BOOK REVIEW

Professor Lincoln D. Hurst

Printed by permission of the author

PROFESSOR'S GRADE: B-

Jeffrey Meyers, the prolific biographer best known for his works on such luminous literary figures as D. H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, several years ago turned his hand to writing books about Hollywood film actors, specifically Humphrey Bogart (1997) and Gary Cooper (1998). This month (June, 2002) he has once again directed his laser-beam intellect and fastidious writing style toward Tinseltown with INHERITED RISK, the much-anticipated father-son biography of Errol and Sean Flynn.

At first blush, this is a dazzling book. The amount of work Meyers has put into it is obvious from the start. He has interviewed and received letters from an impressive number of people who have something to say about both Flynns. These include Errol's daughter Rory - a major source of the book - and Flynn's last companion, Beverly Aadland. Noticeably absent, however, are Flynn's eldest daughter, Deirdre, and his third and last wife, Patrice Wymore Flynn, both of whom declined to be interviewed for the book. For the sections on Sean, Meyers was given a lot of time and information by Tim Page, author of DANGER ON THE EDGE OF TOWN. He has also done a large amount of archival homework, travelling to Southern California and burrowing into the official Warner Brothers files at the Doheny Library at USC, the library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, etc. This is the sort of thing for which Meyers is well-known (one of the reviewers on the back of the dust-jacket refers to him as "a literary truffle hound.")

Meyers, who is said by his publisher to have written forty books, is a gifted and at times brilliant biographer. Cleverness abounds in all his books. At one point in INHERITED RISK, for instance, he draws a comparison between the cannibals of New Guinea and the headhunters of Hollywood (p. 100). Or, speaking of Flynn's marriage to Lili Damita, Meyers refers to the premier of "Captain Blood" (1935), when Lili Damita tearfully said "tonight I have lost my husband." He then recalls the words of Peter Blood (referring to his previous pact with the villainous Levasseur): "So ends a partnership that should never have begun" (p. 130). Meyers is clearly a clever man.

The author repeatedly brings into his treatment of Flynn his knowledge of the world's great literature - again, a practice for which he is well-known. Meyers can take almost any figure and make him acceptable from a literary point of view. Who else could find a parallel between Errol Flynn and Edgar Allan Poe? One can imagine in the future a Meyers biography of Bugsy Siegel, with frequent allusions to Julius Caesar, Faust, and MacBeth.

Meyers is, in short, a man who knows how to write - he is acutely aware of the infinite variety of ways a noun can bump up against a verb, and his writing is suffused with flashes of brilliance. The opening paragraph on Errol (p. 59), for instance, grabs the reader's attention immediately, and hints of the quality to come:

"What heritage made Sean Flynn so ambivalent about his father? What was the burden he had to overcome, the image he wanted to exalt and erase? In many ways Errol Flynn was a dream father. For fifteen years, as graceful hero and daredevil swordsman, he embodied the Hollywood star. He was a superb rider, boxer, swimmer, scuba-diver and sailor; tennis, cricket and polo player, as well as an accomplished pilot. His beauty and athleticism, his rebellious spirit and seductive charm made him irresistibly attractive. Before becoming an actor he had led an adventurous life in Australia and New Guinea. He was also a talented writer who reported on the Spanish Civil War and the Castro revolution in Cuba, and his journalism was later collected in book form. He wrote two plays and two screenplays, two exciting novels and the best autobiography by an actor. A witty, well-read and cultured man, he had an excellent collection of paintings. He took a keen interest in his father's biological research and accompanied him on scientific expeditions. He earned enormous sums of money, and owned mansions, extensive property and a series of yachts."

That's good writing.

Meyers's gift for finding parallels between disparate people's lives is especially impressive. I found those between the lives of John Barrymore and Flynn to be especially compelling and insightful - more so than those between Errol and Sean.

