Lu couldn’t have guessed that she was marrying into a moviemaking dynasty. The patriarch, Arthur Rosson Sr., was a British jockey turned coachman who married a Frenchwoman (Helene’s maiden name was Rochefort). He had worked for the banking titan J. Pierpont Morgan, and he curbed any family rowdiness with the threat of his riding crop. Maybe it was the zest and esprit of the family that made Arthur and his two brothers and three sisters quit jobs as clerks or office boys or stenographers and work in or around movies, first at Vitagraph in Brooklyn and then in California. Gladys, Art’s middle sister, was the only one who became an executive. The rest started out as stuntmen and/or actors; the men became directors, the other Rosson siblings, Ethel and Helene, homemakers after brief stints as silent-film actresses. But Gladys signed up as DeMille’s secretary in 1914, rose to the position of secretary-treasurer of his production company, and stayed with him until she died in 1953. She was also DeMille’s beloved “head mistress” of a three-woman platoon filled out by the screenwriter Jeanie Macpherson and the actress Julia Faye.
Fleming had known Arthur and Lu since before World War I. Fleming’s early moviemaking pals Allan Dwan and Wallace Reid directed and wrote a 1913 film that gave Arthur his first acting job in California and also featured Marshall Neilan in a bit part. Rosson started out as a Western director and retained a gritty reputation for knowing how to handle everything from canyon rock slides to cantankerous horses. Around the time Fleming moved to Beverly Hills, Rosson gave him a pistol that was supposed to have belonged to Pancho Villa. All the Rosson men were known as hale, inventive filmmakers.
If there was one big difference between Fleming and the Rossons, it was how they turned filmmaking into a family affair. Fleming rarely tried to involve any family members in the movie business. The closest he came, in the late 1930s, was getting Yvonne Blocksom a research job at MGM, where her Berkeley history degree came in handy. (Her specialty was “old English and European stuff.”) Even so, she said, “I was on many of the sets, but I never tried to get on any of Uncle Vic’s sets when he was working. I felt it would be an imposition. I tried to keep out of his personal life, and I was grateful for his making the contact at the studio so I could get my job there.” It was merely an innocent, affectionate stunt when Arthur and Lu’s seven-and-a-half-month-old daughter, Helene, became the “star” of a 1913 Allan Dwan half reeler, Our Little Fairy. Dwan’s camera followed her as she woke from a nap, took her bath, breakfasted, shredded flowers in the garden, got into a jam jar and a mud puddle, and imitated the grown nude’s pose in September Morn. It’s doubtful Fleming would have approved of the intrusion.
Lu, however, was a Rosson only by marriage. She was not a theatrical type—she was not even movie-star pretty. She was a good housekeeper and hostess and, in a way, sexy. “She was famous for her tennis legs,” says her daughter Victoria. Both daughters say the first bond between Vic and Lu was culinary. “He used to go to their house because my mother was a fabulous cook,” says Sally. Fleming and the Rossons sailed and dined and danced in the same social circles. Mary Astor wrote that she drove to Santa Barbara after work, one day in 1927, “to spend Saturday evening and Sunday with Vic Fleming and Art and Lou [sic] Rosson and Howard Hawks and Athole Shearer, and went out in Howard’s Chris-Craft.” Fleming’s friendship with Lu grew more intimate over time, but it didn’t heat up for a couple of years.
Meanwhile, Fleming reestablished his friendship with Douglas Fairbanks, who was then at a crossroads of his own. He’d made an exciting, moving swan song to swashbuckling—and to silent moviemaking—in his Three Musketeers sequel, The Iron Mask (1929). After that, his first two sound pictures—a production of The Taming of the Shrew co-starring Pickford (also 1929) and a big-business musical comedy, Reaching for the Moon (1931), with all but one of Irving Berlin’s songs cut out—misfired and let down Fairbanks and what was left of his public. The making of Shrew had magnified his temperamental differences with Pickford—his carefree manner and practical jokes enraged rather than reassured her. He was getting antsy at his and Mary’s mansion, Pickfair, and he needed a recharge or an escape.
