Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics)

by Sragow, Michael

  Pope Benedict XV, who had helped inspire Wilson’s Fourteen Points—and who would canonize Joan of Arc in 1920—welcomed the president on January 4. There would not be another presidential visit to the Vatican until 1959, when President Eisenhower met Pope John XXIII. Fleming may have been the first person to shoot motion picture film at the Vatican; unfortunately, whatever he filmed has been lost. WhenWilson spoke on the balcony of the palace at Milan on January 6, The New York Times reported, “a tremendous demonstration took place . . . stretching as far as the eye could reach.” Fleming’s footage pictures a happy horde whose number seems to approach infinity. As Wilson, benign victor and peacemaker, orates next to a U.S. flag, Fleming pans from right to left and then from left to right. He takes in all of a crowd so dense, euphoric, and turbulent that it makes the classical architecture appear to float and bob on a squall-tossed sea.

  Fairbanks had taught Fleming well about creating celluloid legends. In a peak of mythmaking, Fleming filmed Wilson standing alone in the prow of the launch that took him from Italy to the George Washington.Wilson, having shed the kangaroo pelts for a proper black overcoat, basks in the affection of the crowds onshore and beams back at them. He places his arms jauntily akimbo when he doesn’t use his right hand to tip and wave his top hat. For fleeting seconds, a viewer feels, as Wilson must have, that he was the American destined to unite Europe and prevent future wars and make the world safe for democracy. Then the smile fades; impatience, or maybe doubt, creeps into the picture; he turns and asks for a time-out or direction. But it’s a sensational example of one of the first staged photo ops.

  After six days of preliminaries with the Great Powers—Great Britain, France, Italy, the United States, and Japan—the first plenary session of the Paris Peace Conference began in the Salle de la Paix of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs on the Quai d’Orsay. Fleming’s task, though, was filming dignitaries in their limousines and carriages arriving and departing; he couldn’t bring his camera into the Salle de la Paix. He trained his lens appreciatively on the rare picturesque sight—the elegant costumes of some Asian delegations, or the dramatic mane of Poland’s President Ignacy Paderewski. But he must have felt stranded on the outside of these historic proceedings. He was ready to go home.

  Wilson shipped back to the United States on February 14, returning to Europe at the end of the month. The two thousand soldiers and sailors on board the George Washington must have made Fleming feel as if he were on a mammoth, floating version of a Fairbanks set. Fleming shot them blowing off steam in athletic ways. There was a rope-climbing race, a slap match on a pipe eight feet higher than the deck (the loser was the one who fell off), and a mock boxing match funnier than Fairbanks’s in His Picture in the Papers and just as full of parody bravado. En route, Wilson’s private secretary, Joe Tumulty, suggested that the president disembark in Boston, not Hoboken, as a poke in the eye of his political opponent, the Republican senator Henry Cabot Lodge. Ill prepared for the change, the skipper nearly stowed the ship between two large rocks until a passenger came to the rescue: an assistant secretary of the Navy, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who recognized the spot, near Marblehead, Massachusetts, and adjusted the course to Boston.

  On February 5, Griffith, Pickford, Chaplin, Fairbanks, and William S. Hart had announced the creation of United Artists, which promised to “protect the great motion picture public from threatening combinations and trusts that would force upon them mediocre productions and machine-made entertainment.” (Hart withdrew after three weeks.) Keen to join Fairbanks, Fleming, scheduled to return with Wilson on his second trip to Europe to ratify the treaty, looked for a way out of the military and back into his moviemaking life. Since he was still assigned only to Wilson, he was stationed at the White House. He wrote, “I took a chance and typed my formal discharge on a sheet of White House stationery. Admiral Grayson came down the stairs on some hurried mission and I met him. ‘Will you sign this, Admiral?’ I handed him the paper. He held it on the polished banister and scrawled his signature with my fountain pen. An officer of the Army had written his own discharge and an officer of the Navy signed it.”

  Fleming didn’t stretch the truth too far. He did handwrite the first draft of his discharge, in standard military language on White House letterhead. But Grayson signed the typed version neatly, betraying neither rush nor the curve of a banister. Fleming received his official discharge on March 7 and headed for New York for a few days before returning to California.