Regarding Sean, I will say at the outset that I do not feel competent to judge the validity of Meyers' sections which recreate his last days. Some of it I found persuasive, but other parts - especially some of the links in the chain of logic - I felt to be a bit weak. It seemed to me that his recreation of "the facts" is a bit too confident when dealing with mainly hearsay evidence. Basing his central conclusion largely on the testimony of one source, Meyers asserts that Sean was drugged and then (possibly) buried alive. That, of course, contradicts the usual practice of Sean's captors, the vicious Khmer Rouge, for whom execution/murder by shooting (or rifle-butting) the back of the skull had become a science. But I will let those who know more about the Vietnam war than I comment on that feature of INHERITED RISK. My own feeling is that we will always be confined to speculation about Sean; there will always be loose threads; and we will never ultimately know for certain how he met his sad end.

Many people will be impressed with INHERITED RISK. As one would expect coming from this author (and publisher), it is absorbing, careful, and refreshingly free of typos and misprints (Simon & Schuster are to be congratulated; but, of course, they don't pay their flotilla of proof-readers for nothing!). Also, compared to the inept trash-bios of Charles Higham and David Bret, Meyers' book on Flynn is relatively free of distortions and factual blunders.

However, they do occur - most of them of the minor variety. The following are those I found during my first reading:

* On p. 63 Meyers gets Errol's mother's name wrong - it was Lily Mary Young, not "Mary Lily Young."

* Errol was not born "Errol Leslie Thomson Flynn" (p. 67) but "Errol Leslie Flynn" -"Thomson" was added in the early 1940's as a way of honoring his father.

* Flynn's "soppy brother" in "The Charge of the Light Brigade" (played by Patric Knowles) was not "killed in the charge" (p. 128); he was sent away by Flynn with a forged dispatch to Sir Charles Macefield (Henry Stephenson) before the charge.

* According to Meyers, Flynn "put his pet monkey, Chico, into the film ["The Sea Hawk,"1940] and joked around with him" (p. 157). In fact Errol didn't acquire Chico until the mid-1940's, several years after the death of Arno.

* Meyers also falls into the trap of following Higham's flawed chronology for the death of Arno, assuming with Higham that the dog fell overboard and drowned "in July 1941" - p.161). Arno was actually lost in late August, and Meyers should have known better. Jimmy Fidler's derisive editorial about Flynn's indifference to recovering the dog's body (which sparked the famous restaurant brawl on Sept. 22) was printed in the middle of September (if Arno was lost in July, why the two month delay?)

* On p. 163 the first name of Errol's major domo Alexandre is spelled "Alexander."

* On p. 215 "Adventures of Don Juan" is wrongly given the definite article - "THE Adventures of Don Juan," although elsewhere it is listed in the correct, anarthrous form.

* On p. 221 Meyers claims that Thomson Productions made "only two poor movies" for Warner Brothers - "Uncertain Glory" (1944) and "Cry Wolf " (1947). Actually, there were three - "Never Say Goodbye" (1946) was a Thompson production (Clifford McCarty, who compiled the filmography for THE FILMS OF ERROL FLYNN, failed to record this).

* On p. 231 Meyers mistakenly writes that Flynn referred to Princess Irene Ghika as "the Greek." He actually called her (with a slight touch of cruelty) "the Geek" - a play on her name.

* On p. 262 it is said that Flynn was "not even nominated" for the best supporting actor Oscar for "The Sun Also Rises" (1957), and that this was "a sign of his unpopularity in Hollywood." Wrong. Meyers is not in full possession of the facts here - facts which will soon be forthcoming.

* On p. 299 Myers states that Mulholland House was owned by Ricky Nelson, and then acquired by the gospel writer Stuart Hamblen; in fact Hamblen owned it in the 1970's, BEFORE it was owned by Nelson and his family.

* In the section on "Documentaries on Errol Flynn" (p. 356), the television series "Mysteries and Scandals" is said to have been produced by "British Television" (it was produced by the American "E" network).

* On the same page the British Channel 4 documentary, "Secret Lives: Errol Flynn," is listed as "The Secret Lives of Errol Flynn," as if Flynn had more than one life! (Perhaps Meyers has here confused the documentary with the book by Michael Freedland, THE TWO LIVES OF ERROL FLYNN?) Meyers also does not include on his list the excellent documentary on Flynn produced and narrated by Barry Norman for his BBC "Hollywood Greats" series (strangely, in his text Meyers quotes from Norman's book of the same title which accompanied the series).

