Still, find him they did. The how and why of it remain matters of conjecture. But Gable’s preference for Fleming to direct GWTW instead of George Cukor was not only well-known; it was also reported before principal photography began. And ever since he joined the production, Gable had been out of sorts. He shot his first scenes in January 1939, two weeks after Leigh and Olivia de Havilland. Doubtless he felt uncertain in a new studio, acting with women who already had a close rapport with Cukor.
After Selznick fired Cukor, John Lee Mahin recalled, Gable made a late-night visit to Fleming’s house to beg him to come onto GWTW. Mahin was probably thinking of the events of the early-morning hours of Sunday, February 12: a coup de théâtre straight out of screwball comedy and at odds with Selznick’s denial that he consulted with Gable about the directorial change.
In this version, Selznick, Gable, and Eddie Mannix, after viewing GWTW rushes at Selznick’s house, paid a 3:00 a.m. visit not to Louis B. Mayer but to Mervyn LeRoy at his Santa Monica beach house. The ruckus stirred LeRoy from slumber. He looked down from his bedroom window and demanded: “I’m in bed—what do you mean by busting in at this hour of the night?” Selznick shouted in return: “We want your director—we’ve got to have Victor Fleming!” It took a series of phone calls—including at least one to Mayer—but a few hours later LeRoy had released Fleming from The Wizard of Oz. Selznick announced Fleming’s hiring two days later.
“My God, imagine picking up a project like that at this stage,” Fleming was heard to muse that week on the Oz set. “Still, if Clark’s going to sulk, I guess I’d better do it.” As soon as Selznick made the switch, Norman Webb of National Box Office Digest wrote the producer that he was glad Fleming was taking over, because, unlike Cukor, “Victor Fleming has one of the very best box-office records in the industry.”
So what did happen to Cukor, and why did Selznick summon Fleming? Contemporary columnists as well as latter-day analysts, trying to make sense of Selznick’s decision, have often placed the onus on Gable. But several eyewitnesses contradict the notion that Gable catalyzed the crisis, no matter how central he was to its outcome. Susan Myrick, the film’s Georgia dialect coach and technical adviser, provided an intimate account in a letter to the book’s author, Margaret Mitchell. She wrote that Cukor told her he had “looked at the rushes and felt he was failing. He knew he was a good director and knew the actors were good ones; yet the thing did not click as it should.” He demanded that they return to the original script by Sidney Howard. Selznick balked and offered his own ultimatum: “OK, get out.” In 1954, Ed Sullivan wrote that Cukor reached the point of no return when he clashed with Selznick on how to film a scene of Ashley Wilkes (Leslie Howard) walking down the stairs to meet Scarlett: “I think Ashley, at that moment, would be scared to meet her,” Selznick said. “I disagree wholeheartedly,” Cukor replied.
Cukor was never specific in his own recollections. “David talked generally,” he said in 1968, recalling the day he was summoned to Selznick’s office. “He said something like, ‘It’s not coming along the way I want it to, I’ve taken complete responsibility and it has to be my way.’ ”
The way Selznick saw things—and remembered them, consistently, year after year—the issues were practical and artistic: Cukor’s slow going on the initial scenes, the languid tempo and listless quality of his footage, and a clash over who had final authority over rewrites and on-set scene making. In 1947, Selznick told The New York Times, “We couldn’t see eye to eye on anything. I felt that while Cukor was simply unbeatable on directing intimate scenes of the Scarlett O’Hara story, he lacked the big feel, the scope, the breadth of the production.” Yakima Canutt, the stuntman hired to double Gable and to act a renegade in a bit part, backs Selznick up, writing that Cukor “didn’t seem to understand the action part of films.”
Selznick denied to Gable’s biographer Charles Samuels that any one incident precipitated Cukor’s ouster: “He was in disagreement with me on my concept of how Gone With the Wind should be done.” And when Bosley Crowther interviewed Selznick in the late 1950s for his MGM history The Lion’s Share, Selznick refuted the story that the firing was to please Gable. The producer said he “simply could not agree on points with [Cukor].”
