Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics)

by Sragow, Michael

  Fleming sees Lola as a creature made for and by the movies. For her, staying away from movies is suicide. Indeed, the innate movie-ness of Lola makes Space Hanlon (Lee Tracy) her only suitable life partner: he’s the studio’s director of publicity.

  “He has a crush on Lola,” Fleming said in his script notes. “It has taken a strange form, this love of his. If he openly declares it, he will be just another sucker falling for her. If he yields to her suggestion that they cut out fighting and get together, he will be letting her make a sucker out of him. He wants to and he does dominate her. He is jealous of her men, treats her cruelly, then does something nice to make up for it. Every day they row with each other, but always come back for more.”

  Rather than Space, the man’s man in the picture is Vic’s alter ego, Brogan (Pat O’Brien), who directs Lola in the real Harlow’s role in Red Dust—one of the many ways this movie turns in-jokes inside out. Brogan, like Fleming, is the master of his set and, on his nights off, a romancer who won’t push his advantage. But even he is susceptible to Space’s pinpoint flattery. When Brogan lambastes the Marquis for distracting Lola, Hanlon calms him: “Is this the old smooth-tongued, easygoing Brogan? The one genius in Hollywood that hasn’t got any temperament? The guy that used to keep his stage as quiet as a church and put as much work through in a day as those other piano movers put through in a week?” (Later, trying to puncture the director’s allure, Hanlon splutters that Brogan is “a bluebeard.”)

  By filming this spot-on characterization of his own pre–Gone With the Wind reputation, Fleming was proving that he was more than the studio’s top piano mover. As George Sidney said, he was a big man, with the ability to see where the power lay in Hollywood and the capacity to savor the fun embedded in its tinselly cynicism. In notes penned throughout April 1933, Bombshell’s producer, Red Dust’s Stromberg (billed as the associate producer, under “A Victor Fleming Production”), envisioned the movie as an entertainment exposé comparable to The Front Page, which he pegged as “the first play that presented the cyclonic inside of a newspaper office.” Lola would be “a composite of any and all stars who have reached for the moon and arrived there,” uninhibited and willing to show off her wares as lustily as Harlow did in Red Dust.

  Stromberg wanted the movie’s milieu to reflect his vision of “Hollywood as a crazy house, a burning Rome,” and “a very miserable place . . . because the heart of Hollywood is miserable.” He saw Space Hanlon as Howard Hughes, “a tall, lanky, good-looking guy.” He emphasized that the movie must be “real,” not “a satire or a burlesque, nor . . . [a] wallow in the mud.” Based on Stromberg’s notes, Jules Furthman took the first shot at the script.

  Fleming, with The White Sister behind him, had embarked on another zoological trip with Fred Lewis, this time bagging snakes in Cedros, Cape San Lucas, and the Guayanas, including a boa constrictor that he adopted as a pet and dubbed Effie. (It became known for occasionally wrapping itself around the legs of unsuspecting dinner guests.) When Fleming got around to compiling his own notes on Bombshell, after his return on July 3, he made only one passing reference to Furthman’s pages: describing Lola’s sadness over lost possibilities, he says, parenthetically, “Play the episode as Furthman has written.” It would be their last collaboration.

  Fleming knew Bombshell had to be slaphappy. By the time he put it through Mahin’s typewriter, it had become equal parts satire, burlesque, and wallow in the mud. Yet it remained real. And Space Hanlon became a forward-tilting fast talker with his eyes always popped toward the main chance. He, not Jim Brogan, proves to be Lola’s odd true love and the movie’s conquering antihero—the über-director of the studio universe. Fleming and Mahin achieve Stromberg’s end by their own brash comic means. Their creation is to the world of the soundstage and the publicity office what The Front Page is to newspapers: a booby-trapped bouquet. With refreshing modernity, it blends raw back-lot atmosphere and location work (in Tucson and at various Los Angeles hotels, including the Ambassador, the Huntington, and the Beverly Hills) with privileged views of the actual MGM assembly line. Fleming grasps the diverse elements of the Dream Factory and spins them like plates on sticks in a vaudeville twirling act.

