Mankiewicz told this story to Selden West while she was researching the life of Spencer Tracy. Fleming was not, however, a member of the isolationist group America First. Fleming laying down bets in 1940 that Great Britain would tumble before the Germans typified, as I write, “his blunt and often confounding irreverence to the political turmoil of his day.” But Spencer Tracy biographer James Curtis, on p. 417 of Spencer
Tracy: A Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), quotes another story supplied by West as if to prove that Fleming was a Nazi sympathizer. Anne Revere told West that she beat out Flora Robson to play the mother in Fleming’s aborted The Yearling because Robson was British and “Fleming was violently pro-Nazi. This was ’41, we hadn’t entered the war . . . and he was violently opposed to the English and anyone who was interfering with the boys over there. So he wouldn’t have her, he was against all English.”
This absurd explanation has since flown through the Internet and wound up on Victor Fleming’s Wikipedia page. (It mars Curtis’s generally painstaking and authoritative book.) Fleming revered Stevenson and Kipling. He worked with British talents throughout his career. He and a British producer, Victor Saville, cast most of the (continued)
569, line 30(continued) (speaking parts in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—the film Fleming shot in early 1941, at the same time he was preparing The Yearling—with British and British Commonwealth actors. In the ten years of research for this book, none of Fleming’s surviving colleagues, friends, family members, or professional acquaintances recalled him expressing “pro-Nazi” sympathies, “violent” or otherwise. But he was contemptuous of MGM’s corporate culture—and MGM was the studio that made Mrs. Miniver, a piece of pro-British propaganda that Pauline Kael called “generally offensive . . . one of the most scandalously smug of all Academy Award winners.” Revere’s Oscar-winning turn as Velvet Brown’s mother in National Velvet (1944) proved that she was ideal for maternal roles like the one in The Yearling. Fleming was demonstrating his instinct for putting the right actor in the perfect part, not betraying a political bias. Many Americans thought England would fall to Germany. Fleming was one of the few who would take bets on it. Could Revere have misread Fleming’s impertinent brand of banter? Revere’s interview with West took place “circa 1978”; Revere died in 1990.
Screen Classics
Screen Classics is a series of critical biographies, film histories, and analyti-studies focusing on neglected filmmakers and important screen artists and subjects, from the era of silent cinema to the golden age of Hollywood to theinternational generation of today. Books in the Screen Classics series are in-tended for scholars and general readers alike. The contributing authors are established figures in their respective fields. This series also serves the purpose of advancing scholarship on film personalities and themes with ties to Kentucky.
Series Editor
Patrick McGilligan
Books in the Series
Mae Murray: The Girl with the Bee-Stung Lips
Michael G. Ankerich
Hedy Lamarr: The Most Beautiful Woman in Film
Ruth Barton
Von Sternberg
John Baxter
The Marxist and the Movies: A Biography of Paul Jarrico
Larry Ceplair
Warren Oates: A Wild Life
Susan Compo
Jack Nicholson: The Early Years
Robert Crane and Christopher Fryer
Being Hal Ashby: Life of a Hollywood Rebel
Nick Dawson
Intrepid Laughter: Preston Sturges and the Movies
Andrew Dickos
John Gilbert: The Last of the Silent Film Stars
Eve Golden
David Luhrssen
Maureen O’Hara: The Biography
Aubrey Malone
My Life as a Mankiewicz: An Insider’s Journey through Hollywood
Tom Mankiewicz and Robert Crane
Hawks on Hawks
Joseph McBride
William Wyler: The Life and Films of Hollywood’s Most Celebrated Director
Gabriel Miller
Raoul Walsh: The True Adventures of Hollywood’s Legendary Director
Marilyn Ann Moss
Some Like It Wilder: The Life and Controversial Films of Billy Wilder
Gene D. Phillips
Ann Dvorak: Hollywood’s Forgotten Rebel
Christina Rice
Arthur Penn: American Director
Nat Segaloff
Claude Rains: An Actor’s Voice
David J. Skal with Jessica Rains
Buzz: The Life and Art of Busby Berkeley
Jeffrey Spivak
Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master
Michael Sragow
Thomas Ince: Hollywood’s Independent Pioneer
Brian Taves
Carl Theodor Dreyer and Ordet: My Summer with the Danish Filmmaker
Jan Wahl
Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) Page 86