Cukor was not an easy man when it came to brokering disagreements. Sid Luft’s experiences with him on the 1954 remake of A Star Is Born resemble Selznick’s. Tempo was a major problem—even the non-musical scenes ran a third longer than their exact equivalents in the 1937 original directed by William Wellman, a director far closer in his emotional and artistic makeup to Fleming than to Cukor. (The over-length—not entirely Cukor’s fault, since he had nothing to do with proposing the fifteen-minute “Born in a Trunk” showpiece with Judy Garland—led Warner Bros. to cut a half hour from the film after its big-city engagements.) Luft and Garland’s production company produced the picture. They were intent on providing Cukor with everything the director wanted, including George Hoyningen-Huene—in Luft’s words, “the photographic guru of his time”—as a special color design adviser. Still, the pugnacious Luft and the stubborn Cukor found themselves at loggerheads over Hoyningen-Huene’s attempt to frame Garland in a red dress against red walls (Luft had them painted gray) or the way Luft cut a long dialogue scene in a nightclub. “Cukor was tough, but good-natured underneath,” Luft said a half century later. “I think he had mellowed since Gone With the Wind.”
Getting Gable had been crucial for Selznick to put the picture together. He needed this star to satisfy the throngs who thought the King was destined to play Rhett Butler. In exchange for loaning out Gable, Selznick’s father-in-law, Louis B. Mayer, agreed that MGM would distribute GWTW, put up half its production money (up to $1.25 million), and receive half the film’s profits for the first seven years. A critical goal for Selznick was keeping Gable confident and effective, if not happy.
The idea that Selznick thought Cukor was a “woman’s director” who threw the movie to Scarlett insults the producer as well as Cukor. Fleming later told Mahin, “George would have done just as good a job as I. He’d probably have done a lot better on the intimate scenes. I did pretty well on some of the bigger stuff. George came from the stage and taught us what directing a dialogue scene was about. He knew. And nobody could direct a dialogue scene like George Cukor. It’s bullshit that he’s just a woman’s director. He’s not. He can direct anybody.” Similarly, in a 1972 letter to Kevin Brownlow, Louise Brooks argued (albeit at Cukor’s expense) against Fleming as a “man’s director”: “The best performance Clara Bow ever gave was in Fleming’s Mantrap. And in The Wizard of Oz Fleming made Judy Garland the most adorable creature we will ever see in films. Yet Garbo allowed Cukor to destroy her in Two-Faced Woman. It is no more reasonable to think that pansies love women than to think that cats like birds.”
The most up-to-date, politically correct theory about why Selznick let go his good friend and frequent collaborator Cukor has to do with sexual politics. Although Cukor’s circle spread this explanation of his firing for years, it came to light only after his death and entered film history when Patrick McGilligan included it in his provocative 1991 biography of Cukor, based on what McGilligan calls a “precise contemporary account of it” from the papers of the screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart. The theory hinges on the story that Gable, in the 1920s, had a brief erotic encounter with the openly gay star William Haines—a friend of Cukor’s and a sometime visitor to the set of Gone With the Wind.
Supposedly, during the early weeks of shooting, Gable heard reports that a member of Cukor’s circle, the actor Anderson Lawler, had said during a party, “George is directing one of Billy’s old tricks”—infuriating the star. But Haines’s own biographer, William J. Mann, can’t conclude anything about the original Gable-Haines incident other than “it’s clear something happened between the two men.” (He doesn’t entertain the possibility that nothing happened.) And Mann qualifies his interpretation of the Gone With the Wind snafu: “It would be too naïve to
assume that gossip about Billy and Gable had nothing to do with the antagonism of the director—just as it would perhaps be too simplistic to say it caused Cukor’s ultimate dismissal. Lawler’s wagging tongue, however, might just have been the proverbial straw that broke the back of an already strained, angry, and frustrated star.”
Leigh and de Havilland had bonded with Cukor; they didn’t share Gable’s elation. “I was not aware, when the change came, that Victor Fleming was a particular friend of Gable’s and, in fact, knew nothing about him at all,” de Havilland says. “My fear was that with a change of directors, I would lose my grasp of Melanie [Hamilton]’s character.”
