Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics)

by Sragow, Michael

  When Fleming was advising them on line readings, though, it was really to bolster their physical performances. Before he shot Munchkinland, the MGM sound chief, Douglas Shearer, and the musical arranger Ken Darby devised a system of recording the dialogue and songs at a slow speed, with performers seasoned in radio and/or cartoons, including members of the singing groups the King’s Men Octet and the Debutantes. When played back at normal speed, the voices had the soprano electricity of the high-pitched Munchkin sound. The speaking voices of only two little people ended up on the final sound track.

  Raabe is certain that Fleming signed off on individual casting choices for featured roles such as his Coroner. But it’s unclear how much the director had to do with the intricacies of the recording or, for that matter, the specifics of the choreography. And more legendry abounds: The whimsical and hyperbolic Munchkin Mickey Carroll once boasted, “Vic Fleming would stand there and say, ‘Mickey, the marching soldiers don’t look right. Go in there and make it right.’ So I’d go in and make it right.” However, Swensen says that Fleming gave the soldiers their marching orders directly for “Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead” and guided their steps throughout while maintaining an air of “kindness.”

  MGM’s top-tier stars visited Munchkinland; in 1938, there was no more elaborate Yuletide fantasy park. Norma Shearer, Myrna Loy, Spencer Tracy, and Mickey Rooney toured the sights; Greta Garbo peeked in, too. Joan Crawford brought her niece, and Wallace Beery his daughter.

  The kids’ visits often ended in disillusioned pratfalls. Warner LeRoy skipped down the Yellow Brick Road only to crash into a painted backdrop after about twenty feet. “That is when I learned the difference between fantasy and reality,” he used to say. Victoria Fleming took one look at the talking apple trees and grew so scared she had to be taken out. Edward Hartman declared Garland “the ugliest thing I’d ever seen. Her head seemed to be too large for the rest of her body.” These visitors might have stoked Fleming’s good-humored yet unblinking view of childish perceptions and behavior.

  His conquest of Oz was so complete that it may have helped take him off the film: when Selznick fired Cukor from Gone With the Wind, Fleming was now more than ever, in the eyes of the producer and his MGM partners and distributors, the number-one choice to replace him. And when he did go to Tara, he never left Oz completely. He hiked over to the fantasy’s cutting rooms from the sets of the Civil War epic. With the editor Blanche Sewell, he kept looking for ways to both tighten the movie and temper the Wicked Witch’s villainy without defusing it; for example, he took the skywriting message—“Surrender Dorothy or Die WWW”—down to “Surrender Dorothy.” He chopped off a montage designed to accompany Dorothy’s return to Kansas. (Luckily, even before filming, the image of “a Negro baby in a bathtub” was cut from the list of joke sightings in the twister.) After three to five sneak previews, Fleming and Sewell had winnowed the rough cut from 121 minutes to a release print of 101. (Almost all movies then were 90 minutes or under.)

  Before Fleming left, he oversaw the special-effects squad’s creation of a Kansas cyclone from a muslin stocking. Fleming didn’t get to guide Garland through the farm version of “Over the Rainbow.” Once Selznick and Mayer whisked him off to Tara, Twelve Oaks, and Atlanta, King Vidor came aboard to direct all the Kansas scenes. “Victor was a good friend, and he took me around to all the sets that had been built and went through the thing,” Vidor told Richard Schickel. But he told Harmetz, “Instead of telling me what I wanted to know, he’d say, ‘Oh, you know what to do.’ I’m not even sure that he took me down to see the sets.” Vidor didn’t take credit for any of his Oz work while Fleming was alive, but after his death he even took credit for “We’re Off to See the Wizard,” which he didn’t shoot.

  Vidor often said he was particularly proud of the way he handled Garland singing in the barnyard. “Previous to this,” he told Harmetz, “when people sang, they stood still. I used ‘Over the Rainbow’ to get some rhythmical flow into a ballad.” He did film the number with supreme limpidity. He fixes his camera on Garland as she ambles around the yard, reclines on a hay bale, tugs at a wheel, and comes to rest on some farm equipment with Toto sitting just above and behind her and touchingly holding out his paw. Nonetheless, Vidor’s depiction of his staging as a movie-musical breakthrough for the mobile camera is mistaken. Even in Fleming’s train wreck Reckless, the title number starts with the camera following Jean Harlow down a bar. And through all the musical numbers set in Oz, Fleming and Rosson keep the camera roaming.

