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HOLLYWOOD'S
NOT-SO-ANCIENT
MARINERS
Our Young Man About Hollywood
describes the saltiest crew that ever
sailed the seas — the West Coast fleet
BY ERROL FLYNN
The author in nautical action — one of those few real yachtsmen in Hollywood who don't sit talking about yachting, but practice it — in dungarees
WITH some people it's horses; others like cars and others still go for postage stamps. Personally, I'm one of the men who gets a bit weak in the knees at either the sight of a slim-hulled yacht or a ditto mermaid.
I haven't seen any of the latter since I went on the water wagon.
I have seen one of the former, however — the Cheerio II — and I promptly bought her A new life began and it was then that I learned of a new side of Hollywood — the side where driftwood is substituted for dance floors, where kelp beds take the place of feather beds and blondes. That sounds swell. I wish it were true.
Perhaps you'll think me naive, but I had assumed that these chaps who are forever playing parts before the mast knew something about sailing. For the most part they are very convincing in their pictures as they stride the poop deck and bawl their orders at chantey-singing seamen. Then when I heard that some of these same men owned
their own boats in private life and occasionally could be heard discussing the relative merits of certain types of sail, I began to feel a certain brotherly emotion surging in the bosom.
It didn't surge there very long before it became the surge of nausea and, with it, came the realization that the best seaman in the bunch and the man who should be Commodore of the Hollywood fleet was Popeye, the Sailorman.
At a party you can always spot a pair of . these boat owners by the wary look in their eyes as they talk shop. Like a couple of fencers they feint around with tentatively salty language, obviously quoting from some nautical magazine and praying to high heaven that their vis-a-vis hasn't read the same one.
UON'T get the idea that there aren't a few — a very few — real yachtsmen in Hollywood. There are, but they are hard to find because they don't talk yachting, they practice it — which means you'll only find them beating up the channel, running down the coast or, clad in dirty dungarees, over the side with a bucket of white lead. But where you won't find them is in the Trocadero Bar getting a good coat of Mazda Tan, or giving an indecent exposure of their minds every time they open their mouths when the talk (Continued on page 82)
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