Three weeks after the world premier of The Adventures of Robin Hood on May 14, 1938, Errol and Lili fly on Western Air Express.
Photo published in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner on June 2, 1938.
— Tim
Archive for the ‘Wives’ Category
Four Score Years Ago — Errol Goes a Partying — — Part 1
24
May
April 23, 1941
Hollywood Parade
Los Angeles Times
By Ella Wickersham
Once again the door of the picturesque garden house of the Beverly Hills Hotel to receive a notable and festive medley of filmlanders,with Edmund Goulding in the hosting role and Doris Duke Cromwell enjoying the honor spot.
Apropos of the parties Doris has tossed for Eddie’s delectation at her sumptuous home in Hawaii during his Honolulu holidays, and to provide the visitor with a homelike atmosphere, the Garden House was adorned with palms, Polynesian blossoms and other Hawaiian detail.
A Hawaiian played a soft obbligato to the cocktail chatter, and among those bidden wer the Herbert Marshalls, the Gary Coopers, Reggie Gardiner, Ann (Mrs. Jack) Warner, Sonja Henie and Dan Topping, Harry Crocker, Minna Wallis, Lionel Atwell, Barbara Hutton, Cary Grant, Gloria Swanson, John McLane, Walter Brooks, Jack Warner, Rex Cole, the Errol Flynns, Edgar Selwyn, Kay Sutton, the Ben Finneys, Joan Bennett, Sam Hoffenstein, the Sam Raphaelsons, Philip Terry, Gene Markey, the Charles Boyers, Lothar Mendes, George Brent, Ann Sheridan, Tim Durant, the Charles Feldmas, Eddie Sutherland, Mary Rogers, Dudley MurphyCharles Chaplin, Mona Maris, Gregory LaCava, Andy Lawler, Jean Negulesco, and Roland Young.
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Look for this photo of Errol at the B.H.H. in the video below – with Barbara Stanwyck, Gary Cooper, Tiger Lil, Rocky Cooper, and Robert Taylor. The date of this photo is uncertain to me, but it was definitely taken at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and it appears to be relatively contemporaneous.
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— Tim
Fists, Bottles and Chairs
16
May
May 17, 1938
Los Angeles Examiner
ERROL FLYNN AIDS AMERICAN IN FIGHT
Havana, May 17. Errol Flynn, Hollywood film actor, received the thanks today of an unidentified American he saved from serious injury during a fight in a night club here last night.
Fists, bottles and chairs were flying when Flynn intervened. The American who was involved escaped with a broken nose. Flynn was not hurt.
He was accompanied by his wife, who refused to take the matter seriously.
…
May 17, 1938
Evening Herald Express
ERROL FLYNN, FRIENDS IN HAVANA CAFE FIGHT
“I think this all so funny”, quoth Lili Damita, stage and screen beauty, who was a spectator while fists and bottles flew in a free-for-all-fight at the Eden Concert Night Club with Errol Flynn taking a prominent part in the fighting.
The fight started last night when one of the members of Flynn’s party got into an argument with a man at a nearby table. A minute later, chairs and bottles began to fly.
Flynn, who often plays rough and tumble parts in the movies, joined in with two or three effective punches at those who got in his way. The only casualty was an unidentified American who received a broken nose and a cut eye. Flynn and the others were unhurt and continued their party.
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The Eden Concert Night Club was regarded as one of the world’s most “spectacular” and “phenomenally popular” night clubs in the world. Located in the center of town between Sloppy Joe’s and the Hotel Plaza, it evolved in 1939 into the also world-renowned Tropicana Club.
— Tim
One, Two, Three – Kick!
15
May
“Beginning in the late 1930s and booming in the 1940s, conga dancing became wildly popular in the US.” Errol occasionally joined in the Congamania – in Cuba, in Hollywood, and in New York. Here is some evidence, beginning with a news report of a wire from Cuba, where Errol had just been, or was very soon to be, involved in a “free-for-all” Dodge City-like fracas at a famous nightclub in Havana, details of which I will post tomorrow.
May 16, 1938
Harrison Carroll
Evening Herald Express ba
Errol Flynn has wired for reservations at La Conga for the night of May 21.
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The La Conga in Hollywood
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Errol was still kicking more than a year later. Here he is sitting with his sister Rosemary (and Randy Burke) and in a conga line led by Desi Arnaz on tumbadora at the La Conga in Manhattan, on August 5, 1939:
La Conga, Manhattan
The conga craze continued in Hollywood (and around the world) into the Forties. Here’s Desi Arnaz leading a huge line in Too Many Girls (1940) during which he and Lucy fell in love, leading to groundbreaking television history, in the form of I Love Lucy and Desilu Productions, etc. Look for Lucy near the end of this wildly fun conga clip.
— Tim
Flynn the Flower Man Plans a Hot House
10
May
May 10, 1938
Harrison Carroll
Evening Herald Express
When Errol Flynn gets back from his Bahamas trip in about three weeks, Hollywood will get a floral novelty. He is bringing several hundted cuttings of a black orchid, found when he and Lili Damita were exploring the southern tip of Cat Cay Island.
His agent got an enthusiastic wire today ordering the for sale sign off real estate property the star owns on the top of Laurel Canyon and instructing him to start building a modernistic hot house in which to grow the exotic blooms. Flynn plans to raise them for the Hollywood market.
P
— Tim
Cinco de Mayo, Flynnamigos
05
May
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
To Those Who Knew Him When…
03
May
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
“A Real Homebody”? — “Poorer but Happier”?
30
Apr
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
Road to Mulholland
24
Apr
On Sunday, February 13, 1949, Flynn Flung a Party Up at the Farm on Mulholland.
See, Flynn Flings a Party on the EFB
On the list of luminaries invited to that A-list soiree was the fum and gorgeous Dorothy Lamour. Here she is that party, just her and Errol.
It’s been said that Errol and Dorothy dated. They certainly appear to have enjoyed each other’s company very much and could have been an extremely attractive couple. Circa their being together in ’49, Dorothy recorded ‘Moonlight Becomes You’, a sensational song that became an instant classic when Bing Crosby sang it to her years earlier in Road to Morocco.
Seen in a different light, the title ‘Moonlight Becomes You’ could also be interpreted as ironically applying to the rape trial turning point in Errol’s life, though I’m sure Dorothy never had that in mind. …Here she is singing the song that (rightfully) helped make her famous. (I know I’ve had a major crush on her since the day I first her in that Hope-Crosby classic.) Background vocals by the great Crew Chiefs, known mostly for singing during the War with the Glenn Miller Orchestra.
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CONNECTIONS
Errol was going through a very difficult time in his marriage with Nora, one that sadly resulted in divorce. Nora was a beautiful and desirable woman, so much so that Dick Hames and John Ireland were both trying to win her affections in 1949. So much so that one of the world’s greatest songwriters – Jimmy Van Heusen – also fell in love with her, making his feelings known for all time in the ‘But Beautiful’ – a now-standard jazz gem which Bing also sang to Dorothy in a Road picture – the Road to Rio! – And which was also sung at Nora’s funeral ❤.
Here’s the beautiful ‘But Beautiful’, written for Nora, sang here to Dorothy Lamour:
— Tim
