Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics)

by Sragow, Michael

  MGM’s efficient publicists got a story out to the papers that Harlow had telephoned Irving Thalberg on September 11. “This staying around home is driving me crazy,” she said. “I’ve got to get busy—to forget.” Her stepfather, Marino Bello, and a nurse, Adah Wilson, accompanied her. The sound mixer Bill Edmondson said, “The day she came back, she was really subdued, and for the Baby to be subdued was something.” Astor reported that Fleming asked, “How are we going to get a sexy performance with that look in her eyes?” Yet she deflected any show of sympathy and was, as Edmondson put it, “a trouper.”

  According to Mahin, it was Harlow’s sad luck that the next day required retakes of the rain-barrel scene. One of her feisty, laugh-getting lines was “Don’t you know? I’m La Flamme, the gal that drives men mad!” Mahin said she asked, “I don’t have to say that, do I?” His response: “I’m sure you don’t.” In Mahin’s account, Fleming shot that bit, but didn’t use it. Another report says that Stromberg and Fleming had begun auditioning alternative actresses; when Harlow made her reentrance, Gable was rehearsing a test scene with one of them. Harlow tapped the woman on the shoulder and said, “I’m sorry, honey, but the part’s taken.” In this version, Harlow’s first comeback line was Van-tine’s sardonic statement upon seeing Dennis return from Gary’s drainage project: “Well, if it ain’t old massa Fred, back after all these years.”

  When he wasn’t dealing with turmoil and temperament on the set, Vic was wooing Lu Rosson—though his daughter Victoria says Lu was the one with courtship on her mind. It was unusual—perhaps unprecedented—for Fleming to bed a married woman, especially the wife of a friend. Yet Arthur Rosson and Lu had been living apart for half a year, since he moved out of their Rexford Drive home in Beverly Hills and into his own place. And something about the adrenaline-pumping whoosh and excitement of Vic’s life in these months connected with Lu’s inchoate yearning for a change.

  “I think she was just an unhappy woman,” says Victoria. “She was unhappy in her first marriage, and I don’t think she ever had plans to move forward, at any time.” But Vic and Lu shared similar struggling childhoods, including limited schooling and the early loss of a father. Both had an instinct for jokes that defused situations or exploded them. Fired up from his expedition with Lewis, in the middle of bringing to life a movie with a volcanic id and a complicated view of adultery, Fleming may have allowed the intensity he always poured into his work to spill over, with Lu’s abetting, into their friendship.

  Vic was collaborating with Arthur’s brother Hal when he started his affair with Lu. It’s surprising partly because, in the words of Cecil B. DeMille, “there was never a family of more vividly distinct individuals, neither was there ever a family of more close-knit unity and loyalty.” (He said he always thought of them as “The Rossons.”) Arthur and Lu’s marriage may have started to fall apart in the late 1920s. In 1927, Paramount had initially assigned him to Underworld, the Ben Hecht–written gangster movie. But Hawks, who was at Paramount then, said, “He went up to San Francisco, as I remember, to go to the prison there, but unfortunately got tight, so they had to fire him.” The director Josef von Sternberg took over (with Hathaway as his assistant director) and turned the film into a smash. By 1929, Rosson was directing Hoot Gibson cowboy talkies at Universal. Shooting Westerns took Art away from home, often to Arizona.

  Around this time, Lu acquired her first nickname—from the song “True Blue Lou,” a hit from the show Burlesque, the one Vic was slated to direct before it was made as The Dance of Life. The song is about “a dame in love with a guy” who sticks by him even though she gets nothing back: “Who fought to save him, smiled and forgave him? True Blue Lou.” Lu later insisted that relatives, including grandchildren and great-grandchildren, call her Truie.

