Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) (41 page)

Reviews were mixed. “The narrative starts slowly and never responds to pulmonary first aid,” wrote
Variety.
But
The New York Times,
in addition to applauding what it thought “an affectionately amusing photoplay,” singled out Fonda: “He plays with an immensely winning simplicity which will quickly make him one of our most attractive screen actors.”

Part of the problem with
The Farmer Takes a Wife
is the studio ambience. Sheehan, the producer, feared a lingering winter (although
production
began in early April), so he wouldn’t take the company to the actual Erie Canal. He first scouted locations in Sacramento, then decided to build the canal on the Fox lot. (Fleming later did some location shots in Sonora.) A storm washed out the canal set and sank the barges; Fleming was briefly hospitalized with another kidney stone attack. By the third week of shooting,
The New York Times
suggested the production “seems subject to a jinx.” But Fleming, according to Withers, maintained an even attitude. She was most excited to join the picture because “at that time, Fleming only did A movies and I only did B movies.” She came to “like him very much. He was very quiet, very gentle; I couldn’t stand the ones who’d yell and scream and holler. Mr. H. Bruce Humberstone [who in 1937 directed Withers in
Checkers
] used to yell, and I had to tell him, ‘If you keep your voice down and let people know exactly what you want, you get more.’ He thanked me!”

One thing Withers liked was that “mugging” happened to be the only dirty word Fleming ever used on the set. “On most of my sets I’d start a swearing box where someone would put in 25 cents for every nasty word. I can’t think of how much I made that way for different organizations. But Mr. Fleming, a very handsome man, just couldn’t have been nicer. He was not gruff and not rough, and allowed no tacky language—and even though I was underage, I had been on some sets where people would really let go! Everybody was well mannered, everything went very smoothly, and I had such a good time.”

17

Bagging Game on Safari, Losing
The Good Earth

While
Scribner’s
magazine serialized Ernest Hemingway’s nonfiction novel about a safari,
Green Hills of Africa,
from May through August in 1935, Fleming was experiencing the real thing in the same terrain.

Hemingway peppered his narrative with literary discussion, including his most famous proclamation: “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called
Huckleberry Finn
.” But Fleming, who went on the safari as his vacation after
The Farmer Takes a Wife,
wasn’t discussing Twain, Gertrude Stein, or Stephen Crane with his fellow adventurer, Charles Cotton. Going by Cotton’s safari diary, their cultural excitement came from whatever they could pull in on a portable radio: a cowboy program from Pittsburgh or the NBC show with the pianist-bandleader Eddy Duchin, which they got at four in the morning.

Fleming’s hunting trek through what was then called British East Africa (now Kenya) helped gain him Hemingway’s respect when Howard Hawks tried to team them up in 1941 to film the writer’s safari-inspired short story “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.” (The always underrated Zoltan Korda did film it, superbly.) The director later urged Clark Gable to come with him on another safari in 1939—until their prolonged involvement with
Gone With the Wind
scotched their plans.

Fleming and Cotton left Nairobi for the wilderness on July 4 and, once they hit their stride, stalked game with guns and cameras every day until late August. They dined on fowl and fresh meat, and occasionally conversed with British officials and Anglo-American travelers. In Cotton’s journal, big-game hunting comes off as a test of endurance as much as sporting skills; they “ran into locust so thick they made a dark cloud in all directions.”

Fleming’s
mechanical skills came in handy for Cotton; when a pump casting broke on one of their vehicles, Vic simply repaired it with some wire. Help went both ways. Fleming woke up one morning running a fever of 103. Cotton found him still in bed, “wringing wet,” as the fever broke at the end of the day, and put him into dry clothes and bedding.

They journeyed through hard brush, with high thorns pricking the horizon, until, on July 12, they found themselves on “a very beautiful spot right on the bank of the Tana . . . Real African mahogany and other tropical vegetation a very pleasant contrast from what we have been going through for the past weeks.” Cotton shot and killed a bull elephant. Fleming wounded an elephant without being able to finish him, but killed his share of East African antelope, gazelles, rhinos, warthogs, and crocodiles.

In Africa, as in Hollywood, Fleming remained a confounding combination of sturdiness and ailments. “Vic developed something wrong with his eyes,” Cotton records, “and we had to put cocaine in them and give him sleeping powders. Stayed up until 10 with him then he went to sleep.” Soon he was back on his feet.

