He was sincere about the “moment” part. On June 15, the Los Angeles Times published an interview in which Anderson said “he had no choice” in the final shaping of the script but hoped “the idea that faith can meet the challenge of corruption will stand out strongly.” Four days later, Anderson elaborated his regrets to The New York Times, stating that Hollywood producers “feel compelled to take into account in whatever they do” the entertainment demands of the broadest possible mass audience. “We’ve had no quarrel with Max about these things,” Fleming said, for the public. “He knew when he came out here that he would have to make a lot of changes. In fact, he started making them before he came here.”
But in private, two days earlier, Wanger, at breakfast at the Polo Lounge, tried to persuade Anderson “to soft-soap Ingrid,” and at lunch Fleming said, even more ominously, “The reins have been snatched from my hands.” That afternoon Bergman presented her version of the script from Joan receiving that wake-up call from her voices right up to the Battle of Orléans. “I pointed out that she had taken out the little girl feeling from the script altogether,” wrote Anderson. On June 23, he turned in the introductory sequence of Joan at Domrémy in Lorraine, and Bergman read Fleming and Anderson her version of the Battle of Orléans. “I disagreed violently on two points,” Anderson wrote, “and she gave in on both.” But Bergman held her ground on the elimination of the voices and the sheepcote. The next day she came to see the writers in Solt’s office and “kissed us both for the ‘wonderful opening’—told us she knew now nobody could write like us.”
After so many pitched battles, Anderson had grown fatigued. The script had gotten away from him, and so had Bergman’s interpretation of Joan. Whatever faith he had in the production rested on Vic and an isolated casting coup or two. One was Fleming’s casting of José Ferrer as the Dauphin; Ferrer had acted in the original production of Key Largo and won a Tony for his Cyrano de Bergerac when Bergman won for Joan of Lorraine. Ferrer did prove to be one bright spot in the finished movie, creating a medieval weasel without resorting to camp mannerisms. Ferrer’s Dauphin is a small man in every sense of the word; what makes him piquant is that he knows it. Fleming said, “I chose him . . . not only because he approximates a physical resemblance to the character, but because I knew he would attack the part with more enthusiasm than some actor who wished to return home to the swimming pool.” As a matter of fact, he was taking a rare public swipe at Lee Bowman, who’d appeared in Wanger’s Susan Hayward hit Smash-Up and had tested for the Dauphin. For his part, Ferrer told the technical adviser Father Paul Doncoeur that he took the role “to earn some money” and would “not come back” to Hollywood. But Joan of Arc ended up launching Ferrer on a significant film career as an actor and an actor-director.
For a rising star like Ferrer, Joan of Arc held the excitement of a baptism by fire. But Anderson, a Broadway luminary for two decades, was in the unusually demeaning position of being dependent on a star’s approval, of feeling succored (or was it suckered?) when Bergman declared that she liked the new scene in which Joan converts the army to Christianity. Prolonged conferences over battle scenes and the coronation and trial sequences became ever more exhausting, and the Los Angeles heat exacerbated Anderson’s discomfort. On July 31, he told Fleming he wanted to return home, but it wasn’t soon enough to elude one last set-to with Bergman. Two days later, she presented her version of the trial. It pushed Anderson past his breaking point: in his diary he wrote that he “told her she was an amateur.” Bergman apologized by note, but Anderson, responding in an abrasive letter of his own, would not be placated. When he finally headed back east on August 7, he made a leisurely, digressive road trip with his daughter, Hesper, including a visit to his boyhood home in North Dakota.
Hesper’s account doesn’t jibe with her dad’s diary, but probably reflects his feelings. She wrote that he’d quit and left no forwarding numbers. But he did stay in contact with Solt, Wanger, and Fleming along the way; he even called Fleming to apologize for his scathing letter to Bergman. Hesper remembered their homecoming this way: when they arrived in New City, “My father got out of the car and walked straight to the ringing phone. He picked it up, listened for a second, and then shouted, ‘You big, dumb goddamn Swede!’ The explosion had happened, and, standing outside the window, I looked at South Mountain to see if it was shaking.”
