Errol flynn and me

[RonPrice]

Two Very Different Autobiographies

Errol Flynn, an Australian-born film actor, was popular for his romantic and action roles in Hollywood films and also for his flamboyant lifestyle. Flynn was born in Hobart Tasmania more than 100 years ago, on 20 June 1909.1 I write a prose-poem as a sort of quasi-eulogistic, personal reminiscence, personal reflection on Flynn, my life and our respective ways and beliefs on the 100th anniversary of his passing. Today I revised that piece after watching Tasmanian Devil: The Fast and Furious Life of Errol Flynn.2

Flynn was born three months after the wooden casket containing the sacred remains of the Báb were placed in a marble sarcophagus in Haifa Israel inside what is now the Shrine of the Báb. Flynn died the day, or perhaps it was the week, that I joined the Bahá'í Faith, the religion which the Báb had come to announce, much like John the Baptist had done in preparing the way for the coming of Jesus two thousand years before. Flynn died on 14 October 1959. –Ron Price, 1Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 20 June 2009; and 2ABC1 TV, 11:30 p.m.-12:25 a.m., 10 & 11 January 2012.

You were getting famous, Errol,
right at the start of that teaching
Plan, in those entre deux guerres1
years....your first novel came out
in the first year of that teaching
Plan---1937---and you were still
getting your name in lights when
I was getting into the new religion
that came into town back in those
1950s when rock-‘n-roll started.….
words for Negroes and genitalia
were no-nos and that superficial
cultural propriety prevailed.1

My autobiography will not be as
compelling as yours-My Wicked
Wicked Ways-released just before
Christmas when I was fifteen, still
in love with Susan Gregory & never
having heard of you or your book....

You pulled no punches about your
convictions, obsessions, addictions,
Errol, but your exaggerations, your
entertainment and shock makes the
work ahistorical and a confirmation
of the view that it is impossible to
write autobiography that is really a
true history. Tonight’s biopic told a
story, though, of how you were dead
at 50 and wrote a most compelling &
appalling autobiography by anyone in
Hollywood or in any other time/place.3

1 A French expression for ‘the years between WWI and WW2’
2 D.T. Miller and M. Nowak, The Fifties: The Way We Really Were, Doubleday & Co. Ltd., NY, 1977, p. 302.
3 According to one literary critic, Flynn’s autobiography "remains one of the most compelling and appalling works written by a Hollywood star, or anyone else for that matter.” In the late 1950s, just before his death, Flynn met and courted the 15-year-old Beverly Aadland.-Simon Caterson, "Genius for living driven by lust for death", Australian Literary Review, 3 June 2009, retrieved 6 June 2009: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story

Ron Price
20 June 2009 and
Updated on: 11 January 2012