Tragic, tempestuous life of Palm Beach's forgotten star, Lili Damita

Appropriately, Paris was where they met. Not the city, but the cruise ship.

Lili Damita was a movie star, and Errol Flynn was a handsome young Australian who had vague ideas about being an actor.

He had seen Damita's movies and he may even have been stalking her, which would be ironic, because after they married, had a child and divorced, she spent the rest of his life stalking him through alimony courts.

Her real name was Lili Carré, and she was born in France in 1901, which made her eight years older than Flynn. She had worked in the French music hall, and had once reputedly been the mistress of both King Alfonso X of Spain and Maurice Chevalier. She began making silent films in 1921, American films in 1929.

After she divorced Flynn in 1942, Lili Damita spent most of her life in Palm Beach, avoiding all discussions of her former husband, and most discussions of her former career. She raised her son Sean Flynn here. She endlessly pursued alimony payments from her ex here.

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And it was here that she spent a small fortune trying to ascertain what happened to Sean when he went missing in Cambodia in 1970.

For it was not Errol Flynn who was the love of her life, but the son they had together.

Volatile relationship

From the beginning, it was a volatile relationship that couldn't be sustained outside the bedroom.

"In one way Lili and I were somewhat alike," Flynn remarked in his memoirs, My Wicked, Wicked Ways. "She essentially disliked men and I essentially disliked women."

Late in his life, Flynn wrote letters in which he paid generous tribute to Lili's erotic virtuosity, but he always ended up complaining about other aspects of her : "The important thing was always the style of her hair, the color of her shoes, did her bag match her dress, was Joie the sexiest French perfume or not?"

"They were together for months at a time, then apart for months at a time," says Robert Matzen, who has written two books about Errol Flynn's peripatetic life and times. "They built up an intolerance for each other. The sex was so good, but then it would be off again."

Lili Damita made about 30 movies, starting in European silent films with directors Michael Curtiz and G.W. Pabst. She came to America in the late '20s, and may be best known for films such as The Bridge of San Luis Rey and This is The Night, featuring a promising newcomer named Cary Grant.

Flynn became a star in 1935 with Captain Blood and stayed a star; at the same time, Damita's career was descending.

"The work was drying up, her accent was too thick, and she didn't have much range," says Matzen. "She threw in the towel, and she saw Flynn as a way to keep a presence around the studios and keep working. And she hung around hoping something would happen.

"She wasn't close to his friends. He tended to hang with stuntmen and she had no use for them at all. She wanted his attention and he wouldn't give it to her, and it became an endless struggle."

Once, she broke a bottle of champagne over his head. He responded by knocking her cold.

Damita made her last movie in 1937. The marriage was off and on for years; certainly it was off whenever Flynn saw a woman he fancied, which he did all the time.

In 1940, Lili got pregnant, and after Sean's birth in 1941, Lily had him baptized and confirmed in the Roman Catholic faith.

Years later, a friend of her son's asked if Sean's father had been Catholic. "Fleen?" she said, spitting out the words. "Fleen was an atheist!"

$1,500 per month

From 1942, Damita lived in Palm Beach at 346 Sea Breeze Ave., her home described as "a neat little bungalow that could have been taken off a street in any American small town." Behind the house there was a small cottage that Sean took as his apartment from the time he was a small boy.

She told people her object in life was to stay as far away from Flynn as possible, hence Palm Beach. Sometimes she was listed as Damita in the phone book, sometimes as Flynn.

Her alimony, which seems to have included child support, was $1,500 per month tax-free until remarriage, along with half of Flynn's property. Damita had offered to take a lump-sum payment when they divorced, but Flynn had refused - a monetarily disastrous decision in a life filled with them.

As of 1944, Flynn was making $6,000 a week. A man with a normal set of expenses could have handled $1,500 a month in alimony, but Flynn wasn't normal. He had another wife, more children, a yacht, a large property in Los Angeles, plus lavish parties at said property, not to mention the nominal 1940s prices of alcohol and narcotics.

Flynn kept up the alimony payments for a couple of years, then fell behind. Damita went to court in 1946 and 1947. "He was asking Warners for advances against pictures he hadn't made yet because he was so short of cash," Matzen says .

Warners seems to have put up with an awful lot. "They bent over backwards to accommodate him because his pictures always made money and a lot of it," he says. "Warners kept him around the longest of their stars. Davis left, Garfield left, Bogart left, but Flynn still returned a profit."

Always, Damita stayed after him; for a time, Warners had to produce his earning statements to enter them in court filings.

While all this was going on, Sean and his mother remained very close. She wanted him to become "everything I ever dreamed of," she told writer Perry Dean Young in 1975. The fervent hope would be that he wouldn't have any of his father's "horrible faults."

For Damita, Palm Beach was the place where Sean could grow up among the best families, make the best contacts so he could go to school - MIT, she hoped - and ascend to his rightful place in the firmament.

Sean attended the Palm Beach Private School, then the legendary Lawrenceville school in New Jersey. Teachers remembered him as "a beautiful boy with perfect manners." Unstated but nevertheless present was surprise that such a hell-raiser could have such a sweet child.

Errol would write his son at the school, because he knew his ex-wife would intercept letters sent to the house. A letter arrived every six months or so, generally promising some kind of scooter or, later, a motorcycle. Said trinkets never actually arrived. As David Niven observed, "You always knew where you stood with Errol. He always let you down."