“It is a question of erasing all that remains of Anderson,” Father Paul Doncoeur would write just two weeks later. There was some truth in this exaggeration. The movie retains scraps of Anderson’s dialogue, set pieces, and themes. At times it even hits the same note of postwar disillusionment, such as when Joan’s captor, John, the Count of Luxembourg ( J. Carrol Naish), declares that he’s on neither the English nor the French side: “I’m on the ME side.”
But as the film sped closer to production, drama retreated before hagiography. The National Legion of Decency and the Production Code fretted from the beginning over Joan of Arc because no movie could turn clergy into villains, even though the historical record showed that Bishop Cauchon, who governed Joan’s trials, operated a kangaroo court. When Selznick projected doing a Joan of Arc film with Jennifer Jones, the legion’s Martin Quigley advised, “While no right-minded person can ask for historical distortion, the fact remains that the Catholic people are not to be pleased with the presentation of a Catholic bishop in a despicable light. The part played by the Jewish priestcraft in the crucifixion of Christ is a clear historical fact, but it is entirely understandable that Jews, the world over, today are not made happy by the focusing of attention on that historical incident.” (Quigley, the publisher of Motion Picture Herald, was reflecting Catholic doctrine of the time.) The legion’s advocate to the studios was Monsignor John Devlin of St. Victor’s Catholic Church in West Hollywood. Puffed up by The Song of Bernadette, the legion and Devlin had grown so influential that they successfully demanded that Cardinal Richelieu in George Sidney’s 1948 The Three Musketeers become Prime Minister Richelieu.
To make sure Joan of Arc would land on the side of these dubious angels, Wanger and Fleming hired Father Doncoeur, a sixty-six-year-old French Jesuit scholar and the editor of a Jesuit weekly, Étude, as their reigning arbiter on all things Joan. But he wouldn’t besmirch his international reputation as a published authority on the subject just to please Devlin and Quigley. Doncoeur thought that Pierre Cauchon, the bishop who controlled Joan’s trial, “was an ambitious and venal tool of the English.” The finished film reflects his view. But by the time Doncoeur, the researcher Michel Bernheim, Bergman, and Roberts had finished influencing the script, it would have been suicidal for any prominent Catholic to complain about Joan of Arc, because Joan had become an unblemished and uncomplicated paragon. The movie makes Joan’s quest for moral clarity easy. She is the true Catholic: her antagonist is both listed in the credits and cited in the dialogue as a political figure, “Count-Bishop” Cauchon.
Joan forswears her saintly voices merely because she becomes temporarily confused by her desire to be placed in a church prison (as opposed to a secular jail) and given women guards. Furthermore, the movie frames the trial with explanatory scenes between Cauchon and the Earl of Warwick (Alan Napier), ensuring that audiences see the proceedings as political rather than religious. Cauchon contends that executing Joan would martyr her in the eyes of the French and that the key to destroying her power would be compelling her to abjure her voices and her mission. Warwick says that Cauchon’s future depends on his ability to see that she burns.
Led by Father Massieu (Shepperd Strudwick), her bailiff, several good clerics counsel Joan to petition that the pope review her case. In the movie, that request becomes pivotal, its denial crucial to the audience’s perception that Joan’s persecutors are a political hanging court in churchly glad rags, not an authentic religious body. Of course, historically, there was little chance that the papacy would save her and risk the wrath of the English. And even simplified for the movie in order to conjure rooting inter
est for Massieu, these proceedings are too clunky for poetic tragedy and too tortuous for satisfying melodrama. All the backstage machinations behind Joan’s trial take the focus away from Anderson’s modern attempt to redefine faith and reconcile spiritual purity and compromise.
Doncoeur dismissed Devlin as “a man very sure of himself, and unpleasant in his self-importance,” but considered Fleming “very refined, distinguished, mild, direct.” Fleming told an interviewer that he had read more than a hundred books himself, “including Mark Twain’s version, which he considers the finest of all modern accounts” (making the self-educated Fleming the sole fan of Twain’s 1896 Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, with its idolatrous portrait of the one “entirely unselfish person” in “profane history”).
