Mindset List of the Obscure by Tom McBride

Author:Tom McBride
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2014-09-22T04:00:00+00:00

Flynn reportedly designed his house in Hollywood so that he could bug the ladies’ bathrooms. He was an addicted voyeur who was declared unfit for military service because of, among other maladies, a heart murmur and venereal disease—and was accused of cowardice by his critics. This was a nightmare for his studio, Warner Brothers, because revealing his poor health would have ruined Flynn’s suave image, but not doing so meant that the unpatriotic charge would stick.

It seems that, for Errol, a screwdriver for breakfast and a prostitute for lunch were often on the menu. He married three times and bedded now-unrecalled Hollywood beauties such as Dolores del Río. But despite his troubled reputation, his films remained popular even after the underage sex scandal.

Toward the end of his life, in 1958, he wrote (with a ghostwriter) a highly acclaimed autobiography called My Wicked, Wicked Ways (he wanted to call it In Like Me, but the publisher wisely declined the notion). In it, he confessed a great many of his sins but managed to justify most of them on the grounds that knowledge (carnal, sensual outer limits) is what man is made for. He wrote that few men have “taken into their maw more of life than I” and that while he had a great rage to live, he had “twice the urge to die.” It seems that while he may have been Robin Hood on-screen, off it he was Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde’s character who was obsessed with the subject of aging and how to escape from it. Flynn reported that he hated to be known for his promiscuous reputation but admitted that he had done just about everything he could to cling to fame. Indeed, a national organization called ABCDEF (American Boys Club for the Defense of Errol Flynn) shamelessly supported him throughout his career, until his death in 1959.

THAT WAS THEN, THIS IS NOW: Today no one remembers Errol Flynn and thus has no clue that the phrase “in like Flynn” originally referred to sexual promiscuity. We are now on the other side of the sexual revolution of the 1960s, yet sex outside marriage and other conventional boundaries remain common. Even so, Errol Flynn’s reputation would not shock us today the way he shocked an earlier generation. Relatively few have been utterly outraged by even worse charges against director Roman Polanski in 1977. Being “in like Flynn” isn’t quite the accomplishment it used to be!

HYPOTHETICAL USAGE IN A SENTENCE BY THE OLD AND SETTLED: “Ah, the right key at last: we’re in like Flynn.” —Bobby Gusher, fifteen, speaking to Dwight Dunne, fourteen, in 1948, as they unlocked Bobby’s father’s liquor cabinet

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