Wicked Ways

Just got these two books from Amazon and cannot wait to dive in. I have been on a Flynn kick since his birthday celebration on June 20  [ I took the day off  from work for the occasion ]. Being a fellow Gemini,  I have always felt a special connection with the last swashbuckler. In addition, he died the year I was born. Tomorrow at 1pm PST on TCM they are having a rare showing of 1958's ' Too Much, Too Soon ' in which he plays an aging and quite burnt out John Barrymore. In fact Flynn himself was a burnt out shell of a man when he made this movie and he would be dead some 16 months after it's release in May 1958.  I saw this film, just once years ago, on an extinct  TV station called KCOP channel 13 out of Los Angeles. As far as I know this movie hasn't been shown on TCM before, so I hope you can understand my excitement. As for the books, I have several bios on Errol in my library, a couple of the best are his autobiography ' My Wicked, Wicked Ways' which I first read as a mere lad of fifteen and ' Inherited Risk ' by Jeffrey Meyers which is a duel bio about Errol and his only son Sean, who was reported MIA in Vietnam while working as a photojournalist there in 1970.  Both of these new books have gotten fairly high marks from film buffs and Flynn fans so I was thrilled to free up some hard earned cash and finally get them [ ' Slept Here 'was published in 2009 and ' Errol & Olivia'  in 2010 ]  Maybe I will review them after I plunge in the deep, murky water of Olivia and Flynn's working relationship and the sad, sordid, ghostly goings on at Mulholland House. So much of Flynn and the people he knew and touched in his life had somewhat sad endings: His son Sean dead in 1970, one of his daughters Arnella died in 1998 at age 44 and Mulholland House itself destroyed in the 1990's split up into parcels of land, sold to the highest bidder. Lots of ghosts to deal with. Wish me luck.

Underrated as Soames Forsythe in 1949's That Forsythe Woman with Greer Garson, Robert Young and Janet Leigh