By MRS. FLORENCE AADLAND, TEDD THOMEY (Spurl Editions; 1961/2018)
If nothing else, this outrageous showbiz memoir serves as a fitting footnote to HOLLYWOOD BABYLON. It recounts one of the more sordid chapters of 20th Century Hollywood history: the love affair between the middle aged Errol Flynn and the fifteen year old actress Beverly Aadland (the “Small Companion” to whom Flynn dedicated his autobiography), which came to encompass madness, incarceration and murder in addition to Flynn’s own 1959 demise. What gives this book its special charge is the fact that it was written by Beverly’s Aadland’s mother, who fully approved of the relationship.
Much tabloid ink was spilled about the Flynn-Aadland coupling, with Florence Aadland’s primary motivation in writing this book having been to clear her name. She’s constantly making excuses for her questionable behavior, admitting she might seem like a typical showbiz parent but apparently isn’t.
In fact, Florence Aadland comes off much worse than most typical showbiz moms and dads. She claims not to have known initially that her underage daughter was intimate with Flynn (although she was aware that he’d previously been accused of statutory rape), and doesn’t do much upon learning of it. Nor does it appear to bother her much that Flynn’s first sexual encounter with Beverly took the form of a violent rape. Florence also claims to have witnessed Flynn physically abuse Beverly, after which “we all had a lot of laughs.” Throughout, her biggest concern is whether the affair will have an effect on Beverly’s acting career.
Regarding Errol Flynn’s death and the outrages that followed, Florence is far cagier. Of the 1960 killing of Beverly’s post-Flynn BF William Stanciu, Florence goes along with her daughter’s initial claim about it being a suicide that happened amid a game of Russian roulette, ignoring the fact that Beverly subsequently admitted to police that the shooting occurred during an argument. Of her own sixty day incarceration for contributing to the delinquency of a minor, Florence A. is even less forthcoming, dismissing the photos of her and Beverly in various stages of undress in the presence of several men thusly: “I had been so ill, and so groggy from the pain pills, that I didn’t even realize the photos were being taken.”
Also included in the 2018 edition of this book is a 1960 article from Master Detective magazine about the case. Written in the lurid, sensationalistic brogue of such true crime periodicals, it tells a much different story than Aadland does, making Beverly out to be a scheming femme fatale and Florence a fame-hungry manipulator. Trashy tabloid fodder this article may be, but I suspect it contains as much truth in its pages as the supposedly more “factual” recounting provided by Florence Aadland.