  For all his eagerness to wiggle out of the job, being Wilson’s cameraman had put Fleming at the top of the heap. As an observer, Fleming had sensed the story, and as a craftsman he had known how to get it. Without the evidence caught in Fleming’s camera, future generations wouldn’t be able to judge the potency of these epochal demonstrations for themselves.

  6

  The Importance of Directing Doug

  Douglas Fairbanks Sr. was committed to exploring all the possibilities of movies. Charlie Chaplin remembered ruminating with him over life’s meaning or lack of it one night at the summit of a large water tank. “ ‘Look!’ said Douglas, fervently, making an arc gesture taking in all the heavens. ‘The moon! And those myriads of stars! Surely there must be a reason for all this beauty? It must be fulfilling some destiny!’ ” In the thrill of his epiphany, Fairbanks focused on Chaplin and asked, “Why are you given this wonderful talent, this wonderful medium of motion pictures that reaches millions of people throughout the world?”

  “Why is it given to Louis B. Mayer and the Warner brothers?” Chaplin answered.

  Fairbanks responded with laughter and a history-making idea. With Pickford and Griffith, Chaplin and Hart, Fairbanks founded United Artists, a movie production, financing, and distribution company that had everything except a back lot. It allowed its partners to operate like independent producers.

  After he left the Signal Corps, Fleming shot the first United Artists release, His Majesty the American, for Fairbanks and the director Joseph Henabery. This 1919 action romp about a virtuous, mysterious New York adrenaline addict who finds fresh adventures in an Old World country called Alaine, the home of his long-lost mother, fires up a proven Fairbanks formula with throwaway bravura. In one of the New York scenes, Henabery and Fleming use a cutaway set of six rooms in a racketeer’s building to open up a hive of criminal activity as if it were an ant farm. ( Jerry Lewis would use a similar set for The Ladies Man four decades later, just as Jean-Luc Godard and Jean- Pierre Gorin would in 1972 for Tout va bien.) The Fairbanks humor never flags. When he takes a detour to Mexico, he lights his cigarette on the sunbaked earth. And the action in Alaine has a sweep and a cast of many hundreds (if not thousands) that dwarf the relatively modest dimensions of Fairbanks’s previous European frolic, Reaching for the Moon.

  Fleming moved briefly into his mother’s spacious new home, and as Fairbanks’s marriage fell apart and his romance with Mary Pickford thrived, Fleming grew close to Mary’s younger brother, Jack, who had a yen for fast cars and chorus girls. ( Jack died in 1933, at age thirty-six, of general dissipation from substance abuse and venereal disease; Vic was an honorary pallbearer.)

  Theodore Reed, another of Fleming’s close postwar friends, had worked his way up in Fairbanks’s creative ranks during Fleming’s Signal Corps service—and no wonder. He had the same breadth of experience that made Dwan and Fleming and the Signal Corps brethren such good company. Born in Cincinnati and reared in Detroit, Reed had a background that combined athletics, science, and storytelling. As a teen he’d been a semipro baseball player; he later earned a master’s degree in chemistry at the University of Michigan; he became an actor in a theater troupe that toured throughout the Midwest; and he did time as an efficiency expert. When Reed met Fairbanks in 1918, during a Detroit stop for a Midwest Liberty Loan tour with Marie Dressler and Chaplin, he was a reporter and publicist with the Detroit Free Press, married, and the father of three children. Striking an immediate rapport with Doug, Reed took a leave to join Fairban
ks and company on the road; because he looked a lot like Chaplin, he could stand in for him on the tour when exhaustion waylaid the comic genius. (Reed renewed his partnership with Chaplin as the sound supervisor on 1931’s City Lights.)

  After the bond-selling tour, Reed returned to the newspaper, but Fairbanks dangled a Hollywood job in front of him. The prospect of fending off a frigid, flu-bugged Detroit winter with rationed coal helped make Reed’s decision easy. What’s more, his wife Helen’s parents had moved from Wisconsin to Pasadena; when they heard of his prospective new employment, they bought Ted and Helen a house west of downtown Los Angeles. Reed began his decade-long stint with Fairbanks by editing scripts, writing titles, and helping Fairbanks cook up scenarios. A selection of his words for the silent Western Arizona: “Arizona: Where the burning rays / Of the noonday sun / Assay two men—/ And find—but one.” (In 1930, Columbia approached Fleming to remake Arizona as a talkie.)

