Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) (45 page)

For Harvey’s odyssey to be over and for him to connect with his real father, Manuel must be sacrificed. Lighton and Fleming kept working on Manuel’s death almost to the end, striving for a balance between pathos and cruelty. What requires a willing suspension of disbelief is also what makes the scene extraordinary: Manuel knows he’s cut in two as soon as he hits the water. The snapping of the mainmast was present in the script early, but only in Fleming’s final notes do we find the inspired stroke of Manuel screaming out his horrifying condition to Doc in Portuguese, so Doc can tell Disko to cut him loose. “He’s stove in,” Doc tells Disko. “All the bottom half of him’s gone. But he don’t want the kid to know.”

The element of self-sacrifice does more than ennoble the seaman. It heightens the emotions shared by
all
the characters and particularizes the action beyond a tragic stroke of fate. Manuel insists on determining the manner of his demise, and that becomes his final gift to Harvey. He demonstrates not just grace under pressure but grace in extremis. (Tracy remembered shooting his final scene “in iced water for three days running” in shots that took hours. But he was safely encased in a steel cage camouflaged by rigging; he sank down a mere three feet while water chutes and airplane motors created waves and pneumatic rockers swayed sections of the
We’re Here.
)

Otis Ferguson, a Navy veteran, hailed
Captains Courageous
as “a corking yarn” and praised its “uncanny genius for the shipshape, that inimitable seaman’s order in a cramped confusion of halyards, rope
ends,
buckets, pin and tackle, hatches and capstans and standing gear.” The French agreed. “One must be insensitive to resist the profound emotion of this film,” pronounced
Paris-Soir.
“Fleming has made this film with incomparable technical perfection.” Even the
Times
of London observed that the Americans “have shown here a remarkable capacity for absorbing their author’s mind,” and “in fact, in some passages it almost seems to out-Kipling Kipling.” James Shelley Hamilton of the National Board of Review imagined Kipling’s ghost noting all the changes from the book and then admitting “they had made a good show of it.”

Before those kudos, Fleming found himself fighting the studio. In early February 1937, he threatened to “leave the lot” if MGM didn’t present the film as “Victor Fleming’s production of
Captains Courageous.
” Although still working without a long-term contract, he said the MGM executive Benny Thau had promised him that credit. Eddie Mannix backed up Fleming, but in March he again risked Mayer’s ire. The studio chief was trying to avoid paying Thalberg’s estate—that is, Fleming’s former lover Norma Shearer—what Thalberg would have been owed if alive. This time, Fleming went over Mayer’s head to Nicholas Schenck, the president of Loew’s in New York, and told him the studio had united behind Shearer and that shortchanging her would cost the company its Tiffany image. Schenck concurred.

Fleming shot final retakes on March 18, 1937, after which Tracy went into the hospital for a thyroid operation. “It looks all right, as nearly as you can tell before a preview,” Lighton wrote his family. “Bartholomew is very good, and Spencer Tracy is excellent. Hope it’s all right. It’s been a lot of work.” In the end, he was satisfied.

It’s amazing how much
Captains Courageous
and its director meant to its cast. After Fleming finished with Bartholomew, he growled, for comic effect, “Now we can get this kid off the set!” and mimed a kick. Bartholomew, playing along, leaped off and hit an iron railing, breaking a front tooth. Fleming thought he must have really kicked him or forced him to jump, but Bartholomew, his widow says, knew he hadn’t. The tooth was capped. Years later Bartholomew joked, “To my dying day, I’ll be able to brush my teeth and think of Victor Fleming.”

Rooney raved about Fleming: “He was a fabulous character . . . and so competent that you just knew he could have stepped in and filled any job on the production crew because Fleming was, above all else, a real technician who understood film and filmmaking.” Although Rooney’s
character
suffered most from the expansion of Manuel, Fleming handed him and Barrymore an unforgettable moment. On the
We’re Here,
Disko and Dan are all business, but in the final sequence, back home in Gloucester, Dan leans on Disko’s knee and the skipper lovingly pats the boy’s head—they are a father and son once again.

19

Test Pilot

During all the tumult, illness, and complications of
Captains Courageous,
Vic and Lu conceived a second child. “The stork will stalk the Victor Flemings in February,” the
Los Angeles Times
announced on December 23, 1936, and their new daughter
was
born on February 16. But settling on a name took months. “They’re still trying names on the Victor Fleming baby. And after seven weeks they can’t find one that fits,” ran one column in April. Victoria’s sister was called “Little Bit” before Sara Elizabeth was settled on. But that quickly became Sally.

