Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know: The Mythical Life of Errol Flynn
old hollywood
Hadley Hall Meares David Canfield Matthew Jacobs Hillary Busis Adrian Carrasquillo Katey Rich Chris Murphy Jamilah Lemieux Savannah Walsh Hannah Seligson
Errol Flynn’s My Wicked, Wicked Ways is a canonical celebrity autobiography—as outlandish and problematic as it is utterly absorbing.
https://www.vanityfair.com/verso/static/vanity-fair-global/assets/favicon.ico
Vanity Fair
Born in 1909 in Tasmania, Errol Flynn captivated the world, careening through life like a Hemingway antihero brimming with toxic masculinity. When his autobiography, My Wicked, Wicked Ways, was released posthumously in 1959, he again shocked the public—and even his famous friends. “It is indeed as outspoken as it is reputed to be,” his friend Noël Coward sniped, “but with a sort of outspokenness which curdles the blood. Such a wealth of unnecessary vulgarity.”

From his early days biting off sheep testicles on an Australian farm to his reign as an international superstar, Flynn recounts his amoral adventures in deceptively eloquent prose that blunts his often sordid stories. Whether he was learning to drink odorless vodka on set from Ann Sheridan, smoking weed with Diego Rivera, wooing Princess Irene of Romania, or using cocaine on the tip of his penis as an aphrodisiac, Flynn was out for himself, with little care for the wreckage he left along the way. “I am dangerous to be with because, since I live dangerously, others are subject to the danger that I expose myself to,” he writes. “They, more likely than I, will get hurt.”

The Real Tasmanian Devil

Growing up in Tasmania, mainland Australia, and England, Errol Leslie Thomson Flynn decided quickly that the normal rules of human behavior did not apply to him. “I have been in rebellion against God and government ever since I can remember,” Flynn writes. His favored companions were the wild animals—tigers, kangaroos, opossums, and, yes, Tasmanian devils—kept in the backyard by his beloved father, Theodore, an esteemed professor of biology.

As a child, Flynn constantly butted heads with Marelle, “my young, beautiful impatient mother, with the itch to live—perhaps too much like my own.” She considered him a “devil in boy’s clothing,” and according to Flynn, frequently beat him. When Flynn was seven, he was caught playing doctor with a neighborhood girl under the porch, and received a particularly severe thrashing.

That was the last straw. “This is no place for me, I decided. I’d leave home, get a job,” Flynn writes. He ran away, attempting to find work at nearby farms.

After three days on the road, he was finally returned to his frantic mother. According to Marelle, Flynn had driven an easy bargain while looking for work: “He asked only five shillings a week as wages, saying that would do him, as he ‘never intended to marry.’”

Heart of Darkness

By the age of 17, Flynn had been expelled from his latest exclusive boy’s school and was running with the infamous “Razor Gang” of young toughs in Sydney. Determined to make something of himself, and with his family’s seafaring blood coursing through his veins, in 1926 he took off for the island of New Guinea.

Flynn gloried in his years in the brutal, rough-and-tumble Australian colony, and believed they shaped his moral character (or lack thereof). According to Flynn, during these years he worked as a colonial government lackey, managed a coconut plantation, and was a boat captain, a fisherman, a scammer, and a failed prospector in the gold fields.

By his own admission, Flynn witnessed the horrors of colonialism—and actively participated in them. He became a “recruiter,” marching into the jungle of New Guinea to persuade indigenous men to work as indentured laborers. At night he attempted to educate himself, reading the classics by the light of a hurricane lamp, while lizards and bugs swarmed around the single light. “I took a look at where I was,” he writes, “roaming from spot to spot…looking for gold, bumping and bumbling about like a blind bumblebee, hoping for a chance, plunging at a jungle with bare hands.”

According to Flynn, this reckless life came to a head when he and a group of laborers were ambushed in the jungle. His assistant, a young boy named Ateliwa, was killed. “I jumped behind a tree with my revolver in hand…. I fired as fast as I could, and I hit one of the raiders right in the neck,” he writes.