  Fleming rejoined the Fairbanks production unit in March 1919. Reed, by now Fairbanks’s production manager, hit it off with Vic as quickly as he had with Doug. Reed’s fourth child, Robert, became Fleming’s godson. Robert says Fleming visited their house well into the 1920s, and he appears to have been a likable, rowdy god-dad. “On one of Fleming’s visits to our house,” Robert recalls, “we were playing a game of blind man’s bluff, and each of us was armed with a club made of rolled-up newspaper. We crawled around the living room floor, swinging our weapons wildly and hitting one another from time to time. I recall returning from the game after taking a hard blow and complaining to my mother, ‘Vic’s a rough guy,’ pronouncing it ‘wuff.’ ”

  Like his creative partnerships and friendships, Fleming’s family was prospering. Late in 1918, Sid Deacon finally struck it rich in oil when some wells he had helped locate in Texas began to produce (given the timing, it was likely in Burkburnett, the scene of MGM’s 1940 film Boom Town). His initial payday was a stunning $100,000. With part of that money, he bought a large Swiss-chalet-style house, with a big front yard lined with palm trees, at 1618 Crenshaw Boulevard. He also invested in the Signal Hill oil fields. But wealth and a more upscale neighborhood didn’t change Eva Deacon. “She still was a farm woman, let’s put it that way,” Fleming’s niece Yvonne Blocksom said. “She was the only one with a chicken house. The chickens were fenced in on two sides of a three-car garage. When the old hens stopped laying, we’d have chicken for dinner. She’d chop the head off herself. She had a vegetable garden and grape arbor, too.” In Blocksom’s phrase, Eva “did not live wealth. She did everything herself—her own laundry, cooking, her own housekeeping, stuff like that.”

  The only way for Fleming to keep going up in his career was to become a director. He made his directorial debut with When the Clouds Roll By (1919)—a comic masterpiece that expands its fan base every year at museum and festival showings. His ascendancy was a natural outgrowth of Fairbanks’s reliance on his collaborators and Emerson’s dependence on his cameramen and assistants for staging scenes. Ted Reed is sometimes credited as Vic’s co-director on When the Clouds Roll By, but with a bit of pre–Orson Welles panache, the art titles not only name the creators but also picture them—including Fleming alone as the director, sporting a jaunty cap and waving the camera out of his face with a jeer and some rolled-up script pages. Reed functioned as an assistant to Fleming on this boundary-busting movie, which attested to Fairbanks’s widening aesthetic reach. “An extravaganza of the most fantastic sort,” read the review in the Los Angeles Times. “Whether it will prove a strikingly popular film there is no denying the fact as far as the trappings of the story are concerned the conventional Fairbanks situations have been neatly covered up.”

  Actually, When the Clouds Roll By does more than cover up the “conventional Fairbanks situations.” It subverts them. Fairbanks plays the kind of character he helped reform in Down to Earth. He’s the willing victim of a depraved psychiatrist-neurologist. This persuasive quack uses Fairbanks, a lowly employee in his uncle’s New York investment firm, to establish how easily psychological tricks can destroy a man. Knowing that Fairbanks harbors self-destructive superstitions, the mad doctor mercilessly augments them by prescribing awful diets and sabotaging every aspect of the young fellow’s existence, including his apartment’s plumbing. When Fairbanks bumps into an equally superstitious beauty from Oklahoma, played delightfully by Kathleen Clifford, love has a chance to conquer all, but Clifford’s boyfriend from back home comes east to bilk her dad in an oil-grab scheme, with help from Fairbanks’s uncle. Clifford does choose Fairbanks over her old beau. The doctor, though, connives to bring the Oklahoman and the uncle to the couple’s wedding party—and Fairbanks is accused of fraud. Roused beyond the power of superstition, he chases after Clifford when she leaves New York on a ferry and a train. His first reward comes when insane-asylum orderlies unmask the doctor as an escaped inmate. But it takes Fairbanks’s bravery during a sudden catastrophe—a flash flood that swamps the train and an entire town—for him to expose the Oklahoman as a creep and assert his own worth when he rescues Clifford.

