“You go up and tell Mrs. Goldwyn what happened here tonight,” Sam instructed. “Say Nancy had to trust us for six sodas at thirty-five cents apiece. You come back with the money and see if you can’t scrounge seventy-five cents for a tip—but don’t tell Frances about the tip.”
* * * * *
Evenings were known to be gaudier in the old days. The Basil Rathbones gave a Louis XIV masquerade, and I was set to go as a shepherdess complete with live lamb, who had his hoofs gilded and fleece shampooed. I didn’t get there, but that’s a later story. Mrs. George Temple, Shirley’s mother, went to her first and only big Hollywood party and left a new ermine coat on a bed on top of a pile of others. When the time came to leave, she discovered that one distinguished guest had been taken violently ill in the bedroom with disastrous results to the furs, her ermine suffering most of all.
For one revel at his Mulholland Drive home, Errol Flynn imported a transvestite fairy dressed so skillfully as a girl that nobody guessed the secret. Errol had his swimming pool lit from below and brought on a team of high divers to brighten the evening. When his guests went on chattering, taking not a blind bit of notice of the performance, he dived headlong into the water in protest and refused to speak to anybody except the divers for the duration of the party.
“You’re so generous in many ways and so stingy in others,” I told him, years later. “You spent thousands on those parties, yet you wouldn’t buy a girl a box of candy or send her flowers when you could have saved yourself at least five lawsuits with a single rose each time.”
He worshiped John Barrymore and deliberately started the rumor that he was John’s illegitimate offspring. They came to a parting of the ways, however, when he invited “Father” up to Mulholland Drive. John, who was incontinent toward the end, forgot himself as he sat on a beautiful settee in the lavishly furnished living room that was Errol’s pride. That was the last time John was invited.
Water, as well as drugs and alcohol, attracted Errol. He was sun-bathing mother-naked one day on a sailboat in the Mediterranean when a sight-seeing craft loaded with American schoolteachers came by. He chose that moment to stand up and stretch. One gasping teacher fell overboard, covered in blushes, and he promptly plunged in to retrieve her.
Errol used to live directly across the street from me during his marriage to Lili Damita. All I had to do to pick up an item or two for the column was sit by my bedroom window and listen to them shrieking at each other. I got the low-down on their separation by just lying in bed and listening. It was a screaming, juicy bout.
I was all set to put it on the wire the next morning, when Errol came over in dressing gown and slippers at 7 A.M., got me out of bed, and begged me not to print it, saying they hadn’t even talked about a property settlement. Like a fool, I promised to keep silent until he gave me the cue. But he couldn’t keep his own secret and told Louella, who scooped me with my own story. I could have throttled him—but that’s Hollywood.
The last time I saw Errol was in Paris, when he was making The Roots of Heaven. He wanted his teen-age popsie to stay in the room while I interviewed him. She wouldn’t go, so I did, interview or no interview. But I kept a soft spot for him in my heart in spite of the several kinds of ruin he brought on himself.