432 Goodykoontz was transferred: In the 1950s, Goodykoontz helped prosecute the gangster Mickey Cohen for tax evasion. Says Bill Goodykoontz, “My father always spoke positively about his time in Iceland, so the suggestion that he was banished there surprises both me and my mother.”
433 “We even know their [party] card numbers”: Ibid.
434 “The attacks against the MPA”: Hood to Hoover, March 22, 1944. FBI, MPA file.
434 In February 1944: Ibid.
434 “I have got a bunch”: Ibid.
434 “Selznick spent the evening”: Ibid.
434 [name redacted]: An appeal to the FBI to uncover the names was turned down. The FBI still classifies the long-defunct Motion Picture Alliance under “domestic terrorism.”
435 “pretty intelligent”: An Oral History with Robert Vogel. Interviewed by Barbara Hall. Beverly Hills, CA: Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 1991. Margaret Herrick Library.
28 One Last Adventure at MGM
436 “It has been said”: Hood to Hoover, May 10, 1944. FBI, MPA file.
436 “Put them wise”: Hood to Hoover, May 24, 1944. Ibid.
437 “a studio plot”: Beauchamp, Without Lying Down.
437 vehicle for Spencer Tracy: The New York Times, Aug. 28, 1941.
437 Fleming’s contract: MGM legal files.
437 “You felt like you built the buildings”: Vidor interview, 1971, UCLA. Vidor was often of two minds when discussing his friend Fleming. Sometimes he told interviewers Fleming would mutter “Happy days” as a put-down of anyone he didn’t see at work on the set; at other times, the phrase was a wistful expression of Fleming’s longing for the relaxed atmosphere of shooting on location, away from the studio.
438 “gave no indication”: MGM legal files.
438 “If you ask us”: The New York Times, Feb. 8, 1946.
438 “It has everything except Little Eva”: Chicago Tribune, March 9, 1946.
439 “When he spit out the mouthwash”: Gable had finally learned the foul smell of his false teeth was turning off his on-screen love mates. On Sept. 9, 1991, Anthony Bushell wrote to Michael Dempsey of Leigh’s experience with Gable on Gone With the Wind: “She regards her celebrated partner with only the ghostliest touch of the disapproval she couldn’t help feeling for him. It was the old question of BREATH and its unacceptability, and Vivien figured he had been in pictures long enough and played opposite enough outspoken colleagues to have done something about it.” David Stenn collection.
441 “was jittery”: Los Angeles Times, June 14, 1945.
441 “The trouble was”: Louella O. Parsons, “Mister ‘King,’ ” Photoplay, Nov. 1947.
442 “Gable’s back”: The anecdote of Torchia coming up with the slogan and winning $250 is from her interview in the Ronald L. Davis Oral History Collection, DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas, collection number A1980.0154; viewed at Margaret Herrick Library.
442 Garson didn’t prefer: Troyan, Rose for Mrs. Miniver.
442 “He’d look at her”: Warren G. Harris, Gable.
442 “definitely the worst picture”: Clyde Brion Davis to David Brion Davis, March 31, 1946, collection of David Brion Davis. Before he finally saw the picture at a theater in upstate New York, Davis joked to his son, “I hear it isn’t so hot, but there’ll be a newsreel.”
443 producer’s contract: MGM legal files.
443 “a nice group”: Dowd and Shepherd, King Vidor.
444 “were motivated by personal jealousy”: Hood to Hoover, July 14, 1944. FBI, MPA file.
444 Never a well-liked figure: Herman Mankiewicz said of Revnes, “His job, in the event he sees a glacier moving down Washington Boulevard, is to apprise Louis B. Mayer of the fact with all possible speed” (Hoopes, Cain).
444 “everybody was out for himself”: Eyman, Lion of Hollywood.
