Monday Glamour Starter --- Lili Damita


Lili Damita was some kinda hot French pastry --- hers was a brazen and unapologetic appeal to our baser instincts. If Lili’s kind of "It" had been a little tamer, she might have clicked on our shores. As it is, she had wildness coupled with a sometimes-impenetrable accent that made her largely unfit for domestic consumption. It was only when up-and-coming Errol Flynn took a dollop of her charms (and how he paid for it!) that Damita found immortality. Most of what passes for research on Lili is fraught with error (early first marriage to Michael Curtiz? --- no) and what little data to be found generally revolves around Errol, and even that begins with a myth and ends in mystery. Clearing up at least some of it up has come by way of kind assist from longtime friend and Flynn scholar Michael A. Mazzone. For a woman who almost made it to ninety, Lili Damita left little behind in the way of personal info, but a few scribes got to her toward the end, always on the pretext of having fresh info on the fate of her son Sean Flynn, a journalist who’d been lost in Viet Nam and for whose return she never gave up hope (more on this anon).








She was French born (1904 --- we think) and came of money. There were Catholic schools and ballet classes. Maybe that formal upbringing gave her the itch, cause it wasn’t long before Lili doffed her schoolgirl uniform, shimmied her way onstage at the Folies Bergere and caught the eye of Euro film directors (including a pre-Hollywood Curtiz). US stardom looked to be in the offing when she was brought over by Samuel Goldwyn to replace Vilma Banky as Ronald Colman’s love interest in The Rescue, a 1929 silent (Goldwyn’s last) that barely made the cut before talkies assumed dominance. The partnership didn’t take --- her appeal perhaps too, shall we say, overt, for a Colman consort. More South Seas siren-ing came opposite Victor McLaglen and Edmund Lowe in their second Flagg/Quirt shout-fest, The Cock-Eyed World, which stood ‘em in the aisles in late ’29, but proves a hard sit today. For that matter, The Rescue is its own kind of ordeal --- Lili by far a best thing about both. Getting by on good looks wouldn’t cut it in the early thirties though, and she ended up with undistinguished parts, usually fiery ones, opposite fast rising leading men. Gary Cooper rode covered wagons with her in Fighting Caravans --- major careers were not likely to be forged from material like this --- neither would she win laurels as yet another victim of Warren William’s amorality, there’d been so many of those after all (here they are in The Match King). She bore scars from Erich Von Stroheim’s whip most becomingly in Friends and Lovers (a TCM staple) , but would later take a supporting role in Frisco Kid with James Cagney. An outstanding pre-code was This Is The Night, thankfully on DVD.




With the Hollywood career having sputtered on lift-off, Lili returned to the continent, and that’s where she met Errol Flynn. Reflecting upon this fifty years later, she’d acknowledge it was love at first blink, and the pair got torrid all around Par-ee (he joined her on treks to whispered about lesbian bars she frequented). By the time EF had his Warners (short-term) contract deal, he and Lili had sealed theirs and crossed the Atlantic pretty much as a couple, though maintaining separate staterooms for propriety’s sake. Fiction of the two having met on shipboard was advanced later by WB publicity. Damita had by now committed herself to the promotion of Flynn’s nascent screen career, and had the Hollywood connections to back it up. We may safely thank this woman for our many hours of pleasure with Robin Hood, Gentleman Jim, the rest. Their feet barely touched Yankee soil before she wangled invitations to filmland’s richest households, and it was these contacts, plus her long established association with Curtiz, that got Errol tested, and tested again, for Captain Blood. The fact he was able to win out over hopefuls George Brent and Cary Grant was further tribute to Lili’s abiding tenacity. How could they not have solemnized such an effective parlay with wedding vows? She failed to fully reckon with Flynn’s compulsive straying however, Captain Blood in late 1935 to merely sharpen his carnal appetites. A next six or so years would be fraught with violent conflict, passionate reconciliations, rinse and repeat (Errol forever maintained Lili was the best he’d ever had, bar none). Finally, after he made big money thrice and overflowing, she emptied Flynn's goblet in an L.A. courtroom and effectively put him on the run for the rest of his life --- hell hath no fury and all that. Son Sean came at the end of the marriage (born 1941) and she was determined he'd not be raised midst Tinseltown squalor. Otherwise done with Errol (but for his money, and eventually his home, which she seized), Lili ditched Hollywood as well.





Fate of Sean was the great drama of Lilli Damita’s third act. He grew up in boarding schools and military academies, spent weekends on campus while friends went home. Some summers he'd pass with Errol, visits unpredictable what with Flynn staving off creditors and leaping from one foreign shore to a next. Sean tried acting, but showed little aptitude for it in a couple of his father’s TV anthology dramas. His mother wanted college education and a profession for the boy (there was a short stay at Duke University), but adventure beckoned and so did offers from international producers eager to further exploit the still potent Flynn name by casting The Son Of Captain Blood with untrained Sean. Lure of easy Euro money and high life that came with it proved irresistible --- there were more costumers, espionage thrillers, spaghetti westerns --- the usual sixties pudding from offshore. A few made the leap stateside, but Hollywood wasn’t clamoring for another Flynn --- perhaps their memories of the old one were still too fresh (Errol had died in 1959). Sean was freebooting about Europe and Africa when he wasn’t filming. For a while, he guided safaris in Kenya. Further excitement seemed imminent when he took up a camera and headed for Viet Nam as a war photographer. Some of his stuff got published and he was fearless enough, but his father’s prowess for getting out of scrapes was not there for Sean when enemy combatants on the Cambodian border picked him up along with another photographer during a shoot. Though not confirmed until years later, the captives were evidently marched around for nearly a year before being taken out one morning and unceremoniously killed. For all his mother knew, however, Sean was still alive, and Lili’s search would go on for as long as she would live.




There was a million dollar life insurance policy on Sean underwritten by CBS that Lili Damita collected. She married again (rich dairy farmer) after Errol’s death, so there were ways and means to pursue her goal in finding Sean. Residency in Palm Beach, Florida kept her in regular contact with neighbors George Murphy and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. They used their influence and contacts to aid in the quest, even though few believed Sean was still alive. Walter Cronkite was another who tried to help. He implored Lilli to give up, but she would not. Sean’s bachelor apartment in Paris remained sealed for over twenty years as his mother searched, waited, and continued to pay the rent. That finally stopped in 1991 when Lili’s own health became compromised. Observers said that the place was like some exquisitely preserved time capsule of the late sixties --- all of Sean’s furnishings, personal effects, and bric-a-brac left undisturbed and frozen in time. Even fan letters sat unopened on his bureau table. Lili would never know of this, as the Alzheimer’s disease had by now taken hold and she would only have a few years left. She died in 1994.