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San Antonio's 'Armageddon': Clara Bow, Gary Cooper and the Nine-Month Hotel Donnybrook

Clara Bow / Gary Cooper / Wings (1927 film) 1920s Substance & Parties Myth / folklore 4/5 wildness

During the protracted Kelly Field shoot the cast and crew were billeted for nine months at the Saint Anthony Hotel in San Antonio. William Wellman later summed up the shoot as 'the Armageddon of a magnificent sexual Donnybrook,' claiming the elevator girls were 'all pregnant' by the time the company left. The production allegedly turned into a long, raucous social season: Clara Bow — Paramount's top star — openly flirted with male cast members and pilots despite having become engaged to director Victor Fleming shortly after arriving, and she began a tumultuous affair with a young Gary Cooper that would help launch his career. The set gossip extended to Bow altering her costumes (slitting necklines and removing sleeves) and general sexual abandon among extras and crew during long weather delays.

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San Antonio's 'Armageddon': Clara Bow, Gary Cooper and the Nine-Month Hotel DonnybrookAI concept artwork

Archive Record · 1920s

Substance & Parties4/5 wildness

San Antonio's 'Armageddon': Clara Bow, Gary Cooper and the Nine-Month Hotel Donnybrook

Clara Bow / Gary Cooper / Wings (1927 film) / 1920s

During the protracted Kelly Field shoot the cast and crew were billeted for nine months at the Saint Anthony Hotel in San Antonio. William Wellman later summed up the shoot as 'the Armageddon of a magnificent sexual Donnybrook,' claiming the elevator girls were 'all pregnant' by the time the company left. The production allegedly turned into a long, raucous social season: Clara Bow — Paramount's top star — openly flirted with male cast members and pilots despite having become engaged to director Victor Fleming shortly after arriving, and she began a tumultuous affair with a young Gary Cooper that would help launch his career. The set gossip extended to Bow altering her costumes (slitting necklines and removing sleeves) and general sexual abandon among extras and crew during long weather delays.

Myth / folklore

The backlot files

More Stories from the Hollywood Archive

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5896 stories

5896 stories in this selection.

01

Substance & Parties2010s

The Teen Criminal Record Lana Rhoades Says Redirected Her Life

Lana Rhoades

Before becoming a public figure, Rhoades said she began using narcotics with her first boyfriend and acted as an accomplice in several burglaries. At 16, she was sentenced to the Warrenville Youth Center, a juvenile detention facility in Illinois. During roughly a year of incarceration, she earned her GED and was released early for good behavior. Rhoades has characterized the experience not simply as a punishment but as a turning point, saying that detention interrupted a trajectory involving drugs and crime and gave her a chance to change direction. After release, she moved into legal adult work by hostessing at a Tilted Kilt restaurant and later stripping, eventually entering the adult-film business at 19. The episode is one of the darker contrasts in her biography: the same person who later became one of Pornhub's most searched performers had first spent her mid-teens in juvenile custody.

Unverified ↗
02

Substance & Parties1990s–2000s

Michael Brandon’s Repeated Drug Convictions and Three-Year Prison Sentence

Michael Brandon

Michael Brandon’s career was interrupted by a series of drug-related legal problems. According to the available biographical account, he was convicted of drug possession in 1990 and again in 1997, with the later proceedings ultimately contributing to a three-year period of incarceration. The source does not identify the substances involved, the jurisdictions, or the precise relationship between the two convictions and the prison term, so the chronology should not be embellished beyond those documented claims. After returning to the adult-film industry and building a prominent career as a performer and director, Brandon was arrested again for drug possession in 2007. The later arrest is notable because it occurred after he had become an established figure in gay pornography, rather than during the precarious early years of his career. Despite these setbacks, he continued working in the industry, later moving into business and community leadership, including an executive role with Community, a San Francisco organization serving queer men.

Unverified ↗
03

Substance & Parties2010s

The Director Who Admitted He Was Near Death Before Entering Treatment

Chi Chi LaRue

In 2015, after decades working in an industry associated with punishing schedules, nightlife, and constant public performance, LaRue admitted himself into drug-and-alcohol treatment in Minnesota. According to his friend Kevin Molin, LaRue felt he was 'near death,' making the decision less a publicity maneuver than a crisis intervention. The disclosure exposed the private cost behind the flamboyant Chi Chi LaRue persona: a celebrated director, DJ, performer, and business figure confronting substance abuse seriously enough to seek inpatient help. Unlike the exaggerated party legends often attached to entertainment personalities, this account is grounded in LaRue's own admission and his friend's description of the severity of the situation.

