ERROL FLYNN WAS TWO MEN — AND ONE OF THEM AMERICA NEVER SAW

On the evening of October 14th, 1942, two things happened involving Errol Flynn. In a courtroom in Los Angeles, a grand jury referred criminal charges against him to trial. That same evening, he sat at a dinner table in Beverly Hills and was, by the account of everyone present, the most charming man in the room. Funny. Warm. Full of stories. He did not mention the grand jury once. Two men. The same person. The same evening. America spent twenty years watching one of them — the swashbuckler, the Captain Blood, the Robin Hood, the man who seemed to exist in a permanent state of effortless photogenic joy. The other one was always there. Behind the charm and the films and the trial acquittal and the declining years and the Vancouver hotel room where he died at fifty with the body of a seventy-five-year-old. Tonight we tell the story of both men. Not the simple condemnation and not the simple celebration. The complicated truth of a person who contained genuine gifts and genuine damage simultaneously, and who gave America one of them for twenty years while keeping the other hidden in plain sight.