(1909-1959)
The cinema’s greatest swashbuckler, star of Captain Blood, The Sea Hawk, and They Died with Their Boots On, Errol Flynn was a colorful man off screen as well. His early life could have supplied a Warner Bros. screenwriter with a dozen action-packed plots: he spent time as a roving adventurer in Australia, New Guinea, and the South Seas before heaving-ho for London and Hollywood and a career before the camera. In addition to his skill and charisma as a performer, Flynn also was a writer. In the first years of his stardom he published a memoir of a momentous voyage he took with some friends, sailing a boat along the Australian coast. In later years he would write an assortment of magazine pieces about various other experiences, including some time spent with Fidel Castro’s revolutionary forces in Cuba.
Flynn published one novel, Showdown, an extremely entertaining adventure story about a rugged Australian boat captain taking a group of Hollywood movie people (including a beautiful actress) up New Guinea’s dangerous Sepik River— land of cannibals, deadly animals, and the unknown. Many of the details and incidents were based on Flynn’s experiences in his earlier days, during a similar river voyage through the barely charted jungle island. But Flynn had been in pictures too long not to give his adventure story a bit of glamor, including an irresistible female, described with an expected lasciviousness (though Shamus, the hero, presents a certain prudery the author was never accused of):
The honey hair spiraled off with the morning breeze unchecked. The lithe tenderness of her form, the long smooth legs and knees, admirably pure of shape, presented an unforgettable picture. But at this moment its design and true beauty was lost on him, for the brazen immodesty of her costume made him gasp; a scant pair of very flimsy shorts, and an even flimsier pink bandana handkerchief of extreme decolletage—very obviously it was limited to that. . . . Holding on to the side of the longboat he said in a strained voice, “Would you be kind enough to go and put some clothes on please?”
Showdown ranks high among the small body of pop fiction by Hollywood superstars, and for Flynn fans it is a unique treat. Flynn’s most famous published work is his 1958 autobiography, My Wicked, Wicked Ways, a best-seller in its day and a groundbreaker for all the shocking, kiss-and-tell showbiz memoirs to come. Unashamedly presenting himself as a rogue and hedonist, Flynn recounts his countless amorous conquests with the gusto of a pulp Casanova. Alas, hedonism had taken its toll on Flynn by the time of the topic creation—he did not, in fact, have much longer to live—and he could no longer sustain the effort to write at length by himself. Much of the topic was dictated and edited by an assigned ghostwriter, a smart and sympathetic collaborator named Earl Conrad.
Works
- Beam Ends (1938);
- My Wicked, Wicked Ways (1958);
- Showdown (1946)
