The element of self-sacrifice does more than ennoble the seaman. It heightens the emotions shared by all the characters and particularizes the action beyond a tragic stroke of fate. Manuel insists on determining the manner of his demise, and that becomes his final gift to Harvey. He demonstrates not just grace under pressure but grace in extremis. (Tracy remembered shooting his final scene “in iced water for three days running” in shots that took hours. But he was safely encased in a steel cage camouflaged by rigging; he sank down a mere three feet while water chutes and airplane motors created waves and pneumatic rockers swayed sections of the We’re Here.)
Otis Ferguson, a Navy veteran, hailed Captains Courageous as “a corking yarn” and praised its “uncanny genius for the shipshape, that inimitable seaman’s order in a cramped confusion of halyards, rope ends, buckets, pin and tackle, hatches and capstans and standing gear.” The French agreed. “One must be insensitive to resist the profound emotion of this film,” pronounced Paris-Soir. “Fleming has made this film with incomparable technical perfection.” Even the Times of London observed that the Americans “have shown here a remarkable capacity for absorbing their author’s mind,” and “in fact, in some passages it almost seems to out-Kipling Kipling.” James Shelley Hamilton of the National Board of Review imagined Kipling’s ghost noting all the changes from the book and then admitting “they had made a good show of it.”
Before those kudos, Fleming found himself fighting the studio. In early February 1937, he threatened to “leave the lot” if MGM didn’t present the film as “Victor Fleming’s production of Captains Courageous.” Although still working without a long-term contract, he said the MGM executive Benny Thau had promised him that credit. Eddie Mannix backed up Fleming, but in March he again risked Mayer’s ire. The studio chief was trying to avoid paying Thalberg’s estate—that is, Fleming’s former lover Norma Shearer—what Thalberg would have been owed if alive. This time, Fleming went over Mayer’s head to Nicholas Schenck, the president of Loew’s in New York, and told him the studio had united behind Shearer and that shortchanging her would cost the company its Tiffany image. Schenck concurred.
Fleming shot final retakes on March 18, 1937, after which Tracy went into the hospital for a thyroid operation. “It looks all right, as nearly as you can tell before a preview,” Lighton wrote his family. “Bartholomew is very good, and Spencer Tracy is excellent. Hope it’s all right. It’s been a lot of work.” In the end, he was satisfied.
It’s amazing how much Captains Courageous and its director meant to its cast. After Fleming finished with Bartholomew, he growled, for comic effect, “Now we can get this kid off the set!” and mimed a kick. Bartholomew, playing along, leaped off and hit an iron railing, breaking a front tooth. Fleming thought he must have really kicked him or forced him to jump, but Bartholomew, his widow says, knew he hadn’t. The tooth was capped. Years later Bartholomew joked, “To my dying day, I’ll be able to brush my teeth and think of Victor Fleming.”
Rooney raved about Fleming: “He was a fabulous character . . . and so competent that you just knew he could have stepped in and filled any job on the production crew because Fleming was, above all else, a real technician who understood film and filmmaking.” Although Rooney’s character suffered most from the expansion of Manuel, Fleming handed him and Barrymore an unforgettable moment. On the We’re Here, Disko and Dan are all business, but in the final sequence, back home in Gloucester, Dan leans on Disko’s knee and the skipper lovingly pats the boy’s head—they are a father and son once again.
19
Test Pilot
During all the tumult, illness, and complications of Captains Courageous, Vic and Lu conceived a second child. “The stork will stalk the Victor Flemings in February,” the Los Angeles Times announced on December 23, 1936, and their new daughter was born on February 16. But settling on a name took months. “They’re still trying names on the Victor Fleming baby. And after seven weeks they can’t find one that fits,” ran one column in April. Victoria’s sister was called “Little Bit” before Sara Elizabeth was settled on. But that quickly became Sally.
Nearly twenty years after Fleming promised his mother that “some day I am going to have a house in California—wife and all that goes with it,” he finally did. That spring, he put $60,000 into buying property and building a ten-room house in Bel-Air, a still-expanding district of West Los Angeles. Designed by Kirtland Cutter, who also did the Balboa beach house, the new home sat on eleven acres of rough chaparral in Moraga Canyon. It was substantial and comfortable—the strong, silent type, built almost like a fort, with walls made with two-by-six studs, not two-by-fours, and bars on the daughters’ bedroom windows as a shield against kidnappers. In addition to a basement workshop and darkroom, Fleming installed a massive safe built to withstand the house’s destruction by a wildfire. The family had moved in by the time he started Test Pilot in December.
The daughters say the products of the workroom were usually quite delicate. “He liked to have things to do,” says Victoria. “He made a big bamboo bank to hang on the wall. He made a round box that opened up, and a penguin out of a walrus tusk.” Sally says there was also a carved pelican with “a tiny fish in its beak” and her father presented them with “a mailbox with our address, 1050 Moraga Drive, engraved on it. A tiny silver mailbox. On the end of this teeny chain was this piece of silver.”
“It was a lovely house,” said their neighbor, the film editor Watson Webb. “Very warm and cozy and very attractive, sort of a combination of Early American and a California ranch house. And totally unpretentious, not like something you’d find in [contemporary] Bel-Air for somebody who was big and successful.”
Of course, there was nothing unfashionable about it. The special-effects whiz Jack Cosgrove (who would work on Gone With the Wind and Joan of Arc), the MGM composer and arranger Adolph Deutsch, and the singer Allan Jones (who’d appeared in Reckless) were already neighbors, and the Gary Coopers lived nearby. Lu had selected the spot. A pair of hundred-foot pepper trees attracted her, and Fleming had the house built around them. “One was close to the swimming pool, and another shaded the porch,” said Victoria. Vic and Lu had separate bedrooms, hers in wallpaper and chintz, his in knotty pine; his enormous bed included a carved headboard, and the Kodiak bear rug dominated the room.
He lured a butler away from Deutsch: tall, dour, half-Indian, half-African-American Osceola Slocum, who also doubled as a chauffeur for Lu and the girls. Slocum’s wife, Robbie, was the live-in maid. The daughters eventually also had a live-in governess; early on, their father quickly discharged a nurse after she slapped one of them and he discovered the handprint.
Friends took notice of Fleming’s settling into traditional masculine maturity. Hawks’s biographer, Todd McCarthy, surmises that Vic’s fidelity to Lu prompted Hawks to continue womanizing, as if Vic had left the field to him; now Hawks could at last beat him at something. Fleming’s circle embraced Lu. With small groups such as Webb and the Lightons, Vic and Lu made a lovable couple. He was affectionate and attentive toward his wife, and, Webb said, “Lu was very warm, very nice, very easygoing, not attractive by standards of Hollywood glamour, but attractive as one who made a contribution to a group of people.”
Joan Marsh Morrill had a small role in The Wet Parade and is best remembered today as the poster girl who comes to life in All Quiet on the Western Front. She thought Lu was “a lot of fun, a great personality, and great around the house; I remember a copper bowl always filled with yellow nasturtiums.” Whatever Lu’s elusive charm, she was making Vic a family man. Nearly everyone knew of his womanizing past. Patsy Ruth Miller, now married to Mahin, thought Lu “very pleasant” but “not the sort of easygoing woman who would have accepted” philandering.
Captains Courageous had been one of MGM’s biggest grossers of 1937 as well as an Academy Award nominee for best picture, editing, and script, and Tracy won his first Oscar for best actor. Had it not split MGM’s vote with the prestige-laden Th
e Good Earth, it might have garnered nominations for Bartholomew and Fleming (Sidney Franklin was nominated for directing The Good Earth). On paper, Test Pilot didn’t promise similar critical and financial success. The generic title had kicked around the studio since 1933; pulp fiction writers such as L. Ron Hubbard had published stories with the same name. Gable was always attached to MGM’s version; in 1933, he and Harlow, along with Wallace Beery and Jimmy Durante, were slated for one incarnation of it, and MGM arranged with the War Department to film at Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio, before changing plans.
Nine writers ultimately had a hand in what became Fleming’s version, including, of course, Mahin. The official credits went to Frank “Spig” Wead for the original story and Vincent Lawrence and Waldemar Young for the script. (Lawrence was the playwright who taught Fleming, on Mantrap, that words in movies live or die on their dramatic context.) Wead was an authentic Annapolis-meets-Hollywood personality: in 1957, John Ford even made a John Wayne film about him, The Wings of Eagles. Wead had graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy and flown in World War I before breaking his back falling down a flight of stairs in 1927; then he became a playwright and screenwriter. Hawks had turned Wead’s 1935 play Ceiling Zero into an entertaining picture in the Fleming vein—indeed, Fleming, Wellman, and Tay Garnett had been on the wish list of the producer, Hal Wallis, before Hawks got the job.
Test Pilot turned out even better than Ceiling Zero—and, as on Captains Courageous, Fleming and the producer Louis Lighton were the two who pulled it together. The final product is full of characters and performances from MGM’s stock company, including Lionel Barrymore as the crusty, benevolent owner of Drake Aviation and Marjorie Main as a savvy landlady. Yet it’s a vibrant, personal picture.
Getting it made took persuasion. “Vic Fleming was the most exacting man on a job I ever knew,” the MGM production manager Eddie Mannix said. “Nobody wanted to play [Test Pilot]. Fleming brought it to me. I said, ‘Vic, I don’t understand it.’ He said, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with it.’ Nobody understood it. I said, ‘Come up and read me a sequence.’ I said the thing is underwritten. He said, ‘But we’ll show you.’ I said, ‘I’m sold.’ He had that confidence.”
Myrna Loy and Clark Gable didn’t understand the story, either. According to Hedda Hopper, Loy’s initial reaction was: “It’s incredible, it’s unbelievable, the dialogue is stilted and insincere, the theme is absurd.” Gable testified that when he read the script, “I wanted out because I didn’t understand what the story was getting at. But the director . . . explained the character and I was happy with the part and still am.” Loy would eventually call the picture “a personal favorite of mine.”
On the page, only Fleming could sense the potent tension between the Kansas farm girl Ann Barton (Loy) and the mechanic Gunner (Spencer Tracy) as they vie for the focus of the flying ace Jim Lane (Clark Gable). And on the page, only Fleming could see how powerful it would become to portray the true rival to Ann and Gunner as the wild blue yonder: “the lady in a blue dress,” an aviator’s ultimate seductress.
Fleming’s own flying time had begun to decrease sharply as his schedule became busier at MGM. He flew only seventeen solo hours in 1937, and by the end of 1938, his pilot license had lapsed because he hadn’t put in the minimum number of hours in the air required to keep it active. “I just didn’t have the heart to lie about it,” he said. “You have to fill out a form that says among other things you have flown fifteen hours during the past twelve months, and I couldn’t say I had without lying.” But an ambitious youngster, Sid Luft (he’d become Judy Garland’s third husband in 1952), remembered him as a regular presence at the Santa Monica Airport, where Fleming kept his Waco. “I was a kid then, building up my flying time and trying to get my commercial [license]. We’d just occasionally have some dialogue in the hangar.” Luft admired the Waco: “A nice airplane; it could cruise close to two hundred miles per hour. I had a Monocoupe I bought for $1,500. We used to bullshit about his plane and mine, and he seemed to know what he was doing.”
Fleming’s comprehension of the risks run by test pilots ran deep. The Lockheed Sirius that had bedeviled him in 1932 ended up in the hands of the Australian aviation pioneer Sir Charles Kingsford Smith, that nation’s Charles Lindbergh. “Smithy” had made the first transpacific flight from Oakland, California, to Australia, and set a record for flying solo between Australia and England—nine days and twenty-two hours. He had also briefly done stunt flying in silent pictures.
Kingsford Smith, who named the Lockheed the Lady Southern Cross and had it painted a bright blue, set another record with the plane in 1934, flying from Hawaii to Oakland in less than fifteen hours. Then he hopped down to Los Angeles, where the movie studios as well as local officials feted him. His last stop was with Fleming at MGM. If he expected pleasant conversation about the future of aviation, what he faced were blunt complaints from the aircraft’s former owner. “I never did have any luck in that plane,” Fleming told him in front of reporters. “It was always getting mysterious things the matter with it . . . Why, one time I flew in to Reno and had to come back by train. I developed a leaking tank. That’s why I sold it.” Kingsford Smith and his navigator “exchanged glances and smiled”—they had endured the same problem over the Pacific. Swamped in debt, Kingsford Smith wanted to sell the plane, possibly even to sell it back to Fleming. But he couldn’t find a buyer. He was competing in the 1935 England-to-Australia air race and operating on a thirty-six-hour sleep deficit when, on November 8, 1935, he crashed the plane into the Bay of Bengal.
Test Pilot placed similar life-or-death aeronautics into a Fleming-Lighton specialty—a buddy picture with the emotional intensity of an irresistible doomed romance. Gable’s Jim Lane, the test pilot for top-of-the-line Drake Aviation, uses dames and the bottle to siphon off tension after he breaks speed and altitude records. Spencer Tracy’s Gunner is as reliable and punctilious as Jim is seat-of-the-pants and breezy. Loy’s Ann Barton, a college-educated beauty, wins Jim’s heart and complicates both men’s lives.
MGM promoted the film—the only time Gable, Tracy, and Loy appeared together—as “The Captains Courageous of the Air.” Loy thought it a prime example “of what big-studio moviemaking could be: the writing, the directing, the photography, the technical expertise, the casting of that impeccable stock company.”
It also received a considerable publicity boost from a newly syndicated columnist, Ed Sullivan, who sought to raise his profile outside of his home city, New York, by sponsoring a “King and Queen of Hollywood” contest. Ballots ran in papers that carried his column, and though it’s facile to surmise that a studio fix was in, Gable and Loy, who won, were at the peak of their popularity during the filming of Test Pilot. The “Queen” title didn’t stick to Loy, but “King” did to Gable for the rest of his life.
In early December, Sullivan presented the actors with tin crowns for a newsreel, and in his account Fleming ended up directing the segment. Sullivan, whose wooden manner in front of a camera would become legendary with his long-running TV variety show, kept scrambling his consonants and saying Loy and Gable were the choice of “twenty million ficture pans.” Fleming halted filming and announced, “Stop being nervous, Sully, and let me hear you do it right this time.” A more revealing interchange took place when Sullivan had to cede the mike to Gable. “You might pretend to understand English even as Gable speaks it,” Fleming lectured. “Listen to him. He’s saying words and there must be a reaction from you.” Later he told Sullivan, “Don’t worry about it. Some of the alleged stars of this business are just as bad in scenes where they have to stand and listen. They’re all right if they can talk, but listening is the severest strain.”
The opening scene in Burbank has a beautiful bustle to it. Jim Lane is running late to break a cross-country record with the Drake Bullet. Gunner, fed up with waiting at the airport, goes to Jim’s hotel room, where one girl (Virginia Grey) waits for Jim as he arrives with another (Priscilla Lawson) on
his arm. It’s not yet panic time—as the reactions of Gunner and Drake tell us, it’s Jim’s standard procedure. Fleming retained his veracious edge, improvising around the script. Martin Spellman, who played one of the kids crowding the Drake Bullet near the runway and yelling for Lane to break a record, recalls Fleming telling Gable, “This scene needs a line from one of the kids in the crowd.” So Spellman got to ask Lane for his autograph. In the finished film, the crowd noise crushes that line, but it was smart for Fleming to treat Lane as a blue-sky star.
The Drake Bullet breaks an oil pump (somewhat like Fleming’s Lockheed), forcing Jim to land in a Kansas field in front of the droll, admiring eyes of Ann Barton. “You’re a funny-looking gazebo,” she tells him. She also sees him as a modern-day prince who rode into her field on a plane rather than on a white horse. Ann knows that for all Jim’s dash, he’s not chivalrous. He still represents the larger world, a new life, the unknown.
The following sequence captures the giddiness of an impossible impromptu courtship. Ann and Jim generate the helium high lovers can get just before Cupid aims and stings. Jim is a romantic figure, but he’s determined to make light of romance. They spend a day rooting for the home team at a baseball game in Wichita, then pop into a movie. As the lovers on-screen pitch woo, Ann mock-melts against Jim. (Fleming shot the flowery film within a film himself. The woman on-screen, Mary Howard, went on to play Ann Rutledge in Abe Lincoln in Illinois.) Before long, Ann is whooping it up in a borrowed twin-cockpit plane as Jim performs loop-the-loops.
Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) Page 33