Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics)

by Sragow, Michael

  In this update of a 1915 play first filmed in 1919, Bennett portrays the heroine, Ellen Neal, as a bright, lowborn gal who gets in over her head with the smart set. In one of Furthman’s contemporary twists, she starts the movie as a speakeasy hostess—and persuades the judge (and the audience) after a raid that she really was only a hostess. He convinces her that if she stays at that job, she won’t be a hostess very long. So she goes into service at the mansion of the fabulously wealthy Fullertons. There, even the butler paws her over. Hugh Fullerton (played by Lew Ayres), the heir to the family fortune, offers what she thinks is love and protection. But Ellen is a summer fling for Hugh (partly because he doesn’t realize the depth of his feelings).

  When she becomes pregnant and he doesn’t answer her letters, she hires a lawyer. They file suit for improper relations with a minor against Hugh and his friend Coakley (Matty Kemp), who’s bragged of knowing Ellen intimately from the speakeasy. (He didn’t.) Revelations flare up in the courtroom scenes: Ellen’s “mother,” Mrs. Neal (Beryl Mercer), turns out to be the best friend of her real, dead mother, who threw herself into the Hudson River rather than impede the career of Ellen’s VIP father. The rich fellows’ attorney, Judge Filson (Hale Hamilton), realizes that he’s Ellen’s long-lost dad. Ellen decides that the proudest thing to do would be to drop the case and bring up baby alone. Suddenly Filson and the Fullertons want to make things right. But Ellen won’t be won over until Hugh, repentant and besotted, swears that she is all he wants from life. Fleming’s picture has the sharp trajectory of a feminist crusade. Variety was on the money when Rush wrote that the “original play had the ‘ruined’ girl rather abject about it all. Now she has been made an utterly defiant heroine.”

  Fox put Common Clay on its slate before the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America adopted the morality-policing Production Code in 1930 and four years before the code developed teeth. In January 1930, Fleming told the code’s Colonel Jason S. Joy that he was willing to develop two awful alternate story lines. One would have hinged on the young couple’s comedy-stunt marriage in a New York nightclub, the other on a Tijuana marriage that Hugh’s father refuses to recognize because there is no official record of it. Happily, Fleming pursued neither.

  The code administration tried to make filmmakers dilute their work at the script stage by specifying material that state and city censorship boards would cut from the finished movie, but the theatrical pedigree of Common Clay must have protected it. Despite voluminous suggested emendations and a smattering of changes in the dialogue, Fleming followed Furthman’s script almost to the letter. The most revolutionary act in the making of Common Clay was filming it in sequence, a practice as unusual then as it is now. It had worked for Fleming in The Way of All Flesh, and it worked for him in Common Clay. The movie gets talkier and more static as it goes along, but the forward motion of the speakeasy raid at the beginning propels a viewer into the cozy seductions and stagy courtroom histrionics. With Fleming, as with Wellman, the director’s urge to get on with things often made his material bristle. Common Clay half-bristles, half-creaks, and Bennett pulls you through.

  Throughout Fleming’s career, and even throughout individual productions, he zeroed in on some actors and left others alone; mostly, he knew what he was doing. Sixty years later, Lew Ayres said he felt Fleming wouldn’t have cast him as Hugh if he’d had his choice of leading men. “He had been handed me and it was my first assignment after All Quiet on the Western Front, and for some reason, he was a very different type than I . . . Very macho, I guess you’d say. Very positive.” Ayres was unable to characterize Fleming’s directing beyond “some of his ideas were good.” Yet the completed picture proves that Fleming knew exactly where to draw the line between Hugh’s upper-crust charm and ingratiation. Like many directors of his generation, he used manipulation to tame his ensembles. Hugh needs to be borderline effete for the melodrama to work and for Ellen to emerge victorious; it was good for Ayres to feel half the man that Vic was.

  The director had to recognize that the critical performance was going to be Bennett’s. And she was on target. She plays a paradigm of tarnished virtue without ever becoming a nagging pain. She uses her blond sparkle and her mischievous, longing eyes to create a woman who doesn’t know her own sexual strength. When she gives in to amorous weakness, her husky voice becomes a bruised whisper. The courtroom scenes hand showstopping numbers to Mercer as her “mother” and Tully Marshall as her grandstanding lawyer, but it’s Bennett who holds the show together and mints the newly refined image of a reformed, unflappable flapper.

