Errol Flynn (1909–1959)

The guy on the picture on the left is a pirate, a genuine buccaneer. Oh yes he is! Maybe not a real pirate but certainly a thief and a swindler, a liar and a slaver, he is a drunk, a bum, a deserter and a…

But he is a pirate too. And like all pirates, he is chasing a treasure. A treasure, not of gold and diamonds and pearls, but a treasure in the shape of a career as a famous Hollywood actor. He wants to be free of money worries, to be famous and to have all the beautiful girls in the world show more and you know what? He goddamn succeeds because this sword wielding, heroic-looking actor is Errol Flynn and you, who went to the movies before 1955, you loved him! You put his picture above your bed and you saw all his movies because he was so unique, he looked so dangerous!

Indeed the path that led the Tasmanian devil Errol Flynn to Hollywood, as told in his autobiography “My wicked, wicked ways”, reads like a real pirate story. Well written, captivating and full of the tall stories you might expect to hear in a bar in an exotic location.

The guy manages for example to blow up his own boat, when a shark which he has been feeding a bar of dynamite hides under his canoe. In another adventure, he puts snake poison on a fighting cock’s beak in order to win the bets in the gambling underworld of Manila. He exchanges with a village chief, an invented magic formula’s against slaves he needs to dig up gold from his gold-less mine.
In the Australian outback, he castrates hundreds of sheep, by biting off their testicles. And so on, and so on, all told in a fluent, brash, macho style.

Unfortunately the text has been edited for a post war American public and we sense that Erroll is omitting the juiciest parts. Tell us more about the bordellos of Marseille, Flynn. What happened in the Opium den with that lovely half-blood? Tell us more Flynn, tell us more.

Alas, like all good pirate stories, the treasure is doomed and from the moment Flynn succeeds in realizing his dream, luck and happiness start slipping through his fingers.

First Flynn manages to get stuck in a marriage where domestic violence seems to be the rule. Then, Warner Bross. gives him the same roles and characters in each movie, so that his talent does not get a chance to show its diversity. Girls come easy with his fame and he is accused of statutory rape three times! Flynn is acquitted every time but his reputation suffers. Ex wives, unreliable advisors, expensive lawyers and an immoderate lifestyle keep him at the brink of bankruptcy. All these problems lead the pirate to more alcohol and sometimes drugs.

Nonetheless Flynn manages to convince us of his loneliness and one starts to sympathise with the guy. Although he claims at fifty to be still going strong, we know that his end is near.
But his story is a captivating one and it is with pleasure we would buy him another drink to keep him with us at the bar.

Too bad, Flynn, we never met. show less

"One of my peculiarities is that when drunk I always want to buy an animal." (Page 192)

I am halfway through what has to be the wildest autobiography (or biography) I have ever read. I'm not sure how much is strictly true, how much is exaggerated, and how much is completely made up--although I'm sure somewhere on the Internet someone has done an analysis--but Flynn can write like few others. There is actually a slight letdown when he gets to England and becomes a full-time actor, then goes on show more to Hollywood. After all, before that he was a member of a Sydney street gang, a less than stellar boat captain, an overseer of tobacco and coconut plantations in New Guinea, a gold miner in the same place, a slave trader (just a sideline!), and a jewel thief. Let me see--what else--tried for the murder of a native in New Guinea, a deserter from the Hong Kong contingent deployed to defend Shanghai from the Japanese--it goes on and on. Hard to imagine any of today's actors actually having any sort of real life adventures--or even a real life.

Oh yes, back to the opening quote. So after landing 100 miles from Chicago and getting drunk, he buys a baby lion cub, takes it in a taxi to Chicago, hands the leash to the desk clerk--and never sees it again.

UPDATE: Changed rating to 4 1/2 stars after finishing. I give the 2nd half of the book 4 stars. While the first half of the book tells a true adventure story with a great deal of style and humor, the second half is sad in many ways - as Flynn tries to cope with the difference between his inner image of himself and the self perceived by the public. Still fascinating, but much more episodic. And as others have mentioned, he doesn't really talk much about his films or his fellow actors, although there are some interesting passages about Jack Warner, who certainly made an impression on Flynn. After his first few roles, he confesses to just walking through the rest, always longing for the meatier, more complex roles he was never asked to play.

READ IT!! show less

Errol Flynn has been the subject of numerous biographies, with a goodly portion of them emphasizing the more sensationalist aspects of his life and career. Indeed, few Hollywood personalities have had such a checkered afterlife.

Flynn’s second wife Nora Eddington set the tone for posthumous biographers with her warts and all memoir Errol and Me [Signet, 1960], which actually had some nice things to say about Flynn. This was followed a year later by Florence Aadland’s The Big Love, which show more described Flynn's relationship with teenage companion Beverly Aadland during the final years of his life. In subsequent years there were more Flynn books, each more outrageous than the last. Along the way there were some highly creative interpretations of Flynn’s life [such as the theory that he was an Axis agent in WWII], and even more creative titles for the books, a prime example being The Life and Crimes of Errol Flynn. To be fair, there were also some good books written, with Tony Thomas’s The Films of Errol Flynn and Peter Valenti’s Errol Flynn : a Bio-Bibliography being two of the more notable. This period of Flynn scholarship reached a stunning apotheosis in 2000 with David Bret’s ultra hatchet job Errol Flynn : Satan’s Angel.