Another flaw in INHERITED RISK is that Meyers oversimplifies some things, while overstating others. On p. 144, for example, he writes that "Flynn prided himself on doing most of the difficult and dangerous stunts in his early films. (Later, as he lost interest in his stereotyped roles, his stunts were performed by Buster Wiles . . ."). The truth is that Flynn did some of the dangerous stunts in his earliest films, but other of the stunts in these same films were done by Wiles and others. As his films progressed, of course, more and more of the stunts were done by Wiles, Jim Fleming, Don Turner, etc. (As Buster liked to say when trying to impress a female friend, "You know, I do all the really important stuff in Errol's films; then he does my close-ups.")

For a case of overstatement, Flynn is said to have been "reduced to a freak show" on Red Skelton's television program in 1959 (p. 293). A freak show? Wouldn't it be more accurate (although not as dramatic) to say that Flynn was merely being a sad parody of his current self?

All the way through the book Meyers displays an unfortunate tendency to fall short of putting things into their proper perspective by failing to give the complete story. On p. 155, for example, he recounts Olivia de Havilland's dispute with her director, Mike Curtiz, on the set of "The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex" (1939). It seems Olivia collapsed into a fit of hysterics, causing the whole cast and crew to shut down and go home for the day. For the readers of Meyers book, this puts Olivia into a very bad light. But he does not tell his readers WHY she was hysterical. The truth is that at the time she was under great emotional strain as the victim of Jack Warner's inexplicably cruel and unjust campaign against her. Instead of rewarding her for her success, Warner wanted to punish "this upstart" for her recent success as Melanie in "Gone with the Wind" (1939).

The same tendency is true of anything involving religion. Because of his literary orientation, Meyers has little time for religious considerations. Thus, in quoting from Flynn's essay "Faith?", he omits all reference to Flynn's longing for a faith in God (which, after all, is the whole point of the piece), and thereby fails to take into account a large part of Flynn's personal puzzle. Similarly, when discussing Flynn's last meeting with David Niven in 1958, Meyers writes that "Niven noted how his physical deterioration went with a new inward peace, an honest confrontation with himself that he'd been searching for in his diaries: 'he had been  doing himself grave damage, the face was puffy and blotchy . . . but there was an internal calm and a genuineness about him that I had never seen before'" (p. 261). It is noteworthy that Meyers does not record Flynn's own explanation for his "calm and genuineness," which he related to the astonished Niven: he had been reading the Bible.

The book, as noted, is full of literary allusions, some of which are brilliant. Discussing Errol's self-styled "wickedness," Meyers brings in Coleridge's comment about Lord Byron: he was "a wicked lord who, from morbid and restless vanity, pretended to be ten times more wicked than he was" (p. 286). But there are points where Meyers' reaching for the correct literary allusion may in fact cause him to overreach himself. One even gets the feeling at points that the selection of the incidents in Flynn's life are there in order to serve the parallels, rather than vice versa. This is particularly true of the incident of the "theft" of Barrymore's corpse from the funeral home (p. 169), of which Meyers writes: "The body was like the Commendatore in Mozart's opera, come to drag Don Giovanni [i.e. Flynn] down to Hell." A good try, but it is hard to take the allusion seriously, particularly since the incident never took place (Meyers himself admit this a few sentences earlier). Thus a myth is being used to embellish a myth. The outrageous story of Barrymore's corpse, which Flynn loved to tell, started as a whimsical question of Buster Wiles ("I wonder what would happen if we were to steal Barrymore's body and then . . . .");  it was quickly canonized by Flynn and others to became part of the official Flynn mythology. Taking a metaphysical moment from Mozart and attaching it to an incident which never took place in Flynn's life is, well, a bit over the top.

Also, on p. 193 one finds this rather bizarre comment: "Like many American artists - from Edgar Poe to Truman Capote - Flynn set out to destroy himself." Flynn an "American artist"? One can be forgiven for detecting a loud guffaw from the direction of The Garden of Everlasting Peace in Glendale. Again, there is a procrustean feel to Meyers' treatment; he seems at points to be forcing Errol's life to fit into his cherished literary parallels.

