The initial returns were solid, and Wanger’s hopes of awards, despite the bad reviews, still high. But he and Fleming had misjudged their audience. Shepperd Strudwick, Joan’s idealistic bailiff, shortly afterward appeared as an idealistic doctor in 1949’s All the King’s Men, a torn-from-the-headlines melodrama based on Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel. All the King’s Men ultimately became a box-office success and won Academy Awards for best picture and best actor, Broderick Crawford (a Fleming family friend), and best supporting actress, Mercedes McCambridge. That movie, with its democratic hero turning into a demagogue, boasted the kind of direct, dynamic ambivalence and street credibility postwar critics wanted.
Under Bergman’s spell, Fleming had succumbed to holiday-season poster art and siphoned any bit of ambivalence out of Joan of Arc. Even its cost became a joke. Wanger accepted a Look magazine achievement award for the film in February. When the presenter, Bob Hope, asked in his usual teasing-wheedling fashion why there’d been no role for Hope in Joan of Arc,Wanger said, in a scripted quip, “If a man has a $200 pipe, would he smoke Dr. Scholl’s foot pads in it?” It was nominated for seven Academy Awards, but won only for cinematography and costume design; Wanger shamelessly campaigned for, and received, a special award for “distinguished service to the industry in adding to its moral stature in the world community by his production of Joan of Arc.” Bergman and Ferrer, though nominated, were never considered contenders. When Wanger accepted his award, he said, “Notwithstanding this citation, I cannot accept this award except in the name of my partners, Ingrid Bergman and Victor Fleming, who made this great picture possible.”
By then Sierra Pictures was mired in debt, and Bergman had run off with Roberto Rossellini, leaving her daughter, Pia, behind with Petter Lindström.
And Victor Fleming was dead.
“We had the same dentist, or my husband did at least, and the dentist, I was convinced, killed Vic—gave him too much Novocain or took out too many teeth and weakened him,” said Leonora Hornblow. But Joan of Arc took more out of him than any dentist could. The mature, seductively melancholy Fleming was no longer the Beau Brummell who could laugh off broken dreams with Clara Bow. Bergman said she delighted in observing him run a set. Fleming, however, must have been in agony watching her there and in the editing room, where he could see her slipping away from his personal and professional grasp. Bergman forced Fleming to face the contradictions of his life and to consider whether sustaining his marriage for the previous dozen years had simply been a matter of marital will and parental devotion. His antidote to gloom, as usual, was action. He had dental surgery the day after Christmas, and a mere two days after that drove Lu and his daughters to the Beaver Creek guest ranch, twenty miles east of Cottonwood, Arizona.
In many ways, it was a journey into his past, to the country where he’d played escalating pranks with Douglas Fairbanks and navigated perilous location scouts on horseback with Lois Wilson. He stopped to visit Lighton at his Wine Glass Ranch in Prescott. Watson Webb, who hosted the Flemings and Lightons for dinner whenever Hope and Bud came back to Los Angeles, always found Fleming to be “very gracious and down-to-earth” with his wife in that smaller group. Hope would display a cigarette box adorned with custom-made jewelry charms patterned after Lighton’s favorite productions, including a little boat for Captains Courageous and a parachute for the next Lighton-Fleming production, Test Pilot. And “Lu was very warm, very nice, very easygoing.” Webb had no sympathy for Fleming’s affair with Bergman: “The two most promiscuous women in Hollywood were Grace Kelly and Ingrid Bergman. We used to call a dame a porcupine: a million pricks stick into her. Ingrid was a real porcupine.”
Watching them at Wine Glass Ranch and Beaver Creek, Victoria thought her father and mother had come closer together. “Daddy had rediscovered Mother after the Ingrid Bergman affair was over,” Victoria says. And to Sally’s eyes, too, they were more friendly. Hornblow, who knew the couple well in the 1940s, thought there was something for Vic to “rediscover” in Lu: “She wasn’t the beauty of the world, but she was an awfully nice woman. I think he cared for her in a way; she made his life comfortable. If he would have left her for anyone, it would have been for Ingrid Bergman. There may have been a lot of little in-between with the starlets, but nothing to affect his home life until Ingrid: she was a glorious creature and so was he.” Hornblow said until the Ingrid episode, Lu might even have basked in his off-set reputation: “Women like womanizers. It’s very simple: you know there’s honey in the honeycomb. That was part of Vic’s warmth, charm, and vitality.”
