plutherus

So, I got the book on Friday, started reading it that night, and couldn't put it down.
I can't remember the last time I found a book so captivating. Kept turning the pages, nothing, even the work I was supposed to get done this weekend, distracted me from it.
I finished it yesterday morning on the train on the way in to work.
A fascinating, exciting adventure story, full of colorful characters, where you never knew what was coming next.

I'm referring, of course, to Errol Flynn's My Wicked, Wicked Ways

(What? Was there some other book you would have expected me to read this weekend? :)

The back of the book bills it as "Errol Flynn in his greatest adventure role ever... his own life!" And man, they ain't kiddin.

The best part was the first half, before he came to Hollywood, when he was bumming about Tasmania, Australia, and New Guinea, seeking his fame and fortune. He starts out searching for gold and slave trading in New Guinea (yes, he actually traded slaves, "recruiting" they called it, tricking people into signing up as labor with groups who then don't let them leave - he points out that they're called "indentured servants" because if people in America and Britain found out where there coconuts really came from they might not want to buy any more). (A far worse crime, in my not so humble opinion, than the act of having a tryst with a 17 year old girl that he was later accused, and acquitted, of.)

After stumbling into management of a coconut plantation for awhile (and the whole bit reminds me a bit of my first tech support job, “oh, sure, I know all about that, uh-huh, no problem. Then hurrying to the library to read up on everything I might need to actually do the job.) Hired to take his boat up the then unexplored (by the British) Sepik River, he gets his first movie role, at 17, playing the part of his great-grandfather in Mutiny On the Bounty. Loving it, but never thinking at that time that it could be a career. Scamming his way into, then getting quickly fired from, various government positions. Then, deciding New Guinea is not for him, joins up with a wandering doctor who would make a great action movie character himself to try to get to London – working his way across Asia in the process. Incredible travelogue, and tale of high adventure. The writing, and the story, is reminiscent of John Lloyd Stevens, or Jules Verne.

Even after he gets to Hollywood, the story stays interesting and avoids being bogged down with the behind-the-scenes antics and lists of encounters with other famous people, though there are plenty of both, and continuing interesting stories, from rooftop escapes in Cuba (from a class of Catholic schoolgirls and their nuns, all trying to get his autograph while he's hiding out in a whorehouse in Havana), to the time he decided to fuck off on Hollywood, leave his acting career behind and go fight in the Spanish civil war, to criticizing his paintings to Diego Rivera, leading to the fight that brought about his education of and life-long love of that medium..

He only briefly mentions his time with Castro during the revolution, apparently figuring everyone would have read all about it in the papers at the time so there was no need to belabor it further.

About the infamous statutory rape trials: his story, of course, is that he was completely innocent. I tend to believe him, as my own past research corroborated the facts he gave: he was found innocent of the first two, in one case because the defense was able to find a copy of the driver's license kept by the manager of the bar one of the girls worked at, showing her ID at least was 21 at the time, not 17 (she was unable to produce any documentation of her age in court), and the third was thrown out of court when it was proven that the girl in question had never actually been inside the boat where she claimed their tryst took place.

Living I have done, enormously, like a gourmand eating the world, and I don't suppose it is egotism, but only fact, to suggest that few others alive in the present century have taken into their maw more of the world than have I.

On the sea, beneath it, in the air, and in all the parts of most of the lands I have gone a-hunting in quest neither of fame, nor of fortune, but the vindication of the act of living. But I have found my Holy Grail.

Rest in peace, Mr. Flynn, despite your many flaws, you were certainly something to aspire to.