Finis for the Fabulous Flynn!

from LIFE Magazine – October 26, 1959

There was just one word for Errol Flynn—outrageous. In his real life as on film he was constantly sprinting out from behind the arras pursued by an angry husband or a flummoxed female. He was married three times, fathered four children and won a law suit charging him with fathering another. He loved the company of young girls and he was accused three times, but never convicted, of statutory rape. In 25 years of movie-making he earned and grandly spent more than $7 million. He drank two quarts of vodka daily, three when he got up early enough, and he was a scamp, bounder and barroom brawler in the great and mannered tradition of Cellini, Casanova and Don Juan. The truth was not in him when a lie made a better story. Large numbers of people loved him dearly.

Last week, at 50, Errol Flynn lounged about a Vancouver doctor's apartment while the classic pains of a coronary spread through his body and down his arms and legs (he knew them, for he had suffered them twice before) and talked of other things, of long-gone friends, of John Barrymore, W. C. Fields. He said, “Hell, dying is not so much,” and asked for a room to lie down in. Soon he died.

THE WILD OLD DAYS in Hollywood were the subject of Flynn's favorite stories about prodigious drunks and questionable escapades. Here he tells how John Barrymore's body was spirited from the funeral parlor a few hours after his death by some of Flynn's drunken friends, including a famous movie director. Flynn pantomimed the body (far left), the drunken friends and their difficulties as they carried it to Flynn's house and put it in a chair. Flynn arrived, saw the body and fled screaming (far right). Flynn wound up the story by adding that he did not think it was the correct way to say goodby to John.

— David DeWitt