The debauched trick Errol Flynn taught Jack Nicholson
Errol Flynn may have died a little over a year after Jack Nicholson made his feature film debut in 1958’s The Cry Baby Killer, but the hedonistic lifestyle of the Golden Age superstar ended up having an influence on the actor’s own era as a notorious hellraiser.
During the peak of his career, iconic swashbuckler Flynn was well-known for his heavy drinking, hard-partying, womanising, and drug-abusing ways. These aspects would also apply to Nicholson throughout the 1970s once he’d cracked the A-list and become renowned as one of the best performers of his generation.
The two may have never even met, but according to Bob Woodward’s John Belushi biography Wired, he picked up a trick of the trade from Flynn in order to take his sexual performance to the next level. Nicholson was so into his narcotics at the time that he’d even separate them into two distinct classes, with ‘downstairs’ drugs for regular partiers and ‘upstairs’ drugs kept exclusively for close friends, VIPs, and lovers.
That being said, Anjelica Huston – Nicholson’s partner for 17 years – disputed the rumour in an interview with Vulture, although she did confirm there was indeed a special type of cocaine he kept in his residence. “I don’t know that that’s a true story. But there was a type of cocaine in the ’70s that I would’ve classified as upstairs cocaine, pharmaceutical flake,” she said. “That was kind of effervescent, not that it was fizzy, but it was light and uncut.”
However, as author Marc Eliot put it, Nicholson took a cocaine-fuelled urban legend that surrounded Flynn during his heyday and tested it out for himself. The three-time Academy Award winner apparently “learned that by putting a dab on the manhood he could last longer,” which would, in turn, “intensify the sensations” experienced by his female partners. While he never overtly acknowledged whether or not he was the wielder of a cocaine-assisted penis, he was never shy in recalling his raunchier days.
In his memoir, Nicholson reflected on the parties that had become the talk of Tinseltown, which were “round the clock partying, drinks, drugs, sex, and beautiful, hot, willing girls who loved to get just as high as the boys and have a good time”. With that in mind, him sprinkling some of the devil’s dandruff to imbue his bishop with the ability to give a substantially better sermon hardly sounds like a tall tale.
After passing at the age of 50, Nicholson’s movie career has lasted longer than Flynn was even alive, and that’s without him having appeared in a film since 2010’s How Do You Know. Clearly, dabbling in virtually every substance under the sun didn’t prevent the former from living a long, reckless, decadent, and fruitful existence.