Then there are those places where Meyers "corrects" and "reshapes" quotations to make them a bit more acceptable to his oh-so literary-minded audience. See, for instance, the Mickey Rooney quote on p. 238. In the documentary "Portrait of a Swashbuckler," Rooney said that "Errol woke up one morning and he wasn't Robin Hood any more ... and it killed him." In Meyers book the sentence becomes, "He woke up one morning and he wasn't Robin Hood any more, and that killed him." These are tiny changes, of course. Literary license, perhaps. But it creates suspicion: if Meyers is willing to "fudge" on the tiny details, what other things might he be "fudging"? When dealing with quotes, the actual wording should be respected. Similarly, Meyers cleans up and corrects Flynn's adolescent spelling and punctuation in the letter he wrote at age 13 to his London girlfriend (p. 72). Why not leave the spelling as is - using "sic" to indicate the solecisms (e.g. Flynn's "Bai Jove" is corrected by Meyers to"By Jove")?

There are other anomalies in INHERITED RISK. In one of his appendices (p. 326), Meyers breaks down Flynn's films into three categories: "best," "seeable," and "poor." With all due respect to Meyers, the list is idiotic - it looks as if it was compiled by a blindfolded chimpanzee. Is "The Roots of Heaven" (1958) really a better film than "They Died with Their Boots On" (1941) or "Adventures of Don Juan" (1949)? What cinematic myopia would place "The Sisters" (1938), "Edge of Darkness" (1943), and "Northern Pursuit" (1943) - not to mention "Silver River" (1948) - into the "poor" category? The inherent absurdity of the rankings makes one wonder if Meyers has actually watched all the movies. Has he fast-forwarded his way through them? Or has he simply read Rudy Behlmer's summaries in THE FILMS OF ERROL FLYNN?

In a similar vein, on p. 171, Meyers writes that "most of [Flynn's] movies between "The Sea Hawk" (1940) and "The Sun Also Rises" (1957) were boring to watch and even more boring to make." These "boring" films would necessarily include, among others, "They Died With Their Boots On," "Gentleman Jim," "Edge of Darkness," "Northern Pursuit," "Objective Burma," and "Adventures of Don Juan." While such fare might indeed be boring for literary snobs, there may be those who purchase Meyers' account of Flynn's life and find it "boring to read."

The quotations from Flynn's Majorca, Rome, and Jamaican diaries are interesting, but they may raise some eyebrows at points. For instance, is the business (no pun intended) at the top of p. 236 about women (in this case Flynn's third wife) defecating really necessary (not to mention the added citation of Jonathan Swift's notorious poem, "Celia Sh-ts," on p. 345)? This is clearly intended to embarrass Patrice Wymore Flynn, who did not work with Meyers on the book. It will, of course, cater to the more juvenile and sensational appetites of the baser readers who happen to buy the book ("Hey, man, did you see that 'sh-t stuff' on p. 345? Wasn't that cool?"). Again, one expects a discriminating author of Meyer's standing to be more disciplined than that, and resist the obvious temptation to record such sensitive, private information which, in my view, serves no useful purpose.

Also, in the near future some will find the attribution of Flynn's unpublished Spanish Civil War diary to "the Rory Flynn collection" puzzling, to say the least; others will see it as deliberately and defiantly cheeky - a bit of "in your face" on Meyers' part. He knows, or should know, that the diary belonged for many years to Deirdre Flynn, and that she sold it at auction in November of 2000 to a private party, who now owns the publishing rights to it. It has never part of "the Rory Flynn collection."

Ultimately, a great deal of INHERITED RISK is a rehash of what has been available about Flynn for years. (In fairness, of course, it might be added that a book that doesn't to some extent "rehash" what has been available elsewhere would be a very short book). Some new, interesting information has been added for Flynn's early years, especially the troubles that Errol's father, Professor Theodore Thomson Flynn, had with his university regarding alleged misappropriation of funds.

