On the morning of October the 15th, 1959, in a quiet examination room in a Vancouver hospital, a pathologist looked down at the body on his table and said something to a colleague that the colleague never forgot. He said, in a tired voice, that the man in front of him appeared to be about 75 years of age.
The heart was the heart of an old man. The liver had almost stopped working years ago. Bones were thin and brittle, the kind of bones a doctor sees in patients who have lived a long, hard life and are finally, peacefully, at the end of it. The man on the table was 50 years old, 50 years and 5 months to be exact, and his name, when the pathologist finally said it out loud, was a name that almost everyone in the Western world knew by heart.
It was the name of the man who had played Robin Hood, the man who had played Captain Blood, the man who for almost a decade had been the most beautiful, the most envied, and the most reckless leading man in the history of Hollywood. His name was Errol Flynn. And in the next hour or so, you and I are going to try to understand something that nobody, not his wives, not his children, not his closest friends, ever quite understood while he was alive.
We are going to try to understand how a man who had absolutely everything, the looks, the talent, the money, the houses, the yachts, the women, the fame, managed, in the space of about 25 years, to throw all of it away and to age, in his own body, at roughly three times the normal speed of a human being.
We are going to look at the medical records that the United States Army wrote about him in the spring of 1942, three short documents that quietly destroyed his idea of himself. We are going to look at the trial of 1943, the courtroom where he sat for 3 weeks while two teenage girls described what they said had happened on his yacht.
We are going to look at the women he loved or thought he loved, Lili Damita, Nora Eddington, Patrice Wymore, and at the one woman, Olivia de Havilland, whom he loved most of all and never quite touched. We are going to look, very carefully and very honestly, at the last and most troubling chapter of his life, the relationship with a 15-year-old girl named Beverly Aadland, which by every standard of his time and ours was wrong, and which we are not going to try to excuse.
And we are going to begin in a place that almost nobody who watches his films has ever pictured. Not Hollywood, not California, not even England. We are going to begin in Tasmania, on a windy island at the bottom of the world, in a small house on a hill, where a little boy with bright eyes was, by his own later testimony, never quite sure whether his mother loved him.
Stay with me. By the end of this story, the man in the costume, the man on the white horse, the man with the sword, will look very different from the way he has looked for the last 90 years. And so, I think, will some of the things we tell ourselves about fame, about beauty, and about the price both of them quietly demand.
Errol Leslie Thomson Flynn was born in Hobart, Tasmania, on the 20th of June, 1909. His father, Theodore Thomson Flynn, was a serious, soft-spoken man who taught marine biology at the small university there. His mother, Marelle Lily Mary Young, was 19 years old at the time of the birth, and according to almost every biographer who has ever looked into her life, she had not particularly wanted to be a mother yet.
She was a lively, sociable young woman who liked dances and parties and ships’ officers passing through the harbor at Hobart. The slow domestic life of a young academic’s wife in a small town at the edge of the Antarctic Ocean was not what she had planned for herself. We need to be careful here because in interviews late in his life, Flynn told all sorts of stories about his childhood and not all of them are reliable.
But on this point, that his mother was distant, that she was easily irritated by him, that she preferred her own social life to the daily work of raising a small boy, almost every serious biographer agrees. Tony Thomas, Jeffrey Meyers, David Brett, Robert Matzen, all four of them working independently and with different sympathies, come to roughly the same conclusion.
The boy did not grow up feeling securely loved by his mother. He grew up feeling that her attention had to be earned, performed for, charmed out of her. And that, as we will see, is one of the great quiet keys to almost everything that happened to him later. His father was a different story. Theodore was patient and clever and by all accounts genuinely fond of his son.
He took the boy down to the docks. He took him out to the rock pools at low tide. He showed him jellyfish and starfish and the strange soft creatures that drift in cold southern water. There is a story, and I want to be honest with you that this one comes from Flynn’s own autobiography, My Wicked, Wicked Ways, which is a book full of charm and full of unreliable memories.
So, we should treat it as the way he wanted to remember his childhood rather than as a guaranteed transcript of it. In that book, Flynn describes standing as a small boy in his father’s laboratory, looking at a glass jar that contained, preserved in fluid, the brain of some animal. And he describes asking his father whether the brain inside the jar had ever, in life, thought thoughts.
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Whether it had been somebody. The father, in Flynn’s telling, did not quite know how to answer. True or not, it is the kind of memory that a man chooses to write down at the end of his life for a reason. It is a memory about a child trying to understand the difference between a living thing and the empty shell of a living thing.
And, looking back from the end, you almost feel him asking the same question about himself. By the age of nine, he had been sent to boarding school. By the age of about 13, he had been expelled from one. By his middle teens, he had been expelled from several more in Australia and in England for a fairly consistent set of reasons: fighting, insolence, gambling, and in at least one case that several biographers have documented, a sexual relationship with the daughter of a school employee.
He was clever. He was good-looking even as a teenager in a way that adults found unsettling. And he was, even then, drinking more than was good for him. In 1926, when he was 17 years old, his parents essentially gave up on the idea of giving him an English education and shipped him back to Australia.
And from there, almost immediately, he made his way to a place that very few 17-year-old boys from middle-class families could survive, the territory of New Guinea. In the late 1920s, New Guinea was one of the wildest frontiers left on the surface of the planet. The Australian administration controlled the coastal towns.
The interior was mountains, jungle, and tribal communities, some of which had had almost no contact with Europeans. There was a gold rush going on in the highlands. There were plantation managers, ship captains, traders, gamblers, beachcombers, drunks, deserters, and dreamers all moving up and down the same few rough rivers.
And into this world with very little money and very little plan, walked a tall, slim, sunburned young man with extraordinary blue-gray eyes and a voice that could already, when he wanted, make people lean in to listen. Over the next four or five years, Flynn worked, in no particular order, as a clerk for a shipping company in Sydney, as a copra plantation overseer, as a recruiter, and we need to slow down on that word for a moment because in the New Guinea of that era, a recruiter was a man who traveled into the interior and signed up local men, often under conditions that would today be considered coercive, for plantation labor. It was legal at the time. It was also, by any modern standard, deeply uncomfortable work. Flynn did it. He later wrote about it with a mixture of bravado and embarrassment. And historians today read those passages
with a certain amount of caution. He also worked as the captain of a small schooner. He prospected, briefly and unsuccessfully, for gold. He drank in the bars of Salamaua and Rabaul. He got into fights. He picked up, almost certainly, the first of several tropical diseases that would haunt his body for the rest of his life.
Malaria, in particular, would never really leave him. And somewhere in the middle of all this, in the early 1930s, an amateur filmmaker named Charles Chauvel, looking for a young man to play the lead in a low-budget Australian historical picture about the Mutiny on the Bounty, met Flynn in Sydney and offered him a part.
The film was called In the Wake of the Bounty. It came out in 1933. It is, frankly, not a very good film. But Flynn, on the screen in cheap makeup and an ill-fitting costume, has something. The camera looks at him and you can feel the camera deciding in real time that it likes what it sees. Within months, he had used the film as a calling card to get to England.
Within a year, he had been hired as a member of a repertory theater company in Northampton. And within another year, and this is one of the genuinely astonishing facts of his early career, he had been signed by Warner Brothers in Hollywood and given a small part in a picture called The Case of the Curious Bride.
He was 25 years old. He had been a professional actor for about 18 months. He had no formal training. And he was about to be handed, almost by accident, the leading role in one of the most successful adventure films of the decade. The story of how he got the lead in Captain Blood has been told many times and the basic facts are not in dispute.