  The movie boasts two scintillating fantasy scenes. At the start, the quack’s accomplice serves Fairbanks a late supper of onions, lobster, Welsh rarebit, and mince pie. Fleming dresses up actors as these foods—they could be the progenitors of the Fruit of the Loom clowns—and depicts them knocking around boisterously inside Fairbanks’s stomach. In his ensuing marathon nightmare, Fleming springs one surprise after another. A hydrocephalic stranger reaches for Fairbanks in his bed. When Fairbanks slaps him down, he falls and bounces back like a tin figurine in a pinball game. White shadowy hands cover the room. Fairbanks escapes them by catapulting out of bed and through a closed door, landing in a ladies’ club—shades of the GIs imagining themselves at a garden club in John Frankenheimer’s Manchurian Candidate. (Appearing before proper middle-class women must be a showbiz primal fear.)

  Escaping through a painting of a pool, Fairbanks quickly lands in and clambers out of a real pool, only to find his four-course dinner chasing after him. In slow motion he makes his frantic getaway, hurdling a few fences before pulling off a somersault and a flying mount onto a waiting horse. Breaching yet another wall, he goes through one more time-space warp into a house that’s cut away like the crime hive in His Majesty the American, permitting viewers to see the action inside as on a theatrical set. Fairbanks strolls up walls and across the ceiling and does a handstand upside down. The return of the attacking foods leads to a hundred-yard dash over rooftops. The sequence arrives at its breathless end as Fairbanks plunges into a chimney and winds up in a metal canister, subjected to merciless drumming. As he wakes up, we realize that one of the doctor’s goons has been stomping around outside Doug’s window, impersonating a janitor, and hurling two garbage cans and a bucket.

  Technically and imaginatively, the sequence is a tour de force. In 1919, “slow motion” was not a common term, let alone a typical device. (Fleming’s experience with high-speed photography in the Signal Corps had obviously given him ideas for its application to comedy.) The wall-and-ceiling walk caused such a sensation that Literary Digest exposed the mechanics behind it—basically, “a room open at one side and revolving on an axis like a squirrel cage” and a camera positioned to revolve alongside as Fairbanks kept his balance on the ceiling, walls, and floor. (A pair of Stanleys would embellish the same trick for future generations: Donen in 1951’s Royal Wedding, and Kubrick in 1968’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.) With crazed bursts of pop poetry, this sequence announces and then brings home the movie’s point. When his mind gets tossed off balance, Doug’s exuberant physicality becomes subordinate to his warped thoughts and feelings.

  Seeing Fairbanks display his athletic abilities through a Lewis Carroll looking glass magnifies their emotional power even as it makes them disconcerting. If any film punctures the criticism that Fairbanks exists in his own closed system, it’s this one by Fleming. Throwing the usual Fairbanks universe topsy-turvy allows Doug to make deeper connec
tions with the audience and the other characters. Few Fairbanks courtship scenes are as beautifully balanced as the ones here, in which Clifford matches her leading man’s every nervous tic and gesture with her own fluttery, oddball grace.

  Early on, the deranged scientist tells Fairbanks to stop smiling, because that expression “is the mark of the idiotic.” The put-down plays on Fairbanks’s advertised image as “America’s Greatest Exponent of the Smile” and presages the moment when Fairbanks’s “Sense of Humor” actually saves him in this movie. During the chaotic breakdown of Fairbanks and Clifford’s wedding party, Fleming stages another strange interlude, this time without putting the protagonist to sleep. Unable to pursue his true love, reduced to hiding in the closet when cops block every exit at the doctor’s behest, Fairbanks freezes. As he does, the camera penetrates his brain, where costumed representatives of Worry and Discord seize the throne of the fair lady Reason while an impotent jester lies at her feet. Only when the asylum orderlies unmask the doctor as a loon does the jester inside Fairbanks’s brain—the embodiment of the hero’s Sense of Humor—restore Reason to her throne. Humor does it with an ancient, still-good joke: “Have you ever heard the one about the old maid in the sleeping car?” The climactic deluge that tests Fairbanks’s strength—it’s a lot mightier than the digital flood in Evan Almighty—makes the world seem new enough for him and Clifford to start afresh. It’s as if God’s brain had to clear, too.