Last Years
When Theo first was at University College London he and Marelle lived at 79a Belsize Park Gardens, London NW3 but later they bought a house at 8 New House Park, St Albans in Hertfordshire. There Theo recovered from the stroke. That event distressed Errol, but family relations plumetted when he visited his parents in company with his latest companion Beverly Aadland. The two had come from Africa, making what was to be Errol’s penultimate film. Beverley was only fifteen years of age, both she and Errol lying about this. The Flynn parents were enraged that there might result a repeat of Errol’s trial for statutory rape.
Errol’s Autobiography
Around this time Errol contracted with Putnam’s to write an autobiography. He received an advance of $9000, and evidently planned to use the money from the book to build a dream home on Boston Estate. Notwithstanding his previous achievements as a fiction writer and journalist, the autobiography proved beyond him. The publisher insisted on a ‘ghost’, Earl Conrad, a respected writer of both fiction and non-fiction. Errol, Conrad and Beverly Aadland spent ten weeks together compiling what a later biographer, Jeffrey Meyers, called a ‘mythomaniacal autobiography’. The Flynn parents were initially asked to contribute but in October 1958 Marelle wrote to Conrad -
I am rather at a loss how to proceed with the material you required for Errol’s book. I was going on with what you asked me to do. Now Errol writes to his father that he does not require anything from me. So what am I to do? I am sorry that there has been some misunderstanding, but as I told you, I was quite willing to cooperate to the best of my ability,
With kindest regards,
Yours ever
Marelle Flynn
In fact Marelle did send more letters and photographs to Conrad, which he later used in a second book Memoir of Errol Flynn (1979).
Rosemary joined the authorial party in Jamaica. During her ten-day visit Boston House mysteriously caught fire and was totally destroyed. Conrad says that Errol told him he had it destroyed in order to use the insurance to build his new house. But what about his own possessions and those of his parents? Had he forgotten that his will left the house to them, or, now he had a new love he intended making a new will to provide for them?
The house had been empty for a year and a half and when Conrad saw it just before the fire the scenery was just as beautiful but ‘the outside was weather-beaten, bushes and trees obscured it and vines crawled over the porches and up the windows.’ Rosemary detailed the contents of the house in evidence in a civil law case in 1968. The personal and sentimental value seems to have been very great but the insurance value small; would a sane and rational Errol have deliberately destroyed it?
One evening during the 1958 visit Errol told Rosemary he was very sick and had been for some years-
‘the doctors have said I may live a year or die anytime’. Tearfully he begged his sister to go to England before she returned home and give their parents a message ending the long battle with his mother and reaching again for his father’s respect.
‘I am more sorry than words can tell for any trouble I have caused you or for any shame you have ever felt about my life. I have always loved you. As I close my eyes and relive the days when we were all together in Tasmania, in Belfast, and in England. All the glitter and the girls who have been associated with my name mean nothing compared with those memories’.
It appears that reconciliation went further in mid ’59 as the parents visited Errol and Beverley at his new home, ‘Castle Comfort’. They might have been moved by Errol’s affection for Beverly, and her respect for them.
Life after Errol
Errol died in Vancouver in October 1959. Theo went to Los Angeles to carry his son’s coffin to a grave in Forest Lawn Cemetery. Patrice Wyman had decided on this site, against Errol’s wishes to be buried in Jamaica, so even after death his fate was decided by the same publicity mongering that had prevailed during his years of stardom. Marelle now wrote -
‘Great loss of Errol. My poor boy knew he had not long to live but told no one. He was very sweet to me over the phone the last time I heard his voice.’
Immediately afterwards appeared the ‘mythomaniacal autobiography’, My Wicked Wicked Ways. It spoke of family affairs in a spirit altogether contrary to the nostalgic affection Errol had recently invoked. Marelle came under chief fire. When younger, went the account, she had been promiscuous: a cinema manager in Hobart, and Aga Khan in Paris were proposed as lovers. As for the present;
My mother has just turned seventy-five (in truth seventy) and claims to be a pillar of the Church, a fount of wisdom. There is no subject upon which she is not an authority, and my father had better look out for himself if perchance a coarse word every now and then escapes his loose jaw in a moment of convivial happiness. He is likely to crack out terrible oaths like ’damn’ or ‘the hell with you’, at which one of them my mother who has ears like an owl at night just bends one frightening stare on the old professor and he sinks into the obscurity from which he should never have emerged. Mother, her spry seventy-five*, still goes swimming at Boston Bay beach, and punishes the rolling breakers there as she would me or my father or anybody else who got in her way. She has always been a frustration to me because it appears she is always right and can prove it conclusively.’