It is, however, Meyers' depiction of Flynn which constitutes the biggest problem with this book, and which may invite the most criticism. The Errol Flynn who inhabits these pages will not be recognized by many who were closest to him. He comes across as a tragic, forlorn, dejected, and melancholic sociopath. Because of the flow of ugly adjectives and nouns which are applied to Errol (e.g. "financially irresponsible and morally dissolute, a drug-taker and heavy drinker . . . fond of low life" [p. 59], "[a] panting maniac" [p. 278], "possibly brain damaged" [p. 280], etc.), the perspicacious reader will suspect that Meyers does not like Errol very much.

This may explain a striking feature of the book regarding the names Meyers uses for his two main characters. In the sections regarding Sean (pp. 17-56, 307-324), it is always "Errol" - just as it is always "Sean" whenever Meyers is dealing with Sean alone, apart from Errol. But when he is dealing with Errol alone, apart from Sean (which occupies the bulk of the book, 244 pages), it is always "Flynn." I have my doubts that Meyers is aware of this, but it is a telltale sign of the emotional distance he keeps from Errol.

Meyers also has a penchant for painting things as black as possible (a subtitle of the book might have been "Tales from the Darkside"). On p. 226 Vincent Sherman's wife was "horrified" when, during a visit up at Mulholland House, Errol playfully referred to his little daughter Deirdre's budding breasts. What Sherman actually says is that she was "shocked." Meyers even quotes Sherman several sentences later to the effect that "Errol's manner was so playful, so utterly lacking in prurience, that no one could take offence." Meyers knows there is a subtle yet enormous nuance of meaning between the words "shocked" and "horrified."

The tendency to put Flynn in a darker rather than positive light also surfaces in Meyers' handling of Basil Rathbone. All biography naturally involves some shading of details which usually goes under the heading of literary license. But the deliberate reshaping of quotes by rearrangement and omission, for the purpose of producing the desired result, is fundamentally disingenuous, and a distinct "no-no" for a front-rank biographer. At the top of p. 146, Rathbone is rather duplicitously quoted by Meyers as writing the following about Flynn:

"It was always 'dear old Bazzz,' and he would flash that smile that was both defiant and cruel . . . His greatest handicap was that he was incapable of taking himself or anyone else seriously. I don't think he had any ambition beyond 'living up' every moment of his life to the maximum of his physical capacity, and making money . . . He was monstrously lazy and self-indulgent, relying on a magnificent body to keep him going, and he had an insidious flair for making trouble, mostly for himself. I believe him to have been quite fearless, and subconsciously possessed of his own self-destruction."

Of course, Meyers wants that last part - "subconsciously possessed of his own self-destruction" - to be the climax of the quote, since it so beautifully contributes to his overall scheme of the father-son shared death-wish. But it leaves the reader with a false impression of what Rathbone actually wrote about Flynn. For one thing, Meyers commits the cardinal sin of rearranging the ORDER of the quotation. "Dear old Bazzz" actually comes near the end, not the beginning, of Rathbone's long comment on Flynn. Second, Meyers cunningly omits the final portion of the paragraph, which tempers the previous hostile-sounding comments enormously, and places Flynn in a much more positive light. This is how Rathbone ACTUALLY ends the paragraph:

"I believe him to have been quite fearless, and subconsciously possessed of his own self-destruction. It was always 'Dear old Bazzz," and he would flash that smile that was both defiant and cruel, but which for me always had a tinge of affection it it. We only crossed swords, never words, and he was always generous and appreciative of my work. I liked him, and he liked me."

Thus the full quote, with the phrases in their correct order, gives the reader an utterly different impression of what Rathbone wrote about Flynn.

Flynn may also be given the short end of the stick on p. 231, where Meyers accuses him of "atavistic puritanism" because he hesitated to go nude at a nudist colony. But is "puritanism" - atavistic or not - the real reason? It couldn't have had something to do with the fact that Flynn was a world celebrity, and didn't want to run the risk of photos being taken of him cavorting naked within a mass of human flesh in a nudist colony? And yet later in the book Meyers records with some amount of subtle glee that Errol purposely shocked his mother by swimming nude at the beach in Jamaica (p. 255). Did Meyers or his editor(s) notice this discrepancy?

