Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics)

by Sragow, Michael

  Leigh’s confidant Anthony Bushell later confirmed to a friend, Michael Dempsey, that she blamed Gable’s complaints about Cukor for Fleming’s hiring, and added that Fleming’s “ONLY words to Viv in a directorial sense during the whole run of the picture were, ‘Ham it up!’ ”—or as Sheilah Graham recorded, “Ham it, baby, just ham it!” delivered with a big smile.

  Leigh wasn’t the only one to hear that command. “Ham it up!” became one of Fleming’s favorite proclamations to everyone from Leigh to Yakima Canutt. Butterfly McQueen recalled that the only time he berated her “was when I was sitting in the back of the wagon and we had to pretend that we were going through the fire—which we never saw—and he said to me, ‘Ham it up, Prissy! Ham it up! You’re not hammy enough!’ ” Using “ham it up!” as a direction ran against Fleming’s temperament. On The Farmer Takes a Wife and Oz, “ham” was a dirty word: a synonym for mugging. But on Oz, his goal was to provide “a basis of reality” in outrageous fantasy. In Gone With the Wind, he had to breathe dramatic verve into a mammoth historical romance that had taken on a cultural reality of its own even before Selznick had invested it with state of the artisanship circa 1939. (“After the headache of pure imagination from The Wizard of Oz,” Fleming wrote in a syndicated story, he now had to drill “down to the bed rock of reality, with millions of voices shouting, ‘Hew to the line, mister.’ ”) “Ham it up,” in this case, appears to be Fleming’s way of urging the actors to scale their emotions to the size of the production. Thanks to Selznick and Cukor’s canny casting choices as well as Fleming’s guidance, most of the actors did just that.

  Although Fleming altered his style from film to film and was known for his mastery of scale, he was rarely (at least up to then) a self-conscious or ostentatious storyteller. Part of the charm of The Wizard of Oz is its matter-of-factness. (When reviewing Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Pauline Kael noted, “Very few movies have hit upon this combination of fantasy and amusement—The Wizard of Oz, perhaps, in a plainer, down home way.”) But Fleming had dabbled in pomp and circumstance on The Great Waltz—indeed, most of Hollywood gave him credit for that entire spectacle—and the elaborate Strauss biopic became one of Selznick’s models for GWTW. In an early-March memo, the producer ordered his whole unit to screen the picture, calling it “Hollywood’s best technical achievement in many ways in several years.” Almost simultaneously he advised the production manager Ray Klune that Fleming would go after photographic effects and camera angles he’d achieved on The Great Waltz when shooting the Twelve Oaks barbecue and reshooting the Atlanta bazaar later that month.

  Selznick wanted Gone With the Wind to be the sort of spectacle that announces every summit it means to scale. You want the Old South? You get it, with columns and flowing staircases and flaming sunsets. You want to see Atlanta burn? You see it, with Gable and Leigh moving in front of it, to boot. Luckily, Fleming understood that the naturalistic, conversational scenes had to hold their own in intensity with the splashy set pieces—and that those set pieces had to carry their emotional weight.

  Few movies have made more vivid use of the Technicolor system’s prodigious colors in scenes of spectacular destruction as well as expressionist strokes like Rhett and Scarlett clinching in front of a tangerine sky, or Scarlett raising her fist as dawn breaks over the plantation grounds of Tara. Martin Scorsese has extolled the capacity of this movie’s imagery to unlock the audience’s imagination. That’s partly because Menzies worked out the central drama in vibrant hues. It’s also because Fleming set a matching level of intensity in the performances. Color doesn’t decorate the characters—it helps bring them to completion. When Scarlett outrages onlookers at the bazaar by dancing with Rhett despite her black mourning dress, or later faces down scandal by showing up at a party for Ashley in a garish crimson gown, the red and the black convey the volcanic essence of one of the screen’s great divas.

