Only tourists think of the Caribbean as a ‘paradise’

A couple of years ago in Jamaica, I met Errol Flynn’s former wife, the screen actress Patrice Wymore. Reportedly a difficult and withdrawn woman, her life in the Caribbean (apart from the few details she cared to volunteer) could only be guessed at. The Errol Flynn estate, an expanse of ranchland outside Port Antonio, was grazed by tired-looking cattle. ‘Haven’t we met before?’ Wymore said to me as I walked into her office after knocking. ‘You remind me of someone I know.’

I took in the riding crops and spurs hanging on the wall. After eight years of marriage, in 1958 Wymore had divorced Flynn, who died the following year at the age of 50 having more or less boozed himself into the grave. Flynn had been quick to discover Port Antonio, a drowsy United Fruit company banana port; in 1946 he brought himself a gingerbread mansion there and launched the tourists’ pastime of river-rafting in the Caribbean. By the time Wymore starred with Flynn in the movie King’s Rhapsody (1955), his sexual philandering and drinking had become so bad that he had to play sexually philandering drunks. On Flynn’s death, Wymore inherited 800 head of Jamaican cattle from him. She did not seem to know what to do with them.

Only tourists think of the Caribbean as a ‘paradise’, Wymore told me. Each day the planes land, the cruise ships call, and the tourists arrive for their dream holiday in a region where you can pass from enclaves of immense wealth to utter desolation in a matter of seconds. Jet-setters and other plush folk in search of sex and rum-fuelled oblivion typically sugar-coat themselves against the poverty behind the walls of their all-inclusive resort hotel, where they can get married in the nude on the beach, or dress up as Errol Flynn in Captain Blood and whoop it up on a motorised pirate galleon.