  Selznick cited this movie to cap his indictment of Schulberg for misusing Fleming: Schulberg had doubted the director who turned Common Clay into one of the most successful talkies to date. “Constance Bennett had that audience at Loew’s State Theater so much with her in Common Clay yesterday that if she had walked into the theater she probably would have been mobbed,” wrote Louella Parsons. “I have never seen more tears shed in one afternoon over a heroine’s plight.” (Parsons, by now an established Hollywood character, reveled in superlatives.)

  Fleming’s next Fox film, Renegades (also 1930), is a French Foreign Legion adventure starring Warner Baxter as the head of four ne’er-do-wells who are considered morally unreliable even among the other legionnaires in North Africa. Myrna Loy plays the Mata Hari–like spy who sends Baxter, a former French army officer, into disgrace, and Bela Lugosi, in his juiciest pre-Dracula role, plays the Arab leader whom Baxter and then Loy think they can turn into a continent-dominating dictator. Peopled with nihilistic, greedy, and unstable antiheroes, Renegades flirts with being prophetic and terrific, but doesn’t make good on its promise.

  Dated colonial-adventure attitudes and conventions limit and taint it. Baxter takes Loy to the Arabs’ camp to punish her, only to see her become the chieftain’s mistress—which marks her, in Baxter’s and the movie’s terms, as the lowest sort of fallen woman. The antiheroic legionnaires’ redemption comes when they give in to their conventional guilty consciences: faced with their former barracks mates, they reflexively renew their loyalty to the West and turn their guns on their Arab collaborators. Reviewers drubbed the picture. They were probably responding not to the vigorous, clear action but to the confusions at the movie’s core.

  Nevertheless, Renegades has an arid visual grandeur—Fleming scouted the Mojave Desert locations in his own plane—and patches of scruffy vitality and humor. One shot of the four men crawling into a fort with their butts in the air boasts the same tense visual humor as the Cowardly Lion, Tin Man, Scarecrow, and Toto sneaking into the witch’s castle in The Wizard of Oz. The square-cut, angry Baxter and the slinky, teasing Loy sustain a crackling tension. Their dual erotic death foreshadows Jennifer Jones and Gregory Peck’s in Selznick and King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun. Loy called Renegades “a happy film”: Baxter had skill and charm, and Fleming was “a man’s man and master of his craft.” Before Renegades, Loy had been cast as “Burmese, Chinese, a South Seas islander, a couple of Mexicans, and . . . a Creole.” Even though she was playing a vamp again, Renegades pushed her into the mainstream.

  Some of the fun took place off camera. Loy remembered:

  I was supposed to operate a machine gun. One day on the set a man was explaining the apparatus to me, so simple it seemed a child could work it, and he told me to look through the sights and move the gun, to get the feel of it, I supposed. Victor Fleming, the director, happened to be standing near and almost directly in front of me. I sighted the gun and in moving it must have pressed the wrong thing, for it started shooting. There were blanks in it, of course, but the way both Mr. Fleming and I jumped one would have thought it really loaded with bullets. He jokingly intimated that there were probably several actors who would like to have been in my position with a loaded machine gun.

  Lugosi imbues the warlord with a self-regarding ripeness that deflates Baxter’s vengeful fury and Loy’s canny, manipulative sexuality. The screenplay (by Furthman) han
ds Lugosi a refrain—“What do you think?”—that becomes funnier with every repetition. It’s always used after the Arab muses on some outrageous atrocity, such as “I’m going to crucify every dog of a Christian if taken alive, or maybe I just burn them in slow fire. What do you think?” The script required Lugosi’s chieftain to read the riot act to his native troops for losing ground, and the director wanted it done in a language not readily understandable to Americans. Lugosi’s torrent of exotic verbiage echoed through the desert and delighted Fleming—until, at a preview in New York, a large segment of the audience started howling with laughter. It was the star’s Hungarian-born fan base. When Fleming collared the theater operator for an explanation, the manager, who was also Hungarian, explained that Lugosi had been spouting in Magyar. A loose translation would run, “The hell with you sons-of-bitches. You are the lowest shits I’ve ever had anything to do with. You’re a lousy bunch of beggars. You are lower than the asshole of a drunken frog on a rainy day.” Fleming dubbed the imprecations into Arabic.

