Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics)

by Sragow, Michael

  Fleming’s hunting trek through what was then called British East Africa (now Kenya) helped gain him Hemingway’s respect when Howard Hawks tried to team them up in 1941 to film the writer’s safari-inspired short story “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.” (The always underrated Zoltan Korda did film it, superbly.) The director later urged Clark Gable to come with him on another safari in 1939—until their prolonged involvement with Gone With the Wind scotched their plans.

  Fleming and Cotton left Nairobi for the wilderness on July 4 and, once they hit their stride, stalked game with guns and cameras every day until late August. They dined on fowl and fresh meat, and occasionally conversed with British officials and Anglo-American travelers. In Cotton’s journal, big-game hunting comes off as a test of endurance as much as sporting skills; they “ran into locust so thick they made a dark cloud in all directions.”

  Fleming’s mechanical skills came in handy for Cotton; when a pump casting broke on one of their vehicles, Vic simply repaired it with some wire. Help went both ways. Fleming woke up one morning running a fever of 103. Cotton found him still in bed, “wringing wet,” as the fever broke at the end of the day, and put him into dry clothes and bedding.

  They journeyed through hard brush, with high thorns pricking the horizon, until, on July 12, they found themselves on “a very beautiful spot right on the bank of the Tana . . . Real African mahogany and other tropical vegetation a very pleasant contrast from what we have been going through for the past weeks.” Cotton shot and killed a bull elephant. Fleming wounded an elephant without being able to finish him, but killed his share of East African antelope, gazelles, rhinos, warthogs, and crocodiles.

  In Africa, as in Hollywood, Fleming remained a confounding combination of sturdiness and ailments. “Vic developed something wrong with his eyes,” Cotton records, “and we had to put cocaine in them and give him sleeping powders. Stayed up until 10 with him then he went to sleep.” Soon he was back on his feet.

  Although Fleming never vanquished his most dearly sought prey—a bull elephant—on August 1 he killed a rhinoceros near the Kinno River, right before the animal would have slammed into Cotton. “She charged right at Vic and me,” Cotton writes. “It was Vic’s turn to shoot so we all waited until she was just 8 yds from me thinking all the time that she was bluffing, but just as she got there I saw that she did not intend to stop and told Vic to shoot. In one half second I would have shot to save myself.”

  Her offspring ran into the bush. Everyone felt “terrible,” Cotton continues, “but if they had not shot her I am sure I would have been hurt.” It was the second mother rhino Fleming killed in his travels.

  On August 21, he and Cotton crossed paths with a British hunter and another Californian on safari, which is how they learned of the death of the humorist and actor Will Rogers six days earlier. A Hollywood Reporter review of The Farmer Takes a Wife suggested that Fleming had originally designed Slim Summerville’s Fortune Friendly for Rogers; it would have fit his sly folksiness and built on his role as a Mississippi patent-medicine peddler in Ford’s Steamboat Round the Bend. Fleming never got to work with the cowboy humorist (who really was part Cherokee), even though they had a mutual friend in Fred Lewis, whose Diamond Bar Ranch near Whittier was next to a ranch Rogers had there.

  Fleming and Cotton wound up their travels at the Dutch Trading Company about 110 miles from Nairobi, “where [Theodore] Roosevelt did a lot of hunting.” They made it into Nairobi the following afternoon, “had a fine hot bath and an excellent dinner and went to bed early, ending our safari.” A year later, Cotton shipped four cases of trophies to the Broadway department store in Los Angeles for use in a window display.

  Of course, long before “runaway” filmmaking, Hollywood directors like George Hill would travel four continents on assignment. Six years younger than Fleming, Hill was also a cameraman from the silent days (they might have worked together on the Loos-Emerson Macbeth). He’d recently emerged as a major MGM director because of Marie Dressler’s Oscar-winning hit, Min and Bill (1930), and other acclaimed and profitable talkies such as the prison drama The Big House (1930) and the gangster film The Secret Six (1931), all written by his wife, Fleming’s friend Frances Marion.

