City of Nets

by Otto Friedrich

  Among the many unverifiable legends about Flynn’s pleasure dome, there is one that tells of a paunchy Central European diplomat who was determined to investigate the wild rumors of wild orgies. Flynn was elusive, and irritated, but the diplomat kept making hopeful inquiries among Warners executives until finally his cajoling brought him an invitation to dinner on Mulholland Drive. Black tie. When the diplomat descended from his limousine and rang the bell at Flynn’s mansion, the door was opened by a young blonde wearing nothing but a small apron and a pair of high-heeled shoes. She smiled. He smiled. She invited him to follow her to what she called “the disrobing room.” When he had taken off all his clothes, she said, he should go through the door at the far end of the room to join the other guests. The diplomat was happy to follow her instructions. Stark naked, quivering with excited anticipation, he marched through the door. He thereupon found himself in Flynn’s dining room, where everyone else was fully clothed in evening dress.

  It was to this palace that Flynn welcomed John Barrymore, not realizing (or perhaps he did realize it) that Barrymore’s alcoholic ruin and degradation provided a forecast of his own future. Flynn was impressed by Barrymore’s scandalous reputation, and by his intermittent charm, so Barrymore simply moved in and started pouring himself drinks. “Jack thought it was a waste of time to go to the bathroom if there was a window close by,” Flynn recalled. “During his visit he took all the varnish off one of my picture windows that overlooked the San Fernando Valley. One day I complained bitterly, ‘For God’s sake, look at the varnish here. Your piss has eaten away the paint. Can’t you do it somewhere else?’ . . . He immediately went to the fireplace and let go there. The smell through the room was atrocious. . . .”

  When Barrymore died a few months later, his friends took him to the Pierce Brothers Mortuary on Sunset Boulevard and then gathered in a nearby bar called The Cock and Bull. There was much morose drinking and telling of Barrymore stories, according to Flynn. One celebrant who left early was Raoul Walsh, a former actor whose accidental loss of an eye had made him turn into a director. Walsh went from the bar to the funeral home, accompanied by two friends named Bev Allen and Charles Miller, and persuaded the undertakers, for a couple of hundred dollars, that they had to take away the corpse for one last viewing by Barrymore’s crippled aunt. Then they took it to Flynn’s house and propped it up in his favorite chair. Flynn returned home drunk and lurched into the living room. “The light went on and—my God—I stared into the face of Barrymore!” Flynn reported in his memoirs. “His eyes were closed. He looked puffed, white, bloodless. They hadn’t embalmed him yet. I let out a delirious scream. . . .”

  But haven’t we already heard this same story with quite different details? Yes, all the best Hollywood stories have several contradictory versions. Paul Henreid, in the memoirs written with Julius Fast in 1984, reported that it was Peter Lorre who had spirited Barrymore’s corpse into Flynn’s living room. Flynn, in his supposedly unassisted memoirs, My Wicked, Wicked Ways (1959), described exactly the same event as a prank organized by Raoul Walsh.

  Fun, fun, fun—that was the height of it that year for Flynn, until his doorbell rang and two Los Angeles detectives told him that he faced a charge of statutory rape.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Flynn said.

  “It concerns a Miss Betty Hansen,” one of the detectives said, according to Flynn’s account, “—and we are holding you.”

  “I’ve never heard of her. Betty Hansen? Who is she?”

  Betty Hansen was a girl of seventeen who had come west from Nebraska to visit her sister, and then wandered off into the wilderness of Los Angeles. After worrying for a while, the sister reported her absence to the police and asked them to find her. The police soon discovered her in a Santa Monica hotel. In the course of their questioning about what she had been doing, she said she had gone to a party where she had met Errol Flynn and, as she later testified, “I had an act of intercourse.”

