“He was always the biggest star on his sets,” said the MGM publicist Emily Torchia. “You could tell that by the attitude of the people who were there around him—he was very well appreciated,” says the former MGM child star John Sheffield (“Boy” in the Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan movies). In her book on MGM, This Was Hollywood (1960), Beth Day observed, “Tall, silver-haired director Victor Fleming was privately considered by many feminine employees ‘the handsomest man on the lot’ ” and drew as much attention at the commissary as the man everyone knew as the King—Gable. Fairbanks had been billed as the King of Hollywood, too. But throughout his career, Fleming didn’t just serve Hollywood royals: he put them on their thrones. When he guided fresh young talents, he saw them whole and inside out, tapping qualities that turned them into new American archetypes.
When talkies ruled and production boomed and the Hollywood studios became dream factories, fellows like Fleming and his favorite writers ( Jules Furthman, Mahin) developed the special seen and spoken language of “golden age” sound movies. This audiovisual dialect of expressive actors punching across snappy or suggestive talk in the molded light of a square frame was intensely stylized. It was also unabashedly emotional and sometimes cunningly erotic, even after the enforcement of the Production Code made explicit lovemaking verboten. Vintage Hollywood styles often felt more real than the slangy, jittery realism of today because the characters were substantial enough to cast long shadows and special effects didn’t swamp their crises and predicaments.
If he’d died before directing The Wizard of Oz and most of Gone With the Wind (in the same year) instead of a decade afterward, Victor Fleming would remain an outsized figure in American culture. The Virginian was a Western milestone as influential as John Ford’s Stagecoach. Red Dust was a classic sexual melodrama, fierce and funny—the peak of Hollywood’s few-holds-barred approach to sex before the enforcement of the Production Code. Bombshell predates Howard Hawks’s Twentieth Century (1934) as the seminal showbiz screwball comedy. Captains Courageous proved that movies without sex appeal could be smash hits and that something non-mawkish could be fashioned from tales of surrogate fathers and sons. And Test Pilot, an incisive look at what happens to flying partners when one gets married, brought the first wave of sound-film buddy pictures to a resounding culmination. Fleming’s daring matched his taste, tact, and craft. He frequently demonstrated that free adaptations of beloved novels could both honor their sources and become their own enduring works of art and entertainment.
When Hathaway, Tracy, Gable, and others called Fleming the real Rhett Butler, they were referring not only to manner but also to mind. Rhett and Fleming shared the cynic-idealist’s ability to rise to a challenge realistically and, with competence and wiliness, achieve a tough nobility. From Fleming’s day to our own, American directors who navigate the whirlpools of movie-industry politics often generate denser moral and emotional environments in their films than the wanly virtuous or frivolous worlds too often found in independent fare. Fleming’s artistry lay in the way he molded other men’s material. What’s extraordinary about his work is how often he fully realized or even transcended that material, not how often it defeated him. What’s extraordinary about his life is that he filled it with as much passion and adventure as he did his movies.
1
Born in a Tent
Victor Fleming got his biggest professional break when he began working the camera for Douglas Fairbanks Sr., the actor and producer who set the early-twentieth-century standard for all-American exuberance and athleticism. Fleming often photographed Doug in robust Westerns—frontier sagas such as The Man from Painted Post (1917) or contemporary cowboy tales like Wild and Woolly (1917). Before Fleming entered the service in World War I, he may even have shot pieces of Fairbanks’s Modern Musketeer (1918), which featured a fictional Kansas cyclone twenty-one years before The Wizard of Oz.
The humor and heroism of these Fairbanks mini-epics must have been piquant for Fleming. His family had enacted a real hardscrabble pioneer story, complete with a rampaging twister. When they migrated from Summersville, Missouri, to San Dimas, one of the sparser, dustier outposts of Southern California’s Citrus Belt, they became part of America’s national saga of farm-raised men and women staking out their piece of the emerging middle class. As Carey McWilliams wrote in Southern California Country (1946), the Citrus Belt featured settlements that were “neither town nor country, rural nor urban.” San Dimas was a scrubby bucolic province in America’s first burgeoning suburbia.
