Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics)

by Sragow, Michael

  Fleming filmed iconic images of President Woodrow Wilson in his top hat and kangaroo-pelt coat, touring the European capitals in triumph before the Versailles peace conference. Here Wilson is flanked by French prime minister Georges Clemenceau and British prime minister David Lloyd George.

  Fleming and the “It Girl,” Clara Bow, at the start of their affair, making Mantrap (1926).

  Fleming and another lover, Bessie Love, on location for A Son of His Father (1925).

  Four Conquests

  (above) Samuel Goldwyn’s new discovery, Lili Damita, visits Fleming on the set of his Goldwyn-produced picture, The Awakening (1928). (below) Fleming with Ingrid Bergman at the New York City premiere of Joan of Arc (1948). Their affair was over, and he would be dead two months later.

  Family portrait: Fleming, Vicky, Lu, and newborn Sally, 1937.

  Fleming bought this 81-foot yacht from Frank Morgan to sail up and down the Pacific coast and kept Morgan’s name for it, The Dolphin.

  The polio scare of 1946 prompted Fleming to purchase Knapp Island, near Vancouver, British Columbia, and to use this spacious house as a family retreat.

  Douglas Fairbanks and Fleming were masters of pranks-manship. Here Fairbanks hangs off the roof of a caboose by hanging on to Fleming’s chest.

  Fleming cleans the camera lens as John Emerson directs Arline Pretty and Fairbanks on In Again, Out Again (1917).

  Fleming did his only on-screen acting when he directed Fairbanks and costarred with him in Around the World in Eighty Minutes with Douglas Fairbanks (1931). This photo was carefully posed to create the illusion that Fairbanks and Fleming were roughly the same height.

  (above) Fleming trains his eye on ( from left) Ernest Torrence, Percy Marmont, and Clara Bow in Mantrap (1926), on a set in the Famous Players-Lasky Studios. James Wong Howe is at the camera. (below) Fleming (at the camera), John Emerson (with megaphone), and Douglas Fairbanks (on horse) shooting the comic western Wild and Woolly (1917).

  On location in San Antonio for the lost epic The Rough Riders (1927). George Bancroft holds a cigarette in one hand and his army hat in the other; James Wong Howe sports a white cap; Henry Hathaway, his head popping out of the crowd at his director’s feet, awaits orders from Fleming, who holds the megaphone; and next to Fleming sits a visitor, Clara Bow. This photo was taken on September 15, 1926, when she announced she and Fleming were “engaged.”

  Fleming directs Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh as they stroll down Peachtree Street in the studio-built Atlanta of Gone With the Wind (1939).

  Producer David O. Selznick and Fleming confer over the troubled script.

  Selznick, Leigh, Fleming, Carole Lombard, and Gable celebrate at the wrap party.

  Judy Garland, Fleming, Myrna Loy, and Frank Morgan at Fleming’s going-away party on The Wizard of Oz (1939).

  Sunday fun. Three members of the Moraga Spit and Polish Club: Gable, Ward Bond, and Fleming. Bel-Air, 1946.

  Composer Jerome Kern visits Jean Harlow and Fleming on the set of Fleming’s first musical, Reckless (1935).

  Fleming vacationing on the Rogue River in Oregon just before he went to work on The Wizard of Oz.

  The strain of filming Joan of Arc shows in this 1947 portrait.

  Stone is Stevenson’s Smollett to the unpliable upper lip. The film’s most audacious re-creation, though, may be Charles “Chic” Sale’s Ben Gunn, a crazy-eyed man in beard and tatters who’s been marooned on the island for three years and tells Jim that he can save his friends from Silver’s scurvy bunch. Sale moves with a painful, ecstatic angularity: it’s as if he’s astounded that his limbs are still attached to him. Mahin seizes on a subtle conversational tic in Stevenson’s book to compose a manner of speech for this castaway that’s riotously and emotionally true. Ben has been alone in the wilderness for so long that he transforms dialogue into monologue, and vice versa; “says you” and “says I” and “says he” punctuate every turn of his thought. Cooper gets the last laugh when Jim, in a bout of disgust that his friends take this loon quite seriously, mutters, “Says he, says them, says I, says nobody.”

