Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics)

by Sragow, Michael

  Wings endures as a milestone of aerial moviemaking and a war film of enduring vitality. The Rough Riders would be a casualty of big-studio neglect, surviving only in bits and pieces, and in legend. But for Fleming, it was a grand cinematic exploit. And for Lasky, The Rough Riders was a personal crusade. He had once told his son Jesse junior that he’d been a bugler for the First Cavalry. He now would spare no cost in setting the record straight. (Budgeted at $500,000, the film came in at $1.2 million.) He hired Hermann Hagedorn, secretary of the Theodore Roosevelt Association, to concoct a historically accurate screen story and serve as research guru. Even after Lasky and Fleming added the contributions of John Goodrich (who delivered a romantic triangle) and Keene Thompson and Robert N. Lee (only Thompson worked with Fleming on location), they arrived at an account that—apparently—was faithful to Roosevelt’s 1899 memoir of the same name. “Apparently,” because the only evidence that survives comprises a record of the editing continuity at the Motion Picture Academy library, a few minutes of spectacular footage cut trailer-style (housed at the Library of Congress), and, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, editing-room dupes and trims from the cast-of-thousands scenes.

  The loss of The Rough Riders is serious, because what does survive has the size and charm of popular legend and the detail of history. In the brief Library of Congress reel, there’s percussive power to the action shots. And the romantic leads—Mary Astor as the regimental belle Dolly, Charles Farrell as the Harvard man and New York millionaire Stewart Van Brunt (known as Van), and Charles Emmett Mack as Dolly’s Texas hometown sweetheart, Bert Henley—all look charged up. Astor has a swooning grace and an intriguing shadow in her eyes; Farrell and Mack have the grit, sensitivity, and gruff humor that already characterized Vic’s leading men as well as his brand of storytelling. The MoMA footage of men swarming in and out of long boats, or marching on parade grounds, or embarking and debarking or boarding mules onto military ships suggests an exultant urge to express, on a mammoth scale, the discipline and sporadic chaos of Army life. Teddy Roosevelt wrote that the Rough Riders were an eclectic crew of “born adventurers,” and Mary Astor wrote that Fleming did “get the feel of the period, the zeal for a cause, the heat and dust of Texas.”

  What hasn’t been lost are the fables attached to this film’s making. Wellman recalled the simultaneous shooting of The Rough Riders and Wings in San Antonio as “the Armageddon of a magnificent sexual donnybrook.” Lasky, still in love with the Roosevelt movie’s subject decades later, said that it was “a smashing hit as the big road-show special of its year.” Astor simply dubbed it “the high spot of ‘having fun making movies.’ ”

  The fun started with the search for a Theodore Roosevelt. According to Lasky, “We notified all our exchanges of our need” and found a look-alike in the Midwest. The road-show program stated that Hagedorn put up a $500 reward for the person who found the man who most resembled TR. A Los Angeles apartment-house manager read the announcement in a pamphlet at the Million Dollar Theatre and then “came face to face on the sidewalk” with Frank Hopper, a former Montana businessman and sometime stage actor “employed as a representative of a book concern.” He was Roosevelt’s spitting image, and when he lost twenty-five pounds (Hagedorn promised $5 for every pound lost whether or not he got the part), Hopper won the role. But after Lasky put him in Fleming’s hands, the director said, “Hopper won’t do.” Lasky tried to persuade him otherwise, but Fleming held his ground. “Only in looks [is he a dead ringer for Roosevelt],” Fleming said. “In every other way he’s the direct opposite. Roosevelt was aggressive, dynamic, stormy. This guy hangs his head. He trembles when you speak to him. He’s so timid he’s afraid to ask what time it is. If you’ve got a picture where he’d be working behind a ribbon counter, he’d be perfect—but leading the Rough Riders up San Juan Hill? . . . The audience would roll in the aisles.”