Warner Brothers had bought the rights to Rafael Sabatini’s swashbuckling novel and had originally wanted Robert Donat, a major British star, to play the title role. Donat, for reasons of health and contract negotiations, dropped out. The studio panicked. Production was already scheduled.
Sets were being built. And in something close to desperation, the head of production, Hal Wallis, agreed to test the unknown Australian who had been hanging around the lot in supporting parts. The screen test, which still exists, shows a young man who is clearly nervous, clearly inexperienced, and clearly, unmistakably, a movie star.
The studio gave him the part. Captain Blood was released at the end of 1935. By the spring of 1936, Errol Flynn was, no exaggeration, one of the five most famous men in the United States. He had walked into Warner Brothers as a contract player making a few hundred dollars a week.
Within 18 months, he was negotiating through agents weekly salaries that, adjusted for inflation, would translate into the equivalent of a small modern fortune. Letters arrived at the studio in sacks. Women wrote to him. Men wrote to him. Children wrote to him. He was 26 years old. He had not, by any stretch of the imagination, prepared himself for any of this.
And on the set of Captain Blood, he met a 19-year-old contract player from Saratoga, California, who had been cast as his leading lady because the studio’s first choice had also dropped out. Her name was Olivia de Havilland. She was small, dark-haired, serious-eyed, and almost unbelievably composed for a young woman of her age.
She was, in temperament, almost his exact opposite. And she was, by every honest account we have, the woman he would think about for the rest of his life. We will come back to her because her story and his are knotted together for almost 10 years in a way that neither of them ever fully untangled. But before we go any further into the Hollywood years, I want to step back for a moment and tell you something about that same period that almost nobody mentions because it does not fit the legend.
While Errol Flynn was becoming in 1936 and 1937, the dashing pirate of every cinema in the world, his body was already not well. He was already drinking by any medical standard far too much. He had recurrent malaria from his New Guinea years. He had, the doctors at Warner Brothers contract clinic noted in a memo that survives in the studio archive, an irregular heartbeat that they could not fully explain.
He had what was almost certainly an undiagnosed and untreated chronic infection from his early sexual life in the Pacific, the kind of slow, stubborn infection that, in the years before modern antibiotics, simply moved into a man’s bones and stayed there. None of this was public. None of this fitted the image.
The studio publicity department was busy issuing photographs of him on horseback, on yachts, in tennis whites. The body underneath the photographs was already, very quietly, beginning to wear out. And in the middle of 1935, a few months before Captain Blood came out and changed his life, he had done something that, in retrospect, almost everyone around him at the time considered a bad idea.
He had married, very suddenly, a French actress named Lilly Damita. She was older than him by about 5 years, fiercely intelligent, fiercely jealous, and considerably more experienced in the world than he was. She had known Marlene Dietrich in Berlin in the 1920s. She had had a long, complicated friendship with the director Michael Curtiz.
She knew, you might say, what kind of business Hollywood was. She had a clear-eyed view of what marriage to a beautiful, suddenly famous, very young man was likely to be. And she went into it, by all accounts, with her eyes open and her fists already half clenched. Within months of Captain Blood opening, the marriage was in trouble.
There were rows. There were public scenes. There was a separation and then a reconciliation and then another separation. Friends who visited the house on North Linden Drive in Beverly Hills in those years left memoirs and letters describing the same sort of evening again and again. A long dinner, plenty of wine, polite conversation and then somewhere around 11:00 the temperature in the room dropping by 20° and Lilly getting up from the table and Errol pouring himself another drink and the visitors quietly making their excuses and leaving. He had got in less than 2 years almost everything that a young man could conceivably want. And almost from the moment he had it by every account that survives, he’d begun to be afraid that none of it was real and that whoever discovered the truth first, Lilly, Hollywood, the audience, his own mother far away on the other
side of the world, would take it all away from him as quickly as it had arrived. That fear, more than the drink, more than the women, more than any of the louder things, may be the secret engine of the next 20 years of his life. And in 1937, on a film set in Northern California, that fear was about to meet for the first time a young woman who was completely immune to the kind of charm he had built his entire identity around.
Her name, again, was Olivia de Havilland and what happened or didn’t quite happen between the two of them over the next 8 years is, I think, the real love story at the center of this whole strange, sad, glittering life. To understand what happened between Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland, you have to understand first that they made eight films together.
Eight. That is an enormous number for any two leading actors in the studio system. Bogart and Bacall made four. Tracy and Hepburn made nine, but they were a couple in real life. Flynn and de Havilland were never, by Olivia’s own clear and consistent testimony over more than 70 years, a couple. They were two people who, on a film set, generated something that audiences could feel through the screen, and that, off the set, neither of them ever quite knew what to do with.
The first of those films was Captain Blood in 1935. The second was The Charge of the Light Brigade in ’36. And the third, the one that mattered most, the one that is still, almost 90 years later, one of the most beloved adventure films ever made, was The Adventures of Robin Hood, which they shot in the summer of 1937, and which came out in the spring of 1938.
They shot the exterior scenes in Bidwell Park in Chico, California, a long valley of oak trees and slow brown rivers, about 170 mi north of Hollywood. The cast and crew lived in a hotel in town for several weeks. They ate dinner together at long tables. They played cards in the evenings. And on the set, in the long hot afternoons, with Olivia in a heavy medieval gown and Flynn in green tights and a pointed cap, the two of them looked at each other in a way that the cameraman, the script supervisor, and the director, Michael Curtiz, all noticed. Olivia herself, in interviews she gave many decades later, was always honest about it. She said, in different forms, the same essential thing. She said that she was in love with him, in the way a serious 21-year-old young woman is in love with a beautiful older man who pays attention to her. She said that he was, she believed, in
love with her, too, in his own way, which was a way she did not entirely trust. She said that she knew he was married. She said that she knew that to begin anything with him would be for her the end of her self-respect, and that her self-respect at 21 was something she was not yet willing to risk. And she said, more than once, that nothing happened.
No affair, no secret weekend, nothing the gossip columns could have used. Flynn, in his autobiography, written at the end of his life when he was a sick and disappointed man, wrote about her with a tenderness that is almost embarrassing to read because it is so plainly the tenderness of a man who has spent 20 years thinking about a road he did not take.
He wrote that she was the one woman he had ever known whom he might have actually deserved if he had been a better man. He wrote that he never told her this. There is no evidence that he ever did. Now, around this central, unconsummated, lifelong, half-romance, the rest of his late 1930s life was running at full, dangerous speed.
The marriage to Lili Damita got worse. There were separations and reconciliations. There was, in 1941, the birth of their only child, a son named Sean, who would grow up to become a war photographer, and who would, in 1970, disappear in Cambodia and never be seen again. We will come back to Sean. There was also, all through this period, the steady, joyful, expensive construction of a way of life.
Flynn bought a house high up in the hills above Hollywood, on Mulholland Drive, which he called Mulholland Farm. He filled it with weapons, books, hunting trophies, and friends who drank as much as he did. He bought a yacht, the Sirocco, then later a larger one, the Zaca, which he sailed up and down the coast of California and Mexico.
He hunted, he fished, he collected. He spent on a routine month more than most working Americans of the period earned in a year. The studio paid him, he spent it, the studio paid him again. The system worked as long as the films kept making money. And the films did keep making money. The Dawn Patrol in ’38, Dodge City in ’39, The Sea Hawk in 1940, which is in many people’s opinion the best pirate film ever made by anyone.
