Such lawsuits were common in Los Angeles in the depths of the Depression—practically a weekly occurrence—until California finally outlawed them. Lockwood contended that the director “debauched and carnally knew” his twenty-one-year-old wife, dangled the prospect of a film career, and had an unnamed friend lure her to San Francisco and then abandon her on October 4, two days before Fleming sailed for Hawaii.
Fleming and his lawyer, Howard Henshey, knew the suit was coming, so Henshey made what, for Fleming, was a rare phone call to publicize his marriage. On December 18, 1933, the same day Lockwood filed suit, Walter Winchell’s column reported in its typical slang that Vic and Lu “were secretly welded in Yuma months ago.” Newspapers jumped on both the lawsuit and the wedding announcement, and the story made national news, sometimes with a photo of Mrs. Lockwood in a demure pose. Henshey filed a point-by-point denial to the accusations.
Nothing came of it. The case was never heard. When Lockwood attempted to divorce his wife the following year, a different tale emerged. He charged that his wife had become “infatuated” with Fleming—not that they’d had sexual relations or that an unnamed man assisted the scheme—and that he found a note from her saying she was about to go to Honolulu with “her true love.” That’s when Lockwood drove to San Francisco with her father and found her there in a sanatorium. (If she had taken the same train as Fleming to San Francisco, it was not disclosed.)
Mrs. Lockwood never appeared in court for the divorce trial. Because she refused to undergo a court-ordered psychiatric examination, Judge Georgia Bullock, under the state law of the time, could not grant the divorce. (A divorce went through on other grounds in 1936.)
For every possible scenario, there’s a question, but no information to answer it: Did Fleming seduce a fragile woman in some erotic yet misogynistic panic of his own? Was studio pressure brought on Lockwood to alter his story, or was there a secret cash settlement? Did Fleming impulsively set up a sexual encounter, then change his mind? Was it all a legalized extortion attempt? Or did Mrs. Lockwood become so infatuated with Fleming that she followed him—and did this truth force Lockwood to revise his accusations?
The matter faded away, and Fleming reerected his wall of privacy. But Victoria used to hear jokingly from her half sister, Helene, that occasionally her father would find a woman hiding in his car in the studio parking lot. It was a recurring echo of the Lockwood case.
Meanwhile, Bombshell was turning into Fleming’s most contemporary, of-the-moment film since Mantrap—and its pace reflected the racing current of the director’s life. Louis B. Mayer’s cutting chief, Margaret Booth, said, “I worked alone [in the editing room] and then Fleming came in. He was a wonderful man”—and a daring director, in his prime. “Nobody had ever cut anything that fast; I cut it very snappy, which was unusual then. Everybody at the studio said, ‘Oh, it isn’t going to be any good.’ And of course it was terrific.” At least that’s how it played at its Hollywood premiere. “Bombshell was a SENSATION, a WOW, a SUCCESS, and what an evening,” wrote Harlow’s mother to Jean’s agent, Arthur Landau, even though Louis B. Mayer snubbed her daughter by stopping and saying only, “God, [Lee] Tracy has great lines.” In a night letter to Nicholas Schenck, Mayer urged him to hold the film back from release in order to build a proper campaign: “Don’t believe we should spend money on picture that has no possibilities but BOMBSHELL has not only star value but is truly great entertainment.”
In 1989, Booth confessed that at the film’s sneak previews, MGM thought it “a dud.” She said, “People then didn’t appreciate it like we do now. It’s more of a hit today.” After it opened, the manager of the Fox Granada Theater in Kansas City, Kansas, complained to Mayer, “Box office returns on Bombshell and Lady Killer indicate pictures on Hollywood are not wanted. Suggest you change title Going Hollywood to Going Gay or similar title.” For a knowing, urbane farce, Bombshell still did well—at $761,000, its gross more than doubled its $344,000 cost. And it had a far-reaching influence: the director Stanley Donen, his co-director and star, Gene Kelly, and his screenwriters, Betty Com-den and Adolph Green, screened Bombshell before they created Singin’ in the Rain. In its own time, Bombshell solidified Fleming’s reputation as one of the few directors who could do anything in sound that he did in the silents, from adventure to erotic melodrama to sophisticated farce.
