A smattering of wit keeps the mix of mirth and heartbreak lively. Eve delights in a rugged piece of pulp fiction called Pirate’s Revenge; then her mother grabs it and substitutes gushy ladies’ novels in which “marriage is the sacred road where two souls meet.” Fleming gives satisfying weight to the doctor’s setting things straight. “Mother love is beautiful,” he says, “but you’ve never known it. Your mother is a hysterical, selfish vampire.”
At age thirty-two, when he filmed Mamma’s Affair, Fleming was a “mature” figure in the giddy world of early Hollywood; Constance, for instance, was ten years younger. And Harlan’s doctor typifies an image found in several Fleming silent movies: a worldly and virile yet temperate man.
You lose patience with the doctor character when he clings to spurious notions of male pride. He spurns Eve’s advances twice: first because others might think he’s after her money; second because of her superficial dishonesty when she throws that artificial fit. Eve ultimately convinces the doctor that she had to provoke him before he would acknowledge his own authentic feelings. “I can’t let you go because I love you,” he says, finally. “That’s what I’ve been trying to get at,” she responds. By the end he’s happy with his “bald-faced, brazen, scheming little darling.” As Fleming made future films his own, his notions of love and honor grew more complex and often involved a man and a woman divvying up traditional male and female roles. But Mamma’s Affair, though stagy and dated, still has a smidgen of audacity. Its revolt against a cloying nuclear family is timeless and true to the period; so is its cry for healthy sexual love.
The movie was obliquely true to Fleming’s own experiences. He did know genuine mother love with Eva, who resisted the spoils and spoiling of wealth even after Sid Deacon made his fortune, and Fleming was as frank with her as any mother could require of a son. In an undated letter from the Algonquin Hotel around this time, Victor wrote his mother, “I just finished cutting the picture we made out there” and in about three weeks “will begin a new one with Constance.” Given that Fleming never drew family members into the film business, the reference to Constance connotes a certain intimacy. Fleming followed Mamma’s Affair with one more Emerson-Loos-Talmadge movie, Woman’s Place, this time starring Dutch as a flapper who loses a mayoral race but becomes a political force behind the scenes. Harlan co-starred as her on-and-off-and-on fiancé, an established political boss. No print has survived.
Fleming’s relationship with Clifford ended in early 1923 when she was linked to the scandalous divorce of the operatic diva turned actress Geraldine Farrar and the screen heartthrob Lou Tellegen. Clifford had been one of Tellegen’s lesser flings—she spent a wild few days in a San Francisco hotel with him in 1918—but Fleming had little tolerance for cheating. (He didn’t leave Clifford empty-handed. He had advised her to invest in Signal Hill oil wells; by the time they split, one of the wells had begun to produce. Clifford opened a chain of flower shops with the proceeds. Fleming didn’t kick her out of his Gardner Street house. Instead, he moved out, to a small place in the Hollywood Hills.)
The last of Fleming’s Emerson-Loos productions, Red Hot Romance (1922), about an heir to an insurance fortune, harked back to Fairbanks’s globe-spanning satirical adventures. According to the terms of his father’s will, the hero gains his millions only if he successfully sells insurance for a year. His best bet is to peddle it in a land where there is no insurance—specifically, the tropical country of Bunkonia. There he runs into two giant problems. Rapacious international forces have been engineering a coup d’état in Bunkonia—and his fiancée’s father has become unwittingly enmeshed in it as the American consul. The hero parodies imperial capitalism and Fleming’s old boss Woodrow Wilson when he proclaims, “This country must be made safe for democracy and insurance!”
The surviving print of this movie is a shambles, combining bits and pieces of the setup with most of the last two reels; when I viewed it at the Library of Congress, it was sandwiched around an entirely different movie, Lois Weber’s Midnight Romance (previously thought lost). The script does survive; to judge from it and the available footage, Fleming’s movie is an amiable, slaphappy curiosity, with another of the director’s clever animated interludes (this time a lampoon of urban crowding) and one bizarre twist. At the climax, an all-black U.S. Marine unit saves the day, whipping wicked white authority figures and their mobs into order.