On the dude ranch Fleming reestablished family norms. When Sally, eleven and still prone to childhood ailments, complained of nausea, Fleming found something she could hold down—frozen strawberries. When Victoria went out riding on Thursday, January 6, 1949, she saw that her father “had an arm around Mother. I had never seen that before in my life.” Later that morning, Victoria says, “I got this flash—‘something’s wrong’—and we went back and I galloped back to the house.” Fleming had gone hunting coyotes, then lost his strength, complaining of chest pains. The ranch hands took him back to the cabin. Sally recalls her mother saying that she poured some brandy into him before they put him in the backseat of a car. Lu cradled her big man as best she could.
Vic never made it to the Marcus Lawrence Hospital in Cottonwood. He died in her arms en route, Lu said. An ex officio county coroner ruled it death from heart failure, but there was no autopsy. Family members agreed with Hornblow that he might have died because of the dental operation, possibly from a pulmonary embolism, especially given the complications of the earlier kidney surgery.
Sally had wandered into the main lodge, where a man told her that her father had taken sick. “And I said, ‘Well, he’ll be all right, won’t he?’ The guy said, ‘How old is he?’ That’s all I needed to hear; that was it. And he said, ‘Oh, sure, he’s gonna be fine.’ So when I saw Mother coming through the doorway, you know, she was completely dissolved. That’s when I knew.”
The hospital transported Fleming’s body to the Scott and McMillan Mortuary, in Jerome. The press reported that Lee and Helene Bowman and Hal Rosson went to Arizona on Friday to arrange for the body’s return to Hollywood, but Victoria saw them only at the airport. Graham Lee Mahin said the undertaker John McMillan called Graham’s father to handle the funeral. “So [John Lee Mahin] went out there, and they had picked out this bronze casket. It was going to be [thousands of dollars] for the whole funeral thing.” Mahin looked McMillan in the eye and asked, “What do you bury the indigents in?” McMillan replied, “It’s a $7 pine box.” Mahin declared, “That’ll be fine for Victor.” McMillan had a fit of pique, saying, “But I picked out all the stuff.” Mahin tried to explain, “You don’t understand Victor. He was a very simple man. He wouldn’t have wanted to waste the money.” They finally agreed on an unpretentious walnut coffin. The total for embalming and the coffin was $175. Then Howard Hughes sent a plane to fetch Fleming’s body from the Prescott airport.
Wanger and Joan Bennett immediately wired Lu:
Words are inadequate to express our shock and grief at yours, Sally’s and Victoria’s great loss; and believe me, our own and the industry’s loss cannot be measured in words. Please accept our deepest sympathy in your tragedy and our deepest love, and do not hesitate to call upon us for anything at all at this time. Love, Joan and Walter
Spencer and Louise Tracy and their children, Susie and John, were dining at Romanoff’s in Beverly Hills. Susie remembers, “It was Mike Romanoff who told my dad—who told him Vic died. My father just sat for a couple of minutes and looked down, and said, ‘I’m going to have to go,’ and left. He was very moved and sad, and he left the three of us there. He just couldn’t say what there was to say. They were very good friends. To have Mike Romanoff come over and tell him something like that—I was a teenager, but I understood even then that it was important, and unusual.”
Fleming’s other great star C
lark Gable was making Any Number Can Play for Mervyn LeRoy, who shut down the set for a day. “The pall of gloom . . . was so great that Gable couldn’t talk,” wrote Hedda Hopper.
There had been a cold wave in Southern California since the beginning of the year. On January 10, the day of the funeral, snow fell in Los Angeles, accumulating to a foot in outlying areas and covering the ground in Westwood, the location of St. Alban’s Episcopal Church. The Reverend John A. Bryant, the church rector, read the Episcopal funeral liturgy and Psalm 23 before delivering Mahin’s terse eulogy, “Man of Iron”:
Victor Fleming was an inviolate man.
He was inviolate in his love for his country, standing as he always strove to help it stand, for the dignity and freedom of people before God.
He was inviolate in his passion for work, and the absolute purity of fine workmanship. He held his home and his family inviolate—as the only earthly source of human goodness.
