Hollywood And Mallorca - Errol Flynn

Errol Flynn is remembered with a good deal of fondness in Mallorca. In 2009, to mark the one hundredth anniversary of his birth and fiftieth anniversary of his death, a number of articles appeared in the local press which, for the most part, overlooked negative aspects of his life and recalled a star of whom it was said that if there had been medals to be handed out to illustrious visitors who increased the profile of Mallorca throughout the world, then he would have been a recipient.

Flynn may well have raised Mallorca's profile, but the Mallorcans with whom he had contact - and there were many - perceived Flynn through a Mallorcan's eye. It wasn't necessarily the same eye through which others perceived him. How much Flynn really succeeded in raising the profile is, with hindsight, debatable. Indeed, it might be questionable as to how much the island would have wanted him to have raised the profile.

In yesterday's article, I said that Flynn was a regular vacationer. He was, but there was more to it than simple breaks from filming. Though he made various attempts at reviving his acting career through the 1950s, the truth was that by 1950, when he happened to come across the island, he was already washed up. There is a poignancy with yesterday's article which looked at Johnny Weissmüller's association with Mallorca. Both Flynn and Weissmüller were typecast, the latter far more so. Once the enthusiasm for swashbuckling and jungle stories had waned in Hollywood, there was nowhere for either of them to go. And for Flynn, the decline was swift, often undignified and often played out in Mallorca. He didn't holiday in Mallorca so much as hang out and get drunk.

Flynn's drinking was the stuff of legend, but not everyone subscribed to the view that he was a drunk. Riki Lash, interviewed in 2009, said he never saw Flynn drunk, but then there was the story, related five years ago, of Flynn going off on a hunting expedition to Son Serra de Marina with a group of locals from Maria de la Salut (the year was probably 1953). A bottle of his favourite drink, vodka, accompanied him on his day's shooting, not that alcohol featuring in a Mallorcan party day out was all that unusual. And any possible excess wouldn't have concerned the good people of Maria unduly when, following the hunt, Flynn arranged for a chicken dinner to which most of the population turned up just to get a glimpse of the Hollywood star.

Two years after that series of articles and so perhaps with less of the rose-tinted lens focussing on Flynn, "Mallorca Magazin" spoke, among others, to Martin Xamena, director of the Bon Sol hotel in Illetes. Flynn had a villa in Cas Catala (it was demolished in 1989) and there are photos of him dining on its terrace which date from 1955. Xamena, then a small child, remembered him as being very nice but also remembered that he always had a drink in his hand. The Bar Tirol in Palma was a favourite haunt of Flynn's, and the story goes that on one occasion he got so drunk in the bar that he had to be carried out unconscious. Another anecdote from that German article concerned a boozy trip out on Flynn's yacht, "Zaca", during which Flynn, having taken on board far too much, fell overboard and into the sea. For all this, in Illetes, his memory lives on. There is of course a plaque in his honour there.

Flynn was not alone in having been a Hollywood star who overindulged in Mallorca. Ava Gardner, looked upon perhaps rather differently and considered more refined owing to her association with Robert Graves, was known to like a drink or two herself, though Riki Lash offered an alternative view in that 2009 interview. Her drunkenness was famous, he remarked, but he didn't think that she drank more than usual. What seemed like drunkenness, he observed, was often actually a marijuana high.

Through the Mallorcan's eye, Flynn was no doubt good news. But the relationship wasn't as positive as it might have been. To a potential tourism market, especially an American one, Flynn was an outcast from Hollywood and his reputation was tarnished. He may have been, where the Mallorcans have been concerned, a bit of a lad and a genial good bloke, but was he the right image for the island? Some still maintain that he was, and a comparison is made with a later Hollywood star, Michael Douglas. Flynn was accessible in a way that Douglas hasn't been, but then Douglas's contribution to Mallorca has been of a very different order.

There again, maybe the image was right and always has been. It is one that has cultivated the obsession with celebrities in Mallorca, while maybe Flynn's drinking was to pave the way for what has come since.

