Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics)

by Sragow, Michael

  The high point of his Hoboken footage, though, comes when the liner Leviathan participates in an abandon-ship drill. During this full-dress rehearsal for catastrophe, Fleming’s ability to keep lines of action in deep focus in one setup after another brings out the drama beneath the matter-of-factness. After the lifeboats are lowered, life rafts slowly slither down the sides of the ships, like rubbery mollusks. In the transfer of men from rafts to boats, one or two fall overboard and splash around in life preservers, and with the exercise nearly complete, the rafts bob around empty, filled with water. In Action, Fleming recalled “one occasion when a thousand men were struggling in the water and all life boats were overside.” It looks more like a few hundred men, and very few of them are struggling. Whatever the count, this cameraman achieves indelible documentary impact.

  On August 25, Ellis once again demonstrated his trust in Fleming. He wrote from the War Department’s Office of the Chief of Staff in Washington, asking “Dear Fleming” to make an official report about a lieutenant who had been “insubordinate” at Fort Sill. Perhaps to his chagrin (he did hate the heat), Fleming was sent back to Washington himself in Indian summer and stayed on through most of the fall, working for the Army War College’s propaganda division from September to November. Although no specifics are known, he processed film from France and edited it into civilian propaganda films for the Committee on Public Information. On September 30, he was promoted to first lieutenant and given “one of the precious blanket passes. Which meant that I might go anywhere at any time, without question. It was a rare honor, but it was also the instrument which kept me in service long after the war ended.”

  What he called “a confidential mission” took Fleming to New York, where he was when the armistice was declared on November 11. He hankered to get back to Fairbanks and filmmaking and civilian fun and, on November 16, wrote a letter to his immediate superior, Captain Charles F. Betz, stating that he’d been left in limbo. Betz, a career officer, counseled patience with a letter addressed to Fleming at the Friars Club:

  Suggest you “hold fast” for the time being. Nothing definite can be stated now, but it is believed that within the next two weeks instructions will be issued from the War Department in which case we will know exactly how to act. There have been quite a few who have jumped to the conclusion on the spur of the moment of getting out, and which caused rather harsh comment. You have done such excellent work that a few weeks delay would not cause any great hindrance to you. Suggest that you “go slow” for the time being. If anything comes up will keep you posted.

  The same day that Betz gave his advice, November 18, President Woodrow Wilson announced that he would personally head the American delegation to the Paris Peace Conference in December. “My orders,” Fleming wrote decades later, “were to accompany him.” With a recollection of mingled irritation and excitement, he went on: “So it was that when the war was over, I was still in it as far as military discipline and rigid obedience were concerned. But in compensation, the voyage to Europe and the adventures there as a member of Wilson’s party, provided some of the most interesting incidents in my life.”

  5

  Filming the Conquering Hero: With Wilson in Europe

  “No one in America, or in Europe either, knows my mind and I am not willing to trust them to attempt to interpret it,” President Wilson said in October 1917. So a year later he determined that only he should head a delegation to sell European allies on his Fourteen Points—planks of a treaty for a just and lasting peace that would also serve as the Covenant of the League of Nations, his United Nations prototype.

  In his final task for the Signal Corps, Fleming photographed the ecstatic citizens of the victor nations who swarmed Wilson in Europe. They broke the boundaries of the movie frame with a show of approval that visibly buoyed the president. “Whether Europeans were cheering Wilson’s Fourteen Points, celebrating the end of the war, thanking Americans for military help, or simply responding to a unique and exciting event was not clear,” Wilson’s biographer Kendrick A. Clements writes in Woodrow Wilson: World Statesman (1987). “Being human, Wilson enjoyed the adulation.” Fleming caught the essence of the spectacle and provided critical data for Americans debating whether Wilson let the cacophony cloud his judgment. In Clements’s positive account, Wilson “did not fool himself that securing the peace he wanted would be easy.”