Fleming, more of a globe-trotter by now, may have been the one to propose a round-the-world jaunt. And it was Fleming who probably devised an itinerary that included big-game hunting. The two men bought an elephant gun and tested it at Meadowlark Ranch. Even braced against a eucalyptus log, Fairbanks, the smaller man, couldn’t handle the gun’s recoil. It lifted him off the ground and sent the log flying several feet in back of them, to Fairbanks’s chagrin and Fleming’s covert amusement. (Edward Hartman, who witnessed this with Rodger Swearingen, merrily adds, “Rodger and I ran behind the barn after that, because in those days that’s what little kids did when you heard a grown-up cursing!”)
Doug and Fleming then invited the cameraman Henry Sharp and Chuck Lewis, Doug’s right-hand man, to join them in turning their trip into a deliberately minor movie, Around the World in Eighty Minutes. It was good timing for Fleming. Negotiations for a new directing slot at Columbia had run aground, along with a proposed remake of Fairbanks’s silent Western Arizona. The notoriously unreliable Howard Hawks said Fleming got $100,000 for signing with Columbia’s studio chief, Harry Cohn, because he told Cohn he could bring in stars. Fleming then recommended that Cohn hire Hawks—and as usual in a Hawks story, no good Fleming deed goes unpunished. In Hawks’s version of reality, Cohn tells him, “I want you to make pictures for me. You make good ones, and you can get the stars. And I think the director’s the important thing.” Hawks replies, “OK, Fleming stuck you, but I’m just going to ask you for just what I got on the last picture because I like the way you think.”
Did Hawks turn Cohn against Fleming with that statement? Probably not—Hawks might have made up the whole thing, except for Fleming recommending him. When Columbia announced Fleming for Arizona, it was slated to start in three weeks with Jack Holt in the lead; maybe Cohn needed a director like Fleming, known for swiftness and proficiency, but Fleming lost interest.
With Arizona on the rocks, Around the World in Eighty Minutes was a good excuse for Vic to travel and to see if he could make an early sound film with the same seat-of-the-pants ease as an early silent. It would be a proto-mockumentary, with Fairbanks and Fleming playing themselves. Fairbanks’s roughly $118,000 budget didn’t earmark any payment to Fleming as director or himself as producer-star. Of course, the existence of any budget at all showed that it was never intended simply to be a home movie. Fairbanks’s sidekick Chuck Lewis said that Fleming tried to map out a scenario and Fairbanks always found reasons to balk at his efforts. Fairbanks knew that circling the globe in modern conveyances wouldn’t yield the adventures that greeted the heroes of Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days. He soon learned that his own presence engendered most of the trip’s excitement. A policeman who chased them down after a riot in a Chinese opium den was simply a fan of Doug’s hoping to snag an autograph. The king of Siam assigned Vic and Doug a courtesan each; Vic advised Doug that the best way to save face was to accept the gift. “Just give her your autograph,” he added, as Doug turned in.
None of this made it into the movie. But it probably helped push Fleming and the commentary writer, Robert E. Sherwood, into a frolicsome series of riffs on Fairbanks’s own stardom and his action-oriented filmmaking. (Sherwood was an Algonquin wit and film critic as well as a movie writer since 1926 and a playwright since 1927’s Road to Rome. He was also a longtime supporter of Fairbanks.) It’s fitting that Fairbanks walks into the film by stepping out of a title-credit picture of himself. Around the World in Eighty Minutes deconstructs itself as it goes along, mixing star-in-the-street stuff with bald sleight of hand. Fairbanks introduces his audience to his small crew and to the real movie magic of lightweight sound and photo equipment, but he also gleefully exploits the magical fakery of the movies. He asks for a pointer, and a golf club enters his hand. He aims the club at a spot on a slide-projected map (a map heavily oriented toward Asia) and winds up on
a ship, where he demonstrates how to keep fit in close quarters.
