Fleming’s production returned to California on October 21 and moved to Santa Cruz for twenty-one days of shooting, re-creating the Cuban invasion and several major battles. The push to get the movie done was staggering and so was the size of the production: in addition to the 150-strong company, the 1,200 extras included 250 African-Americans as members of the all-black Tenth Cavalry. Hathaway organized a string of explosives to go off while the Yanks were making a river crossing. Before shooting he ordered his special-effects guy to put one charge down at the last minute, right before Charles Emmett Mack hit a particular spot, for prime dramatic effect. But when Fleming called “Action!” and Mack made his mark and Hathaway was supposed to punch a nail on a strike board to set off the explosion, he couldn’t remember “which damn nail” to strike. Fleming stopped the camera to dry off and regroup everyone who was wet. But Hathaway’s freeze delay saved a life—not Mack’s, but the special-effects technician’s. He hadn’t been able to lay the charge in time. “He was so scared and he thought he was going to get the hell blown out of him.” Hathaway was thinking, “If I’d have hit that nail, he’d have been pieces.”
Fleming used miniatures for the sinking of the Maine (Paramount production records show Wilmington, California, as the location for shots of the searchlights and the gun deck) and reassembled the cast and crew for unspecified reshoots between December 28 and January 8, 1927. The Variety critic alluded to “considerable trouble with the film before it was ready to be shown,” and the negative buzz might have tainted the trade paper’s review. Most critics applauded, including Mordaunt Hall of The New York Times, who reported the audience’s delight at the comic interplay of Noah Beery, as Sheriff Hell’s Bells of Roaring Forks, New Mexico, and George Bancroft, as Happy Joe, who breaks jail to join his troop. There was a subplot of cowardice; Bert bolts from the battle lines but achieves salvation when he ignites the charge up San Juan Hill. Still, the movie pivots more on buddy-film reversals: Hell’s Bells and Happy Joe, Farrell’s Van and Mack’s Bert, take turns bonding under pressure. Hall singled out Farrell’s ability “to express his emotions with a sense of humor” as well as his and Mack’s “sincerity” in the scene of Van singing military songs as he hauls the mortally wounded Bert to the hospital tent. “You can’t call a man a coward—if he dies trying!” reads the title card. Mack died in a car accident on March 17, two days after the film’s New York premiere. Fleming served as one of the pallbearers.
It’s doubtful that Bow met Gary Cooper when he did his small, attention-getting part as a fatalistic flier in Wings (they may have collided on the two-day train ride from L.A. to San Antonio). But Bow did co-star with Cooper, and fall for him, on their next film, Frank Lloyd’s Children of Divorce (1927)—catalyzing a temporary break with Fleming. (“It’s all right to be directed by a man you don’t know very well, but having the man you are engaged to direct you just doesn’t work out,” Bow said. “When a man likes you real well, you know, you can get away with anything.”) After Frank Strayer’s negligible Rough House Rosie, Hula came around a few months later, with Fleming attached to it. By then he was ready to forgive her and direct her; Bow and Cooper were no longer an item. (Cooper thought that what broke them up was Bow’s inability to shake her feelings for Fleming.)
Ever the pro, Fleming would turn Cooper into the It Boy by setting him up to be a sexual icon in 1929’s Wolf Song (co-starring Lupe Velez, also a lover to Fleming and Cooper at different times). And he’d perfect Cooper’s screen image when he directed him in The Virginian later that same year. But for now, he had another kind of superstar on his hands: Emil Jannings.
10
From The Way of All Flesh to Abie’s Irish Rose
When Paramount seduced the German star Emil Jannings in 1926 with $400,000 a year—and the rare guarantee that his films would be shot in sequential order, “according to plot instead of according to the set-builders’ convenience”—B. P. Schulberg (Budd’s father) assigned Fleming to Jannings’s first American production, The Way of All Flesh (1927). Schulberg reckoned that one outsized personality demanded another. Jannings was an international acting potentate with transcontinental charisma. He saw himself as a cinematic demigod: maybe that’s why he maintained that he was born in Brooklyn to Americans of German descent, when actually he was born in the aptly named Rorschach, Switzerland, to an American-born father and German mother. A carnival strongman who rose to become “Kaiser of Berlin’s theatrical world” and then, after Ernst Lubitsch cast him as Louis XV in Passion (1919), Kaiser of Berlin’s film world, too, he relished his position and enacted it with noblesse oblige. He made a point, when he first reached Hollywood, of shaking hands with everyone on Paramount’s staff. (He had no love for America: he stayed for less than three years and, after returning to Germany in 1929, destroyed his reputation with support for the Nazis.)