Although no official record of these events has ever been found, Flynn claims he was arrested and charged with murder. At the subsequent trial, he says he was saved by an old gold prospector, whose testimony helped secure his acquittal. When he finally left New Guinea, it was not the murder trial that drove him away, but a particularly severe case of “nail in the hoof,” otherwise known as gonorrhea.

The Great Lover

Flynn’s improbable journey to stardom began in New Guinea, when a film executive named Joel Swartz chartered a boat so that he could shoot B-roll while traveling on the treacherous Sepik River. Swartz was impressed by the boat’s flashy young captain, and eventually cast Flynn as Fletcher Christian in 1933’s In the Wake of the Bounty, which filmed partly in Tahiti. Filming this low-budget movie sparked something in Flynn and made him determined to escape the South Seas for England.

After stealing loose gems from his wealthy sugar mama and hiding them in the hollow of a shaving brush, Flynn began his trek to England with an equally amoral Dutch doctor. The two blundered across the world, cheating at cockfights in the Philippines, getting scammed by a beautiful, opium-smoking sex worker in the casinos of Macao, and defecting from the Royal Hong Kong Army Volunteers. Finally, in England, Flynn found work as a stage actor, and was discovered by Warner Brothers at the Stratford-upon-Avon Festival.

By 1935, Flynn was a swashbuckling Hollywood sex symbol, the star of Captain Blood, and married to the tempestuous Lili Damita. Celebrated as a great screen lover, Flynn admits to being awkward and shy around his costars, particularly the “lovely—and distant” Olivia de Havilland. “There was the time she found a dead snake in her panties as she went to put them on. She was terrified and she wept. She knew very well who was responsible,” he writes.

This behavior was not going to fly with Bette Davis, Flynn’s costar in 1939’s The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex. “Bette was a dynamic creature, the great big star of the lot, but not physically my type; dominating everybody around, and especially me,” he writes. Davis was particularly aggrieved that Flynn was being paid more than her, which he agreed was ridiculous since “she was a far better actress than I could ever hope to be an actor.”

In one scene, Davis was required to give Flynn a light slap. But during a rehearsal in front of hundreds of extras, Davis “lifted one of her hands, heavy with those Elizabethan rings, and Joe Louis himself couldn’t give a right hook better than Bette hooked me.”

Embarrassed, Flynn confronted Davis in her dressing room. “She didn’t turn around,” he writes. “She just looked into the mirror, dawdled at her makeup with me behind her, cautiously, like a boy with cap in hand.”

She quickly let Flynn know what was up. “If you can’t take a little slap, that is just too bad,” she exclaimed. “I can’t do it any other way!... That’s the kind of actress I am—and I stress actress!”

A rattled Flynn, his ego (and face) bruised, backed out slowly and went to his dressing room, where he promptly threw up.

John Barrymore’s Ghost

One day Flynn was on the MGM lot when he came upon a drunken man in full Renaissance costume slumped on a bench: “His eyes opened slowly, like an owl’s. He transfixed me with a hard stare. I started to pass on, but he straightened up a bit and cocked his left eyebrow….”

“Pray be seated, fellow voyager,” the man said. It was none other than the legendary John Barrymore, the “Great Profile” himself, now blurred by alcoholism. Flynn found a father figure in “Dear John,” who drank, disrespected women, and expounded on literary ideals in ways Flynn found admirable. He was soon an honorary member of “the Olympiads,” Barrymore’s all-male circle, which included the artist John Decker, Anthony Quinn, and W.C. Fields.

One night, Barrymore arrived at Mulholland House, Flynn’s infamous bachelor pad—popular with cowboys, stuntmen, and crooks—overlooking the San Fernando Valley. Barrymore’s antics soon drove his jaded host to distraction. It was, Flynn writes, “the most frightening three weeks I had since I was in the New Guinea jungle.”

“Jack thought it was a waste of time to go to the bathroom if there was a window close by,” Flynn recalls. One night, Flynn asked him to stop peeing out the window since it had removed all the varnish. “Certainly m’lad,” he replied and promptly relieved himself in the fireplace.

“Barrymore took years dying, stalling his exit,” Flynn writes. When he finally did pass away in 1942, Flynn claims that director Raoul Walsh bribed the undertaker to let him take Barrymore’s body on a little trip, to Flynn’s favorite chair at Mulholland House. “As I opened the door I pressed the button,” Flynn recalls. “The lights went on and my God—I stared into the face of Barrymore! His eyes were closed. He looked puffed, white, bloodless…. I let out a delirious scream.”

