EF for TJ

It's too big, it's too wide
It's too strong, it won't fit
"Ego" ©Beyoncé Knowles

Married three times, and the defendant in as many rape trials, Flynn lived a scandalous but brief life.
Errol Flynn - the 100th Anniversary

Errol Flynn may not be household name outside of Australia. Indeed I suspect the only thing that Australian Generation Xers know about him is the expression, "in like Flynn".

But as today is just over a week from his hundredth birthday, I am dedicating this LFNY to Australia's own gold prospector, patrol officer, slave recruiter, pearl diver, diamond smuggler, fish dynamiter and Hollywood matinee idol of the 1940s, Mr. Errol Flynn.

The expression "in like Flynn" means "to be quickly and/or emphatically successful, usually in a sexual or romantic context." And it's based on Errol Flynn's reputation as a hard-drinking, hell-raising ladies' man - a reputation that Mr. Flynn encouraged in his autobiography - My Wicked Wicked Ways: The Autobiography of Errol Flynn. The autobiography also did nothing to dispel the incredible but nonetheless widespread rumours as to the the size of his penis and his success with getting women to jump into the cot with him.

You can hear about Flynn's early life and Hollywood adventures on Australian ABC's Life and Times, where Flynn's biographer Jeffrey Meyers and Bob Casey (Errol Flynn Appreciation Society) talk admiringly of the man. Life and Times also features clips from Flynn interviews, and a radio show recorded during WWII - Mr and Mrs Smith - starring Flynn and Lana Turner.

But just how Australian was Flynn? Certainly in his early years in New Guinea and the UK, his larrikinism attests to the Australian Flynn. But later?

His accent is decidedly English in the recording of "Mr and Mrs Smith" (Flynn and Lana Turner). And at the end of his life he took out American citizenship.

Sadly by then, all that remained of his Australian heritage was his penis size.