Elaine Barrie

Elaine Barrie, the fourth wife of Shakespearean actor John Barrymore, with whom she shared a tumultuous on-again, off-again engagement and marriage that enthralled the nation in the darkest days of the Depression, died March 1 in Manhattan. She was 87.

Her story unwinds like an old-fashioned movie. As a Hunter College student of 19, she wrote an adoring letter to Barrymore, then 53 and hospitalized in Manhattan.

He phoned her, they had a pleasant talk and he invited her to visit him. There was a most meaningful kiss in his hospital room.

They almost immediately became known to the public by the Shakespearean names they had bestowed on each other, Ariel and Caliban, from " The Tempest. "

There was a mysterious voyage on Barrymore ' s yacht, a cross-country chase (with her pursuing him), an elopement and tender reconciliations after spectacular quarrels.

But there were darker elements to the tale.

Barrymore, one of the leading interpreters of Shakespeare in the 20th century, was in decline because of the ravages of alcoholism and was reduced to reading his lines.

Many speculated that the young woman was using him to help her own nascent acting career.

The story at times seemed to sink to slapstick.

When Barrymore got his bride a role in a 1940 play, " My Dear Children, " the most photographed, talked-about scene occurred when he held her in his lap and spanked her. And the best-remembered of her few films was undoubtedly the saucy short " How to Undress in Front of Your Husband, " released in 1937 and still available for sale.

Elaine Jacobs, the daughter of a traveling salesman, was born on July 16, 1915. She first saw Barrymore in the 1931 film " Svengali " and vowed to marry him, a friend, Linda Herman, recounted.

At 16, she won a walk-on part with a stock company that turned into a talking role. She wrote and directed plays at Hunter College.

Even before she married, Jacobs changed her name to Barrie because it sounded like Barrymore. She used Barrymore during her marriage.

She wrote a series of articles about her romance for The New York Mirror in 1935. In the first installment, she told of reading that Barrymore ' s marriage to actress Dolores Costello was on the rocks and of " turning faint with exultation. "

In her fateful letter to Barrymore, dated March 3, 1935, she told him he could " make a dream of mine come true! " She followed up with a phone call.

Sandford Dody, who helped Ms. Barrie write her autobiography, " All My Sins Remembered " (Appleton-Century, 1964), suggested that Barrymore had found her a breezy change of pace.

" It was easy to see why the aging actor, sick in a hospital and sated with strawberry blondes of Hollywood who were as bland as Wonder Bread, found this bright and wry little New York girl, with all her crust, a tasty morsel, " he wrote in his own autobiography, " Giving Up the Ghost: A Writer ' s Life Among the Stars " (M. Evans, 1980).

It was an uneasy courtship, with one argument leading to Barrymore ' s seizing the diamond ring he had given her and saying that he would return it only if she did not call it an engagement ring.

The marriage, celebrated a few minutes after midnight on Nov. 9, 1936, in Yuma, Ariz., was hardly smooth sailing, either.

There were at least four public separations, including one legal divorce that they agreed to reverse. The first tiff, in which Ms. Barrie said her husband " roughed me up a bit, " came less than two months after their wedding, on New Year ' s Eve.

The final divorce was on Nov. 27, 1940.

The Barrymore family which traces its acting tradition to 1752 and is today most famously represented by Drew, the granddaughter of John Barrymore and Costello treated Ms. Barrie as a pariah.

She was the first of John ' s four wives to use the Barrymore name professionally, and the first Barrymore to undress onstage.

Ms. Barrie appeared in radio, plays and movies at the behest of her husband, but she is credited with only one full-length film, " Midnight, " a 1939 movie starring Claudette Colbert.

After the divorce, she remained part of the Hollywood scene and dated Errol Flynn and Ray Milland, among others.

She later ran a business importing straw baskets and handbags from Haiti. Last year, she sold at auction a silver pillbox once owned by her friend Marilyn Monroe.

To help Christopher Plummer prepare for a one-man show on John Barrymore on Broadway in 1997, she showed him Barrymore ' s love letters.

Ms. Barrie was the only former wife to attend Barrymore ' s funeral in 1942. She never remarried and has no immediate survivors.