Movie stuff and real life intersect everywhere in this film. The costar of Vic’s Lord Jim and Adventure, the Olympic athlete Duke Kahanamoku, greets them in Hawaii and takes them surfing. The actors Sessue Hayakawa and Sojin (the Mongol prince from Fairbanks’s Thief of Bagdad) meet them in Japan. Sherwood’s script becomes a running parody of the era’s travel and real-adventure films. “Every travelogue has got to mention these things. Here they are: the contrast between the old and new Japan: rickshaws—elevated trains.” And that’s what we see. Unfortunately, there’s nothing inherently parodic about most of the footage, either in style or in content. (The reason the pasted-on commentary clicks in a goof like Woody Allen’s 1966 What’s Up, Tiger Lily? is that it brings out the essential silliness of the material.) Fairbanks and Fleming set themselves up on-screen as dueling pals, with Fleming as “the menace,” goading golf-crazy Doug to get to the job at hand—making a movie. But the movie’s tone flutters from earnest to comic to ingratiating. Bessie Love recalled, “When Doug went abroad he got red carpet treatment. Vic would go look at the country. He was very upset by India. They would just prop up corpses in the street by the walls—for identification.”
Fleming’s most relaxed moment comes when he corners Doug in a sunken Japanese bath. Robed from calf to shoulder, Fleming cuts almost as saturnine a figure as Richard Nixon walking in dress shoes on a beach. But there’s a twinkle underneath his long-suffering pose. Doug prods him to peek at the early-morning mores and manners of their hostesses. Fleming wittily labels it “window shopping.” Next we see a dapper Fleming advancing to a young woman’s doorway in the manner of “a second-story man.” He has an endearing, formal self-consciousness—there’s a touch of self-burlesque to his voyeurism, possibly from being uncomfortable in front of the camera. Fleming doesn’t photograph as the dynamo he was in real life, but he and Doug share an understated, manly rapport: the star’s joviality seems less strident when he shares the frame with his old pal Fleming.
The movie captures a time when an American star could say “the world is essentially funny”—not life, but the world—and Americans, at least, could laugh along with him. The movie is innocent about the world, but savvy about the increasingly central role of movies (and the legerdemain of moviemaking). The picture gets more antic as it nears the finish line. In the most thrilling sequence, in India, Doug and Vic mount elephants and join a leopard hunt. Doug kills one, and Vic wounds another that must be tracked down and destroyed in a nearby village. So far, so real. But when Fairbanks goes on the attack against a tiger who has dragged human prey from another village into the jungle, the sequence becomes a parody of Hollywood films that try to intercut stars on a soundstage with wild animals shot by second units on location. The fur flies behind bushes as it does when the Cowardly Lion beats up on the Winkies in The Wizard of Oz. The payoff comes when the action fades to Doug grappling half-asleep with a tiger-skin rug. He tells Vic, “I had the most terrible nightmare—I dreamt I was in Trader Horn!”
While Fairbanks and company visit Siam, they watch a performance of a classical Siamese dance troupe; Fairbanks says that the rhythm beneath the exotic moves and music is the same as the fox-trot, then tries to demonstrate that notion by twirling a Siamese gal around a ballroom. Out of nowhere, he announces, “Now, here’s Hollywood’s most famous star dancing to Siamese music. C’mon, Mickey!” The film turns into a cartoon, and Mickey Mouse prances out from a doorway on the right side of the screen. Against a temple backdrop, the mouse pulls off a mix of traditional Oriental choreography and American folk dancing. His hands try to pull off elegant courtly gestures, but his feet can’t help tapping or clogging. He slants his eyes for a second or two, in a mixture of frustration and homage—no slur intended, all in good fun—then does a series of keep-on-truckin’ clogs that would make R. Crumb proud.
It’s a genuine novelty: the rarest Mickey Mouse cartoon. How it ended up in Around the World in Eighty Minutes remains anybody’s guess. United Artists (of course) released the movie, and UA had agreed to distribute Disney’s cartoons after the animator had fulfilled his still-running contract with Columbia. But no Disney cartoon received an official UA release until the summer of 1932; Around the World opened in December 1931. And Disney kept no record of any contract or correspondence between him and Fairbanks. Disney must have known that Fairbanks and Fleming were big fans of his. By then Doug had told the press that only Mickey Mouse fully exploited the capacity of the sound film: “These cartoons get their tremendous appeal from the perfect rhythm, in comedy tempo, of the little characters and of the accompanying sound. It is not merely synchronization; it is more than that; it is a rhythmic, swinging, lilting thing, with what musicians call the proper accent-structure.” So Disney might have simply done Doug a favor and cooked up that Mickey cameo for a renowned, vocal supporter.