  Despite their volatile marriage and prolonged estrangement and divorce (Hill was a depressive and a secret alcoholic), Thalberg teamed Hill and Marion on a choice assignment in 1933: Pearl Buck’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 1931 novel, The Good Earth, about Chinese farmers enduring poverty, famine, and the corruption of wealth. (The director Tod Browning, of Dracula fame, had been announced but withdrew for unknown reasons.) In December 1933, MGM launched an ambitious trip through China, where Hill filled “250 cases of film” with background action and atmosphere.

  Under the direction of General Ting-Hsui Tu of China’s Central Military Academy, expeditions went out on buying missions. They’d arrive at a rural estate and purchase “everything movable on the farm. The plows and implements, the cooking utensils in the kitchen, the used clothing in the house, furniture, bamboo doors and windows, matting partitions—the water wheels for irrigation.” They also had hundreds of items made, including baskets. Hill left after several months, but Tu continued his work.

  Back in Los Angeles, Hill swerved his car from children crossing a street and smashed into a telephone pole. The resulting pains and treatments, along with his chronic drinking and depression, the tension of being around his ex-wife, and disagreements with Thalberg over The Good Earth, eventually leveled Hill. Alone in his Venice beach home, he shot himself, fatally, in the head. Thalberg assigned the film to Fleming.

  Regardless of his all-American profile, Fleming and The Good Earth might have been a better match. As a filmmaker and an adventurer, he had an appetite for the epic and the exotic—and along with Cotton, he’d recently endured “locust so thick they made a dark cloud,” a key ingredient of The Good Earth. The novel summoned his agrarian memories. “It is a story that might be laid in any of our farming states, or in any country of the world,” he said. Thalberg assigned the screenwriter Talbot Jennings to the script, and when Jennings arrived to take his orders from Thalberg’s associate Albert Lewin, he found Fleming and Lewin swimming through a sea of previous drafts. Much as he’d later do with Gone With the Wind, Fleming said, “Throw ’em all out. We’ll start all over again and work from the book.” Publicly, Fleming stated, “The only major change we are making in the adaptation is that of reducing the dialogue from smooth, Biblical-like utterances to the simple, direct speeches of simple, illiterate people. The dialogue of the novel does not make good motion picture dialogue, though it reads very well. The characters are sensitive people of great depth and feeling, who, like many fine but illiterate characters in real life, cannot adequately express themselves.”

  His safari break reenergized him. He named his cabin cruiser The Missy Poo after his daughter, Victoria, nicknamed Missy. On the Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend, he flew in his Waco from Los Angeles to Ensenada in a James Cagney–sponsored air race publicizing a casino in the Mexican coastal resort. (His “competitors” included Wallace Beery and Howard Hawks.) A wire service article in December hailed him as not only one of Hollywood’s best-dressed men but also “the most nonchalant” on that list. And now he was at the helm of MGM’s current super-production.

  Thalberg decided to make The Good Earth at MGM and on California locations, with a mixed cast headed by Paul Muni as the male lead. He had promised to fill the cast with English-speaking Chinese players; every day Lewin tested Chinese actors as well as American and European actors in Chinese makeup. Today, some of Lewin’s reports read as straight-faced comedy, such as “Leonid Kinskey: Russian accent still noticeable; doubtful if he can ever overcome it entirely. Nevertheless, worth serious consideration as Ching.” (The role went to Ching Wah Lee.) Or, of the dazzling Anna May Wong: “not as beautiful as she might be.” (Wong’s potential role, Lotus, the dancer who becomes the hero’s No. 2 wife, went to the charm-deprive
d Tilly Losch.) On the same day Thalberg announced Fleming as the director, October 30, 1935, he officially pegged Muni to play Wang Lung and Luise Rainer to play O-Lan, Wang Lung’s No. 1 wife.

  Fleming selected a five-hundred-acre stretch of California hills and valleys for his main location. He terraced the hills for two miles on each side of the canyons and had them hand-sown with grain, then organized the valley floor in patches of Chinese vegetables. Poultry, pigs, water buffalo, dogs, and donkeys acclimated themselves to the MGM-nurtured farms of Wang Lung and his friend and his uncle. The company tapped an aqueduct, erected a huge pump, and employed modern irrigation techniques to make ready for a harvest in eight months; during filming, the company also used Chinese waterwheels and windmills.