Flynnanigans

Flynn bitterly believed himself a “phallic symbol,” notoriously equated with sex. He was also a braggart who constantly advertised his sexual prowess and peccadilloes.

But in 1943, Flynn’s predatory behavior caught up with him. He was charged with two counts of statutory rape involving two 17-year-old girls. While he admitted to a consensual encounter with accuser Peggy Satterlee, he claimed to barely know accuser Betty Hansen. Besides, he quipped, “who approaches a prospective sweetheart asking her to whip out her birth certificate, or driver’s license, or show a letter from her mother?”

The trial was a media sensation, and Flynn became a national joke—and an even bigger sex symbol. Satterlee testified that Flynn kept his shoes on during their encounter, a perfect joke, since his film They Died with Their Boots On had just been released. Young men around the world bragged they were “In Like Flynn,” and “women banged on the doors of Mulholland House like ice drops in a hailstorm.”

Despite his professed inner turmoil over the trial, Flynn couldn’t help himself. “I still had some will left,” he writes. “Some of that I directed to a very lovely-looking redhead who occupied a cubicle in the lobby entrance of the City Hall. Day by day I passed by her and watched how she sold chewing gum….” This young woman was 18-year-old Nora Eddington, soon to be his second wife.

Flynn was acquitted, but he had in no way learned his lesson. “I might have been guilty as hell—under the law, that is,” he writes. “But in the world of day-to-day common sense…everybody knew that the girls had asked for it, whether or not I had my wicked ways with them.”

Lush Life

By the early 1950s, Flynn was a broke joke—which, according to the star, was everybody’s fault but his: “I felt used. Used by the studio. Used to make money. Used by the press for fun. Used by society as a piece of chalk to provide the world with a dab of color.”

With his third wife, Patrice, and baby daughter in tow, Flynn lived aboard his beloved yacht, Zaca, in the Mediterranean, diving, swimming, and drinking with the likes of Rita Hayworth, King Farouk of Egypt, and Prince Rainier. “I laughed,” he writes. “My friends laughed. I had pals. They had yachts. We dined on their yachts or they dined on ours.”

Everywhere Flynn went he carried a suitcase labeled “Flynn Enterprises,” which contained vodka, quinine, glasses, and a Bible. Dissolute and despondent, he relied more and more on alcohol. His famous face had become bloated and gray. But his new physique would, improbably, lead to a career renaissance in the mid-1950s as Flynn began playing drunken rogues, including his hero John Barrymore in Too Much, Too Soon. “I make more today being a shadow of my former self than I did when I was my former self,” he writes.

In the years before his death in 1959, Flynn spent more and more time secluded on his Jamaican estate—his four children far away in America, his only companion his last girlfriend, Beverly Aadland, whom he met when she was just 15 years old. With a sliver of self-awareness, he was proud of his career in films, but not much else. “Maybe I haven’t been such a loss after all,” he writes. “Anybody who can bring a few moments of happiness to another human life certainly can’t be wasting his time in an otherwise fear-ridden and often very drab world. Maybe it hasn’t all been so futile. Maybe it wasn’t all a waste.”

All products featured on Vanity Fair are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission.

More Great Stories From Vanity Fair

— Cover Story: Anya Taylor-Joy on Life Before and After The Queen’s Gambit

— Zack Snyder Explains His Long-Awaited Justice League Ending

— Tina Turner Is Still Haunted by Her Abusive Marriage

— Emilio Estevez’s True Hollywood Stories

— Armie Hammer Accused of Rape and Assault

— Why Black Panther Is Key to Understanding The Falcon and the Winter Soldier

— 13 Oscar-Nominated Movies You Can Stream Right Now

— From the Archive: Meet the Real-Life Teen Burglars Who Inspired The Bling Ring

— Serena Williams, Michael B. Jordan, Gal Gadot, and more are coming to your favorite screen April 13–15. Get your tickets to Vanity Fair’s Cocktail Hour, Live! here.