When it comes to getting a manuscript published, most times an author’s sudden death won’t help it to the finish line. In the case of My Wicked, Wicked Ways, I think Errol Flynn dying helped get it out. Hard to imagine him ever wanting this version of himself exposed in public.Whatever era you are in, it’s hard to like this guy. In his own telling, Flynn was a rank bastard. What starts out as candid recollections over drinks soon feels more like an exclusive audience with a sociopath.
As he so charmingly puts it late in the book: “Ts-t! Ts-t! It takes some ladies so long to realise they have been raped.”
Errol Flynn was one of the brightest stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age. In his own telling, he was also one of its most reluctant. If My Wicked, Wicked Ways wants to communicate anything, it is that Flynn was a deeply serious man, connoisseur of science and culture who wanted to explore the world, test his strength, and satisfy his bottomless curiosity.
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| Today boarding school, tomorrow the world. Flynn in a 1920 photo at the Friends' School, Hobart, Tasmania, one of the many institutions that took him in and booted him out. "I set records for absolute school indifference," he writes. Image from https://www.utas.edu.au/library/exhibitions/flynn_and_flynn/errolflynn.html |
Flynn’s early life, pre-Hollywood, was like something out of Joseph Conrad. Born off Australia’s rugged coast in Tasmania, he sought adventure where he could, surviving by the skin of his teeth:
Throughout the night the garramuts dinned in our ears. The crocodile-skin tom-toms kept going, sometimes loud, sometimes seeming to beat softer, as if the tribesmen were trying to make up their minds whether to come and get us.
By his own telling, he hunted for gold, sold slaves, smuggled drugs, stole jewels from an older woman who took him in at his lowest, and got into many scrapes with the law. Virtually destitute, he found his way into movies after he chanced upon a lead role in a 1933 Australian film about the Bounty mutiny. Two years later, he was one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, riding the box-office success of his debut, the pirate-themed Captain Blood, into a series of high-profile swashbucklers.
At least that’s the version of Flynn you get here. Be warned, in life and after he had a reputation for unreliability.
If you want Flynn’s take on his movie career, you may be disappointed. The book is more than a third over before he even gets to Hollywood. And when he does, the little he says about the roles that made him famous boils down to maudlin quips about the asinine lines they made him say, the difficulty he had getting out of bed after another debauched night on the town, and Bette Davis’s mean right hook.
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| Flynn in The Adventures Of Robin Hood. His recollections of making the 1938 classic center on pranks he played on co-star Olivia de Havilland. "She must have actively disliked me for the teasing I did," he writes, like hiding a dead snake in her underwear. Image from https://www.britannica.com/biography/Errol-Flynn |
What he wants to discuss instead is sex, which to be fair is why a lot of people bought this book in the first place, and why it may well have stayed in print for over 60 years despite its near-total lack of merit. Flynn was infamous in his time for the nookie he scored, and sometimes got in trouble for scoring. In My Wicked, Wicked Ways, he expresses both pride in his coital prowess and bitter discomfort with his randy reputation:
My principal emotion was that I was hoaxed by life, that I had become something other than what I had set out to be. Now my name was simply associated with sex. I was a male Mae West, as it were. Me, Errol Leslie Thomson Flynn, son of the respectable biologist, student of Darwin, lover of culture – and nothing that I had wanted had happened. Instead I was in a swamp of Flynn jokes, dirty stories, snide innuendos.
In another part of the book, he relates his hatred for comedians who played up this reputation of his and helped popularize a catch phrase of the 1940s, “In like Flynn,” which got wide use after Flynn was arrested for rape, and later exonerated. Which of those outcomes surprised Flynn more is hard to tell; he admits one charge had some validity, and only disputes the matter of her age. About where it all left him, he huffs: “In Like Flynn? That's a laugh. Out Like Flynn.”
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| Flynn with his first wife, Lili Damita. By his account, their sex was great, their marriage terrible. For most of it, he lived on his own and freely pursued other women. Image from https://www.reddit.com/r/OldSchoolCelebs |
My Wicked, Wicked Ways was written with the help of a ghostwriter, Earl Conrad. I sense Conrad wound up writing a lot by its sensationalist tone. Flynn shares his enthusiasm for bordellos and his hatred for the Catholic Church, a “jerk organization” prone to butting into other people’s lives. At one point, he tells of a drug trip he went on with Mexican painter Diego Rivera, who told him: “After smoking this you will see a painting and you will hear it as well.”
I can’t picture Flynn throwing away the remains of his career to outrage middle America, not back when Eisenhower was still President. But to be fair, Flynn doesn’t come across as the type to pull his punches:
Today, of course, I wouldn’t care who caught me in a whorehouse. Sometimes I think I would like to end my days in one.