Hollywood And Mallorca

They've been remembering the time when Tarzan came to Mallorca just lately. He didn't swing in on some jungle vines and take up residence in a tree house atop a pine. He landed at the airport, no doubt sampled the produce of vines and settled for more comfortable accommodation, such as the hotel Taconera in Cala Ratjada. Tarzan was Johnny Weissmüller. He came to Mallorca on three successive summers - 1971 to 1973 - having first been invited, so it is said, by Errol Flynn.

Remembering is one thing, getting the remembrance right is another. Weissmüller certainly did come to Mallorca in the early 1970s, but as for the Flynn connection, well, the recollection has it that Weissmüller was invited in 1969, which would have been pretty difficult, as Flynn had been dead for ten years by then.

Weissmüller was one of numerous Hollywood stars who found their way to Mallorca in the 1950s and 1960s. It would appear that, unlike some others, he was a pretty much down-to-earth sort of a guy - not something you might have expected for someone who had spent almost his entire cinematic career up a tree. He would go out and meet the locals, even spending time with Sa Pobla's drum and cornet band. But if he hadn't been aboard the Flynn yacht that would typically navigate the summery waters of 1950s' Mallorca, he would, by comparison with others from Hollywood, have been something of a Johnny-come-lately.

Flynn was, to no small extent, responsible for this Hollywood interest, albeit his association with Mallorca was an accident. In 1950, en route to Gibraltar from Monte Carlo, bad weather caused him to seek safe haven, and he found it in Pollensa. He wasn't the first to be captivated by the island's north coast, and so for the remainder of that decade, he became a regular visitor. Flynn's yacht, "Zaca", was about as legendary as the man himself, and this yacht may or may not have had fellow Hollywood legends on board. Orson Welles, Ava Gardner (and maybe Weissmüller) were among those who supposedly joined Flynn on his cruises around the island.

Of these stars' links with the island, the best known are probably those of Ava Gardner because of her not infrequent stays with Robert Graves in Deya. But there is a lesser known story about Ava and Mallorca, and it is one to do with a singer who was big news in the 1960s, Johnny Valentino.

Johnny, who is still with us and still performing, met Gardner in Madrid. He met her and fell in love with her. To this day, however, he refuses to be drawn on what the full extent of their relationship may or may not have been. Johnny, by the way, acquired his stage name because he once lived in Peguera where a neighbour was Natacha Rambova, the one-time wife of Rudolf Valentino. 

Of Orson Welles, not a great deal is known of his association with Mallorca. He was far more intimately associated with mainland Spain. Welles's last film, "F For Fake", supposedly contains scenes shot in Mallorca, but there is no evidence that it did. Ibiza was used as a location.

What can be said of these Hollywood greats is that their relationships with Mallorca and Spain were not the product of the close ties between Hollywood and the wider cinema industry and the Franco regime which developed in the 1950s. Flynn, for example, just happened on Mallorca by chance and then chose it as a subsequent holiday destination. The links with Hollywood were far more formal and systematic than that.

When reference is made to Spain's economic miracle of the 1960s, it is often overlooked just how important American influence had been well before this. US foreign policy plus very specific commercial interests, such as those of American Express and Hilton Hotels, had been at work from the early part of the 1950s. And when the Franco regime looked for an influential means of propaganda, it found a willing accomplice in Hollywood, though it must be said that it was a relationship not without some reservations. The regime's Ministry of Information and Tourism believed that American film studios were "the sector most easily penetrated by Judaism and communism".

Nevertheless, the relationship was such that in 1959 the American film producer Samuel Bronston relocated his entire production operation to Madrid. He was responsible for "The Fall of the Roman Empire" and, more notably, "El Cid". The regime was so delighted with the latter that it was officially declared to be a film in the "Spanish national interest". 

Such epics were a long way from Johnny Weissmüller's output. His Tarzan days were years in the past. When he came to Mallorca in the '70s, he hung out with a drum and cornet band. He was still a star but that star had long waned.

Photo: Errol Flynn and "Zaca".