As Mental Floss explains, some of Barrymore’s close friends have attested that his body did in-fact leave the morgue. Others, however, have stated that it’s a complete fabrication. In his 1959 autobiography “My Wicked, Wicked Ways,” Flynn recounted that director Raoul Walsh bribed the undertaker with $200 to allow him to take Barrymore’s body under the guise that his devastated aunt wanted to say goodbye. Instead, Walsh took the body to Flynn’s house and propped him in a chair as a prank. Flynn walked in, encountered the corpse, and lost it. As he put it, “I let out a delirious scream.”
In an excerpt from his autobiography “Each Man in His Time” (via The Grove Book of Hollywood), Walsh has a similar story. He explained that the undertaker, whom he knew, allowed him to take Barrymore’s body as long as he brought it back within an hour. Walsh agreed and took the body to Flynn’s home where he placed it on a couch to prank Flynn. He screamed and with a successful last prank, Walsh promptly took the body back to the mortuary. However, Will Fowler, Gene Fowler’s son, later wrote that they had been with Barrymore’s body all night and that no such thing ever happened.
That being said, Gregory William Mank, author of Hollywood’s Hellfire Club: The Misadventures of John Barrymore, W.C. Fields, Errol Flynn and the Bundy Drive Boys told Mental Floss that he believes the Fowlers. He added that Flynn and Walsh conspired to manufacture what he described as a “morbid tale.”
