Errol Flynn, The Tasmanian Devil-May-Care

David Niven led a special forces unit during WW2 and before one operation he told his troops, "Look, you chaps only have to do this once. But I'll have to do it all over again in Hollywood with Errol Flynn!"

Here are two book reviews I wrote for friends years ago. Note that a lot of the stories from his autobiography really are "stories". The second review illuminates some of that.

MY WICKED, WICKED WAYS, by Errol Flynn, 1959.

I don't know the story behind this book. The writing and grammar are rough and I suspect he actually did write it himself. It was published posthumously, but he doesn't seem to have planned that -- he died of a heart attack in 1959 at age 50.

His filmography: us.imdb.com/name/nm0001224/

The second half of the book is loaded with the expected Hollywood gossip and scandals, many hilarious tales, many sad and tragic. But the astonishing first part describes his life before he arrived in America. I won't call it "unbelievable" because I do actually believe most of it. We have only his own account for many of these exploits, but they are often so painful and embarrassing that I think he is telling the truth as he recalls it. The book is a confession, meant to be entertaining, but no less serious for that.

Born in Tasmania (did you think he was Irish?) his mother would later say "He was a nasty little boy." They fought all his life, when they were speaking. His father was a mild-mannered marine biologist. Errol was kicked out of several schools in England and Australia and was a intermittent bum, mooching at hotel bars and hanging with street gangs.

When down and out, he could always rely on the kindness of women. Although he later resented his playboy image, it was true: no matter how ragged and dirty he was, beautiful women found him and helped him (and used him, he would say). In terms of numbers, I don't know what is required to be considered a sexual athlete, but I have to believe Flynn was in the running. He also had a degree of shyness and decency: one woman at a time (in the immediate sense of "in the same room at the same moment"), in private, with a least a gesture toward romance and gallantry. I don't think there was viciousness or cruelty in him, but he surely left much damage in his wake.

He decided to make his fortune in New Guinea where he managed plantations, operated boats, poached for exotic bird plumage and prospected for gold. All more or less in parallel, all more or less unsuccessfully. He was also a slaver.

Now, technically it wasn't slavery, but the legal fig-leaf was a thin one and he calls it by its proper name. Men were bought from their tribal leaders and sold into the gold fields where most of them died. Flynn was sorry about that, but he took the money. By the way, at this time the law protected rare birds but allowed the slave trade.

At age 20 was was on trial for murdering a native. He cites plausible self-defense -- the interior of the island seems to have been an area of constant war -- but, foolishly acting as his own attorney, it took some doing to get out of it. He writes "I had a premonition I would spend most of my life in court."

Back in Australia, broke as usual, he fell in with a rich woman who kept him for a while. I don't think she paid him, but she bought the meals and hotel rooms. After a few weeks he began to feel exhausted and one night impulsively ran off with her diamonds while she slept. The police caught up with him but didn't find the loot. He kept the jewels for a long time as a fallback stash, but a pickpocket eventually took them from him.

He made his way across Australia, at one point working on a sheep ranch where he castrated the animals with his teeth. (Yes, they really do that). The daughter of the ranch rescued him, but they were caught in bed and Flynn got out the window just ahead of dad's shotgun. More adventures than I can recall ensued.

Fleeing the region, trying to get to England, he fell in with Koets, a madman with a medical kit. They fixed the cock fights in Manila by doping their birds' beaks with snake venom. This went on for some time, but eventually they escaped in a steamer barely ahead of an angry mob.

They joined the British army and dug trenches outside of Shanghai, about the time things were heating up with the Japanese in China. They deserted a week later, Flynn forging his own passport from a laundry ticket.

They seem to have sampled every bordello and gambling den from Macao to Marseilles. He says he was disemboweled in India. (Read that again. He claims he was cut with a knife and his guts spilled onto the ground). The scar was below his navel.

Arriving in England, penniless, he was rescued by a helpful nurse, bluffed his way into theater, got a few small film roles, then a Hollywood contract. After CAPTAIN BLOOD at age 26 he was rich and famous.

He married three times. Marriage #1 was violent: she broke a champagne bottle over his head, he knocked out one of her teeth. After their divorce she took much of his money for the rest of his life. He didn't even try to live with wife #2. Marriage #3 was motivated by a fantasy that he might have a normal domestic life.

After a few years he tired of his swashbuckling roles and marriage #1, so he went to the Civil War in Spain, hoping to be killed. He did no fighting, but did nearly die. Like many who were there, he saw terrible atrocities on both sides.

In Paris we was beaten in a nightclub by a gang of "bull-dykes", and then by the police. Years later he was again beaten by New York police. He spent the night in a cell, raging and rattling the bars.

Back at work, he drank like a fish, had a brief but perilous time with opium, and knew many women.

He despised Michael Curtiz and tried to kill him once. The director had ordered the safety tips taken from the sword points and Flynn was slashed across the face. A few years earlier one of his friends was killed right beside him during the third take of a Curtiz cavalry charge. The tired horse fell and the fellow's own sword went through his heart.

He was close to John Barrymore. When that man died, director Raoul Walsh and two others stole his body and set it up in a chair in Flynn's house. He came in and "screamed deliriously." He later played Barrymore in TOO MUCH, TOO SOON.

He claims that when Warner Brothers wanted to break a contract because the star was getting too expensive, they would give them nothing but bad films, and that this happened to himself, Bogart, and Bette Davis.

