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

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______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

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______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! as a “somebody.” But Errol had arranged a lunch reception 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

admiring her jewels for fear of chipping drivers, I could skip school and deliver the Flynn Estate Images bottom Photo © Errol top Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty 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

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______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. “I was going to stay in New York travelled the South Pacific, running a tobacco Among the guests were Truman Capote, until they came to me.” They did – and two plantation in New Guinea, hunting for gold Ava Gardner and Noël Coward, as he weeks later she was flown to the coast, signing and exotic birds, stealing other men’s wives remembered in his diary: “27 March 1951. her contract in Jack Warner’s imposing (and their jewels, according to his memoir). Rafted down the Rio Grande. In the evening office. Her first film was 1950’s musical He sailed to England via a tour of the casinos dined with Errol Flynn and his wife Pat. extravaganza Tea for Two, opposite Doris Day. and brothels of the Far East, before Warner Drinks on his yacht, which is beautiful, “It was one of the happiest times of my life, Brothers decided he looked good with a sword. then barbecue dinner on his island – palm like going to university for show business. Flynn had tried to shed his playboy image, Patrice Wymore and Errol Flynn trees – lit by torches.” I had to be in the studio at six in the morning, travelling to Spain as a journalist during at the Flynn Estate in Jamaica, ca. 1956 “We became great friends with Noël, didn’t get home until seven at night. I made the Civil War, and volunteering for the first he was a wonderful man,” remembers four films in less than two years,” she says. world war – but was refused on the grounds Wymore. Coward had made his home in “And then… I got married and messed up my of a heart murmur, tuberculosis and recurrent an abandoned stucco building formerly whole career.” malaria. “He hated the typecasting,” says used by pirate Henry Morgan in the 17th top left © Errol Flynn Estate bottom left Photo © Bettmann/CORBIS right Errol Flynn Estate When they met, Wymore was a fresh-faced Wymore today. “He’d say, ‘all Warner Brothers century as a lookout for Spanish treasure 24, while Flynn, following a 15-year rein do is put a girl on my arm, give me a horse and fleets – the house had its own escape tunnel. at the woozy pinnacle of Hollywood, was a sword, and say, now do something Errol!’” Firefly, as Coward christened it, became heading downhill fast, accelerated by the Wymore happened to be the girl put on his his own escape “away from the business Among their hard-drinking and drugs swirling around arm for a western called Rocky Mountain, shot of being Noël Coward”. He’s still there today, guests were “The first time I his infamous Mulholland Drive house parties. in the deserts of Gallup, New Mexico (“A film buried in his favourite spot for a pre-dinner Truman Capote, arrived here? There had also been the scandal of a trial for best forgotten,” laughs Wymore). She didn’t martini. Inside, photographs on the grand Ava Gardner and It was dirty, hot, statutory rape (for which he was acquitted). count herself among the screen idol’s legion Rita Hayworth cuts her birthday cake piano display visitors including Sophia Noël Coward: and Errol wasn’t of fans at the time. “He said Errol Flynn, I said during an intimate party aboard the Zaca, Loren, Elizabeth Taylor, Audrey Hepburn and “A large group there. I was told Errol who?” she remembers. “I was the only with Errol Flynn, his second wife Nora and that other famous Jamaican resident, Ian of us would take he was on Navy woman in the cast, we were out in the desert Orson Welles, Mexico, 1946 Fleming, who wrote every Bond thriller from off down the Island. ‘So how do and became buddies. There was nobody else his home, GoldenEye. The sultry, occasionally river. We’d have I get in touch to talk to! And then he asked me to marry him. stride. “I realise my husband is hardly what incestuous expat lives of the idle rich were the bar on one with him?’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘you’ve gotta be kidding me! You have you call the fireside-and-slipper type,” she captured in Coward’s 1957 play Volcano, raft, musicians they said, ‘you too much of this desert moon in your eyes. told Silver Screen Magazine. Where others a tragi-comedy based on a tangle of Jamaican on another, and walk down the I’ll continue to see you when we go back saw the carousing Flynn of scandalous legend, love affairs that left critics trying to unpick spend the whole path to the to Hollywood, but marriage now…’ Well, pretty Wymore found a complex, troubled character, fact from fiction. day, right to beach, and yell’” Errol Flynn and Patrice Wymore in soon I realised I was in love as well. He was bottom Photo © ullsteinbild/TopFoto top Photo © Rex Features caught between his desire to live up to his In 1952, Flynn’s contract with Warner sunset” Rocky Mountain, 1950 a very intelligent man, with a wild interest legend and a yearning to escape it. “I have Brothers ended stormily, and he and Wymore in everything. He was just so interesting a feeling he’s been an imposter all his life,” took off for Europe. Released from Warner’s to be with.” she told a journalist. “He was never really umbrella, Flynn discovered he was in Once Flynn had extricated himself from wild. He was only unhappy.” On Flynn’s part, a financial mess: two ex-wives were suing the clutches of a European princess, the pair Wymore was a breath of mid-western air. for alimony (“I had to ride a lot of horses tied the knot in Monaco in 1950, followed “I expected vanity, she had none. I was used by a “mild earthquake of a reception” at the to feminine wiles, but she never thought Hotel de Paris on the Riviera. Wymore was of such things,” he wrote. “There were radiant in white lace, gracefully negotiating no tricks with Pat – just directness, sincerity... a towering wedding cake and the thousands In her I’d found something to respect.” of fans gathered behind police cordons In Jamaica, the newly married couple outside. They spent their wedding night hosted an ever-shifting array of guests. aboard Flynn’s yacht the Zaca (named for “There were no supermarkets in those days,” the Samoan word for ‘peace’), awaking she told the Telegraph in 2008, “but someone to the sounds of cannons from the American would always bring over a suckling pig, and Fleet nearby – they announced Flynn’s new someone else some fish...” Days would be marriage over loudspeaker and were renting spent gliding on thin bamboo rafts down Errol Flynn and Patrice Wymore cut the cake out binoculars to anyone eager to get a look the Rio Grande river, under a canopy of following their wedding in France, at the new bride. Hardly a peaceful start foliage and birdsong. “We lived on the river,” Errol Flynn and Patrice Wymore with Errol’s son 24th of October, 1950 to married life, but Wymore took it in her nods Wymore. “A large group of us would take Sean on their property in Jamaica

