Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics)

by Sragow, Michael

  8 “Eddie Sutherland, the gay sophisticate”: Brooks to Kevin Brownlow, Jan. 6, 1971.

  9 “he was part Indian”: Interview with John Lee Mahin in McGilligan, Backstory.

  9 “He was always the biggest star”: Torchia made this comment to Selden West when the latter was researching the life of Spencer Tracy. Katharine Hepburn told West that when she first entered MGM to make The Philadelphia Story, she saw Gable and Tracy flanking an imposing figure and asked her group, “Who’s the one in the middle?” It was Fleming.

  10 When Hathaway, Tracy, Gable: For example, Hedda Hopper devotes her entire column of January 23, 1944, to the comparison of Rhett Butler to Fleming, and begins with Tracy calling him “the Clark Gable of directors.”

  1 Born in a Tent

  11 February 20, 1888: The date is indicated in an autograph book signed by friends and neighbors of the Flemings the day before they left Missouri.

  11 tornado: The date of that tornado is in the 1889 History of Laclede, Camden, Dallas, Webster, Wright, Texas, Pulaski, Phelps & Dent Counties, Missouri, from Earliest Times to the Present.

  12 “publicity, settlement agents”: McWilliams, Southern California Country.

  12 “half an acre in lemons”: Dumke, Boom of the Eighties.

  12 claims of Cherokee blood: According to a Bledsoe County historian Elizabeth Robnett, the earliest traced Fleming ancestor is Samuel Fleming, born in 1795. In 1850, he, his wife, and nine children lived south of Pikeville, Tennessee. Since in that Census his place of birth is given as “Unknown,” the family roots beyond him are open to speculation.

  14 pig roasts and brass bands: Dumke, Boom of the Eighties. Irving Stone memorialized the period in Men to Match My Mountains:

  It was said that the boom did not burst, it gradually shriveled up. By April 1, 1888 a few harsh facts began to emerge: tourists simply had not settled in anything like the numbers expected. The banks, nervous about the paper boom, had cut down on credit involved in real estate. Many who had made large profits buying and selling land realized that their gains amounted to soft signatures by people who had been speculating precisely as they had. Those who had property left to sell saw that they had to sell their land quickly and get out some cash, or they would be left empty-handed.

  15 February 23, 1889: Since his death, for reasons unknown, Fleming’s birth year has often been reported as 1883. It seldom was recorded or reported correctly during his lifetime, either. Among the accurate records: the 1900 census, the 1910 census, and Fleming’s Army record. The volume for births registered for February 1889 is missing from the Los Angeles County Registrar Recorder’s Office, as is the 1891 volume recording his sister Arletta’s birth. However, his sister Ruth’s birth in 1893 is recorded. Fleming sometimes fudged his age. His 1909 marriage license application records his birth year as 1887 because, at twenty, he was not legally an adult. Starting at age thirty-nine, he occasionally recorded his birth year as 1890. It’s written that way on applications for his pilot license and on his 1933 marriage license application.

  17 “There is little room in my life”: Fleming, Action.

  19 spacious three-bedroom bungalow: The house is still there, with the kitchen window Fleming’s aunt Mamie had lowered. One of the oddities of Fleming’s history—especially for someone who grew up in Southern California—is that nearly every dwelling in which he lived still exists.

  19 Chinese peddler: San Dimas Historical Society.

  19 “an old postcard”: Robert Towne, preface and postscript to Chinatown, included in Ulin, Writing Los Angeles.

  21 put their faith in dowsing: Wyman, Witching for Water, Oil, Pipes, and Precious Minerals.

  2 Cars, Cameras, Action!

  25 in 1903: Oldfield’s first Los Angeles appearance was that November; he returned the following December.