When they learned the news on February 13, each was costumed in black to grieve for the death of Melanie’s brother and Scarlett’s first husband, Charles Hamilton. De Havilland wrote of confronting Selznick immediately: “In our garb of deep mourning, Vivien and I stormed his office. For three solid hours, we beseeched him not to let George go. As tears rained on David, he retreated to the haven of his window seat, and when we unfurled the forlorn banners of our black-bordered handkerchiefs, he nearly fled out the window.” According to Selznick, the two actresses were so “sore” they also went to his brother (and Leigh’s American agent), Myron, and asked “if Fleming [was] a good man.” He couldn’t stave off sarcasm. “No,” he shot back, “David’s going all over town looking for a bad director.” (Myron later threatened Leigh: he said were she to quit the picture, he’d see that she never worked in Hollywood again.) De Havilland took some comfort from her then-beau, Howard Hughes, who, “to my surprise, said something both perceptive and reassuring: ‘Don’t worry, everything is going to be all right—with George and Victor, it’s the same talent, only Victor’s is strained through a coarser sieve.’ ”
To her actor friend Anthony Bushell, Leigh protested Cukor’s replacement with a man she called “a mere workaday hack.” She expressed her anxiety more politely in a letter to her mother:
Everyone is hysterical about this film, with the consequence that everything is disorganized—after two years they are still writing the script which means I don’t know where I am. They have changed the director, which has upset me a lot, as I loved George Cukor (who was here before). I like this man alright, but the poor wretch is exhausted as he hasn’t stopped working for ages, & he did not really want to do this film, as he was so tired, & has not even had time to read the book! Then the photography is appalling, they all say. So how can I have any confidence.
Figuring out who had read the novel became a parlor game for columnists throughout filming. One reported, with authority, that neither Leslie Howard nor de Havilland had done so. When Fleming took the job, he had not, but he eventually did, as his well-thumbed copy indicates. He and Mahin worked nights “for about a week” on script revisions, Mahin recalled. “Every night, Vic would say, ‘Now look on page so-and-so.’ He knew the novel by heart.”
At the time of Fleming’s hiring, the cast was working from revisions by Oliver H. P. Garrett, who was rewriting the playwright Sidney Howard’s screenplay. Fleming quickly got down to business with Mahin after bluntly telling the producer, “Your fucking script is no fucking good.” Selznick ended that arrangement. He was determined to be as independent from Mayer as possible—but Mahin had been spotted meeting with Mayer to discuss his new assignment, and Selznick suspected the writer was behind a Hollywood Reporter scoop crediting the MGM talent pool with rescuing his chaotic production. Next at bat was Ben Hecht—one of the most fecund minds in Hollywood and a fan of the director he called “aloof and poetical.” (Hecht may have met him in 1934 when writing The Prisoner of Zenda for Selznick, who wanted Fleming for that picture; it was filmed in 1937 with John Cromwell directing John L. Balderston’s script.)
Hecht’s rollicking account in his memoir, A Child of the Century, told how he rewrote the first half of the GWTW script in a week for $15,000. (Sometimes he said he worked on the script for two weeks for $10,000; whatever the price, he did stay on to edit the second half of the script in week two.) Hecht’s tale, however rife with hyperbole and inaccuracies, captures the dynamic idiosyncrasies of Fleming and Selznick as well as the excitement of boy-on-a-burning-deck filming performed on a grand scale. Hecht insisted that all he was given to eat was peanuts.
Initially, as Selznick laid out the story to an uncomprehending Hecht (who had not read the novel), “Fleming, who was reputed to be part Indian, sat brooding at his own council fires.” Then, after Hecht gave his blessing to Howard’s distillation of the narrative into “treatment” (really, screenplay) form,
Selznick and Fleming discussed each of Howard’s scenes and informed me of the habits and general psychology of the characters. They also acted out the scenes, David specializing in the parts of Scarlett and her drunken father, and Vic playing Rhett Butler and a curious fellow I could never understand called Ashley . . . After each scene had been discussed and performed, I sat down to the typewriter and wrote it out. Selznick and Fleming, eager to continue with their acting, kept hurrying me. We worked in this fashion for seven days, putting in eighteen to twenty hours a day . . . On the fourth day, a blood vessel in Fleming’s right eye broke, giving him more of an Indian look than ever. On the fifth day, Selznick toppled into a torpor while chewing on a banana. The wear and tear on me was less, for I had been able to lie on the couch and half doze while the two darted about acting.