  The citizens of the fictional Monarch Studios in Bombshell live in a world of make-believe even outside the studio gates. From the start, when a butler named Winters (Leonard Carey) calmly presents her with sauerkraut juice instead of orange juice for her breakfast, no one levels with Lola. Nearly everyone around her is either a chiseler or a glad-hander, because everyone depends on her for employment or needs to keep peace between her and the front-office suits. She can count on her blowsy maid, Loretta (the ultra-relaxed Louise Beavers), who wears an evening wrap for a negligee: she explains to Lola, “The negligee you give me got all tore night befo’ last.” “Your day off is sure brutal on your lingerie,” Lola replies, in a line the Production Code couldn’t squelch—and Loretta responds with a knowing smirk.

  What does Lola want? Oh, love and respect all right. How she aims to get them changes from scene to scene. As Space tells Monarch’s boss, Gillette, “She’s great copy because she doesn’t know what she wants and wants something different every day, and that’s a story—!” At the start she’s convinced that her supposedly aristocratic lover, the Marquis, is her salvation. Brogan calls the boyfriend “a no-good immigrant.” Space quips, “Some guy with an Ellis Island accent happens to have a dress suit with a hair-ribbon across his chest, (and) you dames get a pedigree and start reaching for the tiara!”Helater tells Lola, with broad irony, that the Marquis is “a cultured, charming gentleman. We need men like him in this country. We’re still pioneers and backwoodsmen.”

  There’s an air of self-satire to the period xenophobia. When Space refers to the press pack as “You Comanches,” it’s more guttural wit than racism. That also goes for the sequence in which Space arranges for immigration officers to snatch the Marquis from Lola’s arms at the Cocoanut Grove—and for reporters to be present when he’s zipped off to jail. “Modern journalism’s speeded up like everything else, sugar,” Space explains, when a newsie sells Lola a paper, minutes later, with a story about the Marquis already in it. Space is half-right and prophetic. But Lola sees through him—and through the Marquis, too. She joins the Brogan-Hanlon camp and calls the Marquis a “big patent-leather peanut vendor.”

  What’s spiritually attractive about Lola is her generosity. If she has any real affection for a man, she cannot hold a grudge. Shortly after she demands that Gillette discharge Space, he comes to her literally hat in hand and tells her he’s been planning a new image for her as a proper lady. She gets so far into this different “part” that she takes to heart a sob-sister interviewer, Mrs. Titcomb (Grace Hayle), who asks her, “In the grueling midst of your career—doesn’t there ever come a longing for the right of all womanhood?” In another passage the Production Code protested to no avail, Mrs. Titcomb muses, “The call of motherhood is so strong in some women. And fatherhood in men, too. I sometimes think that’s what killed Mr. Titcomb.”

  Space orchestrates a showdown at her house between the Marquis and Lola, with Brogan joining in, to amuse the press and to shock two ladies from the home committee of the orphanage who are interviewing Lola about adoption. As a bonus, Pops, Junior, and Junior’s latest louche girlfriend (Isabel Jewell) also make the scene. The usually acute James Harvey, in his Romantic Comedy in Hollywood, lodges the caveat that “there is something finally unpleasant in the film’s making such a joke out of the idea of Harlow having a baby.” He sees it as the “cruelest” example of the movie winning laughs at its star’s expense and credits Harlow for the “enthusiasm, skill and intelligence” that transcend the meanness of the material.

  The movie’s identification of Harlow with Lola, though, is slippery and playful. True, it shows Lola with the boxer Primo Carnera in the opening montage; Harlow had been slated to appear for MGM in The Prizefighter and the Lady, in which Carnera did a bit. Of course, Lola also run
s through Harlow’s scenes from Red Dust. But the gist of the comedy is that the real Lola differs humorously from the movie Lola—just as the real Harlow differed, tragicomically, from MGM’s bombshell. And the thrust of the film’s satire is that Lola is, in many ways, like her audience. She may know all the ugly machinations of the Dream Factory. But she gets her thoughts of proper behavior from the nicer movies being made all around her—and from the same popular press that either paints her as an irrepressible party girl or sends Mrs. Tit-comb to question, then counsel her on womanhood.

  Fleming and Mahin peppered the first hour with gags that would resonate with starry-eyed fans and influential Hollywoodians. Some of the jokes do double duty. The mooching father, brother, and secretary (Una Merkel) who make free with Lola’s booze and money obviously derive from Bow’s father, cousin, and hairdresser-turned-personal manager, Daisy DeVoe. But Lola’s casually piratical clan also echoes the gaudy materialism and greed of Harlow’s mother, Jean, and her second husband, Bello. “I felt sorry for the Baby,” said Abrams. “All she did was work while her family took her money, just like the girl in the movie. She would come in at 6:00 a.m. each morning for makeup and hair and wardrobe and rehearsal, then shoot ’til dinner or later—and in they’d stroll in the middle of the day, dressed to the nines and riding high. They were parasites.”

