Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics)

by Sragow, Michael

  It was a period of change and sacrifice for the Fleming and Hartman families. On April 9, 1893, Ed Hartman had married Mary Jordan, a petite redhead he’d met while doing farmwork in Missouri, and she instantly became “Aunt Mamie” to the Flemings. Eva moved with Victor, Arletta, and Ruth into Ed and Mamie’s place before the newlywed couple had much chance to make their own home. Clyde, Mamie’s first child, arrived in February 1894. Meanwhile, Eva began commuting on a train to be a nurse’s aide at Queen of Angels Hospital in Los Angeles. “It was either that job or a packinghouse in San Dimas,” says Edward Hartman. “Los Angeles was a place where she could easily find employment. She wasn’t going to work as a domestic.” With Eva and Ed out earning a living, Mamie had the Fleming brood to manage as well as her own son. Hartman tradition has it that Ed simply told Mamie, “You take care of ’em.” (Ed’s brusque treatment of Mamie might have influenced Victor’s later marital relations.) For a time, Mamie breast-fed both Ruth and Clyde. With the birth of her daughter Edna, Mamie found herself in charge of five children, with Victor the oldest at age six. No wonder her hair went gray before she turned thirty-seven.

  Despite the burden, Mamie was a warm, nurturing force, “probably the best loved of all the Hartmans in those years,” says Christy Kelso, a great-granddaughter and the family historian. “[The Hartman household] became the center of family gatherings every Sunday . . . Victor showed the same devotion to her as everyone else. He came to visit one Christmas in the 1930s bringing a baby lamb. But it never became dinner. She turned it into a pet, named it Christmas, and it had the run of the house. During his Christmas visit in 1940, he gave her a check for $10,000, something he would never have been able to do while his uncle Ed was alive.” Ed was tightfisted with Mamie. “She was very short, and since she spent so much time in the kitchen cooking for the orchard workers, she repeatedly asked Ed to lower the window there so she could have some air while she cooked. But he would never do it. The day after his funeral in 1938, she had workers at the house lowering that window.”

  Ed gave his family a firm anchor—and Victor a primary role model—with his perseverance, energy, and resourcefulness. In addition to managing citrus groves and hauling fertilizer, Ed began a side business raising bees necessary for the maintenance of the orchards. Ferociously individual, he sold his lemons and oranges independent of growers’ associations and in good time prospered as a rancher and then as a buyer and seller of ranch properties and a moneylender to fellow ranchers. He would set up his finance operation under a large tree in his yard in San Dimas every Saturday, with a leather bag of gold coins and a pistol in a shoulder holster. His humor reflected his conservatism and self-reliance, traits he shared with many rural Southern Californians. (“A pious and conservative lot” is how McWilliams described the older residents of the citrus towns.) A favorite saying of Ed’s later years was that “Henry Ford ruined the country” with the forty-hour week. Victor followed Ed’s example. Even in an industry where men toiled twelve or more hours every day except Sunday, Fleming the film director would be known as a hard worker.

  After Lon died, Eva’s brother Mal canceled the couple’s debt to him, but she had lost whatever nest egg she and Lon had accumulated. Sidney Roger Deacon offered her and her children security. Sid owned a nearby citrus ranch and well with his younger brother, Ira, and a third brother living in Chicago. Eva was twenty-nine and Deacon thirty-seven when they got married in 1897, in Pomona. “I think [the marriage] was Nanny’s doing. She set her sights on him, because he was not an aggressive-type person, and Nanny was,” says Edward Hartman. “It was a very small community. Everybody knew each other.” Deacon, a carpenter who had grown up in Waukegan, Illinois, was easing out of ranching at the time of his wedding to Eva; his stated occupation was “water developer.” He and his brother sold water to the Covina Irrigating Company, as well as peddling fruit trees on the side. Their well was so productive that shortly before the birth of their daughter, Sid and Eva were able to sell it to the Covina company for $10,000.

  A lean fellow with a clipped mustache and eyeglasses, and big ears protruding from his head, Sid Deacon took Anglo-Saxon reserve from his English immigrant parents and added his own gravity. Before marrying Eva, he had built a new house in San Dimas.

