Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) (88 page)

Selznick wisely exploited a three-year plan of escalating publicity. Headlines screamed about everything from the burning of Atlanta to the casting of Gable and Leigh to the premiere in the real Atlanta. But the hoopla would have evaporated without a film that delivered the goods. Overall, its failings hardly matter—largely because it boasts Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler at its core. They remain startlingly
contemporary
and compelling as antiheroine and antihero. James Cameron says that when he made
Titanic,
“
Gone With the Wind
was the film to beat—it showed the path you could take to do the epic story and capture people’s hearts beyond the normal movie experience.”

Scarlett and Rhett as well as the impact of their twisted love and marriage also are the main (but not the only) reasons Fleming, the credited director, should receive the same honor today as when the movie first went out with his name on it. Over the course of his career, he, as much as anyone, showed Hollywood how to create tarnished protagonists who still glittered. In
Bombshell,
Harlow’s Lola Burns resembles a burlesque version of Scarlett, supporting a sponging family and resisting the go-getting cynic who’s perfect for her, because she prefers classier gents. Directing Gable in
Red Dust,
Fleming brought a new sexual dimension and knowing humor to the figure of the can-do guy and anticipated the attractiveness of a wised-up fellow on a grander scale, like Rhett.

Unlike Selznick, whose biographers portray his forays into womanizing as pathetic or laughable, Fleming, like Rhett, was a ladies’ man
and
a man’s man who became a devoted family man. He’d learned about the esprit and weariness of military service in the Signal Corps and observed the aftermath of war in Europe. He’d even assisted on
Intolerance,
D. W. Griffith’s follow-up to
The Birth of a Nation, Gone With the Wind
’s obvious predecessor. So he was a natural to connect with this material.
Gone With the Wind
would never have become the resplendent thing it is without Selznick, but it never would have found its voice—its bark
and
its bite—without Fleming. Nothing Selznick threw at him was too big a stretch. Fleming’s temperament, background, and aptitude made him more than a journeyman enjoying a stroke of luck. He was the ideal director to save and vitalize the movie.

Years later, Dalton Trumbo, Fleming’s collaborator on
A Guy Named Joe,
became part of another phoenixlike production when the cocky young Stanley Kubrick took over the reins from Anthony Mann on Kirk Douglas’s production of
Spartacus.
Chafing at Kubrick’s highhanded alterations of his work on the set and in the editing room, Trumbo put his own track record on the line, writing to the director in a lengthy and blistering memo, “In the past I have worked with, or my screenplays have been directed by, such competent, successful, and even brilliant artists as Sam Wood, Mervyn LeRoy, Preston Sturges,
Garson
Kanin, René Clair, and Victor Fleming, whom I consider the king of them all.”

From the point of view of a producer who thought directors were overrated anyway, Saul David asked in
The Industry,
“Who directed
The Wizard of Oz
? Mervyn LeRoy? Nope. And who directed
Gone With the Wind
? Selznick? Uh-uh. Both were directed by Victor Fleming—a man who never makes the auteur lists and whose work is therefore a reproach to serious cineastes. Maybe his obscurity is a bitter injustice to Fleming.” Without question.

Acknowledgments

Individuals whom I interviewed or corresponded with: Evangela Anderson, Dorothy Barrett, Rex Bell Jr., Alain Bernheim, Lennie Bluett, Rand Brooks, Kevin Brownlow, June Caldwell, James Cameron, Keith Carradine, Cammie King Conlon, Jeff Corey, Charles Cotton, Thomas Cripps, Jules Dassin, Cecilia DeMille, André de Toth, Ruth Duccini, Sally Fleming, Victoria Fleming, Julie Garfield, Vera Gebbert, Norman Geiger, Kathryn Grayson, Jane Greer, Andy Griffith, Jack Haley Jr., Stan W. Haley, Edward Hardwicke, David Hawks, Leonora Hornblow, Shep Houghton, Joan Kenmore, Gavin Lambert, Frank Leonetti, Val Lewton Jr., Pia Lindström, Norman Lloyd, Julian Ludwig, Sid Luft, James Lydon, Graham Lee Mahin, Tim Mahin, Tom Mankiewicz, Jerry Maren, Patricia Marmont, Barbara Hawks McCampbell, Kevin McCarthy, Karen Morley, Joan Marsh Morrill, Joseph Newman, Marni Nixon, Robert Nott, Gregg Oppenheimer, Margaret Pellegrini, Meinhardt Raabe, Luise Rainer, Maurice Rapf, Gene Reynolds, Ralph Riskin, Mickey Rooney, Ambrose Schindler, Budd Schulberg, Martin Scorsese, John D. Seelye, Vincent Sherman, George Sidney, Andrew Solt, Steven Spielberg, John Springer, Robert Stack, David Stenn, Rodger Swearingen, Larry Swindell, Bob Thomas, Audrey Totter, Susie Tracy, Phillip Trent, Christopher Trumbo, William Tuttle, Lew Wasserman, Watson Webb, Dottie Wellman, William Wellman Jr., Winnie Weshler, Danny Windsor, Ralph Winters, Jane Withers.

