National Post (National Edition)
Errol Flynn, warts and all
How the famed but broke film star met his end in Vancouver
Over July and August, more than five million foreigners will come to Canada on their summer vacation. For the rest of the summer, the National Post presents this series on the revolutionaries, luminaries and criminals who have taken time out from shaping world events to pay us a visit — and how that visit shaped them. Today, the time Hollywood star Errol Flynn came to Vancouver … and came back in a box.
Only hours before, Errol Flynn had a drink in his hand and in his signature highbrow accent, was regaling Vancouver society with tales of globetrotting swashbuckle.
Fifty years old and dressed in a mauve, open-necked shirt, the energetic Flynn had an endless library of gossip and anecdotes at his command. He had dodged shellfire during the Spanish Civil War, hung out in the mountains with rebel leader Fidel Castro during the Cuban Revolution, and there was that one time his friends pranked him by propping up the corpse of actor John Barrymore on his couch.
But a massive heart attack later, and the actor was laid up on a cold stainless steel table as Canadian pathologists broke apart his ribs with hand tools, sifted through his liquor-ravaged organs and scrutinized his legendary genitalia.
“It seemed, I thought at the time, an ignominious end for a famous movie star,” Vancouver coroner Glen McDonald would write later. “But that’s life. That’s death.”
The coroner, just like most Canadians of the period, knew Errol Flynn best as the erudite, impossibly handsome star of films such as The Adventures of Robin Hood, Captain Blood, The Charge of the Light Brigade and Northern Pursuit, where he played a Nazi-fighting Mountie.
But by 1959, the man who had once stood as Hollywood’s most dashing hero was dealing with the sobering reality of a career on the rocks.
“I had by now made about 45 pictures, but what had I become? I knew all too well: a phallic symbol. All around the world I was, as a name and personality, equated with sex,” Flynn wrote in My Wicked, Wicked Ways, an autobiography published shortly after his fateful trip to Vancouver.
He was also broke. A filmed-in-Italy production of The Story of William Tell had been a catastrophic loss, he was in trouble with the IRS and with a succession of wives demanding back alimony, Flynn had come to Canada to finalize the sale of his beloved Zaca, a 118-foot luxury sailing yacht that — according to legend — had been fitted with the rigging from Canada’s famed Bluenose.
Flynn encountered a press scrum when he arrived at the Vancouver airport, where a local reporter asked him why he constantly seemed to be surrounded by underage girls. Flynn shot back “because they f--k so good.”
The question had likely been prompted by the presence of Flynn’s girlfriend, Beverly Aadland, a 17-year-old dancer he had met two years earlier under the false pretense of wanting to cast her in an upcoming film.
Of the Vancouverites lucky enough to get a sighting of the star, they would later say they were shocked at Flynn’s haggard, bloated condition. Of course, they could have no idea of how truly riddled with disease their visitor had become.
Eighteen years before, when Flynn had tried to enlist for the Second World War, the U.S. military had rejected him as 4-F due to a cocktail of ailments including venereal disease, an enlarged heart and a benign lung tumour.
Two more decades of drinking, womanizing and even heroin use had not helped, and by the time Flynn lit up his first cigarette on British Columbian soil, he was essentially a walking time bomb.
Nevertheless, by all accounts Flynn’s final days under the wet pall of a West Coast autumn had been merry enough.
It was only when his host, yacht buyer Georgia Caldough, drove his famous guest to the
It seemed an ignominious end for a famous movie star. But that’s death
airport that Flynn — who had been feeling ill for some time — suddenly became overwhelmed with pain.
The actor was sped to the home of Dr. Grant Gould, who gave the patient a shot of morphine and then, in a questionable move for a physician, invited his friends over to meet the ailing actor.
“For two hours Flynn kept them spellbound with stories of movie greats,” read a contemporary account. And then, abruptly, he entered the doctor’s bedroom for a lie-down, telling the guests “I shall return.”
Twenty minutes later, the guests heard the screams of Beverley Aadland.
Glen McDonald was Vancouver’s coroner for more than 26 years, but for a man who processed 1,100 bodies a year, he had a uniquely funloving manner.
For instance, Mr. McDonald did not visit schools warning children of the perils of drug abuse, he showed them his “Fabulous Traveling Wax Museum and Candy Cane Show”; a macabre exhibition showing aborted fetuses, a heart shattered by gunshot, cancer-riddled lungs and other curiosities from the morgue.
On the night of Oct. 14, Mr. McDonald had been “looking forward to a gin and tonic and dinner,” he wrote in his jaunty 1985 memoir, How Come I’m Dead?, when an ambulance showed up with a “beauty” for him.
The coroner had counted Flynn as one of his cinematic heroes, but the man carried in on a stretcher “was sallow and a bit puffy and he looked an awful lot older than his 50 years,” he would write.
Flynn’s heart had definitely stopped, but all his other organs were so shot that the coroner ultimately ruled his death as due to “natural causes.”
The most notably damaged organ, it turned out, was Flynn’s penis, which was beset by a collection of enormous genital warts.
The warts were so large, in fact, that the city’s chief pathologist, Tom Harmon, removed them and preserved the specimens in formaldehyde with an eye of having them serve as a teaching aid to future generations of British Columbia doctors.
To this day, a piece of Flynn might still have resided in Canada if the bizarre act had not been caught by Mr. McDonald — who immediately scotch-taped the warts back into place.
Fortunately for Mr. McDonald, even as the body was subjected to a second autopsy in Los Angeles, nobody ever mentioned the Canadians’ bizarre treatment of the late star’s famed member.
“How big was Errol Flynn’s penis?” wrote Mr. McDonald in 1985. “Errol Flynn was no larger and no smaller in his stature, his jewels, his endowment, than any other man. So there may well be hope for the inferior-feeling males of the world if, indeed, that’s the sort of thing they’re concerned about.”