Tasmanian Devil (21 page)

9

‘THE SPINNING ANIMAL FROM TASMANIA'

I was lab manager in the Zoology Department at the University of Tasmania from 1962 until 1979 and I worked closely with Dr Eric Guiler. On one occasion he had at the department a number of devils in cages built into a room. Three in all, separated by steel mesh and right to the ceiling. There was one light bulb over the centre cage. Sometime during the first night the devil in that cage climbed up the mesh and chewed off the bulb and its holder. All that was left were two small pieces of electric cable sticking through a small hole in the ceiling. A good thing the light had not been left on.

R
USSELL
W
HEELDON
, S
ANDY
B
AY

T
he story of how a small nocturnal marsupial carnivore came to be immortalised as a Hollywood cartoon icon is an unlikely one. It involved chance, luck, unsolved intrigue and a clutch of dramatically different personalities, among them movie mogul Jack Warner, Hollywood artist Robert McKimson, film star Errol Flynn and his father Theodore.

In 1883 a young Russian Jew, escaping the threat of Tsarist pogroms, arrived in New York. His surname may have been Varna; immigration authorities anglicised it as Warner. His wife later joined him in Baltimore where he had opened a shoe repair shop. Some ten years later their young sons, Harry, Sam, Abe and Jack, lured by the thrill and potential of nickelodeons, pooled together to buy a broken Kinetoscope projector (the silent film
The Great Train Robbery
came with it). They repaired the projector and screened the film in a tent in their backyard. So began the illustrious cinematic career of the Warner brothers.

Jack, the future all-powerful head of Warner Bros., had to wait until he turned sixteen before his brothers allowed him to become a formal partner in their grandly named Duquesne Amusement Supply Company. That was in 1909—a notable Tasmanian devil year. Thousands of kilometres west, at 42° South, Theodore Thomson Flynn and his pregnant wife Lily had just arrived in Hobart from Sydney, where he had been appointed the Ralston Professor of Biology at the University of Tasmania. (As a point of comparison, Flynn's annual salary was A$500; the Warner brothers were together pulling in US$2500 per week—well over five hundred times the professor's earning capacity.)

Theodore Flynn's enthusiasm for Tasmania, which was not matched by Lily's (she disliked the cold and missed her Sydney friends), soon led him into original terrestrial and marine research, some of the most important of which involved the Tasmanian devil. And Flynn is credited with being one of the first scientists to warn of the thylacine's impending extinction.

In June 1909 Lily, soon to rename herself Marelle, gave birth to their first child, Errol. Much has been written about famous Hollywood movie star Errol Flynn's relatively short, tempestuous life. The oeuvre constitutes a mass of contradictions. Even his autobiography
My Wicked, Wicked Ways
(with its devilishly named opening chapter) doesn't exactly set the record straight, disarming and uncomfortably honest though it generally is when he's not cracking jokes, many of them cheerfully libidinous. Throughout the book, however, Errol Flynn writes respectfully of his father. He admired Theodore's intellect and achievements in biology,
¹
just as years later in Hollywood he admired, when not loathing, his boss Jack Warner.

At the university, Professor Flynn's duties were divided between lecturing, examination and research, part of which was a requirement to research the diseases of plants and animals. He made no mention of disease affecting any dasyurid. Within a year he had completed one of his more important papers, which today is still regarded as a standard Tasmanian devil reference text.
²

Ranked somewhere between low soap opera and high intellectual and artistic achievement, the Flynn family saga is a compelling one, though father and son tend to be treated as different species in the literature, while Marelle is variously described as vivacious, fun-loving, cruel to Errol and incompatible with Theodore; Flynn was:

a tall, handsome man, patient with Errol, overfond of alcohol, somewhat shabby for a distinguished professor [and] as a contrast to his wife, so full of life and gaiety, Professor Flynn was often moody and looked ill at ease in the company of others . . . wishing that he was back at his home or at the University laboratory surrounded by his beloved animal specimens.
³

Despite personal difficulties, including separation from Marelle, Theo went on to a career of considerable personal achievement. In 1930 he left for Belfast where until retirement he held the Chair of Zoology at Queen's University and became a member of a number of eminent societies, a far cry from the early years of bringing up naughty Errol—including the occasion Theo found himself in trouble with the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery from which he had borrowed skeletons of a devil, thylacines and platypuses for research purposes and not only not returned them for years but Errol had apparently damaged them.

All the while Warner Bros. Pictures Inc. was benefiting from utilising animals. Soon after setting themselves up in Hollywood the brothers began producing short serials using tame animals from a nearby zoo, in which a heroine would be ‘chased' by a doddery old lion, tiger or gorilla and the serial suspended at a climactic moment until the following week. Then, in 1923, Jack Warner had the prescience—or luck—to take on a script in which a dog rescued a Canadian fur trapper (
Where the North
Begins
). The search for a canine actor uncovered Rin Tin Tin, a highly trained German shepherd. The dog became Warners' first superstar, earning millions in a seven-year career. After Rin Tin Tin's death Jack kept up the animal flavour by introducing a horse, Duke, and its faithful owner, a young John Wayne. It is not surprising that Warner Bros. then took to the animated cartoon business with such gusto, since the brothers knew how positively audiences reacted to animals.