  In this era of CDs and DVDs, Oz fans have become familiar with its deleted musical snippets, which include a Busby Berkeley–choreographed extension of the Scarecrow’s “If I Only Had a Brain” number with Bolger bouncing off fence posts as if they were billiard bumpers. Also, Dorothy reprised “Over the Rainbow” as she cowered in the Witch’s tower, and the Emerald City staged a triumphal procession to “Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead.” One jazz-infused song was excised in its entirety: “The Jitterbug,” about “a goofy critter” who “injects a jitter” that “starts you dancing on a thousand toes.” The first number Arlen and Harburg wrote for the film (demonstrating their grasp of Freed’s jazz concept) was performed in part of the Haunted Forest populated with “Jitter Trees” that grabbed at Dorothy and her friends.

  At a Santa Barbara preview, Harburg said the scene had audience members dancing in the aisles. But this was not a plus for MGM’s conservative executives. According to both Harburg and Hamilton, they feared that number tied in too closely with the jitterbug dance craze and would date the film. (When told Metro anticipated a decade-long life for Oz, Hamilton snorted, “You’re out of your mind.”) All that survives of the number is Arlen’s home-movie footage, which is too haphazard to provide much evidence of how it might have worked, since the jitterbug itself was animated. Fleming wanted the number kept; he was even providing the jitterbug’s owlish hoots on the dialogue track the way Walt Disney (back then) was lending his voice to Mickey Mouse. But Freed thought it pointless and distracting, and he won.

  On the other hand, Harburg put Fleming on the side of the devils during the controversy that arose from “Over the Rainbow” being cut at the preview stage. In Harburg’s version, “Mr. Fleming walked into the office and he said, ‘I’m sorry to say that that whole first part of that show is awful slow because of that number . . . We gotta take it out.’ Now, when a man like that comes in, who doesn’t talk but makes pronunciamentos, you’ve got to listen.” LeRoy, according to Harburg, “became little Mervyn Levine again,” and “Harold ran to shul.” For the moment the song was out of the picture.

  Even Harmetz, hardly the president of the Victor Fleming fan club, doubts that story. Whoever gave the order to kill the number, Harburg and Arlen agreed that Freed earned an even bigger piece of the Oz legend by demanding its restoration. At the time, Arlen liked to tell newspapers that the unexpected controversy taught him that when doing a stage show, “it’s your show and everyone else’s,” but when working on a movie, “it’s never your picture. You’re just getting paid.”

  The movie’s price tag meant that its impressive $3.017 million gross in its first release would register—because of opening costs—a three-quarter-of-a-million-dollar loss. Oz didn’t do better for a couple of good reasons: many of the movie’s admissions were at cut-rate children’s prices, and the flood of quality films in that benchmark year of 1939 prevented holdover runs. MGM publicity concentrated its efforts on a preopening push far different from the sustained, years-long build Selznick had already been giving to Gone With the Wind. What MGM gave Oz was more like a contemporary media blitz, and it may not have suited a movie that was meant for the long haul.

  But with broad popular acceptance (even political cartoons adopted the imagery) and mostly ecstatic reviews nationwide—Russell Maloney of the New Yorker was a notable exception, labeling it “a stinkaroo”—MGM executives must have known that the investment would eventually pay off. And when it aired on CBS, on Novem
ber 3, 1956, it became a pop-culture phenomenon, attracting well over half of that night’s TV viewing audience. The film’s network showings became hugely popular annual events beginning on December 13, 1959, when the network began airing it in a 6:00–8:00 p.m. time slot, often with CBS stars and their children as hosts, such as Red Skelton and his daughter, Valentina, and Richard Boone and his son Peter. Garland was set to introduce the film with one of her daughters in 1956, while she was performing at the Palace, but it didn’t happen. Either CBS didn’t want to lug its lights and cameras backstage at the Palace or the fragile Garland thought twice about juggling an introduction and her act. Bert Lahr and Liza Minnelli did the honors, with the help of an Oz expert. Color sets were so rare that CBS didn’t even broadcast The Wizard of Oz in color in 1961 and 1962. It proved Fleming’s contention that if he did his job right, children would accept the reality of Oz until the movie’s end; Oz carried just as much authentic emotional weight as Kansas, even with both in black and white.