Is the imagery racist or antiracist? Are audiences meant to savor the supposed irony of blacks laying down the law to unruly whites? The sequence leaves contemporary viewers amused and perplexed, especially since the most prominent black character, the insurance salesman and heir’s right-hand man, is played by a broad blackface comic, Tom Wilson. The movie does provide happy echoes of knockabout Fairbanks vehicles like Reaching for the Moon and His Majesty the American, but it may have taught Fleming a lesson in the uses of star power: Basil Sydney, as the hero, is no Fairbanks. There’s no sparkle to his smile. And there’s not enough spring to his step. When Fleming uses a Fairbanks trick from The Half-Breed in Red Hot Romance, filming Sydney dropping off a wall, then printing it as if he’s scaling it, Sydney doesn’t move with enough authority to make the charade convincing.
In the midst of completing Red Hot Romance, Fleming began a seven-year stint with Paramount/Famous Players–Lasky. His studio debut, The Lane That Had No Turning (1922), was released almost simultaneously with his final Emerson-Loos comedy. For Paramount, though, he’d made a melodramatic farrago set in French Canada and based on a Sir Gilbert Parker novel. It centered on a budding opera star (Agnes Ayres), but was filled with soap-operatic twists involving her increasingly unhinged hunchback husband (Theodore Kosloff ) and a hidden will. The film won praise in The New York Times for “two scenes where double exposure is used with dramatic effect.”
During this honeymoon period at Paramount, Fleming helped Howard Hawks land his first sizable studio job as one of four production editors in the scenario department. Hawks gave sole credit for his hire to an even bigger name, Irving Thalberg, the not-yet-thirty “boy genius” of Universal then en route to mythic stature with Louis B. Mayer at MGM. Hawks would say that Paramount’s Jesse L. Lasky declared, “Thalberg says you know more about stories than anybody else he knows, so I’d like to have you.”
But who would have been the more likely Hawks supporter—Thalberg or Fleming, his best pal? In his reminiscences, Hawks became addicted to retrospective one-upmanship; he downplayed Fleming’s talents and contributions. Still, they were best friends. Probably speaking about the time in Fleming’s life after he split from Clifford, Hawks said that Vic once dropped by his house for a visit and ended up staying for five years. That turns out to be another Hawksian exaggeration, but Howard and his brother Kenneth lived in a couple of houses in the early 1920s that became havens for high-powered bachelors like Fleming and the actor turned director Jack Conway. John Gilbert also participated in the single-guy high jinks. Eddie Sutherland, a vaudeville-comedy veteran who later directed giddy hits like International House (1933), became part of the Hawks group, too, calling it “a dandy little household.” Sutherland may have embellished the facts when he said one house had a rain machine, “so if you were sitting there with your fiancée or something and you didn’t want [her] to go home, you’d turn on the rain, and when you decided she should go, you turned it off.” But Sutherland was being real when he remembered Fleming at that time as “a tough guy, a great big strong fellow,” who also had a keen sense of what would work for him on-screen. Fleming bailed out on Behind the Front, a service comedy presenting “the first nonsense side” of World War I, and recommended that Sutherland take it over.
Gilbert and Conway probably brought Thalberg into the fold. They and a writer named Jack Colton had already formed a Thalberg friendship group nicknamed “the Three Jacks.” Thalberg’s longtime story editor Samuel Marx described Colton as “a world-weary homosexual who could be persuaded over drinks to discuss revealing intimacies of love between ma
les,” while Conway and Gilbert “relentlessly stalked the beauties of Hollywood, of which there was a plentiful supply.” The Three Jacks introduced the seemingly ethereal Thalberg to “the pleasures to be derived from sex.” Later, Hawks and company pitched in, too. Thalberg’s two great loves were both linked, in varying degrees, to Fleming: Constance Talmadge and Norma Shearer, who fell for Vic on the set of Empty Hands (1924).
