Everyone she spoke with seemed to have a different – and often dramatically conflicting – view of the young adventurer. “A wild man,” said one friend. “A thoughtful, spiritual guy,” said another. The only definitive conclusion Krass was able to reach was that Flynn was a very guarded person whose true personality would have been known to only a few. “Sean
only let people in to very specific sections of his life. No one ever got the full picture,” she says. As the son of actor Errol Flynn, Sean Flynn had good reason to be cautious about who was in his inner circle. Errol, wildly popular for his roles in such adventure films of the 1930s as The Adventures of Robin Hood and Captain Blood, was notorious for his hedonistic life-
Before Flynn found his calling as a photojournalist he dabbled in both fashion photography and film acting.
style, especially in regard to his relationships with women. Sean Flynn’s mother, actress Lili Damita, had divorced his hard-living father in 1942 when Sean was only a year old, and over the course of his life, Flynn reportedly saw his father only 15 times. But even though the father and son were not personally close, Errol Flynn’s popularity and reputation were impossible to escape. Well into his adulthood, Sean Flynn was identified as “Errol Flynn’s son” everywhere he went. Even while at Lawrenceville from 1957 to 1960, Sean Flynn was unable to entirely ignore the drama surrounding his father. In October 1959, when he was a senior living in Upper, Errol Flynn suffered a heart attack while on his yacht with a 15-year-old girlfriend named Beverly Aadland – a girl whom Sean Flynn himself had dated and brought to tea dances at Lawrenceville. Woodhull Housemaster Larry Hlavacek H’55 ’61 had escorted his former House member to the funeral in New York, and assisted the young man in dealing with the media circus surrounding his father’s death. Shortly afterward, Errol Flynn’s autobiography, My Wicked, Wicked Ways, was published posthumously, and the younger Flynn, as a consequence, had to cope with the publicity surrounding a scandalous tell-all book. Researching this early stage of Sean Flynn’s life brought Krass to Lawrenceville, and she states that what she found here proved pivotal in shaping her understanding of who Sean Flynn was. Not only was she able to interview various people who knew Flynn during those formative years, such as former House Mother Linda Hlavacek Silver H’59 ’61 ’62 ’63 ’64 and roommate Bill Chapin ’60, but in the Stephan Archives, she found a unique perspective that had been missing until that point: Flynn’s letters to his mother, including some written just before his disappearance. For Krass, the letters were a revelation. The producer had determined that Flynn and his mother had been close, and it was in his letters that she felt she finally began to see the “Real Sean.” “If you can’t be real with your mother,” Krass explained, “who can you be real with? The letters finally gave us Flynn’s own voice rather than only others’ perspectives on him.” Krass believes she found the key to Flynn’s personality in his struggles to emerge from the shadow of his father’s fame. Following his career at Lawrenceville, Flynn spent six months at Duke University, only to withFT his pamphlet, produced by the American Committee to Free Journalists held in Southeast Asia, was printed to increase awareness of the 17 journalists who disappeared in the Cambodian war theater.