Dear Flynnstones,
Barbara Barondess was a colorful caracter. Born in NY on the 4th of July in 1907 she left the US for her parents` homeland Russia, only to take a bullet for her father during the October Revolution. She came back to the States and became an actress in Hollywood. Winning a Miss New York pageant along the way, paved her path. She filmed with Greta Garbo, whom she would term a polite, if dull, friend (“She chose to be a recluse, basically because she had nothing to say.”). One of her better known movies was “8 girls in a boat”- Flynn was not in, he surely would have loved to, but it preceded his arrival at the Traumfabrik by two years. Barondess met Errol, when she persued a second career as an interior designer and in that capacity worked for him.
Her third job was a dream come true, since she alwas aspired to be a writer, ever since she went to dinner with literature great Eugene O`Neill. In 1990 she released her memoires “One Life is not enough. Surviving the Russian Revolution and Capture the American Dream of Broadway and Hollywood”. Apparently one book seemed not enough and she had two more additions planned with anecdotes about Harlow, Gable and Garbo. Having been the love interest, or shall we say muse, of producer Paul Bern, it would have been interesting to read, if she also had an apparition of a mischievous dwarf in Bern`s mansion like Sharon Tate had when she lived there with Jay Sebring. If it was Paul or the Pole Tate saw in a lucid dream, who threatened her life years before her gruesome murder. And if Barbara B. would have approved of Sebring`s choice of pitch black as a color for his bedroom. If Errol Flynn`s pool had been of the same color at some time. If… Nuff!
Enjoy,
— shangheinz