Theo fared better, but in being negative:
All my life I have tried to find my mother, and I have never found her. My father has not been Theodore Flynn, exactly, but a will of the wisp just beyond, whom I have chased and hunted to see him smile upon me, and I shall never find my true father, for the father I wanted to find was what I might become.’
Although Errol greatly admired his father he was never a scholar and was expelled from most of the schools his patient father found for him. However he was intelligent, highly literate and a talented writer in addition to being charming, athletic and devastatingly handsome. ‘His beauty may have be his undoing’. From an early age father and son had a close relationship. Errol loved and respected his father even though he may have felt that Theo was always just out of reach. Both were charming and loved the sea and Theo seemed to usually tolerate his son’s prodigious promiscuity. ‘He used his talents in leading the kind of life most men would like to lead but don’t have the guts too’. The relationship between mother and son was a stark contrast to that between father and son. ‘When I finished school I would race home to be at his side, to hurry out into the back yard, where we had specimens of rare animals’. ‘My father was supremely patient with me, though I gave him nothing but trouble. … He could get me into a school, any school, but nobody could make me study’
After Marelle and Theo began to live separately around 1921, and perhaps before, Errol believed his mother saw other men but he never made the same accusation against his father. However by 1928 Errol’s letters implied that his father was not short of female company. From Rabaul Errol wrote
‘I stayed with one Phil Bayliss and spouse. She says she knows you well – or rather did –in Sydney some years ago- her first name is Bonita and she told me to ask you if you remember one Opal. (I don’t know her second name but it sounded like cat fighting in Russian.)’
Of course this could be a reference to Theo before he was married.
‘You’ll be arriving in London in about 3 days time and I envy you. I’d go and have three glasses of sherry, look around for a suitable partner and invite her to dine with me at the Berkerly. But as I’ve no doubt your own procedure will be something along these lines, I get a certain morbid satisfaction out of thinking about it.’
Errol goes on to describe his failed attempt to seduce one Rae Fisher who was a fellow boarder with his father at Pressland House.
Moore says on page 28 ‘A Sydney woman got a divorce expecting the Professor to follow suit.’ Norman says on page 10 Theo had lodgings in London during his 1920-21 visit and once when Errol (on vacation from his boarding school) visited unannounced ‘he found a strange woman living with his father’.
Theo was handsome, charming and popular with the ladies when he was in Hobart. His liaisons with a number of Hobart women were the subject of much gossip but Theo was careful not to put his wife in the same position that his mother found so distressing before her divorce. As a much older man his account of numerous encounters with naked young women on Errol’s yacht and in his house is a mixture of wonder, understanding and perhaps a touch of envy. When one young woman was invited to have a swim she walked past the flabbergasted Professor ‘without a stitch on’, explaining that she had left her swimsuit on the verandah. ‘That girl was quite normal by Hollywood standards. She was only one of the many girls who threw themselves at Errol. But she opened my eyes to the fantastic world in which Errol was living.’
Understandably, the Flynns were distressed by the book’s publication. Legal action resulted in some passages being deleted from later editions. Part of their concern was what they saw as the book’s misrepresentation of Errol himself. He was not ‘wicked’, went their plea. Rather as Theo was to say:
He was born out of his century. He would have been a true buccaneer in Elizabethan times. … He was a warm open-hearted person, with no deceit in his makeup. He said and did what he thought and the devil take the consequences.
No one was better qualified than Theo to make such a judgement.