  25 Charles Soules and Joe Nikrent . . . Ted “Terrible Teddy” Tetzlaff: Soules, one of five racing brothers, was a journeyman racer with a brief career. Along with his brother George, Charles is believed to have won the first twenty-four-hour race, in Columbus, Ohio, in 1905. Nikrent was, like Soules, part of a family of racing brothers, and finished first in the 1909 endurance race from Los Angeles to Phoenix known as the Cactus Derby. It is likely Fleming had more racing experiences with Tetzlaff, a prominent early racer with twenty-two races between 1909 and 1915. Five of those were in Santa Monica, including the first Santa Monica road race on July 10, 1909. Because Fleming, in 1911, raced on the Santa Monica road course used for the 1914 Vanderbilt Cup, this became distorted into the often-published claim that he had been a Vanderbilt Cup racer. It is possible Fleming was Soules’s ride-along mechanic, or “mechanician,” in a race at Santa Monica on August 9, 1913. Soules, driving a Cadillac, finished sixth. There are no newspaper mentions of Fleming as anyone’s mechanician. Except for George Hill, who worked for both Tetzlaff and Oldfield, mechanicians seldom were mentioned in newspaper accounts of races. Mechanicians often had to do hand pumping to maintain gas and oil pressure, and made repairs during the course of the race. In the notes used to compose Action Is the Word, Fleming mentioned that he had begun racing at Agricultural Park in 1907.

  26 Thomas Flyers: The same make, although not the same model, that won the 1908 race from New York to Paris.

  27 “We’d wait until it rained”: Howe’s anecdote about Fleming and the cowcatcher is contained in the Reminiscences of James Wong Howe (1971) in the Oral History Collection of Columbia University, pp. 17 and 18.

  27 Brian J. Leavitt: One of the more colorful figures in early Southern California racing, he sponsored racers and races—including a three-hundred-mile contest against a Stearns in August 1909, with winnings of more than $10,000—and occasionally got behind the wheel himself.

  29 “That’s where you get a job”: Behlmer, Henry Hathaway.

  30 Allan Dwan: He continued to direct into the early 1960s. He became a favorite of film historians for his detailed anecdotes of early filmmaking—although many failed to notice that sometimes he was cheerfully putting them on—and a favorite of film critics for finding the energy in low-cost projects like the High Noon rip-off Silver Lode (1954). He died in 1981, age ninety-six.

  31 “A chauffeur in those days”: Harmetz, Making of “The Wizard of Oz.”

  31 Charlotte Burton: She possibly was born earlier than 1893, the year she usually gave, or 1892, the year on her death certificate, since her daughter was born in 1906. Burton had been married to a man named Wooldridge when she returned to Santa Barbara, where she had family roots. In 1917, she married the cowboy actor William Russell when they both were acting in a serial, The Diamond from the Sky. She appeared in fifty-five films and serials until 1920. The marriage ended in divorce, and she is known to have married at least twice after that. As Charlotte Stuart, she died in 1942. Her daughter, Charlotte Burton Coombs, died in 1986, age eighty.

  31 “superb figure”: Moving Picture World, Nov. 16, 1912.

  31 “We developed some sort of engine trouble”: Interview in Bogdanovich, Who the Devil Made It. In a 1970 interview with Richard Schickel, Dwan said Fleming had his back to the vehicle and announced, “One of your tappet valves is missing,” without looking up. Dwan, trained as an engineer, would undoubtedly have been impressed.

  32 Roy Overbaugh: Fleming credited Overbaugh and his assistant, R. D. Armstrong, with helping get him a job in the developing lab at Flying A, something that may have happened when Armstrong tried his hand at acting in 1913. Fleming moved up to be Overbaugh’s assistant cameraman after that.

  33 “I used to drive a race car”: Interview in Schickel, Men Who Made the Movies.

  33 “True, false, or merely exaggerated”: McCarthy, Howard Hawks.

  33 “we used to load”: Victor Fleming, “Directing—Then and Now,” Lion’s Roar, July 1944.

  35 “There were quite a few incidents”: “In the Days of the Flying A,” Noticias, March 17, 1954, reprinted by the Santa Barbara Historical Society, Fall 1976.

  35 �
�They didn’t make any comment”: Bogdanovich, Who the Devil Made It.

  35 “In the ‘middle ages’ ”: Fleming, “Directing—Then and Now.”

  36 “a tremendous figure”: Slide, Silent Players.

  36 “Quite a lady himself”: Interview in Bright Lights (online), Sept. 1996.

  36 raw kidding: Mentioned in Mann, Behind the Screen.