The question therefore lingers: Does Meyers ever discover the real Errol Flynn in this book? Does he actually get under his skin (or that of Sean for that matter)? The answer, I fear, must be no, despite what Meyers and his publicists say. The claim to have solved the enigma of who - or what - Errol was is overblown. Meyers, in my opinion, is far too detached in his literary mien to explore effectively a man like Flynn.  His Flynn is a two-dimensional, black-and-white figure who set out to destroy himself. The real-life Flynn was an immensely complex, Technicolor, three-dimensional and kaleidoscopic personality. Meyers is, of course, a very careful writer; but he also tends to be a rather dispassionate, joyless writer, with an occasional tendency toward shading and over simplification. I got little sense, if any, of the joi-de-vivre of the man Flynn in this book. Errol was at heart a very, very funny man, as his MY WICKED, WICKED WAYS attests - it is one of the funniest books to be published in the twentieth century.

Meyers is, as mentioned several times, extremely literate, but at points he also comes across to the reader as a something of a snob. On p. 199 he remarks that "Nora was very unsophisticated. She couldn't even remember that white wine went with fish and red with meat." Perhaps it is not accidental that on the dust jacket of INHERITED RISK Meyers, depicted as Rick in "Casablanca," is drinking only the best bourbon - Jack Daniels. But does Jack Daniels really go with the white dinner jacket he's wearing?

Yet there is nothing humorous about INHERITED RISK. The whole thing is written from the point of view of Greek tragedy. It is doubtful that after reading it the reader will have chuckled even once. This is a major failing in a biography of Flynn. The ever-so-literate Meyers, in all his zeal to analyze Flynn - to dissect him into his component parts and isolate his various destructive influences - has allowed the real Flynn to elude him. What happens to Flynn in this book is what happens to anything when you begin to dissect it; it collapses on the operating table and dies. The Flynn of this biography never really came to life for me.
 

As I've said, the suspicion lingers that Meyers may at points "fudge" things slightly so as to make the points he wants to make. He writes, for instance (p. 199), that "while making "Kim" (1951), [Errol] sent a photo of himself with mustache and goatee, and told 'Darling Rory': 'Don't get scared when I come home like this! Errol'" Here Meyers commits a cardinal biographical sin: "Thou shalt not be found out!" Or, putting it differently, "When writing a man's biography, never say something about one daughter which can be refuted by another!" The photo (which has belonged to Deirdre Flynn for years) is actually inscribed to BOTH daughters, i.e. "Darling Sam and Rory . . . ." "Sam" was Flynn's favorite nickname for his Deirdre. That Meyers would deliberately cut her out of the inscription is, well, a bit naughty, and totally unnecessary! Could it have something to do with the fact that Deirdre Flynn would not agree to cooperate with him in the writing of the book? If true, such pettiness would be surprising for a writer of Meyers' reputation.

Refreshingly, on the other hand, Meyers is impatient of much of the rubbish that has been circulating about Errol Flynn for years. He has little time for those pigheaded nebishes who still refuse to believe what everyone who knew Flynn keep saying, that he was thoroughgoingly heterosexual. He will not tolerate stories that Flynn was bisexual, and with devastating wit and accuracy debunks the claim of the dipsomaniacal liar Truman Capote, who fantasized to anyone who would listen to him that he had had a one-night tryst with Flynn.  Meyers is also to be commended in that he has no use for the propagandistic (now bordering on maniacal) claims of Charles Higham that Flynn was a Nazi spy in the service of Hitler. He rightly observes that Flynn is the victim equally of the outrageous distortions of Higham and the "malicious lies" (p. 285) of Hermann F. Erben. He also correctly identifies Flynn's true life-long political leanings as left-wing and pacifistic (p. 131).

Meyers' treatment of Flynn's visit to the Spanish civil war in 1937 (pp. 131-142) is another strength of the book. It is balanced, well-written, and competently researched. He astutely concludes that Flynn was mercilessly used and duped by "his friend" Hermann F. Erben, the real villain of the piece. Meyers takes at face-value, however, that Flynn was wounded while in Madrid - something which is now highly dubious in the light of what Flynn himself wrote in his private, unpublished Spanish diary. The wound was almost certainly a publicity ploy triggered by a near-miss which Flynn had with some falling masonry.