Hecht also said, many years later, “Fleming was a much better director than Cukor ever could be.”
GWTW devotees have long wondered which chunky, bespectacled, wavy-haired man was the better Scarlett: Selznick or Cukor, who had acted the role when de Havilland read for Melanie. The casting doubtless was better when F. Scott Fitzgerald worked on the script and played Rhett and Ashley to Sheilah Graham’s Scarlett and Melanie; Fitzgerald, not surprisingly, both understood Ashley and did his best screenwriting for this project on that character. (He edited the sequence of Ashley’s Christmas leave.) Hecht thought he forestalled any future demands by snaring Selznick into his script process and gaining the producer’s tacit assent, but more likely Selznick realized the wisdom of what Mahin had told him even before Hecht said anything: “For God’s sake, let’s get back to Margaret Mitchell’s book and Sidney Howard’s wonderful script.” And Selznick did get Hecht back to write seven title cards in September.
Most accounts of Gone With the Wind focus on everything Selznick did before Fleming arrived: the search for Scarlett that ultimately landed Leigh; the previsualization of the movie in the elaborate storyboards of the production designer William Cameron Menzies; the many early reworkings of Howard’s script; and even the burning of Atlanta (filmed in December 1938). But rewrites continued during filming, and as Fitzgerald wrote of Fleming for a 1939 lecture tour by Graham, “[He was a] fine adaptable mechanism—which in the morning could direct the action of two thousand extras, and in the afternoon decided on the colors of the buttons on Clark Gable’s coat and the shadows on Vivien Leigh’s neck . . . Like all pictures, it has been a community enterprise . . . but the tensile strength of this great effort has been furnished by the director.”
Fleming took up the gauntlet partly because Gable was a close friend and frequent colleague. Gable as Rhett presents a mature incarnation of the good-bad take-charge guy he and Fleming had been developing since Red Dust. That alone should derail the long-accepted narrative that Selznick was the sole artist and Fleming the hack following orders. Years after his judicious Selznick biography, Showman: The Life of David O. Selznick (1992), David Thomson concluded that Selznick “identified very much with the character of Scarlett O’Hara . . . He believed in her, he so much wanted her success, her survival, for himself.” Selznick’s director, though, identified with Rhett.
The producer had prized Fleming’s abilities at Paramount in the 1920s, and in 1933, during Selznick’s brief tenure at MGM, he argued to Mayer that Fleming should be made a staff director (with a longterm contract) precisely because “we would be be
tter off with fewer supervisors and more producing directors.” (Fleming’s only long-term contract with MGM, negotiated before GWTW, guaranteed him the right to deny credit on his films to any producer.) They had enjoyed a close and respectful collaboration on Reckless, and Selznick hoped Fleming would direct the Carole Lombard–James Stewart marital soap opera, Made for Each Other (which John Cromwell directed while Fleming was in Oz).
Although they were never to be friends, Selznick gave a remarkably fair evaluation of Fleming to Gable’s biographer Samuels in 1961. Samuels asked whether Fleming was “tough, sadistic,” and Selznick responded, “I don’t think he was sadistic. He was another of that extremely masculine breed. The most attractive man, in my opinion, who ever came to Hollywood. Physically and in personality. He had a kind of Indian quality. American Indian, that is. Women were crazy about him, and understandably so.” Admitting that he never knew Fleming socially, he added, “I enjoyed working with him. A really expert craftsman. He had been a cameraman and he knew his cinematics thoroughly.” Naturally, he didn’t drop his refrain that other directors worked on the film, but he summarized Fleming’s contribution by saying, “Fleming did beautiful work on it.” (In an earlier interview with Bosley Crowther, Selznick said Fleming directed 60 percent of the picture, a higher percentage than anyone else gave him.)
Another disaster to be contained was “the terrible mess we have made of Gable’s clothes,” Selznick wrote in one of his fabled memos. Gable was told he couldn’t use his favorite tailoring firm, Eddie Schmidt’s in Beverly Hills. This fiat, Selznick concluded, “was an insane order to begin with. And it had the further effect of making Gable take a what-the-hell attitude.”
Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) Page 41
