Fleming stayed in constant touch with his mother and sisters, made occasional visits, and always arranged for them to have tickets to previews of his films if they wanted them. But he never sought their approval of Lu, and she never made much of an effort to be close to his family or make them feel welcome at Moraga Drive. Lu’s mother, who had remarried, and her two sisters, Georgiana Kohler, a seamstress, and Evelyn Wenchell, a bill collector, all lived in Los Angeles by the 1930s but were kept at a similar chilly distance. “I never saw my aunt Georgie at the house, never saw any of my mother’s relatives, never saw any of my father’s relatives,” says Sally. One Easter, Eva sent Fleming’s niece Yvonne over with a gift of two baby chicks. Slocum took them at the door but didn’t invite Yvonne inside. Whenever Edward Hartman was helping his father with repair work or performing some small jobs himself, “Lu was never around. I’d talk to Slocum, and if Clark Gable was visiting, I’d talk to him, but I never saw Lu. She was always out somewhere.”
Fleming seldom took Lu and his daughters on his annual Christmas visit to his mother’s house, but the always practical Eva demonstrated her own brand of hospitality. The Flemings wrapped their gifts to her in wide satin ribbons. Eva took the accumulated ribbons, shaped and sewed them, and gave them back to her son as a quilt. For the holiday, she would always make her son what she called a “sunshine cake” because of its multicolored sugar dots.
Sally says she and Victoria learned “constancy,” also “friendliness, outdoor living. We all had little boats to go in, and we all learned to fish. We had bicycles and motor scooters.” So did their father. In the years when gas rationing prevented Hollywood’s sailors and pilots from exercising their wanderlust in yachts or planes, he and Hawks anchored a loosely organized Bel-Air motorcycle gang, the Moraga Spit and Polish Club. The bikers would gather at Fleming’s place on Sundays for jaunts on local hills and canyons and across the San Fernando Valley, or for road trips as far away as Malibu or Las Vegas. Members included a third great director, William Wellman; Zeppo Marx; Gable, Robert Taylor, and an up-and-coming heartthrob, Van Johnson; the stalwart character actors Keenan Wynn and Andy Devine (who’d appeared in The Farmer Takes a Wife); the stunt driver Carey Loftin, who later worked on such milestones as The Wild One (1953) and Bullitt (1968); Bill Lear, who went on to create the Learjet; Vance Breeze, the pilot who tested the P-51 Mustang; and the aircraft manufacturer Al Menasco, also a close friend of Gable’s.
Fleming never saw motorcycling as a men’s-only activity. He took Judy Garland up and down the Bel-Air canyons in 1939; unfortunately, she nearly upended the actress Jean Parker and her husband, who were riding on horseback. And despite the Moraga Spit and Polish Club’s macho aura, several wives rode with the bulls: Dorothy “Dottie” Wellman, Dorothy “Doagie” Devine, and Zeppo Marx’s wife, Marion. Barbara Stanwyck occasionally came along, too, on the back of Taylor’s bike. The Devines and the Wellmans made a fabled drive to Vegas, sending club clothes ahead; white-jacketed waiters served them a catered lunch behind a billboard in the Mojave Desert. Slim Hawks designed Moraga Spit and Polish Club sweatshirts and jackets. She was the one who named the group to mock the men as motorcycle dandies. “They spent more time fussing with [the bikes] than they did riding them, really,” said Dottie.
The Harley-Davidson riders bought their bikes in Pomona from Ben Campanale, a Daytona 200 champion. “It was not what you think of today, in Harleys and black,” Hawks’s son, David, recalls. “They were mostly into English and foreign bikes.” Fleming owned a turquoise Harley, but his favorite motorcycle was British, black with pinstripes, called the Ariel Square Four because of its unique engine design. “It had a cigarette lighter custom-mounted on the handlebars,” David notes. The general wisdom of the club, says Devine’s son Tad, was that it was engineered like a Swiss watch and hummed like a sewing machine.
