Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics)

by Sragow, Michael

  “Judy was very, very fond of Victor Fleming,” said Sid Luft, who in the early 1950s became both her husband and her business partner, producing her cult favorite A Star Is Born (1954).

  She only had the nicest things to say about him. He was a genius, as far as she was concerned. And she really enjoyed making that movie. It was the most fun she ever had working at MGM. The spirit of it all; she was sixteen, seventeen, with no problems, and she was a very, very sharp teenager who knew who she was and had a lot of experience by that time. She was close to being a full-grown woman, but she could look and act like a child. And you have to trust her judgment about Fleming. Being in this business as long as I have, and knowing it like I do, I have to think he was probably the undiscovered genius of our business.

  As always, Fleming maintained a rough-and-ready humor on the set. Garland told a reporter, “Once I lay down for a nap in my dressing room and someone—never mind who—had put smudge pots under my bed. They slipped in and lit them, then ran out and yelled, ‘Fire!’ When I stumbled out through the smoke, they threw water in my face.” Although she also told a version of this stunt that was set during the making of Girl Crazy and blamed Mickey Rooney, it has all the fingerprints of one of Fleming’s practical jokes.

  When Garland couldn’t stop breaking into giggles at the pseudo-menacing advances of Lahr’s Cowardly Lion, Fleming escorted her off the Yellow Brick Road, said, “Now, darling, this is serious,” slapped her on the cheek, then ordered, “Now go in there and work.” It must have been one carefully calculated slap from a man with impressive upper-body strength who was also a master of the “corkscrew punch.”

  Sally Fleming hoots at the notion that anyone could find such a slap cruel. “That wasn’t abuse! People in those days weren’t afraid of slapping a child in public for misbehavior. But he could be a little crude sometimes. When I was little, either three or four, I threw a tantrum. I just got hysterical. You know, the way small children do? And I got under the dining room table, and I was screaming. I was a very high-strung child. And Daddy apparently didn’t quite know what to do with me. So he kicked me. Not hard, just enough to get my attention. And it worked.”

  It did with Garland, too. After Fleming got the shot, he asked Mahin to bop him on the nose “because of what I did to her.” Mahin was there when Garland overheard that and retorted, “I won’t do that, but I’ll kiss your nose.”

  Apart from that smack, he stuck to his approach of treating young actors like adults—and the results could be startling. Pickford’s biographer Eileen Whitfield says one of her “favorite moments in all movies” is when the four friends enter the Wizard’s throne room. The disembodied Wizard’s head shouts, “Silence!”—“and Garland, scrambling away to the safety of her group, says ‘Jiminy Crickets!’ with the same shock and fear that adults would use saying ‘Holy shit!’ ” Reporters and fan magazines made much of this emerging star’s dates and occasional crushes. When Garland told Sheilah Graham of Fleming, “I love him like a father,” Graham quipped, “I can see what she means. But from my standpoint, I’d omit the father angle.”

  Donna Stewart-Hardway, one of the child performers who blended in with the little people playing the Munchkins, called Garland’s reaction “a case of puppy love . . . She’d get very close to him, look up at him, and, literally, bat her eyes. It’s something that a kid would do.” To Stewart-Hardway and the others, Fleming “just was brisk. And brusque. He was always moving people and changing things and changing marks.”

  In her autobiography, With a Feather on My Nose (1949), Billie Burke, a renowned beauty and the widow of the theatrical impresario Florenz Ziegfeld (who died in 1932), called Glinda, the Good Witch of the North, “my favorite role.” In 1939, she told an interviewer, “Vic was like a schoolboy, so excited about the film’s possibilities.” The Munchkin Gus Wayne said he saw Fleming yelling at Burke for a flubbed line or bit of business, but that would have been a rare occurrence. And Wayne might have mistaken Fleming for a tall assistant director who gave Burke a dressing-down after she failed to show up on time one day. “You’re—you’re—browbeating me,” Hamilton recalled Burke saying, and as the man’s jaw dropped and he went silent, Hamilton noted to herself, “My goodness, what a wonderful actress she really is.”

  The movie that would become the ultimate holiday attraction demanded that Fleming set a relentless pace through November and December. The Christmas layoff was just two days, including Christmas Day, which fell on a Sunday that year. Before the end of 1938, Fleming filmed the four friends meeting on the Yellow Brick Road, Dorothy and the Scarecrow goading the irascible apple trees, the quartet falling asleep in the poppy field, the scenes in the Witch’s castle, and all the Munchkinland scenes.

