www.portlandtheotherjamaica.com…
— Kathleen
In the 2005 Turner documentary, The Adventures of Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland recorded a series of reminiscences about Flynn, including the recounting of an episode that took place soon after they first met: “He sat down, and he said to me, 'What do you want out of life? And so I said, 'Well, I want respect for difficult work well done.' And then I said to him, 'What do you want out of life?' And he said, 'I want success.' And by that he meant fame and riches. And I thought, 'That’s not enough.'”<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office” />
In Olivia’s mind, Errol wanted one thing, and she wanted another. By implication his desires were material and hers were artistic; his were wrong, and hers were right. His were “not enough.” What she doesn’t account for is that Errol Flynn had by 1935 at age 26 already graduated from the school of hard knocks, getting by on equal parts charm, looks, and guile. Despite her harsh upbringing in stepfather G.M. Fontaine’s home, she had not spent much time out in the world. As has been well documented, particularly in John Hammond Moore’s excellent The Young Errol, Flynn had kicked around Australia and New Guinea working at various jobs for years—dozens of jobs, in fact. His failure in these jobs might have had less to do with character deficiencies than always assumed by his biographers, and more to do with a condition that might today be diagnosed as ADHD. Sometimes, just maybe, this disability set him up to fail. Flynn was always getting fired, although on one occasion when he managed a copra plantation, it may have been a conspiracy by area farmers against the “new kid in town” that led to his failure. These experiences gave Flynn a hard, cynical veneer that prepared him for what was, in his mind, the inevitability of losing this gig as an actor just like he had lost all the others. Proof of this can be found in his early, constant griping to the press that he might just chuck it all and return to the South Seas. He figured he ought to quit the business before the business quit him.
Olivia, on the other hand, had survived a militaristic existence at home in Saratoga, California, as described by Olivia's sister Joan Fontaine in the memoir, No Bed of Roses. Olivia, the older sister, had been forced to become the poised, well-read, and well-spoken young lady who hit the screen at age 18. In response to her harsh home environment, she had by necessity become an intense loner and a person who sought the control as an adult that she had been denied as a child and adolescent. But she had not, and would not ever, wait tables like the typical struggling actor and have to cope with a variety of bosses with different work styles and temperaments. In other words, she didn’t know what she didn’t know, and when Flynn made his statement about wanting fame and fortune, it struck de Havilland as capricious when it was in fact the product of many ego blows that accompanied each pronouncement, “Flynn, you’re fired!”
I discovered a thousand and one things about Errol and Olivia that I didn’t know. Learn about all of them in Errol & Olivia: Ego & Obsession in Golden Era Hollywood, coming in October 2010 from GoodKnight Books.
— Robert Matzen
Hello all. I just finished this book by Earl Conrad. I get that Crane Eden is Errol Flynn and Tishey is Woodsie. A lot of what is in this book was mentioned in Conrad's Memoirs and MWWW (booze, sex, drugs, parties, ex-wife and lovers, the hotel, the island setting, raw hamburger, diving, producers, debt, etc.). What I didn't quite get was the mention of incest. Was this added to notch it up a bit because EC explored this subject with EF or because Earl Conrad was so upset about the cockroaches in his food and pranks played on him while staying with EF in Jamaica??? If you've read this book, can you please give me your thoughts?
— Kathleen
I have finally realized that part of my enjoyment of watching Errol Flynn was the music in his films. Now I'm off on a tangent looking for CD's. My first stop was Amazon where I found numerous choices. I also did a bit of research on Erich Wolfgang Korngold, the composer of many Flynn movies: Captain Blood, Adventures of Robin Hood, The Sea Hawk, Prince and the Pauper to name a few. He was born on May 29, 1897 in Brunn, Moravia and grew up in Vienna. While he was composing film scores in Hollywood under his contract with Warner Bros., he also was trying to maintain his concert and opera presence in Europe. It was in 1946 that he attempted to return to the concert stage. He had less than favorable results and found himself forgotten and essentially unappreciated in Austria and returned to America. Korngold died on November 29, 1957 at the age of 60 in Hollywood believing himself virtually forgotten. I find it interesting that EF thought his acting was not good enough, that he did not want to make swashbuckler movies; yet these, to me, are my very favorites. Korngold also thought along those lines as he did not particularly want to be in America composing musical scores for movies, and here we are enjoying them both 50+ years after their deaths and the next generation will do the same. I wonder if they are amused and thinking “Who knew?”
