Hollywood's Hellfire Club: The Misadventures of John Barrymore, W.C. Fields, Errol Flynn and the Bundy Drive Boys

They made fans go crazy and censors apoplectic, spent fortunes faster than they made them, forged Rembrandts and hung them in major museums, went on trial for committing statutory rape with necrophiliac teenage girls, reinterpreted Hamlet as an incestuous mama's boy,and swilled immeasurable quantities of spirits during week-long parties on wobbly yachts.

They were "The Bundy Drive Boys," and they made the Rat Pack look like Cub Scouts.

Their self-destructiveness was spectacular, the misanthropy profound, but behind the boozy bravado was a devoted mutual affection. The Bundy Drive Boys' un-bowdlerized stories have never been illustrated so well or told so completely as within Hollywood's Hellfire Club.

Author Gregory William Mank also wrote It's Alive!: The Classic Cinema Saga of Frankenstein and Hollywood Cauldron.