  37 Neilan established a new site: Moving Picture World, Dec. 27, 1913.

  37 “With both alcohol and fury”: Brownlow, The War, the West, and the Wilderness.

  37 “The legend”: Koszarski, Evening’s Entertainment.

  38 “the Hollywood version”: Spears, Hollywood.

  38 “Mickey was a genius”: Eyman, Mary Pickford, America’s Sweetheart.

  38 “You must remember”: Ibid.

  38 “Oh, shit!”: Samuel Marx, Mayer and Thalberg.

  39 “Irishmen like Mickey”: Eyman, Mary Pickford, America’s Sweetheart.

  39 “beauty, personality, charm”: Marshall Neilan, “Acting for the Screen: The Six Great Essentials,” in Opportunities in the Motion Picture Industry (Los Angeles: Photoplay Research Society, 1922).

  40 “used dozens of assistants”: Brown, Adventures with D. W. Griffith.

  3 The Importance of Shooting Doug

  41 “he often enjoyed”: Fairbanks to Schickel, March 27, 1972, evaluating Schickel’s article on Douglas Fairbanks Sr. in the December 1971 American Heritage. Part of the Booton Herndon Papers, University of Virginia.

  42 presumed he was half-Indian: Lu Fleming’s daughter from her first marriage, Helene Rosson Bowman said, “I think he probably was,” to David Stenn, but neither of Vic and Lu’s daughters recalls ever being told that he was, or that people said he was. Neither had Fleming’s niece Yvonne Blocksom, born in 1915. Those who did included Allan Dwan (who described Fleming as “half-Indian” to Fairbanks’s biographer Booton Herndon), David O. Selznick (who mentioned Fleming’s “American Indian” quality to Charles Samuels), and Ingrid Bergman’s publicist, Joseph Steele (who wrote of Fleming as “part Cherokee”).

  42 “has definitely abandoned”: Variety, Sept. 24, 1915.

  42 “He went out West”: Fairbanks to Schickel, March 27, 1972.

  42 “The director is much overestimated”: New York Telegraph, Nov. 24, 1918.

  43 “Once even I found myself”: Kael, When the Lights Go Down.

  43 “shattered, messy childhoods”: Ibid.

  45 “this nocturnal scene”: Bingham, Great Lover.

  45 “My tits!”: Carey, Anita Loos.

  45 “bears the taint”: The New York Times, June 11, 1916.

  45 “Griffith was not pleased”: The traditional quotation can be found most recently in Basinger, Silent Stars; the original text is in Photoplay, Sept. 1929.

  46 “has already proven himself”: Variety, Sept. 24, 1915.

  46 “The fact of the matter is”: Fairbanks to Schickel, March 27, 1972.

  46 “You had to keep working”: Bright Lights (online), Sept. 1996.

  47 “We all did”: Bogdanovich, Who the Devil Made It.

  47 “very actorish, petulant”: Richard Schickel, “Good Years, Bad Years,” Harper’s, Oct. 1970.

  47 “If something went wrong”: Undated notes, interview with Booton Herndon, Herndon Papers.

  47 “Douglas Fairbanks was a man”: Harriman, Vicious Circle.

  47 “It was no secret”: Slide, Kindergarten of the Movies.

  48 “basically an actor”: Interview with Booton Herndon, March 10, 1975, Herndon Papers.

  49 “called for a degree”: Jacobs, Rise of the American Film.

  49 “was the abnormal norm”: Cooke, Douglas Fairbanks.

  50 “Gee whiz!”: Jacobs, Rise of the American Film.

  50 “whole damn crew”: Herndon, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks.

  50 Bessie Love: She never indicated when she and Fleming were a couple; most likely they became romantically involved during their time with Fairbanks. She is now best known for The Broadway Melody (1929). After marrying and divorcing William Hawks, she moved to London in the 1930s, where she occasionally appeared in plays. In 1972, she was Aunt Pittypat in a short-lived London musical production of Gone With the Wind. Her last film role was a cameo in Ragtime in 1981. She died in 1986, age eighty-seven.