Fleming’s parents, William Richard Lonzo and Eva (née Hartman) Fleming, set out for California on February 20, 1888, the day after a tornado ripped through their county, demolishing at least three houses. Their destination: Pasadena. Their itinerary: one train across the Ozarks, from Cabool to Kansas City, then another to California on the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe—the line celebrated by Judy Garland in The Harvey Girls (directed by George Sidney, who apprenticed under Fleming, in 1946). Eva’s Methodist minister had officiated at their wedding in Houston, the county seat of Texas County, Missouri, just a week and a half before.
Lon and Eva were one of the first Summersville couples to go west to seek their fortune during the famed mid-1880s California land boom. The Santa Fe laid its final tracks in California’s Cajon Pass (between the San Gabriel and the San Bernardino mountains) in 1887, catalyzing a price war that fanned get-rich-quick dreams throughout the Midwest. The competing railroads, the Santa Fe and the Union Pacific, slashed the cost of tickets and exploited the nineteenth-century equivalent of saturation advertising—“publicity, settlement agents (with branch offices in Omaha, New York, New Orleans, London, and Hamburg), lecturers, exhibits, and inspired news stories”—to promote Southern California’s seductive climate and soaring economy in agriculture and real estate. For a transportation expense of not much more than $25 per person, the Flemings could migrate to a state with fields hyped to be so fecund that “half an acre in lemons is sufficient for the support of a family.”
Eva’s older brother Mal had been living in Southern California for several years, driving a stagecoach filled with passengers and mail. The Flemings had a better handle than many Midwesterners on California realities. Edward Hartman, Eva Fleming’s grandnephew, says, “Jobs were so scarce in those days, Lon must have known someone who knew that someone was hiring.”
Thirty-two and already afflicted with a heart condition when he and Eva made their way to California, Lon had left Missouri once before, possibly to mine for silver in the Idaho Territory. His parents were farmers who had moved to Summersville from Bledsoe County, Tennessee. Established in 1807 on former Cherokee nation land, Bledsoe County was also in the path of the 1838–39 “Trail of Tears,” the forced evacuation of the Cherokee to Oklahoma Territory. Those two facts, along with some Bledsoe families’ claims of Cherokee blood, are the sole basis for the Hollywood-bred myth of Fleming’s Native American ancestry. (Victor once described the Flemings’ ancestry as English, but their origin is obscure.) Lon’s father, John Fleming, likely joined a Confederate unit from Missouri during the Civil War: his name appears on a list of taxpaying Texas County veterans, with a C beside it. He died not long after the war ended, and a year later Lon’s mother, Neoma, remarried to another farmer, Alfred Farrow. Lon lit out for the territories as early as 1870, when he was fourteen, around the time that his mother gave birth to the first of her two Farrow boys, and probably didn’t return to Missouri until the latter half of the 1880s. By then, two married younger sisters had died (another younger sister and a brother, twins, had died in infancy), and his youngest sister had wed and started drifting out of family records.
Residents of Summersville knew the man who would become Victor’s father, this thin fellow with a handlebar mustache, by his initials, WRL. Only the modest, unaffected Eva, who had moved to town with her family three years before, called him Lon. He won her with his good looks and manners, his air of having seen the far horizon, and a touch of father
ly authority. “To Miss Eva Hartman. Bee Wair of temtation [sic] and remember that contentment of mind makes one happy. Your friend, WRL Fleming.” That’s what he wrote in her autograph book on February 8, the day before their marriage. Yvonne Blocksom, her granddaughter and Victor’s niece, said Eva’s prize story from her trip west took place at a Harvey House restaurant along the way. “She was such a farm girl and she thought he was such a gentleman. And on the first meal of the trip, they had finger bowls. And she was completely nonplussed and didn’t know what to do and asked him, ‘What’s this for?’ And he showed her, and he said, ‘Eva, keep your voice lower, please.’ She was so embarrassed.”
