False memories: How Errol Flynn gaslit his ghostwriter

Sue Rabbitt Roff

Six years after the fifty year old Flynn died in the arms of his teenaged lover in October 1959 his former friend and neighbour in Jamaica, Noel Coward – no Puritan himself – wrote ‘I have at last got around to Errol Flynn’s autobiography, which I found painfully irritating. What [his emphasis] a silly man. It is indeed as outspoken as it is reputed to be but with the sort of outspokenness that curdles the blood. Such a wealth of unnecessary vulgarity.’

Fair warning there then.

But I read it anyway. Lockdown took us to places we didn’t expect to go in our reading. And online filmography.

Flynn frequently embroidered or rearranged the truth, but he had indeed led a buccaneer’s life before he got to Hollywood. Born in Tasmania, Australia in 1909, he’d been expelled from most of the schools he attended in Hobart, London and Sydney as his well-respected zoologist father Theodore worked his way up the academic ladder.

Errol was fired from virtually all the jobs he tried after he went to New Guinea in 1927 where, according to the Australian Dictionary of Biography ‘he began training as a district officer in New Guinea, but moved on to become in rapid succession copra plantation overseer, partner in a charter schooner business and gold prospector.’

He ended up in court for alleged crimes during recruiting drives for indigenous labour venturing up the Sepik River. According to the ADB, he was ‘notorious for unpaid debts in New Guinea’ when he was booted out in 1932. He’d also whetted his sexual appetite for teenage girls.

Having been scouted by the Australian film maker Charles Chauvel and made the semi-documentary In the Wake of the Bounty (which can still be seen on Youtube) Flynn set sail for London. He travelled with a tropical diseases doctor he’d met in New Guinea, Dr Erben, who was reputedly no more scrupulous than himself.

By the time they reached Colombo the pair of them were said to be – by Flynn himself – as unwelcome on board ship as they had been in New Guinea for adulterous liaisons and thieving.

Flynn wrote in his autobiography My Wicked,Wicked Ways weeks before his death, ‘Having been kicked off the boat’ at Colombo ‘the next point to head for was Pondicherry, a port on the Indian mainland’. There, in perpetual quest for what Flynn called ‘a poke’, they took a ‘ricksha’ and headed for a whorehouse. The driver wanted a tip but Flynn didn’t think he’d done anything special to deserve it. Flynn recalled

‘When it was clear he would get no more money from us, he kicked Koets [the name Flynn gave Erben in his autobiography] in the shins. That didn’t hurt Koets, because the Hindu had bare feet. But it was poor behavior.

I grabbed the fellow and gave him a waff right where I thought his chin would be. But his head wasn’t there.

His head went around and away in a very wily manner. My fist passed over his head. The next instant, there he was, with a knife that shone like quicksilver, and in a single fast stroke he cut my guts from my scrotum to the navel.

I stood there shocked, bleeding in a great gush, with my guts hanging out. The attacker leaped away and was out of sight in the scattering [sic] of no time.

I bent over in excruciating pain.

“Stand up straight!” Koets bellowed and grabbed hold of my intestines and stuffed them back in and held them, my belly skin in one huge paw, very red now.

He hailed another ricksha immediately. I was taken to the hospital. As I was being moved off, police arrived, but I was indifferent and losing much blood.

I had sixteen stitches put in this wound and when anyone sees my belly today under the shower or elsewhere they gape, “Some appendix!”

Luckily the blade hadn’t punctured the intestines, just the skin. A clean-cut rip.’

Flynn wrote in his memoir

‘I was supposed to be in bed for two weeks, but in two days I got up. Naturally the wound opened up again, the lymph exploding, and again I lay disabled in that hospital bed.

Koets was angry. “If you don’t lie down I’ll leave you. Beside that, goddamit, I’ll kill you!”

He raged on. “No point in your asking my advice if you don’t intend to take it.” I said I hadn’t asked his advice.

They had to do another job of hemstitching on my belly. After another (sic) two weeks of lying there I began to wonder how I would pay them.

Finally I told them I had no money. Besides that, they had the services of the eminent world-famous surgeon and physician, Dr. Koets.’

My Wicked, Wicked Ways was written with a ghost writer, Earl Conrad, who was three years younger than Flynn. Twenty years later Conrad published Errol Flynn: A Memoir where he reported:

‘ ‘‘What’s your greatest fear?” I asked.

“Castration” he promptly replied….. “Did you ever come close to it?”

“I did. That slash I got in India when I was on my way to England with Koets. That little East Indian with the shiv knew how to tangle with a big fellow like me. He snuck down like he was going under a fence, brought his knife up and went for my balls and whang, and fortunately just ripped up my crotch… Take a look.” ‘

He lowered his jeans. There on one side was a scar eight or ten inches long – like an overlong appendicitis scar from his scrotum straight up to his navel. He had barely lived through it and been hospitalized for a couple of weeks….”ever since then I’ve lived in dread of that one thing – being deballed.”

