Hola, Flynnamigos.
Errol was a very frequent and famous traveler to Mexico. He drove, he flew, and he sailed there: to Tijuana, Ensenada, Puerto Vallarta, Mazatlan, all along and off the coast of Baja, Acapulco, Mexico City, Cuernavaca, and numerous other locations. Plus, he dated and was married to there.
Here is a representative sampling of photos, articles, and videos in predominantly chronological order documenting Errol’s Flynnsational travels and adventures South of the Border.
…
— Tim
Western Union – May 4, 1948
“[Billie] “Travilla” arrived in Hollywood in 1941 and won an Academy Award for his designs in Adventures of Don Juan starring Errol Flynn. He is credited as the costume designer of over 90 films and television productions — nine of which starred Marilyn Monroe. He may be best known for creating Monroe’s iconic Seven Year Itch white halter dress which was forever associated with both of them. (See below)”
…
The scene that the not thrill Joe DiMaggio. Dress by Travilla.
— Tim
May 3, 1939
Wireless Weekly
Glamor Man of Screen
Errol Flynn Is Real Life Adventurer
An Unbiased Biography
To those Sydney people “who knew him when,” the screen success of Errol Flynn is just another adventurous lucky break of this incredibly adventurous but capable lad. Flynn’s “official” biography, as set down by himself and his employers, runs counter at several points to the facts of his life as he told them to his acquaintances in Sydney when he was basking in the first beams of the film spotlight after appearing in “In the Wake of the Bounty.”
Flynn is the son of zoologist Theodore Thomson Flynn of Queen’s University, Belfast. He claims to be of the same blood-stock that produced Fletcher Christian, the famous Bounty mutineer, and he claims to have played with Fletcher Christian’s sword as a youngster.
By the time he was thirteen, Errol had attempted running away from home three times. At eighteen he was a member of the British Olympic boxing team. At nineteen he was “hoofed out” of school in Sydney, and he claims he began sailing the Pacific islands as master of a 20-ton yawl. He claims to have guided a party
of film-makers through the New Guinea jungles, and admits having been in the lucrative “recruiting” racket there.
First Film Role
Flynn claims that his movie career began when the party he had guided remembered him, and asked him to enact Fletcher Christian in their film of the Bounty mutiny. His work before the cameras was completed within a few days. Having tasted life in the movies, Flynn decided that that was the life for him.
By his own methods of exploits he did his Job of “selling himself to the Hollywood producers so well that his first part in Hollywood was a starring role!
Worried Employers
Flynn has married Lili Damita and has made a terrific lot of money, has run away from work to enjoy a dangerous sojourn on the Spanish battlefields, has caused his employers a lot of worry and also made himself one of the most glamorous film stars ever known.
Natural successor to Douglas Fairbanks, Errol Flynn is much more picturesque and more genuinely adventurous in his own off-screen life. At 30 he looks back upon exploits of the sort that most men believe are true only in fiction.
Errol Flynn, at 30, one of the big stars of Hollywood, was an adventurer who knew Sydney well only a few years ago.
But, with it all, he has made himself one of the top box office stars in Hollywood, and therein lies his laugh on the Sydney people who deride his smooth-sounding adventures as tall tales.
His weekly pay cheque is not a work of fiction!
— Tim
…
Errol at the 1954 Epsom Derby
“[This book] relates the story of original Beatles drummer Pete Best’s mother Mona pawning her jewelry to bet on the longshot Never Say Die to win the 1954 Epsom Derby. She cashed in her winnings to put a down payment on a house in Liverpool where she converted the basement into the Casbah Coffee Club with the opening, and soon to be regular, band, The Quarrymen (later renamed The Beatles), in residence.”
Per former Beatle Pete Best’s account, if Never Say Die had not won the Epsom Derby, there very likely would have never been a Casbah Coffee Club, nor therefore The Beatles. So, without his ever knowing so, Errol was at one of the most pivotal events in entertainment and cultural history.
— Tim
It’s been said by a credible source (but I have no written or photographic evidence) that Errol was at the 1956 Kentucky Derby, where he bet on aptly-named ‘King O’ Swords’, but witnessed “Needles’ win in one the greatest come-from-behind victories ever.