They Died with Their Boots On in 1941 with Olivia again, the last film they ever made together, and a film that Olivia in interviews always described with a quiet sadness because she said that by then both of them knew that whatever moment they had ever had was already gone. In 1941, the United States entered the Second World War.
And here we come to one of the genuinely painful turning points in Flynn’s life, a turning point that the publicity department of Warner Brothers spent years trying to hide and that the public never really understood until long after his death. Errol Flynn wanted to enlist. The documentary record on this point is fairly clear.
He went to recruiting offices, he filled out forms, he talked to officers. He was in his own image of himself an adventurer, a sailor, a horseman, a man of action, exactly the kind of man who should be in uniform. He was also by early 1942 32 years old and according to multiple medical examinations conducted that spring not even close to fit for active service.
The army doctors examining him in February of 1942 found a heart murmur. They found chronic, recurrent malaria, almost certainly from New Guinea. They found early signs of pulmonary tuberculosis, and they found indications of long-standing damage from the venereal infections he had picked up in the South Pacific in his early 20s.
He was classified as unfit for service. Quietly and without public announcement, the United States Army declined to take him. Imagine for a moment what that does to a man whose entire public identity is built on the appearance of physical perfection. Imagine being told in a small office by a tired military doctor that your body is, in private medical reality, the body of a much older and much sicker man than the one you see in the mirror.
Imagine that you cannot tell anyone. Imagine that the studio does not want you to tell anyone because every other young leading man in Hollywood is enlisting, and the studio still needs you to play the hero on screen for the next 4 years. Imagine that the audience watching Objective Burma in 1945 does not know and is not supposed to know that the man playing the tough American paratrooper is a man whose own army would not have him.
Flynn never publicly recovered from that. By all accounts of friends who knew him before and after, David Niven in particular, in his own memoirs, The Moon’s a Balloon, written long after Flynn’s death, talks about this with great delicacy. There was a man before 1942 and a different man after. The man after drank more.
The man after took more risks. The man after began, in small, private ways, to behave as if his body did not really belong to him anymore, and as if anything that happened to it was happening to somebody else. And then, in the autumn of 1942, with the war in full swing and Flynn in the middle of shooting a film called Gentleman Jim, two young women, on separate occasions, made statements to the Los Angeles authorities that would eventually result in his being charged with two counts of statutory rape. Their names were Betty Hansen and Peggy Satterlee. Hansen was 17 at the time of the alleged incident. Satterlee was 15 at the time of hers, although there was sharp dispute, then and later, about whether she had told Flynn she was older. The alleged incidents had taken place, respectively, at a private house in Bel Air and on board Flynn’s yacht, the Sirocco. The case went to trial in Los Angeles in
January of 1943. It was, by every measure, the celebrity trial of its decade. Reporters from around the world filled the courtroom. Crowds of young women, ironically, gathered outside every morning to cheer Flynn as he walked in. Inside, his lawyer, Jerry Giesler, who was the most famous defense attorney in California, methodically, cleverly, and at times rather brutally, attacked the credibility of the two young women on the stand.
I want to be very honest with you about this trial, because the story has been retold so many times in so many different ways that the basic facts have sometimes been buried under the legend. The jury, after a trial of about 3 weeks, acquitted Flynn on all counts. That is the legal outcome, and it is not in dispute.
But the trial itself was conducted under the laws and attitudes of 1943, and many things about it would not be considered acceptable today. The young women’s sexual histories were brought up in detail in a way that modern courts would not generally permit. Their motives, their backgrounds, their friendships, their previous statements were all dissected in front of a public audience.
The defense strategy in the language of the time was to portray them as essentially not the kind of girls whose word a jury should believe. By the standards of 1943, that was a successful legal strategy. By the standards of today, it is at the very least an uncomfortable one. What actually happened on the Sirocco and at the house in Bel Air, no living person can now tell us with certainty.
The two young women on the stand said one thing. Flynn on the stand said another. The jury believed Flynn, or at any rate did not believe the prosecution beyond a reasonable doubt. He walked out of the courthouse in February of 1943, a legally innocent man. He also walked out, by his own later account, a different person.
Two things came out of that trial that shaped the rest of his life. The first was a phrase. American newspaper readers in 1943 started using in print and in conversation an expression that would attach itself to Flynn’s name forever. In like Flynn. It meant you can guess what it meant. It meant a man who got away with everything, who could not be touched, who had charm in place of conscience.
He hated the phrase by all accounts. He understood correctly that it had nothing to do with him as a person and everything to do with what people thought a man like him must be. The second thing was a quiet, bitter realization, which he wrote about in his autobiography in language that is unusually careful for him.
He realized that he was, from now on, going to be paid to play in film after film, exactly the kind of man the prosecution had said he was. He was going to be paid to be the rake, the seducer, the smiling adventurer who climbs in through windows. Whether that man had ever really existed inside him or not, the studio, the audience, and the gossip writers were all now committed to him as that man.
There was, from 1943 onwards, no real escape from the costume. He came out of the trial straight into a quiet, almost domestic relationship with a young woman named Nora Eddington, who at a tobacco and magazine stand in the corridor of the Los Angeles courthouse. She was 18 years old, the daughter of a deputy sheriff, and by every account of people who knew her, she was a sensible, kind, practical young woman with no particular interest in being a movie star’s girlfriend.
They began seeing each other quietly. The marriage to Lili Damita was by then finally, formally over. He and Nora married in Mexico in 1943, although they kept the marriage secret for almost two years, partly because of studio politics and partly because Nora, by her own later account in the memoir she wrote, was not entirely sure that being known publicly as Mrs.
Errol Flynn was something she wanted. They had two daughters together, Deirdre, born in 1945, and Rory, born in 1947. By the standards of Flynn’s life, this was in many ways the closest he ever came to ordinary family happiness. Nora was patient. Nora was steady. Nora ran the house, and Nora, in the memoir she wrote much later, Errol and Me, describes a man who, even in the quietest years of his life, never quite stopped looking out of the window of any room he was sitting in, as if he were waiting for something to happen, something to interrupt, something to take him away. Now, while all of this domestic life was unfolding in the late 1940s, something else was unfolding in the background. And it is something I have to handle very carefully, because it has been the source of more confusion about Flynn than almost anything else.
In 1980, 21 years after Flynn’s death, an American biographer named Charles Higham published a book called Errol Flynn: The Untold Story, in which he claimed, on the basis of his reading of certain wartime documents, that Errol Flynn had been a Nazi sympathizer and possibly an active agent for German intelligence during the Second World War.
I want to be very clear with you about this, because it matters. Higham’s claims caused an enormous public sensation when the book came out. They have been repeated in articles, in television documentaries, in casual references for more than 40 years. They are also, according to almost every serious historian and biographer who has examined the same documents since, Tony Thomas in The Spy Who Never Was, Geoffrey Myers, the historians who reviewed the declassified FBI files when they were released in the 1980s and again in fuller form in the early 2000s, they are, to put it as plainly as the evidence allows, not supported by the actual documentary record. The FBI did, in fact, have a file on Errol Flynn. The FBI in that period had files on a great many Hollywood figures. The contents of the file, as released, show surveillance, interviews, gossip
from informants, and a friendship that Flynn had with a man named Hermann Urban, an Austrian doctor whom Flynn had met in New Guinea in the 1930s, and who did later turn out to have had at least some contact with Nazi German intelligence. Flynn’s own actions, as documented in the file, do not amount to espionage.
