Helen Chandler: Picon Citron
In the original or at least the first American sound version of Dracula (1931), Bela Lugosi spends a sizable portion of the film after Helen Chandler’s blood, and his pursuit of her seems more than a little misguided. Was there ever a screen performer who looked as snow white as Chandler, as anemic, as small and bloodless? She was a petite blond, a wraith, and her blue eyes were almost white in their starkness, too, so that she always seemed to be looking inward instead of out, and those small inward eyes of hers could have an unnerving quality that suits the buggy but creaky horror of this Dracula. Chandler speaks in a strained, chirping voice, and she’s very intense. Who is she, and why does she stare like that?
She was born in South Carolina, and her Southern accent comes out sometimes on screen, especially in her last film, Mr. Boggs Steps Out (1938), where her distinctively belle-like volatility makes her seem kin to Miriam Hopkins. In the 1920s, Chandler built herself an impressive career on Broadway, playing with John Barrymore in Richard III, Lionel Barrymore in Macbeth, and then as Hedvig in Ibsen’s The Wild Duck and as Ophelia in a modern dress Hamlet. Hedvig goes blind and Ophelia goes mad, and both of these extremes must have suited Chandler’s birdlike imperturbability, her sense that she lived entirely in her own world. She was a leading lady for John Ford in Salute (1929), and then she made an impact as one of the lost people on board a floating ship of the dead in Outward Bound (1930), which looks as creaky today as Lugosi’s Dracula does.
The prime year for Chandler in films was 1931. After Dracula, she played opposite Ramon Novarro in Jacques Feyder’s Daybreak, a movie where she’s asked to do an extended drunk scene: “I want another one!” she cries, when it’s clear that she’s had more than enough booze, and then when Novarro obliges, Chandler insists on “a full one.” And so when Chandler played Nikki in her finest film, William Dieterle’s The Last Flight, she had some practice with drinking on screen for one of the all-time best boozing movies and one of the all-time best romantic group movies.
The Last Flight has attracted a cult over the years, and I return to it like you would return to an old and much-loved friend, a little tatty, a little the worse for wear, a somewhat flowery friend, but oh, such a rare friend. It is not a perfect movie. There is as much bad writing in it, from screenwriter John Monk Saunders, who wrote the book it was based on, as there is lyric writing and then just outright dadaist writing. I’ve seen it so many times, but it’s one of those dialogue movies where you’re always hearing something new, or seeing something from a different angle. It is a tale of the Lost Generation, clearly patterned from Hemingway’s cloth, about a group of World War I fliers who do nothing but drink and drink some more after the war is finished, in Paris and then further afield in Portugal. There are four friends, played by Richard Barthelmess, David Manners, Johnny Mack Brown and Elliott Nugent, plus a fifth hanger-on, Walter Byron, who plays a journalist who drinks sidecars because he’s a louse. They all run into Chandler’s Nikki at a swank hotel bar and immediately take her up as their mascot.
Nikki is introduced holding a man’s teeth in a glass and staring out in that unseeing inward way that Chandler always fell into on screen. Nikki is holding the teeth, she says, because a man went outside to fight and left them with her (we never see him retrieving them). Chandler’s staring is explained in this movie as nearsightedness. When Nikki really needs to see something, she produces a lorgnette from her bag, but this lorgnette only seems to confuse her more—maybe it’s the wrong prescription? She drinks champagne cocktails, which leads Mack Brown to call her “a sissy drinker,” so that she responds, “But I can improve.”
Nikki speaks mainly in non-sequiturs and the men say that she’s always saying the wrong thing, and that’s true up to a point. She is, in a way, a “madcap heiress,” of the sort that would be popular in the middle and later thirties in American movies. The difference is that, say, Katharine Hepburn or Irene Dunne might indicate various eccentricities as part of a performance of self for the character, accompanied by flurries of appropriate mannerisms, whereas Chandler is truly playing in the dark, truly unknowable. Nikki plays situations on instinct, and so Chandler herself plays Nikki on instinct. With her blank blue eyes and her semi-oblivious way of speaking, which suggests, at times, Margaret O’Brien at her most neurotic, Chandler doesn’t do much to act eccentric, she simply is eccentric, and so is the character she is playing, and so the idea of “performance” falls away and what’s left is an odd or even wild duck embodying what must be at least a version of herself.