However, in recent years the pendulum has swung back and there's growing evidence of a pro-Flynn trend : more sympathetic books, including the first full-scale scholarly biography; a TCM documentary and star of the month honors; new printings of Wicked Ways; positive coverage of the Flynn centennary year of 2009; reissues of long out of circulation films; and perhaps most important, numerous pro-Flynn blogs and Web sites. Errol Flynn was a colorful character, certainly, but he was also a man of far more shadings and complexities than he is generally given credit for. The singular difficulty of separating Flynn the man from Flynn the legend was his very success in creating such a vivid – and vividly one-dimensional – public persona. The pivotal year was 1943, when Flynn had just been acquitted of statutory rape charges amid lurid national press coverage. At that point he had the difficult choice of either working to rehabilitate his career – with no certainty of success – or playing along with the public derision of him. For better or worse, Flynn chose the latter. [There’s a certain ironic justice that after nearly a half century of posthumous bad press, Flynn today enjoys a ‘rehabilitation’ of sorts, due to the efforts of scholars and devotees]. In any event, in the post-1943 years Flynn cultivated a dissolute public image, with one of the results being a certain psychic carryover into his films – a sharper-edged intensity to his performances http://greenbriarpictureshows.blogspot.com/2006/05/bitter-tea-of-errol-flynn-nev..., and, later, roles which lampooned his real-life image as roguish libertine (Adventures of Don Juan) and washed up alcoholic (The Sun Also Rises).

Which all brings us, in a roundabout way, to My Wicked, Wicked Ways, a minor masterpiece and arguably the best autobiography of a film actor to date. I first came across the book a few years ago at the local public library, actually a books on tape version narrated by Dan Lazar [I confess to never having actually read the book all the way through]. However, I listened and re-listened to the tape in its entirety, three or four times total over the course of a few years. It was an exercise in addictive listening; I particularly enjoyed how effectively narrator Lazar conveyed the Flynn attitude. But unfortunately the tapes’ three decades old sonics were beginning to show, and I was later saddened to discover that they had been withdrawn from the library collection, no doubt due to wear and tear.

What more to say about Wicked Ways? Much has been written about the book, and thus I’ll keep my comments brief. To begin, it’s not a perfect work : there’s no index, it tends to ramble, and there are inaccuracies along with Flynn’s trademark tendency to embellish the truth. And yes, there’s plenty of spice, but there’s also Flynn’s poetic side as he muses eloquently about life, love and the human condition. However, Flynn the showman and movie star intuited that his readers would expect more than poetry and wordsmithing, i.e. that he would have to give them a good show and tell a good story. And what a story he has given us! With the skill of a master raconteur, Flynn presents his life not so much as a conventional linear biography as a series of stream of consciousness vignettes. My favorites include: the early days in New Guinea; his voyage from the South Seas to London; the many [mis]adventures with his pals and mentors Hermann Erben and John Barrymore; the Spanish Civil War; a visit to a lesbian club in Paris; his famous lack of chemistry with Bette Davis; the shooting of The Roots of Heaven in French Equatorial Africa; and an opium-laced conversation with Diego Rivera, to cite but a few.

It was said that Flynn was a master of tall tales, but perhaps the greatest fiction that he put across on the public -- done at his own expense -- was that he was a mediocre actor and shallow human being. His masterly autobiography, however, serves as a corrective and reminds us that – for all his flaws – Flynn was a man of keen intellect, uncommon wisdom, and genuine literary talent, and Wicked Ways represents, along with his best films, his lasting artistic contribution.
[Reviews : R. Flesch, L.A. Times, March 11, 1960, p. B-5 ; R. Kirsch, L.A. Times, Jan. 17, 1960, p. E-6 ; A. Churchill, N.Y. Times, Jan. 3, 1960, p. BR-10. ; R.L. Coe, Wash. Times Herald, Jan. 2, 1960, p. C-11 ; http://piddleville.com/reviews/book-reviews/my-wicked-wicked-ways-1959/ ; http://via-51.blogspot.com/2011/02/book-review-my-wicked-wicked-ways-by.html show less

A difficult man to like, hence a difficult biography to like. Some appalling behaviour coupled with acts of supreme generosity, and a somewhat introverted, intellectual side make the Great "Baron" of cinema a very complex man. The language at times is difficult to follow & the attitudes very 1950s, but those I would have expected. A great adventurous man who tried to live life to the full but ended up using, and abusing those around him, including those closest to him. He still dosen't, in show more middle age have anything like the emotional maturity that he needs to cope with his ever increasing list of dependents, or with the pressures of life. Unpleasant in parts, but very engaging in others. Not one I would read again, although the subject matter I may revisit with someone else's biography of the man show less