The FBI did not charge him. The FBI did not, on the evidence, even seriously believe he was a spy. The story that he was a Nazi agent is, by the best available scholarship today, a story rather than a fact. I tell you all of this not because it is the most exciting part of his life, but because if you have heard the rumor, and many people have, you deserve to hear what the actual evidence does and does not show.
He was, on the documentary record, a man who knew a suspicious person who traveled in Europe before the war, who said and did some things in the 1930s that, in retrospect, look naive or worse. He was not, on the documentary record, a spy. What he was, by the late 1940s, was tired. The films were still coming, but they were not as good.
The roles were the same roles, again and again, the swordsman, the cavalryman, the daring captain, played by a man whose body was getting heavier and whose face was beginning, in close-ups, to show the long, late nights. The studio knew. The studio’s doctors knew. The audience, which still loved him, did not yet know.
And in the middle of all of this, in 1947, he made a film called Escape Me Never, opposite a young actress named Ida Lupino, that was a quiet failure. In 1948, he made Adventures of Don Juan, which was a moderate success and which gave him perhaps his last completely confident performance as the romantic adventurer.
Watch Don Juan sometime, if you can find it. There is a moment near the end where his character is asked why he has loved so many women, and Flynn, in close-up, gives an answer about loneliness and fear that does not feel like acting at all. It feels like a confession that the studio mistook for a line of dialogue.
By 1949, the contract with Warner Brothers, which had defined his entire professional life since he was 26 years old, was beginning to fray. The studio system itself was in trouble. Television was coming. Audiences were shifting. The kind of large-budget historical adventure that had made his career was becoming more expensive to produce and less reliable at the box office.
And Flynn, sensing all of this, started doing something that would, within 5 or 6 years, financially destroy him. He started trying to produce his own films with his own money, outside the studio system. He had an idea in particular for a film about William Tell, the Swiss folk hero. He thought it would be his masterpiece.
He poured almost everything he had into it. And what happened to that film on a freezing mountainside in northern Italy in 1953 is one of the saddest stories in the history of independent cinema and the moment at which the second half of his life, the long descending half, the half that ends in that examination room in Vancouver, truly and finally begins.
The William Tell project began, like a lot of the worst decisions in Flynn’s life, with a perfectly reasonable hope. He was 43 years old. He had been a movie star for almost 20 years. He had played, by any honest count, the same kind of part in something like 30 films. And he wanted, finally, to do something that he had chosen himself, written himself, produced himself, and that would prove to anyone still paying attention that he was more than the costume.
He chose the story of William Tell, the medieval Swiss archer who according to legend was forced by a tyrant to shoot an apple off his own son’s head. He hired a respected director, Jack Cardiff, who had been the cinematographer on some of the most beautiful films of the 1940s. He hired a strong supporting cast, including the British actor Bruce Cabot, who had been one of his closest drinking friends for 15 years.
He raised money from a mixture of European investors and his own personal savings, which by this point, after 20 years of spending almost every dollar he earned, were not as deep as people assumed. And in the spring of 1953, he took the entire production up into the Italian Alps to a small town called Courmayeur in the shadow of Mont Blanc and started shooting.
About 6 weeks in, the money ran out. Not slowed down, not got tight, ran out completely. The Italian backers, for reasons that were never fully explained in public and that have been variously attributed to currency restrictions, to internal disputes, and to plain bad faith, stopped sending payments.
The crew, who had not been paid in weeks, walked off the mountain. The cameras, which had been rented, were repossessed. Flynn himself, in a story that has been told many times and that is documented in interviews Cardiff gave decades later, ended up personally trying to keep the equipment hidden in the back of a hotel storage room so that the rental companies could not get it back.
He sold his own watch. He sold pieces of furniture from the Zaca, which was anchored in a Mediterranean port a few hundred miles south. He flew to London. He flew to Rome. He tried to raise more money. Nobody would give it to him. The film, about half shot, was abandoned on the side of the mountain.
He never finished it. He never recovered the money he had put into it, which by some estimates was close to half a million dollars in 1953 terms, and which today would be the equivalent of several million. The footage that had been shot was eventually impounded, and although small fragments of it have surfaced in documentaries over the years, the William Tell film that Errol Flynn dreamed of for 2 years and bankrupted himself for has never been seen by the public.
And almost certainly never will be. If you are looking for the moment at which everything in his life turned downward, this is it. Not the trial, not the army medical exam, not the marriage to Lili. The collapse of William Tell on that Italian mountainside in the summer of 1953. After this, the story is, almost without interruption, a story of decline.
He came back to Hollywood and discovered that in his absence, things had changed. The studio system was breaking up. Warner Brothers was no longer interested in a long-term contract with an aging adventure star. The new young leading man of the early 1950s, Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, James Dean, were different kind of actor entirely, mumbling and brooding and naturalistic.
And the kind of full-throated heroic performance that Flynn had perfected in the ’30s looked suddenly old-fashioned. He was offered fewer roles. The roles he was offered paid less. And on top of all this, the United States Internal Revenue Service had decided that Errol Flynn, like many highly paid film stars of the previous decade, owed a great deal of money in back taxes.
The exact figures vary depending on which source you read, but the order of magnitude is not in dispute. He owed, by the mid-1950s, hundreds of thousands of dollars to the American government, in dollars of the time, and he did not have it. There was also, during this period, the slow and painful end of his marriage to Nora Eddington.
Nora had stayed with him through more than most wives would have stayed through. She had stayed through the drinking. She had stayed through the affairs, which, by the early 1950s, were not even being particularly hidden. She had stayed through the long absences, the months on the Zaca, the financial chaos.
By 1953, even Nora, who was probably the most patient woman Flynn ever knew, had had enough. They divorced. He moved out. The two daughters stayed mostly with their mother. Almost immediately afterwards, in October of 1950, but this is not quite the marriage you might be imagining. Patrice Wymore was a young American actress, blonde, capable, 24 years old, who had had small parts in a couple of Warner Brothers pictures.
They had actually met on the set of a film called Rocky Mountain in 1950. Their wedding, on the 23rd of October, 1950, in Monte Carlo, was a glamorous Mediterranean affair covered by the international press. By the time the William Tell disaster happened 3 years later, the marriage was already in very serious trouble.
They had a daughter together, Arnella, born in 1953. And from that point on, the marriage existed mostly on paper. They never formally divorced. Patrice Wymore Flynn would, in fact, remain his legal wife until the day he died, and would outlive him by more than half a century, dying only in 2014, having spent decades quietly running a cattle ranch he had bought in Jamaica.
Yes, Jamaica. Because in the late 1940s, Flynn had fallen in love with the north coast of Jamaica and had bought a property there called Boston Estate near Port Antonio. It is one of the few places in his adult life where, by every account that survives, he was genuinely peaceful. He swam, he fished, he sat in a chair on a veranda and looked out at the Caribbean.
He drank, of course, but he drank a little less. He spent time with local people who, in some cases, did not entirely realize who he was or did not particularly care. There was a small bar in Port Antonio that, until quite recently, still had photographs of him on the wall. After everything else collapsed, Jamaica was the one place he could still go and feel, for short stretches at a time, like a private person.
But there was very little he could do about the central, terrible fact of his middle 1950s. The work was drying up. The money was gone. The body was getting visibly worse year by year. And he was, by his own admission in interviews from this period, drinking more or less continuously from the moment he woke up in the morning.
Friends who had known him in the 1930s, who saw him again in 1955 or 1956, came away from the encounters shaken. David Niven describes one such meeting in his memoirs with a kindness that does not quite hide the horror. He says, in effect, that he saw an old man wearing a younger man’s face badly. He says that the eyes were the same.