  This must have impressed any Los Angeles police officer as a matter of supreme insignificance, but according to California law, an “act of intercourse” with a girl less than eighteen years old constituted statutory rape and could be punished by five years in prison, even if the girl was a willing partner. This law was not very vigorously enforced. For some reason, however, the authorities decided to take Betty Hansen’s accusation to a grand jury in October of 1942. The grand jury understandably declined to indict Flynn. Instead of abandoning this inconsequential affair, the authorities then decided to investigate further, and so they unearthed the case of Peggy LaRue Satterlee, whose mother had appeared at the sheriff’s office the year before and complained that her fifteen-year-old daughter had been seduced by Flynn aboard his yacht, the Sirocco. At the time, the sheriff’s office had shrugged off the mother’s complaint, but now the Satterlee story was resurrected and added to the Hansen story.

  As charges of rape, these stories were so absurd that it is hard to imagine why the authorities pursued them. The least plausible explanation was that of District Attorney John Dockweiler, who had been elected just two years earlier in place of Buron Fitts, the heavily subsidized friend of the movie business. “I must let the public know,” said Dockweiler, “that all men and women are equal when they come before our courts and that no one can violate the law and escape punishment because of wealth or position.” A more interesting explanation—though quite undocumented—appeared in Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon. Anger, a onetime child actor and later an “underground” film director, wrote that when Flynn returned home after being bailed out on the original charge, his phone rang. “An unknown voice said: ‘Tell Jack I want $10,000,’ and hung up. The entire affair might have been dropped then and there, if Jack Warner, Flynn’s boss, had returned the extortionist’s call.” In this version, Flynn was simply a victim of a system in which the movie industry paid off “corrupt Los Angeles politicians” in exchange for protection. “These payoffs had been habitually turned over to the ‘bosses,’ who would make sure that the police got its take of the cut,” Anger wrote. Just before Miss Hansen told her story, he added, “some changes had been made in the chain of command at L.A. City Hall. When Jack Warner had failed to cough up to the new bosses, the first rape charge against Flynn had been brought up as a warning. When that could not be substantiated, the second chippie was pushed forward by the cops to chirp her year-old charges.”

  Florabel Muir, a reliable reporter who covered Hollywood for the New York Daily News, also saw political manipulation in the case, but she was more sympathetic to the authorities. She believed that Warner Bros. was intervening from the beginning and “pulling strings like crazy to keep Flynn from being indicted.” When the studio maneuvering succeeded, she added, the embarrassed police complained angrily to Dockweiler, whom she described as “an honest and religious man.” Flynn had little choice then but to call in the man whom all Hollywood stars called in when they were threatened with imprisonment: Jerry Giesler. A potbellied and rather courtly attorney with a high-pitched voice, meticulous in his preparations for each case and exhaustive in his questioning, Giesler managed to turn his newest defendant into a kind of folk hero. His basic approach, he said later, was to portray the two young accusers as “not as unversed in the ways of the world as the district attorney’s office would have the public believe.” An army of reporters savored every word. In a time of worldwide war and devastation, the prosecution of Errol Flynn for fornication with two eager adolescents was treated as a news story of major importance, often worthy of front-page headlines.

  Betty Hansen claimed that after meeting Flynn at a party, she had felt sick and wanted to go upstairs to lie down, that Flynn had pursued her and taken advantage of her. Flynn denied everything, so it was up to Giesler to make Miss Hansen’s perfectly plausible story sound ludicrous.

  Q: When he told you to lie down on the bed, did he tell you what he wanted you to lie down for?

  A: No, he did not.

&nbs
p; Q: Did you have any thoughts of what he wanted you to lie down for?

  A: No. . . .

  Q: What did you think was going to happen—just going to take a nap?

  A: Yes.

  Even when Miss Hansen’s story had the horrid ring of truth, Giesler made it sound ludicrous. He insisted on asking every detail of who took off which pieces of clothing, and thus elicited the fact that Flynn had kept his shoes on throughout the episode. And when it was all over, what did Flynn do? He went into the bathroom and doused himself with hair oil. “What else do you recall that happened there?” Giesler prodded. “I think he asked if I ever used it and I said no,” the wretched girl testified.