  The movie would garner its largest number of viewers—sixty-four million—on March 15, 1970, for its first broadcast after Garland’s death in 1969. Under Mervyn LeRoy’s direction, Gregory Peck introduced the film that year for NBC, calling it an “unquestioned classic” that “through theater engagements and telecasts may well have been enjoyed by more people than any other entertainment production in the history of the world.”

  For her one-word capsule in the New Yorker, many years after Maloney’s sneer, Pauline Kael simply exhaled, “Heaven.” The production was a stairway to paradise—for the audience, and for Garland, Lahr, Bolger, Haley, Hamilton, and Morgan. And Fleming ushered them all in. Key contributions came from Freed, the design and special-effects teams, a slew of screenwriters—notably Langley—and, crucially, Arlen and Harburg. But the movie’s schedule was stop-and-go, its sets hazardous, and its collaborative history tortuous. Without Fleming’s exuberance, instinct, and strict hand—and his gifts for upheaval and excitement—the movie would have collapsed into campy chaos.

  When a director goes full tilt, his or her greatest contributions are often spiritual, intangible. So in some ways it’s reasonable that Fleming, who worked in many different forms, would be slighted as a prime creator of a picture that ranks near the top not only of all movie musicals but of all movies. In other ways, it’s befuddling. In an enterprise like The Wizard of Oz, where the components are outlandish and the creative risks great, why wouldn’t the director get more, rather than less, credit for holding it all together?

  Harmetz reserves high praise for Arlen and especially Harburg. The lyricist pushed Lahr for the role of the Cowardly Lion, edited the pre-Mahin scripts into a lucid entity, and contributed dialogue as well as lyrics, notably in the scene of the Wizard handing the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Lion their rewards. Understandably, Harburg’s biographers take Harmetz’s argument to its logical conclusion: that the movie “owes its coherence and unity—not to mention its lyrics—to Yip.” Yet Freed was the one who brought up the entwined songs and narrative and the emotional hook of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in an exhaustive and influential memo. And it’s Fleming’s genius at setting and maintaining a robust tone that made it possible for the satiric and comedic turns and one heart-stopping ballad to score with equal zing.

  The influence game has been a complicated one to play with every aspect of the movie or Baum’s book. One academic reading presents Baum’s story as a testament to the lure of urban life and the machine age. Another interprets it as an intricate allegory of nineteenth-century populism, with the magic slippers (silver in the book, made ruby in the movie so they’d show up better in Technicolor) representing the Populist cause of silver coinage. The historian David Parker put it best when he said these conflicting interpretations stem from Baum’s success at writing a “modernized, American” fantasy. Baum produced “not only the first real American fairy tale, but one that showed American society and culture in all its wonderful diversity and contradictions, a story so rich, it can be, like the book’s title character, anything we want it to be—including, if we wish, a parable on Populism.”

  With a cultural stew as eclectic as The Wizard of Oz, the wisest path may be the one J. R. R. Tolkien took with fairy stories: “We must be satisfied with the soup that is set before us, and not desire to see the bones of the ox out of which it has been boiled.” Tolkien, translating the view of the Icelandicist George Webbe Dasent, proscribed: “By ‘the soup’ I mean the story as it is served up by its author or teller, and by ‘the bones’ its sources or material—even when (by rare luck) those can be with certainty discovered. But I do not, of course, forbid criticism of the soup as soup.”

  As soup, The Wizard of Oz is not beyond criticism, but its flaws scarcely mar the flavor. You can see why MGM executives got antsy during the Kansas episodes. Vidor’s pacing is erratic, especially in the scene with Professor Marvel, though Morgan is so wonderful you wouldn’t want to part with any of it. (Morgan also is brilliantly bogus as the Wizard, though not so much as a gatekeeper, a guard, and a coachman in the Emerald City.) Munchkinland is arguably more eye-popping than the interior of the Emerald City, but who cares when you’re gazing at the Horse of a Different Color?

