Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics)

by Sragow, Michael

  Fleming would soon become the MGM director. In 1971, for an oral history project at Columbia University, the producer Pandro S. Berman, who joined MGM in 1940, was asked whether the reputations of MGM’s big directors should really have gone to the producers. “I would say except in the case of one man,” Berman said. Who was that? asked Charles Higham. Vincente Minnelli? Not to this producer’s eyes. “Victor Fleming was such a powerful man and so strong that he wouldn’t do anything until it was his way,” said Berman.

  Fleming would thrive equally under his old pal Thalberg and his new admirer Louis B. Mayer. But Fleming’s first MGM picture, The Wet Parade (1932), was an intolerable Thalberger—a barely viewable film made out of an unreadable book. Upton Sinclair, who had earned his reputation as a muckraker by exposing tainted meat-processing plants in The Jungle, had personal reasons for writing this exhausting fictional screed against John Barleycorn: alcoholism took his father’s life.

  Sinclair had no illusions about his Prohibition propaganda. He admitted, “When I finish my very bad Prohibition novel, I hope to write a very good one about Russia.” Not only did anti-Prohibition voices like H. L. Mencken mock the novel; so did his sometimes sycophantic friend Fulton Oursler (The Greatest Story Ever Told ), who advised, “For God’s sake, throw it in the fire.”

  Nonetheless, Thalberg paid $20,000 for the rights and paid Fleming twice that much to direct it. Fleming gave the project his all, even when kidney stones once again began to plague him. They incapacitated him on and off throughout the 1930s, with severe pain that could make him short-tempered. The only long-term solution then was surgery, which he eventually had. But during The Wet Parade, he managed to keep functioning despite the attacks. The script clerk Morris Abrams said the director “came to work on a [tiltboard] with armrests like actresses used and was carried from set to set. He wouldn’t quit work.” The Wet Parade’s ingenue, Dorothy Jordan, remembered him as a “very sensitive, very dedicated man . . . basically, he was a big person. He never did petty things or little things.”

  Mary Craig Sinclair wrote that in a meeting with her and her husband, Upton, Thalberg “explained that he could not make a Prohibition picture, but gave his word that he would hold the balance fair and give both sides. He did this, and with excellent results.” The Sinclairs—but few others—were satisfied. In a tale of two families ruined by alcohol, Robert Young and Jordan play the juvenile leads, and Jimmy Durante plays Young’s partner when the hero becomes a Prohibition agent. Durante’s crack for a Photoplay columnist, “They’re grooming me for drama, so they can save John Barrymore’s salary,” is sprightlier than any line in the script. Myrna Loy played a small part, and all this Fleming fan had to say about the production was that the Cyrano-like Durante kept staring at her pert nose off camera and exclaiming, “Moyna, where’d you get that schnozzola?” Walter Huston does give a memorable performance as a dangerous blowhard, a Democratic ward politician (Young’s father); the only indelible scene is his brutal murder of his wife (Clara Blandick, later Auntie Em in The Wizard of Oz). The screenwriter, John Lee Mahin, said that the film tanked “because it didn’t take a stand.” Well, that’s one reason.

  From this unpromising beginning grew a director-studio alliance and a writing-directing partnership that extended to most of Fleming’s top sound films, including Red Dust, Bombshell, and Captains Courageous. Mahin, the son of a leading advertising executive ( John Lee Mahin Sr.), was born in Winnetka, Illinois, in 1902, and moved with his family to New York when he was sixteen. He attended Harvard, reviewing movies for the Boston American, but dropped out after two and a half years to work as a full-time newspaperman in New York.

