With the Academy Awards taking place this Sunday, it is interesting to note that one of the most famous actors of all time nearly had a cameo appearance as a tennis player competing alongside a Wimbledon champion at the US Open!
Errol Flynn
Errol Flynn, the swash-buckling actor best known as Robin Hood, actually qualified for the U.S. national doubles championships alongside his then pal, and Wimbledon champion Sidney Wood. Wood, in his posthumously released memoir THE WIMBLEDON FINAL THAT NEVER WAS, ($14.95, New Chapter Press, www.NewChapterMedia.com, available here on Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/gp/
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It wouldn’t be easy for those who have been exposed to the later years’ sad portrait of the hopelessly dissolute Errol Flynn to believe that when he arrived in Hollywood, he was well read, well bred, socially desirable, and a witty and considerate companion. Apart from Olympic swimmer Johnny Weissmuller, he was also the movie colony’s only first-rate athlete.
I first ran across the swashbuckling actor at the L.A. Tennis Club, where Errol would appear with bowler hat, bumbershoot and a black cocker spaniel on a leash. He could not then afford to be a member, but would come around partly because he loved tennis, but mostly in hopes of running into a director or producer (in which the club abounded) who might give him some “extra” work as a valet, butler or anything that would earn him a day’s wages. There were more than a few nights when Frank Shields (then under contract to Sam Goldwyn) or I would take Errol home to dinner just so he wouldn’t go hungry.
During the several years that we saw a lot of each other, there was not the slightest hint that alcohol, and later drugs, would eventually be his undoing. Of all the male stars of that era, more adulation was heaped on Errol than any other, including Robert Taylor, Tyrone Power and Clark Gable. If only his good looks and personality were matched by the ability to occasionally say “No!”
When my business took me from New York to California, which then had been practically a “milk run” for me, I most often stayed with the famed Canadian actor Walter Pidgeon, and, however surprisingly, the first night in town would be a strictly stag get-together dinner with Errol at Dave Chasen’s, The Brown Derby, Cock ‘n Bull or Romanoff’s. Despite ear-whispered invitations from passing ladies, Errol didn’t succumb. I don’t know when he began to lose the battle of self-indulgence, because shortly after we teamed up for a U.S. Championship qualifying doubles tournament in Santa Barbara (that was in 1940, just before World War II shut down my “war non-essential” mining operations.) I closed our Beverly Hills office and moved east.
At Santa Barbara, Errol and I were accompanied by his wife, the French beauty Lili Damita, to whom Frank Shields had introduced Errol. For the record, Flynn and yours truly knocked off some pretty high-level teams to reach the final and actually qualify for the U.S. Nationals, the modern-day US Open. Errol played amazingly well under fire. Thinking back, his was an extraordinary performance for one whose experience was limited to club practice play. We never thought seriously about going to Boston for the Nationals, but wouldn’t it have been great if we had?
Errol and Lili argued a bit; that is, Lili argued and Errol stayed silent as long as he could. On this trip, she finally got to him – via Robert Donat – taunting Errol that he couldn’t do as much with a whole script as Donat could do with one eyebrow. This was in our joint Santa Barbara sitting room, and I decamped as Errol was about to gag Lili with a pair of just-pulled-off wet tennis socks.
Back in New York, Errol and I got together whenever he came east until he started to go to seed. The next time I saw him was after no contact for at least a decade, during which Errol had gone to Cuba and met and supported Castro and his revolution. My fourth wife Pat and I were being shown to our table at Manhattan’s El Morocco and Errol was moving up the aisle in our direction. I said carefully, “Hello, Errol, this is Pat.” Errol kissed her hand, clapped me jovially on the shoulder and said something like “Hello buddy” without a flicker of recognition. Though prepared to see a forlorn facsimile of my one-time pal, this pathetically witless wreck of a man gave me a rotten night.
What a great story. I LOVED, still LOVE, Errol Flynn, and don’t give a damn about the way the American media tried to portray him as a drunk, child molester/rapist. Should actors be “role models”. What a piece of crap!! Whatever… Flynn had no need to force himself on any female. I’m pretty sure it was the other way around. So sad he didn’t recognize or pretended not to. It makes him seem inconsiderate and callous, which I wouldn’t have thought a man of his intellect would be.
This is a great story about Errol Flynn and one not readily known. Errol Flynn always and to this day, was a favorite actor of mine. I learned to know him in the mid 1960′s as the Sea Hawk, Gentleman Jim, The Charge Of The Light Brigade, Captain Blood, Don Juan, Dodge City and of course as Robin Hood and so many others. Over the years I saw all of his movies about sixty of them and I like them all; some more, some less but all have that exceptional special Errol Flynn charismatic performance only he processed and the world star he was, would deliver.
In regards about the remark made at the end of the story it also can be explained that maybe and quite possibly so that he was fearful, very self-conscious of his not so favorable appearance anymore in those days in Cuba, which was not far away from the time of his passing.
It is quite possible, when suddenly he saw the old friend from a long and great time ago, in particular knowing he has become a shadow of his former self; an inner panic, an embarrassment sets in and very possibly he was rather fleeing from the old friend to avoid questions of a hurtful, embarrassing situation.