Individuals whom my research associate, Kurt Jensen, interviewed or corresponded with: Bette Jean Ahrens, Alan H. Anderson, Lawrence Bachmann, Pamela Morris Baker, Elizabeth Bartholomew, H. Bruce Baumeister, Yvonne Blocksom, Hunter Bowman, Lee Bowman Jr., Julie Lugo Cerra, George Coulouris Jr., Patrick Curtis, David Brion Davis, Tad Devine, James Drury, Gene Eckman, Sally Fleming, Victo
ria
Fleming, Richard Foelsch, John Frederick, Greg Giese, William Goodykoontz, Kate Harper, Edward C. Hartman, Olivia de Havilland, Terese Hayden, Marsha Hunt, Schuyler Johnson, Thomas Jones, Christy Kelso, Mickey Kuhn, Helen Reed Lehman, Betty Lighton, Jack Lindquist, Ian Mackersey, John McCabe, Fay McKenzie, Olga Nardone, Micky O’Donoughue, Robert Rampton, Robert Reed, Lina Romay, Arthur H. Rosson Jr., Barbara Saltzman, Eddie Schmidt Jr., Sheila Shay, John Sheffield, Karl Slover, Tim Soules, Martin Spellman, Donna Stewart-Hardway, Rodger Swearingen, Clarence Swensen, Robert Terry, Melissa Wells, Harriet Wheeler, Richard V. Wyman.

Interview collection, Columbia University: Mary Astor (1971), Pandro S. Berman (1971), Marc Connelly (1959), Jackie Cooper (1959), Janet Gaynor (1958), Ben Hecht (1957), James Wong Howe (1971), Mervyn LeRoy (1971), Myrna Loy (1959), Adela Rogers St. Johns (1971), Edward Sutherland (1959).

Interview collection, Southern Methodist University: Don DeFore (1986), Irene Dunne (1986), Mervyn LeRoy (1978), Gil Perkins (1986), Gene Raymond (1986), Emily Torchia (1984), Slavko Vorkapich (1975).

J. D. Marshall interviews, Recorded Sound Reference Center, Library of Congress: Howard Estabrook (1978), John Lee Mahin (1978), and Dalton Trumbo (1973).

Robert Gottlieb, who hired me at the
New Yorker
and often edited me there, championed Fleming as a subject, prodded the book to completion, and applied his pencil cunningly to the manuscript. In person and in writing, he has an uncanny knack for course correction—which he can accomplish with a word of encouragement or a penetrating critique. No one has been more patient or sanguine about this book’s long gestation—except, perhaps, for Sarah Lazin, an agent who is also an ally and close reader, and Glenda Hobbs, my wife, who applied her diamond cutter’s eye to the text.

The biography would not have been possible without my research associate, Kurt Jensen, the best pure reporter I know as well as a first-rate editor and fact-checker. He came aboard to crack the family history and, by his dexterity with databases and tenacity with human sources, cleared up many a clannish mystery. He soon became organically connected to the process of establishing a life story for a man who left a sparse written record. Kurt sifted through prodigious amounts of data to nail down individual details and was crucial to the coverage of
such
varied topics as the Atlanta celebration for
Gone With the Wind,
the birth of the anticommunist Motion Picture Alliance, and the vagaries of Joan of Arc scholarship, which, he was delighted to find, encompassed Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Jack Benny, and Fred Allen. He has a keen nose for the truth, and I can’t think of a nonfiction book that couldn’t be taken to its highest possible level with Kurt’s participation.

Sally Fleming kindly shared all the family material she had and helped persuade Turner Entertainment in Atlanta to open her father’s MGM legal files to me. Victoria Fleming offered her prodigious memory and insights, including this sly, deceptively simple advice: “If there’s ever a question of whether Daddy and some woman did or they didn’t, assume they did!”

Christy Kelso not only shared her extensive files documenting the background and the westward trek of the Hartman family; she also lent her formidable skills as a genealogist to turn up a substantial trove of correspondence and legal documents. Edward C. Hartman divulged his detailed memories of San Dimas and “Uncle Vic” with a generosity matched only by his sanity and natural good humor: he said that when Fleming was at his peak, making
The Wizard of Oz,
“You have to remember that I was fourteen years old, and if it had nothing to do with sports, I couldn’t care less.”

Kate Harper, whose childhood memories include personalities as diverse as Cecil B. DeMille and Jimmy Durante, aided the vast effort to locate interviewees.