The trouble with this story is that no-one else seems to have seen a scar eight or more inches long running from Flynn’s scrotum to his navel.

This is despite Flynn’s penchant for exhibiting his genitals – it’s said to have been a party trick of his to walk into a room opening his flies and exposing himself.

In his biography of Errol Flynn Satan’s Angel published in 2000, for instance, David Bret repeats the version of the altercation in Pondicherry as told by Flynn and Conrad. He also has several stories involving Flynn’s genitalia. During his marriage to Lili Damita

‘When showering after a tennis or boxing match, Errol would show off his latest ‘battle’ injuries – even the long jagged scar caused by the knife-wielding Sinhalese rickshaw man was less consequential than the painful weals on his back and buttocks that had been inflicted by his wife’s fingernails.’

According to Bret ‘One shocked reporter’ was ‘asked to inspect Flynn’s bruised scrotum’ but apparently did not notice an eight to ten inch long scar rising from it.

Bret writes that Flynn frequently had sex in his dressing room ‘always making a point of leaving the door open, and exposing himself, usually with a full erection, to visiting luminaries.’

Bret also reports an incident when the American director and actor Vincent Sherman entered Errol’s dressing room to discuss a scene. ‘He was naked but for a little towel which covered his lower extremities,’ the director recalled. ‘Very slowly, he removed this’. But while Sherman was impressed with the size of Flynn’s penis he didn’t mention any scar running from his scrotum to his navel.

Greer Garson and Flynn played practical jokes on each other – in one of them, according to Bret, ‘she had to open her wardrobe door and reach for a dress – he was standing inside, stark naked but for his top hat!’ There are more such tales in Bret’s biography, but he never remarks on the lack of mention of an eight inch scar running up to the navel.

Even more intriguing is that the incident in Pondicherry is also conspicuous by its absence from Dr Erben’s diary for the year 1933, published in 1985.

The entry for May 29 1933 records:

‘arrive at 10 a.m. at Pondicherry. Flynn punches my rickshacoolie (sic). Interesting loading with barges. Go at 7 on board. Don’t sail at night.’

The next day Tuesday 30th May, ‘sail for Colombo at 7 a.m.’

The editor of Erben’s diary says in his Introduction that ‘Possibly some Errol Flynn buffs may be disappointed about the journey from New Guinea in 1933…because they are not so adventurous as the popular press would have us believe. Nonetheless, this record has the charm of authenticity and does not allow further speculation.’

Flynn probably didn’t expect to be autopsied but he was after his sudden death in a Vancouver doctor’s house in October 1959. Or for th autopsy report to be available available online half a century later for our edification. It notes

‘there are numerous scars on both lower legs and on the knees, these are small superficial scars, they vary from 3 or 4 mm. to 1 cm in diameter. There is an old healed scar in the right lower quadrant of the abdomen.’

Again, no mention of a scar reaching eight or more inches from Flynn’s scrotum to his abdomen. But the autopsy does report ‘a number’ of genital warts ‘on the anterior aspect of the penis just at the margin of the prepuce.’

It is to be hoped that Flynn’s last teenage lover, Beverly Aadland, whom he seduced at the age of fifteen, or her mother who acquiesced in the relationship for two years, noticed these warts and understood their implications. It seems doubtful when one reads Conrad’s story of Flynn convincing his ‘Small Companion’ in 1958 that he will have to go to bed with the nurse the night before he has a vasectomy reversal.

Earl Conrad claims to have seen Errol Flynn’s penis several times in 1958 when he spent weeks living with him as they wrote his memoirs. For the record Conrad tells us that

‘His penis was indeed unremarkable. It was, if not short, certainly not much longer than that, and rather stout, I thought. That’s all there was, there wasn’t any more, except a terribly full, bulging scrotum.’ Sometimes ‘his member would be tossing about shriveled, careless, indifferent or tired.’

As they do.

But Conrad doesn’t seem to have noticed the absence of the scar from the slash that almost eviscerated Errol Flynn in Pondicherry.

It would seem that the Errol and Earl Show became an implicit confabulation as the two concocted the autobiography (which Conrad says Flynn edited closely in the months before its publication). Hagiography can make one blind – perhaps even to believing in an eight to ten inch scar on the abdomen that one hasn’t actually seen despite the subject’s propensity for exhibitionism that was probably a part of his sex addiction.

It’s also a reminder to readers that we should look with a beady eye at the evidence – or lack of – for incidents recited as biography or autobiography. False memories are not necessarily the exclusive property of the subject of a biography.