Cinema: Flynn's First Fling

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"Standing before [Shamus O'Thames —pronounced O'Tems] naked except for a towel . . . was a strikingly beautiful white woman . . . glaring at him out of aqua marine blue eyes. . . . A cascade of golden blonde hair . . . fell over her face. . . . As will sometimes happen in moments of stress, his gaze focused . . . upon a . . . tiny mole, high up on her left breast. " Scram!" she cried, dashing a bucket of water over him.

The lady with the mole is Cleo, cinemactress heroine of a new novel—his first by versatile Cinemactor Errol Flynn.

Author Flynn gestated Showdown (Sheridan House; $2.50) in nightly, four-hour stretches over a period of nine months. The novel, laid in the South Seas, features lusts, busts, tropic moons and cheesecake. "I don't know why I did it," confessed Author Flynn (who is considering making only one movie a year so that he can devote himself to prose). "I won't make any money. Critically, I am bound to be slaughtered. If the reviewers do like it, they'll probably say it was written by somebody else."

Showdown's lusty action begins in a Chinese hotel in Rabaul, where "the white female form is an extremely rare sight. . . even when clothed." So when Schooner Captain Shamus got his first eyeful of gorgeous Cleo, it was as if "an exotic and beautiful wild creature [was] trampling the quiet loveliness of a well-tended flower garden." Shamus was even more trampled when he discovered that Cleo was one of the Hollywood party which he had agreed to ship to New Guinea in search of background material for a new film.

Cleo, "her breasts strained, aggressively pointed and challenging," strode the schooner's deck. "The bunk's so comfortable and so roomy and all," cooed Cleo to Shamus one evening, "—but, well, Captain, it's sometimes so lonesome. . . . "

"These days . . . there is a lawyer hidden behind every girdle," one of the party warned Shamus. But soon Shamus and Cleo were bucking a storm of love and hate that swept them like a typhoon. On one occasion, Shamus drenched her with seawater. "You bastard," she muttered. When Shamus took a moonlight swim in the buff, Cleo tossed off her "intimate garments" and plunged after him. "The water was just above her waist. Facing him, she threw her arms out wide. 'Look at me,' she challenged, her head high. 'Don't you want me? Don't you want me at all?' " Together they transcended the "barriers that separate one human from another."

By the time Author Flynn has plowed his foamy way to p. 308, Captain Shamus—and life itself—have humbled Cleo into the tender little woman she had secretly longed to be, and put the whole party through spine-tingling experiences with hurricanes, sharks, pygmies, headhunters and counterespionage for the U.S. Navy.

"Readers," say Author Flynn's publishers, "will admire. . . the understanding and uncompromising honesty. . . ."