Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics)

by Sragow, Michael

  As the Paramount story said, Fleming “refused to become a preacher, teacher or a civil engineer, as his parents suggested.” Victor itched to get both his hands on gears, wheels, and engines—he was, for most tasks, ambidextrous—so he went to work in 1905 as a machinist with W. W. Whitesell & Co., a large downtown dealer of Columbia and Rambler bicycles and one of California’s first auto agencies. It sold the Eldredge, a two-seat, 8-horsepower runabout with a top speed of twenty miles per hour. In Action, Fleming told of delivering a car to a Santa Monica physician. (He described it as an Oldsmobile, but most likely it was an Eldredge.) The scenario was fit for a Harold Lloyd or Buster Keaton comedy. Exploiting his storyteller’s license, Fleming stated his age as fourteen and described the mission as his initial foray into traffic.

  For starters, he had to use a stick, not a wheel, to steer the car, “and the sensation of riding was not unlike that aboard a mobile Gatling gun.” On “the old winding dirt roads,” covering less than twenty-five miles “took one day over the National Boulevard through Culver City, which was merely an outpost then, long before it became the home of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio.” Near disaster struck on the fringes of Los Angeles when

  the key that held the timing gear fell off. I walked to the shop where the smithy gave me a squarehead horseshoe nail and a hearty laugh. The nail worked in place of the key. Beyond Culver City, at what is now Clover Field airport [and today is Santa Monica Airport], the gas line broke. I chewed a piece of dead tree limb to make a plug, then got a strip of rubber tubing at a farmhouse and completed the repairs. The car was delivered that night and I slept in a cheap hotel room, to return by train in the morning.

  Nothing dulled Fleming’s appetites for cars and speed and automotive tinkering, not even picking up a live electrical line that “put a crease in his [right] hand,” says Rodger Swearingen, Carolyn’s son. (Fleming’s Army documents record a scar on his right palm.) He acquired all the skills of a mechanic and a “demonstrator” who knew how to turn an operating lesson for a wealthy customer into a classy experience. Someone like Fleming, a Mr. Fix-It who could drive and teach, would be a smart hire for any client who could afford him. He could wheel a car out from a dealership and instruct the owner in its use—and often the owner would ask if he needed another job.

  In mid-1908, when Earle C. Anthony, an automotive entrepreneur and future broadcasting pioneer, assembled a small fleet of four-passenger Thomas Flyers for a Los Angeles taxi service, Fleming became one of the city’s first motorized-cab drivers. Simultaneously, Anthony was promoting Chalmers autos in speed and endurance competitions, and Fleming nursed hopes he could get behind the wheel of a race car. His experiences as a cabbie honed his reflexes and fed his craving for practical joking and action.

  A decade and a half later, he told the cinematographer James Wong Howe what a hair-raising challenge it was to skitter through Los Angeles in a cab. There were so few cars that the city hadn’t yet felt the need for traffic cops or signal lights, and hacks had to navigate at their peril among horse-drawn carriages and electric trolleys. The Flyers had the edge on speed and maneuverability over horse-drawn hansom cabs. But the motormen operating the beloved red cars of the Pacific Electric Railway ruled the streets—and they would compete to run over Anthony’s taxis. Fleming confessed to Howe that cabdrivers found a way to get back at them. “We’d wait until it rained, rained really hard, and when the streetcar would stop on the corner, we’d take our cabs and run over that front part, cowcatcher, they called it.” The motormen would soak in the rain as they tried to bend the cowcatchers off the pavement.

  When Fleming couldn’t parlay his cab job into a racing slot, he took a position as a mechanic and later a demonstrator at the Los Angeles Motor Car Company, a Locomobile dealership whose burly, flashy owner, Brian J. Leavitt, helped promote the cream of Southern California’s automotive talent by sponsoring individual contestants as well as entire races. Fleming also could have worked on racing crews in Corona from 1913 to 1916, and in Playa del Rey (at the Los Angeles Motordome) circa 1910–13. But Santa Monica was the sole place that cropped up in all his race-car stories, and he made his strongest connection to professional racing there between 1909 and 1911. The Motor Car Dealers Association of Los Angeles put on the Santa Monica races as promotional events, with a roster composed, in most years, entirely of West Coast drivers.