29 Ingrid Bergman and Joan of Arc
446 the American public condemned her: Two weeks after giving birth to Roberto Ingmar Rossellini in March 1950, before getting a divorce from Lindström, Bergman was condemned on the floor of the U.S. Senate by Senator Edwin Johnson of Colorado as “a free-love cultist” and called one of “Hollywood’s two current apostles of degradation.” (The other was Rita Hayworth.) Earlier that year, citing “exhibitor resistance,” the Motion Picture Association of America also ordered the excision of a Joan of Arc clip from an advertising short about history in films. After separating from Roberto Rossellini in 1956, Bergman made a triumphant return to American movies with Anastasia, for which she won her second Academy Award. In 1972, Senator Charles Percy of Illinois apologized for Johnson’s attack and called her “a true star in every sense of the word.” Bergman won her third Oscar in 1975 in the supporting actress category for Murder on the Orient Express. She died on her sixty-seventh birthday in 1982.
447 “Ingrid’s natural talent”: Selznick to Kay Brown, Feb. 6, 1940, Selznick Archive.
447 “We never got around to it”: Victor Saville, National Film Archive program, British Film Institute. He was planning to do Shaw’s Saint Joan in a manner close to the stage version of Joan of Lorraine: “The style was a treatment of light and close-up leaving it to Shaw and the imagination to provide the scenery.”
448 “I naturally want you”: Anderson to Bergman, April 23, 1945, in Avery, Dramatist in America.
448 “I’m not making any of this up”: The New York Times, Dec. 1, 1946.
448 top box-office attractions: As named by Boxoffice.
449 “She was the kind of young woman”: The New York Times Magazine, Dec. 29, 1946.
449 bored GIs: Adler, It Ain’t Necessarily So.
450 “that she was the reincarnation”: Hesper Anderson, South Mountain Road.
450 “Six years ago”: The New York Times, Nov. 19, 1946.
450 “She is regarded”: Variety, May 9, 1947.
450 Louis Kronenberger: PM, Nov. 18, 1946.
450 “a Readers’ Theatre performance”: New York Journal American, Dec. 2, 1946. Percy MacKaye wrote a 1907 pageant-like play about Joan of Arc. Julia Marlowe, its star, was forty at the time.
452 “constant search for happiness”: Bernstein, Walter Wanger.
452 wooed Noël Coward: The New York Times, May 27, 1946.
452 “Walter, I could never play”: Wanger to Robert Haggiag, Aug. 18, 1955, Walter Wanger Collection, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison.
453 “The good doctor”: Steele, Ingrid Bergman.
453 “Business, business”: Ibid.
453 “was always going off half-cocked”: Davidson, The Real and the Unreal.
453 “not good enough for you”: Steele, Ingrid Bergman.
454 “Ingrid, you were magnificent!”: “Ingrid Bergman Had a Dream” is included in Hollywood Album, a 1947 collection of publicity pieces compiled by Ivy Crane Wilson, Hollywood correspondent for the London Star.
454 “The white-maned lion”: Steele, Ingrid Bergman.
455 “You must play Joan”: Bergman and Burgess, My Story.
455 “Wonders will never cease”: Anderson’s account of the travails of Joan of Lorraine, Fleming’s work in New York, and the writing of the script of Joan of Arc in California in this chapter are from his 1947 diary, with his papers at the Harry Ransom Center.
455 “This was in my pocket”: Fleming’s three letters to Bergman are all as published in My Story, but here, for the first time, put in their correct sequence. The letters are not now with Bergman’s collected papers at Wesleyan University.
456 “wore a simple gray suit”: Dorothy Kilgallen column, Feb. 8, 1947.
456 Wanger was the biggest investor: He also bought out Fleming’s shares after his death. Stressed from his Joan of Arc debts, Wanger served a four-month term on a prison farm after shooting Jennings Lang, his wife Joan Bennett’s agent at Music Corporation of America, in a jealous rage in 1951 because he believed they were having an affair. Newspapers decorously reporte
d that Wanger shot Lang in “the groin.” Shortly after that, the radio wit Fred Allen wrote Groucho Marx (in his customary lowercase) on December 27, “There is a rumor around here that because of missing members, mca is going to erect a statue of jennings lang to be called ‘penis de milo.’ this rumor, I might add, is not sweeping the city. there is no handle on it.” (Groucho Marx Papers, Library of Congress.) Wanger lost his clout as a producer after the financial disaster of Cleopatra in 1963. He kept developing projects, though, until he died of a heart attack in 1968, age seventy-four.
