Slave trader, murderer, and… Nazi spy? Not exactly
the legacy you want to leave behind as one of America's greatest action heroes.
Errol Flynn was an icon of Hollywood's golden age. Throughout the 1930s and '40s,
Flynn starred as swashbuckling rogues and dashing heroes in historical action hits
like "Captain Blood" and "The Adventures of Robin Hood." Flynn was a true movie star,
but he may have been even more famous for his personal life. Stories of his
sexual exploits and misadventures, often embellished by Flynn himself,
have become the stuff of Hollywood legend. A notorious drunk, he was known for sneaking alcohol
and drugs onto the set and getting totally blitzed while filming, while his fondness
for under-aged women put him at the center of one of Hollywood's first major sex scandals.
Before Errol Flynn became a star in the United States, he spent much of his childhood in
Tasmania. True to his future bad boy persona, he was a rebellious child who rejected authority at
an early age, running away from home at the age of 7 to escape a beating for "playing
doctor" with a young girl. Later at age 17, he was expelled from high school for being
involved in an Australian gang. Even his mother referred to him as "a devil in boy's clothing."
Some of the most shocking stories of his life before Hollywood were probably embellished by
Flynn himself. In his autobiography, "My Wicked, Wicked Ways, Flynn describes himself as a ship's
captain, a gold prospector, and sometimes even as a "slave trader." In his book, Flynn talks about
how he tricked the Indigenous people of New Guinea into coming with him onto plantations,
where he sold them as indentured servants. According to Flynn, he was on one of these
horrific trips when he and his assistant were attacked in the jungle. His assistant was killed,
but Flynn escaped unharmed, claiming he killed one of his attackers by shooting him in the neck. When
Flynn was tried for murder, he was judged "not guilty," and left New Guinea soon afterward.
Flynn's first film role wasn't in Hollywood. According to Flynn,
he was in New Guinea captaining a boat on the Sepik River when he was hired by
filmmakers who were shooting a movie called "In the Wake of the Bounty."
His dashing good looks caught the eye of an executive, who thought he would
be the perfect type to cast for "Fletcher Christian." He got the film's leading role,
but while the movie did not make Flynn a star, it did ignite in him the desire to become an actor.
It is believed that Flynn, who was dating a wealthy older woman at the time, stole
and sold some of her jewelry to pay for a trip to England. Once there, he conned his way into
a British theater company by convincing them he was a major star in Australia,
even providing them with a list of phony credits. From there he was cast in a murder mystery that
was being filmed by Warner Brothers in London, and soon he was on his way to Hollywood.
In 1934, while Flynn was on a steamship bound for New York he met a French film star named Lili
Damita. Damita would become Flynn's first wife, but they didn't hit it off right away. According
to Flynn, when he asked the star to dance with him, she replied, "Perhaps. Come back later."
When they met again in Hollywood, however, they started a romance almost immediately.
"The Name is Errol Flynn, and it has been a pleasure, Lili."
The two were married for seven years, but few of them were happy. They argued
so much they were sometimes referred to as "The Battling Flynns." It is believed
their fights were often physical and Flynn frequently arrived on set with injuries from
his wife throwing things at him. When Flynn was late to their one-year anniversary party,
witnesses said that the brawl between them was so spectacular, that they both ended up in the
hospital. Concerned about what the public would think about one of their stars hitting his wife,
the studio covered the incident up. Injuries were explained away as the result of a car
crash caused by Flynn heroically swerving to avoid hitting a cat.
Actor John Barrymore, an iconic figure of the silent era, was Errol Flynn's mentor and one
of his closest friends. Barrymore was also known for partying. Sadly, by the time he and Flynn met,
alcoholism had taken a toll on Barrymore's career, but this didn't make him any less
a hero in Flynn's eyes. After Flynn's inevitable divorce from Lili Damita, he
spent more and more time partying with Barrymore, and Barrymore frequently stayed at Flynn's house.