Niceties like finger bowls weren’t part of Eva’s upbringing. Lizzie Evaleen Hartman (Eva was short for Evelyn, the name she later adopted for herself) was born nineteen years earlier in the village of Buckhorn near Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania, in the east-central part of the state; Fleming’s own speech patterns echoed his mother’s Pennsylvania Dutch inflections. The Hartmans’ earliest recorded ancestor was John Hartman, who lived outside Philadelphia and fought for General George Washington at the Battle of Germantown in October 1777. They came from German stock: Lewis Shortley Hartman, Eva’s father, changed his first name from Ludwig around the time he became a private in the Seventy-ninth Pennsylvania Infantry during the Civil War. He joined the Army in February 1864, served in the Battle of Atlanta under General William Tecumseh Sherman on July 22, and got his discharge in October. When he returned to his Buckhorn farm, the scene resembled the postwar vignettes in his grandson Victor’s Gone With the Wind. Two young sons saw his muddied figure approach their house and ran inside to warn their mother of the ragged stranger bearing down on them.
Lewis and Clarissa Hartman’s children—those who survived beyond early childhood—knit closely together. Three died in infancy, and one at age five, but the remaining six, as well as Lewis, all ended up in Southern California. The family’s first attempt to begin anew, in Summersville in 1885, had also come from a railroad pitch, for land around Missouri train-stop towns like Cabool. (The Kansas City, Fort Scott & Gulf Railroad had just completed its line through Texas County.) The way the story came down to Yvonne Blocksom: “The family’s farm in Pennsylvania wasn’t doing well or something, so Grandpa Hartman decided they should go to one of those real estate things, you know, come down and we have wonderful land and it’s for sale for nothing and what not, so they went down to Missouri, and Nanny said it was just plain hardpan rock stuff, and it was a terrible place.” The most money the Hartmans made came from selling oak for barrel staves.
California may not have looked any better than Missouri to Lon and Eva when they debarked in Pasadena, after four days on trains. The land was cheap. It was also brown and arid, not the green pastures of the promotions. Hucksters hoping to sell real estate still greeted newcomers with pig roasts and brass bands, but the predicted rise in settlement hadn’t panned out, so banks had begun to limit credit, and properties were selling at panic-driven prices. Settlers often laid claim to the little available water with the fait accompli of a diverted sluice.
For seven decades, the main source for Fleming’s life story has been Action Is the Word, a studio-edited autobiography from 1939. Although embellished by the MGM publicity chief, Howard Strickling, the finished document boasts a color and energy missing from Strickling’s earlier attempts to tell Fleming’s life story. Action retains its share of banalities and inaccuracies, but many pages of it crackle with the brass-tacks vitality you find in Fleming’s few surviving notes, memos, and letters. Near the start of Action, Fleming states that his father “put in the first water supply system at Pasadena.” Lon Fleming did not engineer or supervise the system—no Pasadena records mention a Lon or WRL Fleming—but his first California employment was digging for water and installing lines in and around Pasadena, ready work for brand-new Californians who couldn’t leap right into citrus ranching. Lon and Eva went to live in a tent community for water-industry laborers near La Cañada, just northwest of Pasadena (bordering the present-day Rose Bowl). “They were living there as an employee of whomever he worked for,” says Edward Hartman. “Contract workers lived in tent areas they had put up. He was probably hired for four, five, six months at a time, and they provided tent housing, things like that.”
Eva gave birth to Victor Lonzo Fleming on February 23, 1889. Victor’s handwritten family notes state that Dr. Nat Dalrymple delivered him at the Banbury Ranch near present-day La Cañada Flintridge—the same doctor would deliver his sister Arletta on February 9, 1891—and that his birth was registered at Pasadena. (His father got the name from a favorite younger cousin, Victoria Sullivan, who was living in Idaho. Victor would name his own older daughter Victoria.)
Despite the reverse migration of disillusioned wealth seekers after the land boom waned, Lon and Eva stayed on and persevered as citrus ranchers. They moved to a northern Pasadena neighborhood in 1890. In mid-1892, perhaps to lessen the financial burden on Lon during a ruinous drought, Eva took three-year-old Victor and her one-year-old daughter to Missouri to see their relatives, including her sister Arletta, her daughter’s namesake. But she returned in September and brought along her brother Ed. He had toiled side by side with Lon in La Cañada in 1889 before going back to Missouri and now aimed to set down his own roots in the Pasadena area.