Archive: verified ↗
04

Substance & Parties1990s-2000s

The Meth-and-Alcohol Years Kylie Ireland Said She Used to Stay Thin

Kylie Ireland

Ireland has spoken candidly about experimenting with recreational drugs before and during her adult-film career, saying that she tried most drugs and used crystal methamphetamine for a period in an effort to remain thin. She identified alcohol—not methamphetamine—as her principal drug of choice, and by 2001 she recognized that her drinking had become a serious personal problem. The account is notable less for a single arrest or spectacular Hollywood party than for the way it exposes the pressures surrounding appearance, touring, dancing, performing, and celebrity in the adult-entertainment world. The source does not document a specific overdose, rehabilitation episode, or public collapse, so the historically supportable story is Ireland's own acknowledgment of escalating alcohol use and her earlier methamphetamine use, rather than a more dramatic recovery narrative that cannot be verified from the record provided.

Archive: verified ↗
05

Substance & Parties1980s

“Los Angeles Did Not Have Enough Perverts”: The Collapse of Halsted’s Truck-Trailer Sex Club

Halsted’s

Fred Halsted, Joseph Yanoska, and David Webb converted an unfinished industrial property at 2453 Glendale Boulevard in Silver Lake into one of Los Angeles’s most extreme gay sex venues. Halsted’s featured booths with glory holes, bunk beds, a sling, and four truck trailers parked inside a walled rear yard—an arrangement inspired partly by the use of empty trailers as cruising sites in New York’s meatpacking district. Halsted described the establishment bluntly as a “stand-up fuck club,” and later filmed A Night at Halsted’s there, a plotless 1982 record of sexual encounters using the club’s mirrors, slings, glory holes, and other equipment as its setting. The experiment lasted roughly a year and failed for a reason Halsted expressed with characteristic self-mockery: “Los Angeles did not have enough perverts” to support it. The venue’s short life illustrated the unstable economics of underground sexual enterprises even during the period when Halsted’s films were gaining attention in art institutions. Rather than becoming a permanent center of the subculture he wanted to cultivate, Halsted’s became a brief, legendary space that survived most visibly through the film made inside it.

Archive: verified ↗
06

Substance & Parties1980s-2000s

Cannabis, Performance Pills, and the Chemical Workaround Behind Byron's Longevity

Tom Byron

Byron has offered an unusually candid account of the practical drug culture surrounding male performers during porn's 1980s heyday. Before Viagra was available, he said that he and many colleagues regularly smoked cannabis before filming to get into the required state for scenes. As his career continued, however, the problem shifted from nerves and atmosphere to physical endurance. Byron acknowledged that he eventually turned to performance-enhancing pills, later crediting Viagra with keeping him active for roughly another decade after he believed his career should have ended. His comments provide a behind-the-scenes glimpse of a production environment in which performers were expected to deliver on demand, often under repetitive and mechanically stressful conditions, while the industry had few formal health or psychological supports. The account is Byron's own recollection rather than evidence of a specific arrest, overdose, or documented incident, but it illustrates the substance-based coping strategies that accompanied his unusually long career of approximately 3,200 credited appearances.

Unverified ↗
Showing 1–6 of 5896

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From the Hollywood archive

Clara Bow / Gary Cooper / Wings (1927 film) / 1920s

San Antonio's 'Armageddon': Clara Bow, Gary Cooper and the Nine-Month Hotel Donnybrook

Substance & PartiesMyth / folklore4/5 wildness

During the protracted Kelly Field shoot the cast and crew were billeted for nine months at the Saint Anthony Hotel in San Antonio. William Wellman later summed up the shoot as 'the Armageddon of a magnificent sexual Donnybrook,' claiming the elevator girls were 'all pregnant' by the time the company left. The production allegedly turned into a long, raucous social season: Clara Bow — Paramount's top star — openly flirted with male cast members and pilots despite having become engaged to director Victor Fleming shortly after arriving, and she began a tumultuous affair with a young Gary Cooper that would help launch his career. The set gossip extended to Bow altering her costumes (slitting necklines and removing sleeves) and general sexual abandon among extras and crew during long weather delays.

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