  Because of Cooper’s baby-faced youth, Fleming could cut down on Jim’s awkwardness and indecision without losing the boy’s alternately awestruck and despairing perspective. “At twelve going on thirteen,” Cooper said in his as-told-to autobiography, Please Don’t Shoot My Dog (1981), “it was the hardest work of my life, and some of the most unpleasant.” A lot of the unpleasantness came from co-starring with Wallace Beery, a prima donna who reacted to Cooper shooting some relatively harmless flash powder on his foot as if he’d been mortally wounded. Although Mahin thought “all the pirates were good,” he “didn’t think Beery was too good. He was so funny when he got the script. He said, ‘I don’t want to play this thing.’ Then somebody told him it was a great classic and then Beery was saying, ‘Oh, you can’t touch a word of this picture. This is a classic.’ ” Part of Beery’s bluster came from physical agony. “Beery was in terrible pain most of the time, with that leg strapped up in back of him,” said Cooper. “He just hated it. He’d pick scenes as often as possible sitting down, or sitting on the ground where they could dig a hole and stick his leg into it.”

  For Cooper, his director provided most of the “bright spots.” He urged the young star to play old. “Fleming would tell me not to whine, to try to act more mature. It was the first time anyone had made me think about what I was doing, really to consider my character and how to make him come alive.” He later told Burt Prelutsky for Emmy magazine that Vidor and Fleming were his best directors, explaining, “When I was a kid, directors were always offering me bicycles whenever they wanted me to play a difficult scene. Instead of trying to communicate with me, they always tried bribes. By the time I was nine, I had eight or nine bikes in the garage. Fleming would speak to me like an adult. He would talk to me about the scene. I felt he respected me. As a result, I would break my neck to please him.”

  Cooper proved wise beyond his years when it came to handling the rude, unpredictable Beery. Mahin said that in “the last shot of the last day of the picture,” Jim had to cry at Long John’s departure, and Fleming demanded, “Come on Jackie, you’ve got to get to work. Let’s stop fooling and finish the darned thing.” Cooper said, “Okay, Uncle Wally, be mean to me.” Beery let loose with “You little son of a bitch, I’ve had it with this leg . . . I’ve got pains, varicose veins.” Before long, Jackie, “crying like a trouper,” turned to his director and said, “All right, Vic, roll ’em!”

  Cooper saw that Fleming was in touch with his own inner twelve-year-old. When the cast arrived by seaplane at a secluded spot in Catalina Island, “a sort of a large rowboat came out to the seaplane to pick us up.” Cooper’s teacher stepped out on the edge of the boat before he and Fleming were off the seaplane—and “of course the boat went out from under her and she went in the water. With the water filling up her clothes and herself filling up her clothes, she looked like a balloon in the water, spouting great streams of salt water, and pilots and people were jumping in trying to save her—she couldn’t swim, the poor thing. My mother was screaming. They got her out, but she was large and heavy to get out. All Vic Fleming kept yelling was ‘Jackie, throw your schoolbooks in the water, throw your schoolbooks in the water!’ He and I were hysterical while this poor woman half drowned,” Cooper recalled, chuckling.

  The actor needed to put his trust in Fleming, especially in physically uncertain scenes such as Jim’s race up the riggings of the Hispaniola with the pirate Israel Hands (Douglas Dumbrille) in pursuit. “Jackie’s perch sixty feet above the deck was precarious,” said Fleming. “The roll of the boat made it hard to maintain the balance of the cameras built on parallels over the edge of the boat. It was necessary to cover the mike boom to avoid the whistling of the wind.”

  For Fleming, “the most difficult scene mechanically” was Smollett’s flight under fire from the Hispaniola. “The cannon being fired from the ship and the men in the small boat firing muskets back
required several days to photograph. It was necessary repeatedly to remine the ocean, dry off the guns and the players, and reshoot the scene, although it consumes less than two minutes on the screen.” On the set for one of those days, Philip K. Scheuer of the Los Angeles Times observed, “A small charge of dynamite had to be planted each time in a fathom or two of water, its location marked by a cork. On signal there would be a puff of white smoke from the ship, a count of three, and then the charge would be set off. When there wasn’t a mix-up in signals, the skiff would either be too near or too far from the charge. As we departed, Victor Fleming, the director, was slowly going crazy. He didn’t even say good-by. Just ‘Cut!’ ”

  Editing was the ultimate rewrite on Treasure Island. Mahin had written and Fleming had filmed the book’s melodrama-charged sequence of Jim’s witnessing the buccaneers handing Silver “the black spot,” just as Pew had handed it to Billy Bones. “But at this point,” Fleming said, “the preview audience grew restless; they shifted in their seats; they rattled programs; they coughed, all signs of diminished attention. It was obvious that their sympathy was with Jim, the Squire, Livesey.” So Fleming “confined the issue to Long John’s defense of Jim. This simple change, absolutely, at the next preview, eliminated the break in audience attention we had noticed here.”

