Fraud Like Flynn

It's 1935 and the world is still a dusty black and white. Dillinger had been killed the year before, gunned down like his contemporaries Bonny and Clyde. Families are scraping by on the edge of survival and a heavy pallor hangs over a nation wondering the wisdom of its ways, feeling a new and uncertain doubt. But you have just stepped into a Hollywood bar from the rarified air of glistening Los Angeles. It's late afternoon and only a few have the means or the time to lounge within its light smoke and dark paneling.

You spot a rakish fellow in the corner whom you could no more ignore than a blazing sun at midnight. Your heart skips a beat as some primal instinct kicks in and the adrenaline asks, "Who is that guy? It can't be him?" Or can it. Every male carries within him the bogey man of the perfect male who is everything and does everything. You swallow hard as the voices within demand an answer.

You walk to the bar to get closer but not close enough to betray yourself. Your words ask for a drink but your mind is riveted on the exotic alien at the corner table chatting blithely to an incredibly gorgeous woman. He acts as if he doesn't have a care in the world and both he and the lady reek of life lived in the Hollywood bubble, cloud dwellers high above any dirty depression. No, you decide, he can't be all that. He just can't be!

You sip your beer, listening and looking for any chink in his armor. He speaks English but he's not American. Your values, your prejudices, your loves, your hates - he could care less of your tawdry triumphs and meager defeats. His had been a life of high adventure every boy wishes as he plays the swashbuckling pirate before he settles down for the chains of a seethingly polite society. But this man wore no chains! You hate him - you have no choice.

The woman is looking to ride this obvious rising star - a star you can never offer. He's going to have that woman, you can see the contract between their eyes. You burn with jealousy knowing you would bribe her too if given the chance. But that chance will never come for you, only for that devil with his smirking thin moustache. Overflowing with rage you get up and confront the man, asking who is he and where he's from, looking to cut him down to size with your fist if you have to.

He backs down not an inch, a twinkle in his eye. Your worst fears are confirmed of this man of the world: he's seen the likes of you before. That doesn't stop you, however, because the idea of living with the knowledge you share the planet with a man such as this is an unfaceable nightmare. You lay into him but he fights like an animal until you're both too wounded to continue. You slink out of the bar trying to convince yourself you showed him who's who and of how you'll lie about the fight later on. But with every passing lie, you only feel smaller inside and burn with envy watching his star explode into the heavens.

Meet Errol Flynn, the most rarest of birds: a man's man and a woman's man. Hero and coward, life giver and life taker, a soul who blazed an unforgettable path but never found happiness.

I read his story and at the end, I felt very, very sad. Something about this guy spoke to me, to my own vanities and wanderlust and misfit ways. I've always had an interest in Flynn but it wasn't until I read his autobiography My Wicked, Wicked Ways did I get a sense of the man's psyche - which was pretty much a confirmation of what I had felt from afar. Flynn was in bar fights all his life and remained trapped as a daredevil to the very end when he died from a heart attack at age 50 in 1959. But I don't think we'll ever know who Errol Flynn truly was, he whored himself out far too much for even him to know.

"I may not win every fight but by God whoever I fight will know they've been in one." Flynn was seduced by his own image of himself. He was the high adventurer marauding through the Pacific Islands having affairs with exotic women and hacking through jungles in search of gold and fortune. He'd been kicked out of a dozen schools of higher learning all the while his father earning commendations as a professor of science. Flynn's lifelong quest was to prove himself as a fearless and care free spirit dancing through the world, life is but a joke.

Truth is, he was a man gripped by fear, for there was one thing he'd never get up the nerve to face: responsibility. Flynn had no intention of growing up and facing himself. It was Hollywood in the 1930's and the image making machine would never be as powerful again as it was then. As you slept broke and busted on the city sidewalk, you saw amazing pictures of these gods on earth with their fancy cars that would pay ten years of your bills and their lives where nothing ever went wrong. What had you done to miss out on your own reward, you wonder forlornly.