  Lu knew the man she set her cap for—Fleming didn’t hide or tone down anything for her, including his hard-guy joking and mockery. In the late 1920s, a tiny, densely furred monkey called a pygmy marmoset became a frequent pet and fashion accessory for Hollywood women. Alice White took hers on the town in a satin purse. Lu often carried hers in her coat. Vic and Lu “were out somewhere, having lunch,” his daughter Victoria recalls. “And the marmoset peed on Daddy. So to show his disgust, he caught a fly, mashed it on the table with a knife, put it in his mouth, and made a big show out of eating it. He stuck his tongue out at Mother, and there was a single leg of the fly on it.” Victoria also remembers a story Lu told of Vic shooting down a hummingbird at Meadowlark Ranch, where they had occasional assignations. “He must have used a pellet gun, I don’t know for sure.” Then he dressed it “for Thanksgiving, the feathers off and everything . . . in a position with the ‘drumsticks’ sticking up.” Since Lu loved hummingbirds, “she was probably horrified. She was a bird lover . . . He did have a sadistic sense of humor.”

  Thinking of the Gable persona Fleming helped create in Red Dust, Pauline Kael asked, “What man doesn’t—at some level—want to feel supremely confident and earthy and irresistible? . . . And for women, if the roof leaks, or the car stalls, or you don’t know how to get the super to keep his paws off you, you may long for a Clark Gable to take charge.” That combination of competence and sexual certainty, and the air of challenge that went with it, were part of what drew Lu to Vic. (He also may have had what Kael called the “little bit of male fascism” that makes certain actors “dangerous and hence attractive.”) On August 15, Rosson started shooting a low-budget Tom Mix cowboy picture, but Universal swiftly replaced him because of “illness.” If he was having problems holding his liquor and it was beginning to diminish him as a professional and as a man, Fleming would have presented a seductive contrast. Of course, how he viewed his affair with Lu is even more of a mystery than how he regarded his on-and-off-and-on entanglement with Bow. Perhaps, given Fleming’s simultaneous attraction and revulsion to show business, Lu offered a perfect blend of her own: she knew the demands of film production, but had no showbiz ambitions except to marry a respected moviemaker—more specifically, a powerhouse like Vic.

  He rewarded her devotion with a public regard that could be downright courtly. “I remember one lovely story about Victor,” Ben Hecht said in 1957.

  He was a great ladies’ man, and terribly handsome, very strong, very gentle, talented, successful, rich. He used to sit at the directors’ table at Metro, and there used to be topics come up for discussion, and they usually had to do with dames and bragging. One time the topic came up as to how many women one had loved, and the boys began. I remember Joe Mankiewicz led off with quite a high number, and his brother, and a couple of directors. Everybody had from ten to thirty. When it came to Vic to answer, he said, “One.” He dumbfounded the table, and they said, “Who was she?” He said, “I’m married to her.” This was the first time gentlemen’s words had been heard at this table.

  Sans the Philadelphia patina of class that Barbara has in Red Dust, what Lu represented to Vic might have been what Barbara represented to Dennis: someone out of “the life.”

  Before Lu, Vic might have thought there was no room in a real director’s day for a conventional family. Vera Gebbert, the daughter of Fleming’s frequent cameraman at Paramount, Charles Edgar Schoenbaum, recalled her dad telling her that Vic “took great pains, worked around the clock, Saturdays, sometimes Sundays. My father got up at 4:00 a.m. every day, wouldn’t get home until eight or nine; he’d have lunch with Vic. Victor was never tired, never complained—I never heard a bad word about him.”

  Yet while working those hours at Paramount, Vic found himself spending more and more time with Arthur and Lu Rosson, and his friendship with Lu became sexual. During or right after the completion of Red Dust, Rosson discovered the affair. “Rosson caught them,” says Sally, “and he told them if they were going to be screwing, they ought to be married.” (Arthur Rosson Jr. heard it differently: “My dad was going to shoot Fleming” but was talked out of it.) But if Arthur “caught them,” it was at the home he had already abandoned. And Lu may ha
ve wanted to get caught, to push her marriage to its sorry resolution.

  A couple of weeks before the Red Dust premiere, Lu established a six-week residency in Reno, where the divorce went through on November 23 on grounds of cruelty. Rosson never countered with a charge of adultery, and there was no alimony.

  Eventually, Rosson pulled his life and career back together, establishing a long-term relationship with DeMille as an ace second-unit director. In 1940, he married Odetta Bray, a singer and dancer from Hawaii, and had two more children, a son and a daughter. Up to his death in 1960, he racked up formidable achievements like the Indian attack in DeMille’s Plainsman (1937) and the cattle stampede in Hawks’s Red River (1948), earning a rare “co-director” credit on the latter, just as his brother Richard had on Scarface. And he would lead the Hebrew slaves out of Egypt in DeMille’s Ten Commandments (1956).