  None other than the movie producers’ morality czar, Will Hays, provided the solution. Hays, formerly President Harding’s postmaster general, drew on his cabinet experience and said to Lasky, “Suppose you introduce [Hopper] to me with the greatest deference and respect, and I act as if I’m meeting the president himself.” So when Hopper entered Lasky’s office, the mogul and the czar snapped to attention. Lasky turned to Hays and asked, “General, may I present you to Theodore Roosevelt?” And Hays responded, “Sir, I am happy and proud to make your acquaintance. The resemblance is remarkable. I see you have the same character, the same undaunted courage—and your eyes reflect a passionate love for your country.” Addressing Hopper only as Roosevelt and always in tones of homage, Lasky buttressed the actor’s self-worth until “there was just the suggestion of a swagger in his gait. I grabbed the phone before he could get back to the set and told Fleming to give orders to everyone up and down the line to treat the fellow as if he were dealing with royalty, and to feign absolute sincerity in order to build up his ego.” It worked. By the time filming began, Hopper was raring to impersonate TR in all his bluster, demanding to get his boys food “if I have to burn up all the red tape between here and Washington.”

  Production trains for The Rough Riders pulled in to San Antonio on August 18 carrying cavalry units and turn-of-the-century wooden-wheeled supply wagons still in daily use in Army operations on the border with Mexico. Fleming and company arrived the next day on a special Southern Pacific car. “The heat bore down as only Texas heat in August can,” wrote Astor, “but we had no time to think of our discomfort in the noise and turmoil of our reception. The crowd at the station shouted; a military band blasted its welcome above the noise of the crowd; Mayor [John W.] Tobin gained sufficient quiet to make a welcoming speech and present me with roses and gratifying compliments.”

  With a sizable budget resting on his back and a company of 150, not counting all the military extras, Fleming plotted out every minute of the schedule to avoid getting bogged down far from Hollywood. The first three days of shooting went off like gangbusters and “almost finished off” Astor and some of her colleagues. But Fleming and his cinematographer—again, James Wong Howe—were depending on full sunlight. On most days the clouds went in and out. After that marvelous three-day start, the weather turned so rainy and steamy that it shut down production for ten days. Ennui never afflicted Astor, who enjoyed the attentions of the cavalry and fliers. “We were lionized, partied, dated almost to death. On the days when we could work, we hurried back in the late afternoon, hot and sweaty, for a swim at the country club or at Brackenridge Park, followed by a dinner and dance at the Gunter Roof or Kelly Field.”

  When Fleming could pick up the pace, it was intense. Determined to send shock waves through even the most sprawling images, he pushed Howe into devising what Howe recalled was “a crude version of the crab dolly.” Howe and Paramount’s special-effects-department camera expert Frank Madigan put together “a device like a cart on aeroplane wheels and a two-armed thing with a counterbalance and a camera on each arm. You could lift them up or drop them down as you pulled the cart along to follow the action.”

  Fleming gave them action worth following. In The Rough Riders, Theodore Roosevelt wrote, “Half the horses of the regiment bucked, or possessed some other of the amiable weaknesses incident to horse life on the great ranches; but we had an abundance of men who were utterly unmoved by any antic a horse might commit.” Fleming corralled four hundred broncos and hired experienced rodeo riders to mix in with the actors. Howe shot tests of them. “Well, I never saw so many fellows tossed in the air,” he said. “These fellows, they weren’t really good riders. They just thought they wanted to get in the movies, you see. I think there were forty or fifty of them taken to the first aid camp. It was dusty. The horses, the minute they started bucking, they kicked up so much dust, and all I could see was people, fellows going up through that dust in the air.”

  The assistant director, Henry Hathaway, knew Fleming from the seat-of-the-pants Zane Grey pictures and the frolicsome Mantrap, but on The Rough Riders, Fleming brought
his protégé to tears, pushing him to stress point during the staging of the Rough Riders’ departure from San Antonio to Tampa, Florida. Veering away from TR’s account of an organizational breakdown, Fleming planned it as an exultant parade to the Aranas Pass train station, complete with three hundred cheering local extras. It was Hathaway’s job to settle the logistics.

  Fleming was sitting on his ass and I set up this whole damn parade and had to do most of it at nighttime to get ready. In the morning he wanted to see if the start of the parade would come into view. At that time I’d gotten the whole thing ready so that he wouldn’t have to wait too long. I ran all the way from where the parade was up to the camera and I was out of breath. I said, “It’s all ready, Vic.” He looked at me and said, “Oooooooh, I worked so hard.” Oh, I was so mad. He was a cruel man. He’s the kind of guy who picked the wings off flies.

