back in print: The Big Love, by Mrs. Florence Aadland

9781943679065
Spurl Editions, 2018
originally published 1961
205 pp

paperback
my copy from Eva at Spurl -- thank you!!!


Oh my god.  I had absolutely no idea what I was getting myself into when I started reading this book, and by the time I was finished, I was just sitting here thinking a) that the woman who wrote this book would never win my nomination for mother of the year, and  b) how delightfully trashy it all is.  The Big Love is an example of why I always say yes to Eva at Spurl -- I never know what kind of "unusual literature" they're going to come up with next.    I wasn't too far into it before the thought popped into my head that something's just not right here, a feeling that turned into a certainty the more I read. And in a brilliant move, the publishers have included a piece from Master Detective Magazine of August, 1960, which not only says it all, but which sent me poring over contemporary tabloids, newspapers, etc., for more -- not about the affair described in this book, but about the author herself.

I won't go into too many particulars, but Mrs. Florence Aadland was the mother of Beverly Aadland, who at the age of fifteen began a long affair with actor Errol Flynn.  The true tragedy here is that with Florence Aadland as her mother, this poor girl just never had a chance, but that's not something you'll hear about here.  Let's face it -- one thing that comes out of this book more than anything else is that this is all about Florence. 

 The book, I think, serves more than one purpose for Flo (as she's referred to throughout) -- number one, it's her bizarre way of defending herself against " do-gooder busybodies" as to why she allowed her teenage daughter to have a two-year affair with the actor Errol Flynn, some 33 years her senior (and why she'd let it happen all over again if she could); number two, it's also a way she could continue the exploitation of her daughter's relationship with the actor even after his death, especially in the light of not only her current financial situation, but even more importantly, a  number of legal problems that kept the tabloids busy for a long time.  Especially revealing is how this book begins:

"There's one thing I want to make clear right off: my baby was a virgin the day she met Errol Flynn." 

Even knowing nothing of what was yet to come, I started  thinking "oh my god, this is going to be great."  And it was.

She goes on to say that

"Nothing makes me sicker than those dried-up old biddies who don't know the facts and spend all their time making snide remarks about my daughter Beverly, saying she was a bad girl before she met Errol."

At the time Flo was telling all, she'd been in a lot of trouble, especially when a probation report emerged saying that her daughter had, among other things,  since the age of twelve, "been dating adult men," and that she was a "$100-a-night teenage call girl." 

from WFMU Beware of the Blog

The affair with Errol Flynn began in 1957 when young Beverly captured his eye while the two of them were working at the studio. According to Flo (the facts told later to her by her daughter), he took her out, then brought her home and raped her, tearing her $75.00 dress.  (Keep that phrase in mind -- Flo seems to enjoy putting price tags to everything.)  At the time, Beverly was only 15, but according to Flo, Flynn thought she was much older. (Never mind that in 1943, Flynn had already stood trial for statutory rape of not just one, but two girls)  Flo says that Beverly tried to resist, but afterwards, she couldn't help falling in love with the guy, and the two began a long affair that lasted until Flynn's death.  Of course, not knowing about that first encounter, as Flo relates, she was invited to accompany  Beverly to Flynn's home, where she first realized that with Beverly, he had "won her over completely."  It was only a few months later while on a plane to New York to join Flynn that Beverly revealed the truth; it was then that Florence swore that she was "going to put up one hell of a fight to see to it that he married my daughter."  Her original plan was to "tell him off"; but it seems that the opportunity came and went, being "gone in a flash" since he was

"such a lively character, so flip, so quick to turn a person's thoughts onto a new subject."

Right.  So much for that plan, and the affair begins in earnest complete with mom's blessing, and lasts until Flynn's death. And even then Flo and Bev weren't done, but I'll let others discover in the book what I mean about that statement.

The thing about The Big Love is that it's not so much the affair between a 15 year old and a man 33 years older that kept me reading,  but Florence herself.   It's sadly humorous and tragic at the same time to watch Flo's rather crass, vulgar self take shape within these pages.  She's trying to convince the "do-gooder busybodies" who "never bother to examine the facts," about her little girl, who "went to Sunday School and church for years..." whose life was "preordained" early on when Flo was told that "men are going to kill over this girl. She has the scent of musk upon her."   And then there's that scene at the "tremendously swanky graveyard" at the end in which Flo muses that some people will

"never, never try to understand what kind of man Errol Flynn was and what kind of a person my daughter Beverly is,"

the "kind of people who would condemn Beverly for laughing and dancing at Errol's grave."   They are, as she says,  "people who don't count with us anyway."   Righty-o.

If ever a book could be labeled bizarre, it's this one, and god help me, I enjoyed every trashy second of it.   If you're ever in the mood to read something so bad that it's absolutely brilliant, this is the book. Major kudos to Spurl for putting it back into print.

The Strange World of Willie Seabrook, by Marjorie Worthington

9781943679058
Spurl Editions, 2017
originally published 1966
320 pp

paperback

First things first. I have to take a minute and say thanks to Eva at Spurl, who brought this book to my attention.    Spurl is a small press, one that specializes in "unusual literature and photography," and I first heard of this publisher when they came out with Jean Lorrain's Monseiur de Bougrelon last year.  They "love the eccentric, the unexpected, the seedy and the absurd" like I do, so it's great match. 