  “I think it’s the best thing in the world,” he said, “because you’ve got to write something every day . . . Getting your stuff edited, you learn terseness. You realize how important editing is.” Mahin entered show business as an actor—“a thin, reedy juvenile,” he said. He had a bit part in Eugene O’Neill’s Great God Brown and appeared with Robert Montgomery and Hume Derr, soon to be Mahin’s first wife (of five), as a song-and-dance team in Bad Habits of 1926. When Montgomery’s solo success broke up the act, Mahin and Derr married and moved upstate to restore a country house in Rockland County; Mahin commuted to New York to write copy at an ad agency while doing magazine fiction on the side. He regularly met Ben Hecht, who lived in Nyack, on the West Forty-second Street Ferry, and one day in 1928 Hecht announced that he and his playwriting partner, Charles MacArthur (then nicknamed “Nutsy”), the hottest writers on Broadway after the success of The Front Page, were going to Hollywood to write a film for Sam Goldwyn (The Unholy Garden). Hecht asked Mahin if he’d like to come along: “work with us, give us something to sneer at.” Mahin went as Hecht’s “secretary.” As Mahin’s eldest son, Graham, remembers the story, the three writers went on the 20th Century Limited, his mother left from La Guardia Field on a DC-3, and Graham and his governess traveled on the Cunard Line via the Panama Canal. When Mahin assisted Hecht on Scarface two years later, it made the young man’s name. The Wet Parade was one of the first films he wrote for MGM. F. Scott Fitzgerald would come to regard Mahin as “one of the half dozen best picture writers in the business” (the only other screenwriter Fitzgerald singled out by name was Robert Riskin).

  Mahin was urbane. Fleming was elemental. Mahin could be a two-fisted drinker—he carried the spirit of the Jazz Age all the way through the Depression and World War II—but he couldn’t handle his booze. Vic could handle his and Mahin’s. Graham Mahin said, “My dad was a drunk. I mean, he was a Hollywood drunk, like most of the people were. Like Duke [John Wayne] was a drunk, like Ward Bond was a drunk, like all those guys, but, you know, it was fashionable to drink a lot . . . My father had this thing when he was drinking; he would just open the car door wherever he was and pee. It could be in the middle of an intersection. But Victor would say, ‘Now, John, we can’t do that.’ And Dad would get back inside.” Mahin himself said he and Fleming knew each other “the way women do when close . . . If I was in trouble, Vic and I would see each other that night.”

  Over the years, Mahin stood up consistently for Fleming’s character and talent, but to his son Graham, Mahin never downplayed the dark corners of his friend’s life. “Everywhere you went, really strange shit happened with Victor,” he once said. John recalled the two of them visiting a saloon and brothel in Mexico when Fleming noticed a new man behind the bar. Victor asked, “What happened to the other bartender that was here?” The new guy answered, “He was fooling around with a pistol and shot himself.” Fleming replied, “You’re kidding—how’d he do that?” The fellow picked up a pistol from behind the counter to demonstrate—and shot himself. As Mahin’s story went, he and Fleming sped out of there.

  Whenever Mahin was in a fix, Fleming could get him out of it. Mahin once nearly lost an eye in a car accident, when the rearview mirror broke in his face while he shielded his wife. Fleming wouldn’t let the local doctors take the eye out—“just put it together with cotton,” he growled—and got a specialist to fly down from Canada. (“It was always funny,” Graham recalled. “I mean, it worked, but when he got very tired or anything, it would wander off and go into his head.”)

  Professionally, the pair’s reliance was mutual. “Victor would talk about something, about dialogue,” remembers Graham, “and my father would say to him, ‘Verbs, Victor, verbs. You and the cameraman give the adjectives, just verbs is what we want.’ ” Howard Hawks, who took credit for introducing Mahin to Fleming, said, “He had a lot of talent, but he worked well only when he was with me or Victor Fleming or somebody like that—he had to be told what to write, and then what he wrote was really good.” Hawks’s condescension may have come from Mahin’s willingness to call Hawks an awful liar whenever he took credit for Fleming and Mahin’s work. Fitzgerald, again, wrote admiringly, “A Bob Sherwood picture, for instance, or a Johnny Mahin script, could be shot by an assistant director or a script girl.” Mahin saw himself as a yarn spinner, no
t a technician. He told novelist-screenwriters like Scott Fitzgerald and James M. Cain, “I never wrote ‘close shot,’ ‘long shot,’ ‘medium shot’ or anything . . . It’s all horseshit. You write your story; you’re a storyteller; write the dialogue where it should take place and if you have a good director he’ll start with a closeup and pull back, or whatever.”

  Mahin’s preference for a script full of verbs would help Fleming fulfill his appetite for on-screen action. Fred E. Lewis, a wealthy real-estate investor, world traveler, hunter, and amateur zoologist, would help Fleming satisfy his yen for real-life adventure. “Restlessness, I suppose, is an emotion which one shouldn’t try to explain,” Fleming said in Action. “You have it or you don’t, and it has varying effects on different people.”

