Dear Flynnmates,
“How is all this?”, wondered Errol Flynn in a home story for an architectural magazine about his new built house at 7740 Mulholland Drive. “I am still in my thirties and I am sitting on top of the world”.
He refers to his new home as Mulholland House built in the style of Connecticut farmhouse and graciously offers a glimpse not only into his habitat but also his soul.
“I was a pirate in another life and believe dying is only dying on this earth..”
He elaborates how via way of Tahiti he was washed ashore at Warners and beat out Leslie Howard, Ronald Coleman, Frederic March and Clark Gable for the role of Captain Blood vacated by Robert Donat.
Marion Davies had been first choice to star opposite him, but William Randolph Hearst considered the part not prestigious enough for his protegé and consoled her with a ocean front beach house at Santa Monica instead.
Flynn meanwhile built his dream house on eleven and a half acres in the Hollywood hills with panoramic view of the ranch lands of the San Fernando Valley before it became sub urbanized.
“She went up fast, like the sails of a boat,” he remembered the costs escalating from $35.000 to $ 125000 after he made various additions like the circular stables copied from the Lipizzaner stables in Vienna.
The den true to style mimicked a pirate`s lair with a zebra skin rug, a model galleon over the fireplace, a ship`s clock, a barometer and another ship`s model top the stairs with a brass tab on its glass case engraved with four lines of verse that pretty much summed up its owner`s philosophy:
“One ship sails east/the other west/by the same winds that blow/it`s the set of the sails and not the rules/that decide the way to go.”
Enjoy,
— shangheinz
On two separate occasions I nearly made the drive up to the house before it was torn dow. Both times I ran out of time to go explore up there. A third chance never came until itbwas too late. Closest I got was the gate in 2009 with Tom & Jan McNulty. I did get to go aboard the Queen Mary in Long Beach to look for Errol Flynn’s cabin during his trip to Spain to cover the Spanish Civil War. Even then the cabin I discovered on some older ship’s map was not the right one. It took more time to find it. But I finally did …
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Glad you came through on the Queen Mum, David. Flynnmates are explorers by nature. Errol‘s pool is described with a black bottom in the article. Go figure.
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Thank you for the first hand information, Jack. The pic above shows the other side of the living room with another oil painting (supposedly a Manet) on the wall. The article also talks about a big aquarium with live fish with a cartoonish-fish background painted by John Decker.
Thia=s photo is NOT Errol Flynn’s pool up on Mulholland House. This is Huntington Hartford’s pool that fell into disrepair on his estate. Flynn stayed at the Hartfords estate in the bungalows off and on in the last years of his life
Errol Flynn did not have a black bottom pool on his estate. His pool was turquoise in color as well as his front door facing the pool and all the walls in his house that wasn’t covered in knotty pine.
When Errol lived with Lilly in APPIAN WAY there was a small wading pool and that pool was painted black. Did the Flynn’s have that pool painted black or did the previous owner of the house paint it black?
Years later when Ricky Nelson bought Mulholland Farm in 1980 he had heard that Errol Flynn had a black bottom pool so he painted Errol’s pool black.
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Jack tells it like it was. That is a photo of Mulholl Farm at the time the Nelsons lived there. Notice the black pool.
A poet in hiding to be sure!
GREAT highlighting of this interview….