  Red Dust was an instant crowd-pleaser. “I went to see it at the Pantages,” says Gebbert, “and even at a preview you could tell it was going to be a hit.” Abel Green, the Samuel Johnson of Variety slang (and soon to be the trade paper’s editor), called Red Dust “sure-fire b.o.” and declared, “it means a lot for Gable, who’s been tossed around on the Metro lot quite a bit.” He also noted, “John Mahin, the adapter, has some nifty language punctuating the proceedings. It’s censor-proof yet punchy, with lots of extra stuff read into it both by the histrionic interpretation and, best of all, the audience’s own mental reactions. That makes it 100%.” As he reached the decade’s midsection and his own vital midlife, Fleming was 100 percent, too.

  14

  Pioneering the Screwball Comedy:

  Jean Harlow in Bombshell

  While Lu Rosson was signing property agreements before her divorce from Arthur Rosson, Fleming was giving interviews about his new version of The White Sister, long slated for Helen Hayes and now featuring Gable. Fleming said that when it came to remakes, what mattered was “the original idea”: in this case, turning an aristocratic virgin, an Italian soldier, and God into a romantic triangle.

  Fleming and the producer Hunt Stromberg assigned Donald Ogden Stewart to update F. Marion Crawford’s novel, setting it during World War I rather than the 1880s. A Yale-educated satirical novelist who contributed dialogue to Laughter (1930), Stewart later wrote that Stromberg, Fleming, and Sam Zimbalist, Stromberg’s assistant, “were a daily delight to work with, and a revelation to me of the Hollywood psyche.” According to Stewart, Stromberg recognized only the “reality” of whatever he’d already seen in pictures; at the same time, he would measure the effectiveness of a scene by whether, in Stromberg’s words, “a dumb Scranton coal miner” could understand it.

  Stewart strove to satisfy his own “rather high standards of truth,” and Fleming knew how to get that truth across to the cast. “When Vic got a scene going, really going heavily,” said Morris Abrams, once again Vic’s script clerk, “he’d sit there and tears would roll down his face. Or he’d mouth the words along with the actors. He was a hell of a man, high-strung and intense, but he handled himself well. How he got performances out of actors, I don’t know. I only know that if the scene was very heavy, the set would get quiet, the lights would go down, and he would go off in a corner with the actor and talk very quietly. And the actor would come back and do it.”

  Stewart was “very pleased and deeply satisfied” at the playwright Philip Barry’s praise for the first two-thirds of the film. (Later, Stewart would write the script for the film version of Barry’s Philadelphia Story.) The screenwriter’s enthusiasm faded when Hayes wouldn’t play one of his scenes. Stromberg called in Hayes’s husband and Ben Hecht’s partner, Charles MacArthur, to rewrite it and then make over the script’s last third. “That was the moment when the fun went out of Hollywood” for Stewart. Even if he stayed to the end, it’s hard to see what he could have done to transcend high-flown Victorian melodrama.

  At least Fleming brings the same conviction to the best and worst parts of the film. For a while, Hayes’s fluttery artificiality works, expressing the newly released giddiness of a sheltered noblewoman. Gable is part man of the street, part Nature’s nobleman: he’s light on his feet even in army boots, an ideal object of schoolgirl reverie. No chemistry cements Gable and Hayes; no biology simmers beneath the surface. But Fleming puts some zing into the opening sequences: they have the melancholy-tinged euphoria that became one of his specialties. Gable’s car rams into the one Hayes and her dreary fiancé (Alan Edwards) and forbidding father (Lewis Stone) are riding in as a carnival explodes around them. “In the carnival scenes and the convent scenes,” Fleming said, “there were many temptations to stop, to spend a great deal of time catching this bit of landscape, that group of picturesque characters, a lovely corner here and there . . . Beauty we must have in pictures, but it must be beauty in action.”