  50 avert the boredom: Fairbanks’s and Fleming’s daredevil offscreen jokes were celebrated on both sides of the Atlantic. David Lean referred to them in his final film, A Passage to India (1984): Dr. Aziz (Victor Banerjee) walks on the outside of a railroad car as it crosses a dizzying viaduct and proclaims, “I am Douglas Fairbanks!”

  50 “to see which of them”: Love, From Hollywood with Love.

  50 they’d shout “Boo!”: Dan Thomas column, May 10, 1927.

  51 “Vic Fleming [was] taller”: Dwan to Herndon, March 10, 1975. Herndon Papers.

  51 “a suitcase of valuable bonds”: Harmetz, Making of “The Wizard of Oz.”

  51 Fleming once asked Fairbanks: The version in Oscar Levant’s Memoirs of an Amnesiac is what Milestone told him on his TV program, though in his book Levant credited Henry Hathaway. In 1948, the Hollywood columnist Erskine Pearson wrote another variation on that anecdote, calling it “a wonderful story” told by James Stewart. That version involved Fleming, a stuntman, and a flight of steps, and a slightly different punch line: “See,” Fleming said, “that’s exactly what I want. Now do it that way. And call an ambulance for me. I think I broke my leg.”

  51 The Good Bad Man, The Half-Breed: Cinematographer Glenn MacWilliams told John C. Tibbetts in American Classic Screen, January–February 1979, “By 1917, Doug was nuts on cowboy stuff. His idea of life was to make western pictures. He wanted to go on location among the Indians. . . .

  “In those days we had to shoot with available lights and diffusers. There would be many a day when we couldn’t shoot and Doug would organize a footrace. One day he had a marathon, up Sunset, up Vermont to Hollywood Boulevard back to the studio. Doug would put up five dollars and get everybody in on it. . . . He was very energetic, very nervous, but it wasn’t really nervous energy. It was just that he enjoyed everything and he loved making pictures. When he was making westerns, he was in his glory. He was like a little boy playing cowboy. A lot of people don’t believe this, but the whole time I was with him, he never had a stunt man. He kept real cowboys around him all the time. And he never sat still. He was always rehearsing, building up stunts, practicing, working. He’d figure out a stunt and we’d build the whole picture around it.”

  51 an impossibly wide ravine: The effect is described in Herndon, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks.

  51 Dwan remembered: Booton Herndon often was frustrated by the memories of old-time moviemakers who had no intention of telling any unembellished stories. On September 5, 1973, he wrote a friend, Jim Card:

  Allan Dwan told me at great length how he attached a steel rod to a sapling in this picture [The Half-Breed] so that Fairbanks could use it as a catapult to throw himself up a big redwood tree. Dick Talmadge said that even with the steel rod, it just wouldn’t work. It was done by reversing the film. I went back to Dwan and he said yes, this stunt was frequently done by reversing the film, and also by using a piano wire, but on this occasion, they just wanted to do it the easy way and did so using the steel rod. Who am I supposed to believe?

  Herndon just needed to run that scene backward. Herndon Papers.

  52 “the names of actresses”: Motion Picture News, undated copy.

  52 Howard Hawks: His biographer, Todd McCarthy, describes his first job in motion pictures this way:

  The most Hawks ever said about his motivation for entering the film business was, “I just wanted a job during summer vacation. Somebody I knew at Paramount got me a job in the prop room.” He further explained that an emergency had arisen on the Fairbanks picture—the film needed a modern set built in a hurry at a time when the studio’s sole official art director was away. Hawks, with his limited architectural
training, volunteered his services—or perhaps was recommended by Fleming. Fairbanks liked the work as well as the young man who did it, which led to further employment at the studio.

  4 In Manhattan for the Great War

  55 “with what appeared to be the rest of Hollywood”: Fleming, Action.

  56 Major Charles Wyman: Wyman, suffering from tuberculosis, moved to Southern California in 1920 to improve his health, and his family expected him to die soon. He died at age eighty-seven, in 1971. He was the technical adviser for Ten Gentlemen from West Point in 1942, directed by Henry Hathaway.

  57 Starting in September 1917: Nye, Carbine & Lance.

  57 only four motion picture cameramen: “Monthly Report to the Chief Signal Officer for March of 1918,” Records of Allied Expeditionary Force, National Archives, College Park, Md.