A strange failing of the book is the bibliography at the end (pp. 354-356), which is infuriatingly selective. It contains only a fraction of the actual works which Meyers cites in his footnotes, with no apparent rhyme or reason for the inclusions and omissions. This often
means that, when reading a footnote in which Meyers mentions only the author and title of an item (e.g. "Flynn, Letters to Theodore and Conrad, p. 20-21") which is NOT included in the bibliography, the reader must go through all of the prior footnotes to find the first citation of that item in order to get the full publishing details. This is a gigantic inconvenience - it would be so much easier to be able to go to the bibliography and look up the item alphabetically. The bibliography for Sean (p. 356) is even more bizarre, consisting of a mere seven items.

The index (pp. 359-368), on the other hand, which was compiled by Meyers' wife Valerie, is generally well-done, although it refers only the text of the book, not the footnotes. It is as useful as the bibliography is useless (she should have done the bibliography!)

Another major disappointment is the photo section. The few photos of Flynn and those connected with him have been previously published, and will be well-known to anyone familiar with Flynn's life, with the exception of a lovely snapshot (obtained from Rudy Behlmer) of Lili Damita on the set of "The Adventures of Robin Hood." Looking at this never-before-seen pose of "Tiger Lil," one can easily see why Errol fell for her.

Meyers' INHERITED RISK is not your standard film-star biography. This, of course, is not necessary a mark against it. But a real biography of Flynn would contain a reasonable description and analysis of Flynn's films. With the exception of a few of titles (e.g. "The Adventures of Robin Hood," "The Sea Hawk," and "The Roots of Heaven"), most of the films are treated fleetingly - in a sentence or two - or in groups. Thus anyone hoping to find here a careful discussion of the films of Flynn will be disappointed.

Nor is the book, despite the dual photos on the front of the dust-jacket and the publicity blurbs of Simon and Schuster, really an analysis of the relationship of the two men, Errol and Sean, along the lines of Sir Edmund Goss' intense FATHER AND SON. The disparity in the treatments is made clear by the arrangement - Sean constitutes the endpapers, totaling a mere 49 pages, while the main section dealing with Errol takes up 244 pages. There is thus a question of balance.

Also, Meyers' central idea of Greek tragedy - that the fatal character flaw of the father was reproduced in the son, leading to the latter's inevitable doom, does not really come off, no matter how valiantly Meyers tries. The obvious superficial links and similarities of the two men notwithstanding (i.e. both were poor students, adventurers, womanizers, actors, substance users, and war correspondents), Errol and Sean led separate and very different lives, and it is questionable that Sean was as obsessed and imitative of his father as Meyers' neat scenario would have us believe.

Meyers' IHERITED RISK is therefore something of a mixed blessing. It has major strengths and weaknesses. Its strengths are its careful writing, meticulous research, often brilliant literary parallels, and zesty wit (yet without being funny). It is by far the most minutely researched and cleverly written biography of Flynn to appear to date, and for this Meyers is to be thanked.

But it can hardly be called a page-turner; there are points where the staid approach just doesn't hold one's attention. Another major weakness is the book's rather procrustean feel - that the lives of these two men are being stretched and cut to fit the particular thesis Meyers is pushing. There is the distinct impression of a deliberate (and at points rather cunning) shading of the facts. For that, and for the other weaknesses explored above, the book does not rate our unqualified approval. It is therefore awarded the grade of B-.

Or, if I were Siskel and Ebert, I would give it a rather unenthusiastic, luke-warm "thumbs up."

As one of my Princeton professors used to say, "Reading a book is a lot like eating fish: you have to spit out the bones." There were a lot of bones I needed to spit out while reading Jeffrey Meyers' INHERITED RISK. But I can't really complain, for it was a decent, if not ultimately satisfying, meal.

Jeffrey Meyers, INHERITED RISK: ERROL AND SEAN FLYNN IN HOLLYWOOD AND VIET NAM

June, 2002
368 pages hardbound

Simon & Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, New York 10020

ISBN 0-7432-1090-5

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