Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics)

by Sragow, Michael

  Becoming a performer in a disreputable fledgling art form, Clara managed to use her disadvantages and her psychic wounds to invent her own acting grammar and vocabulary built on uninhibited energy and movement. Her swift, intuitive mastery of a new erotic syntax made her a revolutionary star. She was all the more alluring—and, to some onlookers, “dangerous”—because her sexuality informed her overall life force. Neither a vamp nor a Goody Two-Shoes, she provided the figure of the girl next door with a healthy sex drive.

  Her best-known picture was Clarence Badger’s 1927 adaptation of Elinor Glyn’s It, but her juiciest vehicle was the movie that led up to it: Fleming’s Mantrap. Its Sinclair Lewis source novel has been forgotten, but Lewis was coming off an unprecedented string of critical and popular successes (Main Street, Babbitt, Arrowsmith) when Mantrap came out in 1926, and the movie was a plum assignment for Fleming. The director was ready for it. He saw that it was a new kind of sex comedy, celebrating a spunky, unstable erotic heroine (Bow) while poking fun at both her honest, backwoods-trader husband (Ernest Torrence) and the elegant urbanite (Percy Marmont) who almost steals her away. Professional critics took Lewis at his word when he called it “a straight, out-and-out romance of an unspoiled country . . . the most captivating love and adventure story I have ever conceived or told.” But young James Agee, writing to his friend and mentor Father Flye during his summer vacation from Exeter, hit the right note when he called it “always amusing” and “a sort of relaxation for Lewis” from “working on the biggest thing yet,” which turned out to be Elmer Gantry. Of course, Mantrap still had elements of social commentary: it popularized the concept of the “social climber.”

  Whether on a Paramount set or on location at Little Bear Lake in the San Bernardino Mountains, Fleming sustains a summery tone from start to finish. Vincent Lawrence, fresh from Broadway, consulted on the script and instructed Hathaway and Fleming on the importance of structuring scenes rather than concocting clever titles. Lawrence had a benign influence; he’d later work on Test Pilot and Fleming’s unfortunate 1946 Adventure (no relation to the silent Jack London piece). On its own terms and as an interpretation of the novel, the movie is a small comic masterpiece, though Lewis ended up hating it. (He told an audience at a movie theater where he was spotted that he was glad he’d read the book first, because he wouldn’t have been able to recognize it from the movie.) It’s consistently sprightly, as befits the theme that erotic attraction bubbles constantly beneath the surface of social life, even in the Canadian frontier town of Mantrap Landing.

  Most romantic comedies, especially ones revolving around triangles, build to a clear amorous resolution. Mantrap’s characters don’t know or can’t accept what they want, especially the sophisticated Ralph Prescott (Marmont), a New York City divorce lawyer, and the flirty Minneapolis manicurist turned rural wife, Alverna (Bow). At the end, they all drift back to where they started, sadder and wiser and a little bit funnier, too. The movie begins with comical vignettes contrasting the sexual hunger of Mantrap Landing’s general-store operator Joe Easter (Torrence) with the sexual disgust of Prescott, a bored Manhattan attorney. Annoyed rather than flattered when a well-put-together blonde plays footsies with him under his desk, Prescott escapes into a hallway. There he runs into a business neighbor, Woodbury (Eugene Pallette), who beckons him into his office—past a display of papier-mâché legs and sashaying models (he runs a hosiery company)—and suggests that a vacation in the north woods will be therapy for Prescott.

  James Wong Howe, returning as Fleming’s cinematographer, said it was the director’s idea to start with Prescott’s client crying in his office: “He had me open up on her little hand-mirror showing the lips being made up and I would dolly back.” When she puts the mirror down, we get our first view of Marmont’s lawyer, looking stern and stressed. Speaking in 1970, Howe remembered the gal as Bow, though it’s the skillful Patty DuPont as Prescott’s blond client (Fleming would use her in his next Bow picture, too). In a pungent counterpoint, we first see Joe in a marvelous tableau, modeling hats for local squaws; Torrence is priceless when he presents his wares to his audience with an obsequious deadpan. He’s been out of circulation far too long, and when he discovers that dames in the 1920s display more than their ankles, he decides he needs a trip to Minneapolis. Fleming told Howe, “You go ahead and shoot the montage of Ernest Torrence coming to town from the woods by yourself,” and Howe thought, “That’s wonderful.” In Minneapolis, Joe meets Alverna, a manicure girl who finds this endearing lug a welcome change of pace from slick city beaux. Even before Bow’s entrance, the movie’s zest and innovation outstrip even Fleming’s Fairbanks pictures: the camera glides among the characters with a skin-prickling emotional alertness. When Bow does arrive, she provides a power surge that never leaves the picture. From the moment Alverna waggles her way out of a taxi, Fleming lets Bow take charge of the film as if she were stuffing a hotel key down her blouse.

