Memory Lane: Movie star's son had thirst for adventure

It was the middle of an April night in 1970 when former Hollywood starlet and seasonal resident Lili Damita was awakened by her telephone ringing.

He’s been captured by communist guerillas, an official on the other end told her about her son, Sean, a photojournalist who’d been covering the Vietnam War.

“It broke my heart,” Damita said later.

The France born-and-bred beauty had spent much of her life trying to save her son from harm.

In 1942, she’d fled Hollywood with the then-infant to get as far away as possible from celebrity vultures.

They settled quietly in Palm Beach, where the boy could — and did — attend good schools and, Damita hoped, be cloistered from fame’s glare, which burned not so much because of her, but because Sean also was the son of international superstar Errol Flynn and his self-described “wicked ways.”

Palm Beach was absent what Damita privately scorned: “That Fleen!”

Born Liliane Carré in 1904, Damita, who trained as a dancer in France, came to America in 1928 after movie moguls “discovered” her.

Once she became a star thanks to 1930s movie roles with such leading men as Laurence Olivier, Gary Cooper and Cary Grant, she met a disarmingly handsome traveler on a cruise ship. From Tasmania, Errol Flynn was bound for Hollywood after having left home at 17 and traipsed around the world.

They married in 1935. As she downshifted her career, his dizzily ascended after he starred as 1935’s swashbuckling caper “Captain Blood,” followed by other mega-hits, such as 1938’s “The Adventures of Robin Hood.”

When they divorced in 1942, a year after Sean’s birth, Damita took off; not long after, Flynn was accused (and acquitted) of statutory rape involving two 17-year-old girls.

Damita and Sean lived full time in Palm Beach from 1942 through the 1950s (she would continue living seasonally thereafter on the island). Their home was referred to as a “neat bungalow” on Seabreeze Avenue.

During World War II, she served as a guest star at a Palm Beach fundraiser put on by local armed-services members at The Paramount Theatre, which is now a retail-and-office complex at the corner of Sunrise Avenue and North County Road.

Along with her own money, she got $1,500 a month in alimony from her ex, who remarried, had more kids and partied on his yacht.

Though local newspapers described Damita as “a familiar figure” with “a wide circle of friends,” her son became her focus during his school-age years.

Little Sean Flynn first attended Palm Beach Public School, appearing in a 1946 Mother Goose play with other kindergartners at the school. He later enjoyed Palm Beach Private School (now known as Palm Beach Day Academy) though 1957, where he played soccer and touch football.

Described by teachers as good-mannered, he was “a quiet but ardent thespian” who starred in 1957’s spring play, “Charley’s Aunt,” according to “Tradition & Change in Paradise,” a book about the school’s history.

One of Flynn’s childhood friends was none other than George Hamilton, a Palm Beacher who became a well-known movie and TV actor.

When “Where The Boys Are” was being filmed in Fort Lauderdale, Hamilton, one of its stars, helped get Flynn a walk-on part — that of a handsome teen throwing a football on the beach.

“Sean and I had many great times,” Hamilton later recalled, noting his friend enjoyed adventurous fun. “What his father was in the movies, Sean was in life.”

By the time Sean finished high school in 1959 at Lawrenceville, a New Jersey academy where he grew into a 6-foot-plus-tall cleft-chinned teen that girls adored, Sean had spent some vacations in far-flung places with his alcohol-besotted father (Errol Flynn died later that year at age 50).

The fallen movie star-father confused and ultimately was resented by his son, according to friends and authors familiar with their relationship.

Like his father’s movie persona, Sean grew to crave adventure and taking risks, including cavorting as a teen in Havana, Cuba.

Though he attended Duke University, he left to pursue a movie career in Europe, starring in “Son of Captain Blood,” among other films. “It’s the only way I know to make a lot of money" to buy a charter fishing boat, he said.

He instead went to work as a big-game hunting guide in Africa.

Flynn reinvented himself again as a photojournalist. He started covering the Vietnam War in 1966. On assignment with Paris Match and then Time, Inc., he became known for putting himself in danger to get photos cautious peers missed.

He took breaks to travel, including to Bali. During a 1967 trip home to Palm Beach, he told local newspapers of his Vietnam experiences, including seeing Vietnamese children “10 or 12 years old” handling “rocket launchers and machine guns like cowboy toys.”

Hamilton, in 2015 told a newspaper in Cambodia — where, in support of Flynn, he attended a reunion of journalists who’d covered the war — that he’d asked Flynn about Vietnam.

“It’s the only place in the world where anything’s happening,” Hamilton recalled Flynn telling him.

Later, back in Vietnam, Flynn grew his hair long and read “Zen and Buddhists texts” as part of a “transformation many people attributed to a deep inner change,” author Jeffrey Meyers notes in “Inherited Risk,” a book about the father-and-son Flynns.

Meanwhile, Damita had remarried in 1962.

She and her husband, dairy-products manufacturer Allen Loomis, wintered in Palm Beach at his Woodbridge Road home; they summered in his hometown of Fort Dodge, Iowa.

She’d become somewhat of “a recluse,” Palm Beach social-scene observers remembered about Damita. And she feared for her son.

Then came the call she told reporters she received at 3 a.m. on April 7, 1970. It was from a chief correspondent at Time, Inc.’s New York bureau.

She was told what soon made national headlines: Flynn and photojournalist Dana Stone were believed to have been captured April 6 by communist guerillas in Cambodia, where the two had motorcycled to investigate recent developments.

“Their disappearance has become one of the enduring mysteries of the war, two young journalists — like movie adventurers — riding their motorbikes into no man’s land and losing a bet against fate,” the New York Times wrote in 2010, when remains of Flynn were mistakenly thought to be found. “Mr. Flynn, the dashing and glamorous son of the movie star Errol Flynn, had in fact briefly been an actor, and he brought an aura with him to Vietnam that gave his disappearance at the age of 28 a mythic quality.”

After Flynn’s 1970 capture and disappearance, Damita spared no expense funding efforts to find her son. “It has made an old woman of me,” she said of her desolation.

Others also tried to find Flynn, including Vietnam War photographer Tim Page, who died earlier this year and devoted decades to finding his lost “brother.” No trace of Sean Flynn has been found to this day.

Damita was afflicted by Alzheimer’s before she died in 1994. Letters from her son were among keepsakes from her estate auctioned in 2015.

“If father and M.G.M. want me to do a picture, they can all go to hell,” Sean wrote in one. In another: "I just want to say 'thanks' for home, the car, and the fact that you are the best mother that I could ever want.”

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Daily News: Sean Flynn, son of Errol Flynn, grew up in Palm Beach