  The year at Fox helped Fleming consolidate his mastery of the latest sound technology. If he saw his family infrequently, he was still a bountiful figure in their lives. After his niece Yvonne spent two years at UCLA, he paid for her to finish up at UC-Berkeley, then—thinking back to his Signal Corps days—he suggested, “Why don’t you go to Columbia? I think that you’d learn more there.” She didn’t want to go to a big city far away, and she did want to be part of Berkeley’s vaunted history department. “It was to be one year, but I had such a good time and was doing so well, I approached him again, and said I’d like to go back.” He said, “I was just going to buy a twin-engine plane, but I’ll buy a single-engine plane so you can go back to Berkeley.” She demurred; he insisted. “Well, I’ll do it,” he said, “and you just consider it my sacrifice.” Yvonne remembered, “That’s the way he talked. He was very generous, and very fond of Mother. I know she was his favorite.” In 1933, his cousin Clyde Hartman lost his painting business and became the Hartman family handyman, among his other odd jobs. Fleming reacted the way the rest of the family did, hiring Clyde for repair and construction work at his ranch.

  Clyde’s son Edward, born in 1924, got privileged glimpses into Fleming’s life at Meadowlark Ranch. “I would either wash the walls, sand, or do prep work. Vic would do ranch work or meet with Mr. Frost, the caretaker. Mrs. Frost would do the cooking for us. We had a lot of canned tamales. I think Vic bought them by the carload.” Fleming hadn’t lost his appetite for speed and his scorn for traffic cops. In his Pierce-Arrow, he’d drive to Encinitas down the Pacific Coast Highway—as Edward recalls, “A three-lane highway then, with a center lane for passing. When he’d hit it, he would barrel down the middle lane at something like sixty miles per hour before he turned onto a rural road that led to the ranch. Any time I was with him, the police never stopped him, but several times I remember he laughed because the police car was so far behind the officer didn’t see he had turned off. At times, it was scary. We never had much in the way of conversation, but he seemed to like the company.”

  He was tight about money outside family circles. Blocksom once went “riding with him in his car down Wilshire Boulevard, and there was a new building, an auto dealership that was going up on the left side of the road, this beautiful building, this gorgeous auto dealership, and I said, ‘Gee, that’s good-looking,’ something like that, and he said, ‘I own that,’ and I said, ‘Oh, how wonderful,’ and he looked at me and said, ‘I want to tell you something right now. Don’t ever make a million dollars. Because you’ll never know who your friends are.’ ” (When Fleming said “I own that,” he meant he leased the lot; from Dodges to Nashes to Buicks, it was always a site for auto dealers, and is now Beverly Hills Porsche/Audi.)

  No longer was he popping up in all the fan magazines as the favored beau of this or that starlet, but Bow had made him a focus for suspicions of romantic scandal. In 1932, for example, the Los Angeles Examiner investigated his supposed secret marriage in Mexicali to a nightclub dancer named Joan Blair. Blair’s mother said it was “all a joke, started by someone trying to kid the girl.” The newspaper checked it out nonetheless before shelving the item.

  Bow would later say of Vic, “Of all the men I’ve known, there was a man.” In 1929, though, she got engaged to the singer Harry Rich-man, who’d had a hit singing Irving Berlin’s “Puttin’ On the Ritz,” which eventually contained an encomium for another Bow lover, Gary Cooper (“Dressed up like a million-dollar trouper / Trying hard to look like Gary Cooper / Super duper”). The actress-turned-writer Patsy Ruth Miller, in her unpublished memoir, said, “I only met Clara Bow once, but that time was memorable. It was at the wedding reception, when I got married to Tay Garnett.” Garnett was about to direct the singer in a picture, and Miller “was curious to meet Harry Rich-man, whom I had seen in New York; he had a certain crude charm, twirling his top hat, prancing across the stage, and bellowing out the latest jazz.” It would have been impolite not to invite Bow, Richman’s betrothed. At the event, held in the backyard of her Beverly Hills home, Miller thought everyone could find a chair without place cards. The problem was that Bow plunked herself down in the bride’s seat of honor. Thinking quickly, Miller asked the studio trio she and Garnett had hired to stop playing Strauss waltzes. “They set to with gusto playing, if I remember correctly, Charleston, Charleston, da, da, de, da . . . It worked. Miss Bow began swaying in her seat, then, unable to resist the lure of the music, she rose and grabbed Harry Richman, and started doing the Charleston. Quick as a flash, I was in the chair at the head of my table.”