  When Space asks Lola to go to the Cocoanut Grove “for Collegiate Night,” Fleming must have been thinking of his last date with Bow at the Montmartre Café. Lola’s Marquis, Hugo, reflects the propensity of 1920s and 1930s sirens (Mae Murray, Gloria Swanson, Constance Bennett) to wed titled Europeans, sometimes of questionable stock. “He’s got royal blood in his veins,” says Lola. “I don’t care if he’s got a royal flush in his kidneys, tell him to scram!” replies Brogan, with a cheerful brutality that Fleming might have underplayed had he not already been having constant attacks of kidney stones. And Fleming’s script notes state that “the Nut,” the bowler-hatted madman who keeps popping up like a movable jack-in-the-box and declaring himself Lola’s husband, was based on an actual loony who did the same to Bebe Daniels.

  When Lola finally wearies of the rat race—or of being around the rats who run it—she hightails it to Desert Springs (think Palm Springs), hoping to decompress in a plush resort. Space tracks her there. But the publicist’s irritating presence helps make her vulnerable to a vision of class from a bygone era: “Gifford Middleton of Boston.” Sporting a polo player’s figure and with a rich woodwind timbre to his voice, Gifford—the high point of Franchot Tone’s screen career—saves her from the Nut (who has followed her onto one of the resort’s bridle paths) and smothers her in blandishments. She’s doomed when he murmurs, “Your hair is like a field of silver daisies.” With a flourish worthy of Prince Charles, he adds, “I’d like to run barefoot through your hair.” (At least Tone knew how good these scripted lines were. In later years he took credit for ad-libbing them.) Abetted by C. Aubrey Smith and Mary Forbes as his parents, he acts a bassoon-toned romantic buffoon to upper-crust perfection.

  From the days of When the Clouds Roll By and The Mollycoddle, Fleming knew the ingredients of a satisfying comic wrap-up, and Bombshell has a doozy. The Middletons keep Gifford from marrying Lola, partly because of her vulgar movie-star popularity and partly because, after they meet Pops and Junior, they’re wary of her bloodlines. Lola returns happily to Hollywood. She and Space shed their emotional armor and declare their love. But she soon discovers that the Middletons were actors hired by Space to humiliate her and propel her back to the studios. And no sooner does Space assuage her fury with a kiss than she learns that the Nut is really an actor hired by him, too. The movie ends as it begins, in merry chaos. It’s a masterpiece of comic engineering.

  If Fleming were not otherwise engaged with Lu Rosson, he and Harlow might have made a match. Fleming’s friend Hawks had a one-night stand with her, then abandoned her. But Hawks was a sucker for a different, boyish athletic type (Mahin told Scott Eyman that Hawks was “disconcerted by the moisture she secreted during sex”), and for him Harlow was nothing more than a conquest. Vic didn’t have a type. He was what Czech novelist Milan Kundera called an epic Don Juan, appreciating the objective variety of the feminine. But Fleming’s relationship with Harlow was friendly and protective, not amorous. Charles Cotton’s son remembers Vic squiring her for a beach day to Balboa without a hint of hanky-panky—to this boy, the glamour girl was down-to-earth and approachable, especially for a star nearing the acme of her popularity and critical approval.

  MGM, though, was doing a lot of worrying about Harlow. She was having an affair with Max Baer, the heavyweight contender known as much for his easy charm as for his deadly punches. (Ron Howard demonized him in his boxing film, Cinderella Man.) Louella Parsons had alluded to the affair in her column and had asked Baer’s wife about it. Dorothy Baer started talking divorce. MGM’s publicity department doubted that, so soon after the suicide of her second husband, Paul Bern, Harlow’s reputation could withstand another scandal. The pressure was on to make Harlow respectable. To her biographer David Stenn, what followed had all the earmarks of a studio-arranged marriage. On the set of Bombshell she proposed to her cinematographer, Hal Rosson. He’d already photographed three Harlow hits, including Red-Headed Woman and Red Dust, and he’d established a jovial, trusting relationship with his star. No one had ever made her look better. But there was not even flirtation until Harlow made him a marital offer he couldn’t refuse. Arizona, unlike California, didn’t require a six-day waiting period. Justice of the Peace Earl A. Freeman married them in Yuma. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times on September 24, six days later, Harlow said, “Hal’s exquisite quality of friendship, his vast capacity for loyalty,” and “his divine sense of humor” made him the one for her. Her interviewer also noted that Harlow and Hal “insist the influence of the desert stars while on location with ‘Bombshell’ ” swayed them toward their sudden elopement—just the sort of romantic hooey that Bombshell makes hash of. (Rosson’s nephew Robert Terry visited his uncle after the wedding, and Harlow kissed the boy good night. “Her whole family, they weren’t much,” he recalls. “They were just interested in her for the money she could make them.”)