15
Treasure Island
While Fleming was making his next picture, the quintessential pirate adventure, Treasure Island, Hollywood was going through an abrupt and concentrated climate change. The rising Hays Office censor Joseph Breen had done everything he could to heat up the animus between the Catholic Church and Hollywood’s Jewish moguls. In a letter to Father Wilfrid Parsons (the editor of America), he called the studios’ Jewish leadership “probably, the scum of the earth.” When Breen became the head of the newly formed Production Code Administration office, he set out to give the code teeth. He succeeded. The innuendo-laden adult humor audiences had enjoyed in movies like Red Dust and Bombshell would now have to be camouflaged or abandoned.
Before the studios began to feel Breen’s bite, Fleming had already started preparing his adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s beloved 1883 adventure about the plucky lad Jim Hawkins, the murderous one-legged rascal Long John Silver, and their search for buried treasure on a tropic isle in the eighteenth century. Luckily for Fleming, it was family fare, but with a violent, sometimes terrifying edge that would grow ever rarer in studio pictures after the growth spurt of the Production Code. Treasure Island had been filmed at least twice in the silent era, but not even Maurice Tourneur’s 1920 version, with Lon Chaney in two roles (including the blind pirate Pew), achieved the pop-cultural penetration of, say, Fairbanks’s Three Musketeers or Robin Hood. With this hale and hearty blockbuster, Fleming would succeed where the gifted Tourneur had failed.
In the spring of 1934, Fleming and his producing partner, Stromberg (who would get a full producer’s credit on-screen for Treasure Island—an uncommon occurrence for a Fleming picture), knew they had the opportunity to craft a fresh image of a children’s classic. According to Jackie Cooper, who played Jim Hawkins, Fleming and Stromberg lobbied in vain to film in the South Seas instead of on Catalina Island (off the Southern California coast); to purchase a true oceangoing frigate; and to shoot in color, as Fairbanks did with his 1926 two-strip Technicolor hit, The Black Pirate. (Fairbanks’s technical supervisor on all matters piratical, Dwight Franklin, advised Fleming on buccaneering, too.) Mayer turned these requests down; Fleming threatened to walk.
“If Fleming didn’t do it, then Mr. Mayer was not happy with any other director,” Cooper recalled. So, while not giving in to Fleming’s demands, Mayer placed every in-house resource of an MGM super-production at his disposal. Studio publicity trumpeted “more than two years of preparatory work in the studio research department.” The production accumulated antiques, including “thirty-five genuine flintlock rifles,” and manufactured stunning facsimiles, such as “ten large cannon with a range of a mile each.” Crewmen paved mock-ups of eighteenth-century roads and walkways with several tons of cobblestones. In Oakland, California, MGM dressed the estuary wharf of the Alaska Packers Association to look like the Bristol docks. A private collector supplied Catalina with tropical birds. A second unit was sent to Hawaii (Maui, mostly) for additional boat shots and rowing shots.
For the Hispaniola, the three-masted, square-rigged sailing ship of Stevenson’s tale, MGM salvaged the hulk of the whaler Nanuk, which had survived the production of Eskimo (the film Fleming had encountered on vacation in Alaska), and erected period decks and masts on top of it. “If you dove in the water and swam down a few feet, you could see the other hull right underneath it,” Cooper said. “But it stayed afloat, this thing, and it sailed. Actually, underneath there were the motors moving it.” (Cooper insisted that the Nanuk was a yacht and that Joseph Schenck had lent it to Mayer.) Cooper ended up having to wear a wig, because he’d cut off his boyish bo
b when it looked as if the picture would fall through.
The most critical construction was the script. Leonard Praskins and the future leader of the Hollywood Ten, John Howard Lawson, each took a swing at it. To avoid what Stromberg called “the leisurely start of the story,” these scripts began with Captain Flint burying his loot at Treasure Island. The novel’s colorful, mysterious brigands—even Billy Bones, whose tumultuous residence at the Hawkins family’s Admiral Benbow Inn sets Stevenson’s tale in motion, and the menacing blind man Pew, who hands Billy the black spot that seals his doom—entered the tale as bold buccaneers rather than spooky enigmas. Early drafts depicted Long John Silver losing his leg and gaining a wooden stump in a mutiny. No wonder Stromberg recalled, “We began to feel we were leaving too little to the imagination. When Billy Bones arrived at the Inn, there was, for those who would see the picture, nothing mysterious about his character. He was mysterious to Jim Hawkins, perhaps, but not to the audience.”
