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Errol, Fidel and the Cuban Rebel Girls
Based on true events, Errol, Fidel and the Cuban Rebel Girls recreates one of the 20th century's great untold stories.
Cuba, 1959: In the final year of his life, Errol Flynn found time for one last adventure. The dashing star of many Hollywood films had always longed to be a real hero. Fidel Castro was the genuine article, and now he was looking for fame. What each man had the other wanted and, as revolution raged around them, the stage was set for an explosive encounter.
Cuba is on the brink of revolution and Errol Flynn is there making what will be his final film. When they meet, Errol is involved in the latest in a long line of relationships with under-age women, while Fidel is ready to march triumphantly into Havana after overthrowing the Batista government. Within days of the coup, Errol is chased out of Cuba with a firing squad and Fidel hot on his heels.
Featuring a full cast of Hollywood movie stars, beautiful women, Cuban revolutionaries and New York mobsters, Errol, Fidel and the Cuban Rebel Girls is the story of two men at the opposite ends of astonishing careers. It is a story with two heroes ... but there is only ever room for one.
Cuba, 1959: In the final year of his life, Errol Flynn found time for one last adventure. The dashing star of many Hollywood films had always longed to be a real hero. Fidel Castro was the genuine article, and now he was looking for fame. What each man had the other wanted and, as revolution raged around them, the stage was set for an explosive encounter.
Cuba is on the brink of revolution and Errol Flynn is there making what will be his final film. When they meet, Errol is involved in the latest in a long line of relationships with under-age women, while Fidel is ready to march triumphantly into Havana after overthrowing the Batista government. Within days of the coup, Errol is chased out of Cuba with a firing squad and Fidel hot on his heels.
Featuring a full cast of Hollywood movie stars, beautiful women, Cuban revolutionaries and New York mobsters, Errol, Fidel and the Cuban Rebel Girls is the story of two men at the opposite ends of astonishing careers. It is a story with two heroes ... but there is only ever room for one.
320 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2010
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About the author
Boyd Anderson
9 books3 followersBoyd Anderson spent several years as a creative director in advertising, winning many awards in New York, Cannes, London, Los Angeles and Sydney. Boyd now writes historical fiction. Amber Road is his fourth novel, following Children of the Dust, Ludo and Errol, Fidel and the Cuban Rebel Girls. He lives in Sydney.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
February 5, 2012
http://www.stevedow.com.au
IN THE remote mountains of Santiago de Cuba in December 1958, the broken down 49-year-old Tasmanian-born Hollywood movie star Errol Flynn, by now a long-time alcoholic and morphine addict, is sharing cigars with Fidel Castro, the 32-year-old rebel leader about to topple the US-backed Cuban president and dictator Fulgencio Batista.
Castro is curious about the growing power of US television broadcasters, and has just given Flynn an on-camera interview, which will prove to be a scoop. Swashbuckling fame as a typecast hero means little to the movie star; his long-held real ambition is to be a Hemingway-esque war writer and correspondent.
Flynn coaches Castro to restrict to Cuban audiences his speeches arguing workers should share the profits; for Americans, he advises, Castro should ditch the Lenin-style communist talk and “try being the Cuban messiah. You’re just cleaning the temple, aren’t you?” Castro, turning on the naïve charm, asks quizzically: “PR … it means propaganda, no?”
Lest this amusing scenario from the “fiction” novel Errol, Fidel and the Cuban Rebel Girls seems a figment of Sydney writer Boyd Anderson’s imagination, acting was the least interesting thing about Flynn’s life. The plot here actually hews roughly to bizarre real life events.
Flynn, the thrice-married father of four, really did fly to Cuba, with his last girlfriend, Beverley Aadland, in 1958. He’d met the chorus girl on the back lot of Warner Brothers; he was 48, she 15. Together, they would star in his odd last movie, Cuban Rebel Girls, filmed on location.
Flynn’s three previous films, in each of which he’d played an alcoholic – no acting required – had finally given him critical acclaim, though his Oscar nomination for the 1957 adaptation of Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises had been mysteriously withdrawn.
Hence this cut-price Cuban adventure was a last-ditch effort to make a lasting artistic mark on the world – one more flattering than the front-page scandal of the sensational trial 16 years earlier in 1942, in which Flynn had been acquitted of statutory rape of two teenage girls, giving rise to the hackneyed saying “in like Flynn”.
Sexual domination of young women wasn’t the entire measure of the man – some friends and family insist women and girls threw themselves at him, not vice-versa – and the Australian’s overriding agenda was always adventure, even before he fled depression-era Sydney having stolen a socialite’s jewels, never to return.
In Boyd’s novel, Flynn interviews Castro as a way of keeping the peace while they’re making Cuban Rebel Girls. “I’ll do my fake interview with the intrepid leader,” Anderson has Flynn saying, “so he doesn’t get pissed and put the lot of us up against a wall.”
But in real life, Flynn reportedly set out for Cuba with the Castro assignment for William Randolph Hearst’s newspapers, for which he’d briefly written on the war in Spain in 1937 as the fascist threat grew. (On that occasion, his sidekick Jewish photographer, Hermann Erben, turned out to be a Nazi party member and amateur spy, much to Flynn’s unlucky discredit, but that’s another sad story.)