  Alverna parades down the row of barber chairs until her attention snags Joe Easter like a magnet does a filing. She likes this “big boy from away back”—she really likes him. And the camera loves her. Arthur Jacobson, Bow’s sometime lover, who served as a second cameraman or assistant director on several of her films, said, “She was what we called a freewheeling actress . . . The cameramen they put on her pictures got used to her. They knew how to light and how to follow her with the camera, because once she started to play a scene you never knew where she was going to be. No director wanted to hold her down. They let her go!”

  In the wild, the city slickers are unmanned. Fleming was a whiz at the anti-buddy movie before he perfected the buddy movie in films like The Virginian and Test Pilot, as he proves with his swift limning of Prescott and Woodbury’s disastrous woodland partnership. Prescott’s earnest awkwardness clashes so keenly with Woodbury’s know-it-all assurance that when Easter arrives on their campsite Prescott reacts to him like a godsend. Prescott is glad to go back with Easter to Mantrap, although as soon as he gets there he knows in his gut that a real mantrap awaits him: Easter’s new wife—Alverna. Bow shows her native acting genius in Alverna’s interaction with Prescott: she instinctively reads how he reacts to her all-out physicality (even before she makes a move on him), then puts him at ease.

  It was Fleming who put Bow at ease. The twenty-year-old star thought him “older a great deal than I am, and very strong.” In 1928, she told Adela Rogers St. Johns:

  I liked him at once, though I didn’t feel in the least romantic about him. But soon we became great friends and he had a tremendous and very fine influence on my life. He grew fond of me at once. And he began, with his strong intellect and understanding of life, to guide me in little ways. He showed me that life must be lived, not just for the moment, but for the years. He showed me what a future I might have as an actress, because I had made a place for myself that people seemed to want. He was very patient, and he taught me a great deal.

  The “great friends” became lovers. He advised her to be careful in her friendships—and predicted that in a year she would be a great star.

  Happily, Mantrap has the ambience of a frolic, not a tutorial. It was a watershed moment for Bow, for Fleming, and for Howe. It’s the rare comedy—like Midnight, or Fleming’s later Bombshell, or The Lady Eve, or Some Like It Hot—where the scintillating craftsmanship carries its own sense of humor. However fast or slow his affair with Bow, something on this movie energized Fleming and electrified his co-workers. Mantrap makes observational humor cinematic. It’s unpredictable as well as funny, particularly when, at an excruciating pace, Howe’s camera slowly pans around the Easters’ welcome party for Prescott while a grim reverend and neighbors from the nearby Hudson Bay Company outlet paralyze rambunctious trappers with a heavy dose of holy attitude.

  The look of the film may suffer at times from primitivism—the “day for night” techniques used for a night burglary now seem woefully inadequate—but the sophisticated feeling behind the camera-work hasn’t dated and f
its the heroine’s frisson.

  “She was bad in the book, but—darn it!—of course, they couldn’t make her that way in the picture. So I played her as a flirt,” Bow told a reporter, underlining her meaning with, the reporter wrote, “a sidelong glance.” Alverna channels all her vitality into flirtation; she stands for life amid a mob of pious zombies. Fleming and Bow leave little doubt that neither Easter nor Prescott will ever manage her: that’s what catalyzes the comedy. Fleming wisely pushes the material toward an evenhanded satire. Both the slick attorney and the wholesome bumpkin are Silly Putty in this lady’s hand, yet each of these guys could use some kneading. You root to see them fall before her. Prescott does try to leave Mantrap before he gives in to temptation and betrays his friend. Alverna lies in wait at a bend of the river to intercept his canoe; Howe’s lens takes in her hobo sack of goods and then her calves before it moves up to her gorgeous, irresistibly expectant face. Prescott can’t resist. Who could? Yet there’s nothing fatale about this femme. Ultimately, she revives Prescott’s appetites and makes Easter see that she’s worth the trouble.