  The special-effects master A. Arnold Gillespie devised a dolly running on tubing instead of wheels for shooting the poppy field, and the Emerald City provided the most elaborate interiors. But no sequence was more of a challenge—in logistics, creativity, and tone—than Munchkinland. It was “probably the most difficult set to photograph,” said Rosson, “a two-acre set of tiny villages.” The gauntlet he and Fleming faced consisted of “dozens of shades of primary colors. We found it best to try no novel colors but to get variety in shades.” Using a constantly moving camera on a boom was one way to seduce the viewer’s eye into an active appreciation of the spectacle, keeping the Munchkins from blending into one big “mass of nothing when they all mob together.”

  Katharine M. Rogers, a biographer of L. Frank Baum, blames the movie for making the term “Munchkins” refer to “ridiculous little people,” explaining, “In Baum’s book, all the inhabitants of Oz were the size of Dorothy, a child of about six; the effect was to give her a comfortably child-proportioned world. In the film, all the characters, including Dorothy, tower over the Munchkins.” But if the film’s Munchkins were “ridiculous,” they would not be so beloved.

  MGM enlisted the impresario Leo Singer to deliver little people who were identical, except for height, to average-sized men and women. Singer had only eighteen little people under personal contract at the time (among them Charles Becker, who became the Munchkin Mayor), and some others, like the veteran circus performer Major Doyle, cut their own deal with MGM. But Singer bartered with other managers and used agents across the country to come up with 116 little people; eight children were added to fill in backgrounds. Cloaked in outrageous mock-European garb, seen in a mock-gemütlich land of cottages and gardens filled with lacquered flowers, the Munchkins are like a precision operetta corps: Ruritanian village life writ small.

  Edward Hartman visited that set during a rehearsal. “Uncle Vic was trying to organize them, and they weren’t doing what he wanted them to do, so he stormed off and someone else ended up doing it. When he was directing the Munchkins or anyone else, he’d get right up in their face. He didn’t scream at anybody.” Several Munchkins depict Fleming as a godlike figure on the camera boom, delivering instructions from on high via assistant directors. That didn’t bother Margaret Pellegrini, who still thinks of him fondly: “Oh, boy, a great fellow, and a handsome man on top of that—easygoing, and nice and as friendly as he can be.”

  Jerry Maren, the middle member of the trio of toughs who “represent da Lollipop Guild,” recalls Fleming saying, “Tell those three to move their mouths to the right and to the left, so they look more like three tough guys.” Nearly seventy years later, Maren muses, in a comical blasé manner, “He thought it was more realistic—whatever, what the hell.” Then he quickly adds, “It was hard to believe he could be so quiet and cool. It was probably a relief for him to do simple stuff like fairy tales.”

  An entire apocrypha has sprung up about the randy, hell-raising offscreen behavior that the diminutive performers, many of them veterans of the gritty road life of circuses and carnivals, supposedly displayed as soon as they hit Culver City. Most of that can be traced to Garland’s 1967 appearance on a TV special called A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Hollywood—with Jack
Paar. In an appearance on Paar’s regular prime-time program a few years earlier, Garland told the affectionate story of Fleming keeping “three dirty hams” from elbowing her off the Yellow Brick Road. But in 1967, two years before her death, the fawning Paar and a receptive studio audience egged on a brittle and visibly ailing Garland into entertaining snarkiness.

  “No one can tell show business stories like Judy Garland,” Paar cooed as he introduced her, and Garland immediately set out to prove him right. Even before she took on the little people, she told Paar that Deanna Durbin had “one thick eyebrow that just wouldn’t quit. Like a caterpillar!”

  Then Paar brought up “Moonchkins.” After correcting his pronunciation, she said, “They were very tiny, you know.” When Paar asked, “They were kids?” she retorted, “They were drunks!”—and the explosion of audience laughter set off ever more theatrical exaggerations. “What’d they do?” Paar asked three times, excitedly, and when Garland repeated the question, he clarified, “What did the dwarfs do?” In 1967, it was still titillating to hear Garland tell of a “two-inch” forty-year-old asking her out to dinner. “I couldn’t say I don’t want to go out with you, I can’t, because you’re a midget; I just said, ‘You know, my mother wouldn’t like it’ ”—and he, according to Garland, responded, “Bring her along, too.”