The New Yorker’s Elsie McCormick summed up Jannings as “a large, beaming, childlike personage who looks out upon the world with the expression of a good-natured cherub. This cheerful ingenuousness somehow makes those around him feel that he should be pampered like a youngster and protected from adult annoyances. Even his impressive size does not prevent the women with whom he is associated from developing a maternal attitude.”
He was not going to get any mothering from Fleming, who babied only his girlfriends. And during The Way of All Flesh, even that well of warmth was running low. Bow started filming Children of Divorce with Cooper on November 26; within a week reporters took her comments that she and Fleming “have had a slight disagreement and the wedding is postponed.” She told Adela Rogers St. Johns a year later that she “needed romance” and her and Fleming’s “feeling for each other became more and more that of close friendship and less and less that of lovers.” Several years later she added, “I couldn’t live up to his subtlety.” Cooper’s attraction was more direct: Bow famously bragged to Hedda Hopper, “He’s hung like a horse and can go all night!”
Fleming never made a public statement about any of his affairs; by then he knew how changeable Bow could be (they would get back together before the break of summer). On the rebound, he went out with a Bow manqué, a bobbed redhead named Alice White, who in 1930 was named by Cecil Beaton as one of the most beautiful women in the movies, along with Lillian Gish, Dolores Del Rio, Norma Shearer, and Greta Garbo. Her background was almost as juicy as Bow’s. Born Alva White (possibly out of wedlock) in Paterson, New Jersey, raised by her Italian immigrant grandparents, she ended up with them in Los Angeles, and found her way into movies as a script girl for von Sternberg and for Chaplin. Dubbed “Peter Rabbit” for being “so stubby and fat and pink-looking,” she caught fire in front of a cameraman who was snapping some test shots for a new lens, and Chaplin made her a stand-in. She then performed her own extreme makeover, shedding forty pounds, losing her spectacles, and straightening her hair. Beginning as an extra (notably in 1924’s Thief of Bagdad), she was still an extra when Fleming first dated her, but she was angling to be an actress. She also was determined to be as frank as Bow about her escapades. Her first kiss with Fleming, she wrote in a published diary, was “a nice little-boy kiss. No thrills.” But “a girl can’t help liking Victor. He’s so awfully nice and sort of babies her.”
Fleming reveled in his burgeoning status. In March 1926, when Kathleen Clifford married the banker Mirimir Illitch, he sold the Gardner Street house and moved to his bachelor house on Cove Way in Beverly Hills, not far from his friends Arthur and Lu Rosson, around the corner from Buster Keaton, and down the road from both Chaplin and Fairbanks. The ad he composed bursts with pride:
HERE’S A BARGAIN
AM MOVING TO BEVERLY HILLS
Will sell my beautiful English stucco bungalow at extremely low price. Six lovely rooms and a separate small bungalow for maid. 1632 Gardner, just south of Hollywood Blvd. See it today. Owner, GR 7220
Early in 1927, Fleming also bought a spread north of Encinitas to provide an escape from Hollywood and to host friends lik
e Fairbanks and lovers like Bow and White. He paid $250,000 for the eleven-hundred-acre Meadowlark Ranch (he purchased even more land later) and announced plans (unfulfilled) to expand the residence into a Spanish-style hacienda. It remained “a very modest house,” his niece Yvonne Blocksom said, with two bedrooms, a living room, a dining room, and a screened-in porch. “No pretense. Uncle Vic was not one for pretension.” He did clear a landing strip, plant grain to feed the livestock, and fill the land with horses, cattle, and Poland China pigs—a special show breed. “Part of the ranch was on the other side of the road. An old stone house, a waterfall. And the horses were all loose-running, so if we wanted to ride, we had to go out there and lasso them.” Edward Hartman, at age seven, was tucked into bed there one night when a voice startled him: “Move over, kid, I’m getting in.” It was Douglas Fairbanks. (And a far more innocent time, echoing the days of bed sharing in frontier inns.)