Although Fleming never vanquished his most dearly sought prey—a bull elephant—on August 1 he killed a rhinoceros near the Kinno River, right before the animal would have slammed into Cotton. “She charged right at Vic and me,” Cotton writes. “It was Vic’s turn to shoot so we all waited until she was just 8 yds from me thinking all the time that she was bluffing, but just as she got there I saw that she did not intend to stop and told Vic to shoot. In one half second I would have shot to save myself.”

Her offspring ran into the bush. Everyone felt “terrible,” Cotton continues, “but if they had not shot her I am sure I would have been hurt.” It was the second mother rhino Fleming killed in his travels.

On August 21, he and Cotton crossed paths with a British hunter and another Californian on safari, which is how they learned of the death of the humorist and actor Will Rogers six days earlier. A
Hollywood Reporter
review of
The Farmer Takes a Wife
suggested that Fleming had originally designed Slim Summerville’s Fortune Friendly for Rogers; it would have fit his sly folksiness and built on his role as a Mississippi patent-medicine peddler in Ford’s
Steamboat Round the Bend.
Fleming never got to work with the cowboy humorist (who really
was
part Cherokee), even though they had a mutual friend in Fred Lewis,
whose
Diamond Bar Ranch near Whittier was next to a ranch Rogers had there.

Fleming and Cotton wound up their travels at the Dutch Trading Company about 110 miles from Nairobi, “where [Theodore] Roosevelt did a lot of hunting.” They made it into Nairobi the following afternoon, “had a fine hot bath and an excellent dinner and went to bed early, ending our safari.” A year later, Cotton shipped four cases of trophies to the Broadway department store in Los Angeles for use in a window display.

Of course, long before “runaway” filmmaking, Hollywood directors like George Hill would travel four continents on assignment. Six years younger than Fleming, Hill was also a cameraman from the silent days (they might have worked together on the Loos-Emerson
Macbeth
). He’d recently emerged as a major MGM director because of Marie Dressler’s Oscar-winning hit,
Min and Bill
(1930), and other acclaimed and profitable talkies such as the prison drama
The Big House
(1930) and the gangster film
The Secret Six
(1931), all written by his wife, Fleming’s friend Frances Marion.

Despite their volatile marriage and prolonged estrangement and divorce (Hill was a depressive and a secret alcoholic), Thalberg teamed Hill and Marion on a choice assignment in 1933: Pearl Buck’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 1931 novel,
The Good Earth,
about Chinese farmers enduring poverty, famine, and the corruption of wealth. (The director Tod Browning, of
Dracula
fame, had been announced but withdrew for unknown reasons.) In December 1933, MGM launched an ambitious trip through China, where Hill filled “250 cases of film” with background action and atmosphere.

Under the direction of General Ting-Hsui Tu of China’s Central Military Academy, expeditions went out on buying missions. They’d arrive at a rural estate and purchase “everything movable on the farm. The plows and implements, the cooking utensils in the kitchen, the used clothing in the house, furniture, bamboo doors and windows, matting partitions—the water wheels for irrigation.” They also had hundreds of items made, including baskets. Hill left after several months, but Tu continued his work.

Back in Los Angeles, Hill swerved his car from children crossing a street and smashed into a telephone pole. The resulting pains and treatments, along with his chronic drinking and depression, the tension of being around his ex-wife, and disagreements with Thalberg
over
The Good Earth,
eventually leveled Hill. Alone in his Venice beach home, he shot himself, fatally, in the head. Thalberg assigned the film to Fleming.

Regardless of his all-American profile, Fleming and
The Good Earth
might have been a better match. As a filmmaker and an adventurer, he had an appetite for the epic and the exotic—and along with Cotton, he’d recently endured “locust so thick they made a dark cloud,” a key ingredient of
The Good Earth.
The novel summoned his agrarian memories. “It is a story that might be laid in any of our farming states, or in any country of the world,” he said. Thalberg assigned the screenwriter Talbot Jennings to the script, and when Jennings arrived to take his orders from Thalberg’s associate Albert Lewin, he found Fleming and Lewin swimming through a sea of previous drafts. Much as he’d later do with
Gone With the Wind,
Fleming said, “Throw ’em all out. We’ll start all over again and work from the book.” Publicly, Fleming stated, “The only major change we are making in the adaptation is that of reducing the dialogue from smooth, Biblical-like utterances to the simple, direct speeches of simple, illiterate people. The dialogue of the novel does not make good motion picture dialogue, though it reads very well. The characters are sensitive people of great depth and feeling, who, like many fine but illiterate characters in real life, cannot adequately express themselves.”