  Fleming also varied the performances so Gable and Leigh could perform unpredictable duets of ardor and manipulation. Rhett is both smitten with Scarlett and, until their mostly disastrous marriage, able to step back and appraise her. In one of several antiromantic pas de deux, he says, “You need kissing badly. That’s what’s wrong with you. You should be kissed, and often—and by someone who knows how.” When she taunts him with “And I suppose you think you’re the proper person,” he wisely (at that point) keeps his distance, responding, “I might be . . . if the right moment ever came.” He forces their first kiss on the road back to Tara from burned Atlanta, when Rhett, suddenly seized by the pull of Dixie’s lost cause, asks her, sardonically, to think of herself as “a woman sending a soldier to his death with a beautiful memory.” A witness captured Fleming bristling as he filmed that scene, with Leigh clinging to a fence to resist Gable’s advances. “Resist, but don’t resist too much, it takes up too much time,” Fleming told her. After she softened for a second and Gable came on like gangbusters, she hauled off and smacked him. Fleming was “jiggling up and down with excitement. ‘That’s swell,’ he said.”

  It took the gut feelings of a director like Fleming to keep alive the audience’s hope that Scarlett will realize that swashbuckling Rhett is her man rather than overrefined Ashley. Leigh’s give-and-take with Fleming—like Scarlett’s with Rhett, but without love—resulted in the polar magnetism that powers the movie. Scarlett is simultaneously calculating and unconscious, and Leigh conveys her psychological shifts with lightning physical and verbal contortions. She’s a virtuoso at knitting her forehead, and she makes unusual choices with her dialogue. As admiring men encircle her chair at the Twelve Oaks barbecue, she chatters to the brink of unintelligibility: “Now, isn’t this better than speaking at an old table? A girl has only two sides to her at a table.” She’s being as coquettish with the audience as the heroine is with her adoring beaux.

  Leigh and Fleming developed their own tense rapport. To Hedda Hopper, he lauded Leigh with, for him, the highest praise: “At first, I didn’t give Vivien Leigh credit enough for the emotional depth she has. She’s an amazing person and can stand more punishment than any woman I’ve ever met.” Gladys Hall, who observed the filming for Screen Romances, thought it amusing that the director called his star “Miss Fiddle-de-dee” and that she called him “Mr. Boom-Boom” because of his predilection for boom shots. Ed Sullivan, witnessing Scarlett sport her famous green-curtain dress during her “horse jail” visit to Rhett, extracted a terse “She’s terrific” from the director. Harrison Carroll visited the Twelve Oaks set during the library scene and watched Leigh repeatedly hurl a vase. In one rehearsal, Leigh’s throw only got as far as the sofa, leading Fleming to crack, “There’s one thing certain, my dear. You’re no baseball player.”

  Afterward, Selznick wrote, “Vivien made no secret of her opinion of certain scenes as she went along; during the 122 days she was on the set . . . she groused plenty . . . and then, at a word from Victor Fleming, who was not merely a very fine director but a man who had the ability to conceal the iron hand in the velvet glove, she would walk into the scene and do such a magnificent job that everybody on the set would be cheering.” In Leigh’s account, she enjoyed Fleming’s joking with the cast and crew: “Take it easy, we’ve only got three more days’ work to do tonight!” And she understood that he had to put up with everything she endured, like the brick dust that simulated Georgia’s red clay and made the actors’ sweating faces cry crimson rivers.

  “The separation from Larry [Laurence Olivier, whom Leigh married that coming September] was very, very upsetting for her,” wrote Sunny Alexander, who worked for Myron Selznick and lived with Leigh as her secretary/companion. “She was motivated by how fast she could get this movie over and get back to Larry. It was a horse race. She had a cute little way of going up to Vic Fleming and saying, ‘Darling, could we do just two more shots?’ ”

  Fleming brought out Leigh’s fighting spirit, but Selznick’s assistant Marcella Rabwin thought she was steely enough, and ready for action, from the tests�
��she loathed Fleming partly for the way he “targeted” his female star with his fury and sent her running to her “black-market director,” Cukor. Fleming did coerce Leigh into belting down several slugs of real brandy for her drunk scene. (Maybe he was stealing the ploy from Emil Jannings.) He brooked no dissent from his insistence that she play Scarlett’s bitchiness all out. But there was method to Fleming’s intransigence and anger. Leigh had never taken on such a demanding movie role. Scarlett had to be a one-woman compendium of contrasts: selfish and self-destructive, rock-hard and changeable, decisive and procrastinating. A whiz at putting food on the table or launching a business, she’s a loser when it comes to resolving her deepest feeling—the alternately inexplicable and heartbreaking longing she retains for Ashley, her childhood ideal. Most of all, though, she has drive. By the time Sherman marches through Georgia and Scarlett returns to the ravaged Tara, audiences are geared to applaud when she raises her fist against the sky and vows never to be hungry again. Fleming built that push into the beat he laid down from the moment he took charge of the movie.