456 “As poor Victor Fleming used to say”: Wanger to Rank, Jan. 18, 1949, Wanger Collection.
457 “What peasant wears red chiffon?”: Bentley, Costumes by Karinska.
457 “to better facilitate conferences”: Steele, Ingrid Bergman.
458 He shot craps: Ibid.
458 “September Song”: Evidently this serenade took place in the restaurant at the Hampshire House, since Anderson recorded that he also saw the producer Peter Cusick there.
458 “Marvelous, just marvelous!”: Steele, Ingrid Bergman.
458 “I had assumed”: Miller, unpublished memoir.
459 “When we came to the hotel”: Steele, Ingrid Bergman.
459 “a clean operation”: Spoto, Notorious.
460 “Joe! Goddamn it”: Steele, Ingrid Bergman.
461 “Just how long”: Undated, probably April 6, draft of a letter from Anderson to Fleming, Anderson Papers, Harry Ransom Center.
462 “I get so angry”: Bergman and Burgess, My Story.
464 “four years since you heard”: From Anderson’s pen-script first draft of the Joan of Arc script included in his papers at the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress.
464 “a disaster”: Marilyn Horne, My Life (New York: Atheneum, 1983).
464 Barnes’s biographer states: Kessler, Happy Bottom Riding Club.
465 “it was plain”: Laurence Stallings, “The Real Ingrid Bergman Story,” Esquire, Aug. 1950.
465 the nettlesome voices: Anderson’s pen-script draft.
465 analogizing her to King David: From 2 Samuel 7:8 (King James Version): “Now therefore so shalt thou say unto my servant David, Thus saith the Lord of hosts, I took thee from the sheepcote, from following the sheep, to be ruler over my people, over Israel.”
466 Joan of Arc: Self Portrait: “William R. Trask: A Universal Garland,” Literary Review (Winter 1957). The article doesn’t quote Trask, a famous translator of his time, but evidently he was the source of a quoted Bergman letter in which she called his book “her Bible, and kept it by her bed” as she prepared for the role of Joan. The National Legion of Decency recommended to Fleming a 1944 book by T. Lawrason Riggs, Saving Angel: The Truth About Joan of Arc and the Church, but he relied instead on the Quicherat transcripts.
466 “feel compelled,” “We’ve had no quarrel”: The New York Times, July 27, 1947.
467 “I chose him”: New York Herald Tribune, Nov. 11, 1948.
468 “My father got out of the car”: Hesper Anderson, South Mountain Road.
468 “It is a question”: Father Paul Doncoeur’s remarkable “Lettres de Hollywood” written to his Jesuit brothers in Paris from July 21 to the end of November 1947, as used in this chapter, were published in June 1979 in Cahiers Paul Doncoeur. Doncoeur came to Hollywood at the recommendations of the Production Code chief, Joseph Breen, and Tom Lewis, Loretta Young’s producer husband, who was a regular at a Jesuit retreat near Los Angeles. He also was used to promote the film to Catholic audiences. Of Fleming, Doncoeur wrote in the Catholic weekly America on November 13, 1948: “How often have I seen him on the set, anxious, his face drawn, running a fever perhaps, but striving to draw from a scene its maximum of dramatic truth.” Doncoeur died in 1961, age eighty. (Translation by Elizabeth Anthony.)
468 “While no right-minded person”: Quigley to Selznick, Oct. 8, 1946, from the National Legion of Decency file on Joan of Arc.
