one final ride, taking Barrymore's body back to Bundy Drive, propping him up against a poker table and partying all night with their late friends cadaver.
03:03.209 --> 03:10.760
[SPEAKER_00]: It was like a weekend at Bernies before the movie a weekend at Bernies, a frat party wake in its worst or best state.
03:11.461 --> 03:14.827
[SPEAKER_00]: But as crazy as it sounds, was this legend actually real.
03:15.688 --> 03:30.330
[SPEAKER_00]: The earliest reference to the story of John Barrymore's body being stolen from the local morgue by the Bundy Drive Boys is from Errol Flynn's memoir, My Wicked Book of Ways, great title, published just months after Flynn's death in 1959.
03:30.310 --> 03:38.483
[SPEAKER_00]: Flynn's version of the story is that director Raoul Walsh and two friends persuaded the morgue's caretaker to let them borrow the body for an hour.
03:39.064 --> 03:46.395
[SPEAKER_00]: Lying to them about Barrymore's housebound old aunt, who wanted, quote, a final look at her beloved nephew.
03:46.375 --> 04:03.355
[SPEAKER_00]: A $200 bribe also helped matters, according to Flynn's book, and the Bundy Drive Boys brought Barry Moore's body to Flynn's house, arranged him in Flynn's favorite chair, and waited for the unsuspecting actor to return from his local hangouts, the bars.
04:03.335 --> 04:05.780
[SPEAKER_00]: Flynn was not happy.
04:06.281 --> 04:11.631
[SPEAKER_00]: Quote, the lights went on and oh my god, I stared into the face of Barrymore, Flynn remembered.
04:12.253 --> 04:15.780
[SPEAKER_00]: His eyes were closed, he looked puffed, white, bloodless.
04:16.321 --> 04:17.683
[SPEAKER_00]: They hadn't in balmed him yet.
04:18.264 --> 04:21.090
[SPEAKER_00]: I let out a delirious scream.
04:21.070 --> 04:27.620
[SPEAKER_00]: Walsh on the other's caught up to flint as he ran out in this version of the story, explaining that it was only a gag.
04:28.121 --> 04:34.692
[SPEAKER_00]: They returned Barrymore's body to the funeral parlor, while Flynn spent the night, quote, shaken and sobered by the prank.
04:35.433 --> 04:39.940
[SPEAKER_00]: Quote, it was no way to remember the passing of John Barrymore, he wrote.
04:39.920 --> 04:51.814
[SPEAKER_00]: While Walsh had his own version of the story, according to his 1974 memoir, they got the body from the morgue, and Walsh recruited Flynn's inebriated Butler to help him put the corpse on the couch.
04:52.655 --> 04:57.640
[SPEAKER_00]: quote, I've never seen Mr. Barrymore so drunk the Butler said, looks like he might be dead.
04:58.682 --> 05:09.454
[SPEAKER_00]: Flynn, after seeing the body reacted similarly in Rowal Walsh's book, running out of the house and retreating behind a bush, shouting that they'd all end up in San Quinton State Prison
05:09.434 --> 05:16.323
[SPEAKER_00]: When Walsh eventually returned the body, according to his book, he told the undertaker that Barrymore had been, quote, out to visit Flynn.
05:17.063 --> 05:23.191
[SPEAKER_00]: The undertaker replied, quote, why if I didn't know you were going to take him up there, I would have put a better suit on him.
05:23.632 --> 05:38.530
[SPEAKER_00]: After decades of hearsay and a couple of, in my humble opinion, dubious, first-hand accounts, actor Drew Barrymore, of course, the granddaughter of John Barrymore, also confirmed the story
05:38.510 --> 05:46.900
[SPEAKER_00]: Quote not only S. Drew answered, but there have been cinematic interpretations of that, a Blake Edwards film called SOB that's just brilliant and fun to watch.
05:47.721 --> 05:55.011
[SPEAKER_00]: In the 1981 film that she's referencing the deceased protagonist, a film producer, is taken away from the funeral home and buried at sea.
05:56.052 --> 06:05.023
[SPEAKER_00]: The host of Hotlons followed up by asking Drew for grandfather's post-mortem festivities, had also inspired the 1989 Black comedy Weekend at Buries,
06:05.003 --> 06:10.369
[SPEAKER_00]: To which she replied, quote, I've heard things but I can't know ever if that's even true.
06:10.689 --> 06:18.918
[SPEAKER_00]: While Drew Barrymore's vote of truth might settle the Bundy Drive Boys last night with her grandfather, it's still possible the story is just perpetuated legend.
06:19.319 --> 06:28.108
[SPEAKER_00]: Agreed upon as a continuous prank by the Bundy Drive Boys and their successors, and John Barrymore's body actually never left the Morgan all.
06:28.088 --> 06:38.502
[SPEAKER_00]: According to Gene Fowler's son Will, he and his father sat visual beside Barrymore's body for the entire night that it was at the morgue, and at no point was a taken by Walsh or anyone else.
06:39.202 --> 06:52.780
[SPEAKER_00]: In a 1977 biography of Barrymore, according to a mental floss article on the prank, author John Kobler alleged that the only visitor was a sex worker who, quote,
06:54.008 --> 07:09.958
[SPEAKER_00]: Also, according to Mental Floss, Gregory William Mank, author of Hollywood's Hellfire Club, the Miss Adventures of John Barrymore, W.C. Fields, Arrow Flynn, and the Bundy Drive Boys, finds Fowler's claim, quote, far more credible than Flynn's or Walsh's.
07:10.580 --> 07:16.772
[SPEAKER_00]: Quote, it was Errol Flynn, I believe, who originally made up this morbid tale, and Rolla Walsh was all too happy to support it.
07:17.253 --> 07:20.018
[SPEAKER_00]: After all, it's a hell of a story, make told mental floss.
07:20.680 --> 07:28.174
[SPEAKER_00]: Quote, Flynn worshipped Barrymore, and he created this wacky corp swiping saga to give his idol a resurrection of sorts.
07:28.194 --> 07:30.158
[SPEAKER_00]: Temporary though it was.
07:30.138 --> 07:40.723
[SPEAKER_00]: True or not, the Bundy drive boys really were early versions of the rat pack, the rat pack, and hey, even the pussy-posse, down for a night out, a joke, or of course something a little bit darker.
07:40.763 --> 07:48.822
[SPEAKER_00]: It's of course the great stuff of Hollywood legend, but there's also something kind of sad about the Bundy drive boys.
07:48.802 --> 07:57.453
[SPEAKER_00]: They're of course, aging stars, geniuses, of course, but unsure of their own futures and by extension their own legacies.
07:58.194 --> 08:09.668
[SPEAKER_00]: Mank himself describes the group as quote, brilliant, sensitive men plagued by demons and tormented by the way they destroyed most of their meaningful relationships and squander their remarkable talent.
08:10.429 --> 08:17.678
[SPEAKER_00]: The, we once stole Barrymore's body for one final party story, was one of their ways of laughing at their own misery.