  Leigh, who had weak lungs, seldom complained publicly about her physical problems. (Early on, she took one afternoon off because her corset, which gave her a seventeen-inch waist, was making her ill.) She lost weight and body tone under the duress of twelve-hour (sometimes longer) shooting days. Other than Sundays, she had only three days off from March 2 to June 27. Her diminished appearance led Selznick to order Fleming to improve her “breastwork situation”—he wanted her looking “at least as good” in that department as Fox’s singing star Alice Faye. (Selznick said Fleming “feels even more keenly about it than I do.”) The director had Leigh’s breasts taped up to improve her décolletage.

  That task might have been on Fleming’s mind a few years later when he teased MGM’s up-and-coming musical star Kathryn Grayson in the studio commissary. In the early 1940s her prettiness was in full (and buxom) bloom, and her spats with Mayer over her desire to sing opera were the talk of the studio. “Oh, Katie,” Fleming called out, to her momentary confusion, “you’re the real Katie Scarlett. I wish you were here when we made that. We’d have had to tamp you down, but we had to build Vivien up.”

  Sidney Howard returned to California in April for additional script work. He soon discovered that Fleming, despite the constrictions of a producer’s pet project, was commander of the set, committed to making every scene emotionally authentic. On April 5, Howard wrote his wife, “Footage wasted on spectacular shots of Scarlett’s marriage to Charles. No room for Rhett to give back Melanie’s wedding ring. Vic Fleming says: the screen is no place for trivial character. OK by me. Vic Fleming is the director.”

  Within two weeks Howard comprehended the grueling pace and pressure of Selznick’s attempt to create a Hollywood sound epic comparable to The Birth of a Nation. “I can now, for the first time in my life, say with confidence that I know what the word ‘tired’ means. My own private weariness, apart from nausea whenever I look at a page of the script, is less my trouble than the miasma of fatigue which surrounds me.” Selznick popped Benzedrine and chain-smoked. Fleming wore himself out with his own intensity, and chain-smoked, too. But Howard described the director getting what appeared to be vitamin shots as well: “Fleming takes four shots of something a day to keep him going and another shot or so to fix him after the day’s stimulants. Selznick is bent double with permanent, and I should think, chronic indigestion. Half the staff look, talk and behave as though they were on the verge of breakdowns.”

  Even then, Fleming was in his element. He might have been speaking of himself as he yelled out directions to the extras for the hospital scene: “Remember, this is a hot summer day. This hospital is a filthy place. You are tormented by wounds, mosquitoes, flies, bedbugs, lice. Now everybody sound off in misery . . . I want a perfect litany of pain!” Adding to his own litany was an April 12 memo from Selznick, who hadn’t shaken his Great Waltz fixation. Selznick advised Fleming, “If and when you get a moment and when you are not a wreck and haven’t got nine million other things to do,” he should discuss with Menzies how to get images of a waltz “at least as good as what they have had in other pictures in the way of waltz shots.”

  Published rumors of Fleming’s possible departure began the first week in April. “Whatever I do, they’re fighting me all the way,” he confided to his brother-in-law Dick Kobe, who feared that a breakdown was imminent. On April 14—a Friday—Selznick sent out a memo stating that Fleming “is so near the breaking point both physically and mentally from sheer exhaustion that it would be a miracle, in my opinion, if he is able to shoot for another seven or eight weeks.” Myrick wrote in her diary the same day, “Vic told me . . . he was tired to death and he thought he was getting the jitters and would just have to quit.”

  Yet Fleming maintained his family dinnertime schedule before returning to Culver City for night shoots or to edit The Wizard of Oz. That Sunday, he also summoned sufficient energy to fulfill an obligation to direct a live radio program—an episode of the Gulf Screen Guild Theater for the benefit of the Motion Picture Relief Fund. Although directing a tightly written half-hour program was nowhere near as strenuous as taking the helm of a movie, Fleming still had to be at the CBS studio for both the rehearsal and the broadcast. Oddly enough, the episode, “The Hand of Providence,” written by Charles Tazewell (The Littlest Angel ), involved a return to Kansas—this one starring James Cagney and Andy Devine as two escaped cons who go straight under the influence of a farm girl played by Priscilla Lane.