Almost nothing else was. And then, in 1956, Flynn took a part in a small American film called Istanbul. And after that, in 1957, he was offered a part in a much better film, a 20th Century Fox production directed by Henry King called The Sun Also Rises, based on the Ernest Hemingway novel. The part was Mike Campbell, the charming, broken, alcoholic British war veteran who drifts through the South of France and Spain drinking and falling apart.
It is perhaps the role he was always going to end up playing. He did not have to act it. He simply had to stand in front of the camera in the Spanish sunlight with a glass in his hand and let the camera see what he had become. The performance is, by general critical consensus, the best work he ever did on film.
He was nominated for nothing. The Academy did not give him any kind of late career recognition, but film historians today, looking back at The Sun Also Rises, almost universally identify Flynn’s Mike Campbell as a small, terrible, brilliant piece of acting in which a man who has lost almost everything stands in a fictional story and quietly tells the truth about himself.
The success of The Sun Also Rises gave him, briefly, a kind of second wind in the late 1950s. He was offered another film about a doomed alcoholic, a biographical picture about the actor John Barrymore called Too Much, Too Soon in 1958. He played Barrymore. Barrymore had been a friend of his in the 1930s, had drunk himself to death at 60 in 1942, and had been, in some ways, the model of exactly the kind of decline that Flynn was now living through.
Playing Barrymore on screen at the age of 48 was, in the words of one of the journalists who visited the set, like watching a man rehearse his own funeral. And here, in 1957, in the middle of this difficult late period, we have to stop and talk very honestly and very carefully about a relationship that is, by any modern standard, the most uncomfortable and the most morally serious episode of his entire life.
In the autumn of 1957, on the lot at Warner Brothers, where he was visiting the studio for a meeting, Errol Flynn met a 15-year-old girl named Beverly Aadland. She was a young dancer and aspiring actress under contract to the studio in a junior capacity. She had told the studio she was 18, with the full knowledge and active cooperation of her mother, Florence Aadland, who functioned throughout this story as the kind of stage parent that, even in the Hollywood of the 1950s, struck observers as deeply troubling. Flynn was 48. Beverly was 15. There is no version of this relationship, by the standards of 1957 or by the standards of today, that is acceptable. By today’s law, in almost every jurisdiction in the Western world, the relationship would be a criminal offense. By the law of California in 1957, it was
also, in fact, a criminal offense, although neither Flynn nor Beverly’s mother was ever prosecuted for it. I am not going to romanticize this. I’m not going to tell you about it in the language of love or destiny. I’m going to tell you what the documentary record, as established by serious biographers, including Robert Matzen and Jeffrey Meyers, and by Beverly’s own much later interviews and her mother’s tasteless and disturbing memoir, The Big Love, actually says.
The record says that the relationship was sexual from very near the beginning. The record says that Flynn knew, fairly soon and certainly within the first year that she was not 18. The record says that her mother actively facilitated the relationship in a manner that Beverly herself, in interviews she gave as a much older woman, eventually condemned.
The record says that for the last 2 years of Flynn’s life, from the autumn of 1957 until his death in October of 1959, Beverly Aadland was in effect his constant companion. She traveled with him. She lived with him at intervals at the house on Mulholland. She went to Cuba with him.
She went to Europe with him. She was with him eventually in Vancouver on the day he died. In 1957 and 58, Hollywood was a place where this kind of arrangement was scandalously, often quietly, tolerated by the people in a position to stop it. Today, it would not be. We do not have to argue about that. Beverly Aadland herself, late in her life, she lived until 2010, gave interviews in which she described the relationship in mixed and sometimes contradictory terms.
Sometimes defending it as a great love, sometimes acknowledging that she had been a child and that adults around her had failed her badly. We can, I think, take her later, more reflective comments seriously without taking them as the only truth. And we can, at the same time, recognize that the responsibility in a relationship between a 48-year-old man and a 15-year-old girl rests overwhelmingly with the adult.
I tell you all of this because the rest of the story, the last 2 years of his life, took place with Beverly somewhere in the frame, often literally on screen. And I do not want to tell you the rest of the story without having been honest with you about that fact first. In 1958, Flynn went to Africa.
He had been hired by John Huston, the great American director, for a film called The Roots of Heaven, based on a novel by Romain Gary, about a man who tries to save the elephants of French Equatorial Africa from extinction. The shoot was, by every account, a kind of slow-motion disaster.
The location was [singing] unbearably hot. The crew got sick, one after another, with dysentery and malaria. Huston himself, who was tough and experienced, and had directed films in difficult places all over the world, said in his autobiography, An Open Book, that The Roots of Heaven was the worst working environment he ever survived.
Members of the cast were hospitalized. One assistant nearly died. And Errol Flynn, by Huston’s own account, spent much of the production in a state somewhere between drunk and unconscious. Huston writes about Flynn during that shoot with a strange tenderness. He says that Flynn was visibly dying in plain sight every day on set.
He says that Flynn was drinking vodka mixed with fruit juice from the moment he got up. He says that there were several occasions during the location shoot in Central Africa when crew members had to physically help Flynn back to his quarters in the evening. And that on at least one occasion, Huston himself sat with Flynn through the night because he was not certain that Flynn would still be alive in the morning.
The film was finished. Flynn, somehow, finished it. His performance, when you watch it today, has the same quality as his work in The Sun Also Rises. A man who is no longer acting, simply standing in front of the lens and letting the wreckage be photographed. In 1958, between trips, he flew to Cuba, where he became briefly, and rather unwisely, fascinated by the revolution that was unfolding there.
Fidel Castro’s forces were in the Sierra Maestra mountains fighting the army of the dictator Fulgencio Batista. American journalists were trying to get up into the mountains to interview Castro. Flynn, partly out of genuine sympathy for the rebels and partly, one suspects, out of pure restlessness, decided he would go and see for himself.
He visited Havana. He met some of the people around the rebel movement. After Castro’s victory in January 1959, Flynn made several more trips to Cuba and even produced and starred in a small, very poor half-documentary film called Cuban Rebel Girls, which featured Beverly Aadland in one of her only screen credits.
It is a strange, sad little film, almost unwatchable today, that exists mainly as evidence of a famous man at the very end of his powers, trying to be relevant in a world that had stopped needing him to be. By the spring of 1959, his health was visibly failing. He was 50 years old. He looked, according to people who saw him at the time, somewhere between 60 and 70.
He was complaining of constant pain in his back. He had trouble sleeping. He had trouble eating. He drank, by his own admission to one interviewer, at least a bottle of vodka a day, sometimes more. The IRS was still pursuing him. His daughters by Nora rarely saw him. Sean, his only son, was 18 and had already begun the slow, separate life that would eventually carry him into Cambodia and out of history.
And in October of 1959, with Beverly, he flew to Vancouver in Canada to meet a wealthy local businessman named George Caldo, who had agreed, perhaps, to buy the Zaca. The yacht was Flynn’s last large possession. He needed to sell it. He needed the money. He had no idea when he stepped onto the plane in Los Angeles that he had less than 2 weeks left to live.
He landed in Vancouver on the 9th of October, 1959. He was met at the airport by George Caldow and Caldow’s wife, who drove him into the city. He looked, by Caldow’s later description, exhausted but in good spirits. He was looking forward, he said, to a few days of rest. He had brought Beverly with him.