Fleming enjoyed playing the paterfamilias; it was good research for his new movie. Although The Way of All Flesh borrowed the title of Samuel Butler’s severe novel about patriarchal tyranny, it was a tearjerker for daddies. The script originally carried the title The Man Who Forgot God, from an unrealized project by Bruce Barton, the advertising-meets-religion guru of the Roaring Twenties, who interpreted Jesus as the ultimate promoter, entrepreneur, and organization man. Barton had written an update of the David and Bathsheba story—a fable that would find its way into parts of Fleming’s Red Dust. But Jules Furthman’s screenplay for The Way of All Flesh is about a chief cashier ( Jannings) with a half-dozen kids and a doting wife (played by none other than Belle Bennett, the self-sacrificing mother in 1925’s tearjerker for mommies, Stella Dallas). He falls from grace and contentment when the bank director asks him to transport bonds to a distant city. In the original script he went from Weimar to Berlin, but the shooting script Americanized the action to Milwaukee and Chicago. On the train, he meets a bottle-blond floozy (Phyllis Haver), who gets him to commit drunken adultery in the Windy City; then she swipes the bonds and splits. In a glitch of fate that preserves the antihero’s honor, a railroad runs over a thug who has picked Jannings’s pockets and scavenged his identification papers. But Jannings cannot tell the truth, recover his identity, and keep his good name. He becomes one of the anonymous urban poor and, in a climactic twist, chooses to preserve his reputation (and his family’s) and accept a prison term for his own murder.
The Way of All Flesh was an ideal conveyance for Jannings’s adroit masochism. (Unfortunately, even this famous film has been lost.) At the time of its premiere, Jannings praised “Mr. Fleming and Mr. Schulberg” for filming it in sequence and for completing shooting “in six weeks—in Germany they would have taken six months.” A master of makeup, Jannings also appreciated the care Fleming and his assistant—Hathaway again—took in preparing the look, up to a custom hairpiece that extended his hairline when the character was young. Its removal, of course, then made him look old. (George Westmore, Hollywood’s pioneer of creative makeup, and/or one of his sons, conceived the look.)
In his posthumously published (1951) memoir, Jannings wrote that he and Fleming
discussed every scene as a matter of principle. He usually asked: “How do you want to do this, Emil?” I told him what I thought, he listened attentively and responded: “If that’s what you feel—good! Do it!” But then he watched like a hellhound. His often repeated, whispered “Too much!” liberated me more and more, all in a sense of friendship, and I realized to my astonishment that a very different Jannings came out of the shell—a simpler, less burdened, more matter-of-fact person. I believe that it was Fleming’s great fortune that he had never been an actor. With his natural artistry he personified what every actor wishes for—the ideal audience!
It took time to reach that accord. Fleming was accustomed to megaphoning his directions to actors who followed them immediately. The German star, said Fleming for public consumption, insisted on dissecting every change and discussing “the situation so thoroughly that Jannings became in fact the character of the story, feeling the same emotions, venting the perfect reactions. It did not take me long to realize that Jannings can never give a true Jannings performance when he feels that he is acting. And that is why I say that an actor who acts is never a good actor.”
Jannings requested that Fleming go on to direct The Last Command. (That didn’t happen because of scheduling conflicts with Abie’s Irish Rose.) Still, Hathaway, who thought Jannings was a problem drinker, witnessed titanic clashes between them. The day they shot the cashier antihero waking up with a hangover, Jannings took “about three or four slugs of whiskey,” said Hathaway; then Jannings fell asleep. Fleming “went over and turned out that light and quietly left . . . Jannings woke up on a dark stage about two hours later.” Hathaway claimed Jannings threw a fit, summoned Schulberg to his dressing room, and called Vic a “son of a bitch.” Fleming responded, “I don’t want to work with any autocratic German son of a bitch who’s drunk. You can take me off the picture, I don’t care.”
Jannings’s next director, Josef von Sternberg, who became the director of The Last Command and then was invited to Germany for The Blue Angel, told a slightly different version, with an acid moral. According to von Sternberg, Jannings loved practical jokes, except when they were played on him—any reference to those “would bathe him in gloom.” Fleming simply asked him to perform his sleeping scene with “more conviction,” and Jannings, “needing no such spur,” fell into such profound slumber that Fleming, unable to rouse him, moved his crew to another set and continued filming. “Jannings awoke eight hours later no longer the object of intense interest, alone and abandoned on a pitch-black stage. Except on that occasion, he was never alone, behaving as if the Earth were worthless unless it revolved around him.”
