January 20, 1936
Harrison Carroll
LA Evening Herald Express
It’s Scotch that Errol Flynn is, instead of Irish, if you ask the fan magazines. Since Captain Blood, they’ve all been clamoring to run a life story of Flynn, but he turns them all down.
“I’m writing it myself in book form,” he cannily replies.”
— Tim
Errol Skipped on Skippering this Mysterie Ship Which Thirty Years Later Sailed into Trippie Hippie History.
Who was She?
Here are a few chronological visual clues involving it’s pre-Flynn and post-Flynn news, cruise and crews:
— Tim
Loew’s Seventy-second Street Theater, Manhattan
From “Tony Curtis: The Autobiography”
When you’re a kid, you don’t know you’re going to grow up. You just look at big people and you don’t believe it’s going to happen to you. It has no reality. You’re not quite sure who you are or what you are, and a lot of time you’re not happy about that, or anything else.
Then all of a sudden you go into a building. It’s dark. It’s got thirty-five-foot-high black-and-white images of people doing the most incredible things you’ve ever seen. What an extraordinary environment. For an hour or two in that warm, different planet, whatever problems I had faded away. It was as calm and reassuring as a church. It was almost always open for business. You could go in and sit down quietly in the dark, and all that anguish going on around you outside disappeared. I could sob if I wanted, or I could just be quiet and look up at the screen. Those experiences were very intoxicating and important for me. Now and then I thought that I would like to bounce around up on that screen too.
The Charge of the Light Brigade was the most important movie to me when I was a kid. What a picture! I watched it over and over at Loew’s Seventy-second Street, glued to my seat up in the loge and forgetting everything around me. I had no sense of my body at all; just of perceiving those images on the screen and the thunder of all those sounds. The way Errol Flynn sacrificed his life for his brother, who was in love with that girl. I can still see it today in my head, the one brother knocking out the other and taking his place. It brought tears to my eyes, that sacrifice. Maybe because it was around the same time I lost my own brother.
The Adventures of Robin Hood, too, was a fabulous picture I loved so much. It was the first color movie I ever saw. Flynn’s insouciance, his daring; it was so appealing I could picture him walking into any pool room in Manhattan and just taking over. I loved Errol. He was lean and mean and strong.
— Tim
On the Twelfth Day of Christmas, 1959, it was reported around the globe that Errol Flynn had been wounded in Cuba while covering the combat of Fidel Castro’s rebel forces. This was spectacular and very surprising news: Robin Flynn of Hollywood was swashbuckling around in the Sierra Madre Forest with the future Hood of Havana and his Not-So-Merry Rebel Men (and Rebel Girls.) A blockbuster story custom-made for (and by) the one-and-only Errol Flynn.
— Tim
“Not too tight, and not too loose.”
In The Courage to Love, renowned psychologist and hypnotherapist Stephen Gilligan recounts Errol’s response to a question regarding how best to hold a sword when fencing. Dr. Gilligan observed that Errol’s answer can be adapted as a guiding philosophy to many facets of life. He coined it “The Errol Flynn Principle”.
Errol said that when holding a sword, one should imagine holding a bird. If you hold the bird too tightly, you will crush it and lose it forever. However, if you hold it too loosely, it will fly away. “Not too loose and not too tight” was Flynn’s advice. And sage advice it was. After all, who knew both swords and birds better than Errol?
— Tim
“The Light Brigade Rides Again”
“The Making of the Charge of the Light Brigade”
— Tim
New Year’s Day, 1938
Louella O. Parsons
Los Angeles Examiner
Happy New Year!
Very little whoopie in Hollywood this year to herald in the New Year. Many of the stars went to the desert for a quiet New Year’s Eve and those who didn’t went to bed early to attend the races at Santa Anita or the football game at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. Our sport-loving stars had a difficult time choosing between the game and the races, but a poll taken disclosed that the races won by a large majority.
Socially the most important events were a dinner given by Grace Moore and Gladys Swarthout, a small gathering of Marion Davies’ close friends at her beach house to celebrate her birthday, and a celebration at the Charlie Chaplin mansion.
The Bing Crosbys partied with a few congenial friends, including Andy Devine. But Bing had big business at Santa Anita, so he didn’t stay up late.
Marlene Dietrich, Myrna Loy and Arthur Hornblow Jr., Bette Davis and Harmon Nelson, George Brent, the Robert Youngs, Jeanette MacDonald and Gene Raymond saw the New Year in at Palm Springs, while the Charles Boyers, the Errol Flynns, and Brian Aherne chose the restful La Quinta for their holiday.
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— Tim
December 28, 1937
Hollywood Citizen News
Sidney Skolsky Presents
Watching Them Make Pictures
Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Claude Rains, and a crowd of extras are getting ready to play a scene for the picture, Robin Hood.
The setting is Nottingham Castle in England, and a feast is about to take place. Errol Flynn is Robin Hood, and Claude Rains is Prince John. The extras, dressed as knights, stand out in their shining armor. Director Mike Curtiz seems out of place, wearing trousers and a sweater.
Dirctor Curtiz gives the signal that he is ready. The cameras are turning. Robin Hood Flynn, lugging a deer, walks toward the banquet table. Here Prince John, with meats and wines before him, is entertaining. Robin Hood Flynn offers him the deer for the feast.
It is then that Prince John interrupts the scene and becomes Claude Rains.
He says to Curtiz, “Mike, I forgot to tell you something. I’ve been doing some research on the part. And according to history, Prince John was a vegetarian, and he never drank wine.”
Miss de Havilland and Mr. Rathbone, standing at the banquet table, are amazed, but say that history is history.
But this doesn’t stop director Curtiz. He says: “We need this big scene for the picture. In the movies we don’t make historical pictures, we make history.”
— Tim