  A few years before, in 1915, this president had hosted the first White House screening of a movie: Griffith’s Birth of a Nation. His reported reaction—“It is like writing history with Lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true”—became part of essential movie lore, though nobody has ever nailed down the source of the quotation. For this trip, he was lucky to take along a cameraman able to capture international diplomacy at flash point.

  “I don’t know what you will think of this news,” Fleming wrote to his mother on November 27. “But I won’t get home for Christmas. I have to go to France with President Wilson on the peace trip. We will be gone about six weeks from the time we leave—go to England, France, Italy and maybe Germany. I tried to get out of going but they won’t let me. Anyway, it will be a great trip, and worth much to a young chap for the knowledge he will gain, of course.” The assignment’s prestige had started to sink in: “It is really quite an honor when you stop to think of it.”

  Fleming wasn’t kidding, though, about seeking “to get out of going.” He’d been on the brink of a professional breakthrough just before the war, and may have seen his Hollywood career slipping away. But once Fleming came on board, he found himself caught up in history in the making. On November 27, the White House announced that the president and his delegation would travel on the George Washington, a German passenger liner the U.S. government had impounded and turned into a troop carrier during the war. The ship boasted a crew of 525 and had enough room for twenty-seven hundred passengers. On this voyage it would contain a few hundred diplomats, scholars, and soldiers, including Fleming and four other Signal Corpsmen.

  As the novelist John Dos Passos neatly put it fourteen years later in 1919, the second volume in his trilogy U.S.A. (1937), “On December 4th, 1918,Woodrow Wilson, the first president to leave the territory of the United States during his presidency, sailed for France on board the George Washington, the most powerful man in the world.” Amid the blare of military musicians and a happy, noisy throng, the ship left Hoboken’s Pier 4 at flood tide, 10:15 a.m. In footage that can be seen at the National Archives, Fleming’s camera glances upward at the presidential flag and then stays focused on the cheering crowds as the ship glides out. Wilson’s well-wishers race along at eye level; the ship goes a short distance before a viewer realizes that they’re running along the rooftop of a pier building. (This “found” tracking shot has the inexorable pull of Francis Ford Coppola’s harbor and rooftop scenes of roughly the same period in The Godfather: Part II.) Patriots spill out of windows and doorways; an ebullient mob waves handkerchiefs below.

  Flag wavers line the piers, biplanes cut the air in blocky loops and zigzags, and a Navy dirigible circles watchfully, with eerie evenness, until the George Washington sails past Long Island. Wilson received a send-off more tumultuous than for any previous American leader. An escort of five destroyers fired off a twenty-one-gun salute. “We replied, and the din was terrific,” noted the Columbia history professor James T. Shotwell, the president’s adviser on economic and political history.

  It was a bang-up start to Fleming’s first ocean voyage. He’d made his initial trip to the East Coast just four years before, but here he was, listening to popular anthems like George M. Cohan’s “Over There” as he drank in the intoxicating imagery of the ship’s steam underlining the New York skyline. On board and in Western Europe, he was wielding the camera that would catch the tour for the record, and for posterity. (Fleming’s chronicling of the Wilson trip was always meant to be archived: it was the first time film would be considered as important as presidential papers.) Shipping
out was a dizzying continuation of his wartime experience, with its blend of service and growth as well as a smattering of showbiz.

  Wilson’s company and the ship’s crew soon assembled for a portrait. Fleming focused on the delegates, then tilted his camera up to depict the crew forming a diamond shape as they hung from every corner of each deck. Even more magnetic for Wilson’s delegates than the movies shown nightly was the camera recording them during the day. On December 9, Shotwell wrote, “I nearly forgot to say that the Military Intelligence took our pictures this morning, not merely as a group but individually, and then took film of us for a movie!” The same day Charles Seymour, a Yale history professor who was chief of the delegation’s Austro-Hungarian Division, was writing to his family:

  We have at our table the Signal Corps officer who is responsible for all the pictures to go into the war records and who is to make all the pictures of the Conference. He took still pictures of the Inquiry group all together, then individual pictures of each of us; then moving pictures of groups of three of us at a time, talking and smoking . . . All these movies go into the war records and copies are sent back to the Committee on Public Information. So keep a watch for movies of the President’s party.