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______264 ______265 The Sun Also Rises, as well as stepping into the shoes of his late drinking partner John Barrymore in Too Much Too Soon. The critics scrambled to praise his latest reinvention. “I make more today being a shadow of my former self than I did when I was my former self,” he joked. The final years of Flynn’s life will be told onscreen later this year, in Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland’s The Last of Robin Hood; while Wymore and Flynn remained married, the actor’s last days were spent in the company of a 17-year-old aspiring dancer and actress, Beverly Aadland (played in the film by Dakota Fanning). Errol Flynn and Patrice Wymore disembark It was Aadland who was with Flynn in in Majorca, Spain, ca. 1954 Vancouver, where he was selling his beloved Zaca when he suffered a fatal heart attack, and wave a lot of swords to take care of their aged just 50. But it was Wymore who buried expensive tastes,” he wrote.) He lost $430,000 him a week later, in Hollywood’s star- on doomed film project William Tell, and studded Forest Lawn Memorial Park cemetery it soon became clear he owed millions in taxes, alongside the likes of Clark Gable, Humphrey while his business manager had stolen much Bogart and Jimmy Stewart. For Wymore, “He hated the of his fortune. For a time, the couple stayed whose career had been all but on hold as she typecasting. in Rome with new baby daughter Arnella, travelled the world, there was only one thing He’d say, ‘all entertaining Flynn’s high-society circle – to do next. “I went back to work,” she says Warner Brothers Prince Rainier, Aly Khan and King Farouk – simply. “Almost immediately. I was in LA do is put a girl as well as film pals passing their way, for about ten years. First I stayed at the on my arm, give “Orson Welles, Rita Hayworth, and Beverly Hills Hotel, later I lived in a cottage me a horse and a social registerites from the bored Newport at the Chateau Marmont.”

sword, and say, and Long Island set”. But as debts were called A role in 1960’s Ocean’s Eleven introduced Flynn Estate Photo © Errol now do something in, the Zaca became the pair’s floating home, her to the Rat Pack, “who weren’t as wild Errol!’” sailing the Mediterranean from port to port, as everyone says they are”, she insists. during an itinerant period Wymore refers “Dean Martin, who was supposed to be the to as “my Hemingway years”. “We lived drunk, would be on the golf course at six on the Zaca for about five years, a 126 foot in the morning! And Sammy Davis… Well, schooner,” she says fondly. “We’d go to I loved Sammy. He’d see me across the room Tangier every year, store up on all the varnish, and say, ‘Hey kid! How are you?’ Frank was and mechanical parts. It was a free port then, charming. He and I went out for a while,” and they had all kinds of American stuff she confides. “He was going to come down to buy, like ketchup and pickles. I’d make to Jamaica. Then he got involved with that hamburgers with banana splits.” Unmoored lady he married [Mia Farrow] and didn’t from the demands of his career, Flynn’s make it.” While shooting in Vegas, Wymore watery life reflected his view of himself. developed a one-woman cabaret act and “I believed I was a wash-up, finished,” spent much of the next few years on the road. he wrote. Swiss doctors informed him his liver “But it’s a very lonely kind of existence. had ceased to function. His eyes, he wrote, I was away from home an awful lot. Plus looked like they were “dipped in mustard”. I was getting older. Movie careers didn’t last Yet he might have guessed that Hollywood too long then.” In 1968, she made the decision loves a comeback. Ironically, it was the to return to Jamaica full-time, fuelled withering of his film star looks that finally by a desire to remove daughter Arnella from delivered the kind of roles he’d been longing the temptations of Sunset Strip. “I thought for; in 1956 he was summoned back from exile my daughter needed more attention, which to play the heavy-drinking war veteran Mike she did. I thought, ‘OK, I’m going to do this.’ Campbell in an adaptation of Hemingway’s So I walked out of Hollywood, fired the