  When Paar asked, “What could you do with him?” and then, “What could he do?” she got another blast of laughter by saying, “They evidently did a lot . . . [there were] hundreds of thousands! And they’d put them all in one hotel—not in one room, one hotel in Culver City, and they got smashed every night, and they’d pick them up in butterfly nets!” Garland had complained that she received no residuals from her MGM films. Her closing quip was “The poor things—I imagine they get residuals!”

  The surviving Munchkins insist that such memories are exaggerated or just false. One of them, Clarence Swensen, a soldier (“Fourth row back, camera side”) says that Garland was “a sweet sixteen” who at the time seemed as happy to see them on her breaks as they were to see her. In 1974, though, LeRoy tapped the same vein of comic hyperbole as Garland in his as-told-to autobiography, Take One: “I guess it’s like any group who go to a convention in a distant city; somehow their inhibitions are left behind. Or maybe the little people, as they prefer to be called, have little inhibitions to go with their little stature. Whatever the reason, they were wild. Every night there were fights and orgies and all kinds of carryings-on. Almost every night, the Culver City police had to rush over to the hotel to keep them from killing each other.” (An unpublished memoir by the Culver City motorcycle cop Ed Meese partially supports that version. Meese wrote, “They all went into the local bars . . . They were the cockiest little people I have ever seen in my life, and I had more trouble with them than anyone in town.”) But not all of the little people stayed at the Culver Hotel; perhaps the tiniest of the women, Olga Nardone, stayed at an apartment house, and so did Billy Curtis and some others.

  Langley called the Munchkins “hell-raisers.” One was fired after threatening his estranged wife with a knife and dragging her from a restaurant, caveman style, by the hair. Two others and their adult manager were dropped after a disputed knifing incident. Still, these were isolated events. And even if some of the little people were carousers, what’s so wrong about acting out in a surreal situation? When Maren looked out his hotel window the morning after his arrival in November, he saw a parade and thought it might be for the Munchkins; he didn’t realize at first that it was Armistice Day. The future Culver City cop Charlie Lugo, then a radio store owner, would see them climb up bar stools, get drunk quickly, and often fall off. “Some of them just had way too much fun,” he’d tell his family.

  Many Munchkin tales—perhaps all versions of a single event—revolve around restroom mishaps. MGM provided the women with attendants from the outset, but not the men. Megan Rosenfeld of the Washington Post uncovered the story behind “twins Mike and Ike Matina . . . problem drinkers who liked to seduce into overindulgence less hardened colleagues, one of whom had to be rescued from a toilet into which he had fallen.” (Billy Curtis told Harmetz the man wasn’t found for forty-five minutes: “They had to clean him off like he was a baby.”) Langley would tell a story about “the King of the Munchkins” landing in a studio commode; if he meant the Mayor, that would have been Charles Becker. But the bit player Shep Houghton provides the resolution. Houghton, who found the Munchkins “arrogant,” says “all hell broke loose” when one man splashed into a toilet, and the studio’s response was to have two propmen rig up a child’s potty seat to prevent further incidents. However practical and safety minded that may have been, the Munchkins who confronted the device reacted as if it were a put-down and smashed it to pieces. (That’s when the men got their attendants, too.) But the Munchkin soldier Swensen says, “Aw, that’s a lot of hooey! Yeah!”

  Lahr told a story about all hands searching for the fellow who played the Witch’s chief Winged Monkey (Pat Walshe) and finding him “plastered” and facedown in one of those long horse-trough urinals. For the monkeys, the casting office had put out a call for “small, thin men,” and some of the Munchkin actors filled in as well. Danny Windsor was small, thin, and not yet fourteen at the time he appeared as the flying mate of the Winged Monkey who soars off (on wires) with Toto in his furry arms. As Windsor says, the other monkey did the work and got the full-figure shot: “All you see is my rear end flying away.” But it gave him “the most famous ass in show business.”