For those unrelenting principles, his friends and the world that knew Victor Fleming loved and respected him beyond measure.
To many of his fellows, he was, affectionately, “The Iron Man.” In Victor, we discovered and learned the simple axiom: “Iron has the gentlest touch—when springing from the heart of Man as he was meant to be.”
Mahin, Gable, Harold Rosson, Charles Cotton, Al Menasco, Sterling Hebbard, and Victor Ford Collins, Fleming’s attorney, served as his pallbearers. Among the honorary pallbearers were Wanger, Ward Bond, Spencer Tracy, Eddie Mannix, Leland Hayward, Sam Zimbalist, Jack Conway, Jules Furthman, Robert Peyton, Laurence Stallings, Douglas Shearer, Ormond Ruthven, Richard Rosson, Louis Lighton, Henry Hathaway, King Vidor, Howard Hawks, Fred Lewis, Cedric Gibbons, and Lew Wasserman.
Approached to comment on his friendship with Fleming a half century later, Wasserman predictably answered, “I do not give interviews.” Then he added, “You have my best wishes for the success of the biography you are doing on Victor Fleming. He was a great man.”
The other mourners included John Wayne, Louis B. Mayer, Andy Devine, Sam Goldwyn, James Stewart, Hoagy Carmichael, Van Johnson, and Brian Aherne. A year later Stallings remembered seeing Bergman at the funeral, too. But Stallings focused on what he would no longer see: “The great Fleming’s lithe figure (his fierce eyes beneath the high forehead and the crest of silver hair) standing behind a camera to control the destiny of a movie set.” Stallings wrote that Joan of Arc was “a killer-film”: Joe Valentine and the set decorator Casey Roberts also died in 1949. So did Roman Bohnen, who played Joan’s uncle and succumbed to a heart attack on February 24, while under the gun from government investigators to testify before HUAC.
Fleming’s secretary, Nan Hynd, and his relatives guessed that the cross of Lorraine made of lilies of the valley and topping his rose-covered coffin came from Bergman, and they resented what they saw as a brazen gesture. “I think that Nan was quite sure about it. It was so obvious to me, for heaven’s sake, that she had sent it,” said Yvonne Blocksom.
And just as brazenly, at least from their point of view, Bergman was sitting in a front pew. Of course, she had no control over the seating arrangements. Whoever had made them simply observed Hollywood protocol by seating the big movie stars, including Gable, in the front and wasn’t aware of what was then still a closely held secret.
Bergman’s sorrow at Fleming’s death, as she occasionally would tacitly acknowledge in interviews years later, was genuine. And as for the cross of Lorraine, she, probably more than anyone else, knew that Fleming had died on the long-accepted birthday of Joan of Arc.
As the mourners filed out of the church, “I remember that Gable was crying,” Swearingen recalls. Sally and Victoria did not attend. “The Bowmans decided that Sally and I shouldn’t go to the funeral, because it was too sad,” says Victoria. Instead, they sent the girls to a movie. Fleming’s mother chose the grave plate for his burial in a mausoleum at Hollywood Memorial Park. Above his name and the years of his birth and death, it reads, “He Leadeth Me.”
“I was in London making Night and the City when I read about his death,” said Jules Dassin, who was already on the run from the blacklist. “That we had different political opinions did not stop me from reading this with sadness.” A year later Fleming’s friend from Paramount days the director Herbert Brenon compared his own “peaceful, happy life” in retirement to the pressures of directing. “I am positive that those splendid men, like Victor Fleming and others, cracked under the strain.”
One encomium after another poured into Wanger’s office. They came from collaborators on Joan of Arc, including Father Doncoeur and the costume designer Karinska, and from the nation’s film exhibitors. Wanger passed the most personal ones to Lu. Lee Bowman thanked Wanger: “Of all the old friends of Victor’s, you certainly came to the fore in your offers to help in any way she needed you.” Putting the best face on his and Fleming’s past, he added, “We have lost a great friend and an even greater man.”