His safari break reenergized him. He named his cabin cruiser
The Missy Poo
after his daughter, Victoria, nicknamed Missy. On the Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend, he flew in his Waco from Los Angeles to Ensenada in a James Cagney–sponsored air race publicizing a casino in the Mexican coastal resort. (His “competitors” included Wallace Beery and Howard Hawks.) A wire service article in December hailed him as not only one of Hollywood’s best-dressed men but also “the most nonchalant” on that list. And now he was at the helm of MGM’s current super-production.

Thalberg decided to make
The Good Earth
at MGM and on California locations, with a mixed cast headed by Paul Muni as the male lead. He had promised to fill the cast with English-speaking Chinese players; every day Lewin tested Chinese actors as well as American and European actors in Chinese makeup. Today, some of Lewin’s reports read as straight-faced comedy, such as “Leonid Kinskey: Russian accent still noticeable; doubtful if he can ever overcome it entirely. Nevertheless, worth serious consideration as Ching.” (The role went to Ching
Wah
Lee.) Or, of the dazzling Anna May Wong: “not as beautiful as she might be.” (Wong’s potential role, Lotus, the dancer who becomes the hero’s No. 2 wife, went to the charm-deprived Tilly Losch.) On the same day Thalberg announced Fleming as the director, October 30, 1935, he officially pegged Muni to play Wang Lung and Luise Rainer to play O-Lan, Wang Lung’s No. 1 wife.

Fleming selected a five-hundred-acre stretch of California hills and valleys for his main location. He terraced the hills for two miles on each side of the canyons and had them hand-sown with grain, then organized the valley floor in patches of Chinese vegetables. Poultry, pigs, water buffalo, dogs, and donkeys acclimated themselves to the MGM-nurtured farms of Wang Lung and his friend and his uncle. The company tapped an aqueduct, erected a huge pump, and employed modern irrigation techniques to make ready for a harvest in eight months; during filming, the company also used Chinese waterwheels and windmills.

Shortly before Christmas, Fleming scheduled surgery for kidney stones, expecting to be back on his feet in time to start filming in January. He would have weathered it easily, except for a blood clot that formed in one leg. Doctors confined him to bed, and his niece Yvonne remembered that when she visited him at his house, “he was like a caged tiger”—one who, sadly, couldn’t keep his biggest picture yet from slipping through his claws.

After so much costly preparation, Thalberg had to make a move. Speedy, worldly W. S. Van Dyke, Fleming’s best possible replacement, begged off so he could finish
San Francisco.
As the official MGM production history put it, “Here was a great picture, under way so far as locations, casting, and all operative details were concerned . . . and no director.” In late 1935, Thalberg approached Sidney Franklin, and on January 21, 1936, he took over, deeming the physical layout Fleming had prepared “altogether excellent.” But he considered the script Fleming had prepared “too Occidental” and ordered a new script written with more “Oriental flavor.” Franklin ended up directing with (in Pauline Kael’s words) “his usual lack of imagination, individuality, style. He was the MGM heavyweight champ”—and a thorn in Fleming’s side a few years later, on
The Yearling.

18

Spencer Tracy and
Captains Courageous

No matter how odd the circumstances of Lu’s pregnancy, the delight Fleming took in parenting surpassed the disappointments of forfeiting
The Good Earth
and
They Gave Him a Gun,
an antiwar adventure set to star Spencer Tracy. (Mayer had lured Tracy from Fox with a promise of leading roles.) Victoria turned one as Fleming was recuperating. A few weeks later, she piled some twigs in her tiny fists and gave them to him. He wrote, “Missy gathered up these beautiful things to her daddy one March morning—her first gifts to him,” then lined a jewelry box with cotton batting and preserved these gifts. By the end of March 1936, he had recovered sufficiently from his surgery and embolism to travel to Dayton, Ohio, to look at new airplanes, and from there sent his daughter a telegram in baby talk.