63 of 68 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
In With Flynn, February 6, 2006
For a generation or two of eager young men, he was the epitome of adventure and accomplishment, especially with the opposite sex, and Errol Flynn's autobiography doesn't disappoint. "My Wicked, Wicked Ways" is a remarkably candid and eloquent account of the star's life as he saw it that reads like you are there spending a besotted long evening in the company of the screen world's Tasmanian Devil.
Errol Flynn won little critical acclaim in his lifetime. His only Academy Award nomination, if you can call it that, was bestowed on Peter O'Toole for playing a thinly-disguised Flynn in the 1982 film "My Favorite Year," where O'Toole plays a character named Alan Swann with an affinity for cognac rather than vodka but otherwise is an obvious parallel for Flynn.
Was Alan Swann the real thing? Was Errol Flynn? "My Wicked, Wicked Ways" leaves room for doubt. He tells some improbably tall tales of fighting natives in New Guinea and sailing through hurricanes in the Caribbean. I think I believe the slapping story about Bette Davis, though, since I read it in a couple of other places. The post-mortem story about John Barrymore is legendary, too, and it's especially fascinating reading Flynn's account since he was the victim of one of Hollywood's most legendary heartless pranks, a punking that Ashton Kutcher would have blanched at.
Flynn was an odd screen star, as he makes clear, starting out a gold prospector on the other side of the Pacific from Hollywood with no thought of movie acting until he found himself virtually drafted by a director making a movie about the mutiny on the Bounty, in which young Flynn played Fletcher Christian.
Later, he recalls his time with another actor who also played Christian in a better-known production, Clark Gable: "If anyone should ask 'What do two actors talk about when they meet?' the answer is Themselves.'"
Yet Flynn isn't quite as full of himself as that. As "My Wicked, Wicked Ways" makes clear, the last thing he really cared about was his screen image. That's actually a negative for me reading the book; I hoped to read more about his on-screen work. Alas, he barely mentions "The Adventures Of Robin Hood," his greatest screen role, and less than that of other screen performances like George Armstrong Custer in "They Died With Their Boots On" and the title role in his breakout film, "Captain Blood."
Flynn claims here he hated his cinematic roles enough to contemplate suicide after a time faced with the repetitiveness of one swashbuckler after another. He found sanctuary in booze instead. If there's one message in "My Wicked, Wicked Ways," it was that Flynn was a serious person, with an interest in science and literature, though all that was drowned out in the public imagining by his attraction for the opposite sex.
This is actually a point of obvious, repetitive bitterness for Flynn or his ghostwriter, I suspect both: "A man who for a woman fits the bill is the one who pays the bill."
The poormouthing does grate after a while. Reading Flynn complain about divorce lawyers is like hearing Charles Manson whine about police officers. He brought it on himself, as he's the first to admit, unable to understand monogamy in the abstract or in practice. But he seems unwilling to make the connection between the life he led and the inevitable results.
Still, this is an engaging, intelligent book that at times reads like Joseph Conrad and at times like a deposition at the Los Angeles district attorney's office. Never less than entertaining, it never quite gels into something coherent. If nothing else, it shows Flynn nearing the end of his days still displaying real wit and self-awareness. "There's out, and then there's out," Alan Swann says. Errol Flynn seems far from out here, and indeed, he comes across more alive from reading this than many actors on the screen today.
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34 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Flynn's Autobiography is Mixture of Fact, Fiction, March 13, 1998
By A Customer
By the time Errol Flynn got around to the task of putting his incredibly adventurous life on paper, booze, drugs and a life of dissipation had caught up with him. At 50, he was a wasted shadow of the once beautiful, vibrant movie idol who had captured a nation's imagination in such glorious screen epics as "Captain Blood" and "The Adventures of Robin Hood." No longer capable of the sustained concentration and commitment necessary to write an autobiography, Putnam and Sons assigned Flynn to a ghost writer by the name of Earl Conrad. Conrad spent many hours interviewing Flynn, and the result is "My Wicked, Wicked Ways." While the book was not written by Flynn, Conrad tried to duplicate the actor's unique way of expressing himself so that it was, in a way, spoken with Flynn's voice. The reader of "My Wicked, Wicked Ways" should be aware that a great deal of its contents has, since its publication, been discovered to be false. Flynn either made things up as he went along -- he was a notorious and gifted liar -- or he was confused thanks to the two quarts of vodka he tossed down every day of his life, and simply got some things wrong. Whatever the case may be, Errol Flynn did not tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth in "his" autobiography. However, "My Wicked, Wicked Ways" is still a rousing look at a rousing life...at one of the most visually stunning men of his or any other day...at a man who could seemingly generate screen magic without effort...at a man whose demons drove him, at the age of 50, into his grave with the body of an 85-year-old man. For those reasons it is worth reading.
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