  Fleming was always a hard-driving joker, especially to men he liked and trusted like Howe and Hathaway. On The Rough Riders, he struck up a jovial friendship with the associate director Earl J. Haley and made him a thousand-dollar “quit smoking” bet. When Haley fell off that wagon in 1930, he wrote Vic a $1,000 check—and to his astonishment, the director cashed it. (Uncle Ed would certainly have approved. Haley’s son Stan says the incident became a cherished family story.)

  On the day the company shot the departure of the Rough Riders, Hathaway probably did sense something off balance. The top-billed star of Wings (albeit for a relatively small part) was Clara Bow, and she chugged into town at 4:00 a.m. the previous morning. Eluding the welcoming committee, she went straight to her hotel, and when she did step out, on September 15, it was to witness Fleming shooting his parade—and to declare her engagement to “Vickie” (her latest pet name for him).

  The timing was not choice. Bow had recently announced that she was engaged to the smoldering actor Gilbert Roland. Indeed, Roland told a reporter that this engagement to Fleming was just a ploy to win him back. Roland produced a wish-you-were-here telegram signed “Lots of love” from his “Clarita,” and said he’d wired her back that their affair was “all off” because he wouldn’t share her “with several other suitors.”

  It all made for amorous chaos and fresh material for reporters who rarely tired of field updates from Bow’s romantic battlefronts. Bow had already gone through with a joke application for marriage to a Yale amateur poet named Robert Savage, who thought it was no joke—and slashed his wrists to demonstrate his seriousness. And of course, Fleming had in recent weeks been seen cheek to cheek with Norma Shearer. The Society of Cinemaland column in the Los Angeles Times noted, “We were quite sure that there was some sort of love affair between Fleming and a popular young star who is not Miss Bow—but now the little Clara is quite sure that the Victor has gone to her heart. And what are Gilbert Rowland [sic] and Robert Savage saying about this?”

  Years later, Bow told a movie magazine that she knew she’d been “impetuous and thoughtless.” She had been having an affair with Roland—“I did not consider myself engaged to him but our relations were of a very friendly nature.” But when she got to San Antonio, her “friendship” with Fleming “was renewed. We talked engagement sincerely but here again I thoughtlessly did something which placed both Victor Fleming and Gilbert Roland in embarrassing positions”—that is, announce the engagement in order to be “ ‘a good sport’ and give a publicity man trying to gin up some ink ‘a break.’ ” When it came to speaking with the press off the cuff, the girl couldn’t help it; she was always lively and unpredictable (and inconsistent). She visited one San Antonio newspaper and told reporters that Fleming had proposed in a letter and that they’d been engaged for ten days before they announced it.

  No wonder Hollywood viewed her as a sexual flibbertigibbet. If anyone is responsible for propelling that view into the twenty-first century, it’s Wellman. A director of great force who got a winsome performance from Bow in Wings, Wellman was also an agreeable if unreliable storyteller, with the uncanny knack of embedding a grain of honesty in not-so-cultured pearls of wisdom. “A motion picture company lives hard and plays hard, and they better or they will go nuts,” he wrote in his memoir, stating a truth that all Hollywood’s great wild men have adhered to, from Fleming and Wellman to John Huston and Robert Altman. Like Bow herself, but with a yarn spinner’s hyperbole, Wellman gleefully mixed up Bow’s image with reality:

  To begin with all the young actors in The Rough Riders and Wings fell in love with Clara Bow, and if you had known her, you could understand why. This presented a problem to both Vic Fleming and me, but a far greater problem to Miss Bow. She took care of it—how I will never know . . . She kept [Buddy] Rogers, [Richard] Arlen, [Gary] Cooper, [Charles Emmett] Mack, a couple of pursuit pilots, and a panting writer all in line. They were handled like chessmen, never running into one another, never suspecting that there was any other man in the whole world that meant a thing to this gorgeous little sexpot—and all this expert maneuvering in a hotel where most of the flame was burning.