The screenwriter John Lee Mahin, who got to know Fleming a few years later, thought the Hawks brothers gave him swank and refinement. “Howard had class, you see. Vic had innate class, but he wasn’t born to the purple like Howard was. He didn’t have the advantage of his young life, the rearing.” Yet Fleming’s years with Fairbanks, Emerson, and Loos had already spruced him up smartly. He may have found it socially and sexually useful to foster the illusion that he had a roughneck background and rose from abject poverty. Bessie Love knew him professionally from her days as a Fairbanks co-star and romantically by the time she appeared in A Son of His Father (1925). When Kevin Brownlow interviewed her in 1971, she said, “I loved Vic,” and recalled, “I once asked him where he came from, where he went to school. There was a long pause. ‘Oxnard,’ he said. I took no notice. It was only later I discovered that he had come from a very poor background.” Love remembered that he used to pronounce “-ing” as if it were “-een”—as in “eateen and drinkeen” and “singeen.” (She said Marshall Neilan did that, too.) Fleming once told Howard Hawks’s formidable and socially prominent mother that she taught him how to use a knife and fork; Love thought Mrs. Hawks took that statement literally.
In 1929, Love married another Hawks brother, William, who for many years acted as Fleming’s agent. Other women went back and forth between Fleming and the Hawkses throughout the 1920s. Howard was briefly engaged to Pauline Starke, who had starred in Fleming’s Devil’s Cargo and Adventure, both supervised by Hawks. In 1926, Howard met his first wife, Athole Shearer, because Fleming had been wooing her sister, Norma; and in 1928, Kenneth Hawks married Mary Astor, the female lead of Fleming’s Rough Riders.
Ferocious yet friendly competition, with a patina of class, formed the basis of all this Hawks-Fleming bonding. Hawks’s tale of them meeting during an auto race hit on its essence. The unapologetic masculine ardor flaring out of their best buddy pictures (say, Ceiling Zero for Hawks and Test Pilot for Fleming) reflects their offscreen connection. Hawks once recounted to Joseph McBride that he and Fleming “just started” calling each other Dan: “He’d say, ‘Dan, what are you gonna do?’ And I’d say, ‘Dan, I don’t know.’ And we’d go out and get into some kind of trouble.” (Fleming’s daughters tell similar stories about Hawks and their father calling each other Ed.) These two talented fellows swam through the same hormonal Hollywood atmosphere. They extended the chemistry of adolescent chums well into adulthood. Even given occasional jealousy on Hawks’s part, their friendship was one of the purest things about them. After Fleming’s death, Hawks’s propensity to contend he had the upper hand as a person and a pro may give a sour cast to almost all the anecdotes Hawks would tell about his best friend. But scrape away Hawks’s self-promotion and you can still feel the shared zing of two world-beaters rivaling each other zestfully at every macho pastime.
“I think I got about an hour and three-quarters flying, and they made me an instructor,” Hawks said of teaching flying down in Texas during World War I. “There were two or three thousand cadets down there,” he said, “and about seven or eight planes. They didn’t even have enough planes to train people.” He must have been a decent teacher, because the Army Air Corps kept him at it. And in 1921 he probably encouraged Fleming to become an aviator, joining other movie-land pilots such as Cecil B. DeMille and Wallace Beery. Fleming took instruction at Rogers Field in Los Angeles and Clover Field in Santa Monica. One of his instructors was Gilbert Budwig, an early test pilot.
Hawks told Peter Bogdanovich that he and Fleming “built a couple of airplanes. One of them was very fast, but it was also very heavy. We used to call it the ‘Cast-Iron Wonder.’ We knew if we could get up, we could go faster than anything around, but it broke its landing gear every time it landed!” Inevitably, Hawks characterized Fleming as a pilot easily spooked compared with himself, a paragon of coolness:
We built an airplane for racing, he flew it in the first race, won the race, and landed it and the landing gear broke. And I said, “Next time you better let me fly it.” And I flew it and won the race and the landing gear broke when we landed. We flew it in four races and won four races and every time broke the landing gear. Then we gave up on that airplane. He was funny. He came in one day and wanted a drink. “Well,” he said, “I’m through flying.” I said, “Why?” “Well,” he said, “you know that new airplane? I landed it—perfectly good landing—right out in the middle of a landing strip,” he said. “I pulled the lever and let the wheels down. What I meant to do was put the flaps up.” “Oh,” I said, “Vic, anybody does that.” He said, “That isn’t what I’m talking about. I’m so sore about doing that to a new airplane, I went in and had a cup of coffee and they passed me the sugar and I unwrapped the sugar, threw the sugar away, put the paper in my coffee cup.” He said, “I have no business flying any more.” But he did.