Around the World in Eighty Minutes was just a lark for Fleming—as a movie, its prankishness is its saving grace. More important, it once again solidified his friendship with Fairbanks. The star was the one who reached out to him. Not only was Fairbanks at loose ends professionally, but stress lines were showing in his marriage. In the movie, Doug starts to make time with a pretty Japanese girl, and Vic warns, “I’ll tell Mary on you, young fella,” an in-joke twice over, because Fleming was six years younger. When the Asian voyage ended, Fairbanks sailed for New York with Lewis, but Fleming, this time with some color film, headed to Africa for a Kenyan safari. In Action, he recalled that he once “let a wounded rhino get within twenty feet before I fired. Her own momentum carried her forward and she went down at my feet. She was actually protecting her calf and her courage was magnificent. I hated to pull the trigger.”
According to Anthony Quinn, when Fleming returned, he had a fling with Katherine DeMille, Cecil B.’s adopted daughter. It went unreported until Quinn wrote his as-told-to autobiography, One Man Tango, in 1995. Quinn had met Katherine at Paramount in 1936 and married her the following year; when he discovered that at age twenty-six she was not a virgin, he wouldn’t be satisfied with her as his bride until she made a clean sweep of a confession. In a fit of macho hysteria, Quinn feverishly thought:
Shit, she had been with Clark Gable? How could I compete with someone like Gable? Or the director Victor Fleming, another of my predecessors? In my lunatic paranoia, I imagined Gable and Fleming on the set of Gone With the Wind, comparing notes on Katherine, and laughing at me. Oh, how I hated that movie! I would not see it for more than forty years, until I had beaten back the ghosts, but even then it was a torture . . . When she told me Fleming had taken her to a ski lodge in Aspen, and asked that she lie around naked with him when they were not on the slopes, I wanted to kill the bastard.
Lu Fleming’s great-granddaughter Kate Harper, a relation to the DeMilles through her mother’s marriage, knew Katherine well in her later years and thought her “a gracious and dignified woman” who “deserved far better than Quinn’s Mexican machismo.” Quinn is the sole source for the fling with Katherine, but Fleming was operating at high energy in every way throughout the early 1930s. He hatched a new travel plan and travelogue with Fairbanks when the friends reunited at the Hotel Del Mar in San Diego. The round-the-world trip had inspired Fleming to propose a bolder, less jokey documentary, centering on a pontoon plane tour of South America, down the Amazon. As if talking about our era’s reality-TV craze, Fairbanks touted “natural adventure” and boosted the notion that “the new fiction is fact.” But the trip and the movie never happened—it was probably too risky for Fairbanks—and its demise cooled the friendship. Edward Hartman says his father grumbled that Fairbanks lacked Fleming’s relish for hard labor: when the friends went to work on Fleming’s boat in Newport, “Vic got down on the deck and we sanded and sanded, but Fairbanks would disappear someplace.”
Shortly after he returned, Fleming took what would be the most momentous step in his career by signing his first contract with MGM. At th
e same time, he slaked his thirst for adventure by buying the aircraft that had been chosen for the Amazon adventure. The black and orange Lockheed Sirius, a muscular low-wing monoplane, was the same model that Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh had used to map international plane routes. Lockheed had built this particular plane for the Baltimorean Charles Hutchinson—he hoped to break a New York–to–Paris speed record, but instead crashed the plane on its first flight (he pleaded lack of ease with its controls). Fleming poured money into retooling it for shorter distances. With a forty-two-foot wingspan, it was bigger and more difficult to operate than Fleming’s previous aircraft. He flew it with Douglas Shearer (MGM’s sound chief and Norma’s brother) as his co-pilot, but the plane was beset with mechanical problems, including a cracked oil tank that forced a landing in Reno. Within two years, he sold it back to Lockheed. His experience with this monoplane would plant the seeds for one of his critical and commercial triumphs, Test Pilot, at his new studio.
13
Guiding Gable in Red Dust
On October 2, 1931, Fleming received the most important document of his professional life. MGM delivered a letter of agreement for him to direct “one photoplay” within a seventeen-week period for a salary of $40,000. (Several days later, Variety announced that MGM had showered him with fifteen scripts.) For most of the 1930s, similar notes would fly back and forth between Vic’s lawyers and the studio, because he resisted any long-term contract.
Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) Page 22