The rape trials broke his spirit. Charged with sex with two underaged girls, he claimed that it never happened with #1, and that #2 (a) consented, (b) sure looked old enough, and (c) her real age was never actually established afterwards, so she might have been legal. It was a long notorious trial but the jury returned "not guilty" after four hours. Flynn believed the DA was trying to extort money from Warner Brothers and that he just got in the way.

He felt he had become a joke and the scandal poisoned the rest of his life. He started playing up the "in like Flynn" image for the press and worked on suicide, putting a gun to his head more than one night. Instead of shooting himself, be bought another boat and went sailing. Those are the most joyful times in his story: out on the "Zaca", away from it all, idling in tropical ports, diving. He describes in detail one trip with his father which seems to be the same one that appears in the short film THE CRUISE OF THE ZACA, which is included in the two-disk DVD version of THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD. In the Caribbean they had a four-day hurricane and were blown into Kingston, Jamaica, which he called Paradise. He later put all his money into land there and bought a hotel.

He was out of movies for a few years but made a small come-back in the late 1950s. His last picture was CUBAN REBEL GIRLS and he mentions in passing spending time with Castro, but gives no details.

Flynn lived with considerable gusto but was also despondent and self-loathing much of his life. He was a mariner, bon vivant, and practical joker. He was fascinated by women and they usually returned the compliment. He had loads of sex and romance of a sort, but not much love. His philosophizing seems adolescent, but not insincere for that, and his confession is an honest peek into his soul. He wanted to be an art collector and a "real" actor; he was getting some interesting roles toward the end and one wonders if he might have earned more respect if he had lived and gotten farther from the swashbuckling era.

"I have a genius for living, but I turn many things into crap."

"My greatest addiction: not drink, not drugs, not sex. It is curiosity. This has gotten me into all my troubles, successes, failures."

"I love all the simple things in life: breathing, eating, drinking, frolicking, fishing, all the f's."

"I know what is good for me. It is Paris."

* * *

ERROL FLYNN: THE LIFE AND CAREER, by Thomas McNulty

I read Flynn's autobiography not long ago and wanted to separate the fact from fiction in his account of the pre-Hollywood years. I picked McNulty's new book for its many fine reviews. It is a very nice history, although as it turns out he has only twenty pages on the early years, so many of my questions ("Was Flynn really disemboweled in India?") remain unanswered. McNulty recommends John Hammond Moore's THE YOUNG ERROL: FLYNN BEFORE HOLLYWOOD.

The book is extensively researched and footnoted and includes a huge bibliography. The author conducted many interviews and worked with other Flynn biographers. I would call him a sympathetic Flynn partisan, but not an uncritical one. How many biographers dislike their subjects? He comments on other books about Flynn, both good and bad. Some he calls "pathetic": the Bret and Higham titles charging Flynn with having fascist sympathies and being homosexual.

MY WICKED, WICKED WAYS was co-written with Earl Conrad, a well-regarded author of the period. The earlier material was pretty complete, but the later text was fragmentary. Conrad did not attempt to separate fact from fiction.

The overall impression of Flynn's character I get from this book is similar to that revealed in his autobiography. In some respects where I thought Flynn was tooting his own horn a bit much -- in being a great reader and serious writer-- McNulty supports him.

Much of Flynn's account of his fortune-hunting years in Australia and New Guinea is largely true: the slaving, mining, and the diamond-theft incident. McNulty doubts that the murder trial ever occurred; everyone in the area denies it. Likewise the rigged cock-fights in Manilla and army desertion in Shanghai are fictions.

The story about stealing John Barrymore's body is an often-told Hollywood myth with varying participants but it never happened.

Everyone who witnessed his trip to Spain during the civil war comments bitterly about his self-aggrandizement and publicity-seeking.

The book includes some striking photos. One shows Flynn and Olivia de Havilland holding hands in a cafe, talking very seriously. This was after she had told him she would be his friend but never work with him again. (An aside: she says she was "tempted" by Flynn, but never succumbed). Two more photos show him at his rape trial, his back always to his accusers.

McNulty takes seriously Flynn's contention that the charges were trumped up by the prosecutor in an attempt to shake down Warner Brothers. But regardless of the merits of those specific incidents, Flynn undoubtedly had a taste for young women. If they were willing he just didn't care if they were eighteen. His last girlfriend was fifteen. He doted on her and she made his last couple of years happy. She was with him at the end, the "end" being a heart attack while resting after regaling an informal gathering with stories.

He lived for years after the doctors told him death was imminent if he didn't shape up, hitting the booze and drugs even harder. He was careless of death. He wrote about opium and dope; he didn't mention his acquaintance with heroin and cocaine. Apart from his malaria, he also had TB, clap, and a heart murmur. He had a heart attack while filming GENTLEMAN JIM, a strenuous boxing picture. Toward the end of his life his liver was disintegrating.

McNulty gives interesting details on Flynn's USO tours, work he much enjoyed. (I wonder if anyone has studied soldiers' attitudes toward popular actors? I'm told that WWII GIs did not much care for John Wayne, despised Frank Sinatra, but liked Flynn. Why would that be? Because he was not a phoney?)

McNulty also gives a history of "The Errol Flynn Theatre", a twenty-six episode TV anthology from 1957 that Flynn hosted and starred in.

The book, by the way, is printed like a textbook and costs $65, which makes me thankful for interlibrary loan.

One of the greatest stars of all time. A true Hollywood legend.

Errol Flynn, I have word for him, WOOF!!!