Nikki has a crooked tooth, and when it gets noticed, she tells the guys that the crooked tooth is useful, because if men kiss her too hard it splits her lip, which alerts her to trouble, “So now I don’t let anyone kiss me…hard,” Chandler says, coming out with that last word on a note of emphatic distractedness. It’s a perfect line reading because it doesn’t seem like a line reading. Chandler just launches into this little speech about her tooth and then pauses and then adds that word at the end, “hard,” as a stopgap. When she’s as headlong as this, Chandler’s Nikki starts to seem like a whole way of living and reacting to the world.
Nikki’s all-purpose response is, “I’ll take vanilla,” and this suits Chandler’s “where am I, what’s going on?” blondeness. It may also be a small clinging to convention; she knows, maybe, that vanilla might be a little dull but it will never let her down. Nikki collects shoes and perfume and she keeps turtles in her tub. She has a rich mother named Beulah that she hasn’t seen in a while, and when the men ask how rich Beulah is, Nikki says, “Leave a lady a few secrets, can’t you?” in a surprisingly worldly voice. When they’re all hung-over the morning after their first drinking bout, Chandler makes her voice almost unrecognizably low as she greets all the men with their first names. When they question why she’s getting her toenails painted, she comes out with a phrase that will become the group’s motto: “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
They take some hair of the dog that bit them, some cocktails for breakfast, and Nikki sets her sights on Barthelmess’s Cary, the leader of the group. Cary and Nikki drink Picon Citrons together at a sidewalk cafe where the wind ruffles Nikki’s hair, and they visit the Père Lachaise cemetery. She has her reasonable moments, Nikki does, but then she’ll say that she needs to put her red shoes on because she can run faster in red shoes…and it’s tantalizingly unclear whether Nikki actually believes something like that or it’s just the way her mind works, on the principle of, “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
Drinking alcohol can be as liberating and vivifying as any other vice. It can make you “laugh and play,” which is what the men in The Last Flight are always saying to Nikki. Liquor can make you loosen up, or “go wild,” as filmic screwball heiresses of the late 1930s so often do. Liquor can also become a way of life that debilitates you and chips away at you until there’s very little left. The Last Flight is an unusual American movie in that it makes no bones about the fact that its spontaneous narrative is basically a sometimes-lively lurch toward death, without any possible path to anything that can be called a happy ending.
And so it feels fated, I suppose, that Helen Chandler, the shifty, perishably delicate female star of this ultimate drinking movie, fell prey to alcoholism herself. She returned to the stage in the mid-thirties, but by the forties she was drinking so heavily that she often had to be hospitalized, and she was considered unemployable. In 1950, at 44, she fell asleep while smoking and was burned over most of her body. Disfigured, she continued to drink. She died in 1965, of cardiac arrest, while being operated on for a stomach ulcer. Though she had been married three times, no one came forth to claim her ashes and barely anyone attended her funeral.
It can be such fun to drink with a group. The tongues waggle, candid talk sparks even more candid talk, the bodies laugh and play. To drink alone and consistently, though, is a dogged thing, a sore throat, medicine-like way of life. I can only assume that Helen Chandler was not exclusively drinking champagne cocktails and Picon Citrons in her grim-sounding twenty-five years from 1940 to 1965. But Nikki learns to drink Picon Citrons in The Last Flight, with a man she loves. In Nikki and in some of Chandler’s other film work, there is the Jazz Age spirit of another Southerner, Zelda Fitzgerald, a spirit that is seemingly out-of-control but so vital that the vitality is what’s important and not what eventually became of it.
by Dan Callahan