  In 1930, Fleming and Charles Cotton, along with Lewis, bought a strip of bayfront property in a Southern California coastal town, Balboa, and built luxurious vacation homes. Lewis, unlike Fairbanks, was the real thing when it came to sailing, and he was much more than another Carl Akeley. It is likely that he was Fleming’s own Disko Troop, a living prototype for the seasoned skipper in Captains Courageous. Nine years older than the director and born into Gilded Age wealth in New York, Lewis was a charismatic naturalist in the era in which zoos still relied on wealthy patrons not only to build their facilities but also, at times, to supply the animals themselves. Collecting baby mammals typically meant killing one or more of their parents, meaning that Lewis also had the skills of a big-game hunter.

  Right after The Wet Parade, Fleming leaped at the chance to join him for an animal-collection voyage on his diesel-powered yacht, the Stranger, which Lewis had custom-fitted to transport live animals. Lewis had planned a five-month sail to collect walrus, reindeer, and perhaps some bears in Alaska. As they headed into Alaskan waters, Fleming, off the starboard bow, “made out a ship through the glasses and her name was the Nanuk. Aboard her was W. S. Van Dyke, my fellow director . . . He was, with his crew and technicians, freezingly engaged in filming the picture Eskimo.”

  The expedition ended up hauling away a three-hundred-pound baby walrus, three black bear cubs, three reindeer, and two Kodiak bear cubs for the San Diego Zoo. The Kodiak cubs were captured after Fleming shot their mother, who weighed nearly a ton. Fleming had the bear pelt made into a rug and put it in his bedroom during his second marriage. “I used to enjoy rolling around in it,” says his daughter Victoria.

  Fleming, needing to return to Hollywood, cut his adventure short after that, flying home from Juneau. He quickly committed to direct The White Sister, a remake of the high-toned Italy-set soap opera that had been a silent hit with Ronald Colman and Lillian Gish. But MGM had a drifting production called Red Dust that needed an immediate course adjustment. Wilson Collison’s 1927 play pivoted (in far different ways from the finished movie) on a sexual triangle—the brusque, competent manager of a rubber plantation in Cochin China (present-day Vietnam), a prostitute from Saigon, and the classy wife of the manager’s new specialist in surveying. The setting was exotic; the material, turgid. Early plans to have Fred Niblo direct Garbo in the picture (with several different projected co-stars) went nowhere. Perhaps because of the French colonial backdrop, the producer, Hunt Stromberg, next put Jacques Feyder in charge; the Belgium-born director had made an acclaimed French silent version of Zola’s Thérèse Raquin in addition to Garbo’s last silent film, The Kiss. Now Jean Harlow was to play the streetwalker, with one of the silent screen’s great lovers, John Gilbert, as the hero. In the talkie era, without stage experience or sound technicians who knew how to mike his light and charming voice, Gilbert had grown unsteady. Teaming him with Harlow was supposed to buck him up.

  Mahin wrote the script, by the skin of his teeth. “We were starting the picture with about ten pages of script and were going to spitball it as we went along.” (That sounds like Hollywood hyperbole, but the Production Code correspondence backs his story. Viewed against the uninhibited finished movie, it also illustrates how toothless the code could be, when handled properly, before 1934. Mahin’s Scarface didn’t fare as well: censorship fights kept the film from opening until a month after Red Dust did in the autumn of 1932.)

  The turning point for Red Dust came when Mahin saw an up-and-comer playing a lady-killer chauffeur in William Wellman’s Night Nurse and told Stromberg, “There’s this guy, my God, he’s got the eyes of a woman and the build of a bull. He is really going to be something.” Stromberg looked at Mahin as if he thought the writer “was queer or something,” but finally said, “By God, you’re right.” Clark Gable made thirteen movies in the single year before Red Dust and was well-known on the Warner Bros. and MGM lots (if not to Mahin or Stromberg!) for his smoking physical presence. He hadn’t carried a film by himself, but he’d already partnered a handful of the era’s sirens, including Garbo (Susan Lenox, Her Fall and Rise), Barbara Stanwyck (Night Nurse), Norma Shearer (A Free Soul ), and, most often, Joan Crawford (Dance, Fools, Dance; Laughing Sinners; Possessed ).

