The link with Errol Flynn and the stars

Entrevista · El País · 6 de junio de 2018

El ecuador de Ulises: The link with Errol Flynn attracted the stars to the island

The arrival of Errol Flynn in 1950 to Mallorca could well be the script of one of his films. After getting married in Montecarlo, city in which the stars of the golden age of Hollywood enjoyed vacations and parties, he traveled by boat with his third wife, Patrice Wymore, on his way to Gibraltar when a storm forced him to divert the Zaca to Pollença. The beauty of the first sunrise in Mallorca tied the actor to the island during the last decade of his life. Years in which Flynn (Australia 1909 – Canada, 1959) showed the beauties of the island to illustrious friends such as Ava Gardner, Rita Hayworth, Orson Welles, John Wayne or Tyrone Power. Today’s Ibiza, full of celebrities, has little to envy to the Hollywood mallorcan summers of the fifties.

With the idea of rescuing the past, Roser Amills has written The Equator of Ulysses (Ifeelbook). “I am sorry that the Mallorcans do not have enough self-esteem to add the presence of these great actors to the history of the island,” she says after diving into the actor’s memoir, the news published 60 years ago and listening to the “stories” of some neighbors of Palma. The novel – told by the fictional character Miquel Bibiloni (based on the author’s grandfather) – collects the stay on the island of “an actor who had to soften his past because he had done so many things in his life that he was not credible”. Before being one of the sexual myths of Hollywood, he was an Olympic athlete, pearl fisher, gold prospector, animal castrator and even traveled to Spain to fight with the Republicans during the Civil War, something that put him on the blacklist of the dictatorship and that was about to cost the expulsion of the island.