— Kathleen
I was looking for Errol Flynn books yesterday and came across Charles Higham's the Untold Story. I thought about buying it for target practice (I read someone else did this and received immense satisfaction from blowing holes in it!), but I left it on the shelf. Alas, this was the only book the shop had regarding EF.
— Kathleen
This is a book that contains information on EF's final visit at the Vancouver morgue. The chapter is entitled Captain Blood's Last Hurrah. Maybe I am being a bit morbid, but I am reading all that I can find about him. Can anyone tell me if the accounting of the events by Judge McDonald are accurate?
“We didn't find much in the way of personal effects . . .There was a ring. It was on, I believe, his left hand but it wasn't particularly noticeable . . . it looked pretty cheap to me, in fact, like a trinket from a five-and-dime store. . . .”
Could this have been a keepsake of some sort?
— Kathleen
<?xml:namespace prefix = o />What follows is a manuscript excerpt from my mock-epic poem Errol Flynn: A Life in Doggerel, for which – if anyone's interested – I'm presently seeking a publisher.
I've completed “Book I,” consisting of 6 “cantos,” some 600 stanzas total, and am now at work on “Book II,” which will consist of a like number of cantos and stanzas. Book I ends exactly midway through Flynn's life, in late 1934, as he is crossing the Atlantic to Hollywood, and Book II picks up with Flynn recently installed in the film capital.
As my book's working title implies, this is not to be taken seriously as “poetry” – although I'm using a great poem as my template: Byron's Don Juan. Being one of the twentieth century's consummate Don Juans, while having played the role to ironic perfection in a Hollywood film, Flynn and Byron's rollicking Don Juan stanza seemed like a natural pairing. I also chose the verse form because:
Flynn was about romance and poetry –
He wasn't prosaic by any stretch;
And those biographies and other would-be
Accounts of the man (I don't wish to kvetch,
But it has to be said) miss his esprit,
Of which I'm at very great pains to etch
Into hearts and minds through the studied use
Of what's referred to as the “lighter muse.”
Of course, without the “prosaic” biographies, I could never have written my work – but I did want to try and sing Flynn's life, as it were.
The excerpt below comprises the concluding stanzas of canto 4, where we find Flynn having recently returned from his second New Guinea sojourn (or third, depending on how you count) and having just acted in his first movie, In the Wake of the Bounty. But no other acting jobs are forthcoming. It's late 1933 and Flynn is at loose ends:
Errol was anxious about his future—
<?xml:namespace prefix = st1 />New Guinea, he feared, was just a dead end.
He’d gone there partly seeking adventure
(Which he had found) but to mainly ascend
In the world and that brass ring to capture;
And though Wake of the Bounty might portend
Greater things to come, he had seen his share
Of portents prove out to be castles in the air.
He also harbored ambitions to rise
In society, and to that end had
Gained a fianceé—did I not apprise
You of this turn of events? Well, the sad
Fact is that Flynn had been very unwise
And something of an insensitive lad
In swearing his love to Naomi Dibbs,
This one of his more unfortunate fibs.
Flynn rightly perceived Miss Dibbs as high class,
Being as she was from the upper crust,
And he handling her like fragile cut glass:
Containing somehow his powerful lust,
Never unsheathing his stalwart cutlass
And never betraying Naomi’s trust
That theirs was a love “on a higher plane”—
But leaving his lower parts in acute pain.
