Mail Bag! A few Words from TJR McDowell!

I went to a school named Lawrenceville in NJ, and my math teacher, Mr. Parks, an old fossil but nice guy, occasionally would talk about Sean Flynn who he’d also taught at Lawrenceville. Errol visited once on parents day, and Mr. Parks met him and said he was friendly and proud of Sean. We were asked to pray for Sean at chapel (this was in 1972, my 8th grade year), as I think it was his birthday, and he was still missing in Cambodia.

I know a guy from Sean’s class who said Sean was a nice low key guy, who struggled (like everyone there) in class, but excelled on the swim team..I knew another fellow in London name Colin Crewe who told me he spent a day with Errol in the late 1950’s when he worked for Lloyds of London and was insuring Errol for a film and assigned to tag along with him for a day, and that Flynn wore this beautiful blue wool suit and Colin went out the next day and bought one.

Then there was Robin Moore whom I knew slightly, wrote French Connection, and he told me about hanging out with Flynn in Jamaica, teasing the native dogs and hitting on the native women, and how Flynn once fought with a young Chris Blackwell, the record magnate, whose family lived in Jamaica. Then there was an in depth article I wrote for Premiere Magazine all about the Garden of Allah, and there were sundry Flynn stories here; I interviewed everyone from Hal Roach to Cesar Romero to Billy Wilder to Glen Ford who had me over and we talked for hours and he thought Flynn was a man’s man but basically a sad guy.

Lastly, I once interviewed Charles Higham, who wrote the untold story, the weirdest most dysfunctional misanthropic con man I’ve ever spoken with, a sick guy who was into exploiting everyone to make a living; his book was sheer invention calculated to get on best seller lists everywhere, which it did.