  With the Locomobile job came another big change. Vic began a brief, childless marriage to Clara West Strouse on April 7, 1909, at the parsonage of Trinity Methodist Episcopal Church, South, in Los Angeles. He was twenty, still legally a minor, so when he applied for the license, he put his age as twenty-two. Having turned sixteen in July, Clara was roughly eight months past California’s age of consent for women. Her father had died in 1903 (in Fostoria, Ohio, where he owned and managed a plumbing business), and she was living in California with her mother and her mother’s second husband (a salesman). It may not have been the happiest of households—Clara’s older sister chose not to move with them to the West Coast—and after the wedding Clara moved in with Victor and his family. Eva always spoke well of Clara. Yvonne Blocksom recalled seeing her picture: “All I remember of the photo is that she was quite beautiful.” The couple then rented furnished rooms with a private bath at the Munn Hotel near Victor’s new workplace. Only one thing is known about this marriage: her beauty and his charisma couldn’t hold it together for long.

  In September, C. N. Cotton of Deming, New Mexico, bought Leavitt’s Locomobile agency with part of the fortune he’d acquired as one of the first national marketers of Navajo rugs. (He also exploited cheap Navajo labor by supplying gangs of workers to the Santa Fe Railroad and paying them in scrip usable only at his Gallup store.) Cotton installed his son, Charles, as the agency’s manager, and Charles became a mentor and friend to Fleming for decades. (Clara, sadly, would barely be a memory.) Although Locomobile withdrew from racing and focused on stunts designed to prove the car’s comfort and durability, such as having drivers take high-society women on long-distance land cruises, Charles Cotton didn’t completely retreat from the high-speed arena. He built the grandstand for the Santa Monica races in 1911 and arranged for Fleming to enter his one documented professional race, which took place on October 14.

  Fleming, who drove a Locomobile, received no advance publicity, unlike most drivers in his nine-car field. But the newspapers did list “Vic Fleming” the day of the event. He was part of the “baby” group, composed of stripped-down stock models with engines up to 230 cubic inches, able to reach speeds in the fifties. (The bigger cars could hit the nineties.) More than fifty thousand spectators lined up at 8:30 a.m. for the running of the “medium” race (cars with engines 231 to 300 cubic inches) and the “heavy” race (cars with engines 301 to 450 cubic inches). The “baby” cars raced at 10:45 a.m. Then came the major contest, the “free-for-all,” at 1:30 p.m., including drivers from both the medium and the heavy classes. Starting in front of the grandstand on Ocean Avenue, the roughly triangular eight-mile road course ran south to a sharp ninety-degree turn onto Nevada Avenue (later named Wilshire Boulevard). This was nicknamed “Dead Man’s Curve” as a warning for racers to slow down—luckily, no one yet had died there. Then the course made a straightaway to the Soldiers’ Home on San Vicente Boulevard, followed by a final S turn along San Vicente. Although his car didn’t break down, Fleming didn’t finish the hundred-mile race; he was flagged after completing 10 of the 12.5 laps and being lapped twice by the leaders (the average speed was fifty-three miles per hour). Fleming’s modest showing in his one pro race helped convince him to drive only as an amateur and serve pros as a ride-along “mechanician.”

  The Cottons soon left the car business and entered real estate and then the oil market, developing holdings in the Signal Hill oil fields and establishing the Jurgins Oil Company. (Signal Hill was immortalized by Upton Sinclair in his novel Oil!) Locomobile’s departure from racing and Cotton’s decampment from the agency left Fleming at loose en
ds. His professional racing dreams had hit the skids, and his marriage to Clara was already falling apart. Young and inexperienced, she wasn’t emotionally suited to be the spouse of a man who aimed to be on the move—and was now floundering.

  Fleming forged more lasting bonds with other future directors logging time around autos in Los Angeles, such as Marshall “Mickey” Neilan, soon to become the favorite moviemaker of the first female superstar, Mary Pickford. Neilan was born in San Bernardino in 1891 and, like Fleming, had a pronounced mechanical facility and a father who died when he was young. He left school even earlier than Fleming, at age eleven, and made his way onto the stage of the Belasco Stock Company in Los Angeles. He also performed as a juvenile for a San Francisco company that included Lawrence Griffith, who would earn acclaim under the name of David Wark or D. W. Griffith. As Neilan grew up, he alternated acting and car jobs, becoming a bit player moonlighting as a chauffeur and sometimes the other way around. In 1909, Neilan was living with his mother in Los Angeles, but in 1910, he moved to the home of the theatrical impresario Isaac M. Peyton as his full-time chauffeur. Possibly with Griffith’s help, Neilan had started acting at the Kalem studio in Santa Monica by 1911. Fleming and Neilan would have crossed paths in the Los Angeles auto world when Neilan was driving for Griffith.