They’d now been “engaged” for almost three years,
But what in fact would it mean to marry?
Love, joy and laughter or blood, sweat and tears?
His parents’ union had made him wary
Of marriage, confirming all his worst fears,
And his own life was presently very
Unsettled and riddled with question marks . . .
And then he encountered a certain “Madge Parkes.”
That likely wasn’t the lady’s true name,
Flynn changed it in Wicked—you’ll see why—
And did I say “lady?” Try one gorgeous dame!
The kind of woman that’d make a rabbi
Drop-kick his Talmud and loudly declaim
The Kama Sutra, or a sworn Samurai
Bust both of his swords right over his knee
And go off on a saki-drinking spree.
Statuesque she was, sporting auburn hair,
And we can safely resort to “bombshell”
In describing her figure; she bore an air
Of artless glamour and in a nutshell
Was charming, clever and had savoir faire—
Along with a touch of the Jezebel;
A scarlet woman, as it were, for you see,
Our siren was married—and pushing forty.
Urbane, well-traveled, spirited and gay,
She enjoyed swimming, also liked to dance,
Was stylish without being recherché,
The kind of woman who perforce enchants;
And what I guess I’m trying to convey
Is that Flynn’s first hot and heavy romance,
His first “real woman,” was no other
Than the doppelgänger of his mother.
And she was rich. In their nights dining out,
And for drinks thereafter at a dance place,
There was never the shadow of a doubt
Who’d treat; and she did it with faultless grace,
Not in the business of trying to flout
The unspoken rules, leaving not a trace
Of just how the bill had been settled—they’d
Walk out of somewhere and it’d just be paid.
And she loved sex. Madge Parkes loved it so,
That Flynn was a quick convert to the school
Of thought which holds that a woman’s libido
Emerges more active, and does not cool,
As might be expected, when the big 4-0
Looms up. (However, in later life—you’ll
No doubt smile wryly—Flynn’s special delight
Was girls decades shy of their sexual height.)
Yes, sex was her thing and she Flynn’s training ground,
But her needs so great that the constitution
Of our phallic hero, later so renowned,
Was undergoing a dissolution;
And one night after another hard round,
Feeling like he could use a transfusion,
Errol arose weakly from the mattress,
Relieved to escape Madge's scorching caress.
She lay there sleeping, a vision, a dream,
Her arms outspread and her beautiful hair
Spread over the pillow, and a thing supreme
Was her form, with thighs designed to ensnare,
Fulsome hips (yet not too broad in the beam),
Slim waist, and her breasts—oh man, what a pair!
Flynn took all this in, and then his gaze
Began another vision to appraise.
On the dressing-room table, sparkling bold,
Were scattered some jewels, in sizes assorted,
Some of them rings, and others with gold
Or silver chains; he had often escorted
Madge out with these gemstones, but to behold
All those rocks now here together hoarded
Reminded him just how much she was worth
As well as of his own financial dearth.
And it seemed to him that in their affair
Madge was getting the far better deal;
She took him to places with long stemware,
Places that had a strong snob-appeal,
But you could eat only so much Camembert,
And even for bed he had lost his zeal,
For far from being paradisiacal
Her demands had grown nymphomaniacal.
His gaze drifted from the dressing-room table,
Away from the lustrous and dazzling jewels,
And back to those legs to rival Grable
And bust to incite Pavlovian drools
And shapely hips that were willing and able
And face over which men had once fought duels—
On Madge his eyes lingered for a short while,
Wrestling with his conscience—her or the pile?
It was clear that there were no prospects for Flynn
In Parkes; Errol still had big albeit
Somewhat vague plans for his future, which in
So far as he was able to see it,
Wasn’t in Australia—though he’d miss the women,
He felt that he had no choice but to flee it;
And as Madge had been getting constantly laid,
Then Errol ought to be consonantly paid.