Flynn’s attitude about women is the most shocking, and it would have caused him the most trouble if he had been alive to face the music – shaking off my doubt he ever would have wanted it published. A survivor of three marriages whose money went up into puffs of lawyer costs and alimony, he presents ample grounds for bitterness: “If there is one thing they like better than personal attention I’d say it was this: the man who for a woman fits the bill is the one who pays the bill.”
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| Flynn facing four counts of statutory rape, 1943. He describes the case as brought on by an ambitious district attorney who wanted a celebrity scalp: "Everybody knew that the girls had asked for it, whether or not I had my wicked ways with them," he writes. Image from https://calisphere.org/item/a5db2a06406114466c612ad3ee7d3a33/ |
Feeling sorry for Errol Flynn is beyond my capacity, however. I suspect it will be beyond yours, too.
By his own account, he treated women abominably throughout his life and rather savored this streak of ruthlessness. He exploited maids at his boarding school, servant girls in the tropics and extras on movie sets looking for a break. He would give them a part alright, then part with them before they realized they were never getting on screen. He shrugs it off with a laugh:
I often ask myself, was this ethical or not? So what?
Even before achieving fame in California, while he was a struggling actor in Great Britain, Flynn tells us he wrote a play, entitled Cold Rice, ostensibly about English colonialism as he saw it in his travels but in reality a chance to indulge in some misogyny. “The central fact of the play was its sharp ridicule of womanhood,” he writes. “Women seemed to me so stupid, so fatuous, that I had to express it in dramatic terms.”
Where this hatred for the fairer sex originated is not hard to guess. Flynn had a complicated relationship with his mother, complicated by the fact that for much of his life she wanted nothing to do with him.
For long periods of his childhood she kept him at arm’s length, complaining of his froward ways and sending him to boarding school when he got to be too much trouble. While Errol’s father pursued an academic career as a biologist, she vacationed in France for months. “I was pretty much neglected by my parents,” he explains, though he seemed to accept his father’s distance more.
Later, when Flynn had made and lost millions and was nursing his sores and many vodka bottles in Jamaica, Mom and Dad came to live with him. In Errol’s telling, she immediately set about donating large sums of her son’s remaining money for rebuilding a local church, which bothered the agnostic and hard-up Errol quite a lot.
Even more annoying was the time she nearly got Errol killed when he found a large tree growing on a private runway constructed outside his home. She had taken a liking to the tree. The problem was that Errol found this out when he and his pilot tried to land on the runway and barely escaped death in a crash-landing.
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| Flynn made as many westerns as swashbucklers during the height of his career. Despite their success, he hated them. "It was most frustrating, it stopped my trying to act," he writes. "My heart wasn't in it, only my limbs." Image from https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2021/04/errol-flynn-autobiography-wicked-wicked-ways |
Nature serves as a frequent muse in My Wicked, Wicked Ways, and his time in Jamaica stirs some pleasant prose:
Most of it is an incessant rolling and unraveling hill. One might say Jamaica is all one hill which rolls into millions of unceasing shapes for a length of 144 miles and crosswise for another fifty miles, rising to five or six thousand feet. Everywhere there is a blanket of green so thick that the earth never shows through.
Elsewhere Flynn writes at great length about his boat trips, his tropical adventures, his witnessing combat during the Spanish Civil War. It is sometimes vibrant, but very patchy and a touch affected.
What one wants is the Tinseltown stuff, the movie lore and dishing on other actors. Yet while he writes about a couple of trysts, most of the actresses Flynn worked with did not inspire much lust.
His closer bond was with male actors. John Barrymore, a legend by the 1930s as much for boozing as for his acting, befriended Flynn and affectionately dubbed him “Navarre” as an aristocratic jape. The two drank together while Barrymore hung out for weeks at Flynn’s home. When Barrymore’s body gave out, a director friend left his corpse seated at his favorite chair at Flynn’s home for Errol to walk in on.
At least that is the story told here. Other sources say it never happened. My Wicked, Wicked Ways may exaggerate things for a spicier read. Flynn himself wasn’t around to confirm or deny.
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| Flynn meets the press in Vancouver, Canada. He would die there on October 14, 1959, victim of a heart attack and a hard life. He writes: I loved those spaces over the hill. I always have all my life. What’s
around the corner? I have got to go and see. Image from https://montecristomagazine.com/highlights/errol-flynn-death-vancouver |
I guess my skepticism around My Wicked, Wicked Ways centers on the fact I don’t want it to be true. Just the awful fates suffered by his many pets over the years (including those his father brought home to dissect) was painful to this soft-hearted carnivore. So was his ease around hurting women and breaking the law.
He
was a scoundrel utterly at odds with the dashing myth of his many fans. Or
maybe the real Flynn was totally lost in the rewrite. My inability to figure
this out made for a frustrating and dejecting read.
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