Indeed, Fleming kept improving his standing in the flying world. After soloing for more than three hundred hours in a secondhand Curtiss JN-4, or “Jenny”—a popular instruction vehicle favored by barnstorming pilots—Fleming mastered another slow-moving war-surplus trainer, the Standard J-1, then a Catron & Fisk CF-15, often used for racing and aerobatics.
Flying must have given Fleming more satisfaction than his first few Paramount movies. (Most of his Paramount films have been lost.) After The Lane That Had No Turning, he shifted gears with Anna Ascends (also 1922). It was the film version of Harry Chapman Ford’s stage melodrama about an immigrant waitress in New York City’s Little Syria district who triumphs over dire obstacles, including a brush with murder, to become a productive, happy American. (In the play she nearly kills a rapist; in the film, a diamond smuggler.) Although The New York Times summarized Anna Ascends as “a collection of puppets in a mechanical plot,” the movie is notable for two reasons. It features an Arab-American as the protagonist (although she was played on Broadway and in Fleming’s film by the Irish-American Alice Brady), and it marked the debut of sixteen-year-old Betty Bronson, who credited Fleming with helping her land her most famous part: the title role in Herbert Brenon’s Peter Pan.
Dark Secrets (1923) starred Dorothy Dalton as an “untamable” society gal, crippled in a riding accident and courted by an Egyptian mystic who offers to cure her in exchange for marriage. (A virtuous Egyptian servant kills the quack and restores the heroine to her true love.) In stills, Dalton has the bold, dark beauty of Anjelica Huston; Photoplay noted that because she was nearing the end of a long-term contract, she was making $5,000 a week, “far more than such favorites as Pola Negri or Gloria Swanson.” But the movie’s main interest was its reliance on the notions of the chic French hypnotherapist Emile Coué (author of Self Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion). His signature line, “Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better,” became one of the jumping-off points for the satire of Nathanael West in his 1934 novella A Cool Million. Along with The Lane That Had No Turning’s Theodore Kosloff, Dalton also starred in Fleming’s next lost picture, The Law of the Lawless (also 1923). This tale of Tartar and Gypsy rivalries on the shores of the Black Sea derived from a story by Konrad Bercovici. Photoplay said, “It never seems real anywhere,” but Fleming won approval from Variety: “In direction the picture is well handled.”
Amid all this heavy industry and fine carousing, Fleming managed to romance Virginia Valli, an actress at Universal. “You could always tell who his current girlfriend was by whoever’s picture was on the piano,” said his niece Yvonne Blocksom, who recalled seeing Valli’s photo there. Fleming never guided Valli through a film.
He did direct the frequent Wester
n heroine Lois Wilson in back-to-back Zane Grey adaptations, To the Last Man and The Call of the Canyon (both 1923). Wilson’s niece Sheila Shay (the daughter of the director George Fitzmaurice) says of Wilson and Fleming, “I’m sure she liked him as a director and probably as a person,” and, “They seemed to enjoy one another’s company.” Fleming shot both films in Arizona—To the Last Man in Tonto Basin (where he had shot The Mollycoddle), and The Call of the Canyon in Sedona—and he and Wilson, an expert rider, would go searching together on horseback for picturesque locations. One day, Fleming insisted on roaming into a dead volcano to see, he said, “a pine tree growing right in the middle.” Wilson said, “We rode our horses down into that dead crater, and we had a very hard time getting back. I got a little panicky, but we made it. Victor said he found out that the last thing in the world to do is ride down into a dead crater, because it’s all ash.”
The man Wilson fell for wasn’t Fleming but her co-star, Richard Dix. To the Last Man was one of Dix’s first Paramount movies as a contract leading man, replacing Fleming’s old pal, the late Wallace Reid. Dix wasn’t the daredevil that Reid was. Vic “gave me a half-broke horse off the range,” Dix recalled. “He was a photographic horse, black and white spots . . . I had to run the animal around in a circle and there was a ditch a foot deep. About the fourth time around the horse stuck a foot in a bush and I went with him. I had more than 8,000 thorns in me. I got up and laughed it off, because I wanted to impress the director.”
Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) Page 12