Before the Rat Pack, another wild bunch

On Bundy Drive just north of Sunset Boulevard, in the leafy, hillside section of Brentwood, a postage stamp-sized Tudor-style lodge lurks unobtrusively behind a row of hedges. In a block of rebuilt insta-mansions and multimillion-dollar homes, there is little about this low-key cabin to suggest that it was, at the height of Hollywood's Golden Age, headquarters to a clan of the movie industry's most famous names and its most celebrated group of over-the-hill scalawags.

Approaching the house, however, a hint of its devilish past reveals itself. On the heavy wooden front door, above a brass lion's head knocker, a garishly colored escutcheon leaps out -- what appears to be a family crest until one looks closely at the words sketched below the two heraldic unicorns: "Useless. Insignificant. Poetic."

The words proudly fluttering across the door were the motto of the infamous group's ringleader, the cabin's onetime resident, John Decker, a painter whose shadowy life left behind a trail of mystery only beginning to be unraveled. It was in this unassuming lodge that Decker played kingpin to a flamboyant boys' club of Hollywood's most notorious rakes, a club that will be memorialized this weekend when the descendants of its members gather for the first time for a "Farewell Toast to the Bundy Drive Boys."

The group was led, alongside Decker, by actors W.C. Fields, John Barrymore, Errol Flynn, journalist Gene Fowler, and art critic/aesthete Sadakichi Hartmann, a group of men each rapidly approaching the ends of not only their storied careers but, for most, also of their lives. Activities careened from epic drinking bouts to late-night impromptu Shakespeare stagings (while cutting out the boring parts).

In his 1954 memoir of the group, "Minutes of the Last Meeting," Fowler wrote, "That brown beamed studio was a place of meeting for still-lively survivors of Bohemian times, an artists' Alamo where political bores never intruded and where breast-beating hypocrites could find no listeners .... These men lived intensely, as do children and poets and jaguars."

The Bundy group's rambunctious antics and its blend of irreverent highbrow inebriation brought it to the public eye as much for its brushes with the law as for its members' day jobs.

An art opening at Decker's West Hollywood gallery in 1946, to take a typical incident, degenerated into a drunken brawl that had to be dispersed by the police; Fields, for his part, was in perpetual hot water for tax evasion; and Flynn's statutory rape trial was the sensation of the decade.