I’m really sorry I forgot about Vintage Scandal Monday. To make it up to you, I’m giving you a particularly juicy Vintage Scandal Tuesday about infamous rogue Errol Flynn. I always thought it was one of the best casting decisions ever to use Jude Law as Flynn in Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator. Jude perfectly captured the devilish rogue quality Flynn had – the beautiful man-boy who could get away with anything with one well-placed, delicious smile. Only Flynn was even dirtier, crazier and sketchier than Jude could ever dream of. Case in point: Errol Flynn loved him some jailbait. Like, teenage girls were his absolute favorite, even when he was in in his late forties. Flynn was even charged with statutory rape twice – and while his court case was making headlines, he picked up ANOTHER teenage girl and married her. Errol was quite open about his exploits, writing his autobiography My Wicked, Wicked Ways, which ended up being published posthumously after he died at the age of 50. I found some great excerpts from it:
“I particularly detest books that begin something like, “Ah, there was joy and happiness in the quaint Tasmanian home of Professor Flynn when the first bellowings of lusty little Errol were heard…” So if you are interested, let’s get down to the meat of the matter.”
So begins My Wicked, Wicked Ways, the jaw-dropping 1959 autobiography by Errol Flynn. Posthumous autobiography, it turned out: Flynn died at age 50 on a bedroom floor in Canada before his finished book could be published.
At the time, Flynn was in the midst of something like a comeback, having been recalled to Hollywood to play a succession of dissipated drunks and lechers — roles Flynn admits he was suited for by type. Before that he had been in exile in Europe after a series of legal hassles, bad business deals, feuds with studio heads, and a change in public tastes.
And before THAT he was Hollywood’s handsomest star and its biggest scoundrel, the fun-loving natural who did his own stunts, the swashbuckler who thrilled audiences in Captain Blood and The Adventures of Robin Hood, and the womanizer whose lust for young women led to a 1943 statutory rape trial that Flynn survived only by the skin of his teeth and the dimple of his chin.
… And yes, the women. Half the book is about women, and Flynn (thrice married) is blunt on the topic: “I have never married. I have been tied up with women in one legal situation after another called marriage, but they somehow break up.”
The great villain of Flynn’s book is his hot-blooded first wife, Lili, whom Flynn accuses repeatedly of draining him dry with lawsuits and alimony payments. Also, of cracking him over the head with a full Champagne bottle while they were still “happily” married, after which a reeling Flynn slugs her in the mouth before passing out. Jolly times!
Flynn also admits (more or less) to the charge of statutory rape with two different teenage girls, arguing that 1) he didn’t know they were under 18, 2) they were star-chasers, and 3) he didn’t know it was a crime anyway. (“Rape to me meant picking up a chair and hitting some young lady over the head with it and having your wicked way. I hadn’t done any of these things.”)
Maybe not, but rape was still the charge in the infamous 1943 trial that nearly put Flynn in jail for 20 years. The trial goes on for weeks, heavily covered by the newspapers, and in the middle of it, hilariously, Flynn begins eyeing a teenage redhead who sells cigarettes in the courthouse lobby. He then invites her up to his house on the sly while the trial is still going on. Flynn doesn’t seem to think that’s too out of the ordinary. “I carefully checked her age. She was eighteen, safe ground. Her name, it turned out, was Nora Eddington. What I didn’t know was that her father was Captain Jack Eddington of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office.”
No matter! Flynn is acquitted, and Nora later becomes his second wife. (That marriage doesn’t work out so well, either.)
After the trial, Flynn posted a “neatly printed notice” on the door of his house: “LADIES: Kindly be prepared to produce your birth certificate and driver’s license and any other identification marks.”
After which one of his pals scrawled, “Preferably on your thigh.”
The trial was a scare but turned out not so badly, according to Flynn: “I expected to be an object of ridicule, but the opposite surprisingly happened. My box-office appeal went up, and with one or two box-office successes I was completely restored in the Hollywood community.” The episode also sparked the bawdy phrase “In like Flynn,” as the old scalawag himself notes with a certain pride.
