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Perhaps the greatest testament to famed actor John Barrymore's impeccable style is this: Moments after the first shock of the San Francisco earthquake in 1906, Diamond Jim Brady spotted an unruffled Barrymore in full fig with a carnation in his buttonhole, standing outside the St. Francis Hotel and doling out cognac to a shivering opera soprano. Brady never tired of telling people how Barrymore dressed for a natural disaster. Barrymore never tired of shivering sopranos, showgirls, actresses, and cigarette-picture pinups. But between wooing everyone from Mary Astor to his second wife, Michael Strange, the Great Profile emerged as the greatest actor of his time. He re-invented Hamlet and Richard III, and played leading man to Garbo, Hepburn, and Crawford. "He was decadent. He was high. He was beloved," says Margot Peters, the author of The House of Barrymore. "He was just riding the tide."

In 1920s New York that tide took him to the Pipe Room of Keens Chophouse. Originally an offshoot of the London literati's Lambs Club, Keens became the rendezvous of choice for the Herald Square Theatre crowd. In the tradition of travelers in 17th-century England who checked their pipes at their favorite inns, men about Manhattan left their clay Churchwarden smokers at Keens until the next time they popped in for a drink. (Barrymore's pipe is still there today.) The tobacco emporium De La Concha just up Sixth Avenue carries the most impressive selection of modern counterparts.

Barrymore was born in 1882 in Philadelphia, heir apparent to the first family of American theater. His first known film role was as a Clark Griswold–like character in the silent An American Citizen (1914), but he was to become a devoted Anglophile. He won London's heart as Hamlet in 1925, and befriended Winston Churchill and Edward, Prince of Wales. When he said good-bye to Broadway for Hollywood in the summer of 1926, it was with an English valet and a chattering monkey named Clementine—a gift from the English actress Gladys Cooper. "At one point he was very New York. Very bohemian. Very artist," says Peters. "That certainly changed. He became very British."

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