  Fleming’s protégé Henry Hathaway said Victor used to say that when he drove for Cotton, the five-year-older man grilled him about his ambitions, discovered that he wanted to “get into the motion picture industry,” then drove him over to the Griffith studios himself. “That’s where you get a job in pictures. Go in and get yourself a job,” Cotton told Fleming. “Talk to the manager. Talk to the head man. Walk in and say you know about cameras.” According to Hathaway’s retelling of the story, Fleming went in, came out, and said, “I got a job.” It’s an anecdote with some emotional truth to it. But Hathaway got the elements of the story confused. Fleming’s introduction to movies didn’t occur in Los Angeles. It happened up the coast in Santa Barbara and became a treasured tale of American film’s infancy.

  Fleming’s benefactors were a host of talents at the American Film Manufacturing Company, including Neilan’s new boss, Allan Dwan, a seminal figure in American movies. (Dwan would go on to direct Fairbanks in 1922’s Robin Hood and John Wayne in 1949’s Sands of Iwo Jima.) Dwan had become the top filmmaker for the company, known as the Flying A because of its winged trademark. A former electrical engineer with a degree from Notre Dame, he got to observe movie production in Chicago when experimenting with mercury vapor arcs for lighting. He had talked his way into becoming a scenario writer when the Flying A sent him on a reconnaissance mission to find out what was happening to a unit that was roaming through the Southwest and California, filming one-reelers with real cowboys, on the run. They had moved from New Mexico and Arizona to San Juan Capistrano, where Dwan met up with them. Flying A filmmakers were wise to present a moving target. Agents of the group known as the Motion Picture Patents Company, or simply “the Trust,” strove to protect the Edison Company’s patents on motion picture technology by any means necessary, ambushes and sabotage included. Spies of the Trust dogged the trail of independents like the Flying A, who ignored licensing fees. And other independents were competitive to the point of vandalism.

  Catching up with the cast and crew, Dwan discovered that their alcoholic director had abandoned them, so he took on the directing job himself. He then continued casting about for unusual locations, filming one-reelers wherever he found picture-worthy settings. Eventually he settled in La Mesa, a dozen miles north of San Diego. (Hathaway’s mother, a musical comedy actress stranded in San Diego, began performing for Dwan, who used Hathaway as a juvenile bit player.) For a year in La Mesa, Dwan put out films at the rate of two a week. Neilan was his scout and actor as well as the driver of Dwan’s elaborate car, a Mitchell Six. When Dwan went looking for new locations and headquarters, Neilan suggested Santa Barbara, a sleepy coastal town that was a three-hour train trip from Los Angeles. It impressed Dwan with a variety of potential shooting sites: picturesque cliffs and spacious beaches; hills and mountains glinting with streams and dramatically cut by gullies; nearby Santa Cruz Island, with its primitive beauty; and aristocratic Mediterranean mansions, with their airy luxury. On July 6, 1912, the Flying A moved into a makeshift studio on an abandoned ostrich farm and began churning out one- and two-reelers.

  The year before, Fleming had become the chauffeur for a prominent Santa Barbaran, a wealthy retired merchant and banking heir named Clinton B. Hale. “A chauffeur in those days was quite somebody—like a pilot is today,” John Lee Mahin once explained. For Fleming it was a steady job in a pretty spot when he was going through hard times. Clara didn’t join him in Santa Barbara; on grounds of desertion, he filed for divorce. By the time he had the papers served at the Venice Apartments in L.A. in 1912, Clara had gone back to Ohio. (She protested the desertion charge, but the divorce became final in 1915. Eva told her grandchildren that Clara succumbed to the 1918 flu pandemic; Fleming’s daughters remember hearing that she died of sunstroke.)