In other words, it didn’t take long
For Flynn to decide on his course of action:
He knew emphatically that it was wrong,
By far the “most dastardly” malefaction
He’d ever committed, but the urge was strong,
So in his state of near stupefaction
He got himself dressed very stealthily
And grabbed up the loot as his rightful stud fee.
He raced down the stairs like the place was on fire,
Then hurried through the streets, but didn’t run
Since running was a thief-identifier;
And back at his lodgings he took his hard-won
Yet ill-gotten gains and placed them entire
—He'd scooped up plenty, but hardly a ton—
In the cavity of a shaving-brush,
Which was pretty darn crafty in view of his rush.
Several inches in length was the shaving
Brush’s handle and at the end a crown
That unscrewed to reveal a lifesaving
(Hopefully, at least, in case of shakedown)
Hollow interior made for a thing
To constrict blood vessels and thus shut down
The bleeding if you contracted a nick,
Namely an old-fashioned “shaving stick.”
Flynn placed the jewels in the hollow section
And put a small end of the stick on top
And then screwed the crown back on—a deception
That was likely to outsmart your basic cop,
From whom any top-to-bottom inspection
Of Errol’s belongings would surely stop
Short of reducing his toiletry articles
To their sundry component particles.
Flynn had to get out of town right away
And soon caught a boat that was leaving Sydney.
He’d safely boarded, they were all set to weigh
Anchor and sail from the harbor, when he
Saw bulking large in his stateroom doorway
Two plainclothes cops who’d come round to see
What they might be able to uncover
In the bags of Madge’s light-fingered lover.
First place they looked was the heels of his shoes,
Thinking they might be hollow, then they checked
His shoulder padding, another old ruse,
And the whole time Errol sought to affect
A derisive mien, putting to good use
His inborn and nurtured lack of respect
For authority types—but his fat sneer
Was also intended to mask his fear.
If they discovered the jewels he was sunk.
Prison was not the least of his worries,
But to be exposed as a dirty skunk,
And Father’s displeasure to incur, please,
That was too much; so he showed the same spunk
As Leonidas in reply to Xerxes
When he demanded that the Spartans lay
Down all their weapons at Thermopylae.[1]
“Are you shitheels finished? Why don’t you take
One leg and you take the other and shake me,
I might just have them up my arse”—thus spake
Errol, they responding: “That would not be
A bad idea.” No, a grave mistake
It would be, countered Flynn, and promised that he
Would shove through a porthole the first of them
Who attempted this foolhardy stratagem.
“Come and touch me, one of you yellow-livered
Sons-of-bitches!” It was not as if these
Hardened Australian plainclothesmen shivered
In their boots at his words and got knock-knees,
But Flynn seemed like the sort who delivered
Fully on his threats, not a boy to sneeze
At by any means, so they let it ride
And by way of answer intensified
Their search of his bags; and then Errol, for
His part, did sneeze at them, simulating
An ACHOO that was summoned with a roar
When one of them started investigating
The shaving brush—which you might well deplore
As a sophomoric trick, effectuating
The exact opposite of its design,
But the cop was clearly no Albert Einstein,
So he failed to see through Errol’s schoolboy
Attempts to distract him from the very
Thing he was holding. (The transparent ploy
Can also derail an adversary
Who anticipates that you will employ
Cunning—just witness that cautionary
Tale where doing the overt is better,
Edgar Allan Poe’s The Purloined Letter.)[2]
Whether or not Flynn’s sneezing and bating
Tactics really served to draw attention
Away from the search, thus extricating
Him from this fix, they show a dimension
Of his person, otherwise so fluctuating,
That was a constant, and hence bears mention:
Equipped with a heart unusually stout,
Flynn was an ace at brazening things out.
With the policemen having left empty-
Handed and the boat now full underway,
Errol unscrews the shaving brush and he
Prises the gemstones, one by one, away
From their settings and throws these into the sea,
Via the convenient porthole, the day
Having yielded to night of deepest black—
All hail our prudent kleptomaniac!