Adela Rogers St. Johns wrote Lu to describe Vic helping her get through her son Bill’s death in the war. He had urged St. Johns to act as if Bill were still looking on. St. Johns urged Lu to do the same:
We have completely dropped into the conviction of our Bill just being “away.” And I am 100% sure that Vic’s wonderful advice helped more than anything. So may I give it back to you, so that it makes a true circle, and please know that I feel so sure the friendship Vic and I began . . . hasn’t been broken . . . When my Bill went on, I know it did help me to find how many people loved him, how many were praying for him, how surrounded I was by love and sympathy. Nothing can change the sorrow but it did help to endure it, and so I wanted to add my little bit to the flood of affection, admiration, and love and prayers that must be going out to you and Vic. There was a man!
Nothing could comfort Lu. “She was very grim when he died,” says Winnie Weshler. “Vic was the one thing that kept her straight, and he was gone.”
“I think she was so knocked away by what happened,” Sally reflects. “I thought she felt my father was sort of a god. I think she really did.”
“I remember it being very quiet and not the same at all at his house,” says Barbara Hawks McCampbell. “He just made a big impression in the house . . . He was just a very special person, and I felt about him like I did about my dad; they threw away the molds of a lot of these people. I only saw a wonderful side of him.”
The public was soon to see another side. “Widow, Cut Off If She Reweds, Accepts Will,” ran the headline in the Los Angeles Times on February 2. The estate, when probated, amounted to a little over $453,500, with nearly half of that in cash. (His fifteen thousand shares of stock in Sierra Pictures had “no value.”) Lu, Sally, and Victoria received one-third shares of the estate in trust. But Lu’s income would be managed by the trust for the rest of her life (with what was left, at her death, to be divided between daughters), while the girls controlled theirs outright after they turned thirty-five. Were she to remarry, Lu got nothing.
Harsh terms indeed—yet to Fleming’s extended family, they reflected badly on Lu, not Vic. Yvonne Blocksom said, “There was an earlier version of that will, which we all saw for some reason or other. He left, I think it was, $5,000 to each member of the family. Well, [Lu] blew a cork, and he changed it, and he didn’t leave any of that money to anybody. She really had him by the hooks, which was typical.”
The real meaning of the will was that Fleming—at least on December 11, 1939, when he signed the document, and was already in a foul mood over Selznick—didn’t trust Lu’s side of the family or her judgment in the potential choice of a third husband. Not only did the will ensure that there would be no stepfather in his daughters’ lives: it cut off any money to Victoria, Sally, and their guardians “during any time they may live with the relatives of [Fleming’s widow] Lucile Fleming.” In this case, Fleming was referring not to Helene and Lee Bowman but to Lu’s sisters, Evelyn and Georgiana, who were heavy drinkers. Lu’s sisters were to stay out of her daughters�
�� lives.
Lu’s first order of business was to sell the Moraga Drive estate for the fire-sale price of $113,000; she then moved to a smaller house on Rockingham Drive in Brentwood. Fleming’s mother and sisters made a bittersweet trek to Knapp Island before Lu sold that, too. “Each of them brought a souvenir home, something that had belonged to him,” Blocksom said.
Lu and the daughters drifted further apart from the Deacons and the Hartmans. The last time Lu and her mother-in-law, Eva, met was at attorney Collins’s office so that Eva could sign over a half-million dollars’ worth of oil stocks that Fleming had put in his mother’s name as a tax dodge. Afterward, Lu told Eva, “Mother Deacon, if you’re ever in need of anything, let me know.” Collins quietly set her straight: “Mrs. Fleming, this isn’t a patch on Mrs. Deacon’s wealth.”
The will hemmed Lu in, defining her, until her death in 1966, as Victor Fleming’s widow. But it didn’t serve Fleming’s intended purpose of preserving his household values. “As soon as [Victor] died, people that we’d never seen started coming to the house,” Weshler says. “Helene and Lee Bowman and their crowd then came in profusion.” The Bowmans removed the girls from Marymount and enrolled them in the fashionable Marlborough School. Sally says her half sister, Helene, “swooped in to rule” and “took over our lives, and I think my mother pretty much just abdicated. Don’t know why—must’ve been her personality.” Lu did feebly try to find new ways to while away the hours, such as playing bridge with other single women. Among Vic’s gang, only Ward Bond stayed close to her. “Clark Gable took her out for dinner once. Broderick Crawford took her out to dinner once, and that was about it. Joan Fontaine kept up her friendship, and so did Joseph Cotten,” says Victoria.
Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) Page 63