It was “just a group of guys who like to go out and ride motorcycles on Sunday,” said David. “Not ne’er-do-wells looking for people to bash—or a bunch of thugs, quoting the rumors.” He compares it to “the camaraderie and clubbiness” of drivers in the early days of sports cars. Motorcycling hadn’t won the notoriety that it would after The Wild One. Cyclists who passed each other would give each other a friendly wave or a thumbs-up. “We’d do it to motorcycle cops, too,” said Dottie, “’cause they’d wave back to us unless they were in a mean mood, you know—and then they’d see there was a girl on a motorcycle!” Dottie had a Harley of her own. During one Sunday barbecue and tune-up session, Dottie told Fleming and Gable that her bike sounded “kind of funny.” They “started pulling things out and testing and fussing.” When Dottie asked, “Hey, do you guys know what you’re doing?” they simultaneously said, “No!” They kept on fooling with the Harley until they put it back together, saying, “Now try it.” “Scary,” she thought. But it worked: “Oh, yeah, they knew what they were doing.”
A score of bikers might take off from the Flemings’ house, then stop at the Devines’ five-acre “ranchette” in Van Nuys. Because the Flemings and the Devines farmed their land, they earned extra gas-ration coupons during the war and maintained their own gas pumps. (Fleming was always generous with his friends: “Howard [Hawks] borrowed large sums of money from Victor Fleming at various times,” said the screenwriter Wells Root.) Taylor sported a leather jacket, which protected him when he fell after his bike hit gravel rounding a curve. But David Hawks says most of the guys showed up as if dressed for a tailgate party, wearing “Levi’s or nice shirts or sweaters or jackets—sporting clothes, like you’d [wear] to go to a football game.” At the Devines’, they congregated under a walnut tree that spread between the house and the garage; carved on top of a large bench in the middle was “Liar’s Bench, Moraga Spit and Polish Club.” Tad Devine remembers that it would “take sometimes the better part of an hour for the group to assemble. Actors, directors, stuntmen, cameramen, grips, and electricians. It wasn’t just an elite group.”
Even though Mahin and Patsy Ruth Miller didn’t like motorcycles, the group would sometimes stop at the Mahins’ place in Encino, dubbed “the Farm.” (“It wasn’t exactly a farm,” Miller wrote, “but we did have a cow, some chickens, a large, mean rooster and some horses in addition to a few fruit trees. Sometimes, with any luck, we had a few ears of corn and a cucumber or two.”) Fleming would “exchange some studio gossip” with Mahin, Miller wrote, and tease her about her haircut, her woefully undisciplined dogs, or her “very conservative” politics—a session that might have shed some light on his own conservative but elusive politics. He was godfather to Mahin and Miller’s son, Timothy, who most vividly recalls being deposited on Fleming’s Kodiak bear rug: “I was put on a bear rug with a genuine bear head attached, fangs bared, and I was scared!”
The stars and directors generally left daredevil exploits to the stunt driver Loftin, the test pilot Breeze, or the roughrider Wynn, who later wrote, “I think [Vic] rode for the same reason I did—to hold onto the feeling of being still on the leeward side of forty.” Van Johnson, Wynn said, would just go “plugging along, enjoying himself, and leaving the hell-for-leather stuff to hotter heads than his.” David Hawks has “fond memories of nice calm cruises, and hill climbs up Topanga Canyon” when it was undeveloped. He says his dad and Fleming would “drive out and watch guys do the big hills; we’d do small hills.”
Gable wasn’t the biker that Fleming was. As Wynn wrote in his autobiography, Ed Wynn’s Son, “He was converted into a steady rider, content to jockey along in the middle of whatever pack he was out with, just taking it easy.” But Gable was adept at improvising in a crisis. Wynn recalled a Fleming spill in 1946 that occurred when he was “twenty or thirty miles from his house, scrabbling up a deep rutted track.” Gable reworked his scarf into “a rough sling,” then offered to get “a Jeep or something” to bring him and the motorcycle home. Fleming would have none of it. “Forget it,” he said. “I rode this bike up here, and I’m going to ride it down.” The gang helped him on and got th
e motorcycle going as he “pushed off, making one hand work for two,” then endured “two hours of pounding” on what turned out to be a broken collarbone.
This bunch didn’t actively court danger, says David Hawks: “They just enjoyed going on local trips and had a good time and socialized.” Still, he wasn’t around when Fleming, Gable, and Loftin played motor tag at ninety miles an hour on fifteen miles of open road outside Los Angeles. Fleming was on his Ariel, Gable on his Knucklehead Twin Harley, and Loftin on a Rudge Ulster. “We opened them up, full throttle,” said Loftin. “Gable and Fleming didn’t think I’d be able to keep up with them on that Ulster. But they were wrong. I sat straight up like a farmer and moved to the head of the pack. As it turned out, my bike could easily go to 120, while Clark’s Harley could barely break 100.”