  Edith Benham, First Lady Edith Wilson’s social secretary, wrote of being filmed by Fleming on December 11, two days before the landing in Brest, in northwest France: “So up we went and made fools of ourselves talking animatedly for the movie man and posing for the cameras.”

  Fleming was the one who thought he’d made a fool of himself. President Wilson’s chief bodyguard, Edmund W. Starling, was walking on a small promenade deck during the second day at sea when he noticed Fleming—“an enterprising young photographer”—cranking his camera as Starling approached him. Fleming “had turned and fled” before Starling could introduce himself. Fleming spread the word that shipboard footage of the president would be projected before the next scheduled movie. As Starling recalled, “A man in a dark overcoat and gray felt hat could be seen walking slowly around the deck. Finally he turned and walked toward the camera. There was a gasp of astonishment, then a roar of laughter as the features of his face developed into the countenance not of the President, but of myself. The President and Mrs. Wilson turned and waved at me, laughing. The young photographer was embarrassed.”

  But not demoralized. Fleming leaped at the chance to film an abandon-ship drill, with the president and the delegates looking on in life jackets. Two days after the drill, a severe storm made the headlines back home, as Fleming rolled his camera on dark skies, roiling seas, spume-drenched bulkheads—and then shards of sun piercing the newly calm Atlantic.

  Wilson turned Fleming into a catch-as-catch-can portrait artist, stealing close-ups of the president doing paperwork in his stateroom. Outside, whether Fleming depicts Wilson chatting up correspondents, ambling on the deck, or staring thoughtfully at the Atlantic, Edith is at the president’s side, usually with his aide and physician, Admiral Cary Grayson. One reason for Wilson’s spare presence on the journey out was the onset of a cold. Because of the momentousness of his mission and the euphoria surrounding him, Wilson may have felt unusually vulnerable. On December 12, after the evening movie, the crew serenaded Wilson, and all the officers and guests joined in. “At the end, just before the lights went up, a group of fifty bluejackets who had gathered unseen in a corner of the dining room, sang ‘God be with you till we meet again,’ ” noted Raymond Blaine Fosdick in his diary. (Fosdick would eventually become an undersecretary general of the League of Nations.) “The president was visibly affected. His head was bowed and I could see the tears on his cheeks.” In a testament to Fleming’s work, a New York Times dispatch stated, “Nothing has pleased [Wilson] more than the moving picture taken of him with the assembled crew on the forward deck, in which the president shook hands with everyone, from the grimy fireroom gangs to the men of the upper decks.”

  Eighteen American destroyers accompanied the George Washington as it pulled into Brest, the principal city of Brittany, on December 13. “The town was a veritable mud-hole,” Grayson noted in his diary. “Yet today when the George Washington steamed into the harbor, the sun was shining brightly, and the sea was as tranquil as the proverbial millpond.” In Fleming’s scenes, the ships spread blithely across the water, dreadnoughts at their ease. A sailor on the George Washington uses semaphore to signal them and the greeting party; the crew hoists the tricolor to flap alongside the Stars and Stripes. In Action, Fleming writes that when French and American officials reached the ship,

  Gen. John J. Pershing, commanding the AEF, was the first man to stride aboard the ship. I was endeavoring to be the first ashore, because I wanted to shoot that moving scene on celluloid. The general became lost in the winding companionway below decks. I rounded a turn at considerable speed and collided with him head-on. Now a lieutenant who bumps unceremoniously into his commander-in-chief had better pull himself together promptly and explain. I lost no time. Pershing readjusted his cap to its customary rakish angle and eyed me as I stood at attention. A faint smile came to his lips. “Lieutenant,” he said crisply, “will you direct me to the president? This damned alley is confusing.”

