Errol Flynn was one of the last people I expected to bump into in Vancouver. I mean, he’s dead, for a start, so of course that’s how I found him. I was surprised by the indignity of his death and, because I’d recently read his autobiography, I felt sad for him: for the ultimately self-inflicted nature of the indignity.
There he was, laid out on the slab, an exhibit in the autobiography of the local coroner who delighted in a salacious story involving genital warts and sticky tape. Indignity, like I said.
Flynn died in Vancouver in October 1959. He went there to sell or lease his yacht because he was, as usual, strapped for cash. He had taken his latest very young girlfriend with him and told reporters when he arrived that he liked young girls because they gave him better sex. He put it more crudely than that.
He’d not long finished his autobiography, a rather sad but psychologically revealing volume that tries to be brash but succeeds in being insecure. Apparently he’d planned to call it In Like Me – a reference to the “In Like Flynn” saying that used to refer to his reputation as a sex-hound. Instead he called it My Wicked, Wicked Ways and it ended up being published after his death, so if he’d hoped it would earn him some money he was disappointed again.
The explanation of me bumping into Flynn in Vancouver is a little tortuous, as usual. I’m going to start with the Sylvia Hotel and the way that started was that we were flying to New York and, with one thing and another, we added Mexico to the itinerary.
My wife, Sylvia, knows I hate long-haul flying and she had the good idea of going to Vancouver first and staying a few nights there to start readjusting the old body clocks. With that in mind she started hunting for Vancouver accommodation online and found the Sylvia Hotel, which she naturally wanted to book on account of it being her namesake.
Just by way of irrelevant diversion I need to mention how, when we booked it, the name of the hotel triggered a memory of something I knew I had in one of my albums of ephemera. Was it a suitcase label or a brochure? It took me a while but eventually I found it: a cute 1930s postcard of the self-same Sylvia Hotel – evidently an establishment with some history. I extracted this card from my album and we took it to Vancouver where I presented it to the desk staff on arrival. Happily, this resulted in a generous upgrade to our accommodation and our short stay at the Sylvia was a very enjoyable one.
Incidentally, the hotel was named for Sylvia Ablowitz (nee Goldstein), daughter of the man who built the hotel (originally an apartment building) in 1913.
It was the chatty waiter at the seafood restaurant who asked us where we were staying. When we named the Sylvia, he told us that some famous film star had died there. He thought maybe it was Clark Gable. With a minimal amount of online research I was able to tell him that the dead star was actually Errol Flynn, and that he maybe didn’t die at the Sylvia, but in rooms nearby. Flynn had clearly frequented the Sylvia though, as some promo literature in the hotel boasts (coyly omitting the fatal nature of Flynn’s Vancouver sojourn).
When Errol Flynn died in Vancouver on October 14, 1959, he wasn’t at the top of his game. The one-time heart-throb movie idol had been trying for years to revive his flagging career but scandals involving under-age girls, alcoholism and drug abuse weren’t helping. He’d tried to fund and produce his own movies but this didn’t go well and he was broke. If you clicked the link at the top of this story you’ll know how things turned out.
Somebody once wrote that the English poet Lord Byron was “mad, bad and dangerous to know”. This epithet has also been applied at times to Errol Flynn, with some justification. If you’ve ever read an autobiography and thought, once you’d finished, that the author didn’t do themselves too many favours then you’ll know the effect Flynn’s book had on me. I was left with the overwhelming impression of a badly raised man who couldn’t live up to his ideal of his father; who resented his mother; who was too good-looking for his own good and who lacked insight into his deep character flaws. He’d have benefited from a lot of psychoanalysis.
You probably know that Errol Flynn was born and raised in Australia? He clearly felt overawed by the reputation of his scientist father, whose respect he was always unsuccessfully trying to reclaim. His book dwells on his time in New Guinea, where he ran to seek his fortune. His descriptions of womanising and of kidnapping highlanders to force into agricultural labour don’t reflect well on him and nothing gets much better, even after the camera discovers him and makes him a star. I found it a sad book, and it seemed even sadder to me when I got to Vancouver and found the dead idol waiting there, trousers down and sellotaped for posterity.
Millions of words have been written about Flynn. He was, in his heyday, Hollywood’s most bankable star. In his good years, every film he touched turned to gold. He had three wives, countless lovers and a clutch of children. And he remains fascinating, still attracting writers to add to the bevy of books about him. Film-makers still find reasons to revisit his life and times.
Here’s a rap-sheet by a non-admirer.
