The legendary John Barrymore, patriarch of one of the most talented and successful families in the history of stages and screens, was known as THE GREAT PROFILE because of his rugged, handsome, chiseled features that had our great-grandmothers lusting. Probably a handful of our great-grandfathers as well.
But for as cherished as Barrymore’s profile may have been in life, according to legend, his body was just as desired in death. No, not necessarily in THAT way. I mean his LITERAL body.
For every proven story from Tinseltown’s 20th-century heyday, there’s an abundance of legends that we’ll probably never know the truth about. One of the wildest ones involved actor John Barrymore: Supposedly, after Barrymore died in 1942, his friends stole his corpse from the morgue and brought it back to Errol Flynn’s house.
As Wikipedia elaborated:
Errol Flynn‘s memoirs claim film director Raoul Walsh “borrowed” Barrymore’s body before burial to leave his corpse propped in a chair for a drunken Flynn to discover when he returned home,[204] Gene Fowler, a close friend of Barrymore, stayed with the body all night and denied the story. However, in a 2020 interview for the YouTube series Hot Ones, John’s granddaughter Drew Barrymore claimed the Flynn account was accurate.[205]
Ask any random WGA member you might know what they think of Drew’s integrity these days and you might get something lacking an endorsement.
But in this particular case, such distrust may not be warranted, as our friend Wiki concluded:
Barrymore was buried at Calvary Cemetery in Los Angeles on June 2.[206] (1942). In 1980, Barrymore’s son had his father’s body reinterred to the family plot in Philadelphia’s Mount Vernon Cemetery.[
That’s one corpse with a lot of mileage. Got around more than many friends and family members of mine do these days, in fact.
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