Errol Flynn refers a few times to the Tasmanian devil in his autobiography, including this (his father's?) definition:

‘A Tasmanian devil (
Sarcophilus ursinus)
is a carnivorous marsupial known for its extreme ferocity'. Errol had a deep interest in the natural world from early boyhood. He loved the sea and its creatures and much of this came from Theodore, who also kept marsupials at home for research purposes. They were pleasures in a place of friction: according to Errol his mother found him unmanageable, and

a devil in boy's clothing . . . My young, beautiful, impatient mother, with the itch to live—perhaps too much like my own— was a tempest about my ears, as I about hers. Our war deepened so that a time came when it was a matter of indifference to me whether I saw her or not . . . The
rapport
was with my father . . .

When school finished, I raced home to be at his side, to hurry out into the back yard, where we had cages of specimens of rare animals. That courtyard was a fascinating place for a small boy.

Tasmania is the only spot in the world where three prehistoric animals, the Tasmanian tiger, the Tasmanian devil and the animal Zyurus are found. Father had specimens of all of these in his cages, as well as kangaroo rats, opossums, sheep. I got to know these creatures very well, even the most savage, and I hated it when he had to chloroform one and dissect it . . . Occasionally I went with him on a trip in quest of one of the rare Tasmanian animals. We headed for the western coast, a difficult terrain, where there were huge fossilised trees. We hunted the Tasmanian tiger, an animal so rare it took Father four years to trap one.
⁴

Errol alone knew what a Zyurus was, though he may have been relying on memory. His father had made a major palaeontological discovery in Wynyard in northwest Tasmania of the oldest known marsupial fossil,
Wynyardia bassinia
. At a nearby site was the fossil
Zygomaturus
, a wombat-like member of the megafauna.

After a period of adventuring as a young man in Australia and beyond, Errol acted in a cheap movie in England (his second) which came to the attention of Jack Warner. According to Flynn, ‘Warner saw me popping around on the screen with a lot of energy.'
⁵
According to Jack, ‘I knew we had grabbed the brass ring in our thousand-to-one-shot spin with Flynn. When you see a meteor stab the sky, or a bomb explode, or a fire sweep across a dry hillside, the picture is vivid and remains alive in your mind. So it was with Errol Flynn.'
⁶
The year was 1935: a wild, virile, dashing, swashbuckling Tasmanian devil had arrived in Hollywood.

Jack teamed him with the equally unknown Olivia de Havil-land in
Captain Blood.
The movie made him instantly famous. Yet despite the rewards for the disgruntled, rebellious Hobart youth who'd struck the Hollywood jackpot, Errol Flynn came to begrudge as much as appreciate his luck:

You were assumed to be Irish, your name being Flynn . . .

Nobody knew or cared that my whole life was spent in Tasmania, Australia, New Guinea, England . . . Nobody believed me when I talked of that background. They didn't want to hear of it. They wanted me to be Flynn of Ireland.
⁷

Still, he went on to make over 50 films, mostly with Warner Bros., until his death from a heart attack in 1959. That output of over two films a year, mostly in lead roles, is considerable, while he also found the time and energy to become the era's most colourful and controversial Hollywood identity. But he never lost his love for the sea, in particular, nor for animals. He sometimes arranged whale-watching cruises, one eminent guest being Professor Hubbs of the Scripps Oceanic Institute. He bred champion lionhounds, a breed more familiarly known today as Rhodesian ridgebacks.

Inspired by his father Theodore, Tasmanian-born actor Errol Flynn developed a
lifelong devotion to animals. In the United States he was the first to breed lion hounds,
also known as Rhodesian ridgebacks. The first chapter of Errol's biography is entitled
‘Tasmanian Devil, 1909–1927'. (Courtesy Steve and Genene Randell, Errol Flynn
Society of Tasmania,
www.geocities.com/errolflynn1909
)

Flynn acrimoniously parted company with Warner Bros. in 1952, after ‘a violent argument with Jack Warner . . . although we laugh at it today'.
⁸
And no doubt they did. In his autobiography Flynn claimed that he was one of the very few able to saunter into Warner's office and expect to be treated as an equal. Given Flynn's dominating and uncompromising personality, the outwardly gregarious Jack must have been pretty formidable himself. According to his son Jack Jr:

[He was] the most complex and confounding of all the brothers. For years I have tried to find the keys to the labyrinth of my father's mind, but it remains now what it was throughout most of his lifetime: boxes within boxes, rooms without doors, questions without answers, jokes without points, scenarios based on contradictions, omissions, and deceit. His was the anguished story of a man driven by fear, ambition and the quest for absolute power and control . . .
⁹

It's a harsh sketch. As harsh as those caricaturing Flynn as a rapist-paedophile-Nazi. How would two such apparent demons get on in a closed room? Even Hollywood might struggle to script it . . .

Flynn's subsequent battles with drugs and legal troubles overshadowed a successful quarter-century of moviemaking and it's hard not to imagine a degree of sympathy for him from his former employer, which he had served very well. Less than two years later, in 1954 (as Flynn, in Jamaica, steadily lost his looks and highly conditioned physique), Warner Bros.'
Looney Tunes
produced a feisty, energised, crazy, ravenous, fearless, wild cartoon character, unlike any yet seen: the Tasmanian Devil.

How and why did this animated marsupial come about? There is no documentation, or official confirmation, from Warner Bros. or anyone else, linking Errol Flynn and Taz. Flynn himself makes no reference to the cartoon character in his autobiography, but just three Taz cartoons had been made when he wrote his book, and he may not even have known of their existence—back then they were a combined eighteen minutes of obscurity.