John Barrymore lived all his brilliant, violent, much-married life in glass houses. No biography can hope to pull up any blinds; it can only poke under carpets and rummage in desk drawers. In Good Night, Sweet Prince (Viking; $3.50) Barrymore's lusty pal Gene Fowler (The Great Mouthpiece, The Great Magoo) has done just that. Gaudy, gossipy, with a sob-sister lining to its Rabelaisian hide, Good Night, Sweet Prince honors Barrymore without emasculating him. From it the Great Profile paradoxically emerges both more tarnished and more dazzling, more fantastic and more real.
Fowler...
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