  Miller, who became close friends with Fleming when she married her next husband, John Lee Mahin, said Vic “had what might be called an old-fashioned sense of chivalry, of courtesy toward women. He had sort of a protective attitude toward women which some modern girls might object to, but which I found very appealing. I never heard Victor say anything disparaging about a woman, even about Clara Bow . . . If asked about her [he] only said, ‘She’s a nice kid. A bit flighty, perhaps. But a sweet kid.’ ”

  Bow sometimes blamed Cooper for her breakup with Fleming, just as Cooper blamed Fleming for his breakup with Bow. Another cowboy star, Rex Bell, would eventually stabilize her love life, but not even Bell could get her to settle down at this time. He was romancing the It Girl in California while newspapers were exploding with headlines about Bow’s 1930 trip to Dallas to see another long-term lover, a married Dallas urologist, Dr. William Earl Pearson. When the scandal was cresting in July, Fleming spotted Bell in the Fox commissary. “Hey, Rex!” he reportedly whooped. “How’s our girl?”

  Meanwhile, Fleming was spending more time with Arthur and Lu Rosson. Especially Lu. The middle child of a German saloon keeper who had two other daughters and kept taverns first in Brooklyn, then on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, she was born Louise Irana Nieder-meyer (on March 22, 1895), later changing her first name to Lucile. When her dad died at age thirty-five of a burst appendix (in 1906), the family’s fortunes plunged. “They were very poor,” Sally Fleming says she was told. “And my grandmother insisted that they live on the top floor of a tenement on Ninety-third Street, near the Jacob Ruppert Brewery. She would send those three girls, in complete misery and embarrassment, to collect horse droppings to use for growing vegetables in a garden she kept on the roof.” Lu’s mother, Emily Nieder-meyer, was a talented cook (a gift she passed down to Lu). She took in boarders and served them “fantastic dishes.” She made the three girls’ clothes and raised them “in a strict Germanic fashion. You know, if they touched the silverware before dinner, they were sent away from the table. They didn’t have a lot of money, but they maintained their dignity.”

  The clock tower of Ehret’s Hell Gate Brewery, topped with crossed beer barrels, loomed over the neighborhood. Lu’s family lived at 181 East Ninety-third Street; also struggling next door, in a three-room apartment at 179, were the Alsatian tailor Sam “Frenchie” Marx and his ambitious wife, Minnie, who nurse
d showbiz aspirations for their five sons, Leonard, Adolph, Julius, Milton, and Herbert. Thanks in part to their mother’s drive, the sons, renamed Chico, Harpo, Groucho, Gummo, and Zeppo after their move to Chicago in 1910, would succeed in vaudeville, Broadway shows, movies, radio, and television. Harpo described the block as “a small Jewish neighborhood squeezed in between the Irish to the north and the Germans to the south in Yorkville.” The side of it the Marxes (and the Niedermeyers) lived on was indeed, Harpo wrote, “the tenement side,” cruelly facing a string of “one-family brownstone townhouses.” (The block now borders the Carnegie Hill neighborhood made famous in numerous Woody Allen movies.)

  “I’d like to be able to say that my mother knew the Marx Brothers growing up,” says Sally. “But she never spoke about them, and I don’t think she did. Her mother, from the stories I heard, was very reclusive.” Just to the south of them, Yorkville-bred Bert Lahr (born Irving Lahrheim, the son of a Prussian upholsterer) was reading penny dreadfuls and dreaming of the theater. Just to the north, that future Irish-American icon, James Cagney, was teaching himself how to hoof and also how to speak Yiddish. But Lu’s mother kept to herself (she didn’t know Plattdeutsch, the German dialect spoken by the Marxes en famille, or Yiddish, which increased her isolation). And her family had no propensity for showbiz. Lu’s older sister, Georgiana, went to work for the phone company at age seventeen. Lu left school in the seventh grade and by age fifteen had a job in an advertising agency as an office assistant.

  Arthur Rosson, nine years older than Lu, was a movie-struck stock-exchange clerk. Within two years he was in movies at the Vita-graph studio in Brooklyn, working as a stuntman and sometime actor. Arthur and Lu got married on June 2, 1912, when Lu was three months pregnant. “Lu’s theory was, if you want to get married, get pregnant,” said Blocksom. In December, Lu gave birth to their daughter in Hoboken, New Jersey, and named her Helene, after Arthur’s mother. Then they started for California. By the time Fleming got to be their neighbor, in 1926, Arthur had won a reputation as a versatile director, able to shift from melodramas to frothy comedies; his brothers had solidly established themselves, too, Richard as an actor turned director and Hal as a stuntman turned cinematographer. Hal would shoot many movies for Vic, including Abie’s Irish Rose; Richard would get a co-director credit on Hawks’s Scarface and also contributed to Fleming’s Joan of Arc; Arthur got a co-director credit on Hawks’s Red River.