  Tooling up Hale’s several luxury cars while living in a boardinghouse, Fleming was one of fifteen thousand Santa Barbara residents in the second decade of the century. It was a relaxed, pleasant town, and he even had family close at hand—his sister Arletta worked there as a clerk at a millinery shop. His new flame was the stage actress Charlotte Burton, a beauty from old Santa Barbara stock and, at twenty-one, herself a veteran of a failed marriage, with a six-year-old daughter also named Charlotte. Burton grew up in San Francisco. She had been acting in theatrical stock companies when the movie business lit up Santa Barbara. Her divorce—and the Flying A—brought her down the coast. In November 1912, the studio signed Burton to star in pictures and lauded her in its announcement for her “superb figure” as well as her “cleverness.” Her relationship with Fleming lasted several years. He began hanging around the Flying A and its footloose crews, watching pictures being made. He hired Albert Witzel, the photographer of choice for early movie stars and a forerunner of the glamour-master George Hurrell, to take a portrait of him for his new gal. Compare it with photos taken a year or two before, and the change is startling. The slablike lines of the chauffeur’s face suddenly seem hewn from red marble, and the right eyebrow is cocked as if he’s about to fire a fatal gaze on an adoring lover.

  Dwan, thanks to Neilan, entered Fleming’s life at that time, too. “We developed some sort of engine trouble in that car we bought,” Dwan told Peter Bogdanovich, “and all the mechanics in Santa Barbara didn’t seem to be able to fix it.” Neilan said he knew a chauffeur for a wealthy family: “If I can find him, he knows more about engines than any guy I ever met.” So he and Dwan drove around looking for this fellow and at the estate where he was working did find a tall young man shooting a .22 with a Maxim silencer at a target in the garage.

  Mickey said, “There he is now,” and we drove up behind him. Without even looking at us, he said, “One of your tappet valves is stuck.” Anyway, while he was fixing the car, I looked around the garage and saw over in the corner a bunch of photographic equipment—still cameras. So I said to him, “Are you interested in photography?” He says, “You bet I am—I like it very much.” And he showed me some very pretty things he was doing. So when he got through with the car, I said, “How’d you like to go into the moving-picture business and be a photographer?” He said, “Well, that sounds pretty good, but I’ve got to eat—do you pay for it?” I said yes, so he joined us.

  In reality it wasn’t so immediate. Fleming told Paramount in 1928, “I wanted to start in at the bottom. A person can’t begin at the top in any business. If he does, he’ll undoubtedly lose his balance and slip off someday.” So, probably following Cotton’s advice, he begged the company’s president, Samuel Hutchinson, for a job, any job, offering to work for nothing. Hutchinson complied and soon sent Fleming a note praising his efforts and awarding him a salary that applied even to his first “free” days at the Flyi
ng A. (Fleming framed the note.) Fleming often said, “My introduction to the business was an order to repair an old Williamson camera that had been chewing up good film in the manner of a buzzsaw with cordwood. I discovered that the brass plate was fouling the film and replaced it with a new aperture plate of steel.” But his first regular job at the Flying A was simply to drive cast and crew out on location. Fleming wrote in Action that the Flying A cameraman Roy Overbaugh was “instrumental in placing me in the [developing] laboratory, from which I graduated to become an assistant cameraman.” (Vic and Charlotte and Roy and his girlfriend would go on double dates.) Overbaugh, Hutchinson, Neilan, and Dwan all deserve credit for helping to launch Fleming’s career.

  Fleming next struck up a friendship with Wallace Reid, a budding cowboy star who had “transferred his affections from bucking horses to racing automobiles. We had the love of speed and the interest in engines as a common bond and I can still remember some of the rides we took in those early vintage automobiles. Wally was a good mechanic. He was also reckless, a quality that was equaled only by the generous nature which made him one of the most lovable characters in the field.” Reid would be a top name at Paramount/Famous Players–Lasky from 1915 until his untimely death in 1923. (Introduced to morphine as a painkiller, he became addicted to the drug and died in a sanatorium.) There’s no proof, but if Fleming did occasionally do some “doubling for a star as an auto driver or an aviator,” as his publicity suggests, the star was likely to have been Reid. In the actor’s 1919 movie The Roaring Road, he plays an auto salesman who goes against the wishes of his car-dealership boss and races on the Santa Monica road course. For Fleming, it would have been a case of entertainment imitating life.