Who is Willie Seabrook, you might ask, just as I did.  I did a half-hearted search on him just to find out what he'd written, but left it at that since I decided I really didn't want to know anything about him until I'd read this book. Here we get to know Willie Seabrook the author, the traveler, and the adventurer; he was a man with many friends who loved him, a man who knew a veritable who's-who list of famous writers and other colorful characters during his lifetime.   However, Marjorie Worthington probably knew him better than anyone. In a very big way, this book is her own story.  Her love for Willie she describes as

 "something so intricately bound up with the breath I breathed and the blood that channeled its way in and out of my heart that only death could put an into it,"

one, which says  "cut myself off from wherever I belonged in order to be with him."

Standing by him with the patience of a saint, finding deep reserves within herself upon which to draw, she documents that "strange world" she lived in with Seabrook, often at great risk to her own sanity, until a time when she just couldn't do it any more.  While the story is not pretty, it is compelling enough that I couldn't stop reading it, not so much because of any voyeuristic tendencies I may have, but because in Marjorie we have a woman who wrestled with her own demons while devoting herself to trying to help Willie with his. Written in 1966, the book takes us through Marjorie's years with Willie Seabrook, and then up until his death in 1945.  Whether this may be her own way of looking back and taking some measure of blame for his suicide, I'm not sure, although the argument could certainly be made here.

She begins her story in 1926 when they were both in Paris as part of what Gertrude Stein called the "Lost Generation."  The "core of her life" as she puts it, was during their seven-year stay in France; it was a time when they met for aperitifs and conversation with  people like Ford Madox Ford, Stein and Alice B. Toklas, and Jean Cocteau.  There they lived in a small place in Toulon where they both worked on their writing, although they also spent time travelling  throughout France.   There's a lot of "name dropping," as Marjorie calls it, but we also get a brief glance into Willie's rather strange persona for the first time.  On page 19, she refers to Willie's relationship with women, saying that he liked them,

"in spite of a deep-rooted hostility to his mother Myra, that compelled him to make them miserable...Author, traveler, celebrity, he could still look wistful and sort of small boy, and he had a way of making a nice woman feel that he needed her, that she alone could help him get rid of the demons that beset him, his drinking and his sadism." (19)

These twin "demons" of "drinking" and "sadism"  will reappear many times throughout Marjorie's account, but more interesting is that after having finished the book, it seems to me that here we have the first clue about how Marjorie sees her own role in Willie's life -- she is that "nice woman" who wanted to feel needed, and with whose help he could exorcise the "demons" in his life. Everything that happens later (up to a point), I believe, comes back to this statement, as Marjorie will take his failures on her own shoulders, making them hers.  For example, during the 1930s when Willie began drinking "almost a whole bottle before lunch, and another bottle between the time he awoke from his siesta and nine o'clock at night," to

"deaden some inner anguish that lay so deep a whole ocean of brandy couldn't touch it,"

he came to the decision that he needed to go to New York, "to be shut up someplace 'behind bars' where he couldn't get a drink for love or money."  In Marjorie's eyes, she "had failed" because she "could not help him stop drinking," and she viewed Willie's decision to leave for New York as a way of him telling her that the two of them "weren't good for each other," that she was "the last one to help him stop drinking," and that together they'd "made a fine mess" of both their lives.

She also came to believe that while they were "physically drawn together," she had also failed when it came to taming Willie's other demon, manifested in the women who were paid for hours to allow him to put them in chains while he took sadistic pleasure in their pain.  She referred to these women by the "generic name" of Lizzie in Chains, and while she hated it, she put up with it, once in a while even obliging him herself.

Willie Seabrook and Lee Miller, taken by Man Ray, c. 1930. From "The Zombie King," by Emily Matchar, Atavist Magazine.

About his "Lizzie in Chains" fetish, she wrote that she

"had always kept some tiny thread of hope that one day Willie, who I believed could do anything, would be able to slay his evil demon before it destroyed him."  (293)

Things did seem to be on target for better lives after Willie's treatment for his alcoholism -- he was sober again, they married, he was writing, and they even bought a place in New York out in the country to take on "a new kind of life."   But even for a woman whose patience seemed to know no bounds, and despite her life devoted to  this man, Marjorie eventually came to discover that she had a breaking point, a realization that likely saved her in the process.

The Strange World of Willie Seabrook was written twenty years after Seabrook committed suicide. It is haunting, and between these two covers we find not only a lot of soul searching on the author's part, but also a picture of Seabrook as she knew him,  a deeply-flawed, severely-troubled human being who seemed destined for self destruction.  At the same time she leaves us with the idea that he was a

"fine, intelligent, and lovable man, with a touch of genius as well as madness,"

and that he inspired "deep and indestructible love" among those who "tried to help but were not successful." Perhaps Marjorie should have realized that the possibility looms large that Willie never really wanted help, saving herself a whole load of grief much earlier on.

very highly recommended and major, major applause to Spurl for bringing this book back into print.