Nearly twenty years after Fleming promised his mother that “some day I am going to have a house in California—wife and all that goes with it,” he finally did. That spring, he put $60,000 into buying property and building a ten-room house in Bel-Air, a still-expanding district of West Los Angeles. Designed by Kirtland Cutter, who also did the Balboa beach house, the new home sat on eleven acres of rough chaparral in Moraga Canyon. It was substantial and comfortable—the strong, silent type, built almost like a fort, with walls made with two-by-six studs, not two-by-fours, and bars on the daughters’ bedroom windows as a shield against kidnappers. In addition to a basement workshop and darkroom, Fleming installed a massive safe built to withstand the house’s destruction by a wildfire. The family had moved in by the time he started
Test Pilot
in December.

The daughters say the products of the workroom were usually quite delicate. “He liked to have things to do,” says Victoria. “He made a big bamboo bank to hang on the wall. He made a round box that opened up, and a penguin out of a walrus tusk.” Sally says there was also a carved pelican with “a tiny fish in its beak” and her father presented them with “a mailbox with our address, 1050 Moraga Drive, engraved on it. A tiny silver mailbox. On the end of this teeny chain was this piece of silver.”

“
It was a lovely house,” said their neighbor, the film editor Watson Webb. “Very warm and cozy and very attractive, sort of a combination of Early American and a California ranch house. And totally unpretentious, not like something you’d find in [contemporary] Bel-Air for somebody who was big and successful.”

Of course, there was nothing unfashionable about it. The special-effects whiz Jack Cosgrove (who would work on
Gone With the Wind
and
Joan of Arc
), the MGM composer and arranger Adolph Deutsch, and the singer Allan Jones (who’d appeared in
Reckless
) were already neighbors, and the Gary Coopers lived nearby. Lu had selected the spot. A pair of hundred-foot pepper trees attracted her, and Fleming had the house built around them. “One was close to the swimming pool, and another shaded the porch,” said Victoria. Vic and Lu had separate bedrooms, hers in wallpaper and chintz, his in knotty pine; his enormous bed included a carved headboard, and the Kodiak bear rug dominated the room.

He lured a butler away from Deutsch: tall, dour, half-Indian, half-African-American Osceola Slocum, who also doubled as a chauffeur for Lu and the girls. Slocum’s wife, Robbie, was the live-in maid. The daughters eventually also had a live-in governess; early on, their father quickly discharged a nurse after she slapped one of them and he discovered the handprint.

Friends took notice of Fleming’s settling into traditional masculine maturity. Hawks’s biographer, Todd McCarthy, surmises that Vic’s fidelity to Lu prompted Hawks to
continue
womanizing, as if Vic had left the field to him; now Hawks could at last beat him at something. Fleming’s circle embraced Lu. With small groups such as Webb and the Lightons, Vic and Lu made a lovable couple. He was affectionate and attentive toward his wife, and, Webb said, “Lu was very warm, very nice, very easygoing, not attractive by standards of Hollywood glamour, but attractive as one who made a contribution to a group of people.”

Joan Marsh Morrill had a small role in
The Wet Parade
and is best remembered today as the poster girl who comes to life in
All Quiet on the Western Front.
She thought Lu was “a lot of fun, a great personality, and great around the house; I remember a copper bowl always filled with yellow nasturtiums.” Whatever Lu’s elusive charm, she was making Vic a family man. Nearly everyone knew of his womanizing past. Patsy Ruth Miller, now married to Mahin, thought Lu “very pleasant” but “not the sort of easygoing woman who would have accepted” philandering.

Captains
Courageous
had been one of MGM’s biggest grossers of 1937 as well as an Academy Award nominee for best picture, editing, and script, and Tracy won his first Oscar for best actor. Had it not split MGM’s vote with the prestige-laden
The Good Earth,
it might have garnered nominations for Bartholomew and Fleming (Sidney Franklin was nominated for directing
The Good Earth
). On paper,
Test Pilot
didn’t promise similar critical and financial success. The generic title had kicked around the studio since 1933; pulp fiction writers such as L. Ron Hubbard had published stories with the same name. Gable was always attached to MGM’s version; in 1933, he and Harlow, along with Wallace Beery and Jimmy Durante, were slated for one incarnation of it, and MGM arranged with the War Department to film at Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio, before changing plans.