  “If we do not heed the mandate of mankind,” Wilson said in his initial speech in France, “we shall make ourselves the most conspicuous and deserved failure in the history of the world.” The images Fleming set on film were often stately, monumental—retinues proceeding down piers decorated with Allied flags and full-dress parades moving along roadways. But those phenomenal crowds are always pushing in. The task of documenting the action required alertness and flexibility. After a greeting from Brest’s mayor, and shouts of “Vive l’America” from his audience (throughout the country, the French held “Vive Wilson” signs or draped them across streets), Wilson’s motorcar convoy whisked him to the railroad that would bring him to Paris on December 14. French President Raymond Poincaré and Premier Georges Clemenceau met him at the railway under Fleming’s eye. Then the cameraman leapfrogged the delegation to find the best possible vantage point on the Champs-Élysées. He managed to catch both the front lines of spectators and the masses maneuvering for position, as well as the parade’s motor convoys speeding ahead and a group of women on the sidelines holding the banner for the American Red Cross.

  Here, Fleming was not alone. The Signal Corps wisely enlisted five or more other cameramen—including an aerial cinematographer—to cover the presidential route and, in Fosdick’s words, the “riot of color and fun” surrounding it.

  President and Mrs. Wilson and most of the official party stayed four miles from the train station, at the Hôtel Murat, the three-hundred-year-old mansion in the heart of Paris. The Hôtel de Crillon on the Place de la Concorde put up the rest of the delegation, including Fleming. “An American,” Fosdick noted, “can have anything he wants in Paris today—he owns the city. The girls even try to kiss him on the streets.”

  Another American in Paris for the peace conference was a twenty-four-year-old theatrical producer, Walter Wanger. His future credits as a movie producer or production executive would range from Stagecoach (1939) to Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and include two epic fiascos—Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra (1963) and Fleming’s Joan of Arc (1948). Fleming and Wanger met at the end of 1918. Wanger had spent part of the war working for the Committee on Public Information in Rome, learning the rudiments of film editing by re-titling and often rearranging Signal Corps newsreels for Italian audiences. Now he was an aide to Shotwell, who described him as “a very jolly boy.” Wanger “assured” Shotwell “we were going to have major-generals do our laundering, and all things on a similar scale!” Wanger flirted with the Foreign Service, but years later would say that after seeing the effects of films on public opinion, “I decided this was going to be my niche.” Wanger once referred to Fleming as “my cameraman at the Peace Conference.” Fleming, though, was not Wanger’s man: he was Wilson’s. On December 18, he was placed at the president’s dispos
al “until he otherwise directs.”

  Fleming became Wilson’s personal cameraman. In his footage are dozens of iconic images of Wilson in his top hat and one-of-a-kind winter coat—a calf-length fur piece made of kangaroo pelts, a gift from an Australian admirer. Fleming also was in the perfect place to photograph “the international actors of the theater of war.” He told an anecdote about Wilson reviewing the troops. At one point, Pershing blocked Fleming’s angle on the president and was so engrossed in conversation that he didn’t hear the cameraman’s request to move two feet to the right. Noticing a cloud about to cover the sun, Fleming roared, “Get out of the way!” Pershing smiled and moved three feet to the right.

  Fleming’s stories fit the photographic evidence. At the reviewing stand at Humes, “Black Jack” Pershing betrays an attractive, unbuttoned sense of humor, laughing with the president, nudging him to look in the cameraman’s direction, then snapping a salute just for Fleming.

  The day after Christmas the Wilsons crossed the English Channel. King George V, Queen Mary and Princess Mary, Premier David Lloyd George, and various other politicians greeted the president at Charing Cross Station. Two million people filled the sidewalks. Fleming shot the more regally paced British reception, with its fancy horse-drawn carriages, liveried drivers and riders, and row on row of cavalry, to provide a president’s-eye view of the parade, sometimes from within the route itself, the horses nobly clomping right in front of him. Nothing deterred the British crowds, whether in London or outside the Lowther Street Congregational Church, where Wilson’s grandfather had preached in Carlisle, Scotland.