When Barrymore died in 1942, Flynn was devastated,
but several of Flynn's friends allegedly took the opportunity to play a ghoulish prank on
him. They paid the undertaker $100 to let them borrow the actor's body, then snuck into Flynn's
house and propped it up in a chair. When the very drunk Flynn returned home that evening,
he found the dead Barrymore waiting for him. According to Flynn, he was so terrified he ran
back out of his home and was preparing to drive away when the pranksters came clean.
Unlike many of his contemporaries in Hollywood, Errol Flynn never fought in World War II. There
have been a few explanations for why he was never in the army. Some have speculated that
Flynn simply didn't care about the war. Several of Flynn's friends believed he
was intentionally avoiding service, either because he was afraid or because he didn't
seem to care very much about the war in general. One of Flynn's closest friends,
David Niven, described Flynn as having no loyalties whatsoever.
At 33, Flynn was not too old to be in the military, but he was declared "unfit for
service" for health reasons. Many were suspicious of Flynn's medical status,
suggesting that the studio may have gotten Flynn exempted from military
service so they wouldn't lose their star. No matter what the truth of the situation was,
many found it hard to believe their beloved action hero was unfit for service. It appears, however,
that Flynn's medical conditions were genuine, he even sometimes collapsed while filming.
"I'm all right, I'm all right, I'm all right."
"My God! You scared me. Can I get you anything?
"No, it's alright. It's an ancient case of malaria."
Sources close to Flynn later revealed he was declared unfit for service in
any branch of the military because he had suffered from a long list of potentially
serious medical issues, including a heart condition, recurrent malaria,
chronic tuberculosis multiple STDs, and chronic pain, to name just a few.
Errol Flynn was a movie star, and he lived like one. His house, located on the famous
Mulholland Drive in the Hollywood Hills, was a classic "party house." The estate was part home,
part casino, and was as unusual as its owner, featuring hidden passageways,
two-way mirrors, and peepholes for secretly watching other people in the house. And,
according to Flynn, there was certainly no shortage of interesting guests to spy on.
The house was a nearly nonstop Hollywood party, attended by Flynn's friends, other movie stars,
and even total strangers. Apparently, there were sometimes so many people milling around
when Flynn got home he often had trouble getting in the front door.
Devilishly handsome, Flynn was an unapologetic womanizer, claiming he was so irresistible to
women that he needed a baseball bat to fend them off. With women banging on the doors
of the Mullholland House at every hour of the night and day, Flynn claimed he had to
bolt the doors against them while fending off a daily flood of marriage proposals.
Throughout his life, Flynn excused his notorious sexual behavior by saying
it was beyond his control. He even once went so far as to explain that if a woman
approached him in his dressing room and pulled down his zipper, he was not to blame for what
might follow. Flynn had such a reputation that the idiom, "in like Flynn," came to be
used as a way of saying someone was going to be successful with women very quickly.
"..if I just touch the arm of a girl or a woman who fires me,
I’ve got to go as far as I can, or as far as she'll let me…"
In 1942, a pair of policemen dropped by the Mulholland House to see Flynn. He invited them
inside, offered them coffee, and proceeded to discuss a report they had received about
him. According to Flynn's autobiography, he would later come to regret talking to them
without a lawyer. The police seemed to be on Flynn's side. They were friendly and revealed
information about the case that would typically be kept from the subject of the investigation.
Among other things, the police informed him that a 17-year-old runaway named Betty Hansn,
who at the time was being held in Juvenile Hall, had accused him of statutory rape.
The LAPD eventually connected the Hansen case to another case, stemming from the complaint
of the mother of a girl named Peggy Satterlee. Flynn never denied that he and Peggy had been
together on his yacht, but he insisted there had been no way of knowing her real age, as she had
a license stating she was 21. Satterlee's mother, however, insisted that her daughter was only 15.
The courtroom for Flynn's trial was packed with fans and was reported on
constantly by the media. The scandal fascinated the public
and sordid details of the crimes became popular celebrity gossip. Ironically,
rather than damaging Flynn's reputation, it only boosted his image in Hollywood as a sex symbol.