After the Sturm und Drang, the movie was a critical and popular success and, along with The Last Command, won Emil Jannings the first Academy Award for best actor (in a ceremony that didn’t take place until 1929). Fleming’s use of a moving camera as a mood reader and probe won comparisons to F. W. Murnau’s and E. A. Dupont’s collaborations with Jannings on, respectively, The Last Laugh (1924) and Variety (1925). Even a Paramount publicity item singled out the way the camera follows Jannings “around one room, down a long hallway and into a second room, recording every action on the way.” Berlin critics contemptuous of the movie’s pathos-laden finale still praised Jannings and Fleming—one even called it the star’s “greatest success.”
There was a strong dissenter: Luis Buñuel. He had no use for Jannings: “For him, suffering is a prism cut into a hundred facets. That’s why he’s capable of acting in a close-up from 150 feet, and if one were to ask even more of him, he’d manage to show us how an entire film could be made of nothing but his face.” Buñuel treated Fleming as a skilled opponent: there’s a poetic rightness to the premier avant-garde director of his time attacking the man who would go on to make two of the most popular movies of all time. “Devoid of authentic emotion, Victor Fleming’s film is, ultimately, a counterfeit. Although technically excellent, this film shares with many others the distinction of appealing more to our tear glands than to our sensibilities. One could hear the tears falling on the theater floor. Everyone was exposed deep down as a crybaby at the showing of The Way of All Flesh.” Edmund Wilson disdainfully referred to the movie’s “ballast of American hokum.” But Yvonne Blocksom, who saw it at age twelve, fondly recalled not only the film but also its sniffling audience.
Few Hollywood directors worried about their international reputations. What was significant, even at relatively lighthearted Paramount, was their standing within their own company and industry. Fleming was now near the top. Frank Tuttle and Clarence Badger (It) held tidier paychecks, but neither had bettered Fleming’s critical and box-office record.
Out of the studio, Fleming was sustaining some kind of relationship with Alice White—and with Bow, too, who, after a few months, was cooling on Cooper. “Gary was big and str
ong, but Victor was older and understood me,” Bow said. “You know I have always been terribly lonesome. I have no brothers, no sisters, no mother. I need someone to soothe and quiet me. Victor was like that. I mothered Gary, but Victor mothered me.”
In case Victor needed some mothering, there was the soft shoulder of Hedda Hopper, not yet a fearsome gossip columnist but a forty-two-year-old actress and divorcée when Fleming squired her to Hollywood events like the premiere of Seventh Heaven. When Hopper did become a columnist, in 1938, she championed Fleming in ultra-personal terms, raving about “that great shaggy head of his, with his fine, sensitive features and hands like a surgeon,” or “blue eyes, iron grey hair, and bronzed face . . . almost as dashing as Rhett Butler.”
Motion Picture magazine completed its 1928–29 series on the “love-lives” of Hollywood women by proclaiming Fleming one of the two “Beau Brummells of Hollywood” (the other was the leading man Ben Lyon) and noting, “Many of the men have commented on their honorable mentions [in the series]. But not Victor Fleming. A real sheik doesn’t talk, we take it, unless he is love-making.”
How did he keep his balance if he wasn’t sounding off? His older daughter, Victoria, said, decades later, “Daddy used to bring his girlfriends around to Mother for her approval.” When Victoria said “Mother,” she meant her mother, Lu, then the wife of the director Arthur Rosson. But years before Vic and Lu changed their relationship from friend and confidante to husband and wife, there was another love bout—and another movie—with Bow.
Hula (1927) is the sort of cheerfully flimsy picture that critics and serious fans disparage, with some cause, for being unworthy of its stars and creators. Reteaming Fleming and Bow, Paramount wanted to recapture the magic of Mantrap. In little more than a year, the director and the star, as well as being an on-and-off item in the fan magazines, had acquired enough luster to put a shine on any property—including one about the farmer’s daughter. In this case it’s a Hawaiian plantation owner’s daughter named Hula (Bow) emerging into ripeness when a handsome British engineer, Haldane (Clive Brook), arrives on the scene.
Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) Page 17