  There’s tenderness to this movie’s sexiness—maybe that’s why it was a favorite with both its stars. On a packet of production stills, Bow wrote to her sons, “From Mantrap—the best silent picture I ever made.” In 1991, a Toronto Star reader responded to a request for “magic movie moments” with an experience he’d had seeing Mantrap at a “nostalgia cinema” in England:

  Just before the lights went down, the ushers parked a frail, shriveled old man in a wheelchair beside my aisle seat. As the voluptuous “It” girl romped with her handsome leading man on the screen, this shrunken man beside me was overcome with emotion. His sobbing, groaning, and whimpering were so distracting that I wound up watching him as much as the movie. Then, when the lights came up, the theatre manager bounded up on stage and announced: “Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to introduce to you the man whom you just saw making love to Clara Bow on screen.”

  It was, of course, Percy Marmont.

  In a tragedy or soap opera, Alverna’s itchiness would doom her to eternal disappointment—even Lewis’s book leaves her hurting. But here, as later in Red Dust, Fleming has a healing comic vision. She’s better off with Easter than with a tonier and more forbiddingly “honorable” man like Prescott; Easter just has to hold on to her when she slips a little. It’s a trick Fleming couldn’t master with Bow in real life. But Mantrap was the start of an affair to remember.

  9

  A Lost Epic: The Rough Riders

  Fleming and Bow may have set the screen and the box office ablaze (at a cost of $216,584, Mantrap netted $415,600 in rentals), but exactly when their affair turned serious isn’t clear. In their few weeks between pictures back in Los Angeles, they followed separate tracks. Bow was still an outsider. Though Fleming was living not far from Bow’s Hollywood Boulevard home and then in the Hollywood Hills, he was becoming a member of “the Club”—literally. In 1925, the Hollywood Sixty Club, a group that tried (and failed) to build a “clubhouse” for moviemakers, proudly announced Fleming as one of its founders, along with Chaplin, Howard Hawks, John Ford, and other luminaries. But Hollywood never took to Bow. “Most people in Hollywood were burying their pasts,” says David Stenn, author of Clara Bow: Runnin’ Wild (1988):

  She was exhuming hers. They were doing everything behind closed doors, and she was talking to the press. Esther Ralston told me a story on herself that I thought revealed a lot about Clara and Hollywood. She and Clara were shooting Children of Divorce and the day they wrapped, Esther was having a big party. Esther was very proper—blonde, petite, pretty—and she lived in a big mansion. And everyone in Hollywood was invited: that is, all the right people. So Esther was getting dressed in the dressing room and Clara walked by and lingered in the doorway and said, “You’re having a party, ain’t cha, Esther?” And Esther said, as if it had just hit her, “Oh Clara, would you like to come?” And Clara Bow stood in the doorway and said, “Oh, no, I know you don’t want to invite me.” This is the biggest star in Hollywood—and she’s a pariah to the point where no one even pretended to accept her. And Esther liked her. I mean, there are plenty of people around who don’t like the big female stars today, but they sure put on a great act.

  “Clara did strange things,” even the besotted Arthur Jacobson had to admit. “Someone told her she shouldn’t leave her two dogs in the backyard. She brought the dogs into the spare bedroom, and had someone cover the floor of the room with dirt. When she sold the house, she had to replace the floor.” (Fleming would later use his knowledge of Bow’s helter-skelter home life to enrich Bombshell.)