Soon after Errol’s death the grieving parents began to consider their life while holidaying in Italy. The house in St Alban’s was bigger than needed, and domestic help lacking. In June 1960 they sold the place and bought a penthouse in Ventimiglia a small town just across the France/Italy border east of Monte Carlo, quite near where Theo and Marelle had attended Errol’s marriage to Patrice in October 1950. They liked the climate and the lifestyle but living on the seventh floor of a building with e temperamental lift was not good for elderly folk in dubious health. After a long motor trip with Marelle at the wheel they returned to England in the middle of 1961.
That November Theo wrote to Conrad who duly used the letter to open his Memoir of Errol.
I am very grateful indeed for the nice letter you have written to us recently concerning the last days of Errol and his attitude towards us, his parents. I do wish we could get together some time so that perhaps with your help we might be able to solve the enigma of Errol…
The letter was addressed from a flat Rochester Gardens Hove. This location was evidently referred to in a Tasmanian newspaper piece of 21 April 1962, which told that the couple was writing a book to rehabilitate Errol’s reputation from the image given by in My Wicked Wicked Ways. Marelle was reported as saying as saying
'we are building a house in Sussex with the money he (Errol) left us’. (His bequest was $10,000 and some West Indies real estate.) While waiting its completion they spent several months with friends in Jamaica. A Daily Gleaner journalist further spoke of the Flynns’ intent ’to put the record straight’.
From the flat in Hove they moved to their new house at 40 McWilliams Road Woodingdean, Sussex, a district with which there had been some earlier association. Marelle enjoyed bridge playing and work for the Conservative Party, but felt the pinch of Britain’s relatively high cost of living: In 1963 she wrote to the head of her son’s former employer, Jack Warner, ‘emphazing their desperate financial situation and asking for help’. The book to rehabilitate Errol never appeared, but from time to time Theo gave press interviews that told of the departed star as ‘a perfectly mannered soft hearted gentleman’ and ‘considerate and dutiful son and humorous company’
On 10 December 1967 Marelle went to fetch her car from the garage on the other side of Falmer Road. Leaving the curb, she failed to see a fast approaching three-wheel bubble car. The driver one Brian Dale lost control as he came down the hill; after braking the car skidded and hit Marelle. Taken to the Royal Sussex hospital, Brighton she died in its intensive care unit on New Years day. Reports said her body was identified by Lewis Redford, who had a farm in Horsham, 25 miles away. ‘He had known Mrs. Flynn since 1936, his wife being a close friend of the family.’ Such an acquaintance might have dated back to Belfast in 1936 but the episode remains odd. Marelle was treated under her own name, leaving no mystery as to her identity; presumably Theo was in the offing, and Rosemary and her husband probably had arrived from America by now. The funeral was held at a crematorium in Crawley, north Sussex on 7 January. Soon afterwards Dale was committed for trial, for causing death by dangerous driving; in March he was acquitted, it being found that Marelle had walked in front of the car, giving it no time to stop.
Theo’s health might have been failing and he now went to live with Rosemary and Charles Warner in Washington. In contrast to the general story of wedlock told in these pages, the Warners enjoyed a happy marriage. Charles had continued in the armed services after the War, serving in posts that demanded high intellectual capacity; inter alia he contributed to several war histories, and in the early 1950s spent two years as military attaché at the US embassy in London. Next he moved to Johns Hopkins University Washington DC, leading advanced work in operations research. Rosemary too had impressive skills and interests; the latter including the Washington Opera Society and the National Symphony Orchestra.
Theo returned to Britain in October 1968. Probably by now he needed an advanced level of care, less financially demanding in a welfare state than in America. Theodore Thomson Flynn died in a nursing home at Liss Hampshire, 23 October 1968. To Peggy Glanville-Hicks, Rosemary wrote, ‘We were glad for his sake the end came when it did as he had lost all the attributes that make life worth living’. His ashes were scattered in same location as Marelle’s. Whoever made this decision, perhaps it was the confirm a final unity between husband and wife.
In 1972 Rosemary and Charles left Washington to live in France. Perhaps they returned to the place where she lived as a girl in the 1920s. Rosemary contracted cancer and was taken to U.S. Air Force Hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, where she died at the end of June 1981. Charles lived until he was 91 and died of heart failure at his home in Limeuil, France on 21 August 1999.