Fleming eventually cut this material and made the Admiral Ben-bow Inn, once again, the story’s point of origin. To speed things up further, he eliminated the character of Hawkins’s father (after all, he begins wasting away just three pages into the narrative) and turned young Jim Hawkins into the man of the house and the sole protector of a pretty mother (Dorothy Peterson). With Fleming’s new favorite, Mahin, in charge of the script (he would receive sole credit), the moviemakers built suspense while balancing coziness and risk, picturesque action and grotesquerie. In the finished film, Jim is a lad we first see baking a cake for his mother’s birthday. Shortly afterward, he begins to serve as a trusted aide to the dissolute, apoplectic Billy Bones (Lionel Barrymore), who uses the Benbow Inn as a hideout. Without resorting to narration, Fleming and Mahin walk us right inside Jim Hawkins’s head. The movie’s Jim seems a few years younger than the book’s, but he has a large thirst for thrills. And with the age difference, his gullibility becomes more understandable, his perils more pronounced.
Mahin and Fleming perceived Treasure Island as an elemental melodrama whose complexities derive from divided allegiances among the characters, not from psychological torture underneath their skin. “Character to the boy is a sealed book,” wrote Stevenson in an essay defending the emotional authenticity of his work; “for him a pirate is a beard, a pair of wide trousers, and a liberal complement of pistols . . . The characters are portrayed only so far as they realise the sense of danger and provoke the sympathy of fear.” The moviemakers bravely embellish Stevenson’s caricatures. Watch this movie at an impressionable age and it’s your Treasure Island for life. Watch the movie in adulthood and you have to adjust to its high-on-the-hog acting and broad-stroke storytelling. But adjust you will. The New Republic’s Otis Ferguson, the best American film critic of the day, called it “a picture so good in some ways that any but the most determined can see what fresh possibilities in the way of beauty and free movement lie in this new art of the screen.” Mahin and Fleming hit on a hyperbolic tone that’s scary, comical, and disrespectful of propriety—that’s what Ferguson meant when he wrote that they caught “the frank swagger of the story.”
Barrymore’s scowling, growling Billy petrifies the inn’s clientele with tales of seafaring men less “genteel” than himself who would slice and dice Spanish dons, ravish their women, and drain their feminine blue blood into punch. (The content is Stevenson, the words pure Mahin.) You know you’re in good hands when Dr. Livesey (Otto Kruger) enters the picture and, in a ringing line from Stevenson, vows to Billy that if he doesn’t stop brandishing his cutlass, he’ll “hang at the next assizes.” Kruger makes Dr. Livesey’s righteousness function as an invisible shield. And “Lionel Barrymore was just marvelous as Billy Bones,” Mahin remembered years later. “He had that shiny black beard; N. C. Wyeth had drawn color pictures of those characters, and his face was like that, just shiny from the weather.”
Fleming swiftly sketches Black Dog (Charles McNaughton) and Pew (William V. Mong) and the other scoundrels who go after Bones’s sea chest as part of a rogues’ gallery that stretches to infinity, or hell. In a breathtaking and brutal variation on Pew’s death scene from the book (one of the good guys’ horses tramples him), Dr. Livesey crushes the sightless brigand twice. His carriage horses knock Pew down; then both sets of carriage wheels create ruts in his body. (On location, Fleming used an Oakland riding-academy manager as the coachman, after forcing the fellow to shave off his grandiose mustache.) At its fringes, this Treasure Island is a Halloween cartoon. The score, with its insidious theme song—“Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest / Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!”—employs a pastiche chantey and occasional bouts of minstrelsy to form a not-so-silly symphony. There’s something Disney-like about the way Fleming coordinates the score with images of desperate men straight out of Wyeth illustrations—pockmarked, wart-laden pirates in billowing capes tramping up lonely seaside lanes under lowering skies. (Fleming was thinking of Wyeth when he promised a columnist an “exact picturization of the book.”) When Jim croons the dead-man’s-chest song as Billy Bones walks the hills outside the inn, dirty dealings float through the air. Fleming’s Treasure Island belongs to the realm of good bad dreams.