  If Betty Hansen’s night of romance sounded squalid, Peggy LaRue Satterlee’s cruise on Flynn’s yacht sounded, in Giesler’s own term, “preposterous.” She had gone aboard at midnight and repaired to her cabin and taken off most of her clothes. Giesler wanted to know every detail.

  Q: So you took your socks off too, and you wear those—What do you call those things? . . . Brassiere?

  A: Yes, sir.

  Q: Did you take that off?

  A: No, sir.

  Q: You did not take that off?

  A: I mean yes, sir.

  Q: Which was it?

  A: I took it off.

  And so on. Miss Satterlee, who was now a nightclub dancer, claimed that Flynn had entered her cabin and she had protested that “You should not be here, because it is not nice to come in a lady’s bedroom when she is in bed.” She quoted Flynn, who was already outfitted in striped pajamas, as saying that he just wanted to talk. “He said, ‘Let me just get in bed with you and I will not bother you. I just want to talk to you.’ ” Giesler, perhaps remembering Miss Hansen’s testimony, wanted to know about Flynn’s shoes. “Did he have anything on his feet?” Miss Satterlee said she “did not notice his feet.”

  Q: Did you let him get in bed?

  A: No, sir.

  Q: Did he get in bed?

  A: Yes, sir. . . .

  Q: Did he say anything at that time before the act of intercourse?

  A: Not that I recall. . . .

  Q: Did you fight him then?

  A: Not very much, no, sir.

  Q: Did you fight with him at all?

  A: No, sir, I cried.

  Giesler made it clear that Miss Satterlee had not only not resisted Flynn’s advances but that she had spent all of the next day swimming and chattering and posing for pictures with Flynn aboard the yacht. That evening, she made some remark about the moon shining upon the sea, and Flynn lured her belowdeck, she said, by saying that the moon could best be viewed through a porthole. Giesler pursued every possibility. Had Flynn carried her downstairs? No. Pulled her downstairs? No. Had he taken her arm? “He might have taken hold of my arm on the way down the steps,” Miss Satterlee said. Did she know where they were going? Flynn had led the way. Had she followed him? Yes. Why? “Because I wanted to see the moon through the porthole.” And so she had looked through the porthole, on the right side of the ship, and then “Mr. Flynn . . . said since he had possession of me once, naturally why wouldn’t I let him do it this time?”

  Giesler had an exquisite sense of detail.

  Q: Did he direct his privates into you?

  A: Yes, sir.

  Q: How did he do it, do you know?

  A: No, sir.

  Giesler kept questioning her about her resistance or lack of resistance. “You did not want to protect your honor, did you?” he demanded at one point. The prosecutor objected that the question was “argumentative” but the judge overruled him. “Did you?” Giesler insisted to Miss Satterlee. “After that I did not count my honor,” she said, “because I had no honor anyway after he was finished.”

  All this melodrama, which the press treated with headlines worthy of the fall of France, was just a preliminary hearing, a dress rehearsal. At the end of November, Los Angeles Municipal Court Judge Walters ruled that Flynn should go on trial on three counts of statutory rape. So the crowds stood in line for hours, in January of 1943, for a chance to watch Flynn defend himself in Los Angeles Superior Court. Giesler took pride in getting nine women on the jury—would the same assumptions apply today?—for he was confident in their judgments of Flynn’s accusers. He made Betty Hansen tell her implausible story all over again and then insisted on even more details.

  Q: Miss Hansen, the act itself lasted, how long, please?

  A: About fifty minutes.

  Q: About fifty minutes?

  A: Yes, that is right.

  Q: And during the entire time he was on top of you?

  A: That is right.

  Q: Did it pain you?

  A: Yes, it did.

  Q: You did not scream?

  A: I did not. . . .

  Q: Did it hurt very much?

  A: No.

  Q: Did you take part in the performance of the act yourself?

  A: Explain that some to me, please.