  Beauty in action is exactly what he gets on the winding small-town boulevard filled with giant bobbing heads and costumed stilt walkers. In its luster and its whimsy, it’s almost a prelude to the Emerald City, and Fleming, proud of his handiwork, put his own face on one of the bobbing heads. Gable pursues Hayes, once under the front end of a two-man costume horse, with the screenwriter, Stewart, under the rear end, revealed in a quick, funny cameo. Hayes’s high-pitched refinement lends some pathos to Gable’s tender wooing of her. She’s discovering the delight of childish things as well as adult passion.

  Then comes a cavalcade of catastrophes. Her father races to stop her from meeting Gable in the barracks as she speeds to meet her lover where he really is (at the officers’ club, in town)—and the family cars nearly crash head-on. Her father dies when his car runs off the road. The will reveals a debt-ridden estate. Gable goes to war. In the only thrilling sequence, the Germans shoot him down over enemy territory; the Italians report him dead. So Hayes becomes a nun—and even after she learns he’s alive, she refuses to renounce her vows. Fleming wanted to close the film with Gable simply walking away, but Catholic clergy pressured MGM to make sure, as in previous versions, the White Sister’s would-be suitor really dies at the end.

  Lillian Gish wrote that Hayes, disappointed in the rushes, called Gish to ask how she, Ronald Colman, and their director, Henry King, “had achieved certain effects.” Gish asked Hayes what the on-set atmosphere was like; Hayes replied, “Oh, you know, the usual stories and jokes.” “Then you’re not going to get it,” Gish told her. “You cannot set up a camera and take a picture of faith.”

  Gish was a great actress, but King’s version of The White Sister is sanctimonious. André de Toth said that Fleming “was Henry King with balls,” and that holds true even with this impossibly masochistic and high-minded material. Fleming thought the scene in which Hayes tells Gable that she won’t renounce her vows one of the best he’d ever filmed. He knew that’s when Hayes had to pay off—as René Jordan put it, “The Gable blow-torch style could by then melt an iceberg, but not Helen Hayes in a nun’s habit.” Variety applauded: “Pre-eminently a woman’s picture and one of the strongest of recent entries in that direction.”

  A week after The White Sister premiered, Louella Parsons noted that Lu Rosson took in some recent prizefights with Fleming and Howard Hawks, and reported, “The Lou [sic] Rosson–Victor Fleming romance continues to interest Hollywood.” But Fleming’s next project would make him look back with laughter at a previous love. “A dramatic character sketch of Lola, a Clara Bow type—in fact, one is tempted to think that it is Miss Bow who is being dramatized.” So began the October 25, 1932, MGM reader’s report for the play Bombshell by Caroline Francke and Mack Crane—a serious examination of a Hollywood star losing her bearings.

  Mahin explained:

  That came in, again, as a very purple movie, a treatment about this poor girl who worked all her life and in the end committed suicide. Nobody understood her, and she had all these people on her, her father and her brother. It was a tragic thing. I said, “Let’s turn this into a comedy. It’s funny. You must have known people, Vic, in the early
days . . .” He said, “I know one right now, Clara Bow. She was my girl. You’d come into the room—there’s a beautiful Oriental rug with coffee stains and dog shit all over the floor, and her father’d come in drunk.”

  No behind-the-scenes Hollywood film has been sharper than Bombshell. It revels in the ironies of the industry and popular press building a star image around the merest fragment of a diva’s life. Bombshell is unique because it’s such a happy satire. Fleming, unlike the studio reader, could see Bow’s whirlwind personality as the basis for a comedy. By casting Harlow as Lola Burns and getting her loosest screen performance—her humor is as jiggly as her braless, corset-free look—Fleming ensured that the audience would always cheer on Lola, even after she makes lousy decisions. We see what she doesn’t: her problem isn’t her distance from “real” life at the studio but the rapacity of all-too-real parasites at home. Topping the list are her sporting-man “Pops” (Frank Morgan, Fleming’s future Wizard of Oz, in an amusing sketch of a lesser humbug); her current gigolo lover, the Marquis di Binelli di Pisa, a.k.a. Hugo (Ivan Lebedeff, nonpareil at unctuousness); and her conscienceless sponging brother Junior. (Ted Healy demonstrates a lethal knowing deadpan in this role; in vaudeville he’d groomed the Three Stooges as his stooges.)