  Despite his prominence in the credits, and his tireless work on the film, the chef of this inimitable soup hardly figured in its national publicity. A May 1 letter from the MGM publicist Teet Carle to the writer Grover Jones, who had done the story adaptation for The Virginian, pushes Fleming as a possible subject for a national magazine piece. He “is certainly one of the early-day screen directors who has still retained the color that directors used to have a long time ago . . . It occurred to me that since you were one of those also in the birth of motion pictures that Fleming might be used by you as an example of a director who has grown up in the business as compared with the influx in recent years of stage directors.” Of course, there was a caveat: “I don’t know how interested a magazine would be in a yarn on a director.”

  Or maybe just this director: after all, Frank Capra had been on the cover of Time in 1938. But Capra was both an endless self-promoter and a creator of his own easily recognizable blend of whimsy, uplift, and melodrama. Fleming was, as Steven Spielberg says, “one of the great chameleons . . . We honor his movies and don’t know him, because he did his job so well.” And rarely had he done it at a higher pitch of inspiration than in The Wizard of Oz.

  22

  Saving Tara and Gone With the Wind

  The bond between a reformed rake and a headstrong woman is the imperfect union at the core of Gone With the Wind. If The Wizard of Oz crystallized Fleming’s feelings for the resilience of children, Gone With the Wind drew out his understanding of the traumas of matrimony. The Civil War and the destruction of antebellum Georgia provide the film with its breadth—at its widest reach the movie is about how people react when social upheaval rends a settled way of life. The wedding of the dashing, piratical Rhett Butler (Clark Gable) to the Southern belle Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh) gives it the snap and heartbreak of a romantic tragicomedy.

  Lu Fleming was no Scarlett. She was an affable housewife, not a grasping minx who thought she was in love with someone else. Unlike some of her contemporaries, she didn’t seek social advantage as the wife of a powerful director. As a traditional spouse, she was happy to be “Mrs. Victor Fleming.” Yet the marriage contained enough wrenches and twists to give Vic and Lu advanced degrees in emotional mechanics. She may have been the pursuer in their love match; Fleming had never before been intimately involved with a married woman, much less the wife of a friend. When it turned sour, he would charge that she tricked him into wedlock by claiming she was pregnant. Fleming’s grip on the heated sentiment and harshness that romance can funnel into domestic life gives Gone With the Wind a shrewdness verging on wisdom.

  By the time he directed the picture, Fleming was no longer automatically linked to his leading ladies, not even knockouts like Mary Astor, Harlow, or Loy. He had been fait
hful to Lu; it would take Ingrid Bergman’s allure and more than a dozen years of household strains to break his resolve. The marriage was built on teasing as well as tender emotion; their mutual goading was part of their relationship. Vic and Lu knew what they were getting into when they tied the knot. They seemed to know what they wanted.

  With his daughters, his playfulness was caring and serene. Sally once saw him retrieve a hummingbird’s nest and try to hatch the eggs with the warmth of a lightbulb. He doted on Victoria as Rhett does on his daughter, Bonnie Blue, and, just as Rhett took Bonnie with him to London, Fleming took Victoria with him on fishing trips on their good ship Missy Poo. (Many years later, she became a crack skeet shooter like her father.) His discipline was often silent, swift, and surgical. Victoria recalls that when she was five and Sally three (just after Gone With the Wind), “We were going down to Balboa in the car. And I was in the front with Daddy, and Sally was in the back with Mother. But we got into some sort of fight, anyway. And Daddy didn’t say anything. He just turned the car around and drove us back home.”

  Fleming wasn’t keen on directing Gone With the Wind, but he hadn’t been in the mood to make The Wizard of Oz, either. He missed flying, and he’d had no time for one of his usual long vacations. In an interview with Sheilah Graham a week before he left Oz for Tara, and before he’d been asked to take over GWTW, she found him “nervous as a thoroughbred horse.” He told her, “I’ve been working too hard.” When she pointed out that his last picture, Test Pilot, had been months ago, he corrected her: “Test Pilot was my last credit, you mean,” then listed The Crowd Roars, Too Hot to Handle, The Great Waltz, and The Wizard of Oz. “After this, I’m going away where no one can find me—not even me.”