Long regarded as Hollywood’s prodigal son, Errol Flynn packed more into his 50 years than most of his high-living contemporaries could have done in several lifetimes. The quintessential hedonist and an insatiable womanizer, Flynn was infamous for his drinking binges and high-spirited bacchanalia. Here, David Bret traces the extraordinary life, loves, and career of the cinema’s first action-adventure star. With the spectacular looks and athletic prowess that first attracted the attention of Warner Brothers, Flynn reveled in the public acclaim for his performances in Captain Blood, The Adventures of Robin Hood, and The Adventures of Don Juan. But his on-screen panache did little to hide his scandalous personal life. In a series of compelling revelations, Bret divulges the star’s staggering appetite for young men and underage girls, his brawling, drinking, and drug experimentation, and his controversial political leanings. It is an often startling portrait of an incorrigibly complex man and one of the undisputed icons of the 20th century.
"Amazon USA is Janus, pure and simple. You get 5-stars reviews and tremendous praise...or you get 1-star reviews which are so poisonous (the July 2011 one for "Valentino", by Markus King being a prime example)that they defy belief. If someone leaves a 5-star review, you can guarantee that a poison review will pop up the next day. The homophobic Valentino female fans are the worst--easy to discern here, they cannot accept that he was gay, loathe anyone who suggests that he might have been, and have set up a hotbed of loathing against this author. There is of course a maxim to all of this: if Bret's books were SO bad, how come that he has been publishing for a quarter-century, and outselling ALL of his rivals?
Diary For 2011:
"Elizabeth Taylor: The Lady, The Lover, The Legend", April, to be followed by special foreign language mass-printings (Poland, Russia, Sweden, China, Japan), September-December.
"Freddie Mercury: Too Young, Too Soon", September.
Born in Paris in November 1954, Bret published his first biography, "The Piaf Legend", in 1988. His other bestsellers include biographies of Maria Callas, Mario Lanza, Gracie Fields, Elizabeth Taylor, Rudolph Valentino, George Formby, Rock Hudson, and around twenty more. His two biographies of Morrissey have sold in excess of 150,000 copies in the UK alone.
Bret loathes fan forums, another reason for the one-star reviews:
"They place their idols on pedestals, but they see the idols only as THEY want to see them, not as they really were. Really, I am SO flattered that they can devote so much time to attacking me, and it is such fun attacking them back--though of course they do not like having a taste of their own medicine!"