The final rewrites leaned heavily on historical accounts. Fleming had procured a translation of the detailed rendering of Joan’s trial that the French scholar Jules Quicherat put together between 1841 and 1845. These volumes had inspired the movement to canonize Joan, and Fleming’s ability to quote from them directly led Doncoeur to observe that the director “doesn’t miss a thing” and to say that in his “very ambitious” production “one senses a very serious desire for the truth.” As captivated with Fleming as many a collaborator before him, Doncoeur wrote that the director “has the charming manners of a very great nobleman.” When the Jesuit recommended wooing the French cardinals to surmount the legion’s opposition to the trial scene, the director “took my hand and kissed it.”
At Fleming’s behest and with Bergman’s urging, Doncoeur replaced language from Anderson and Solt’s working draft with chunks from the 1431 trial “transcript” (a consensus account of the proceedings, created afterward). Doncoeur wrote in longhand, in French; Michel Bernheim translated; and Bergman and Roberts concocted their own versions of scenes, drawing heavily on Trask’s Joan of Arc: Self Portrait, a verbal album of Joan’s greatest hits. (In Trask’s version, Joan exhorts her troops at Orléans, “In God’s name! Let us go on bravely! Courage! Do not fall back. In, in, the place is yours!” The movie gets that down to “Frenchmen, there is no turning back! We will have victory, God wills it!”) Roberts, a Protestant, told Doncoeur “that through prayer, we will find what is missing: the spirit and the heart.”
As production approached and the drafting of the trial grew even more critical, Bergman often consulted separately with Fleming. Any new material, from full sequences to mere lines, still went through Solt’s typewriter under Fleming’s eye. But this hydra-headed monster of collaboration squeezed out Anderson’s attempt to bring some twentieth-century complexities to his Joan. The process itself became a theatrical spectacle to at least one of its participants. “The whole thing amazes me,” wrote Doncoeur.
In a way, Bergman seduced Doncoeur, too, impressing him with her daily Bible reading and hinting that she might convert from the Lutheran Church to Catholicism. “A very simple woman,” he thought. “She wants to live the life of Joan as deeply as possible.” He interrogated her with an intimacy and intensity beyond the usual domain of a production or script adviser, then concluded “she is not familiar” with Catholicism “at all.”
She had just played Sister Mary Benedict, but in that role her chief actions were secular, such as teaching a bullied schoolboy how to throw a punch. Doncoeur felt compelled to ask whether she was “bothered by Joan’s Catholic behavior.” He noted she’d had no
in-depth engagement with the religion . . . What attracts her about Joan is her love for France, for her people, for whom she sacrifices herself, her simplicity, and her honesty. She herself [is] very straightforward without any kind of affectation, not in dress (I am a country girl, she said, and people chide me for dressing as such), nor in thoughts, and without complication. She has a very simple nature, and I believe that she finds herself in Joan without having to become a character.
She and Bernheim attended a Mass for Saint Joan, and when she invited Doncoeur in October to watch her and Crosby record the radio version of The Bells of St. Mary’s, to be broadcast the following night, he dubbed it “in good taste, except for the Camel advertisement.”
Fleming managed to stave off Devlin and the legion with an incomplete script late in August (“the whole picture, as visualized by you, will not in any way give offense to any member of the Catholic Church,” wrote Devlin), and as September rolled around, Doncoeur thought his work was done. But when he asked the movie’s star, “Do you really need me, because they need me in Paris?” Bergman pleaded, “Help me to be correct, I pray you.” Doncoeur determined, “I believe I must not abandon her now, but rather play with her the great part that eclipses personalities, interests, pettiness, and see only Joan.” He had already proven his willingness to side with Bergman against Fleming. The priest thought her August makeup tests made her look like “a courtier,” but Fleming knew what he was doing. He was trying to accent his star’s youthfulness, which he also emphasized by surrounding her with older female performers. Even so, the novelist Mary Gordon would rightly lump Bergman together with other big-screen Joans as “too old and too feminine to get the important element of Joan’s boyish youthfulness.”
The pressure on Fleming was tremendous when filming started on September 16. The trial portion of the script was, Doncoeur reported, still in “complete upheaval”; Fleming eventually dispatched Solt to Anderson in New City, hoping this team could create sequences playable for the actors and acceptable to the National Legion of Decency. (The filmmakers didn’t submit final pages for the group’s approval until October.) Fleming’s feelings for Bergman and hers for him hadn’t dissipated, even if no one at the Hal Roach Studios suspected an affair. Yet here he was, living with his wife and daughters and commanding a project that would rise or fall entirely on Bergman’s star power. For the first time in fifteen years, he wouldn’t have the safety net of MGM’s marketing and distribution prowess. (In addition to demands that Wanger reduce his budget, MGM had wanted 50 percent of first revenues to distribute the film; Wanger went to RKO, which agreed to 35.)
