Patrice Wymore

Patrice Wymore Jamaica’s link to classic Hollywood, the actress-turned-rancher Patrice Wymore opens the doors to the estate she shared with husband Errol Flynn HeadLine Standfirst MainText PicCaption Credit Bleed Folio HeadLine Standfirst MainText PicCaption Credit Bleed Folio ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ 258 ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ 259 Words Hannah Lack he was headed for the Galapagos. When the Photography Maurice Haas storm clouds cleared, the swashbuckling movie star found himself sailing into the port The winding coast road from Kingston to Port of Kingston, and experienced a lightning bolt Antonio on Jamaica’s north shore unfolds coup de foudre: “Here I would try to salvage like a pirate’s treasure map: Sugar Loaf myself,” he wrote in his freewheeling memoir Bay, Poor Man’s Corner, Frenchman’s Cove, My Wicked, Wicked Ways. “After 37 years Turtle Crawl Harbour. Tropical lagoons and of wandering I had found my Grecian Isle.” waterfalls hide behind thickets of bubblegum- Flynn moored in what is now Port Antonio’s coloured flowers. On a Friday evening, locals swish Errol Flynn Marina. In the years that and lop-eared dogs gather at roadside bars followed, he set up home on the small, tangled as phosphorescent fireflies blink like strings Navy Island offshore, after winning of fairy lights in the trees. When the sun dips, it in a drunken dice game. He bought and the Blue Mountains turn a darker, midnight filled the grand, crumbling Titchfield Hotel blue, sliding down to the Caribbean Sea in the harbour with celebrity guests (it later and forming a kind of peaceful shield from burned to the ground), and purchased the turbulence of Kingston. On this side a 1,600 acre estate – with a modest three of the island, it feels as though little has miles of ocean frontage – installing himself changed since the post-war era, when the at its peak in a California-style glass-and- international jet set turned Jamaica’s coast concrete aerie. Fifty-four years after into a millionaire’s playground. During the his death, the hellraising star (who legend 1950s, film stars, royalty, tycoons and literati has it once walked crocodiles down the street could be spotted on the country’s beaches, here), hasn’t been forgotten in the colourful hanging on to a jet ski, snorkelling among bars on Port Antonio’s former Rum Lane: It feels as though the neon-bright sea life, or draped on yachts “He’d come drinking in all these bars,” little has changed nursing a rum punch. Marilyn Monroe and says a local resident, “people loved him.” since the post- Arthur Miller holidayed in Ocho Rios, JFK But only one person holds the real key war era, when and Jackie in Montego Bay. Winston Churchill to Flynn’s Jamaican hideaway, and she still the international swapped the War Room for a paintbrush lives at his ranch in the foothills of the Blue jet set turned to capture the Jamaican light (“the best Mountains, surrounded by citrus, banana Jamaica’s coast in the world” he said) and Grace Kelly and breadfruit trees. Patrice Wymore, Flynn Estate Photo © Errol into a millionaire’s helicoptered in to pose for photographers Flynn’s third and final wife, is a living echo playground on Round Hill’s beach. But no one brought of Jamaica’s glamorous past, and she has Hollywood to Jamaica quite like Errol graciously agreed to a lunch date. We’ve Flynn, who trumped the rest with a typically arranged to meet at the spectacularly flamboyant entrance; he washed up on the renovated Trident Hotel nearby, where country’s shores in 1942, after a tropical Wymore used to run a boutique in the 60s. storm sent his yacht spiralling off course – (In the cocktail lounge, they can rustle up an In Like Flynn – spiced rum, Irish mist.) The next day, the sky is a wide stretch of blue after sheets of warm rain have washed down overnight. A corner table – the best – has been reserved on the airy terrace, overlooking an immaculate crayon- green lawn and the Caribbean beyond. A lipstick-red piano tinkles. Aged 86, the former actress still knows how to make an entrance. If you weren’t versed in her silver-screen pedigree, Patrice Wymore (or Mrs. Flynn, as she’s known around here) still instantly registers as a “somebody.” So slender as to be ethereal, effortlessly chic in pale silk and sun hat, she arrives in the lobby on the arm of her driver. A waitress Errol Flynn aboard the Zaca hands her a rose – as though she’s just taken 260 AnOther Magazine HeadLine Standfirst MainText PicCaption Credit Bleed Folio HeadLine Standfirst MainText PicCaption Credit Bleed Folio ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ 260 ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ 261 a curtain call – and she takes a seat, fishing a pack of cigarettes from a black handbag. Iced rum and cokes arrive. She lights up and takes a long drag. “Jamaica was the one quiet place where we could go, where people didn’t tear you apart asking for autographs,” she remembers, contemplating the velvety sea. “It was a magic land, and it was just Errol and I.” Today Wymore is a cherished local treasure, but when she first touched down in Jamaica in the early 50s, it was the Kansas-born actress’s first encounter with the tropics. “Oh god, the first time I arrived here?” she laughs. “The airport was a converted hut left over from the war. Dirty, hot, windy and Errol wasn’t there. I got into the first limousine Patrice Wymore, ca. 1963 I saw and said, ‘Port Antonio, please.’ Hours later we finally arrived at the Titchfield Hotel and they told me Errol was on Navy Island. ‘So how do I get in touch with him?’ ‘Well,’ they Mrs. Flynn, as said, ‘you walk down the path to the beach, she’s known and yell.’” She takes a sip of rum and shoots around here, still me a mischievous look. “Well, I yelled like instantly registers a wounded banshee when I got down there! Flynn Estate Photo © Errol as a “somebody.” But Errol had arranged a lunch reception bottom She arrives of 20 people for me on the yacht. I couldn’t on the arm of exactly express my anger right then. So I went her driver and a below deck, got into some country clothes Aboard the Zaca waitress hands and… joined the party!” her a rose, as Her Lauren Bacall looks aside, it might line,” she says. The cargo contained though she’s just have been Wymore’s readiness to match a glimmer of her future – her father was taken a curtain Flynn’s spontaneity that convinced him in charge of distributing motion pictures call their marriage would be third time lucky. as far as the border. “I even used to drive the She may have been a bona fide movie star, truck sometimes,” she remembers. “When but Wymore isn’t the type to stay home there was bad weather and we needed reserve Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty admiring her jewels for fear of chipping drivers, I could skip school and deliver the top a nail. Photographs of the couple in Jamaica films. So from delivering them, I ended capture them sailing, horse riding, shooting up making them.” and diving, the svelte, blonde Wymore Wymore’s mother, a singer and pianist, in swimsuits, while Flynn, 17 years her put her daughter into dancing school aged senior, is a little paunchier, one hand never four, and she was soon performing all over too far from a tumbler of vodka. the state, christened “the Shirley Temple It must have been breathtakingly exotic of the Mid-West”. In the summer of 1944, compared with small-town Miltonvale, on a trip to New York, the ambitious teenager population 500, where the actress was born fixed her sights on Broadway. “I told my in 1926 (a Google search turns up an image mother I wanted to stay. I called Dad and of a dusty cornfield and a solitary gas station). explained my plight. He said, ‘alright, we’ll “Miltonvale was only a few miles from put your college money in an account and the geographical centre of the US – you can’t if you’re not supporting yourself by the time get any more mid-western than that,” she that’s finished, you come home’. He put the explains. When the Great Depression hit, ball right back in my court.” She cut her teeth Wymore’s father went into a neighbouring as an understudy, and in 1948 took a starring town and got a job driving a truck. “And role in Mike Todd’s production of Hold It! before the year ended, he owned the truck (Todd was the third of Elizabeth Taylor’s seven 262 AnOther Magazine HeadLine Standfirst MainText PicCaption Credit Bleed Folio HeadLine Standfirst MainText PicCaption Credit Bleed Folio ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ 262 ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ 263 husbands). Wymore’s performance won her The star of Captain Blood and The Adventures off early in the morning, spear the fish, set a Theatre World award and the attention of Robin Hood was finding his swashbuckling up a fire – the best food in the world! We’d have of talent scouts from Tinseltown. “I wasn’t role wearing thin. In his teens and early the bar on one raft, musicians on another, going to go to Hollywood, looking for a job,” twenties, the Tasmanian-born adventurer had and spend the whole day, right to sunset.” she explains.

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