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Oh Errol ….

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Errol Flynn: the True Story of Australia’s Hollywood Icon

Patricia O’Brien

Golden Age screen hero, silver-tongued charmer, tough-as-nails swashbuckling sailor, swordsman and horseman with a virtual patent on historic hero roles. Dripping with money, ridiculously handsome and a back story of real adventures – every woman wanted him, every man wanted to be him.

So the conventional wisdom goes. But I’m not so sure I’d give everything just to be like him, as Aussie Crawl’s Guy McDonough sings.

When things were good, they were very good. When they were bad, they were very, very bad.  Fast, furious and fantastic as Captain Blood’s reign in the limelight was, Flynn’s course around the sun was ultimately short-lived and pathetic, badly fractured by drugs, booze and a faltering grasp on reality.

Author O’Brien, fascinated by the man and the legend, seems at pains at the outset to cement Flynn in the category of Weinstein, Epstein and the casting couch cabal that’s run Hollywood for decades. And there seems little doubt he paired up with more than a few ingenues busting to get him to get them into Tinsel Town. But the portrait she paints of the Tasmanian megastar is far more complex, pegged by some 50 pages of notes and bibliography references.

Truth is, it’s doubtful Hollywood’s hosted a heartthrob more arresting, magnetic, exciting or rakish than Errol Flynn.  Or troubled, because to his CV you can safely add fabulist, wife-beater, heroin and coke junkie, blotto alcoholic, hot-headed brawler …

“Don’t tell me it’s true, I don’t wanna hear about it”, as McDonough says. Oh Errol.

Unlike Flynn’s own My Wicked Wicked Ways autobiography, ghosted by Earl Conrad, O’Brien places his adventures, achievements, and failures, against the straitened social, moral and political contexts of the day, as well as today.

Hypocrisy is writ large, and often, but Flynn’s far from the only guilty party. His actions are aided, abetted and, perhaps most notably, forgiven by an adoring public every bit as addicted to him as he is to the superstar lifestyle. It’s a curious mirror on human behaviour.

The Flynn story remains rivetting nonetheless. His Tasmanian childhood, his Sydney years, are detailed comprehensively. Likewise, his teenage years abandoned in England public school system. His parents’ fortunes and careers are spelled in similar detail, as are his relationships with them, deferring favourably to his father while highly critical of his mother.

His New Guinea years overseeing copra and tobacco operations, his sailing adventures, writing and early acting efforts are all mapped out in a sharp contemporary context that stresses Flynn’s predilection for colonial-style management and attitudes. He might have easily made a plantation slave-master is the clear impression O’Brien delivers while rejecting Nazi spy claims levelled against Flynn.

As for womanising, and teenager-ising, it’s fair to say the apple didn’t fall far from the tree given Flynn’s old man Theodore’s philandering. Mum Marelle had more than just cause to cast her eye elsewhere. Flynn expanded the role exponentially, amid three marriages and an infamous rape trial.

O’Brien tracks Flynn’s movies and their production doggedly: Blood, Robin Hood, Sea Hawk, Charge of the Light Brigade, Santa Fe Trail, Don Juan, his numerous westerns – together with his co-stars, his work schedules, hard-nosed contracts and demands, and the eventual souring of all the above.

As age, health and dissolute lifestyle caught up with him, his career came under a cloud as did his finances. Grand plans on a Jamaica plantation, which looked promising for a while, failed to eventuate. Likewise, efforts to resurrect his film prospects. Taking up with a 15-year-old girlfriend while filming the Cuban Revolution, alongside Fidel Castro, perhaps highlights the degree of fame and farce of his final years.

Ultimately, getting sense out of Flynn was hard work at best, as Earl Conrad learned. His death at age 50 was a foregone conclusion. Same goes for his ongoing popularity, both assisted and perpetuated by O’Brien’s compelling if rather academic account of this intriguing celebrity.

Suicide Freddie: Olympic daredevil, rake, gun-runner, diamond smuggler

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Dirty rotten scoundrels don’t come much bigger, better or more reckless than Aussie-born, international high-society gatecrasher Freddie McEvoy.

McEvoy was a swashbuckler, a daredevil race driver, world bobsled champion, Olympic medallist, a gambler, diamond smuggler, gun-runner, suspected Nazi spy … and one of the most expensive, most highly-chased male escorts in Europe.

Freddie supposedly killed a man in a Marseilles bar-room brawl. Coupled with his athleticism, humour, refined charm and extraordinary network of filthy rich and royal friends, it made him irresistible to women.

Rich and powerful women.

He married some of the world’s richest women: Standard Oil heiress Beatrice Cartwright – he was 33, she was 62 – heiress Irene  Wrightsman, and a wealthy French-Algerian fashion model Claude Filatre.

He might have married the world’s richest woman, old pal Barbara Hutton, in between but made the blunder of introducing her to a Russian mate, Prince Igor Troubetzkoy. It didn’t last.

Along the way he tupped with Nazi spy Sandra Rambeau and a raft of dripping-rich society and titled dames – they were a weakness. McEvoy was sought not just for his boudoir skills but as a status symbol. Stepping out with Freddie showed they could afford him.

Smooth operator, charmer, Lothario, rogue, philanderer, rake, whatever you want to call him, Freddie was equally a great weakness for women. Adjectives for this impeccably-mannered playboy included debonair, witty, charming, fascinating and elegant.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, his best friend was another smooth-talking Aussie satyr, Captain Blood himself, Errol Flynn.

Far from any celebrity hanger-on, if Freddie Mac was anything to Flynn it was a role model on how to develop and execute his wicked, wicked ways. They’d met as teenagers in Queensland then again in London in 1934 where they became thicker than thieves.

They were brawlers, drinkers, gamblers and womanisers par excellence. After Flynn hit the big time, they made the Hollywood Rat Pack of the 1960s look like choirboys.

When Flynn was facing prison on rape charges in LA in 1942, the biggest celebrity story of the year, Freddie was ready with car and hired muscle to break him from court and escape to Mexico. Flynn, with whom McEvoy has played bit parts in his movies, was acquitted and the two retired to his Mulholland Drive ranch to take up the cavorting and carousing where they’d left off.

Proudly a man of no visible means, the Maseratis, grand yachts, French Riviera lifestyle and tuxedos of ‘Suicide Freddie’ – as he was nicknamed for his speed freak addiction – were also part financed by a variety of his own means; from brokering meetings of rich wannabes with society to smuggling between LA and Mexico on Flynn’s yacht.

Guns, diamonds, whiskey, cigarettes, people … it was all great fun and adventure for Freddie. That is, until sailing a yacht from the south of France to the Bahamas with some ex-SS Nazis, he came unstuck.

Shipwrecked off the coast of Morocco, he and wife Claude were washed up dead, their heads so pulverised they were thought to be scalped. Two others were washed up, naked, while two more were washed off the yacht while it was being battered on rocks.

Three others, the Nazis, survived. They reported that Freddie had been fearless aboard the sinking craft, swimming 200 metres to shore for help and then back to the boat when he couldn’t find any.

He hauled his wife almost ashore but 20 metres from safety they disappeared in the crashing surf. So the story goes.

What really happened is anyone’s guess.

 THE SCANDALOUS FREDDIE McEVOY

By Frank Walker

Hachette