After Jim saves the treasure map from Black Dog’s crew and delivers it to Squire Trelawney (Nigel Bruce) with Dr. Livesey, the Squire hastens to outfit a ship for his treasure hunt. In Stevenson, the Squire falls “in talk with” Long John Silver on the Bristol dock and hires him as sea cook. Mahin sharpens the action. The introduction of the sea cook and Jim at Silver’s Spy-Glass Inn had been, in previous scripts, too “long,” noted Mahin, “and not at all pictorial. Instead, in the final scenario, we have Jim, a boy in transports of delight, rushing here and there on the ship during his first moments aboard. Boy-like, he kneels down to sight a cannon, and through the porthole he sees a man with one leg!”
In this exhilarating presentation of the movie’s extraordinary good-bad guy, Fleming’s camera swings with Hawkins’s point of view until it fixes on Silver (Wallace Beery), who soon accepts the job of sea cook and takes the Squire up on his offer to replace a vanished crew. (Beery signals the audience that Silver is behind the seamen’s disappearance.) When Long John approaches the Spy-Glass Inn with Jim, he buys a whistle for his young friend—then uses it to alert his mates. With comical rapidity, they cease brawling and assume mellow, amiable postures as Dandy Dawson (Charles Bennett) sings and strums his mandolin. It’s the kind of stunt-like transformation found in Roaring Twenties movies set in speakeasies. And it’s typical of the filmmakers’ drive to keep the story dynamic as well as fable-like. Dandy Dawson, a Mahin-Fleming invention, is a true “dandy” who loves fine lace and sings Robert Herrick’s “Gather Ye Rosebuds While Ye May” but keeps a dagger hidden in his tricornered hat. “I like pretty things,” he tells Jim ominously, after Long John introduces them, and notes that with their similar shoe size, they’re like “two sister craft.” Jim never gets close to this predatory figure again.
Long John and Jim, though, become fast friends, because Silver treats the boy as a peer. In his script notes Fleming remarks, “What would help make the kid and the audience like him, even though he does slit throats, is the way he explains to the kid the necessity of one pirate having to kill another, etc.—it’s just a matter of business, that’s all.” In a way, it reflects the child star’s relationship with his director. When giving interviews at the time, Cooper said, “One thing I hate is to be treated like a baby. Mr. Fleming didn’t try any of that stuff on me. He’s my pal.” (Fleming, for his part, called Cooper “a great kid,” able to discuss everything from “screen stories” to “the Chinese situation.”)
Because Mahin and Fleming respect Stevenson’s structure, their version plays faster than the half-hour-briefer (ninety-minute) Disney adaptation from 1950. Fleming’s team holds true to Stevenson’s charged tableaux technique—they recognize that the relative impact of each episode is a matter not of length or adrenaline but of intensity of feeling. (“There was
a fine sequence of the ship getting under weigh,” Otis Ferguson wrote, “one of the most lovely I have seen.”) And they pick up on the mildest suggestions of suspense and wit. Just when you think there couldn’t be a more righteous gentleman than Dr. Livesey, along comes Captain Alexander Smollett (Lewis Stone), who orders the sailors’ blades “tipped” (or blunted) when he fears they know they’re on a treasure hunt. (It’s another Mahin-Fleming invention.) Smollett borders on the prescient during the sea voyage. But he flits with foolishness after Silver’s mutiny. Smollett, Livesey, and Trelawney, along with a few good men, abandon ship and defend themselves in an empty island stockade. The stalwart captain flies the British flag and won’t pull it down even though it presents the pirates with a target. He’s determined to create a spot of England—a true-to-the-book incident that plays today like a piece of satire.
On her own: Eva Fleming with Victor, Arletta, and newborn Ruth, September 1893, Pomona, California.
(left) Starting out in California: Victor Fleming’s parents, Lon and Eva, in Pasadena, 1891. (right) Eva and her second husband, Sid Deacon, early 1920s.
(top) Fleming in Santa Barbara, 1912. (bottom) Fleming is in the passenger seat of this camera car (year unknown), but his first goal in life was to become an automobile racer.
First lieutenant Victor Fleming of the Signal Corps mans a Bell & Howell camera while acting as Woodrow Wilson’s personal cameraman with the Presidential Peace Party, 1918.
Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) Page 27