Nora Eddington Nora Eddington

Background & early life

Born in Chicago, Illinois in 1924, the daughter of Jack Eddington of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's office,[1] Nora Eddington was nineteen when she met Errol Flynn in February 1943[2] – at the time, she was working at the courthouse where Flynn's notorious 1943 trial for statutory rape was taking place.[3] Flynn was acquitted and they were married in 1944 in Mexico.[4] Their daughter, Deirdre, was born on January 10, 1945.[4] By the time their second daughter, Rory, was born in March 1947, their marriage was already essentially over.[5] The couple were divorced in 1949, but parted on fairly amicable terms,[5][6] with Eddington (now Eddington Flynn) given custody of the children.[7]

Shortly after the divorce she married singer Dick Haymes,[6] on July 17, 1949. She and Haymes had been having an affair for some time, a fact which became public knowledge by way of the gossip columns.[7] Her marriage to Haymes, during which she suffered a miscarriage, lasted four years, a period which Haymes later characterized in an unpublished autobiography as "not a Dick Haymes marriage".[7] After divorcing Haymes she married Richard Black, a marriage which lasted for most of the rest of her life – they had a son named Kevin, who died from leukemia at the age of 10.[8] Richard and Nora Black divorced sometime before her death.[9]

Eddington was highly critical of Charles Higham's biography of her first husband, Errol Flynn, the Untold Story, stating to Maggie Daly of the Chicago Tribune: "I resent Higham's book because it is a fraud. He hasn't come up with a single document about Errol's supposed tie-in with the Gestapo, but continues to go around the country saying he has".[10][11] Her own book about her life with Flynn, entitled Errol and Me, was published in 1960.

[edit] Death

Nora Eddington died in 2001, aged 77,[9] after a long battle with kidney disease, at Cedars Sinai Hospital, Los Angeles. She was interred in Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery beside her son Kevin.[9]