Flynn returns the jewels to their hiding place
And walks out on deck and breathes the fresh air,
And he gets the wind and the spray in his face
As he leans out over the railing; a rare
Sense of elation has come to replace
That of impending doom, the rude scare
He had suffered now giving way to a feeling
Akin to pride in his double-dealing.
He’d gotten away with it! Guilt he had,
But that just made it more delectable;
He’d done a thing unquestionably bad
As well as highly disrespectable,
Something that branded him a first-rate cad,
But now that it was indetectable
And he himself pretty much off the hook,
He felt just swell about being a crook.
But Errol’s present exhilaration
Was not exclusively owing to his
Narrow escape from incarceration
But from his sexually exhausting miss
And that other form of ruination
Which went by the misnomer “wedded bliss,”
With his prim fiancée Naomi Dibbs,
Entailing both in-laws and baby cribs.
Also, as mentioned, Flynn felt that to make
His fortune he’d have to leave Down Under
And head Up Top; and icing on the cake
Was that with his newly acquired plunder
He now had a very healthy grubstake
Which might buy him time to work a wonder
In this or that project or endeavor,
In China, India, or wherever.
But not in Australia—that much Flynn knew.
In stealing the jewels he hadn’t planned
To bid a definitive farewell to
His mistress, intended, and native land;
But through his thievery, out of the blue,
Errol had managed to force his own hand,
His subconscious impulses, as a group,
Now being realized in one fell swoop.
And I’ll venture there was yet another
Unconscious urge behind his larceny:
Because Madge was so like Errol’s mother,
The quite real if latent misogyny,
Spawned by Marelle, found in his rich lover
An apt target, hence the sheer villainy
Of Errol's transgression, which victimized
A generous woman whom he otherwise prized.
But let’s leave Flynn now, leaning on the rail,
Looking out over the expanse of sea,
Trying to make out whatever detail
He can on the distant shore, because he
Will not be returning again; but braille
Is needed to pierce the obscurity,
The mainland now completely out of sight
As Flynn sails blindly into the night.
[1] Leonidas called back, “Come and get them!”
[2] In which the letter in question is “hidden” in such an open and predictable place that it escapes detection.
— Kevin McAleer
by Steve Hayes
Thanks for this tip from Jack Marino…
From the website:
Ever wonder what it was like back in the forties and fifties, mingling with famous movie stars on the Sunset Strip; to ride beside James Dean in his Porsche Speedster, zipping around the curves of Mulholland Drive; to stay at Errol Flynn's house and sleep in the bedroom with the infamous hole in the mirrored ceiling; share a secret with Marilyn Monroe; act in a movie with Alan Ladd or Lana Turner; race motorcycles with Clark Gable on Ventura Boulevard; paint Rita Hayworth's house; be invited to tea by James Mason; go to the Hollywood Bowl with Jayne Mansfield and Louella Parsons; hang out with Flynn and countless other stars at the sordid Garden of Allah?
Well, I did all those things and more, much more. As a fledgling actor, part-time house painter, parking attendant, “snoop” for the Fred Otash Detective Agency, and manager of Googie's, a celebrated coffee shop next to Schwab's drug store, I was in the catbird seat, privy to all the gossip, brawls and excitement that nightly took place at the Mocambo, Ciro's, The Players, Crescendo, Villa Nova and other glamorous night spots along the Strip. Known as the “playground of the stars,” never a night went by on the Sunset Strip that one didn't rub elbows with the likes of Frank Sinatra, Ava Gardner, Duke Wayne, Lana Turner, Rita Hayworth and numerous other high profile celebrities.
It's a fascinating era that has disappeared forever.
And I was there in the thick of it.
And now you can be, too.
Because I've written it all down, exactly as it was…
— David DeWitt