  Early poverty, like an Indian genealogy, became part of Victor Fleming’s legend, but his main childhood home was a spacious three-bedroom bungalow nestling comfortably against a hill on five acres. The kitchen boasted a dumbwaiter to the cellar; the backyard outhouse had three seats, a sure mark of respectability for a growing household. Sid the carpenter milled sliding oak doors to separate the dining room and parlor. He erected a barn and tapped an artesian spring in the back, and planted orange trees in front. And Uncle Ed and Aunt Mamie eventually lived roughly a half mile away. “The whole family worked as a cohesive unit, and saw to it that the kids were taken care of,” says Edward Hartman. In adulthood, Fleming remembered working on Uncle Ed’s ranch when he was ten, learning how to blast tree stumps with dynamite. In a bit of Hollywood hyperbole, he claimed one stick went off in a delayed reaction and hospitalized him for three months.

  Life in San Dimas wasn’t easy. Apart from a Chinese peddler from Azusa who sold vegetables, Eva had to do her shopping in Pomona, and took her children to a Methodist church in Lordsburg. But practicing rural survival rites like shooting gophers, coyotes, and rattlesnakes gave young Victor an ease and skill with firearms that garnered him a reputation as a crack shot whether aiming for big game on safari in Asia and Africa or shooting pests in Bel-Air. And as the Deacons and Flemings relaxed in their backyard, they got a glimmer of the heaven on earth promised years before in the railroad ads.

  The screenwriter and director Robert Towne, another Southern California native, once eulogized the unspoiled atmosphere he knew as a child. Brought back decades by “an old postcard” or the air on Catalina Island, he remembered “the warm dry itch across your skin . . . the mountains and sky and the pastels of lavender, salmon, and blue . . . [the] messy green shade [of pepper trees] overhead, tiny dry leaves and red-green bee-bees crunching on the cracked sidewalk . . . a whiff of dry weed, cactus, and wet paint on an open porch.” Eva would summer in San Dimas, without Sid, after he moved the family to Los Angeles. Her relatives began going to the shore and setting up tents to escape blistering heat, but she preferred San Dimas to Redondo Beach.

  Eva gave birth to Sid’s daughter, Carolyn Evaleen (named after his mother), in August 1899. By then, Eva’s youngest brother, Loid, had arrived in San Dimas—living for a spell with her and Sid, in 1897. Ed and Mamie had given Missouri one last try but, scared off by another Midwestern twister, had returned for good. The Hartman patriarch, Lewis, moved to San Dimas in 1901 and, at age eighty-five, had become the town’s oldest man by the year he died (1914).

  Longevity and a close family life were Hartman traits; another was musical talent, going back to the Hartman family band, which played at the Bloomsburg Fair in the nineteenth century. Blocksom recalled that both Carolyn and Arletta “played the piano and they sang and painted.” (Ruth, Blocksom’s mother, “was the businesswoman in the family.”) Blocksom also said that Carolyn was “totally different from the other two girls. She was a Deacon. She had the advantages, and got to go to a private school. Arletta and my mother went to public school.” Edward Hartman says that Eva remained especially close to her first three children. “In talking with her and the way she talked about Vic, Arletta, and Ruth, they were separate from [half sister] Carolyn in [her] feelings. There was still that bond between the Flemings and her, and naturally for Victor because he was the firstborn . . . There was a special bond there.”

  In Hollywood, Victor would be known, in Leonora Hornblow’s words, for “great strength, great vitality—but it wasn’t just energy. You knew there was somebody there.” Hornblow, the wife of the producer Arthur Hornblow Jr., said, “When he talked to you, he looked at you and, believe me, in Hollywood that was rare.” Victor’s early ye
ars in San Dimas provided him with an inexhaustible well of emotional substance. “You can’t understand the closeness of this family. A lot of love, and a lot of respect,” says Edward Hartman. “Nanny could motivate anyone to do anything,” said Blocksom of Eva. “She was not the huggy kind, particularly, but she was there, and you knew it, and you wanted to do what she wanted you to do . . . You knew she loved you, and she took good care of everybody. Even with Uncle Vic, I never saw what you’d call fondness shown, physically. It just radiated, but not physically.”

