Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) (85 page)

Anderson rented a beach house in Santa Monica, but did most of his writing at Fleming’s remodeled guest house, commuting with a car the director lent him. Even more than Mahin’s testimony, Anderson’s diary provides the best evidence for Fleming as a director who cared about script and went back to literary sources. Anderson and Solt started work on June 7, and on June 8 they and Ross and Fleming decided to break down the picture into five sequences. Just three days later, the entire picture was laid out. On June 12, Fleming came by with a Bible and a copy of George Bernard Shaw’s
Androcles and the Lion.
They spent the afternoon reading the New Testament accounts of the Crucifixion and the preface to Shaw’s play.

At the same time he was screenwriting
The Robe,
Anderson was preparing for rehearsals of his new play,
Anne of the Thousand Days,
for a New York opening that fall. Anderson gave Fleming a copy of
Anne
and recorded that the director was “very enthusiastic,” adding, “for him.” He hoped Fleming would direct the film version right after
The Robe.
Neither happened. The RKO chief, Howard Hughes, ended up dumping
The Robe
and concentrating on Fleming’s old Paramount colleague Josef von Sternberg’s
Jet Pilot,
featuring supersonic fore-and-aft cleavage from aerodynamic jets and a voluptuous, jump-suited Janet
Leigh
as a Soviet pilot.
Anne of the Thousand Days
wasn’t made until 1969 with Richard Burton, Geneviève Bujold, and a revamped script. But Fleming got something out of Anderson’s work on
The Robe.
While the writer was in town, he persuaded him to contrive a new opening speech for
Joan of Arc.
And if he had lived to see the producer Ross turn
The Robe
around and land it at 20th Century Fox, the director might have mastered one more movie milestone.
The Robe
became the first movie in CinemaScope, the widescreen process designed to draw 1950s audiences into theaters and away from their TV screens—and for a while the sole competitor for
Gone With the Wind
’s box-office crown.

When Hesper Anderson turned fourteen on August 2, Fleming presented her with two bottles of wine “for her hope chest.” The gift touched her deeply. Maxwell Anderson noted, “On the way home she said, ‘That was about the most moving thing anybody ever did for me. He must have learned a lot about girls. I felt like just sitting there and crying.’ ” But her and her father’s feelings for Vic didn’t cushion their reactions to
Joan of Arc
when they saw it the following week, along with Mab, Marion Hargrove, and Andrew Solt. Anderson kept his feelings private, not even recording them in his diary. In her memoir,
South Mountain Road,
Hesper recalled it as a terrible, depressing afternoon, the silence in the screening room broken only by Hargrove’s crack, “It just goes to show, a woman’s place is over a hot stove.”

Fleming sounded off to Mahin: “I don’t know what’s wrong . . . Everything is so beautiful. Ingrid is just so marvelous. I don’t know what’s wrong.” Graham Lee Mahin said his dad responded, “Well, Victor, it’s the first picture
she
ever directed.”

Men of Fleming’s generation would sneer at a phrase like “midlife crisis.” But the deep humiliation of
Joan of Arc
aged Fleming beyond the virile grand-old-man status he’d enjoyed for more than a decade. Bergman’s high-toned ardor and sense of her own power disarmed him and damaged the movie. And their affair had thrown a wrench into the family life that he’d managed for a decade to keep out of scandal or Hollywood foolery. Alain Bernheim, the brother of Michel, thought Fleming a proper family man who seemed “very Catholic” to him. When Bernheim found out about Fleming’s romantic involvement with Ingrid, he thought it “didn’t mesh” with the rest of what he knew about him.

Bergman
wasn’t the tragicomic figure that Bow was—someone Vic could look back on with unself-conscious fondness. He was passionate about both of them, but with Bergman he had what Ward Bond in
A Guy Named Joe
called that “slow poison” kind of love. When it passed through his system, could it have strengthened him as a man and an artist? Fleming had been developing a reflective strand to his movie-making, similar at his best to William Wyler’s. Just as his friend Hawks had turned Hemingway’s then-worst novel,
To Have and Have Not,
into a first-rate escapist romance, Fleming might have turned Hemingway’s new-worst novel,
Across the River and into the Trees,
into a stinging summing-up.