Slim didn’t ride motorcycles. Otherwise she was the perfect spouse to complete this picture. By the time Hawks married her, after a three-year wait for his divorce from Athole Shearer, she was competitive at manly sports. William Powell had called her “the Slim Princess,” and even though only the “Slim” stuck, she comported herself like royalty. Slim became the muse for Hawks pictures from Only Angels Have Wings to The Big Sleep that immortalized “the Hawks woman”—a gal who could talk as smart and tough as any man and dish out and take as much emotional punishment. Slim brought Lauren Bacall to Hawks’s attention after seeing her photo in Harper’s Bazaar—and Bacall perfectly embodied the Hawks woman when the director paired her with Humphrey Bogart in her first movie, 1944’s To Have and Have Not, then followed it up with The Big Sleep. Hawks even gave Bacall’s character the same nickname in To Have and Have Not: she’s billed as Marie “Slim” Browning.
With a homegrown sense of understated American high style, the real-life Slim decorated Hawks’s Moraga ranch herself. It would eventually include stables, barns, and a riding ring. “She was clearly very, very bright, very original in looks and thought, and very straightforward,” Bacall wrote of Slim. “And with humor.” Bacall found Lu at least “friendly.” Sally Fleming liked Slim’s occasional flamboyance. “She painted the toenails on Oliver, her poodle. She was very much that way, you know. Very clever.”
Before they made To Have and Have Not, Bacall was shocked when Hawks, over lunch, casually asked her, “Do you notice how noisy it is in here suddenly? That’s because Leo Forbstein just walked in—Jews always make more noise.” Slim told Bacall that her husband “didn’t want any Jews in his house” except for his agent, Charles K. Feldman—as if Slim and Howard didn’t know that Bacall was Jewish, too. Hawks’s anti-Semitism wouldn’t have upset Slim. Her father, Edward Gross, a prosperous German-born businessman, was an anti-Semite, also anti-Catholic and generally intolerant. Slim branded Lu with a tasteless nickname that reflected Slim’s own upbringing. “Mother was not a beauty,” says Victoria. “Her nose was not small and cute. And Slim decided this made her look Jewish. You know what she used to call her? Lu the Jew. All in love, you know.”
Lu didn’t have Jewish parents. Her father’s family was Protestant, and on her mother’s side some ancestors were German Catholics who had emigrated from Russia. But as with stories about Fleming’s Cherokee ancestry, the nickname stuck. Slim “gave Mother a gold bangle, something you’d wear on a bracelet,” says Sally. “On one side was engraved ‘L the J,’ and on the other side, ‘I love you, Miss Schmaltz.’ ” Lu, whose real opinion of the nickname is not known, was outwardly accepting of it and attached the bangle to a gold bracelet that Clark Gable had given her.
Like many a rhyming nickname, it spread quickly. Fleming’s relatives, who barely knew Lu and disliked her, anyway, found in it an explanation of her disdain of them. “You mean True Blue Lu, the Little Jew?” asked Yvonne Blocksom. “I always called her Truie. I never really liked her very much, and she didn’t like me. She put me down as much as she could.” Rodger Swearingen recalls being told that Lu really was Jewish.
Edward Hartman offers a gentler explanation for the family antagonism. “Lu literally blew Vic out of our lives when he married her. He just dropped Yvonne and Newell [Morris] after supporting them all their lives. It was a real blow to them.”
Of course, in that era, even sophisticated adults found it difficult to sort out prejudice from banter. Some ethnic and racial goading derived from xenophobia and snobbery, some from the spirited give-and-take of a melting pot that was still bubbling. Leonora Hornblow, Arthur Hornblow’s wife, thought Slim was purely affectionate, not anti-Semitic at all, when Slim told her, “I’m having lunch with Lu the Jew.” Fleming’s daughters said that whenever they heard him and his friends complain about “the goddamn Jews,” it was about studio politics. Hornblow agrees. “David O. Selznick just ate up directors. Darryl Zanuck wasn’t Jewish, and he could be appalling, and Harry Cohn was Jewish, and was appalling. Ben Hecht was a passionate Jew and he really liked Victor. It wasn’t the place to be an anti-Semite.”