Among the usual displays of theatrical temperament, the chief costume cutter, disgruntled over her pay, threw her scissors in Wanger’s face and walked off the film with most of her staff. L’affaire Bergman, though, was paramount for Vic. Doncoeur, convinced that Fleming was a devout husband (he’d met Lu at a Wanger dinner party), considered the director’s behavior toward Bergman the height of chivalry. “Before beginning, on the set, it was beautiful to see Victor Fleming caressing her, paternally, kissing her hand, then embracing her.”
Reading Doncoeur’s descriptions of Fleming’s generalship, you wonder whether the director’s love for Bergman was spurring him on or unhinging him. Watching Fleming shoot Joan’s arrival at the army camp, with “extras, horses, dogs, etc.,” “45 meters of track” to move the camera, and “100 electricians and two wind machines,” all at the cost of $80,000 a day, Doncoeur declared, “But what waste! When everyone was in place, Victor Fleming decided that Joan’s helmet was not to his taste. (Three months ago they tested it and approved it, and again the day before yesterday, seen, reseen, etc.) He stopped the take for 30 or 40 seconds to arrange the gorgerin [the chain-mail necking]. Cost, thousands of dollars for nothing.” Well, maybe not for nothing: Fleming made sure that Bergman looked even more captivating in armor than she had in a nun’s habit.
On Halloween, Bergman raided her makeup room for a raven fright wig and green cosmetics; she crafted warts and a hooked nose from putty and fit crooked teeth over her real ones. Chauffeured by Steele, she swooped into the Flemings’ house as a witch astride a broom, dispensing candy to Sally and Victoria as she cackled her way through the living room. Even weirder for Fleming and everyone else were the occasions when, as Sally remembered, Ingrid “came sometimes with her husband. He was terrific, a very nice guy. He played games with us. One time she came over and gave us some presents—scarves and some kind of gold bracelets. I remember her in our sun-room.”
Fleming had q
uoted a motto from the Arabian Nights to Bergman once—“He best lives and noblest dies, who makes and keeps his self-made laws”—but the lesson hadn’t stuck in his own mind. Suddenly all sorts of boundaries Fleming had established for himself and his family went by the wayside. Fleming had always kept his movie life and home life separate; the signed copies of The Wizard of Oz were the rare mementos allowed inside Moraga Drive. Now he was giving his daughters bows and rubber-tipped arrows used by Joan of Arc’s soldiers. “Victoria and I used to shoot them from the driveway to the pool,” Winnie Weshler said. “One metal-tipped one got in there and landed near the pool man when he was working. He was very unhappy and left,” she recalled, giggling. Even more oddly, Fleming presented Victoria with the shears used to crop Joan’s hair into a pageboy cut. She then used them to bob her own hair. “I did it because I thought [Ingrid] was so beautiful, and I wanted to look like her,” Victoria says. The act “killed my mother.” And her dad “hated it, of course.”
Bergman’s behavior kept jolting the long-suffering Lindström during the autumn of 1947. One night, when she said she would be staying at Ruth Roberts’s apartment, Lindström arrived there unannounced. “At first, Ruth mentioned that Ingrid had locked herself up in a room to work there,” Lindström recalled. “I searched the apartment. There was no Ingrid there, and Ruth had to admit that Ingrid had gone out for the night with a boyfriend. A few days later, [Lu] came to me and said, ‘You must help me! My husband has got to stop this relationship!’ ” (It was the reverse of the scene between Lionel Atwill and Luise Rainer in The Great Waltz.) Lu huddled with Lindström, but he understood that the only solution to his problem was divorce. “I was never perfect and the marriage was anything but ideal,” Lindström told Bergman’s biographer Donald Spoto. “One of my many mistakes was that I did not proceed with the divorce I firmly proposed. She pleaded with me and assured me that she was changing her life.” She counter-proposed that they have another child following her next picture for Hitchcock (Under Capricorn). Lindström said he agreed, and made plans to expand their house.
Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) Page 60