As Wanger set out to orchestrate the publicity campaign for
Joan of Arc,
Fleming returned to his mechanic roots, restoring a 1932 Ford Model A as a hot rod. “It looked stock on the outside, but it screamed. It was a really fast thing,” said Graham Mahin. Fleming’s partner in the restoration was Ormond “Red” Ruthven, a sometimes screenwriter and full-time troubleshooter for MGM. “Apparently, when Victor wanted to get away or something without going on vacation, he’d go and work on the car with Red.”

Meanwhile, Bergman, the star in the driver’s seat of his latest screen vehicle, was falling out of favor with the press. The columnist Edith Gwynn blamed Joe Steele’s departure. “Ingrid has always been difficult with the ‘press’ and others, taking herself too seriously perhaps. And what a job the diplomatic and hardworking Joe did, to keep most of the world from finding it out!” When fall arrived and the advance reviews began spilling out, there were indications that even the critical community was falling out of love with her. “Miss Bergman presents a splendid figure as Joan,” wrote
Variety.
“But her part demands long speeches amounting almost to soliloquies, and force of these is lost as spectator watches endless scenes of the trial.” The
Hollywood Reporter
was unqualified in its praise, especially for Fleming as “a director whose sensitivity can merge subtle characterizations and human emotions into the pageantry.”

By the time
Joan of Arc
opened to the public at the Victoria Theatre on Times Square in New York on November 11, the luster was gone from the fleur-de-lis. November 10, the night of its charity premiere, was rainy, and there were few stars visible on the ground. Bergman arrived from Sweden and stood stiffly next to Fleming for photogra
phers;
Barbara Bel Geddes and Guy Kibbee were the biggest showbiz names among a phalanx of Catholic clergy. Wanger had made sure to win the approval of New York’s Cardinal Spellman and the National Legion of Decency with a special screening the month before. The RKO publicist John Springer knew movie fans were still in love with the Bergman of
The Bells of St. Mary’s,
and she seemed to live up to that image: she took him to St. Patrick’s Cathedral every day when they were promoting
Joan of Arc.
Wanger and company gave the film’s opening the old college try. Putting together Bergman and the movie’s second- and third-most-popular selling points—the spectacle of medieval battle and the spectacle of conflagration—RKO erected a huge electric sign of Bergman resplendent in Joan’s armor, surrounded by orange flames.

In his last interview, Fleming reiterated the themes of
Action Is the Word,
saying, “I’m getting my history this way, to make up for quitting school in the seventh grade. It’s like a fairy land to me.” The reviews were no fairy tale.
The New York Times
’s Bosley Crowther wrote similar pans for Fleming and his star, saying just as “the spiritual ordeal of the maiden is confused in the pageant of the trial,” the “agony of the execution is likewise lost in the surge of the big show,” and Bergman, “while handsome to look on, has no great spiritual quality. Her strength seems to lie in her physique rather than her burning faith.”

Adela Rogers St. Johns said, “The one time [Vic] failed, poor man, I felt so sorry for him, when he made
Joan of Arc
with Bergman . . . I went to see it with him one night, and he sat and cried all the way through it. That was his heartbreak.” In December, Fleming appeared at the Fox Beverly in Beverly Hills for the movie’s West Coast premiere. He greeted the crowd, then slipped quietly inside the theater. This time Bergman stood by Alfred Hitchcock. Robert Mitchum came, and, with Shelley Winters as his date, Farley Granger was there, too, having recently appeared in Hitchcock’s
Rope.
A slew of older female stars paid tribute to Bergman, including Joan Crawford, Ann Miller, Esther Williams, Susan Hayward, and, reminding Fleming of his Fairbanks days, Mary Pickford.

The next day the hometown reviews appeared. They were shriveling. “ ‘Joan of Arc’ sprawls awkwardly, in episodic lumps,” wrote the reviewer for the
Los Angeles Daily News.
He also shrewdly noted, “All hands concerned would have been better off had they stuck to Maxwell
Anderson’s
original ‘Joan of Lorraine,’ which at least stuck to the one basic theme of faith-as-a-compromise—and from a modern standpoint at that.” As for Fleming’s direction, it was “almost insensate.”

Two days later it was Christmas, and Fleming was at his mother’s house passing $20 gold pieces to a collection of young relatives and softly admitting to Rodger Swearingen, “It’s a disaster, that picture.”