  Sid Deacon gave Victor much of value, too—the mechanical expertise that would feed his enthusiasm for cars and planes, then land him a job in movies and earn him a reputation for exacting film craftsmanship. “[Sid] had him work with him drilling water wells, which he didn’t like,” says Edward Hartman. “The wells had internal combustion engines fueled by natural gas. They had a flywheel and a big belt, maybe twenty feet long. Pa Deacon probably taught him a lot of mechanical things that carried through. He had an above-average mechanical ability and knew how things worked. His philosophy was, you thought out what you were going to do first. Think about it, make good plans, and do it the best you possibly could.” Around the turn of the century, Deacon began investing in desert property and also dreamed of becoming a water baron. But a Deacon family venture into a water company (along with an Azusa orchardist) went bust. Deacon and his brothers sold their ranch in the spring of 1904; Ira and Sid (with his family) moved back to Los Angeles. Sid couldn’t resist the job opportunities and potential for wealth in the growing city. But Ed bought the house Sid had built for Eva, and it remained a gathering place for the clan until Mamie died in 1942.

  “The only thing I ever heard about my grandfather and oil was that he had been very, very lucky,” says Deacon’s grandson, Rodger Swearingen (Carolyn Deacon’s son). Between 1900 and 1921, when asked to list his occupation for a city directory or a Census, Deacon would switch between “water developer” or “water locator” and “oil explorer” or “oil promoter.” What he did was practice the ancient art of witching (or dowsing). He used a forked twig to uncover subterranean water (he then also drilled wells) and placed a cylinder filled with crude oil between forks of copper tubing to locate new oil (which was supposed to cause the cylinder to rotate). Although this may conjure images of the humbug Wizard of Oz, many wildcatters and small operators put their faith in dowsing rather than the relatively new science of geology. Witchers and prospectors like Deacon taught themselves rudiments of earth science, learning to spot oil from natural gas bubbling through water or iridescence slicking across mud or salt domes pushing to the surface of the ground. Using observation and intuition, witchers would discover the gushing Spindletop well in Texas in 1901. “I used to go prospecting with him in the Mojave Desert,” says Edward Hartman. “He knew that quartz formations were one of the signs of gold possibly in the vicinity. And he’d tell me, ‘Dig here, the ground will be soft.’ And sure enough, it was.”

  When Deacon moved to Los Angeles, oil had already been drilled there a dozen years before. He bought options on oil wells in Texas and Oklahoma with part of the money he got from selling his water well, and he kept dowsing and prospecting, too, advertising his services in the classifieds of the Los Angeles newspapers. “To teach you how to locate water, oil and minerals,” read one; “S. R. Deacon, locater of gold, silver, oil or water,” read another. He still practiced carpentry as he moved his family to three different houses in four years—the first two rented, the last one bought (perhaps a sign of improving fortunes, though he didn’t strike it rich for another decade and a half). Despite the novelty of indoor plumbing for kids raised in San Dimas, the peripatetic life couldn’t have been easy on the Fleming children and their half sister. “As soon as [Arletta and Ruth] graduated [high school], they went to work,” Blocksom said. “They went to work for Bullock’s, the big department store downtown at the time. You had to make your own living; I think they moved out as soon as they could. They couldn’t wait to get out of the house.”

  At times, Victor would play the household prankster. “This is what my mother remembered,” says Swearingen. “They all had to share the same bathroom. And one day, Vic announced that he was sick and tired of seeing women’s hair in the basin whenever he came in to shave. The next day—it was either Arletta or Ruth—when they finished their cup of coffee, they found a big wad of hair in the bottom of their cup.”

  In Action, Fleming recalls, “I quit school in the seventh grade . . . I was 14 years old.” He said the same to an MGM reporter for the in-house magazine The Lion’s Roar in January 1944, adding that on a salary of $135 a month he set aside enough money in a year ($312) to buy the Encyclopaedia Britannica. He also set aside enough time to read all thirty volumes—not as the magazine writer and editor A. J. Jacobs recently did, as a stunt for a book deal, but out of his drive for self-improvement. He was the perfect example of an autodidact. Fleming told his daughters and his niece that he dropped out in the eighth grade, but he was consistent about feeling his lack of education and the need to compensate for it. Blocksom remembered that “he told me when I was struggling with school, he went through the dictionary, bit by bit by bit, and the encyclopedia. So he was quite learned, I would say, but he did it himself.” The Lion’s Roar reporter wrote, “He is still trying to catch up on his education. An unresolved fact drives him crazy.”