He had brought a small amount of luggage. He had brought, as always, a bottle. For the first few days in Vancouver, things were, by the standards of his life in this period, almost peaceful. The Caldows had given him the use of a comfortable house. He had meetings about the Zaca. He went out to dinner once or twice.
He gave a brief interview to a local journalist in which he was, by all accounts, charming, self-deprecating, and very clearly unwell. He talked about possibly writing more, possibly directing, possibly going back to live in Jamaica. He talked about his daughters. He did not talk about the future in any concrete way because by this point in his life, the future was something he had largely stopped making plans for.
On the morning of the 14th of October, the deal for the Zaca was, in principle, agreed. The yacht would be sold. There would be money, finally, after years of catastrophe, to begin paying down some of what he owed. He spent that day mostly with Caldow and with Beverly. He had lunch. He talked. He laughed.
He told the stories he had been telling for 30 years. The stories about New Guinea, about ships, about Hollywood, about Curtiz and Bogart and the others who were already dead or about to be. By the afternoon, he was in significant pain. His back was bothering him badly. He had been complaining of back pain on and off for several months.
He took a painkiller. He had a drink. The pain did not go away. In the early evening, the Caldos decided to drive him to the airport so that he could catch a flight back to Los Angeles. Halfway there, the pain became severe enough that they turned the car around and drove instead to the apartment of a doctor named Grant Gould, who was a friend and physician to George Caldo.
Gould examined him briefly. He diagnosed what he thought was a back spasm, possibly a slipped disc, and recommended that Flynn lie down and rest for a while before continuing on to the airport. Flynn was helped into a bedroom in Gould’s apartment. Beverly went with him. He was given some water. He lay down on the bed.
He told a couple of stories by Beverly’s later account in a tired, quiet voice. He closed his eyes. He went to sleep. He never woke up. When Beverly tried to rouse him, perhaps half an hour later, he did not respond. Gould was called back into the room. Resuscitation was attempted. An ambulance was called.
He was taken to Vancouver General Hospital. By the time he arrived, by every clinical indication, he was already gone. The official time of death is recorded as a few minutes past 5:00 in the afternoon on the 14th of October, 1959. He was 50 years and almost 4 months old. The postmortem examination performed the next morning told a story that the world had for 20 years refused to see.
The pathologist found, in plain language, the body of a man who had been, by any reasonable medical definition, slowly destroying himself for at least the last decade. The heart was enlarged and severely damaged. The arteries were narrowed and thickened to a degree that the pathologist associated with men of 70 or older.
The liver was hard, scarred, and shrunken from cirrhosis. There were old, healed lesions consistent with previous tuberculosis. There were signs of long-term venereal infection. There was visible damage from chronic recurrent malaria. The cause of death was certified as a heart attack. But it would be more honest to say that almost every major organ in his body had been failing simultaneously, and the heart simply happened to give out first.
It is the pathologist’s reported remark to a colleague after he had finished that has come down to us, and that I quoted at the very beginning of this story. He said, in effect, that on his table lay the body of a man in his 70s. He had to remind himself, looking at the toe tag, that the man was 50.
The news traveled around the world within hours. By the next morning, every major newspaper from London to Sydney was running the story on its front page. In Hollywood, the reaction was a strange mixture of grief, embarrassment, and a kind of exhausted relief. Many of the people who had loved him had, in private, been waiting for this telephone call for years.
Olivia de Havilland, who was living in Paris by then, learned of his death from a journalist who called her for a comment. She was, by every account, profoundly upset. She did not, contrary to a story that has been repeated many times, give a public statement that day. In interviews many years later, in the 1980s and 1990s, she spoke about him with consistent, careful, understated affection.
She said, in one of those later conversations, that he had been, in her memory, the most beautiful young man she had ever seen, and also the most lost. That phrasing, which is close to what she actually said in interviews and is not invented, captures her feelings about him better, I think, than any of the more dramatic quotations that have circulated since.
David Niven, who had been one of his closest friends, learned the news in California and reportedly went off alone for several hours and did not speak to anyone. And then, as Niven so often did, came back and made a series of dry, affectionate jokes that were, in their way, his form of mourning. John Huston, who had directed him only the year before in The Roots of Heaven, said, in an interview sometime later, that he had been expecting the news every week for the last year of the production, and that he was not so much shocked by Flynn’s death as quietly grateful that it had come at home, in a bed, with someone he cared about in the room, instead of on a film set in the middle of Africa. Lili Damita, his first wife, did not give a public comment. She was in New York. By that point, she was 60 years old, long retired from acting, and had spent the last two decades raising their son, Sean.
Nora Eddington, his second wife, gave a brief and dignified statement in Los Angeles. Patrice Wymore, his third and legal wife, who had been living separately from him for years on the cattle ranch in Jamaica, was the person who, in legal terms, had to handle most of the immediate aftermath. She was, by every account, extraordinarily calm and competent in the days that followed.
The financial situation was a mess. The IRS was still owed money. There were debts in Europe. There was the half-finished William Tell footage somewhere in Italy. There were lawyers, reporters, telegrams, and Beverly Aadland, who was 17 years old and who was suddenly the most photographed teenager in the world.
I want to stop on Beverly for a moment because what happened to her after Flynn’s death is part of the story and an honest version of his life cannot leave it out. In the weeks and months after he died, she was, by every measure, exposed to a level of public attention that would be considered abusive by any modern standard.
Reporters camped outside her home. Her mother, Florence, gave interviews and eventually, with a co-author, produced the book I mentioned earlier, The Big Love, which presented the relationship between her teenage daughter and a 50-year-old movie star as a great romance. The book is genuinely difficult to read today.
It tells you almost nothing reliable about Errol Flynn and a great deal about the kind of mother who would write such a book about her own child. Beverly herself, as she grew older, gradually distanced herself from her mother’s version of the events. She lived a long, mostly private life. She married, became a mother, gave occasional interviews, and died in 2010 at the age of 68.
Her later comments, taken as a whole, are sad and complicated and they should warn us against any neat conclusion about what the relationship really was. We can hold two thoughts at the same time. We can recognize that she, late in life, often spoke of Flynn with affection and we can recognize that she had been a 15-year-old girl and that the adults in her life, including Flynn, including her mother, including the studio personnel who looked the other way, all failed her.
Flynn’s funeral was held in Los Angeles at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale on the 20th of October, 1959. About 150 people attended, which is by Hollywood standards a small funeral for a man who had been one of the most famous actors in the world only 15 years earlier. Many of the people who would have been expected to attend did not.
Some were out of the country. Some had not, in honesty, seen him in years. Some, by their own later admission, did not want to face the reporters. The pallbearers included Mickey Rooney, Raoul Walsh, who had directed many of his best films, and a few others from the older generation of Hollywood. There is a story, which has been told in various forms, that one or two of the men closest to him, including the director Walsh, played a private joke at the funeral that was, depending on who is telling the story, either a touching final tribute to Flynn’s sense of humor or a piece of black comedy poor taste that says more about the people involved than about Flynn himself. I’m going to leave that particular story aside because the documentation on it is contradictory, and I would rather not tell you a version that I cannot be sure is true. What is certainly true is that he was buried at Forest Lawn in a grave that
for a long time was not marked with anything especially dignified. Friends, in subsequent years, made sure that the grave was at least kept in decent condition, but visitors who went to find it in the 1960s and 1970s often described it as surprisingly modest, almost anonymous, given who he had been.
There is a story, which is one of those stories that may be apocryphal, but that several people have repeated over the years, that someone, on one occasion, left six bottles of whiskey at the gravesite on the theory that he would not have wanted to be sober even in death. I do not know if that is true.
