Sylvia, Queen of the Headhunters by Philip Eade

Author:Philip Eade
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781250045904
Publisher: Picador

11

WATCH OUT, HOLLYWOOD

In mid-February 1937 Sylvia set off for Hollywood as planned, leaving Vyner to rattle around on his own at the Astana in Kuching. Travelling with her secretary Freddy Mann, she sailed from Singapore in the vast steamship Empress of Japan, the fastest, largest and finest trans-Pacific liner. En route they stopped in Japan, a visit organised by the Japanese company Nissa Shokai, which had been engaged in various farming and mining activities in Sarawak since the beginning of Vyner’s reign. The previous year Nissa Shokai had arranged for a Japanese rear-admiral to visit Sarawak. Notwithstanding Japan’s withdrawal from the League of Nations three years previously and its increasingly bellicose actions, the admiral and his party were given a twenty-one-gun salute from Fort Margherita. In Japan, Sylvia too was treated like royalty, even though she was not a state guest. When they put in for a night at the port of Kobe, just west of Osaka, on Japan’s inland sea, no one, reported the Sarawak Gazette – not even the wife of the President of the Philippine Republic – was allowed on or off the ship until the Ranee had disembarked; audiences at cinema houses throughout Japan were later treated to a newsreel of this great event.

When eventually they reached Los Angeles, awaiting Sylvia at her hotel was a film script, The White Rajah, written by Errol Flynn. Flynn had recently made his name with his swashbuckling performance in the pirate adventure Captain Blood (1935) and he saw himself as perfect for the part of James Brooke. Indeed, he told Sylvia that he had always imagined that the two of them were remarkably alike. Before becoming an actor, Flynn had spent much of the time between 1928 and 1931 in New Guinea, running a coastal sloop, mining for gold, and growing tobacco and coconuts, although some attributed his more exotic ‘memories’ – trading slaves, abandoning a sinking ship, et cetera – to his ability to bluff, to make things look a little more exciting than they were. He had used more than a little artistic licence in the script that now lay on the Ranee’s dressing table.

Though she was hardly a paragon of factual accuracy, Sylvia decided that Flynn’s film script was, historically speaking, ‘an absurdity’, and she wrote to Warner Brothers to tell them so. The result was that Flynn asked her to dinner. Arriving at his house, she was shown into a large sitting room with leopard-skin rugs on the floor and ‘furnished in the glossiest style’. She was told that Mr Flynn would be down shortly.

I waited; and suddenly the staircase became brilliantly floodlit. On it there appeared Errol Flynn himself in a pair of white close-fitting trousers that showed every nerve and muscle of his body. Slowly and gracefully he descended, giving me plenty of time to appreciate his entrance – and him. He flashed a smile at me that would have sent a thousand fans into hysterics and then he started to make me a drink … The lights slowly dimmed, and I could only just see him across the room.

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