The man who’s done more than anyone since James Agee to revive the popularity of the silent film, Kevin Brownlow, gave the first big boost to this biography. At the 1998 Telluride Film Festival, he expressed his enthusiasm for Fleming as a director and a personality, then opened up, and
kept
open, voluminous data and research on early Hollywood, including correspondence with Louise Brooks from the 1960s and early 1970s, an unpublished memoir by Sidney Franklin, and interviews with Howard Hawks (1970), Bessie Love (1971), and Dorothy Jordan Cooper (1972). Throughout this book’s own long history, Brownlow overflowed with information, photographs, and insights, and he never said no.

Elizabeth Anthony, editor of the Web site
ReelClassics.com,
made marvelous contributions on several fronts. In addition to assiduous library work, she translated Sergei Eisenstein and Father Paul Doncoeur from the French; she deciphered Bosley Crowther’s handwrit
ing;
and she made the kinds of suggestions for further research that could come only from a three-strip Technicolor dyed-in-the-celluloid movie lover.

The biographer of Jean Harlow and Clara Bow, David Stenn, scoured the David Stenn collection for quotations from acquaintances and co-workers of Fleming’s and kept finding untapped sources of testimony to the director’s drive and creativity. Selden West provided anecdotes from her research on Spencer Tracy. William Wellman’s biographer, Frank Thompson, put me in touch with John Gallagher, author of the first important monograph on Fleming. And Gallagher was invaluable: he delivered tapes of rare films, dozens of contemporary reviews and publicity stories, several of his own original interviews, and even a program for the road-show presentation of
The Rough Riders.

Scott Eyman, while researching, writing, and promoting his book about Louis B. Mayer, shared his knowledge of and sources on MGM in the 1930s and 1940s and even came up with a budget sheet for
Around the World in Eighty Minutes.
Joseph McBride, while completing his life of John Ford, gave me a score of leads on filmmakers (or family members of filmmakers) from Fleming’s generation.

Todd McCarthy, Howard Hawks’s biographer, put me in touch with Hawks’s family and sent me his notes on Fleming from Norma Shearer’s unpublished autobiography. He also cheered the project on, although he knew it wouldn’t always view
his
subject favorably. So did David Thomson, who lent me the Fleming-related research he did for his life of David O. Selznick,
Showman.
Matthew Bernstein, Walter Wanger’s biographer, provided pointers on the Wanger Collection at the University of Wisconsin; the indefatigable and prolific Milwaukee-based biographer Patrick McGilligan (a colleague since Boston alternative-weekly days in the 1970s) navigated it for me. McGilligan also sank back into his fifteen-year-old notebooks on George Cukor to locate the source of a now-crucial piece of
GWTW
lore.

John Fricke, who keeps proving the last word can’t be written or spoken on
The Wizard of Oz,
was always open to questions, as was Willard Carroll, who was profligate in his generosity with
Oz
photographs, memorabilia, and lore. Anthony Slide provided key early assistance on silent-film resources, and Lee Tsiantis of Turner Classic Movies offered practical and aesthetic support from beginning to end.

My longtime friend and ace professional movie researcher, Joan
Cohen,
gave the project a shot of energy with her in-person research in London as well as her forays into many Los Angeles archives and libraries. Amy Glover and Jennifer Clark operated like brainy sharpshooters, homing in on every request with immediate perception and clarity and invariably coming up with more than I asked for. Meg Singley discovered eloquent testimony to Fleming’s standing at MGM in Bosley Crowther’s unused notes for his book on the studio.

Don Rogier’s effort to trace Clara Strouse and her family even involved a hike through an Ohio cemetery.

“Several friends and colleagues” of Dave Smith, director of the Walt Disney Archives, spent a weekend, on their own time, casting their experienced eyes on several vintage Mickey Mouse cartoons to determine whether any footage was recycled into
Around the World in Eighty Minutes.

Neal Graffy generously offered his own research, aided by his friendship with Lulu Phelan, to add detail to Fleming’s professional launch—and his romance with Charlotte Burton—at the Flying A studio in Santa Barbara.

Most of the research originated at the facilities of the Library of Congress. Zoran Sinobad and the rest of the staff of the Motion Picture Reading Room lent their wide-ranging expertise at every turn. But a biography with widely scattered source material can only come about with the skilled assistance of archivists and reference librarians nationwide. Foremost on this list are Barbara Hall at the Margaret Herrick Library, Ned Comstock at USC’s Cinema and Television Library, and Charles Silver at the Museum of Modern Art. And Fleming’s story could not have been fleshed out without the knowledgeable help of volunteers at local historical organizations from Columbia County, Pennsylvania, to San Dimas and Santa Barbara, California.