  Q: I am asking you if you took part in the performance of the act yourself. Did you respond to him in his performing the act with you?

  A: I did.

  Peggy LaRue Satterlee was even less plausible as a rape victim, not only because she willingly boarded Flynn’s yacht, not only because she was now a nightclub dancer, but because Giesler had discovered from an anonymous telephone tip that she had engaged in some weird antics with a Canadian pilot named Owen Cathcart-Jones, who called her, among other things, Scrumpet and Bitchy Pie. Miss Satterlee had lived with her sister in the Canadian’s apartment during the summer of 1941, and she had gone with him to a funeral parlor. Giesler demanded that Cathcart-Jones provide the details.

  Q: And she was kind of playing hide-and-seek around the corpses, wasn’t she? Do you remember that night?

  A: Yes.

  Q: Do you remember she showed you—opened it up and showed you—the body of an elderly lady?

  A: Yes.

  Q: And pulled the sheet down in the mortuary on a Filipino who had been crippled across his center?

  A: Yes, I remember that.

  Q: And then went back to where they inject the veins of corpses and there looked down at an elderly man lying there, and her head was pushed down against the man’s face. Do you remember that?

  A: Yes, I remember that.

  Could any Los Angeles jury, whether it included nine women and three men or nine men and three women, hear testimony like that and then convict Errol Flynn of rape? Giesler was nothing if not thorough. Having heard Peggy LaRue Satterlee testify that Flynn had led her belowdeck to look at the moon through a porthole on the starboard side of the yacht, he put a federal meteorologist on the stand to testify that the moon by which Miss Satterlee had been seduced was actually shining on the opposite side of the Sirocco. There remained then only the testimony of Errol Flynn himself, who took the stand and presumably lied as he denied everything. He swore that he had never had sex with either one of the girls.

  Two of the three male jurors wanted to convict Flynn, but what did their views matter? After a day of arguing, the jury announced its verdict: Innocent. A little girl rushed forward and handed Flynn a bouquet of flowers. And Flynn declared, as every exonerated criminal has always declared, “My confidence in American justice is completely justified.”

  If Bertolt Brecht couldn’t get a job in a movie colony filled with successful German refugees, what hope could there be for the greatest film director from Spain? Luis Buñuel, dismissed as a leftist from his minor job in the film department of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, managed to get another job, dubbing movies into Spanish for Warner Bros. Too late. “As a dubbing capital, Hollywood was finished,” Buñuel later recalled, “since it was being done in every country where the film was to be shown.”

  So the creator of the surrealistic classic Un Chien Andalou just wandered around, observing the southern California landscape. It naturally fascinated him in ways in which only Buñuel could be fascinated. “One day while I was out driving,” h
e recalled, “I discovered the enormous two-mile-long Los Angeles garbage dump, with everything from orange peels to grand pianos to whole houses. Smoke from the fires rose here and there; and at the bottom of the pit, on a small piece of land raised slightly from the piles of garbage, stood a couple of tiny houses inhabited by real people. Once I saw a young girl, perhaps fourteen or fifteen, emerge from one of the houses, and I fantasized her involved in a love affair in this infernal decor. Man Ray and I wanted to make a film about it, but we couldn’t raise the money.”

  Boris Karloff (top) as the Frankenstein monster was a substitute for real horrors. Charlie Chaplin (middle) had boldly ridiculed Hitler, but moralists made him a villain. Shortly after marrying young Oona O’Neill, he had to stand trial for fathering Joan Barry’s daughter (bottom right).

  6

  Reunions

  (1944)

  The Hollywood people who had gone off to war returned home from time to time, and sometimes they lurched into unexpected battles with the Hollywood people who had stayed home. Lieutenant John Huston, back in California on a visit, went to one of David Selznick’s parties and encountered Errol Flynn. When Flynn said what Huston called “something wretched” about Olivia de Havilland, Huston snapped at him: “That’s a lie! Even if it weren’t a lie, only a son of a bitch would repeat it.”