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Swashbuckling hero trips over gleeful biographer
Errol Flynn: Gentleman Hellraiser.
By David Bret. JR Books £8.99
LOTHARIO, brawler, polygamist, drug guzzler, mother hater, war correspondent, yachtsman, slave trader, raconteur, gold prospector, drunkard and movie star swashbuckler: Errol Flynn was far more than his matinée idol looks belied. His one regret, it is said, is that he never learned to play the piano.
He learned very quickly how to play people, however. The stories of his beefcake opportunism, under-age dalliances (which he referred to as “San Quentin quail”) and unparalleled egotism, curtailed only by an intoxicated coronary at the age of 50, are legendary.
Celebrity biographer David Bret gleefully chronicles every rumour and misdemeanour in his gossipy, subjective but highly enjoyable portrait, published by Camden Town imprint JR Books. Much of the book’s inspiration is drawn, of course, from Flynn’s notoriously salacious memoirs, My Wicked, Wicked Ways, which remains a high watermark of the genre.
Bret also digs deeper though, beyond Flynn’s lecherous but ultimately exonerating version of events, revealing the actor’s life-long friendship with a sinister, hirsute Nazi, his vehement anti-Semitism and his rampant insecurities.
Flynn was many things, but a congenial human being was not one of them. His life is an incredible tale – which of today’s Hollywood stars could moonlight as an overseer of “mostly reformed” cannibals in New Guinea? – made all the more compelling by its uglinesses.
“I’ve lived for, with and by my balls,” Flynn crows philosophically. “I learned to value my balls so much that possibly I decided to make continual use of them.”
From the mouths of mere mortals that might sound awful, but somehow coming from Flynn it is bloody mindedness to marvel at.
SIMON WROE
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