  It was natural to link him up with Harlow, the sound film’s update of Clara Bow. Harlow was born Harlean Harlow Carpenter in Kansas City, and Gable in Ohio. Each had youthful experiences of Hollywood—Harlow as a precocious eighth grader at the Hollywood School for Girls, Gable as a West Coast theater actor who made Hollywood his base at the age of twenty-two. Harlow’s mother was so devoted to her daughter’s stardom that she’d ice Jean’s breasts before each shot to perk them up. Gable had a series of lovers and wives who helped teach him art and “class” and even, in the case of Pauline Frederick, temporarily fixed his lousy teeth. Indeed, in 1931, his first wife, Josephine Dillon, the Portland acting coach who felt she’d given him discipline, confidence, and naturalness as an actor, threatened to sell her story of how she made Gable who he was unless Louis B. Mayer paid her to keep quiet. She wound up with $200 a month—out of Gable’s salary! In a thank-you note to Mayer, she offered her teaching skills to MGM and said, “I wish I could do something about John Gilbert’s voice for you. I know it can be done.” It’s poignant to think of Gable’s ex-wife wanting to aid Gilbert just when Gable was taking his place. (In 1932, Gable stopped the payments.)

  Gable and Harlow may have been homegrown, but they were also wised-up. They projected a democratic and down-to-earth sexuality and smarts that made them ideal fantasy figures for Depression audiences. By the time Stromberg brought them together for Red Dust, they were crack camera actors. Yet they didn’t know their own strengths; they were still insecure.

  With Gable in, Feyder was out. Mahin described Feyder as “a sweet, delicate Frenchman who didn’t know too much.” The screenwriter called him “an old-timer”; actually, Feyder had some glory years ahead of him. In 1935 he made Carnival in Flanders in France, in 1937, Knight Without Armor in Britain. But Stromberg needed a robust presence on the set and initially hired Rowland Brown, an attention-getting, volatile director who had recently made Quick Millions (1931) and Hell’s Highway (1932). The Los Angeles Times noted that Brown was “famous for his departures from the set”; in the case of Red Dust he departed before shooting began. Gable hadn’t yet worked with Fleming, but the star had done a 1931 film called The Easiest Way for Vic’s old friend Jack Conway.

  The director-star rapport must have been immediate. Fleming shared more with Gable than with Cooper. Gable had grown up on an Ohio farm. He’d worked part-time as a garage mechanic and labored as a rigger and tool dresser and cleanup man at Oklahoma oil wells and refineries. Like Fleming’s stepfather (but with less success), his father had dreamed of founding his own oil empire. Fleming and Gable knew how much toil went into failed dreams but hadn’t let that knowledge blunt their ambitions or dull their appetites.

  According to studio conference notes, Fleming came onto the production realizing that Red Dust hadn’t found its “driving dramatic force.” With Howard Hawks as an unofficial adviser, he tore apart the original piece. A play that in the studio précis reads like a big mess became one of Hollywood’s lasting comic-r
omantic melodramas about sex, love, honesty, and duty. “Just thinking out loud, suppose we change the order of the entire story,” Fleming said. “Open up as Hawks felt with a stunning dramatization of a rubber plantation in the throes of Hell. Let’s forget about the play and its feeble motivations and see what characters we can evolve whose own emotions will give us the situations. We open on the plantation as the red dust is furiously blowing. The rebellious and faithless coolies are deserting at all turns and we characterize Dennis [the hero] as almost giving up the fight.”

  Americanizing the characters and also vitalizing them, Fleming and Mahin arrived at a startling blend of high and low romance and comedy. They gave the men and women caught in this hellish part of Cochin China more facets and harder edges—any angels here are fallen, any devils have real sting. That push toward complexity pays off in adult entertainment value. Dennis Carson (Gable), born into the rubber trade, has tired of living with one sloppy, drunken co-worker, Guidon (Donald Crisp), a cheerful, simple Chinese cook, Hoy (Willie Fung), and one friend he trusts, observant, mellow Mac (Tully Marshall).

  Dennis’s exhaustion opens him up emotionally instead of burning him out. Guidon returns from a trip to Saigon with a prostitute named Vantine (Harlow). Dennis tells Mac that he’s sick of whores being the only women available to him, but Vantine is frank and funny and has standards: she won’t tumble for a foul drunk like Guidon. She wins Dennis over, gets him into bed. It’s her rotten luck that the next boat brings in gung-ho but green-at-the-gills Gary Willis (Gene Raymond) and his upper-crust-lovely, Philadelphia-born wife, Barbara (Mary Astor).