  Final cut on the movie, of course, belonged to Mayer. According to Cooper, Mayer was crestfallen for two reasons. First, Cooper, his biggest child star, the uncrowned prince of male weepies since The Champ (1931, also co-starring Beery), hadn’t a single good bawling scene in the whole picture. And the climax of Long John slipping away under the eye of Ben Gunn didn’t provide a suitable theatrical crescendo for the friendship between the pirate and Jim Hawkins. So LB “had a new ending written—Jim Hawkins frees Long John Silver just before the end of the film, but first, he cries because his piratical friend will be gone forever.” This capper has caused Stevenson scholars to charge the film with sentimentality ever since.

  Still, the relationship between the boy and the buccaneer generally cleaves to the novel. From the time he lies hidden in an apple barrel and eavesdrops on Long John laying plans for mutiny, Jim sees through the pirate’s feigned innocence. Yet even after he witnesses Long John commit cold-blooded murder, he retains a reluctant admiration for the man’s leadership, cleverness, and persistence, just as Long John appreciates the boy’s true grit even after Jim brags of setting the Hispaniola adrift and bollixing the pirates’ plans. Cooper and Beery are at their best when Long John and Jim are enjoying each other’s mettle. The characters’ mutual admiration needs no underlining. Small wonder that Cooper was to write, “We were all unhappy at the summons to return to work.” Beery hated the idea of Cooper getting a climactic showcase, so he flubbed lines and stalled and stretched a day of retakes into a week. As for the director, Cooper said, “Fleming nearly had a stroke; to him, the idea of mucking about with a Stevenson ending was damn near sacrilegious.”

  Mayer, however, did know his audience, and he didn’t stint on promotion. Treasure Island initially grossed $565,000 over its enormous $825,000 budget, then was revived both in the United States and overseas. It was during a London revival that Graham Greene, then a film critic (and a great one), compared it favorably to the nautical adventure Midshipman Easy, by Carol Reed, his future friend and collaborator on The Fallen Idol, The Third Man, and Our Man in Havana. Wrote Greene: “The story of Treasure Island has a deeper, more poetic value” because “the buried treasure, the desert island, the horrifying murder of the faithful sailor, the persons of Long John and blind Pew, all these have symbolic value. Treasure Island contains, as Midshipman Easy does not, a sense of good and evil. Even a child can recognize the greater dignity and depth of this Scottish Presbyterian’s Mansoul written in terms of an adventure-story for a boys’ magazine.”

  Treasure Island solidified Fleming’s reputation as a “big picture” man and a reliable moneymaker. Ever since 1929, he had wanted to do “epics, not melodramas,” but this at least was an epic melodrama.

  He was firming up his marriage, too. Lu was devoted, even witty. Vidor would say, “Fleming was very sort of tough with his wife, always,” but Victoria thought she was happy playing a supporting role and was “completely subordinate and quiet. He was a big director and she was his very little wren of a wife.” As far as his niece Blocksom could see, “She spent her days playing cards and gambling. She was a great gambler, so [now] she had money to gamble with. But Uncle Vic wanted children.” Lu visited Vic on Catalina, the site of a great casino, while he was filming there in May—Sally says her mother joked years later, “It was a dark and stormy night”—and gave birth to their first child, Victoria Sue, on January 28, 1935.

  16

  Introducing Henry Fonda, Farewell to Jean Harlow

  A fan of Fleming’s since Vic’s Paramount days, David O. Selznick was in the middle of his brief but spectacular producing stint at MGM, designed, said his father-in-law, Louis B. Mayer, to take pressure off the ailing Irving Thalberg, who suffered from a bad heart. Under various working titles, including Salute, There Goes Romance, and A Woman Called Cheap, Selznick, using the pseudonym Oliver Jeffries, cooked up the original story for Fleming’s first musical, Reckless (1935), with the director himself. Ten writers, including Joseph Mankiewicz, Philip Barry, S. N. Behrman, and Val Lewton, had some involvement with the script; P. J. Wolfson got credit for the final screenplay.

