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*and if there is
anything i write
that is factually
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An Account of Errol Flynn's life
based on what i have found out so far...
Errol Flynn was born Errol Leslie Thompson Flynn on the 20th June 1909 in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia. His parents were Professor Theodore Thompson Flynn and Lily Mary Young (she later changed it to "Marelle"). Professor Flynn was a well known Marine biologist and Zoologist (Errol says in his A/B that he (the Prof.) brought the first platypus to England) and later went on to recieve an MBE for his work at Queens University, Belfast. Errol also was a direct decendant - on his mothers' side - of Midshipman Young from the infamous HMS Bounty Mutiny of 1789. There is a great tale in the A/B about a sword that had belonged to Captain Bligh and it used to hang on the wall in the family home it had been handed down the generations ever since then. Errol says he was mad when his father gave it to a local Naval museum! Anyone from Hobart reading this: is the naval museum still there?
When he was a small boy, Errol was very intelligent. Even before he started school he was using multi-syllabic words and expressed a self awareness that was advanced for his age. Lily Mary recalled an event (so does Errol and some of his biographers) where he was around the age of 3 and he and his mother were out and came across a family friend. Errol totally ignored the man and when his mother asked him why he had been so rude he explained that at the time he was being a train and that if the man didn't know that then he was stupid! That coming from a kid of 3 years old? !
When he was a bit older he got interested in his father's work. I think that it facinated him how "things" (living beings) work. He used to watch his father's experiments that he did in his shed and observe the "specimens" that he kept in various jars and cages around his workplace. Errol was present on the journey with the platypus to England (so he says in MWWW) and he nearly killed the whole lot of them. He thought they might be bored with their present diet of specially grown worms and instead might like some tadpoles that he had caught for them just earlier. Errol says of his father's reaction: "He didn't say a word but the expression on his face was more than punishment."
Errol as a small boy obviously did not understand certain double standards of his parents. One day he did his own experiment with a ball of string, a piece of fatty pork and some ducks from the back yard. Basically, Errol had found out somewhere that a piece of fatty pork could pass through a duck in a matter of minutes so he decided to make "the first living bracelet" using the ducks, the string and the piece of fatty pork. Need i elaborate furthur?! I would like to add that i am a strict vegetarian and all for the animals but this was too funny to pass by! but, for the record, Errol did say that the ducks didn't come to any harm from his latest "scientific experiment". He says that when his father came home and saw it he called him a "cruel little devil" and broke his unopened umbrella over his son's back. Errol says that was the only violence he felt from his fathers hands. He retorted back after the attack: "Dad, you cut open animals all day long in your laboratory. What did i do wrong?"
In his late teens and early 20's he spent sometime to-ing and fro-ing between Australia and Papua New Guinea. Still to this day you may hear the odd tale told of Errol's exploits if you go for a beer in a Papua New Guinean pub!
He first got bit by the acting bug during this time when approached by a Mr Charles Chauvel - knowledge has it that Errol was spotted on a beach in Sydney by Chauval's wife - who offered him the part as Fletcher Christian in a film titled
In the Wake of The Bounty (ironic eh?!).
This was not his first appearance in front of a camera: two years earlier he was employed by a man who wanted a yacht and a skipper to take him up the Sepik river to film shots of the natives in their surroundings. The man in question is named as "Joel Swartz" or Hermann F. Erben in various versions of the tale. This confusion is somewhat cleared up in the early biography "The Young Errol Flynn before Hollywood" by John Hammond Moore. In his autobiography, Errol states that he first met Hermann Erben (although he gives him the pseudonym Gerrit Koets) on the port of Rabaul in PNG at the onset of his journey to England. But the above suggests otherwise - anyone reading this has any info i'd be most grateful!! "Joel Swartz" was also one of the characters in Errol's semi-autobiographical novel Showdown pub.1946.
I totally fell in love with Shamus O'Thames!.
During WW2 when America joined in many from Hollywood signed up, Errol (although still looking immaculate on the outside) was registered as medically unfit (4F) due to a heart murmur and TB and was sent instead to entertain the troops. He had had recurrent malaria and TB from his days in the jungles of Papua New Guinea. He had been a US citizen since 1942 and desparately wanted to do his part for his country in the war and was crushed when told he could not participate. Many people ribbed him during this time because he looked on the outside to be as fit as a fiddle yet wasn't signing up for service. Was he a chicken (or a yellow-belly in native oz)? they are all saying. It must have been really hard for him during all this as he was seen on the big screen as THE big hero of all time, yet where was he when the real action was on? He was tortured by the fact that he couldn't serve his country with all the others and with this and also the statatory rape case only just behind him, he sunk into a deep depression and even contemplated suicide. Buster Wiles tells us in his book "My Days with Errol Flynn" that Errol went to give talks to troops in Alaska and then he went to Louisiana and Missouri to promote the sales of war bonds. Said Errol at one speech: "It's sound economy to buy war bonds. No one is going to make you buy them. No one is going to hold a pistol over your head. Thank God we live in America. But if you don't buy them, there may be someone holding a pistol to your head if we lose this war, and it'll be loaded, too." Says Buster Wiles in the book: "Louisiana reached its quota of war-bond sales - the first state in the nation to do so." The rape case was not as cut and dry as some people like to make out. There was a lot of talk at the time about that Warner had "financially supported" some politian guy for ages and this particular year his opposition had got in instead and wanted to make an example somehow of Warners and Errol (being the biggest moneymaker for them at the time) got targeted. Buster Wiles says in his book that he had shared a cabin with Errol during the alleged first assault (against the girl named Peggy Satterlee) aboard the Sirocco and he was adamant that nothing out of order had happened. Nora Eddington had a boyfriend (before she got with Errol) when she worked on the cigarette counter in the building where the trial was being held and she had asked his opinion of whether Errol was guilty or not and his answer was: "I seriously doubt it, a guy like Flynn doesn't have to rape a girl. His problem is how to prevent them from raping him."
there is still a lot more i have to write here but please bear with me, there is a lot to get through!