  Until 1905, says his Army record, Victor did take classes at Los Angeles’s Polytechnic High School, including “intensive study of scientific and engineering subjects.” The Hartmans’ artistic bent hadn’t yet affected Victor, who was by and large an adolescent gearhead. Eva put together a scrapbook for anything he did as a schoolboy between 1901 and 1904 that could be classified as artwork. Inside she pasted a machine-printed fortune that read, “She will have a dutiful and handsome son.” On the following pages she affixed typical schoolroom assignments such as an agricultural map with regions labeled and shaded according to farm products, a map of the westward expansion of the United States, drawings of a trunk and of a barn and farmhouse, and a map of the landscape of The Lady of the Lake. Her son puckishly signed the last one “Victory Fleming.”

  Victory for Fleming—independence and success—would come in ways his mother never anticipated when she and Lon worked the citrus groves. To her undoubted delight, it would have a lot to do with art.

  2

  Cars, Cameras, Action!

  Victor Fleming is an American boy, born a Yankee and bred of staid, Yankee parents. He set out on a personally conducted tour to conquer the world some years ago, and he has succeeded in some respects. His mother wanted Victor to become President of the United States. Victor, in turn, didn’t, and still fails to like the idea.

  —PARAMOUNT STUDIO RELEASE, 1928

  Early American adventure films and comedies had an infectious, antic movement. Even the machines—cars and motorcycles, trains and planes—behaved with improvisational abandon. Heroes and heroines soared to improbable heights by seizing on opportunities with confidence and prowess. Yet these flights of fancy weren’t all make-believe. They had emotional roots in the experiences of filmmakers who made up their lives as they went along. Fleming’s early years, like those of other directors such as Allan Dwan and Marshall “Mickey” Neilan and producer-stars like Fairbanks, were breathless amalgams of industry, gamesmanship, and hustle.

  In 1928, a Paramount publicist described Victor Fleming as a Yankee tinkerer who showed his mechanical aptitude from infancy, when he’d quiet down only if he could hear his mother pedaling a Singer sewing machine. “His teachers say that as a schoolboy, Fleming was ‘a holy terror,’ ” the studio release goes on. “But it was that terror that they called on when the school bell broke down. He had a mechanical mind.” Beneath the hype lay elements of truth. Fleming’s fascination for machines and especially cars—not pictorial composition—led him to photography and movies. “Because automobiles were rare and pictures of them accordingly interesting
, it was a natural step for me to experiment with an old box camera,” he said in Action Is the Word.

  Autos did come first. He had wanted to become a race-car driver like Barney Oldfield ever since Oldfield took Los Angeles by storm in 1903, setting a 65.6 mile-per-hour one-mile dirt-track speed “record” in a Winton Bullet. (Oldfield, ever the showman, always set crowd-pleasing “records” at his appearances.)

  Although Fleming’s most famous racing scenes would be aerial (Test Pilot) or aquatic (Captains Courageous), his youthful history with auto racing added to the allure he would later radiate in Hollywood. His record wasn’t as extensive as it would become in studio handouts. He probably did cross paths, though, with three California race-car pros he mentioned in later years. Charles Soules and Joe Nikrent were part of renowned racing families. Ted “Terrible Teddy” Tetzlaff appeared in a Mabel Normand one-reel comedy in 1913 and fathered the cinematographer Ted Tetzlaff. Beginning in 1907, Fleming put in hours at Agricultural Park (future site of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum), which started hosting contests in 1903 for local amateurs as well as exhibition matchups for visiting professionals such as Oldfield. It was quite a spectacle for a young man with a hankering for speed. In 1903, there were no more than a few hundred cars in all of Southern California. Fleming said he worked on two of Oldfield’s racers: the Peerless Green Dragon and the Blitzen Benz. If he did work on the Green Dragon, it was in 1904 or 1905, and on the Blitzen Benz, 1910. Oldfield would travel only with his manager and publicist and would hire local mechanics to help him tune, prime, and patch his cars. Fleming doubtless responded to Oldfield’s nervy masculine showmanship.