  Shortly before Christmas, Fleming scheduled surgery for kidney stones, expecting to be back on his feet in time to start filming in January. He would have weathered it easily, except for a blood clot that formed in one leg. Doctors confined him to bed, and his niece Yvonne remembered that when she visited him at his house, “he was like a caged tiger”—one who, sadly, couldn’t keep his biggest picture yet from slipping through his claws.

  After so much costly preparation, Thalberg had to make a move. Speedy, worldly W. S. Van Dyke, Fleming’s best possible replacement, begged off so he could finish San Francisco. As the official MGM production history put it, “Here was a great picture, under way so far as locations, casting, and all operative details were concerned . . . and no director.” In late 1935, Thalberg approached Sidney Franklin, and on January 21, 1936, he took over, deeming the physical layout Fleming had prepared “altogether excellent.” But he considered the script Fleming had prepared “too Occidental” and ordered a new script written with more “Oriental flavor.” Franklin ended up directing with (in Pauline Kael’s words) “his usual lack of imagination, individuality, style. He was the MGM heavyweight champ”—and a thorn in Fleming’s side a few years later, on The Yearling.

  18

  Spencer Tracy and Captains Courageous

  No matter how odd the circumstances of Lu’s pregnancy, the delight Fleming took in parenting surpassed the disappointments of forfeiting The Good Earth and They Gave Him a Gun, an antiwar adventure set to star Spencer Tracy. (Mayer had lured Tracy from Fox with a promise of leading roles.) Victoria turned one as Fleming was recuperating. A few weeks later, she piled some twigs in her tiny fists and gave them to him. He wrote, “Missy gathered up these beautiful things to her daddy one March morning—her first gifts to him,” then lined a jewelry box with cotton batting and preserved these gifts. By the end of March 1936, he had recovered sufficiently from his surgery and embolism to travel to Dayton, Ohio, to look at new airplanes, and from there sent his daughter a telegram in baby talk.

  That colleagues noted a transformation in Fleming is evident in an item found in Louis Lighton’s papers. Among the notebooks and scraps of paper containing scribbles of story and film ideas, Lighton wrote, “Vic’s parenthood.” Under the guidance of Lighton and Fleming, and with that thought in the background, the movie version of Captains Courageous, Rudyard Kipling’s virtually plotless 1897 novel about a spoiled young man’s redemption through labor on a New England cod fleet, became a moving paradigm of fathering.

  In his final year at Paramount, Lighton made two standout productions with Fleming’s directing and acting protégés: The Lives of a Bengal Lancer and Peter Ibbetson, both directed by Henry Hathaway and starring Gary Cooper. When Lighton moved to MGM in 1936, it was natural for Thalberg to pair him and Fleming. They shared a professional past and a forthright aesthetic.

  Budd Schulberg said Lighton, like Fleming, “was very un-Hollywood, not mixed up in the social scene, seemed to stay apart from that.” Elia Kazan, in A Life (1988), wrote that the producer consciously made films dealing “with individual standards, never politics; with courage and decency, privileges and responsibility . . . Lighton’s work goal was to capture a single, strongly felt human emotion, one he believed in himself.” Lighton respected all the old “tough” directors, including John Ford and Hathaway, but “his particular favorite” was Fleming.

  Kazan observed of Lighton, “perhaps because he had no children, his best films dealt with children,” including Captains Courageous. In 1931, Thalberg approached Kipling to purchase screen rights to the poems “Gunga Din” and “On the Road to Mandalay” as well as Captains Courageous and Kim. Three years later, Thalberg optioned the novels for $25,000 each. He assigned Lighton to both as soon as the producer arrived at MGM in 1935.

  MGM’s pre-Lighton treatments for Captains Courageous didn’t win Kipling over. An attempt to inject the story with sex prompted the author to inform the studio that “a happily married lady codfish lays about a million eggs at one confinement.” Kipling died in January 1936 and Thalberg in September. By then Lighton had taken charge of the production, and he quickly dispensed with vulgar notions.

  At the end of April, with Fleming back on his feet, MGM announced that he would direct the picture and Freddie Bartholomew would star in it. (Lighton wanted to make Kim with Fleming and Bartholomew, too.) Franchot Tone was reported to have nailed down the adult lead a year before, but Tracy was luckier casting. It would be the first of five Fleming-Tracy collaborations. The actor was closer to the director in temperament, though not in background, than Cooper, Fonda, or even Gable. Both Fleming and his new star radiated complicated moods and feelings beneath a tough-smart surface.