Anyone have any information or evidence of Errol being at this or any other Kentucky Derby?
Anyone see him in the photo below? :-)
— Tim
April 30, 1957
Louella 0. Parsons in Hollywood
International News Service
Louella O. Parsons Motion Picture Editor
After six years abroad Errol and Mrs. Flynn (Patrice Wymore) return to Hollywood with baby Arnella.
He’s a real homebody now.
DASHING, happy-go-lucky, colorful Errol Flynn, who lost millions, is poorer today but happier than he’s ever been in his life. And he didn’t hesitate to say that Patrice Wymore (the present Mrs. Flynn) is responsible. Six months ago, Errol owed $900,000. Today, he has paid off $750,000 and sees his way clear to handing over the remainder by December. This is a changed Errol. No longer does that roving eye of his look at every pretty girl who enters a room. In the past, Errol was as wild, unpredictable and full of pranks as anyone I ever interviewed. He always talked with his tongue in cheek, and while I always liked him, I used to have the feeling that some of his nonsense was due to the fact that life was not happy. He asked me to have dinner with him and Patrice at La Rue. You can always depend upon Errol to say something different and to make an interview an occasion, and his first words to me were: “Well, what do you think of her?” pointing to the calm, gracious Patrice. A little embarrassed with such frankness, I countered with, “What do you think of her yourself?” “Well, she’s not my type, but 1 love her,” he laughed. “You know, she saved my life. I’d have run when the going was so tough, but, Pat, without a word of complaint, helped me straighten out my affairs, stuck by me and gave me encouragement. “I never thought I’d ever say I’d be lonely for any woman,” he continued, “but, do you know something? I can’t bear to be separated from her. She gives me a confidence I all but lost during those months of worry.”
The Flynns have been in Europe for six years. They left Hollywood in 1950, and Errol had considerable trouble with William Tell, the picture he was to make in Italy. He says he lost over $200,000 of his own money in it. Errol said, “To show you the kind of girl Pat is, she was expecting our bambina any hour when I got word that I had to be in New York on business. She said, ‘You go right ahead and I’ll wait until you return to have the baby.’ I got back Christmas Eve to find that she’d invited 30 people for Christmas Day egg nogs. On Christmas I rushed her to the hospital where the baby was born within a few hours. We just left all our guests at the party. “I never thought I’d want to settle down to family life,” Errol went on, “but you should see me now. You know how I never wanted domesticity. Whenever it threatened me I’d go away on my boat or take a picture assignment away from home. We now have the greatest family life you ever saw.
“Since I’ve been back in Hollywood,” he said, “we’ve had Pat’s parents from Kansas, her grandmother, and all the children with us My two little girls, Deirdre and Rory, by my marriage to Nora Haymes, spend every week end with us, and our daughter Arnella loves playing with them.” His fourteen-year-old son, Sean, by his marriage to Lili Damita, is the spittin’ image of Errol. Patrice told me Sean spent a little time with them in Europe. “He is so handsome and so intelligent,” she said. “He’s now in Florida with his mother.” A woman who can praise a previous wife’s child is all right for my money. Usually there is a feeling of resentment, but if Pat has any feeling of this sort she’s a great actress. Errol said, “At Universal-International they gave me some of rry ‘face’ back with a great part in Istanbul. I hope to come back and make another picture for them; it’s a nice studio. I’ll return in December.” “Didn’t you almost turn in at Warner Brothers studio by mistake?” I asked him. He started his career at Warners with Captain Blood [the film which made him] one of the top stars in the country.
Errol is older now and wiser. He has taken off some of the weight which so shocked me when I first saw him after his return here. But he’s still and always will be the same charm boy. When domesticity threatened in the past, he’d be off to other shores.
— Tim
April 29, 1945
Olivia in 1946 (WOW!) – Over whom Errol and Huston fought.
Site of the Fight! David O. Selznick’s “breathtaking” home and gardens Summit Drive in Beverly Hills. The fight took place in both the the famous gardens and the then gravel driveway.
— Tim