Errol Flynn is a swell storyteller, and his flashes of frank talk give you the urge to believe everything he says. It’s probably not wise. For instance, Flynn conveniently forgets to mention that while writing the book he was traveling the world with a 16-year-old girl he had started chasing when she was 15. Flynn was married at the time, of course, but in this book that hardly counts for anything.
Fisher was with Errol Flynn when he died in Vancouver while giving his sore back a break on the floor of the home of a friend of a friend. She later married but remained Flynn’s ’til the end, a fact which even her husband admitted: “Ronald Fisher said his wife never stopped loving Flynn and told him once that ‘if [Flynn] was still around, I’d be with him.'”
Flynn’s death certificate listed “myocardial infarction, coronary thrombosis, coronary atherosclerosis, liver degeneration, liver sclerosis and diverticulosis of the colon as the causes of death.” A triumphant total breakdown! Flynn would have had it no other way.
Late in My Wicked, Wicked Ways, Flynn sums up: “In brief, I like people. I like to enjoy the thrill of living every day, every hour of the day, for we are here only this once, and let’s feel the wind while we may.”
[From WHO2 & the biography of Errol Flynn, My Wicked, Wicked Ways]
The statutory rape stuff – while completely insane and evidence of his general sketchiness and skeeviness… well, it’s not really Roman Polanski territory, is it? He didn’t drug these women as they were begging him to stop. He just loved jailbait, and jailbait loved him right back. It’s more akin to those little tween girls throwing themselves at Robert Pattinson. If The Sparkler was anything like Errol Flynn, he would have seduced many of those girls (and their mothers), and while technically statutory rape, there would be no violence or anything like that. It’s a legal age of consent thing, not a “forcing himself on someone saying no” thing.
I wanted to do this story because my first exposure to this (crazy) side of Errol Flynn was a few paragraphs in a larger Vanity Fair article about yachts, published several years ago. I dug up the 2005 issue, and here’s a partial transcript:
Yachtsman speak of porn boats, yachts with all-female crews, and yachts with stripper poles… but the template for misbehavior at sea is docked in Monte Carlo’s Port of Fontvieille, the low-slung, two-masted schooner called Zaca, the infamous yacht of the late actor Errol Flynn, who, the six-member crew insists, still haunts the boat on which he slowly went insane, despite an actual exorcism by the Anglican Archdeacon of Monaco in 1978.
“We can feel him here; things happen that just can’t explain,” says the captain. Flynn bought Zaca after his 1948 trial for statutory rape, writing in his autobiography, “Instead of killing myself, I bought a new boat.” Perhaps Zaca (Samoan for “peace”) was cursed from the start; at its 1930 christening, the champagne bottle failed to break on its bow, always a bad omen. On one of Flynn’s first voyages, Zaca sank. On another, the crew mutinied. On what was supposed to be a “make-up” cruise, Orson Welles split from his wife Rita Hayworth.
After two wives left Flynn, he fell into a delirium of booze and drugs on the boat – a descent that included orgies, drug smuggling, a trip to Mexico to help a friend who was a Nazi evade arrest, and a second rape charge, by a woman of barely legal age.
At 50, Flynn was “drinking vodka for breakfast and keeping a condom full of cocaine in his swim trunks,” according to Zaca’s scrapbooks. “I’ve squandered seven million dollars. I’m going to have to sell Zaca,” Flynn lamented in an interview just before flying to Vancouver with his 17-year-old girlfriend to sell the boat. The sale never took place, because Flynn had a heart attack, or committed suicide, just before signing the papers.
[From Vanity Fair, print edition, 2005]
Eat your heart out, Lindsay Lohan. Even Robert Downey Jr.’s past shenanigans seem silly compared to this nonsense, right? A condom filled with cocaine? Sure. A second rape charge? Why not? Being so crazy that your luxury yacht crew mutinies? Of course. God, I love Old Hollywood.
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