The Errol Flynn Blog

Thanks to our friend Topper! RIP, Mr. Rooney!

— David DeWitt

The Rock-itt Magazine April 2014 featuring our own Robert Florczak’s regular column Movie Locations Then & Now (Must See!) and the continuing column our Mr. Flynn!

— David DeWitt

Gloria Viola Seeman shares a nice sketch of Errol Flynn with us signed by an artist named “Strange” …

— David DeWitt

The estate of Errol Flynn releases the news to the medfia of the death of Patricia Wymore Flynn in Portland, Jamaica, on Saturday, March 22:

Patrice Wymore Flynn, an actress during Hollywood’s Golden Age and the widow of screen legend Errol Flynn, died Saturday at her home in Portland, Jamaica. According to Robb Callahan a family spokesman she had been battling with pulmonary disease for the last year. She was 87.

The tall and elegant Mrs. Flynn began her career in musicals performing in Up in Central Park in 1947; She made her Broadway debut a year later in the musical Hold It! and won the Theatre World Award for “promising actress.” Following her performance in another musical, All for Love (1949), the Kansas born set-eyed beauty was handed a starlet contract by Warner Bros. and headed west to seek her fame and fortune. She found a little bit of both. She received notice for her first screen role, as the young upstart to Doris Day’s established Broadway star in the film musical Tea for Two. She continued to make films in the early 1950s, co-starring with such screen greats as Kirk Douglas, Ronald Reagan, Randolph Scott and Danny Thomas. But it was her second role, as the female lead in the 1950 western Rocky Mountain that would have the most lasting effect on Miss Wymore’s life; it was during principal photography for the film that she met her future husband, the aging screen legend Errol Flynn, the film’s male lead.

In his autobiography My Wicked, Wicked Ways, Flynn describes Wymore when they met as “attractive, warm, and wholesome…she could sing, she was reserved, she had beauty and dignity. [She] typified everything I long for…everything I am not.”

Though Flynn was engaged at the time, the co-stars soon became a couple and were married in late 1950 at Monaco Town Hall in Nice, France—an event about which Mr. Flynn later stated, “it was wonderful to have a legitimate wedding for a change.” (The marriage was his third and her first.)

Like Mr. Flynn himself, Hollywood films were then in the middle of a long transition from glamour to grit, but the first few years of the couple’s marriage were still illuminated by the fading lights of that passing era, when they would attend parties thrown by Marion Davies and film premieres in Beverly Hills. They had a daughter, Arnella Flynn, in 1953; within two years, Mrs. Flynn had stopped acting altogether to raise their child and care for Mr. Flynn, whose career had stalled and whose health was in serious decline. “Nobody ever tried harder than Pat to make me happy,” Flynn would later note in My Wicked, Wicked Ways.

After her husband’s death in 1959, Mrs. Flynn returned to acting, landing the role she is best known for today as Frank Sinatra’s girlfriend Adele Elkstrom in the original 1960 film version of Ocean’s Eleven. Music buffs probably also recognize her as the imperious magazine editor Madame Quagmeyer from 1960s television show The Monkees. In 1970 however, she retired from acting for good and moved to Flynn’s massive estate in Jamaica. Though the property’s coconut farm was eventually destroyed by disease, Mrs. Flynn was able to turn it into an active and successful cattle ranch, and it remains so today.

Mrs. Flynn never remarried. She is survived by her grandson Luke Flynn, an actor and model and the only child of Patrice and Errol’s deceased daughter Arnella.

– Special thanks to Robb Callahan, at the Errol Flynn Estate

— David DeWitt

The March Issue of Rock-itt Magazine is now available:

The Rock-itt Magazine

Robert Florczak’s fascinating Movie Locations Then & Now, and the other continuing series Hobart to Hollywood are ready for your reading pleasure!

— David DeWitt

NEW DATE and TIME – SUNDAY, February 23, 2014 at 7PM PST & 10PM EST Jack Marino Warriorfilmmaker Show on www.latalkradio.com… on Channel 2

TONIGHT – My guest is Steve Hayes, writer, actor, producer. Steve first came to Hollywood in 1949, stayed a brief time, then went back to Canada and returned in 1950 to stay.

Errol Flynn had promised to sponsor me, he says, but didn’t (typically) so it took me a little while to find one. I then began acting and got my first part at 20th century Fox (where I later was put under contract) in the movie: Bells on Their Toes.

Steve will talk about about Ava Gardner, whom he met at Errol Flynn’s house with her ex-husband, Mickey Rooney. He is pretty sure that was the first time he met her–though he did know Lana Turner well, and he says she also introduced me to Ava–but he says, that was when Ava said we’d already met at Flynn’s.

He will talk about various other movie stars who were in some way attached to her or that he met through her like Lana Turner, Sinatra, and Robert Taylor.

Steve has often told me he has never quite gotten fully over Ava, which is understandable. Sinatra never did either. But she was hard to love. She swore like few women he’d ever known–especially in an era when normal girls rarely swore.

Steve not only knew Lana Turner but worked on a film called Diana or that co-starred a young Roger Moore.

I met Rita Hayworth when I painted her house with my pal and house-painter, Dick Morris, he says. Later, he saw her again and they briefly talked About Hollywood, including about her being being a neighbor of Glenn Ford.

At Errol Flynn’s house he became friends with Ann Sheridan, the Ooomph Girl, who was one of Flynn’s buddies and romantic interests years prior. Steve actually punched out actor Bruce Cabot at a party at Flynn’s.

Ida Lupino was a close pal of Errol’s–I think they cared for one another, he says–and years later, she became a director (Thriller or Chiller) of a weekly TV show. Bob Middleton, Steve’s mentor, starred in one of these shows and Steve visited several days of shooting and talked at great lengths with Ida.

Steve’s birth name was Ivan Hayes, which He says “I soon changed to Steve Hayes because Ivan is Russian for John and the McCarthy/pinko, commie era was in full bloom and Fox insisted I change my name to something more American. I stole the name of Steve from my buddy, Mr. America Steve Reeves, who starred in European films like Hercules.”

Steve has kept a lot of notes for a book entitled:
“Once in Love With Ava.”

YOU CAN GO TO STEVE’S WEBSITE
www.stevehayes.org…

Show call in number: 1-818-602-4929

Jack Marino’s Warriorfilmmaker Show

if you miss the LIVE show you can always go back to the archive and hear it then

www.latalkradio.com…

Visit the BLOG site for the Radio show on warriorfilmmakers.com…

Write down your comments on the site.

iTunes

Thank you, Jack Marino

Steve “Ivan’ Hayes today and he is holding his 1949 acting head shot when he came to Hollywood.

— David DeWitt

Featuring Robert Florczak’s regular Column  Movie Locations Then and Now, and Hobart to Hollywood, about our Mr. Flynn!

— David DeWitt