  When the Mayfair Club, a more successful and elitist version of the Hollywood Sixty Club, held its first formal dinner dance at the Biltmore Hotel, the lady on Fleming’s arm was Norma Shearer. The Hollywood Sixty Club would serve dinner to anyone who could cough up $15; the Mayfair Club was much snootier. Mary Astor described it as “a social experiment” to see whether Hollywood mainstays could find a space without gawkers or press to “be themselves”: to eat and dance and (especially during Prohibition) drink. “But as for movie people being themselves,” Astor wrote, “it was absurd. The men wore top hat, white tie and tails. Everybody got a good look at everybody else, and who was with who, and who got drunk, and who looked terrible, and the columns duly reported the long lists of important names the following day; and if your name wasn’t there you called the paper and raised hell.” The galas sometimes doubled as charity benefits, and the organization was exclusive—a nonmember couldn’t come as a guest to two galas in a row. A local madam did manage to puncture the group’s airs: she sent fifteen employees to infiltrate a dance, all dressed in red. At the club’s glittering first night in August 1926, Fleming had his last known date with Shearer; his pal Hawks had his first date with Shearer’s sister, Athole, his future wife; and Astor went with Hawks’s brother Kenneth, her future husband.

  Patsy Ruth Miller, the performer turned writer who had played Esmeralda to Lon Chaney’s Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), was in a good position to understand the Hawks-Fleming allure; she married John Lee Mahin, who in the 1930s became Fleming’s favorite screenwriter. She knew how men like Hawks and Fleming denigrated the flaccid side of make-believe and treasured their risky real-world pursuits. In Miller’s That Flannigan Girl, a 1939 roman à clef that mingles perceptions of the Hawks clan and Vic, she portrays a pair of brothers from Pasadena’s upper crust—“tall, loose-jointed men, big-featured and soft-voiced.” The figure resembling Howard Hawks possesses “a smile that had very little mirth.” The brother more like Fleming has “a fullness, a softness that his brother never had,” also a protective way with women and perhaps with other men—he boasts of rescuing an assistant director from suicide. (Vic said he did, too.) Accused of being “just a hidebound Pasadena boy,” the Fleming figure says Hollywood puts out “entertainment for morons” and declares, “Acting’s a hell of a way for a man to earn a living . . . You get punch drunk from hitting yourself in the face with a powder puff.” The character’s exuberance for flying charms her—until he dies in a plane crash.

  Fleming himself kept flying throughout the 1920s. Near the end of the decade, a Washington Post movie columnist spotted him enjoying an aerial bout of tag in a checkered biplane over Santa Monica. But William “Wild Bill” Wellman, a filmmaker of Fleming’s robust temperament and roving pedigree, got the call to make Wings (1927), Hollywood’s landmark flying epic, even though it was written by Vic’s recent collaborators Loring and Lighton. In World War I, Wellman flew in the Lafayette Flying Corps of the French Foreign Legion. Douglas Fairbanks had met Wellman at a high-school hockey match in Boston. When Doug read a newspaper account of the young man’s wartime exploits, the star cabled the aviator with the words “When it’s all over, you’ll always have a job.” Wellman possessed chiseled, camera-ready looks, and Fairbanks tried to make him an actor. But Wellman felt ridiculous in wigs and makeup and wanted a post
on the other side of the camera. It took him only four years to work his way up from messenger boy and assistant propman and assistant director to director. Once he did, his ascent to the top ranks was even swifter. B. P. Schulberg, first as an independent producer and then as Paramount’s production chief, championed Wellman—and Wild Bill landed the prize of Wings.

  Fleming was another of Schulberg’s favorites. But it was Schulberg’s boss, Jesse Lasky, who handed Fleming an equally ambitious assignment: The Rough Riders (1927), a salute to Teddy Roosevelt and his command of the First U.S. Volunteer Cavalry during the 1898 Spanish-American War. Fleming had already made his reputation as what Astor called “a good ‘big production’ man.” The Rough Riders was enormous. Fleming would shoot most of it in San Antonio, Texas, partly on the same International Exposition parade grounds where Roosevelt trained his troops. Wellman would shoot Wings in San Antonio, too, and at the same time, because the location contained both air and land Army bases. Wellman got complete cooperation from the War Department: fliers from across the country flocked to San Antonio. And Fleming had the use of up to twelve hundred soldiers from the Army’s First Cavalry Division. “The town was lousy with movie people,” Wellman wrote—and even lousier with military people. And, as Wellman continued, “if you think that contributes to a state of tranquility, you don’t know your motion picture ABCs.”