  De Havilland explains that she was one of the few cast members to see the strain behind Fleming’s bold facade in late April:

  I found that during the lunch hour, it did me good to repair for a while to a quiet spot on the back lot before returning to the set. One day, as I was eating in the fresh air and sunshine, Fleming—no doubt searching for similar solitude and relief from the oxygen-deprived confines of the soundstage—wandered into the same area and discovered me there. It was, I think, during our walk back to the set that he gravely told me that on the previous Saturday night he had driven to the top of a cliff and had contemplated leaping from its edge. As we presently can see, he was suffering from a depression which, now that I think about it, must surely have predated the filming of Gone With the Wind and not only required his absence but must also have continued in some measure after the film was finished. But on the film, despite his melancholy, he was unfailingly professional, capable, courteous, and considerate, I would never have guessed that he was a deeply suffering man—serious, grave, aware of his enormous responsibility, yes, but not despondent to a profound degree. Fleming, finding me so unexpectedly in that quiet sunlit spot, may have sensed a kinship of some sort, and perhaps this impelled him to make his anguished admission.

  Shortly after that, Fleming filmed Melanie’s death scene, which included Mickey Kuhn, a seven-year-old actor, already a veteran of a half-dozen movies, playing four-year-old Beau Wilkes. No other fictional scenario would have cut closer to Fleming than a four-year-old boy losing a parent, but he knew how to control his emotions around children. Before filming, Fleming approached Kuhn’s mother and said, “I want to talk to Mickey.” In Kuhn’s recollection:

  He just talked to me. He just knew how to get to people. He said, “You know, it’s a very sad day. Your mother is dying.” And he said, “How would you feel if your mother was dying? She’s dying, and she’s very, very sick.” I cried easily in those days. He patted me on the back and handed me to Leslie Howard, and on the count of five, as I remember, we went out and did the scene. One take. What you see is what it was. Afterward, he picked me up and held me and took me back to my mother. Because I was crying, you know, pretty hard. I don’t think what I did in that scene could be done just by acting ability. It needed someone like Victor Fleming to plant the seed, you know what I mean?

  Kuhn, in turn, helped bring out Fleming’s emotions, as Leigh’s companion Sunny Alexander recorded. She wrote that Melanie’s death “w
as so real and everybody so emotional and so tired from working so hard that when [Fleming] said ‘Cut,’ everyone on that set was crying—the crew, the electricians, the third and fourth assistant—everybody was weeping as if we’d been to a memorial service or something. That’s how real it all seemed. Vic knew he had a good shot when he saw tears in everybody’s eyes—including his own.”

  Gable didn’t agree. It took two days of rehearsal and shooting for Fleming to wring just the right anguish from Gable for Rhett’s mourning of Melanie. The director envisioned some exhausting takes on the horizon; he knew he would want Gable to shed tears when Rhett reacts to Scarlett’s miscarriage. Yet he had to move on without pause to prepare his back-lot Atlanta for a night scene with Scarlett, Melanie, and Rhett’s mistress, the notorious madam Belle Watling (Ona Munson). Once again, Leigh fought Fleming’s determination to convey Scarlett’s most unlikable qualities, such as her cynicism and snobbery toward Belle—but this time Fleming responded, “Miss Leigh, you can stick this script up your royal British ass!” Then he stomped off the set and didn’t come back.

  It was April 27. “Confusion redoubled today when doctors ordered Victor Fleming to quit work,” Sidney Howard wrote his wife. Fleming said his doctor ordered him to bed after eighteen months of nonstop labor. He typically crashed from exhaustion at the start of his prolonged vacations. But no one in Hollywood had worked on such a relentless procession of complicated, big-budget projects (including The Great Waltz), and the pressure finally got to him, as it would two years later when his production of The Yearling collapsed in Florida. Victoria remembers exactly what happened during these episodes: her father was confined to his bedroom for two weeks, and the only person allowed to enter, other than his doctor, was his butler, Slocum.