  His grandmother, who hoped he’d become a juvenile lead, had brought him to central casting on a dance call; he wound up with four days in a monkey suit. During two rehearsal calls and a day and a half of actual shooting (including a half day of pickup shots), Windsor witnessed Fleming on the boom and LeRoy on the floor, but took his orders from assistants. After serving in World War II (including time on Guam and Iwo Jima), he forged a career in nightclubs, casinos, and early TV, winning acclaim from the San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen for his work in a waterfront club as part of a comedy team called Doodles and Spider. He mastered a killer Ethel Merman impersonation. In 1938, though, his grandmother thought his fellow monkeys were far too outré to be casual company for her budding child star. “I don’t know if they were from the circus or what, but strange-looking guys played the winged monkeys—heavy, heavy drinkers and smokers,” Windsor says. “My grandma wouldn’t let me near them too much.”

  These tales of ribald little people and hard-guy monkeys may be a legacy of carnival-sideshow fantasy and humor. But they also reflect the real-life tragicomic slapstick that little people or unconventional performers confronted in pre-OSHA times. At any rate, whether they were falling into bed after work or into a latrine before the day started, on the set the Munchkins seized any chance they had for the spotlight.

  Meinhardt Raabe, who played the Coroner of Munchkinland, still speaks in the formal tones and locutions he feels won him the role. “Victor Fleming had a reputation of being a rather hard-driving director, but with the Munchkins he was, shall we say, an extremely sensitive, compassionate individual. I never heard him say, ‘Get over here! Do it like this, do it now!’ He’d always say, ‘Let’s try it this way; let’s try it that way.’ He never raised his voice with the Munchkins at all. All Munchkins had a very high regard for him. He was very, shall I say, concerned for the little people.”

  The choreographer Bobby Connolly’s assistants, Dona Massin and Arthur Appel, had more contact with the Munchkins in rehearsals than Fleming and his directing team, and even that was limited. Olga Nardone, at three feet four the tiniest Lullaby League dancer and the first Sleepy Head to emerge, had been part of her own vaudeville act in Boston as “Little Olga,” with a six-foot partner who was the brother of her dancing teacher, Mildred Sacco, one of Bolger’s many terpsichorean friends. She says there were so many Munchkins, “We didn’t get any individual attention. You had to learn by yourself,” and Sacco helped prepare her and the others as m
uch as the choreography team. As for being a Sleepy Head, she shrugs and says, “We [Karl Kosiczky, Pellegrini] were the only ones who could fit in that little nest they built.”

  Joan Kenmore, another of the child performers, says even when she was seven (and the youngest actor in Munchkinland), she wondered why the choreographers picked a signature step that was particularly difficult for little people: “They had to kick their legs up to execute that step.” But Ruth Duccini speaks for most of her peers when she says that being among dozens of other little performers made it “exciting and fun.”

  Raabe says that they knew it was Fleming’s voice that rang out at shooting time and when “something didn’t look right, he’d say, ‘Cut!’ We had so many big arc lamps that as soon as he’d say, ‘Cut!’ an electrician would say, ‘Save your arcs.’ We’d say, ‘Save your arches,’ and squat wherever we would be, so we wouldn’t lose our positions.” A graduate of the University of Wisconsin, Raabe had worked for the Oscar Mayer company both as an accountant in the Chicago office and as “Little Oscar,” their tiny trademark, “the world’s smallest chef.” Says Raabe, “I had done a lot of public speaking, and was used to enunciating clearly. So when it came time to cast the Munchkin Coroner, I knew how to speak, shall we say, appropriately. I did it once, and the casting director said, ‘Okay, you’re the Coroner.’ ”

  Karl Kosiczky (he took the last name of Slover in 1943), who played one of the three Munchkin trumpeters, declares Fleming “a sincere gentleman, well liked by the Munchkins” because he was direct and approachable. When the lead trumpeter, Kayo Erickson, missed three cues, “I, Karl, suggested to put me in first. Mr. Fleming said, ‘Change.’ ” Kosiczky, at just over three feet tall, was a movie veteran whose credits already included They Gave Him a Gun and Hawks’s Bringing Up Baby. Not only did he play multiple roles (including a townswoman), but Fleming also asked him to sing “We’re Off to See the Wizard” for set visitors. He remembers Raabe making too much of a song out of the Coroner’s report. “Mr. Fleming said, ‘Don’t sing,’ this is serious.” The verdict was, of course, “As Coroner, I must aver, I thoroughly examined her, and she’s not only merely dead, she’s really most sincerely dead.”