Nine writers ultimately had a hand in what became Fleming’s version, including, of course, Mahin. The official credits went to Frank “Spig” Wead for the original story and Vincent Lawrence and Waldemar Young for the script. (Lawrence was the playwright who taught Fleming, on
Mantrap,
that words in movies live or die on their dramatic context.) Wead was an authentic Annapolis-meets-Hollywood personality: in 1957, John Ford even made a John Wayne film about him,
The Wings of Eagles.
Wead had graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy and flown in World War I before breaking his back falling down a flight of stairs in 1927; then he became a playwright and screenwriter. Hawks had turned Wead’s 1935 play
Ceiling Zero
into an entertaining picture in the Fleming vein—indeed, Fleming, Wellman, and Tay Garnett had been on the wish list of the producer, Hal Wallis, before Hawks got the job.

Test Pilot
turned out even better than
Ceiling Zero—
and, as on
Captains Courageous,
Fleming and the producer Louis Lighton were the two who pulled it together. The final product is full of characters and performances from MGM’s stock company, including Lionel Barrymore as the crusty, benevolent owner of Drake Aviation and Marjorie Main as a savvy landlady. Yet it’s a vibrant, personal picture.

Getting it made took persuasion. “Vic Fleming was the most exacting man on a job I ever knew,” the MGM production manager Eddie Mannix said. “Nobody wanted to play [
Test Pilot
]. Fleming brought it to me. I said, ‘Vic, I don’t understand it.’ He said, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with it.’ Nobody understood it. I said, ‘Come up and read me a sequence.’ I said the thing is underwritten. He said, ‘But we’ll show you.’ I said, ‘I’m sold.’ He had that confidence.”

Myrna
Loy and Clark Gable didn’t understand the story, either. According to Hedda Hopper, Loy’s initial reaction was: “It’s incredible, it’s unbelievable, the dialogue is stilted and insincere, the theme is absurd.” Gable testified that when he read the script, “I wanted out because I didn’t understand what the story was getting at. But the director . . . explained the character and I was happy with the part and still am.” Loy would eventually call the picture “a personal favorite of mine.”

On the page, only Fleming could sense the potent tension between the Kansas farm girl Ann Barton (Loy) and the mechanic Gunner (Spencer Tracy) as they vie for the focus of the flying ace Jim Lane (Clark Gable). And on the page, only Fleming could see how powerful it would become to portray the true rival to Ann
and
Gunner as the wild blue yonder: “the lady in a blue dress,” an aviator’s ultimate seductress.

Fleming’s own flying time had begun to decrease sharply as his schedule became busier at MGM. He flew only seventeen solo hours in 1937, and by the end of 1938, his pilot license had lapsed because he hadn’t put in the minimum number of hours in the air required to keep it active. “I just didn’t have the heart to lie about it,” he said. “You have to fill out a form that says among other things you have flown fifteen hours during the past twelve months, and I couldn’t say I had without lying.” But an ambitious youngster, Sid Luft (he’d become Judy Garland’s third husband in 1952), remembered him as a regular presence at the Santa Monica Airport, where Fleming kept his Waco. “I was a kid then, building up my flying time and trying to get my commercial [license]. We’d just occasionally have some dialogue in the hangar.” Luft admired the Waco: “A nice airplane; it could cruise close to two hundred miles per hour. I had a Monocoupe I bought for $1,500. We used to bullshit about his plane and mine, and he seemed to know what he was doing.”

Fleming’s comprehension of the risks run by test pilots ran deep. The Lockheed Sirius that had bedeviled him in 1932 ended up in the hands of the Australian aviation pioneer Sir Charles Kingsford Smith, that nation’s Charles Lindbergh. “Smithy” had made the first transpacific flight from Oakland, California, to Australia, and set a record for flying solo between Australia and England—nine days and twenty-two hours. He had also briefly done stunt flying in silent pictures.

Kingsford Smith, who named the Lockheed the
Lady Southern Cross
and had it painted a bright blue, set another record with the plane
in
1934, flying from Hawaii to Oakland in less than fifteen hours. Then he hopped down to Los Angeles, where the movie studios as well as local officials feted him. His last stop was with Fleming at MGM. If he expected pleasant conversation about the future of aviation, what he faced were blunt complaints from the aircraft’s former owner. “I never did have any luck in that plane,” Fleming told him in front of reporters. “It was always getting mysterious things the matter with it . . . Why, one time I flew in to Reno and had to come back by train. I developed a leaking tank. That’s why I sold it.” Kingsford Smith and his navigator “exchanged glances and smiled”—they had endured the same problem over the Pacific. Swamped in debt, Kingsford Smith wanted to sell the plane, possibly even to sell it back to Fleming. But he couldn’t find a buyer. He was competing in the 1935 England-to-Australia air race and operating on a thirty-six-hour sleep deficit when, on November 8, 1935, he crashed the plane into the Bay of Bengal.