  According to Lighton (via Kazan), Fleming would say, “A good actor is one who, when he’s asked what he does for a living, will drop his head, kick a little shit, and speaking with a bit of shame, mumble, ‘I’m an actor.’ ” He might have been thinking of Tracy. Tracy was born in 1900 in Milwaukee, and his hard-drinking Irish-American father owned a trucking company; his mother’s ancestors had founded Brown University. He settled into acting at Ripon College and went on to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York. It took Tracy eight years to become a breakout stage star with the prison drama The Last Mile, in 1930. Although John Ford snatched him up for a prison comedy called Up the River, it would take more than half the decade for Tracy to have the same impact on-screen. When he did, he became, as Time declared, “cinema’s no. 1 actor’s actor.” But he was a conflicted man—a boozer and a married Catholic whose lasting romantic connection would be to a woman not his wife, Katharine Hepburn. “Spencer always thought acting was a rather silly way for a grown man to make a living,” Hepburn wrote.

  He arrived at MGM at the end of 1935 after an unsatisfying five years at Fox, where he’d kept busy in character roles—eighteen films, including loan-outs, between 1932 and 1934—and where stardom had eluded him. By the time he entered MGM, he and his wife, Louise Treadwell, had weathered his intimate friendship or affair with Loretta Young and an embarrassment of drunk-and-disorderly charges stemming from binge drinking. To explain his carousing, studio publicists forwarded the story that Tracy felt God had punished him for his vices by making his son, John, born in 1924, deaf.

  Hepburn’s biographer William J. Mann in Kate (2006) traces the roots of Tracy’s drinking further down in his psyche, painting the actor as bisexual or gay, in torment over the gaps between his secret erotic identity and his supermasculine Hollywood image. Mann effectively deflates the romanticism that usually surrounds Tracy and Hepburn—an image cultivated by Hepburn from nearly the week after Tracy’s death in 1967—but his evidence for the star’s homosexuality is built entirely on stories that passed through George Cukor’s circle. Mann’s single source is party bartender Scotty Bowers. After two tours with the Marines in World War II, he worked at a Richfield gas station that he ran as a male bordello “arranging introductions between returning servicemen and older gentlemen.” Bowers said he had sex with Tracy repeatedly in the guest bungalow on Cukor’s estate, where Tracy lived for the last few years of his life.

  Mann summoned a number of testimonials to Bowers’s veracity and Cukor’s implicit trust in him, but
no direct statement from Cukor himself. And even the director grew wary of the rumors rampant in his crowd. One of his regulars, a supporting actor named Anderson Lawler, was a key component of a tale often used to portray Gable as a bashful bisexual. Cukor called Lawler “a great and bitchy gossip,” but also “an idiot—full of half-assed sophistication.”

  Tracy’s alcohol-fueled escapades stayed out of the press after he joined MGM. The studio’s publicity chief, Howard Strickling, a suave, efficient “fixer” with connections to pliable police officers and reporters, confessed that he ordered the studio’s security chief, Whitey Hendry, to have an ambulance ready to rescue Tracy from the scene of any trouble in a bar. But the studio also invested Tracy’s moviemaking collaborators with much of the responsibility for keeping him away from booze. While co-producing Mannequin (1937), Joseph Mankiewicz ensconced the star in his own home.

  The poetic Irish lush was a cliché long before the 1930s, but off-screen Tracy seemed determined to put flesh on it. “I would get drunk and disappear in the middle of a film, get into fights, become a complete bum,” he admitted to Stewart Granger. “At the beginning, the studio heads and my friends would rally round and cover up for me, but eventually the only one left who seemed to care at all was Victor Fleming.”

  He was likely speaking of the bender he went on after Thalberg’s death on September 14, 1936, the day Captains Courageous had been scheduled to begin principal photography. Tracy was not close to the production chief, but like many others at the studio, he was uncertain about his future when Thalberg died of a heart attack at age thirty-seven. MGM rescheduled the picture to start after Thalberg’s funeral three days later, but Tracy’s drinking held it up for another five days.