As Sean grew into young manhood, he went to the races at Sebring. He loved to drive fast and hard - he had a Healy, a '57 Chevy, all white with a red interior, glass packs and moon disc hubcaps. A friend of Sean's once asked Damita whether her son had ever known his paternal grandparents - Errol's father was a respected marine biologist.

"Absolutely not," she replied. "I was mother, father, everything to him. I did it all myself."

When Sean entered Duke University in 1959, his freshman student advisor was a young man named George Weber. Sean's roommate was Les Brown Jr., the son of the bandleader, and Weber remembers that "they really didn't need an advisor for social acclimation, so to speak. Nicer young men you'd never hope to meet, but I don't think that they continued into the second year."

While Sean was trying to figure out his place in the world, Damita remained obsessed by her ex-husband and vice versa - she's all over his autobiography. "They had that intense love/hate thing," Matzen says. "Whatever he did to her - whether it was the philandering or something else - it hurt her so badly that she spent the rest of her life trying to get even. They had that chemical thing, and after it went bad, it was still a chemical thing."

The sexual betrayal may have been on both sides. When Flynn sat down to dictate his memoirs in Jamaica in the late 1950s, he talked about he and Damita going to a lesbian bar in Paris, and he described her becoming intimate with another woman. But that was only in the first edition, because Damita's lawyer made the publisher take that section out. Matzen says that, "around Hollywood, she was thought to be bisexual."

Errol Flynn died in Vancouver in 1959. He had gone to Canada with his 16-year-old mistress to sell his yacht. He was 50 years old, looked 75 and seemed to have no regrets about anything.

Surprisingly, he wasn't actually broke. There were 2,000 acres in Jamaica, a van Gogh. But there were enormous debts; the income tax bill alone was $1.4 million. When it was all said and done, Sean got about $5,000 from his father's estate.

The alimony war ended when "Fleen" did, so in 1962 Damita remarried, to Allen Loomis, a businessman who manufactured Eskimo Pies. He seemed to be a genial, pleasant homebody. They spent their winters in Palm Beach, at 136 Woodbridge Road, the summers in Loomis' home town of Fort Dodge, Iowa.

"She was something of a recluse," says Brownie McLean, a perennial presence in the Palm Beach of that era. "She was never a close friend; we would say hello and that would be it. She did not choose to be social; she was not running around the way we did."

A couple of years later, Sean Flynn made a couple of swashbuckler movies in Europe. He was a handsome kid, a blond beach-boy type, with trace elements of his father's looks.

"Sean was a horrible actor," Matzen says . "He had none of his father's chameleon qualities. He was just himself, with no range, uncomfortable in front of a camera, playing on his father's name."

A few years after that, Sean reinvented himself as a photojournalist and went off to put himself in harm's way, just as his father had in 1937, when he traveled to the Spanish Civil War.

"Sean Flynn arrived at the UPI bureau in Saigon shortly after his friend Dana Stone," wrote the photographer Dirck Halstead.

"He had 'popped over' to Vietnam from Singapore where he was acting in a movie. An adventurer, like his famous father, Errol Flynn, he wanted to see some action. I got him accredited as a UPI photographer.

"Sean was unlike most photographers. Instead of doing quick operations in the field, Sean wanted to hang out with the Special Forces and the 'LURPS' (Long Range Patrols) in the thickest jungles and the highest, most remote mountain ranges. He would disappear for weeks at a time, and when he returned, it was with only a few rolls of film. But his photos were unlike anyone else's."

Damita gave an interview to the local paper and said that "Sean has already been wounded twice." On Sean's last trip to Palm Beach, in 1967, he told a reporter about the crazed environment of the battles in Da Nang, with children fighting for the communists: "They handled rocket launchers and machine guns like cowboy toys."

His photographs, and his utter fearlessness, were gradually making a name for Sean. But in April 1970, Sean and fellow photographer Dana Stone were captured by communist guerillas on Highway One in Cambodia.

Back in Palm Beach, Damita swung into action. She hired commandos and mercenaries, funded private expeditions to find Sean or traces of Sean. Nothing

"It was incredibly hard on her," Matzen says . "Even at the time it was generally felt he was dead. It just devastated her."

In 1975, Damita talked to a friend of Sean's. "It has made an old woman of me," she said of her son's disappearance. "It broke my heart. You see me. I sleep with the phone beside my bed, but I don't sleep. I worry all the time."

Sean had been missing for five years by this time, but Damita maintained his presence in the house. There were photos of Sean everywhere - Sean hunting in Africa, Sean standing with his mother and stepfather. None of the photos showed Sean in Vietnam or Cambodia; none of the photos showed Sean with his father.

Sean Flynn has been missing for 41 years. No trace of his body has ever been found.

Lili and Allen Loomis eventually divorced in the early '80s. In her last years, she was afflicted by Alzheimer's, and when she died at the age of 93 in 1994, she was incongruously buried next to her second ex-husband in Fort Dodge, Iowa - a long way from Paris, a long way from Errol Flynn.

Her tombstone has a picture of the older Damita, a birthdate that makes her younger than she was by seven years, and a single sentence: "She touched so many lives, brightened so many days."

She left an estate of $10.3 million, which she bequeathed to the Lawrenceville school, Sean's alma mater.

Shortly after her death, the memorabilia Lili Damita had collected and maintained from her film career showed up for sale at a store in Disney World. Sometimes, valuable things are carelessly thrown away.