Although the age of the celebrity stalker had not yet dawned, the normally unflappable Olivia de Havilland could not help being discomfited by the disheveled man with the dead eyes who would not stop staring at her. It was 1957. She was at a charity ball for the costumers union at Conrad Hilton’s sparkling new hotel, the Beverly Hilton. This one big gala would remind her of what she was not missing in Hollywood before she boarded one of her old flame Howard Hughes’s TWA Super Constellations and made the long journey back to Paris, where she had moved in 1955.

Hollywood, Olivia felt, had changed for the worse since her glory days, in the 1930s and 40s, and everyone was blaming it on television. America wasn’t going out anymore. Its citizens were staying home and watching Gunsmoke. Olivia had just wrapped a Western, The Proud Rebel, with her old friend Alan Ladd and his son David. Petite and still perfect at five feet three, Olivia, then 41, was one of the few female stars whom Ladd didn’t have to stand on a soapbox to kiss. Their new horse opera was a clear attempt to recapture the box-office magic of 1953’s Shane, but television was making such feats more a labor of Hercules than even of John Ford or George Stevens.

But who was this creepy man who wouldn’t go away? All Olivia could do was turn her back and protectively chat with her old friend William Schallert, the son of the longtime drama critic of the Los Angeles Times and one of many talented character actors who had been body-snatched, to borrow a term from that paranoid era, by television. (He would soon have several episodes of Gunsmoke to his credit.) “Suddenly I felt a kiss on the back of my neck,” Olivia recalls. She was too polite to dream of calling security. “I turned around and it was that man. He was gaunt. His clothes didn’t fit. But it was those lifeless eyes that troubled me. ‘Do I know you?’ I asked him.”

“It’s Errol,” he replied.

“Errol who?” Olivia genuinely didn’t know. And then she figured it out: Errol Flynn. Nearly 60 years later, she remains shocked by the moment. “Those eyes. They used to be so glinting, so full of life,” she remembers. “And now they were dead.”

In their day, Errol and Olivia had been the Fred and Ginger of action movies. From 1935’s Captain Blood to 1941’s They Died with Their Boots On, the Tasmanian devil and the Anglo-Californian ingénue made seven swashbuckling blockbusters. They were Bogie and Bacall, minus the offscreen romance. Or was it really minus, and not just Olivia’s legendarily discreet charm? Hollywood was still discreet, even in the 50s, simply out of fear of the snoops and scoops of Confidential magazine. There were no paparazzi allowed in Conrad’s new Hilton. If they had been, and they had seen Errol’s vampire kiss on Olivia’s neck, how the presses would have rolled.

Soon the bell tolled for the dinner, and everyone began filing into the grand ballroom. Errol offered Olivia his arm. “Can I escort you to dinner?” No woman could refuse, especially the woman who had contributed the most to Flynn’s romantic mystique, Maid Marian to his Robin Hood. So into the Hilton ballroom they strode, giants of the earth, re-united at last.

“The moment we sat down,” Olivia recalls, “the table filled up with seven or eight beautiful young ladies.” Inspired by the attention, Errol came to life and turned on the charm. “Somehow I couldn’t help myself from being increasingly enraged that Errol Flynn was paying more attention to the other ladies at the table than he was to me,” Olivia says, still chiding herself for letting emotions overtake her. “Here I was, living in Paris, happily married to a wonderful Frenchman, two great children. Why was I having a fit of jealousy over Errol Flynn?” The two icons barely spoke for the rest of the dinner. “When the ball was over, I said good night and left in a cab by myself,” she says.