It is the kind of story, true or not, that he would probably have appreciated. The estate, when the lawyers had finished going through it, was, in net terms, almost worthless. The houses had mortgages. The yacht had not yet been transferred. The IRS took most of what could be liquidated. Patrice Wymore, in the years that followed, fought a long, slow, sometimes lonely legal battle to keep the Jamaican property, which she eventually succeeded in keeping, and which she ran, as I mentioned, as a working cattle ranch until her own death in 2014. The two daughters from his marriage to Nora, Deirdre and Rory, grew up in their mother’s careful, sensible orbit, and have, in their public statements over the years, always spoken about their father with a kind of cautious, complicated love. They were small girls when he left their daily life. They knew the man behind the legend more from absence than from
presence. His mother, Muriel, in Australia, outlived him by almost 10 years. She died in March of 1969 in Melbourne. The relationship between mother and son had, in the last decade or so of his life, partially repaired itself in the way that such relationships sometimes do when there is no longer enough time left to fight.
They had written letters. He had, on at least a few occasions, sent her substantial sums of money in the years when he still had it. He had not, by any account that survives, ever quite asked her the questions about his childhood that he plainly wanted to ask. She had not, by any account, ever quite given him the answers.
They had, in the end, simply written to each other across the Pacific in the careful, slightly formal language of two people who knew each other extremely well and had never in life found the right room to talk in. His son, Sean Flynn, was 18 when his father died. Sean had grown up mostly with Lili Damita in New York and France, a serious, quiet, dark-haired young man who looked startlingly like his father in photographs, but who had, by every account, almost none of his father’s restless need for performance. Sean became a journalist and a war photographer. He went to Vietnam in the mid-1960s, working for Time and other publications. He took photographs that are today in the permanent collections of major museums. And on the 6th of April, 1970, in Cambodia, on the road between Phnom Penh and the Vietnamese border, Sean Flynn and another young photographer, Dana
Stone, rode out on motorcycles to cover the war and were captured by the Khmer Rouge. They were never seen again. The exact circumstances of Sean’s death have never been confirmed. Lili Damita spent the next 20 years of her life refusing to believe he was gone, and then, gradually, accepting that he must be.
She died in 1994 in Florida, having outlived both her husband and her only son. So, when we add up the family that Errol Flynn left behind, we’re looking at three daughters scattered across different households, each of whom had to make her own private peace with a famous and largely absent father. A son who vanished into a war zone 11 years after his father’s death.
Three former wives, each of whom had been damaged in different ways by the marriage. A mother on the other side of the world. And a 15-year-old girl who had grown into a 17-year-old in the glare of an unkind press and would spend the rest of her life trying to live with what had happened to her. That is the human cost.
That is the part of the story that does not get into the trailers when his films are re-released for anniversary screenings. And yet, and this is the strange, persistent fact that we have to sit with at the end of the story, the films are still here. Captain Blood is still watched by audiences who were not born when Flynn died.
The Adventures of Robin Hood is, by general critical consensus, one of the great Hollywood films, full stop, of the entire studio era and is shown in film schools, on television, in restored prints in cinemas almost every year somewhere in the world. The Sea Hawk is still, for many people who care about that kind of film, the best pirate adventure ever made.
The Sun Also Rises is still studied for his late performance. The image of him on the white horse with the green tunic and the bow is still, at Halloween every year, somewhere on a child who has no idea who Errol Flynn was. In the next part of this story, the last part, we are going to try to ask the question that all of this has been building toward.
Why does the legend survive when the man who created it destroyed himself so thoroughly? What was it, exactly, that the camera saw in him in 1935 that we can still see, almost a hundred years later, in a darkened room? And what, if anything, can the strange, brilliant, sad, partly admirable, partly indefensible life of Errol Flynn tell us today about the price of being looked at? To answer that question, we have to go back, one last time, to the beginning.
Not to Tasmania, not to the small house on the hill in Hobart. Further back than that. To the screen test that Hal Wallis ordered in the spring of 1935 when an obscure Australian contract player was asked to read a few pages of dialogue on a Warner Brothers sound stage for a film that another, more famous, actor had just dropped out of.
The screen test still exists. It has been digitized. You can find it in low resolution on the internet if you know where to look. The young man on it is 25 years old. He is wearing a plain, dark shirt. He is not in costume. He is not in pirate gear. He is just a young man, slightly nervous, slightly amused at himself, reading lines that he has clearly only learned that morning in front of a camera that is, in 1935, an enormous and unforgiving piece of machinery.
And what happens in those few minutes of black and white film is one of the genuinely magical things that happens every so often in the history of the movies. The camera looks at him. He looks back. And something passes between them. The film historian David Thomson, who is not particularly easy on Errol Flynn in his writing, once tried to put his finger on what that something was.
He said, in different essays at different times, that Flynn had a quality that almost no other male star of the studio era possessed in the same combination. He had physical beauty of a kind that does not really happen in most generations. He had athletic grace, the result of a real childhood and adolescence spent climbing, rigging, and riding horses, and swimming in cold sea water.
He had a voice that was light and warm and slightly amused, with a faint Australian undertone that nobody in 1935 quite recognized, but that gave him a sound on a soundtrack that was unlike anybody else. And he had, perhaps most importantly, an attitude towards being looked at that was neither hungry nor hostile.
He simply allowed it. He allowed the camera to come close, and he did not flinch, and he did not pose, and he did not show off. He just stood there and let himself be photographed. That, more than anything else, is the gift of the great movie stars of the classical era, and it is a gift that almost no amount of training can give you.
You either have it or you don’t, and Flynn, in 1935, had it in abundance. The tragedy is that, for the rest of his life, he could not understand it as a gift. He understood it as a trick. He understood it as something he was getting away with. And because he understood it as something he was getting away with, he spent the next 25 years bracing for the moment when the world would catch on and take it back.
That, I think, is the real engine. That is the thing underneath the drinking and the women and the money and the yachts and the wars and the trials. He never quite believed that he had earned any of it. He never quite believed that the audience really loved him. He thought, at some level he could not articulate, that he had stolen the costume from somebody better, and that one day, possibly tomorrow, the rightful owner would come back to claim it.
And so he behaved like a man who had nothing to lose because he had already convinced himself in private that none of what he had was really his. If you watch his films in chronological order, which is something I would gently recommend doing if you have the time, you can almost see this conviction writing itself onto his face year by year.
In Captain Blood in 1935, he is luminous, eager, almost embarrassed by how good he looks. In The Adventures of Robin Hood in 1938, he is perhaps at the absolute peak of what he is going to be. A young man who has briefly stopped doubting himself. Because the part fits him so perfectly that even his own self-doubt cannot quite get in the way.
In They Died with Their Boots On in 1941, he is already a little harder, a little more shadowed, a little more inclined to play scenes from behind the eyes rather than from the front. By Objective Burma in 1945, 2 years after the trial, 3 years after the army medical examination, he is a different actor entirely.
He is good. He is committed. But there is a coldness around the edges of him that was not there in 1938. He has stopped trusting the camera. The camera, sensing this, has stopped trusting him in quite the same way it once did. And by the time you get to The Sun Also Rises and The Roots of Heaven in the late 1950s, the trust between him and the camera has broken down entirely.
And a different, stranger relationship has taken its place. He is no longer trying to charm the lens. He is, in those late performances, almost confessing to it. He is letting it photograph what is actually there. And what is actually there in 1957 and 1958 is a profoundly damaged human being who knows he is dying and has stopped pretending otherwise.
