Never Too Young

[GymnastGuy]

TPTB screwed up by having their target audience in school when the show premiered and cancelled the show before summer vacation???  I mean, they should have kept it going through the summer and see if the ratings grew. Another problem is that in some markets it aired at 8:30am, 2pm and 3pm.  How would their target audience see it except holidays?  I also think instead of high schoolers, they should have been college age and draw the college age audience......

[danfling]

I am not sure if those college-aged were a consideration in 1966.

[Paul Raven]

TV Guide 3/26/1966

Errol Flynn’s widow

SOAP-OPERA ACTRESS with a SOAP-OPERA LIFE

Daily, ABC telecasts the lugubrious goings on of a group of teenagers and their unhappy parents in a soap opera called Never Too Young, referred to by its cast as “Gloom-a-Go-Go.” One member of the cast is Patrice Wymore, widow of Errol Flynn. Her story would make a better soap opera than the writers of Never Too Young ever dreamed of.

Can’t you hear it? Time now, intones the announcer, for Our Gal Patrice, the story of a young girl from Miltonvale, Kansas, who danced her way from tent shows to Broadway and Hollywood, where she became the wife of one of filmdom’s richest and most flamboyant actors!

Although the Flynns had been separated when he died six years ago, Patrice, as widow of record, inherited a reported million-dollar estate, including a cattle-and-coconut ranch in Jamaica, which she now runs (“I’m the only real cowgirl-actress”), and the yacht Zaca, still in litigation (“By the time this is all over, I'll be ready to take a bar exam”).

Despite her apparent affluence, however, she has been working steadily and hard. A month after Flynn’s death, she opened at the Desert Inn in Las Vegas—“And now Patrice Wymore starts to pick up the pieces of her life" reported the Associated Press.

 Only last summer she starred in four musical comedies in 10 weeks—“Carnival” in Chicago, “Guys and Dolls” in St. Louis, “Bye Bye Birdie” in Fairfield, Conn., and “Irma La Douce” in San Diego.

Then, in September, she took on the rigorous five-days-a-week schedule of Never Too Young, which is shot like old-fashioned “live” television—from the top with no retakes. Since Patrice is extremely nearsighted (“When I do theater-in-the-round, they have to have four Seeing Eye dogs for me”), she can’t even use cue cards.

Patrice Wymore has been working hard since she was named Patricia and doing tent shows at age 6 back in Kansas, where she was born Dec. 17, 1926. The only break was a dubiously idyllic few years with Flynn aboard the aforementioned yacht— years of which the actor wrote, “On board the Zaca, Pat cooked and comforted me. . . .I invented a role for her, that of homebody, Hausfrau, sweet domestic thing.”

This was hardly the role her mother, a former singer and concert pianist on the Chautauqua circuit, had trained her for, or exactly what Pat herself may have had in mind. She recalls her early days: “I would get out of school at 3 and rehearse with my mother until 7. Then after dinner I’d do my lessons at 8:30.” Despite its “Gypsy”ish overtones, she describes this as “a marvelous kind of childhood—the other girls would go to the local malt shop and waste their time. I knew I was going somewhere. Out of Kansas. I was in a hurry.”

She got out of Kansas for good when she was 16. Her father, who ran a trucking line, gave her the money he had put aside to send her to college and let her go to New York. Soon she landed a part in a road company of “Up in Central Park,” followed by roles on Broadway in two other musicals, “Hold It” and “All for Love.”

Columnist Earl Wilson would write that “she had magic in her toes.”

In 1950 she got a contract to go to Hollywood for Warner Brothers. After a brief appearance in an early Doris Day picture, “Tea for Two,” she became “the fair-haired girl on the lot” and was rushed into something called “Rocky Mountain” as Errol Flynn’s leading lady.

Flynn, who at the time was involved with a Romanian princess, suddenly decided that Patrice “typified everything I longed for, or thought I longed for.” The mother of his most recent ex-wife said that Patrice “likes to fish and hunt and do other things Errol likes.” Pledging that “this is for keeps,” Flynn and Miss Wymore were married in Monte Carlo on Oct. 23, 1950. Her mother said, “Oh, honey, I’m so glad you’re getting married and settling down.”

Of course, it did not quite work out that way. “I grew up in a hurry when I married him,” says Patrice. She led a vagabond’s life with Flynn, mostly in Europe. A daughter, Arnella Roma, was born in Italy on Christmas Day, 1953.

Five years later, after a number of partings and reconciliations, Patrice Wymore returned to Hollywood and went back to work. When Flynn died in 1959, she conducted herself with dignity amid the highly publicized grievings and threatened legal actions of her late husband’s teen-age “protégée,” one Beverly Aadland.

She has never remarried. Today she lives quietly in the Hollywood hills with her 12-year-old daughter, a tall blonde like her mother, who wants to be an actress. At the moment, Arnella is taking dancing lessons. Who knows? Perhaps in a few years she'll go to New York and make good on Broadway and then go to Hollywood, where she will meet this handsome movie, star, and then... But who would believe it? It sounds like soap opera.