More than her ethnic humor, Slim’s chic would have rubbed Fleming the wrong way. Jane Greer did remember him playing croquet at the Hawks house. But Hedda Hopper reported that when Slim made a list of best-dressed women in 1945, he called Hawks to “razz him about the money it was going to cost him for her to live up to that reputation.” Dottie Wellman recalled, “I know the first party we went to there, Slim said, ‘Oh, we’re going to barbecue.’ I said, ‘Fine, so it’s casual.’ And I go over there to barbecue, [and] the gals all have on—like a uniform—black pants, gorgeous satin blouses, with lots of jewelry. And this is barbecue dress?”
Not surprisingly, the ambitious Bowmans became Slim’s fast friends. Slim was godmother to Lee junior. Bacall recalled a 1943 bash at Hawks’s place where the luminaries included Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, Johnny Mercer and Hoagy Carmichael. She spent the evening dancing with Lee Bowman “and flirting, of course . . . I wanted something of my own, and, failing that, was willing to flirt outrageously with a man like Lee Bowman. I went a bit far that night and Helene Bowman was less than thrilled with me, for which I could not blame her one bit. Lee took me home—somewhere along the way it was daylight, and I remember sitting on a diving board in my evening dress and then dancing with him. Harmless, and I enjoyed it completely.”
Nothing, however, not even Slim’s friendship with the Bowmans, soured Fleming on Howard Hawks. “They were the very closest of friends,” recalled Hornblow. “Howard was an ice cube, cold; Victor was not cold. Howard was a wonderful director, but they were different, and their work was different.” Their boyish bond endured despite slashing contrasts in psychology and temperament. For reasons known only to themselves, they persisted in calling each other Dan or Ed. “They used to make each other presents,” Sally says. “He made Daddy these silver things that go around a casing for matches. He engraved it ‘Ed and Lu.’ ”
They’d goad each other deliberately and playfully. Edward Hartman recalls, “Hawks had dogs over there that barked at night. They woke Vic up and it really pissed him off. So he had me collect tin cans, and he hung them up on a string on the fence between their properties. And he had a wire that ran into his bedroom, so the next time the dogs started to bark and howl, he’d yank the wire, rattle those cans, and make even more noise. That situation lasted about two weeks, and finally they found a way to shut their dogs up.” Fleming may have found Hawks’s notorious yarn spinning funny. Vidor said he and Jules Furthman “just told stories about Hawks” the way other Hollywoodians would tell stories about Sam Goldwyn.
Slim Hawks’s family lived in Steinbeck country, but were hardly Steinbeck characters. She came from Pacific Grove, a fashionable spot at the top of the Monterey peninsula. Her father didn’t work on Cannery Row—he owned most of Cannery Row. They were the hoity-toity opposites of the hoi polloi in Steinbeck’s first best seller, Tortilla Flat.
Fleming directed an adaptation of that episodic novel during the winter of 1941–42. Other projects had come his way; MGM had started to develop Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea for Fleming while he
was in the midst of The Wizard of Oz. But after the storms and strains of Oz, Gone With the Wind, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and his aborted Yearling, Tortilla Flat promised to be (and was) idyllic. It fit this easygoing moment of his life. For Steinbeck, writing the novel was a lark, and it reads like one: a relaxed comedy of bad manners set among the paisanos of Monterey, California. Steinbeck presents this mixed-Hispanic people as the salt of the earth—make that the tortillas and beans, since their children astonish authorities by achieving health with that staple diet. The novel teeters on the brink of condescension toward paisanos but never becomes a Monterey version of Erskine Caldwell’s pandering Tobacco Road. ( Jack Kirkland had adapted both books for the Broadway stage; Tortilla Flat proved as big a flop as Tobacco Road had been a hit.)
Building on anecdotes provided by Monterey friends as well as Monterey cops and others who lived and worked with paisanos, Steinbeck makes them figures of fable as well as earthy fun. A rascal named Danny sets the novel in motion when he inherits two houses in Monterey from his grandfather. What underlies the sprawling content is the idea that owning property entails life-altering risks. Steinbeck’s madcap variation on Marxism pales before the secondary idea that when Danny, Pilon, and the rest of their friends adopt one house as their base (the other goes down in flames), they grow akin to Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. But their code, as well as their camaraderie, rests on slackerdom, not chivalry.
It’s sad and funny to read in literary studies that the movie softens the book or muddles its intentions. There’s nothing softer or more muddled in either book or film than the novel’s ending, which strains to turn Danny’s house into a ruined Camelot by having him go mad. Aside from Steinbeck’s sometimes ironic but always real attachment to its characters, what unifies the book is the paisanos’ ability to believe in their own lies or illusions.
Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) Page 50