Far from harboring bad feelings toward the young women who accused him, Flynn said he felt sorry
for them and thought they were victims of a media frenzy that had taken advantage of all of them. In
fact, the trial does not seem to have discouraged his interest in young girls at all. Although,
he did take the time to confirm the age of the next girl he was interested in. Her name was
Nora Eddington, she was 18 years old and he met her while he was still on trial.
Eddington worked behind the cigarette counter in the courthouse lobby. Throughout the trial,
Flynn admitted he had his eye on her,
and since he was still concerned he might end up in prison, he hoped to have one last fling.
But Flynn's luck held, and he did not go to prison. Even though he admitted that
he might have broken the law it didn't seem to matter and soon after the trial,
Nora Eddington became Flynn's second wife.
While the trial was a complete media frenzy, Flynn's fans did not abandon him, in fact,
they seemed to love him more than ever. But all the negative publicity took a toll on Flynn. The
stress led to an increase in his already heavy drinking, and soon, he was taking drugs as well.
Flynn was often seen taking vitamin injections, which he was having mixed with morphine.
To make matters worse, Flynn's film career was slowing down. Paired with his feelings
about the trial, he sank into a severe depression. The critics were hard on him,
and he regularly met with bad reviews. Flynn railed against the studio for typecasting him,
but in fairness, that was probably because films starring Flynn as anything other than
a costumed action hero did poorly at the box office. On top of all that,
for the first time since he had become a movie star, Flynn was struggling financially.
Directors hired to work with Flynn had to be warned about his excessive drinking and he still
managed to find ways to drink on set. One strategy Flynn used was to inject booze into oranges,
which he would eat on set throughout the shoot. Within a few years, he would also struggle with
heroin addiction. He became extremely difficult to work with and eventually, both his marriage to
Nora and his contract with Warner Brothers came to an end. In a tape-recorded interview years
after Flynn's death, Nora Eddington discussed the effect Flynn's drug use had on their marriage.
"He thought he could stop when he wanted to [...] But he went on and on, and
it does catch up with you."
In 1980, a biographer named Charles Higham wrote a book about Errol Flynn
that accused him of being a Nazi spy. Higham reportedly became suspicious
of the actor because of the political leanings of a few of Flynn's friends.
One of these many friends was an Austrian doctor by the name of H.F. Erben. Flynn and Erben met in
New Guinea and the two remained close. Dr. Erben was a member of the Nazi party but claimed not
to be active. He once stated authorities within German intelligence had attempted to recruit him,
but he never admitted to being a Nazi spy. Another controversial figure was Freddy McEvoy, another
very close friend of Flynn's, who was described as being an antisemitic Nazi sympathizer. In
addition, Higham also claimed to have received confirmation from a woman whose husband worked
closely with Flynn that, when drunk, the actor had revealed he was secretly working for the Nazis.
Many points of Higham's theory have since been refuted, and while Flynn's connection to several
Nazi sympathizers has been confirmed, there is no hard evidence that Flynn himself was a spy.
For years Errol Flynn was a celebrated action hero, but after his film "The Adventures of Don
Juan" bombed, the studio decided he had become more trouble than he was worth.
For a while, Flynn was only able to work abroad or on television. Once,
when he attempted to co-finance his own film in the hopes of making a comeback,
the shoot had to be canceled when the production ran out of money. Struggling
financially and hounded by the IRS, Flynn was forced to take small roles just to
stay afloat. While Flynn would never again star as a hero in a costumed action film,
this new phase in his career would lead to what would consider some of his best work as an actor.
In the 1957 film adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's novel "The Sun Also Rises," Flynn was cast as the
exciting, debt-ridden, frequently intoxicated war vet Mike Campbell. This emotionally complex
role allowed Flynn to explore new territory in his acting career. His work was so well
received by the critics that Warner Brothers cast him again, this time as his old friend,
John Barrymore, in "Too Much, Too Soon," an adaptation of Diana Barrymore's memoir about
life with her famous father. It was to be his last appearance in a major Hollywood picture.
Flynn died suddenly on October 14th, 1959 while on a trip to Vancouver, Canada. A rogue
to the very end, rumor has it he was buried with six bottles of his favorite whiskey.