My Wicked, Wicked Ways [antikvár]

Introduction to the Cooper Square Press Edition j/n 1958, while living in Jamaica, Errol Flynn hired the ghostwriter Earl Conrad—a literary stand-in—to help him write a scandalous book, guaranteed to offend everyone he knew. From August to October, Flynn dictated and Conrad wrote what later became My Wicked, Wicked Ways. According to Flynn's teenage girlfriend, Beverly Aadland (who was surely exaggerating), Conrad was usually drunk, spent most of his time chasing Jamaican women, and did little more than ask a lot of questions. Conrad had an ironclad contract with the publisher, Putnam. Flynn, who had to finish the book in order to get the money to build his long-planned dream house, couldn't get rid of him. "He was basically a door stop," Beverly said, "with a paid vacation." Whatever his faults, Conrad certainly helped Flynn produce a lively, amusing, and extremely successful book—the most entertaining autobiography ever written by an actor. In his negative portrait of Flynn in his roman á clef, Crane Eden (1962), Conrad described the desperate context: "He was broke or very hard up. Crane hadn't had a big picture recently; he was poking about looking for any kind of proposition, bits on television, partnership movie productions, business deals of any kind. These were the movements of an artist in trouble." When his estranged third wife, Pat Wymore, thinking of all the people Flynn intended to libel, asked why he didn't wait another ten years to write the book, he replied: "In another ten years I may be dead." By the time his book was posthumously published in December 1959, Flynn had virtually killed himself with dissipation and readers were prepared to believe almost anything he said about himself. In life, Flynn habitually disparaged himself, drew fire from others, and often took the blame when he wasn't guilty. On his trip to the Spanish Civil War, he was the victim of malicious lies perpetrated by his pro-Nazi friend, Hermann Erben. Afterward, he became the target of spite against Hollywood.