Hollywood careers have been wrecked since the time Hollywood was invented: Wallace Reid (dead from drugs in the early twenties), Jack Pickford (Mary’s brother) managed to drink himself to death by the early 1930s. John Gilbert, screen heartthrob of the silent cinema, killed his career and himself with booze in 1936. And Buster Keaton shredded his career via chronic alcoholism.*
But the epic disintegration, one I’ve touched on elsewhere, is the wrecked career of film-star Errol Flynn. (He didn’t just wreck his career, he nuked the sucker.)
How did Errol’s career start? In 1935, Warners took a gamble and put a 26-year-old newcomer that nobody had heard of into a large-budget swashbuckler titled Captain Blood, and it became a smash hit. And Flynn became an instant star that the public flocked to see.
Flynn and Olivia de Havilland in “Dodge City” (in glorious Technicolor).
For the next ten years he was the box office champ of Warner Bros. Almost every movie* in which he appeared made a profit. He was the only star of the 1930s who was put into big Technicolor epics over and over. (At the time, using Technicolor was hugely expensive. Clark Gable made only one full-color feature in the ‘30s; Flynn made three.)
But Flynn was a wild, untamed Australian with an unhappy childhood (he idolized his professor father; loathed his beautiful, philandering mother), and had a low thresh-hold of boredom. He had a penchant for reckless living. In the late twenties and first half of the thirties, Errol got thrown out of high-toned boarding schools, then bummed around the South Pacific running scams and collecting sexually transmitted diseases. He finally ended up (surprisingly) in British repertory theater.
Then he jumped to Hollywood, and within a year was a Big Deal. Olivia de Havilland recognized early on he had issues (the man couldn’t stop rubbing his thumb and forefinger together when he was standing still), and David Niven noted in two memoirs Flynn’s capacity for drink, lust for young, young women, and fondness for brawling.
In the early forties Flynn started taking morphine. In 1943 he went on trial for statutory rape. He beat the rape charges but the drug habit stayed with him. By the late forties Jack Warner had private detectives tailing him in an (ultimately futile) effort to keep him out of serious trouble.
On the set of the partially-completed “The Story of William Tell”
Flynn and Warners negotiated an end to his contract in 1953, and the actor went into a co-production venture with Italian investors that resulted in a half-made Cinemascope swashbuckler entitled “The Story of William Tell” that cost Errol Flynn close to a million dollars in personal money. From there the descent got steeper. He made some higher budget pictures, also lower budget pictures. He made a cheapie television series in Britain. None of this output resurrected his glory years.
By the late fifties, Errol had ditched his third wife and taken up with the teen-aged Beverly Aadland. His career was pretty much a pile of ashes. The Fall of ’59 found him in L.A., working on a half-hour, three-day TV Western called The Golden Shanty for the anthology show “The Goodyear Theatre”.
Errol in “The Golden Shanty”, his last performance on film.
Director Arthur Hiller took one look at Mr. Flynn and knew it would take a miracle to get him through the shoot. He had the crew scribble out cue cards, re-blocked a long scene so Errol wouldn’t have to move around much. Somehow Hiller got the show completed, then called Errol Flynn’s agent and bawled him out for sending the actor out on a quickie television production he was in no shape to handle.
A month-and-a-half later, Flynn was dead. As one of his friends said, “He had it all in the palm of his hand, and threw it all away.”
- … as long as Mr. Flynn was wearing a uniform, swinging a sword, or riding a horse.
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