Read it, and then give it to the nearest 12-year old as an act of love: you’ll be telling that kid life isn’t something to be endured, but enjoyed. Ideally, you’d have first read this book as a twelve-year old boy (like I did) it would have made the world seem like a wider place for you and a carnival sideshow at every turn. It’s not a tell-all, confessional in the modern Tatum O’Neil sense, though: it’s more of a picaresque travel through the mind of a fascinating, dissipated man. He lies and charms as he writes of his many affairs-some with starlets, others with farmer’s daughters.

In My Wicked, Wicked Ways, Flynn presents himself as a heroically bad example, someone whose life is veers toward Gargantua and Pantagruel: He starts off claiming to have been a slave trader (but just as a sideline) and a person who sailed through Caribbean hurricanes. For them, he was the measure of a man: anyone who was smooth with the ladies was “in like Flynn.” In his off-hours, he was a “ladykiller”-and for that the boys and lonely young men in the movie theaters loved him. He was the movie pirate, the best Robin Hood, and the hero with the fastest sword. Two books that avoid those tiresome pitfalls are Errol Flynn’s My Wicked Wicked Ways and Harpo Speaks!, by Harpo Marx.Įrrol Flynn, whose greatest acting successes were in the thirties and forties, was the lead actor of a now-dead film genre, the swashbuckler. Some go into details of an abusive past (see Tatum O’Neil’s memoir, A Paper Life) while others are obviously written as a way to guard a legacy (Diana Ross, Secrets of a Sparrow).

Most movie-star memoirs are tiresome affairs: after a few details on the actor’s childhood, we’re treated to some New Age philosophy then asked to imagine world peace. Errol Flynn starts off claiming to have been a slave trader (but just as a sideline).

My wicked wicked ways