Patty Marx recommends The Big Love

Patricia Marx is a staff writer for The New Yorker, a former writer for Saturday Night Live, and a party planner for the C.I.A. Her most recent novel, Him Her Him Again the End of Him, was a Thurber Prize finalist. Her most recent children's book, Dot in Larryland, is the 2009 winner of the Friedrich Medal (an award made up by Marx and named for her air-conditioner). She lives in New York City, and, as far as she knows, has never killed anyone. She once traded a puppy for a book.

 

 

The Big Love
Mrs. Florence Aadland as told to Tedd Thomey
1961

"There's one thing I want to make clear right off: my baby was a virgin the day she met Errol Flynn." How can you resist a story that begins like that, especially when I tell you that this ludicrously odd, icky, riveting, sweet, hideous, and unintentionally comic account of the amour between the boozy swashbuckler (who'd already been charged with statutory rape of minors) and Beverly Aadland, the so-called baby, is narrated by her mother, an unreliable raconteur if there ever was one? Mrs. Florence Aadland, as she calls herself on the book jacket, proudly tells us that her ingénue daughter, who'd started modeling at six months and taking singing and dancing lessons at age two, was noticed by forty-eight year-old Flynn on the Universal Lot when she was fifteen, and that they did it soon after, because their love was "preordained." As it happened, "He overwhelmed her. He tore her dress, the black one with the bolero ruffles in the back, and he was so eager she cried and she fought him." How does Mrs. Aadland know so much? "When the time came she told me everything she did with Errol Flynn. . . . Everything. And in detail, because she and I love details and get a kick out of sharing things like that." The public did not find out about the liaison, however, until Flynn died of a heart attack shortly after Beverly turned seventeen, and Mrs. Aadland was convicted for contributing to the delinquency of a minor and denied custody of her daughter. In retrospect, would she have been so supportive of her Beverly's carrying on with this middle-aged reprobate? "Of course I would. And I mean it from my heart. I would let Beverly have those two wonderful years again-even if I knew in advance what the ending would be!" Indeed, in one of the last scenes of the book, mother and daughter, visiting the grave of Errol Flynn, decide that, though his tombstone was graced with more flowers than any other in the cemetery, this extraordinary man deserved more still. And so they steal a larkspur from one dead person, a daisy from another, and a lily from another. What is it that separates this too-candid tale from trash? Is it Mrs. Florence Aadland's voice-somewhere between Anita Loos and Nathanael West? Or is it because the book is out of print and copies are fairly uncommon? Or is it, in fact, trash?

Patty Marx
Writer