In the fall of 1892, the Flemings moved to the hamlet of San Dimas, about thirty miles east of Los Angeles. Once part of the Rancho San Jose as the village of Mud Springs, it never attracted many settlers even under a more enticing name. Still, says Edward Hartman, for the Flemings and for Ed, managing citrus ranches in San Dimas “represented a fresh start out of construction work and pipeline work.” They hoped to earn enough from this form of sharecropping to purchase their own spreads. Victor’s notes say that after leaving the Banbury Ranch, his parents went to the twenty-acre Saulsbury Ranch in San Dimas. (Banbury and Saulsbury were names of absentee owners.) In 1893, Ed began managing the nearby Caldwell Ranch. “A family named Caldwell from back East owned it,” says Edward Hartman. “They paid my grandfather for planting it. They paid him for the trees, and paid him for the fertilizer. He’d have twelve wagons, six going into the stockyards in Los Angeles and six coming out all the time, to haul the fertilizer out to all these places . . . Lon was doing the labor work [on the Saulsbury Ranch]. He was out taking care of the trees.”
Lon and Eva had approximately two thousand trees to shield from gophers and to defend from frost with oil-burning smudge pots. The labor was intense and exhausting. “What they did, they watched the irrigation furrows all the time. They watched [for] gophers, and you had to make sure that [all the trees] had the stakes up. Those trees, I would guess, were not over four or five feet tall at the time, and so they needed tending all the time to make sure the stakes weren’t broken and that the furrows were okay for irrigation and the gophers were not eating everything up and destroying everything,” says Hartman. It could take as long as seven years to raise a profitable crop, and in the days before refrigerated trains, spoilage was a constant hazard. Irrigation water had to be bought, then conveyed through concrete pipes. Mal Hartman, by then a railroad engineer and married in Salida, Colorado, sent Lon and Eva money to see them through.
On May 31, 1893, Lon left home after breakfast and didn’t come back for lunch. Eva—more than seven months pregnant with their third child—went looking for him. She found him in the orange orchard, dead of a heart attack. According to Edward Hartman years later, the story passed down to the family about Lon’s death “was very graphic, and very definite. Lon was stricken in the orchard, and Eva went out and found him out there, and [he was already dead] and she had his head in her lap, and grandfather went out, and she said, ‘Don’t go away.’ And so he waited [with her] that evening, and the next day he went out and said, ‘Okay, Eva. It’s time to go.’ ”
Lon was actually buried on June 1, the day after Eva first cradled his dead body. But the intensity of the tale an
d the way it prolongs her time in the orchard with Lon suggest the depth of the widow’s shock and grief. “Sister Eva takes it hard, as you may believe,” Ed wrote Mal on the day of Lon’s death. “He has been as well as usual all the time and able to work, but you know death by heart affliction is very sudden.” The family laid Lon to rest in Pomona according to Hartman custom, with a short graveside service.
When Eva had her second daughter, on July 8, she named her Willie Ruth. Only the immediate family ever knew Ruth as “Willie,” but by naming this daughter Willie Ruth and her son Victor Lonzo, Eva had passed her beloved Lon’s initials, WRL, down to another generation. “She loved the man dearly,” Edward Hartman remembers. “You could just tell all the way through her. She was a one-man person.” After Eva’s mother died in Missouri in 1894, she expressed her gratitude to her sister Arletta for saving a lock of their mother’s hair. “I never thought to have a bit of poor Lon’s. It was such a shock to me I did not have very much thought about me. I have often been sorry since. Lon had such nice curls on his head. Oh dear, oh dear, isn’t it hard to part with our dear ones.”
Decades later, Victor would write, “There is little room in my life for sentiment and soft words.” He overemphasized his toughness; with close family and some friends and lovers he could overflow with “sentiment and soft words.” But he did assume a life-goes-on posture toward death that may have stemmed from experiencing his father’s abrupt demise and burial. In Action Is the Word, Fleming tersely writes, “When I was about four years old my father died. My uncle, Edwin [sic] Hartman, a San Dimas citrus rancher, took me into the household and there I went to school.”
Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) Page 2