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______266 ______267 managers and came down to Jamaica old friends now,” she says. “Is Kirk Douglas to be a farmer, even though I didn’t know still alive? I used to see him once in a while. anything about farming. Well, I’ve learned Doris Day is still around but she’s become now! Would you like to see the ranch?” kind of a recluse…” Spanning her life from Minutes later, we’re driving east along a tiny mid-western town via Broadway to the the coast road, Wymore in the passenger silver screen, and a marriage that will forever seat acting as tour guide, pointing out the link her name with one of the most charming azure waters of the Blue Lagoon (legend has and self-destructive screen icons of the 20th it a dragon lurks beneath its waters), and century, it’s likely to be an extraordinary Alligator Head, a jetty of land bought by the story. But if the Flynn name casts a long late billionaire industrialist and art collector shadow, Wymore’s late reinvention as cowgirl, Baron Thyssen. In the hills to our right, entrepreneur and queen of a Jamaican ranch obscured by vines, lies the former home is her very own twist in the tale. In 1989, she of Flynn’s parents, who spent many years added a “rancher of the year” award to her there – nature is working to overtake what’s acting ones. “You know, between making left of the house. Suddenly Wymore taps movies and running the estate, I think this a manicured fingernail on the window. is tougher. Only the other day I thought, ‘I’m “Here is the beginning of the ranch...” going back to Hollywood, this is too hard,’” We keep driving. There’s plenty of it. “Small she says with a laugh. for Texas, big for Jamaica,” she quips. “If I have any genius, it is a genius for At a small turning, a gate is unlatched and living,” Errol Flynn decided in the final year “I thought my the car makes bumpy progress up a track. of his life, relating his kaleidoscopic daughter needed “I’m running about 700 heads of cattle,” she adventures. And as the 86-year-old Wymore more attention. explains. “We’re expanding the herd to 1,000 waves farewell from her porch, dogs weaving So I walked out of heads, so it’s a handful. I have about 20 people about her feet, the sweet smell of frangipani Hollywood, fired working with me.” Two horses canter past, in the air, and the distant swell of the the managers ruffled by the sound of the engine. “I don’t Caribbean below, you might argue his widow and came down ride anymore,” she sighs. “I figured the law has every right to say the same. to Jamaica of averages wasn’t on my side. I didn’t feel like to be a farmer, having a broken hip.” Soon we’re on Wymore’s even though porch high up on the mountainside, hills I didn’t know rolling away to cove beaches and coral caves anything about below. It’s awe-inspiring and a little wild. farming. Well, I’ve “It can be,” she nods, studying a hawk

learned now” balancing on the air above us. “Especially bottom Photo © AF Archive/Alamy top Photo © AF Archive/Alamy in hurricane season. Gilbert was the worst. Thirty-nine panes of glass blew out. I was hit by 200-mile-an-hour winds. I didn’t even Frank Sinatra and Patrice Wymore know it was coming.” in Ocean’s Eleven, 1960 Flynn’s original home has been pummelled so often by Jamaican “blowers” that it’s currently being refurbished. Meanwhile, Wymore has shifted operations, with her dogs Lady Gaga and Footy, to a smaller cottage on the land. The hope, she says, is that her grandson Luke, who grew up in Jamaica (and inherited his grandfather’s looks, modelling for Tommy Hilfiger), will take over the reins of the estate. Arnella, Patrice’s troubled daughter and Luke’s mother, passed away in 1998, after a long battle with cocaine and alcohol. It’s a painful story that perhaps Wymore will tackle in her next project – she’s 20,000 words into writing her memoirs, Frank Sinatra, Peter Lawford and Patrice longhand. “But I’m afraid to ask about my Wymore in Ocean’s Eleven, 1960

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