That is why I think those late performances have the strange power that they do. He is finally, after 20 years of hiding inside costumes, simply standing in front of the camera as himself. The terrible price he had paid to get to that moment is the reason it works. Now, what do we do with all of this? What do we, sitting here in the 21st century with our different sensibilities and our different laws and our different ways of thinking about what fame does to people? What do we do with the life of Errol Flynn? I want to be straightforward with you about a few things before we close. We should not pretend that he was a hero. Heroes are characters in films. He played them. He was not one. He was a charming, intelligent, deeply troubled man who hurt people, including very seriously at least one teenage girl who was too young to be in any kind of
relationship with him, and who, regardless of whatever the courts of 1943 did or did not believe, lived a private life in which the people around him were often treated as supporting players in a story whose star was always going to be himself. We should also not pretend that he was a monster. He was not.
He was loved, genuinely and seriously, by intelligent and clear-eyed people who knew him well. Olivia de Havilland, who saw him at the closest possible range for almost a decade, never spoke of him in interviews as a bad man. She spoke of him as a sad one. David Niven, who watched him deteriorate from across 30 years of friendship, wrote about him with affection and with grief.
Nora Eddington, who had every reason in the world to be bitter, wrote a memoir at the end of her own life that is, in its way, gentle. Patrice Wymore, who could have been louder than any of them, was almost completely silent in public for 50 years. None of these people would have spent that much of their inner lives on a monster.
He was, in the end, what most of us are in slightly less spectacular form. He was a person made of good things and bad things who got handed very young an enormous quantity of attention that he did not know how to manage and who used the rest of his life to find out the hard way what attention can do to a person who never had a stable sense of being loved before it arrived.
There is, in the literature of fame, a recurring observation that I have always found useful and that I think applies particularly well to him. It is that fame does not change you. It magnifies you. Whatever you were before, fame takes that thing and makes it larger and louder and makes it impossible to hide.
If you were generous, fame makes you more generous in ways everybody can see. If you were frightened, fame makes you more frightened and gives you all the resources you need to act on the fear at full scale. Errol Flynn was a young man who did not believe he was loved and who, as a result, did not believe in love.
Fame magnified that. Fame gave him the money and the houses and the yachts and the women that allowed him to act on a daily basis as if love did not really exist. By the time he was 45, he had built with his own hands an entire world that confirmed the fear he had carried out of his mother’s house when he was 5 years old.
The film historian Janine Basinger, in her work on the studio system, has written about how the great stars of the classical era often functioned for their audiences as a kind of public dream. The audience, sitting in the dark, projected onto the figure on the screen the things they themselves could not have or could not be.
In Flynn’s case, the projection was unusually pure. Audiences in the late 1930s looked at him and saw a young man who appeared to be having a wonderful time. He was beautiful. He was free. He was funny. He swung from ropes and rode at full gallop and kissed beautiful women and laughed at danger. The audience did not know, could not know, that the young man on the screen was in private almost the opposite of the dream.
The dream was real in the sense that the photographs on the screen were really photographs of him. The dream was also, in a sense that took the rest of his life to reveal, completely false. That gap between the public dream and the private person is the gap that I think killed him. He could not live in the dream because the dream was not him.
He could not live outside the dream because outside the dream, in private, the world had been waiting since he was a small boy in Tasmania to confirm that he was not really lovable. So, he stayed in the gap. He drank to manage it. He spent money to distract from it. He moved constantly from city to city and woman to woman and project to project because if you keep moving, the gap is harder to feel.
And in the end, at 50, in a borrowed bedroom in a Vancouver apartment, the gap closed in on him for the last time and his exhausted heart simply stopped trying to keep up with it. If you watch The Adventures of Robin Hood tonight after listening to all of this, something strange will happen. The film is still wonderful.
It has not become less wonderful because we have spent the last few hours talking about what came after it. The young man in the green tunic laughing on the screen, leaping over a banquet table with a sword in his hand, is still doing exactly what he was doing in 1938. He has not changed. He cannot change. He is fixed forever in those frames of celluloid, 28 years old at the absolute moment of his bloom.
And there is something, I think, almost merciful about that. Whatever else happened to him, whatever else he did, whatever else was done to him, the camera kept a copy of him at the best moment of his life. And that copy will outlive everyone listening to this, and everyone they ever knew, and probably everyone those people will ever know after that.
The dream survives the dreamer. The image survives the body. The young man on the white horse goes on in his green tunic riding through Sherwood Forest, while the older man whose body produced the image lies and has lain for more than 65 years now in a small grave at Forest Lawn in Glendale, California.
With the visitors and the occasional bottle of whiskey and the steady patient sunlight of Southern California falling on the stone. The pathologist’s remark at the very beginning has stayed with me through all of this. And I want to leave it with you, as well. He looked at the body of a 50-year-old man, and he said in tired professional surprise that the body looked 75.
That sentence is, in a way, the saddest summary of Errol Flynn’s life that anyone has ever written. And they did not even know they were writing it. He had aged in his own body 25 years faster than he was supposed to. He had used himself up. He had spent every day of his fame as if there were no day after it.
But here is the thing the pathologist could not see in that quiet examination room in Vancouver. He was looking at the wrong piece of evidence. The body on his table had aged at 1 and 1/2 times the normal speed. The image on the screen in Captain Blood and Robin Hood and The Sea Hawk has not aged at all.
While his body raced ahead into ruin, the photographs of him kept their 28 years. And those photographs are still, today, almost 90 years after they were taken, the freshest, most immediate, most physically alive performances in the entire archive of 1930s Hollywood. So in a way, both things are true at once.
He aged faster than any of us. He also never aged at all. He paid the full price of being looked at, and he also bought with that price a kind of immortality that almost nobody else achieves. Whether the trade was worth it is something only he could have answered. And by every account of the people who knew him at the end, his answer in the last year of his life was no.
He told one interviewer in 1958 that if he had it to do over again, he would have stayed in New Guinea. He would have run a small plantation. He would have drunk less. He would have read more. He would have been, he said, with a small sad laugh that the journalist wrote down, an absolute nobody, and probably much happier.
We do not have to take that statement entirely at face value. It is the kind of thing that famous dying men sometimes say to journalists. But I think if you hold it next to everything else we have been through together, the boy in Hobart, the young man in New Guinea, the screen test in 1935, Olivia at Bidwell Park, the army medical, the trial, the William Tell collapse, the African shoot, the bedroom in Vancouver, I think there is at least the possibility that he meant it.
I think there is at least the possibility that somewhere deep underneath the costume, the real Errol Flynn would have liked to have been left alone. He was not left alone. The camera found him in 1935 on a sound stage in Burbank, California. And the camera did what cameras do. It made him into something he was never quite ready to be.
And then having made him, it watched him year after year with the patient, indifferent, unblinking gaze that cameras have until there was no more of him left to photograph. If you are listening to this somewhere this evening and you have stayed with me all the way through, I would like to thank you for that.
He has been in a strange way a difficult companion to spend a few hours with. He was not a simple man. He was not a clean story. He does not tie up neatly. The only honest way to leave him is the way he left himself. Half in shadow, half in sunlight, smiling at something just off camera that the rest of us cannot quite see.
Good night, Mr. Flynn. The dream still works. The young man on the white horse is still riding. And somewhere on a small, well-tended grave in Glendale, California, the sun is going down exactly the way it goes down on all of us in the end.