Flynn's Robin Hood will never be matched -
or even come close to by anyone else

The man threw legendary Hollywood parties, setting up a house separate from his wife and if those walls could speak God only knows the tales they could tell! Flynn loved his reputation and his house being an epicenter of activity and fantasy (despite his sometimes complaining of intrusions). He also said he was a "man not to cross". When he nearly lost an eye in a swordfight (Flynn insisted on doing his own stunts as much as possible) he asked why the guard had been removed from the sword. When he found out it had been done on instructions from the director to provide "realism", Flynn sought out the director and started choking him, asking him if that was "real" enough for him.

God, I loved him for that!

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"When you see a meteor stab the sky, or a bomb explode, or a fire sweep across a dry hillside, the picture is vivid and remains in your mind. So it was with Errol....he was all the heroes in one magnificent, sexy, animal package....he showered an audience with sparks when he laughed, when he fought, or when he loved. I just wish we had someone around today half as good as Flynn."
- Jack Warner (of Warner Brothers)

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Flynn and women had a turbulent relationship that never got settled. He estimated he bedded over 13,000 by the time of his book (written just before he died), but he never found happiness and he constantly complained of the mistreatment he received from those with whom he got involved. This led him to decry the female form and cast off any notions of feminine innocence. What he left out of the equation, though, was as an irresponsible person himself those were the kind of women he attracted. Eventually this all got revealed in the Flynn Moment of 1943.

We can't always see behind the veil of public figures but sometimes the truth gets revealed by a lie that sticks regardless. For though it may not be true in fact, it is true in spirit. In November 1942 Flynn was falsely accused by two underage girls of statutory rape. He was no billed by the Grand Jury but the DA was out to make a name for himself and pressed forward with the trial. The trial was all he was after, a conviction just icing on the cake. Publicity was the name of the game.

At the infamous Mulholland house

As testimony leaked out of supposed details of Flynn's fictional salacious sexploits with the girls on his private yacht, transcripts of the trial knocked even war news off the front page. But their witnessing was not credible and in those days it would have been too heartbreaking to see a matinee idol go to jail. Flynn was acquitted. Afterwards he prepared for a party on his now famous yacht, jokingly preparing a sign asking for I.D. and age verification. Nobody came. The shine had disappeared.

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And a man who has been through this time and again and again (seduction) with many women, comes to see it all very clearly. He has a clear memory, the day or week after the spell is broken, of how he has idealized the woman in question, created something in his mind that in the end is not the reality.
- Robert Greene, author

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The trial had made people ask: Who is this fellow really? And without the knowing there can be no loving. Many suspected Flynn probably had underaged sex considering the vast quantities he consumed and his feckless reaction to the trial confirmed as much. In addition, he had failed the physical for the draft but this was hushed up by the studio to protect Flynn's moneymaking power at the box office as an action star. But the public only saw a man who continued to make films as other stars went off to war. Again: Is he really cracked up to be who we thought?

Post war America entered a new era, packing away the illusions of the past forever. The world that had bred a monster such as Hitler must be done away with. It was not a time for glittery illusions like Flynn. His star declined and he wandered a lost soul during the Fifties, drinking heavily and bloating his once famous figure. He wrote he didn't care his face changed, he'd never liked it anyway. All he ultimately cared for was maintaining his precious image, telling jokes even on the night of his death, being "the same old Flynn". But Errol had died long before that on a cool evening in 1943, unmasked as a sad little boy who could never grow up.

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He wanted to die. In the end, he wanted to die.
- Raoul Walsh, favorite director and friend

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There's a biopic made-for-TV flick called "My Wicked, Wicked Ways... The Legend of Errol Flynn" that does a decent job of recounting his life. But I like "My Favorite Year" better, a film that captures the spirit of Flynn with the fictional character of Alan Swann. No one gets it like they want it but some get it more than others.