30

Death in the Desert

Fleming had declared that he wanted to be a director of epics ever since the late 1920s. But
Joan of Arc,
his one independent foray into epic territory, was a creative debacle.
Time
’s movie column, generally sympathetic to him, said the heroine “becomes a lifeless symbol in a pageant.” RKO found no better way of promoting the film than
as
a pageant. The critical reception scotched the idea of sending it out as the American-produced equal to Olivier’s
Henry V:
Crowther put the two heroic-medieval portraits head-to-head and declared
Joan of Arc
competitive only in its pictorial “perfection,” because Fleming, unlike Olivier, allowed “this whole drama to be played in the wide frame of a pageant, with consequent lack of real insight and intimacy.” (It’s “score one for Henry,” he quipped.) The studio hedged its bets from the start, showcasing it as a reserved-seat, road-show presentation in some theaters and a continuously run film in others.

The initial returns
were
solid, and Wanger’s hopes of awards, despite the bad reviews, still high. But he and Fleming had misjudged their audience. Shepperd Strudwick, Joan’s idealistic bailiff, shortly afterward appeared as an idealistic doctor in 1949’s
All the King’s Men,
a torn-from-the-headlines melodrama based on Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel.
All the King’s Men
ultimately became a box-office success and won Academy Awards for best picture and best actor, Broderick Crawford (a Fleming family friend), and best supporting actress, Mercedes McCambridge. That movie, with its democratic hero turning into a demagogue, boasted the kind of direct, dynamic ambivalence and street credibility postwar critics wanted.

Under Bergman’s spell, Fleming had succumbed to holiday-season poster art and siphoned any bit of ambivalence out of
Joan of Arc.
Even its cost became a joke. Wanger accepted a
Look
magazine achievement
award
for the film in February. When the presenter, Bob Hope, asked in his usual teasing-wheedling fashion why there’d been no role for Hope in
Joan of Arc,
Wanger said, in a scripted quip, “If a man has a $200 pipe, would he smoke Dr. Scholl’s foot pads in it?” It was nominated for seven Academy Awards, but won only for cinematography and costume design; Wanger shamelessly campaigned for, and received, a special award for “distinguished service to the industry in adding to its moral stature in the world community by his production of
Joan of Arc.
” Bergman and Ferrer, though nominated, were never considered contenders. When Wanger accepted his award, he said, “Notwithstanding this citation, I cannot accept this award except in the name of my partners, Ingrid Bergman and Victor Fleming, who made this great picture possible.”

By then Sierra Pictures was mired in debt, and Bergman had run off with Roberto Rossellini, leaving her daughter, Pia, behind with Petter Lindström.

And Victor Fleming was dead.

“We had the same dentist, or my husband did at least, and the dentist, I was convinced, killed Vic—gave him too much Novocain or took out too many teeth and weakened him,” said Leonora Hornblow. But
Joan of Arc
took more out of him than any dentist could. The mature, seductively melancholy Fleming was no longer the Beau Brummell who could laugh off broken dreams with Clara Bow. Bergman said she delighted in observing him run a set. Fleming, however, must have been in agony watching her there and in the editing room, where he could see her slipping away from his personal and professional grasp. Bergman forced Fleming to face the contradictions of his life and to consider whether sustaining his marriage for the previous dozen years had simply been a matter of marital will and parental devotion. His antidote to gloom, as usual, was action. He had dental surgery the day after Christmas, and a mere two days after that drove Lu and his daughters to the Beaver Creek guest ranch, twenty miles east of Cottonwood, Arizona.

In many ways, it was a journey into his past, to the country where he’d played escalating pranks with Douglas Fairbanks and navigated perilous location scouts on horseback with Lois Wilson. He stopped to visit Lighton at his Wine Glass Ranch in Prescott. Watson Webb, who hosted the Flemings and Lightons for dinner whenever Hope and Bud came back to Los Angeles, always found Fleming to be “very gracious
and
down-to-earth” with his wife in that smaller group. Hope would display a cigarette box adorned with custom-made jewelry charms patterned after Lighton’s favorite productions, including a little boat for
Captains Courageous
and a parachute for the next Lighton-Fleming production,
Test Pilot.
And “Lu was very warm, very nice, very easygoing.” Webb had no sympathy for Fleming’s affair with Bergman: “The two most promiscuous women in Hollywood were Grace Kelly and Ingrid Bergman. We used to call a dame a porcupine: a million pricks stick into her. Ingrid was a real porcupine.”