469 “was an ambitious and venal tool”: The New York Times, Aug. 10, 1947. Doncoeur’s comment, while historically accurate, raised concerns with Devlin. “Evidently the historian in Father Doncoeur refuses to be dominated,” Devlin wrote on August 13 in a letter to his superior, Father Patrick J. Masterson, executive secretary of the National Legion of Decency. Masterson suggested in a letter on September 4 that Devlin look into the possibility of having the Los Angeles archbishop “put him under your paternal guidance and jurisdiction.” But that was not done. Letter, National Legion of Decency file.
470 “Mark Twain’s version”: New York Herald Tribune, Nov. 11, 1948.
470 “The whole thing amazes me”: Fleming also arranged a screening of Gone With the Wind for Doncoeur, since he had never seen it. Doncoeur found it “mammoth,” but also “downright unendurable. Excess itself.” He wrote that he promised Fleming he would tell him how he felt, but his letters don’t record Fleming’s reaction.
471 “the whole picture, as visualized by you”: Devlin to Fleming, Aug. 22, 1947, National Legion of Decency file. Doncoeur wrote that Devlin “is very proud of the movie Song of Bernadette, which 100 million Americans and English loved. ‘I care little what they thought of it in France,’ he says.” Doncoeur also wrote that Devlin told him, “What I want is not historical accuracy; it is the service of the Catholic Church.”
472 “too old and too feminine”: Gordon, Joan of Arc.
472 “Before beginning”: Doncoeur described Fleming and Bergman on the set on the first day of shooting.
473 “At first, Ruth mentioned,” “I was never perfect”: Spoto, Notorious.
474 “She’s not superhuman”: Pete Martin, “Big, Beautiful Swede,” Saturday Evening Post, Oct. 30, 1948.
474 “Except for Joan of Arc”: Truffaut, Hitchcock/Truffaut.
474 She chalked that comment up: Times, Jan. 13, 1971.
474 “a magnificent crane shot”: Stallings, “Real Ingrid Bergman Story.”
474 “Vic Fleming wore himself out”: Bergman and Burgess, My Story.
475 “I think the pressures”: Ibid.
476 “Brother, she is bulletproof”: Stallings, “Real Ingrid Bergman Story.”
477 “She’s no bovine girl”: Martin, “Big, Beautiful Swede.”
479 “If Ingrid hadn’t insisted”: Anderson to Brown, May 18, 1949, in Avery, Dramatist in America. (Alan Anderson adds: “He called her ‘that Swedish bitch’ to the end of his life.” Anderson died in 1959, age seventy.)
479 “England’s Harry”: Saturday Review, Dec. 18, 1948.
479 whether her saints had hair: The French historian Régine Pernoud writes in Joan of Arc and Her Witnesses that because Cauchon himself was asking the questions that day—March 1, 1431—Joan’s answer was sarcastic and hostile: “It is good to know that they do!” In Fleming’s version, Bergman answers it defensively, not sarcastically. Anderson’s diary entry of October 14, 1947, records that Solt mentioned “giving Joan a bit more comedy.”
480 “That fell apart”: Globe and Mail (Toronto), Oct. 25, 1980.
480 “I started on second unit work”: Hoch to John Gallagher, courtesy of Gallagher.
482 “This is May 30, 1431”: Associated Press, Dec. 15, 1947. The reporter Bob Thomas added, “It made a lovely blaze.”
483 “Wotzis about a red-hot feud”: Jimmie Fidler column, Dec. 28, 1947. On January 10, 1948, Erskine Johnson fired back: “Oops, sorry. Ingrid Bergman and director Vic Fleming definitely are not feuding—despite what the Hollywood grapevine may say.”
483 Despite Anderson’s objections: Anderson to Wanger, Jan. 7, 1948: “Joan of Arc is a stale, flat, worn handle—with no freshness, no promise of a new slant or any entertainment value. It’s a chapter out of a history assignment which bored the children in the fifth grade.” On January 3, Anderson wrote in his diary, “Seems I’ll have to take my name off it.” Anderson Papers, Harry Ransom Center.
Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) Page 74