The Warner Bros. are sincerely worried over their failure to locate Errol Flynn,
who was hastily summoned back to Hollywood when it was learned that he was
planning to penetrate war-torn Spain. Errol was in Paris, and last Friday he told
his wife, Lili Damita, he was leaving for Spain. He left, while Lili remained in Paris.
He didn’t tell her where he was going in Spain, and apparently Lili didn’t bother to inquire.
Robert Schless, head of the Warner Paris office, has not been able to locate him. Errol,
when he left, was determined to do some war corresponding in Spain. He started to make
arrangements with the United States for some special articles, but the studio jumped in
and soured the deal. Errol threatened that he would make arrangements with an English syndicate.
This he may have done.
Warners cabled him to be back here by April 15, to start the The Perfect Specimen.
I doubt if they actually had a picture ready for him, but hoped to get him back on the plea of urgency.
Miriam Hopkins has been announced for the co-starring spot in The Perfect Specimen, but that
announcement is quite premature, for she has not been signed for the role.
Flynnvestigating other matters, I came across claims and suggestions implying that Errol may have owned a lake and cabin/hunting lodge at the long now gone “TWIN LAKES PARK”, “Twenty-five miles from Hollywood”, aka “Southern California’s Garden of the Gods”. One site suggests, too, that he even built a dam at near his alleged lodge.
Quoting a comment on the great Iverson Movie Ranch post linked below:
“One of the “Twin Lakes” was reputed to belong to Errol Flynn and the dam can still be seen from DeSoto Ave. (North of the 118) Flynn had a cabin (The old Dave Rhodes Ranch) and he used to hunt in the area.”
Does anyone have any information or thoughts on these claims? Should we be hunting for this lakeside lodge of Errol Flynn? – Or are these claims of Flynn’s lakeside lodge a dam mistake?
Here are front and back looks of a now long gone entrance to Twin Lakes Park:
Here’s a glimpse of the Twin Lakes gate in White Heat, filmed by Raoul Walsh:
welcome to a new installement of a Flynn film Errol wasn`t in.
The year of 1959 marked the death of Our Man Flynn, which brought the cloak and dagger genre to a full stop. Just when the Old Swashbuckler hung up his boots, the Caucasian Chin, Kirk Douglas, put on his sandals to plough the field of sword and sand movie extravaganzas. Just like Charlton Heston had done successfully in “Ben Hur” prior that year. Not only did Douglas secure the services of one blacklisted author John Trumbo for “Spartacus”, but also of a young director named Stanley Kubrick, whom he had met while filming “Paths of Glory”.
Originally Kube had planned to do “Lolita”, a film version of the Nabokov novel, deemed untransmittable to the screen due to its paedophilic context. Nevertheless the Bronx born filmmaker was dead set to achieve the impossible. While Hollywood Studios readily declined the offer to finance the precocious project, the film was made three years later in England instead.
Errol Flynn had been approached to play Professor Humbert Humbert and enthusiatically accepted the offer under the condition he was to play opposite of his own nymphette, Beverly Aadland. But the package deal fell flat, mainly because Errol`s last love at 16 (!) already was too old to depict a 12-14 year old teenager. Had it gone through, Flynn would have been reunited with another real life love of old of his, since Shelley Winters had been cast for the female lead.
Other leading actors considered for the main role were Laurence Olivier, David Niven and Peter Ustinov. Ultimately it was James Mason`s turn to portrait Prof. Lovesicko.
Vladimir Nabokov did write a script for the screen adaptation of his lust story and came up with a 700 page treatment. We can take a peeping tom`s look here: www.openculture.com… and it also sells here: www.amazon.com…
Before Sue Lyon got to wear those heart shaped sunglasses and sucking lollipops, Jill Hayworth, Joey Heatherton, Tuesday Weld and Hayley Mills were considered for the part of little Lolita. The director later said that French teenie star Catherine “Zazie” Demongeot would have been a good choice also.
Tamar Hodel, the daughter of the number one suspect in the Black Dahlia murder, claimed in a Vanity fair article, that singer Michelle Phillips from “The Mamas and the Papas” originally procured young Lyon with the novel and gave her a rubdown what it was all about: www.vanityfair.com…
Sue, who attended the premiere in New York City at age 15, would have been still to young to buy a ticket for the movie legally: www.youtube.com…
Peter Sellars came up with a stellar performance as Clare Quilty. He remembered his Golden Globe awarded role fondly: “Quilty was a fantastic nightmarish character, part homosexual, part drug addict, part sadist, part masochist, part anything twisted and unhealthy you can think of. He had to be horrifying and at the same time funny. I had never met anyone at all like this so I just had to guess, to construct an imaginative idea for myself of what such a person must be like. When I saw myself on the screen, I thought ‘This time you’ve done it – no one will ever believe this.’ But then in the U.S. I actually ran into a couple of people who might almost have been role models for the character and I began to think, ‘Oh, well, perhaps you weren’t so far out after all.” It is commonly seen as blueprint for his next character in the Kubrick film “Dr. Strangelove.”
Somehow this unmakeable movie material sparked the careers of all involved. One can only wonder if our Hollywood hero had walked away from an Academy Award in order to do “Cuban Rebel Girls”.
here`s a little appeTVizer of Errol`s 1957 television outing “Without incident”, a back to the boots western starring Ann Sheridan, John Ireland and Julie London.
Ann steals the scene chanting the English folksong “Greensleeves”, baiting the about- to- attack- Apaches.
Still widely regarded as an Irishman, even more so in his Hollywood hey days, how Irish was Errol in reality? Genetically and culturally?
The name Flynn and his father’s apparent ancestral and professional connections to Ireland seem to indicate Errol had some significant percentage of Irish blood, but how much? He also seemed to treasure and/or at least play up his Irish. He may not have liked being portrayed as a American-Irish motorcycle cop, as he was initially by Warners, but he did seem to relish the roles of Peter Blood and Gentleman Jim. His fighting spirit appeared Irish in nature also. And he did go by Flynnie in his early days. How much of it was real, and how much was theater, perhaps designed to make big green off of the huge population of Irish-American movie fans?
IT WAS EIGHTY YEARS AGO TODAY
March 16, 1937, in the Los Angeles Evening Herald Express
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Green Light Hero Does His Cooking Best Outside
In the opinion of Errol Flynn, cooking is best in the great open spaces.
Flynn, the Irish actor, author, world-traveler and soldier-of-fortune now starring in the Cosmopolitan production of Green Light, which closes tonight at Warners’ Hollywood and Downtown, is a great admirer of culinary delicacies.
“You can’t do food real justice,” he contends “unless it’s cooked in the open. I’d trade the finest kitchen range anytime for a small plot under the trees by an open stream.”
Flynn learned the art of cookery beside roaring bonfires. His tutors were natives of New Guinea, Australia, and the uncharted islands in the South Seas.
He discovered that they know more about cooking and seasoning than most of the civilized races of the earth.
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Here’s Errol shopping on Catalina for one of his famous pig-on-a-spit backyard roasts:
