His beloved Victoria, “Missy,” was three and Sally one. He was pouring more energy and effort into his Bel-Air home, including now a sizable pumpkin patch, which he was using to set up his land for an eventual orchard. Around this time he wrote:
I am the only farmer in Bel-Air, which is supposed to be a rather exclusive residential colony in Hollywood. My neighbors are famous stars and executives. Carey Wilson, the writer and a studio colleague, is one. Gene Raymond and Jeanette MacDonald, Carole Lombard, Clark Gable and W. C. Fields are others. So far none of them has entered a protest against my own two acres under cultivation. Under the peculiar law of the state, I get special water rates as a farmer. It costs the rest of them more to sprinkle their lawns than I pay for irrigating my farm. And furthermore, if they want homemade pumpkin pie, they come to me for the pumpkins. Mine are the best in this section of the country.
The one farmer in Bel-Air presented a formidable, stylish presence on the MGM lot. As he approached his fifties and his hair began to gray, Fleming began dressing almost uniformly in shades of gray as well; perhaps his only outward sign of eccentricity, it made him look like a jaunty Southern California banker. Gable sometimes adopted the style for himself, but for Fleming it was virtually a daily look, one he kept for the rest of his life. “Flem was very conservative,” says the tailor Eddie Schmidt Jr. “He was not a wild man.” Schmidt’s father made Vic look natty, and his butler, Slocum, kept his wardrobe in perfect order. His niece Yvonne marveled, “[Slocum] would tidy them up and put them at the far right end of the closet. And then the next day he would get in the left-hand side of the closet, and those would be all ready to go. It was beautifully done and he looked like a model at all times. He was absolutely a perfectionist about quality. And he said to me, this was when I was quite young, ‘Don’t ever buy two of anything. Buy one good thing!’ Which I thought was a very good idea.” The actor Norman Lloyd remembers seeing Fleming at a distance and thinking, “Now that’s the way to look in this town!”
Fleming dressed like the old-school swells Astaire and Cooper, wearing “a lot of Shetland jackets with two-button flaps and side vents,” gray trousers, “and understated ties,” Schmidt recalls. He wasn’t the man for “plaids or a bright white stripe on dark blue stripes.”
One legend had it that “he demanded the choicest dressing room and, on location, the biggest trailer.” Actually, he got them simply for being MGM’s most prominent director, just as, because of his popularity with the stock company, “an extra quota of stars . . . appeared in tribute to him” at the premieres of his movies, though another legend had it that he never attended his own premieres.
Even at his zenith, he may have felt some insecurity about rising from San Dimas into Hollywood aristocracy. One man who thought he saw a taste of this was the freelance director Edward Ludwig. He worked at MGM on The Last Gangster with John Lee Mahin around the same time Fleming and Mahin did Captains Courageous, and he later directed John Wayne in the anticommunist movie Big Jim McLain (1952). Ludwig had a secretary he brought from studio to studio, and he told his nephew Julian that “she would suddenly be close to tears or in tears when he came to check up on things at his office at MGM. She said this director who used to drive for her family kept ignoring her whenever she tried to say hello to him at the commissary. She’d go by his spot at the director’s table and he’d not even recognize her.” That director was Fleming. When Edward Ludwig heard the story, he explained to the distressed girl that Fleming was “quite a good director and probably had his mind on his next shot.” But the last time it happened, “Fleming walked right by her when she was standing in line to pay for her lunch. She just wanted to try to say hello to a guy she once knew, and all the other secretaries thought she was making a pitch for a big director.”
That insult set off Ludwig. His nephew recalled, “He went to Fleming’s set and told him something like, ‘I’ve got a part in my picture that calls for a big lummox of a driver, someone who knows about cars—you’d look like you’d be perfect for the part!’ I think they would have really gone at each other if the other people on the set hadn’t separated them.”
Ludwig may have been right the first time, when he told his secretary that Fleming had his mind on his next shot. Assuming that she was part of that wealthy Santa Barbaran Clinton Hale’s extended family, she may have wrongly presumed that Fleming retained a familiarity with, or respect for, her name. And that anecdote offers a minority report on Vic in this bustling period.
The MGM publicist Norman Geiger said he was just “a real solid guy who didn’t take any crap from anybody” and didn’t let studio politics affect him: “He knew where he was going and how he was going to get there.” Lawrence Bachmann, a junior writer at Metro in the late 1930s, remembered Fleming as “almost a legend at that time.” Joseph Newman, who started as an MGM office boy and went on to direct the sci-fi cult favorite This Island Earth (1955), considered Fleming to be “a man respected by everybody.” To Newman, he was not a mingler like George Hill, Woody Van Dyke, or Robert Z. “Pop” Leonard, but also not a snob: “Just a little bit aloof.” Newman said everyone knew he was “also successful [directing] women.”
And, of course, children. In July 1938, he assumed command from Richard Thorpe for two days of retakes on The Crowd Roars before pitching in for Jack Conway on another pairing of Gable and Loy, Too Hot to Handle. Gene Reynolds, a child actor and future TV director, writer, and producer (notably for M*A*S*H ), who’d had an unbilled role as one of the schoolboys in Captains Courageous, acted for Fleming in The Crowd Roars. Reynolds played the Robert Taylor character as a young boy (“in those days, the opening reel often showed the stars’ characters as children so you’d see the characters being formed”). Frank Morgan played Reynolds’s father; the scene took place in a bar where Morgan was getting drunk. Morgan receives a telegram, then sticks it in his pocket; it falls out, and the boy picks it up and reads it. That’s how Reynolds’s character learns that his mother has died.
“We shot it once or twice, but Victor wasn’t satisfied with what I was doing,” Reynolds recalls. Fleming approached the boy and instructed him: “You pick up this letter and you read it—this note of your mother dying.” And then he said, simply, “You cry.” For Reynolds, the secret of Fleming’s communication was his own “sensitivity, sensibility, and vulnerability.” And Fleming agreed. He isolated “sensitivity—that quickness of inner response on which the director depends in getting across the characterization” as the quality that a filmmaker must not only share with his stars but also “know how to use.” Even as a gun for hire or a Mr. Fix-It, he was an actor’s director: “Stars and players are the instruments through which [a director] breathes life into a story.”
Fleming’s largest back-lot salvage job to date arrived one month later. “Vienna seen through American eyes,” ran one of MGM’s ad lines for The Great Waltz—though as its star, Fernand Gravet, pointed out, “there wasn’t a single American on the film except for Victor Fleming, and he wasn’t originally slated for it.” Made in 1938, the year of the story in The Sound of Music, and set in the 1840s, it, too, had songs with lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, and it, too, conjured a musical fantasy of an Austria brimming with gemütlichkeit. Completed before Hitler annexed Austria but released eight months afterward, it fictionalized and conflated the careers of Johann Strauss Jr. and his father.
It hails Johann junior, or “Schani,” as the Waltz King whose music revolutionizes Viennese social life against the background of a student-led revolt against the omnipotent chancellor Metternich and his befuddled absolute monarch, the emperor Ferdinand. Strauss senior never appears on-screen and is notable in the narrative only for trying to get his son to be a bank clerk; when Franz Josef, Ferdinand’s nephew, is installed as emperor, the protesters greet it as a victory, though they can’t know then that he’ll be a benevolent ruler. In small print under the credits, the moviemakers confess that except for Strauss II and Franz Josef I, “the events and c
haracters depicted in this photoplay are fictitious.” To squash in-house haggling over the written prologue to the movie, one MGM functionary advised, “Strauss having died about 39 years ago and his second wife having recently died, there is no one living who would be connected.”
In bold kitsch strokes, the movie depicts a musical youth culture buoying up bourgeois Vienna, a city where Strauss can gather an orchestra from the ranks of his future father-in-law’s bakers. Luise Rainer, fresh from her back-to-back Oscars for The Great Ziegfeld and The Good Earth, plays the selfless and adoring Poldi, who marries Strauss. Miliza Korjus, a coloratura soprano, plays the cosmopolitan opera star Carla Donner, who almost woos Schani away from Poldi— although Joseph Breen warned against “any suggestion that there is an adulterous relationship between Carla and Schani.” MGM had bought the title, which previously graced an operetta in Vienna and London and a Broadway spectacular, and commissioned a whole new script (story by Gottfried Reinhardt; screenplay by Samuel Hoffenstein and Walter Reisch) and score (the composer Dimitri Tiomkin adapting Strauss for Hammerstein).
If Fleming had initiated the project, it might be possible to read in it some presentiment of the conflict he would face between fidelity to his hausfrau, Lu, and rapture for Ingrid Bergman, who in a few years would be enthralled by him and his talent. But MGM brought Fleming onto this film simply to fix it (the studio gave a little work on it to Josef von Sternberg, too). The sole credited director is the Gallic master craftsman Julien Duvivier, who had become one of France’s “Big Five” with such masterpieces of poetic realism as Poil de carotte, Pépé le Moko, and Un carnet de bal. Duvivier, like Jacques Feyder (the deposed director of Red Dust) and René Clair and Jean Renoir, learned that Hollywood production methods demanded as much political savvy and generalship as sensibility. (The fifth man of the Big Five, Marcel Carné, never attempted the leap.) Duvivier “made magnificent pictures in Paris, where he had charge of everything,” said William Wyler the following year. “But in Hollywood he couldn’t make a picture. Why? He wasn’t given a chance to express himself. Someone else was always overruling him. Believe me, those producers who take authority away from the directors are seriously hurting the business.”
The producer-culprit was the Thalberg associate Bernard Hyman. All Hyman’s initial choices made sense—the Berlin-born story writer Reinhardt was the son of the fabled theater director Max Reinhardt, who had most recently co-directed the sometimes magical film of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Gottfried Reinhardt would become an MGM producer ( John Huston’s Red Badge of Courage) and eventually direct himself (Town Without Pity). But Hyman’s goal once he hired men like Reinhardt was simply to spread out a deluxe cultural smorgas-bord. The composer-arranger Tiomkin obtained four Stradivarius violins at $10,000 each, and MGM spent lavishly for rights to dozens of waltzes.
Reinhardt persuaded Thalberg to hire Korjus, a film novice celebrated in European operatic circles for her altissimo, after playing a record of her singing Strauss’s “Voices of Spring” over the phone from Europe. And Hyman became a believer after Reinhardt played him a recording of Korjus singing the “Queen of the Night” aria from Mozart’s Magic Flute. “Transported” by Korjus’s high notes, Hyman declared he would put that aria in the picture, and when Reinhardt noted that the picture was about Strauss, not Mozart, Hyman retorted, “Who the hell is going to stop me?” (The original script invokes the aria with a wink, when a starstruck Strauss says he heard Donner sing it at the Imperial Opera; in the film, he refers to seeing Norma.)
While the Estonian-born Korjus learned English and shed weight, Duvivier assembled her cast mates and pitched in on Woody Van Dyke’s Marie Antoinette. Thalberg and Hyman considered Nelson Eddy for Strauss, but when shooting began, all the leads were European. Rainer was Vienna-born—she had worked with Max Reinhardt—and Fernand Gravet was Belgian-born and became a film star in France, though Mervyn LeRoy put him under personal contract and he spoke English without an accent. Duvivier shot from May to the end of June. “I got exactly what I wanted,” he told his fellow Parisians. “They gave me two million dollars to make my movie.” MGM designed a splashy trick magazine spread inculcating the idea that they were making The Great Ziegfeld in waltz time. “Korjus—pronounced ‘Gorgeous’ ” was Hollywood’s way of introducing its new musical star to the heartland; Korjus later used that line for a self-produced LP.
The studio finalized writers’ credits on July 5—and almost immediately sent Duvivier back to France and laid plans to remake his movie. Executives found his Great Waltz too dark—often literally, with many atmospheric night scenes—and Korjus’s part too brittle. “New policy at MGM,” wrote Ed Sullivan. “If a director doesn’t measure up to the front office standard he is relieved immediately. Victor Fleming was rushed in on ‘Too Hot to Handle.’ Then Fleming was rushed in on ‘The Great Waltz.’ ” Fleming began reshoots on August 5 and put Mahin on the movie’s payroll three days later. Fleming wanted Mahin on anyway, but hiring him instead of the original writers to create or revamp scenes consolidated his position and froze out Hyman’s team. By now, he had become both a master director and one who knew how to throw his weight around.
Even if the front office complained that the dailies were murky or odd, the studio later lobbied for the cinematographer Joseph Ruttenberg to win an Oscar for the movie—and he might be the one most responsible for the film’s visual unity. (Fleming would hire him a few years later for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.) MGM’s problem with Duvivier was more basic than unconventional photography. In the record left by his shooting script, Duvivier’s hints of sophistication don’t fit a scenario that, in exuberant cartoon form, depicts the rise, midlife crisis, and apotheosis of an artist. The story starts with Strauss losing his bank job for writing waltzes on company time. He pulls together an orchestra—the conceit is that every room or workplace in Vienna contains at least one musician—and then makes his debut at Dommayer’s Casino.
In reality, Strauss did make his debut there, but it was a rousing historical event: the upstart son challenging the cultural primacy of his disapproving father. In the movie, apart from Poldi and her parents, hardly anyone shows up except Carla Donner and her escort, who insist the music continue despite the owner’s intention to close for the night. When she departs to attend a party at her lover’s palace (leaving word that Strauss should go there, too), Dommayer huffs off and opens up the windows on the way out, figuring that whoever wants to listen might as well listen for free. The breeze carries Strauss’s glorious music into crowded sidewalks and cafés—it’s the waltz called “An Artist’s Life”—and everyone within earshot surges into the casino. It’s the prototype of the music-sweeping-the-nation sequences in movies about jitterbugs or rock and rollers. Strauss arrives at Donner’s party flush with success, ready to play along when she decides to risk aesthetic scandal and sing one of his waltzes.
Duvivier then convoluted matters considerably. In the script he shot, Carla kisses Strauss in the palace’s “quiet room” before the performance; her noble lover, Count Hohenfried, arrives before that kiss can go anywhere. Then, during the performance, she angers Strauss with the way she takes the song-waltz over musically, making it her own with the brilliance of her “embroidered cadenzas” and “coloratura obbligato” and daringly prolonged trill. Strauss leaves spluttering about the honesty of his music and the good Viennese who dance to it. When the movie audience has just gotten a chance to glory in Strauss’s music and sample upper-crust sexual confusion, could the composer’s disagreement with the singer ever have been made clear and persuasive?
In the Fleming-Mahin version, Carla’s performance, relatively straightforward, occurs before the flirtation in the quiet room—and it seduces everyone, including Strauss. (Korjus’s singing is the only glory in the movie.) And Fleming and Mahin don’t merely place the scene in the quiet room afterward: this time Donner caps it by kissing her protector, Count Hohenfried, who adorns her with a dazzling necklace. That’s when Strauss comp
rehends that among celebrities and noblemen, love can be mysterious and enraging. Upon leaving Donner with Hohenfried, Strauss sees Poldi waiting in the street; she’s sensed that he (and their love) might be in danger. After a policeman mistakes them for man and wife, Fleming cuts to their wedding party, a corny yet exhilarating Fleming-Mahin invention in which Schani wins a bride and a good business partner (Hugh Herbert) simultaneously.
Luise Rainer says, “They shot all the scenes over because they wanted to have more of Miliza Korjus.” Yet it was not about adding more scenes for Korjus but making the ones already there more vivid and accessible. (Fleming’s instincts worked: Korjus won a best supporting actress nomination, and Tom Held, who did Test Pilot, was again nominated for best editor.) Rainer goes on, “I always jokingly said to my friends that after Duvivier had done the film, it was a film of Mrs. Strauss not Mr. Strauss. Then he was replaced with Fleming, who made a film of Mr. Strauss”—a legend similar to that of Fleming taking over Gone With the Wind and putting the focus on Gable’s Rhett Butler rather than the women.
Rainer, in truth, retains her big scenes in Fleming’s overhaul, though the director did some snipping: for example, Poldi doesn’t tell Carla in the diva’s dressing room that she intended to kill her. (She does carry a gun, and the full bit even made the trailer.) Rainer found Fleming “a very good man to work with.” Unfortunately, she was “rather miserable because the whole thing was supposed to be practically over when he started.” Did she think Fleming dashing? “He probably was dashing, but it escaped me. But then, I was very occupied.” Part of what occupied her: she was in the middle of her draining three-year marriage to the playwright and screenwriter Clifford Odets. The columnist Jimmie Fidler observed that during a scene with Gravet, “her eyes suddenly filmed over with tears, her voice trembled and she seemed on the verge of breaking down. A tall woman dashed on the set, threw her arm around Luise, and led her away, talking German like mad. The talker was Miliza Korjus and before long she had Luise back at work.”
Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) Page 35