  The Rosson-Harlow nuptials were only the first in Bombshell’s talent base. Vic and Lu were next.

  The circumstances were murky, but this much is known: Sometime between Vic’s return from the Lewis trip and his completion of Bombshell’s first cut, Lu told him she was pregnant. And on September 26, 1933, the day before the film’s first preview, he drove her 240 miles to Yuma, where Freeman married them, too. True to Fleming’s longstanding story that he announced his retirement after every movie, he gave his occupation on the license application as “Retired—from motion pictures.” They exchanged no wedding bands, and there was no honeymoon. According to Lu, Vic ordered Freeman, “Let’s leave the ‘love’ out of the ceremony.” Fleming drove back to California and deposited Lu at her old home. The marriage would stay secret for the next three months.

  Some time and in some way after that, Lu told him she was not pregnant. The details of her mistake, deception, or self-deception only entered family lore in her sad tirades after Fleming’s death in 1949, when, Sally observes, “Mother would get six Schlitzes under her belt and start to tell horrible stories.” It’s possible that in panic, Lu had impulsively sprung the oldest marital trap in the world. She knew of examples close to home and in her home: Lu’s daughter Helene was two months pregnant when she married Jaime del Valle (later a famed radio director). And Mildred Harris had coerced Fleming’s friend and neighbor Charlie Chaplin into marriage under the pressure of a pregnancy that turned out to be false, too.

  Fleming’s reaction was to tell Lu she could not share his Cove Way house until she was really pregnant. For nearly a year, she continued to use her old house as her social base and legal address until she did become pregnant the following May.

  But Sally observes of those circumstances, “Let
’s be honest about one thing. They were adults. They had been friends up to that point for several years. And that long friendship is what kept them together.”

  Fleming gave no outward sign that he felt panicked or rushed into marriage. He rarely let his private complications get in the way of his job duties or amateur enthusiasms, and he didn’t then. He immersed himself in Bombshell when he returned from the Lewis trip, and on September 23, he even kept an appointment to join Charles Cotton in the California state skeet-shooting championship in Santa Monica. On October 6, he boarded the President Hoover in San Francisco, bound for Hawaii and another animal-collection voyage with Lewis. Married or not, he was going to take his usual post-film getaway, plans he had made weeks earlier. Taking Lu to Hawaii, where they would be greeted by ship news reporters, would have ended the secrecy.

  Fleming ensconced himself at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu for a couple of weeks until Lewis sailed in from San Pedro, and then spent the next two months sailing around the Hawaiian islands with the millionaire oilman N. Paul Whittier and his wife, the silent actress Olive Hasbrouck. They collected specimens for San Francisco’s Steinhart Aquarium—yellow tang, butterfly fish, and moray eels—and were not scheduled to return until December. But another kidney stone attack forced Fleming to cut the trip short and sail back with Whittier on the luxury liner Lurline.

  With the notable exception of his “engagement” to Bow, Fleming had kept his personal life largely out of public view—maybe that’s why the real-life Space Hanlon, MGM’s Howard Strickling, thought he was “the shyest, most bashful guy.” Fleming separated parts of his existence from his extended family, too. His niece Yvonne said she and her family didn’t even meet Lu until well after the marriage. “We could never figure out why in the world he married her.”

  A court case would force him into going public about the marriage—although not about its unusual living arrangement. In December, the MGM cameraman Paul Lockwood filed a $150,000 lawsuit accusing Fleming of “alienating the affections” of his wife, Marjorie DeHaven, a pert, big-eyed brunette and sometime dancer. She was the daughter of the stage stars Carter DeHaven and Flora Parker, and the older sister of Gloria DeHaven.