  Selznick and company loosely based the film on the mysterious demise of Smith Reynolds, the R. J. Reynolds tobacco heir who died of a gunshot wound to the head. His widow, torch singer Libby Holman, contended that it was suicide; the state of North Carolina nonetheless accused Holman and Reynolds’s best friend, Ab Walker, of murder. Holman was an easy target, being Jewish, bisexual, and culturally and politically adventurous, but the family successfully petitioned the state to drop the case because the evidence was not decisive. (Holman’s biographer Jon Bradshaw argues that Reynolds’s death resulted from Ab and Libby trying to wrest Smith’s gun from his hand.) Parallels to Holman run a zigzag path through Reckless.

  The movie’s heroine, Mona Leslie ( Jean Harlow)—also a Broadway musical star, but not Jewish, bisexual, educated, or culturally and politically adventurous—makes the mistake of eloping with a flamboyant, confused swell named Bob Harrison (Franchot Tone). His one accomplishment in life is founding the SAML: the Society for the Admiration of Mona Leslie. Bob’s belated recognition that he still loves the highborn woman (Rosalind Russell) whom he jilted to marry Mona leads to his suicide. The media and the district attorney accuse Mona of murder, and Bob’s snooty father (Henry Stephenson) threatens to bring their fight over the custody of his grandson to trial. Her support through all her troubles is the fellow who really loves her: Ned Riley (William Powell), a sports promoter who catapulted Mona from the sideshow circuit to headlining shows on the Great White Way. (Two weeks before the premiere of Reckless, MGM publicity chief Howard Strickling wrote Howard Dietz, his New York counterpart and a friend of Holman’s, assuring him there was “nothing ever done here to connect Holman case with RECKLESS and will be doubly careful in the future.”)

  After the arduous Treasure Island, Reckless must have seemed like a cakewalk for Fleming, who had wanted to do a musical ever since Burlesque fell off his schedule in 1929. Fleming became acquainted with Broadway’s brand of personality-infused musical theater in his Columbia/Army days, when he and his company saw Al Jolson, in Sin-bad, step to the footlights and announce that he had been hunting down barbed wire to weave a sweater for the kaiser. Selznick obviously intended Reckless to be “Metro Goldwyn Mayer’s mammoth musical melodrama” of 1935 (to quote the poster copy). He aimed to star Joan Crawford as Mona and surround her with a clutch of top players: not just Powell as Ned and Tone as Bob Harrison but also, as Mona’s granny, May Robson, who had recently been Frank Capra’s Apple Annie in Lady for a Day (1933). “So this picture looms as of the multiple stellar variety,” noted one press release. But
along the way, Harlow fell for Powell. MGM, hoping to capitalize on the eruption of this romance into the newspapers, pulled Crawford out and put Harlow in—though the story now seemed (to Harlow and others) a vulgar echo of her marriage to Paul Bern.

  Powell urged Harlow to stay in the picture because walking out would enrage the studio into suspending her and further cloud her image. Selznick later wrote, “I thought she could do well by it and was for the substitution, even though I certainly never would have planned a musical for Jean Harlow,” who was no singer or dancer. Virginia Verrill dubbed her vocals. The choreography interlaced long shots of Harlow’s dancing double (Betty Halsey) with the star herself, swaying her shoulders, swinging her arms, and executing a cartwheel and some skips and bounces.

  But Reckless doesn’t fail because of Harlow’s inadequacies; it fails because it plays like a sober and archaic Broadway version of the inside-showbiz melodramas that Fleming had already satirized to cinders with Bombshell. In Reckless, instead of a sponging family, there’s the square, straight-shooting grandma (Robson). Instead of Bombshell’s dozens of Hollywood hustlers, there are Ned Riley’s redoubtable lieutenants. They’re Runyonesque and funny-tough yet also righteous New Yorkers, played by Bombshell’s uncouth brother, Ted Healy (Smiley), and Nat Pendleton (Blossom), who had appeared with Powell in The Thin Man. Space Hanlon in Bombshell was as wily, witty, and manipulative as he was amorously abashed. In Reckless, the otherwise similar Ned Riley is more wounded and smitten. And Tone, as Harrison, is a rakish version of Gifford Middleton without the comical corkscrew of his Bombshell character.