Errol Flynn and the Hope of America

Years ago the autobiography of movie star Errol Flynn, My Wicked, Wicked Ways, caught my eye in a bookstore. I was tempted to get it, but alas, at the time I was too principled and erudite to waste my time on what sounded like a very sleazy tome. Besides, I was in college, and it was hardback and too expensive.

Recently in the Philippines we had dinner at a western style restaurant designed to look like the Alamo called Texas Joe's. The Filipina waitresses all wore leather cowboy hats and boots, and they served some of the best ribs and brisket I've ever savored. On one side of the dining room was an old cabinet full of used books set up for a book exchange. So I brought an old paperback novel I had read and looked for something to swap it for. To my surprise I found a first edition Dell paperback version of Errol Flynn's book, that originally cost only sixty cents.

It's probably been thirty-five years or more since I noticed the hardback in the bookstore, and by now I'm either not so principled as I once was, or my experience in the world has better prepared me to read about his frivolities, so, curious as I was, I took it.

My first impression way back when was right. It was a bawdy romp through his memory of all the women he'd had in a hard packed, compressed life lived to its worldly fullest. In fairness, Flynn was clever but not graphic in his descriptions of his dalliances, and for all the episodes he related about fellow actors and some of their vulgarities, there was surprisingly little bad language. But the story is more than just a tale of how he became revered for his sexual prowess and then became a standing joke for the same thing. It's a tale of a man searching for his own soul, and Flynn is brutal in assessing himself.

Although it doesn't excuse his own culpability, young Errol was a product of his environment and careless upbringing. He was born in Tasmania, to a world famous Darwinist biologist father, who was too busy on archeological digs and teaching in universities to take any time for his son. His mother was an un-compassionate beast who beat him so severely that he ran away from home. When he was found and returned she was uncaring. He was put in boarding schools where he was either expelled or just ran away, and as a teenager he faced the world and stepped out on his own.

By the time he was 21 he had lived half a dozen lifetimes. He had sailed the Australian coast and across the ocean to New Guinea and Rabaul. He had managed a coconut farm and prevented the outbreak of a tribal war, owned a gold field which produced all of 100 ounces of gold, had owned a successful tobacco farm, and bought and sold New Guinea tribesmen into slavery. On an expedition into the New Guinea highlands he had been ambushed by head-hunters who speared two of his porters before he killed one with a pistol and they all fled.

Often broke, he became a thief, a con-artist, and a tough-as-nails street brawler. In Manila he and a friend invented a cock-fighting scheme and won all their fights by poisoning the opposing roosters with a slick slight of hand. When they were exposed they barely made it aboard a sailing freighter ahead of an angry mob.

When he finally reached England he got into movies, went to Hollywood, and became internationally known as a swashbuckling, sword swinging star. Everywhere there were women, and enslaved to his physical drives, he was almost powerless to resist any of them. The result was one scandal after another, including accusations of statutory rape of which he was acquitted, yet bore the stigma and a plethora of dirty jokes for the rest of his life. As he approached his fiftieth year he began to look back at his life with some remorse, but no regret. The book might have been better titled The Confessions of an Unrepentant Sinner.

"Confusion," he wrote, was his trademark. He questioned his existence. "How does a man become what he becomes?" To the end of his life he always had a question mark embroidered on the handkerchief pocket of his suits.

He saw no point in marriage, yet tried it three times, and had five children with whom he spent very little time until his last years. By his own admission he had dallied with thousands of the fairer sex in brothels, jungle villages, and in cosmopolitan circles. After a world wide search for love he very cynically concluded that there is no such thing, that the only thing that matters to a woman is money. "The man who for a woman fits the bill is the one who pays the bill," he wrote.

Early in his life he did everything he could to perpetuate his reputation as a ladies' man, but he came to think of himself as a male Mae West "in a swamp of Flynn jokes, dirty stories, snide innuendoes." In the end he had become nothing of what he wanted, and everything he didn't want.

Hollywood appealed to him and he to Hollywood audiences. Tall, muscular and gloriously handsome, he was a hit from his very first film, Captain Blood, in 1935. He might have been considered the action hero of his day with such popular films as The Charge of the Light Brigade and Robin Hood. He made several westerns to which he thought he was thoroughly unsuited due to his accent. He wanted to be remembered as a serious actor, but after over fifty films, he was only satisfied with half a dozen, bitterly disappointed that he was remembered for being a swashbuckler.

"There I was," he wrote, "sitting on top of the world. I had wealth, friends, I was internationally known, I was sought after by women. I could have anything that money could buy. Yet I found that at the top of the world there was nothing. I was sitting on a pinnacle with no mountain under me."

Flynn reads like the Book of Ecclesiastes. I said in mine heart, Go to now, I will prove thee with mirth, therefore enjoy pleasure: and, behold, this also is vanity. (2:1)

He eventually became so despondent and self-loathing that for three nights he sat on the edge of his bed with a gun trying to find the courage to end it all. He couldn't. Instead in a journal he began recording some astonishingly poignant thoughts.

"Alcohol is a far greater killer than all opiates.... It gets your brain, your liver. It destroys your morals, destroys your vitality, kills the sexual potential, and you become sluggish. It is a great pity that Prohibition failed."

"Man's indecency to man all over the world rules out the idea of humanity as an actuality."

His greatest addiction, he said, was curiosity. "This has gotten me into all my troubles, successes, failures."

He was an agnostic, he concluded, and didn't believe in a hereafter, so why be afraid of death?

Flynn finally found solace in a yacht and the sea which he loved. He sailed the Mediterranean and the Caribbean Seas, was an early scuba diving enthusiast, and built himself a large estate on the north shore of Jamaica. There he lived alone with his dogs and his caretaker. Finally he had a place to leave the world behind and consider his future.

On June 20, 1959, he turned fifty years old. He finished his autobiography a short time later, and the last line of the book reads, "The second half-century looms up, but I don't feel the night coming on."

But the night came on quickly. A month or so later he died suddenly of a heart attack, having used up his body, but never having found his soul.

Errol Flynn could have been a poster boy for the ACLU or any number of liberal, anti-morality organizations running around today. He was the picture of rowdy, raucaus, uninhibited living, the very lifestyle the anti-Christian crowd wants to force upon our society.

Flynn had delved into all the world's vices (except heroin, he said), had women, wealth and fame, yet he found his life empty and without meaning, and found no satisfaction in his accomplishments. At age twenty-five he was an Adonis, the best looking man in the movies. At fifty, his looks gone, he was a broken down wreck and could have passed for seventy-five.

This is the future the godless left offers to America. There might be an immediate gratification, but in the end it's not an audacity of hope, whatever that's supposed to mean, it is no hope at all. In a world without God there is no humanity. A culture dominated by an empty, free-wheeling, licentious philosophy is a culture headed to destruction.