  Contrary to popular perceptions, Arlen and Rogers didn’t vie for Bow’s affections during the making of Wings or even in the movie. On-screen they competed for the second female lead, Jobyna Ralston (though their characters actually had the hottest friendship with each other); offscreen Arlen and Ralston fell in love and got married after the movie wrapped. Despite her billing, Bow as scripted was the weakest corner of a romantic quadrangle: she plays the girl next door who can’t get Rogers’s attention until the final scene. Still, her arsenal of wholesome flirtations keeps her character alive and gives the action on the ground a lift whenever Wings doesn’t soar into the clouds.

  Fleming was probably more pivotal than Bow herself to the romantic goings-on in San Antonio. Rogers later said he got “a little flirtation” going with Bow one night, but “was too scared to do anything about it” because “Vic Fleming was a tough guy, rough and tough. I was scared to death of him.” Meanwhile, Fleming was playing the fairy-tale godfather for his Rough Riders leading lady, Mary Astor. On the rebound from John Barrymore, the first great love of her life, Astor had become engaged to the production manager Irving Asher—and Astor’s mother, who accompanied the actress to Texas, conspired with the director to keep Astor away from Los Angeles and Asher as long as possible. Her part could have been done in a week; Fleming spread it out for months, from August into October, the whole run of the production. As Astor and Asher grew distant, John Monk Saunders, the dashing Rhodes scholar who wrote the original story of Wings, decided to give Astor the rush. When she signaled she was giving in, “Vic smiled a knowing smile; Mother kept out of the way (she was, she assured me, happily entertained by a cavalry captain); rumors were carelessly but pointedly dropped that back in Hollywood [Irving] was seeing a good deal of a former girlfriend; and I didn’t care whether we got home by Christmas.”

  Bow knew Wings would be another breakthrough: her first part in a bona fide super-production. Apart from trying to be a right gal for a publicist friend, is it so hard to comprehend why she’d make her announcement during that heady time? After all, when she spoke about Fleming, she described him as the man who gave good counsel when she had what future generations would call “an identity crisis” over becoming a star. “You couldn’t deceive him with any false glitter,” she said. “He steered me straight a lot of times when I was going ‘haywire.’ ” She said when they got engaged in 1926, “I began to read again, and to enjoy music, and to grow calmer about many things.”

  It’s testimony to Fleming’s fortitude that he had a calming effect on Bow during what she called their engagement, because at that time he was experiencing the kind of pressure that would make lesser directors crumple. On September 21, Paramount’s West Coast production manager, Sam Jaffe, came to San Antonio to take the pulse of the studio’s runaway productions. Both The Rough Riders and Wings suffered from the weather. If Fleming wanted absolute sun, Wellman wanted sunlight with a few clouds to contrast with the speeding planes; gray skies
did neither of them any good. After Jaffe left, Fleming doubled his efforts to pick up the pace wherever he could. (Bow returned to California on September 25.) Astor wrote that they “worked like slaves to make up the lost time,” doing “twenty scenes in one day.” One bout of running down a road in the Texas heat, wearing corsets and heavy Gay Nineties clothing, made her collapse and knock off for three days.

  The urgency to bring off the special-effects-laden action scenes grew particularly intense. Hathaway was preparing shots of an American observation balloon when the same Frank Madigan who helped Howe create the crab dolly arrived with Fourth of July pyrotechnics—small devices that could whirl around in the air before detonating like bullets, setting off smoke clouds and giving audiences the impression that they were “exploding in the balloon.” Hathaway instructed his crew: “Set your things so there’s no way of hitting the balloon,” which was carrying a stuntman. He caught a break when the first explosive device grazed the balloon, rebounded, and went off. “The next one goes, hits the balloon, blows it up. Thank God there was only one man [‘the second man chickened out’] because he climbed out and slid down the cable. Boy, was he raw—his hands, his legs that he wound around the cable.”

  As usual, Fleming’s practical-joke side escalated with risky circumstances. He asked Howe, “Jimmy, you want to take a ride in [the balloon]?” Howe said, “Sure,” so Fleming said, “Take your camera up there and get a shot.” Howe recalled, “He put the camera in this basket and he let this thing up there, and we got some shots . . . Then I said, ‘Victor, take us down.’ I must have been up about 150 feet or so . . . and Fleming I would see down there swinging this rope. You know what he was trying to do? He was trying to get it loose up there . . . He’s crazy. Vicious.”