Anderson has Flynn narrating in first person, including post-humously, and the gamble pays off; the voice is convincing. The novel manages to be both a smart read and rollicking good fun, and put me in mind of Sydney writer Luke Davies’s engaging fictive novel God of Speed, about aviator, filmmaker and billionaire – and drug addict – Howard Hughes.
Anderson, like Davies, imbues his famous star with a psychological depth; his Flynn is struggling mentally and is self aware the world sees him as a “phallic symbol” and a “shallow, philandering fool”, though perhaps more could have been made of Flynn’s mother issues; there was a love/hate relationship with his Sydney-born mother.
Despite the real headlines such as I Fought with Castro by Errol Flynn: Film Star Gives Fidel Tips on Talking, Flynn’s movie biopic Cuban Story was shown once in Moscow, but never screened in the US. (It has been available on DVD since 2002 after the negatives were retrieved from storage after 40 years.) He returned to Los Angeles, his millions stolen or squandered, his house taken by his first wife, the film offers dried up to dust.
Flynn died of a massive heart attack in October 1959 at age 50; all his major organs diseased from a decadent life on the run from boredom. In his neglected Cuban film, Flynn says approvingly on camera the “spirit started by this handful of wonderful rebels is spreading and growing stronger every day”. Perhaps he didn’t give a damn for public opinion after all.
IN THE remote mountains of Santiago de Cuba in December 1958, the broken down 49-year-old Tasmanian-born Hollywood movie star Errol Flynn, by now a long-time alcoholic and morphine addict, is sharing cigars with Fidel Castro, the 32-year-old rebel leader about to topple the US-backed Cuban president and dictator Fulgencio Batista.
Castro is curious about the growing power of US television broadcasters, and has just given Flynn an on-camera interview, which will prove to be a scoop. Swashbuckling fame as a typecast hero means little to the movie star; his long-held real ambition is to be a Hemingway-esque war writer and correspondent.
Flynn coaches Castro to restrict to Cuban audiences his speeches arguing workers should share the profits; for Americans, he advises, Castro should ditch the Lenin-style communist talk and “try being the Cuban messiah. You’re just cleaning the temple, aren’t you?” Castro, turning on the naïve charm, asks quizzically: “PR … it means propaganda, no?”
Lest this amusing scenario from the “fiction” novel Errol, Fidel and the Cuban Rebel Girls seems a figment of Sydney writer Boyd Anderson’s imagination, acting was the least interesting thing about Flynn’s life. The plot here actually hews roughly to bizarre real life events.
Flynn, the thrice-married father of four, really did fly to Cuba, with his last girlfriend, Beverley Aadland, in 1958. He’d met the chorus girl on the back lot of Warner Brothers; he was 48, she 15. Together, they would star in his odd last movie, Cuban Rebel Girls, filmed on location.
Flynn’s three previous films, in each of which he’d played an alcoholic – no acting required – had finally given him critical acclaim, though his Oscar nomination for the 1957 adaptation of Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises had been mysteriously withdrawn.
Hence this cut-price Cuban adventure was a last-ditch effort to make a lasting artistic mark on the world – one more flattering than the front-page scandal of the sensational trial 16 years earlier in 1942, in which Flynn had been acquitted of statutory rape of two teenage girls, giving rise to the hackneyed saying “in like Flynn”.
Sexual domination of young women wasn’t the entire measure of the man – some friends and family insist women and girls threw themselves at him, not vice-versa – and the Australian’s overriding agenda was always adventure, even before he fled depression-era Sydney having stolen a socialite’s jewels, never to return.
In Boyd’s novel, Flynn interviews Castro as a way of keeping the peace while they’re making Cuban Rebel Girls. “I’ll do my fake interview with the intrepid leader,” Anderson has Flynn saying, “so he doesn’t get pissed and put the lot of us up against a wall.”
But in real life, Flynn reportedly set out for Cuba with the Castro assignment for William Randolph Hearst’s newspapers, for which he’d briefly written on the war in Spain in 1937 as the fascist threat grew. (On that occasion, his sidekick Jewish photographer, Hermann Erben, turned out to be a Nazi party member and amateur spy, much to Flynn’s unlucky discredit, but that’s another sad story.)
Anderson has Flynn narrating in first person, including post-humously, and the gamble pays off; the voice is convincing. The novel manages to be both a smart read and rollicking good fun, and put me in mind of Sydney writer Luke Davies’s engaging fictive novel God of Speed, about aviator, filmmaker and billionaire – and drug addict – Howard Hughes.
Anderson, like Davies, imbues his famous star with a psychological depth; his Flynn is struggling mentally and is self aware the world sees him as a “phallic symbol” and a “shallow, philandering fool”, though perhaps more could have been made of Flynn’s mother issues; there was a love/hate relationship with his Sydney-born mother.
Despite the real headlines such as I Fought with Castro by Errol Flynn: Film Star Gives Fidel Tips on Talking, Flynn’s movie biopic Cuban Story was shown once in Moscow, but never screened in the US. (It has been available on DVD since 2002 after the negatives were retrieved from storage after 40 years.) He returned to Los Angeles, his millions stolen or squandered, his house taken by his first wife, the film offers dried up to dust.
Flynn died of a massive heart attack in October 1959 at age 50; all his major organs diseased from a decadent life on the run from boredom. In his neglected Cuban film, Flynn says approvingly on camera the “spirit started by this handful of wonderful rebels is spreading and growing stronger every day”. Perhaps he didn’t give a damn for public opinion after all.
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